seo

Posted by CraigBradford

Without a basic understanding of statistics, you can often present misleading results to your clients or superiors. This can lead to underwhelming results when you roll out new versions of a page which on paper look like they should perform much better. In this post I want to cover the main aspects of planning, monitoring and interpreting CRO results so that when you do roll out new versions of pages, the results are much closer to what you would expect. I’ve also got a free tool to give away at the end, which does most of this for you.

Planning

A large part running a successful conversion optimisation campaign starts before a single visitor reaches the site. Before starting a CRO test it’s important to have:

1. A hypothesis of what you expect to happen
2. An estimate of how long the test should take
3. Analytics set up correctly so that you can measure the effect of the change accurately

Assuming you have a hypothesis, let’s look at predicting how long a test should take.

How long will it take?

As a general rule, the less traffic that your site gets and/or the lower the existing conversion rate, the longer it will take to get statistically significant results. There’s a great tool by Evan Miller that I recommend using before starting any CRO project. Entering the baseline conversion rate and the minimum detectable effect (i.e. What is the minimum percentage change in conversion rate that you care about, 2%? 5%? 20%?) you can get an estimate of how much traffic you’ll need to send to each version. Working backwards from the traffic your site normally gets, you can estimate how long your test is likely to take. When you arrive on the site, you’ll see the following defaults:

Notice the setting that allows you to swap between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’. Toggling between them will help you understand the difference, but as a general rule, people tend to speak about conversion rate increases in relative terms. For example:

Using a baseline conversion rate of 20%

• With a 5% absolute improvement – the new conversion rate would be 25%
• With a 5% relative improvement – the new conversion would be 21%

There’s a huge difference in the sample size needed to detect any change as well. In the absolute example above, 1,030 visits are needed to each branch. If you’re running two test versions against the original, that looks like this:

• Original – 1,030
• Version A – 1,030
• Version B – 1,030

Total 3,090 visits needed.

If you change that to relative, that drastically changes: 25,255 visits are needed for each version. A total of 75,765 visits.

If your site only gets 1,000 visits per month and you have a baseline conversion rate of 20%, it’s going to take you 6 years to detect a significant relative increase in conversion rate of 5% compared to only around 3 months for an absolute change of the same size.

This is why the question of whether or not small sites can do CRO often comes up. The answer is yes, they can, but you’ll want to aim higher than a 5% relative increase in conversions. For example, If you aim for a 35% relative increase (with 20% baseline conversion), you’ll only need 530 visits to each version. In summary, go big if you’re a small site. Don’t test small changes like button changes, test complete new landing pages, otherwise it’s going to take you a very long time to get significantly better results.

Analytics

A critical part of understanding your test results is having appropriate tracking in place. At Distilled we use Optimizely so that’s what I’ll cover today; fortunately Optimizely makes testing and tracking really easy. All you need is a Google analytics account that has a custom variable (custom dimension in universal analytics) slot free. For either Classic or Universal Analytics, begin by going to the Optimizely Editor, then clicking Options > Analytics Integration. Select enable and enter the custom variable slot that you want to use, that’s it. For more details, see the help section on the Optimizely website here.

With Google analytics tracking enabled, now when you go to the appropriate custom variable slot in Google Analytics, you should see a custom variable named after the experiment name. In the example below the client was using custom variable slot 5:

This is a crucial step. While you can get by by just using Optimizely goals like setting a thankyou page as a conversion, it doesn’t give you the full picture. As well as measuring conversions, you’ll also want to measure behavioral metrics. Using analytics allows you to measure not only conversions, but other metrics like average order value, bounce rates, time on site, secondary conversions etc.

Measuring interaction

Another thing that’s easy to measure with Optimizely is interactions on the page, things like clicking buttons. Even if you don’t have event tracking set up in Google Analytics, you can still measure changes in how people interact with the site. It’s not as simple as it looks though. If you try and track an element in the new version of a page, you’ll get an error message saying that no items are being tracked. See the example from Optimizely below:

Ignore this message, as long as you’ve highlighted the correct button before selecting track clicks, the tracking should work just fine. See the help section on Optimizely for more details.

Interpreting results

Once you have a test up and running, you should start to see results in Google Analytics as well as Optimizely. At this point, there’s a few things to understand before you get too disappointed or excited.

Understanding statistical significance

If you’re using Google analytics for conversion rates, you’ll need something to tell you whether or not your results are statistically significant – I like this tool by Kiss Metrics which looks like this:

It’s easy to look at the above and celebrate your 18% increase in conversions – however you’d be wrong. It’s easier to explain what this means with an example. Let’s imagine you have a pair of dice that we know are exactly the same. If you were to roll each die 100 times, you would expect to see each of the numbers 1-6 the same number of times on both die (which works out at around 17 times per side). Let’s say on this occasion though we are trying to see how good each die is at rolling a 6. Look at the results below:

• Die A – 17/100 = 0.17 conversion rate
• Die B – 30/100 = 0.30 conversion rate

A simplistic way to think about Statistical significance is it’s the chance that getting more 6s on the second die was just a fluke and that it hasn’t been optimised in some way to roll 6s.

This makes sense when we think about it. Given that out of 100 rolls we expect to roll a 6 around 17 times, if the second time we rolled a 6 19/100 times, we could believe that we just got lucky. But if we rolled a 6 30/100 times (76% more), we would find it hard to believe that we just got lucky and the second die wasn’t actually a loaded die. If you were to put these numbers into a statistical significance tool (2 sided t-test), it would say that B performed better than A by 76% with 97% significance.

In statistics, statistical significance is the complement of the P value. The P value in this case is 3% and the complement therefore being 97% (100-3 = 97). This means there’s a 3% chance that we’d see results this extreme if the die are identical.

When we see statistical significance in tools like Optimizely, they have just taken the complement of the P-value (100-3 = 97%) and displayed it as the chance to beat baseline. In the example above, we would see a chance to beat baseline of 97%. Notice that I didn’t say there’s a 97% chance of B being 76% better – it’s just that on this occasion the difference was 76% better.

This means that if we were to throw each dice 100 times again, we’re 97% sure we would see noticeable differences again, which may or may not be by as much as 76%. So, with that in mind here is what we can accurately say about the dice experiment:

• There’s a 97% chance that die B is different to die A

Here’s what we cannot say:

• There’s a 97% chance that die B will perform 76% better than die A

This still leaves us with the question of what we can expect to happen if we roll version B out. To do this we need to use confidence intervals.

Confidence intervals

Confidence intervals help give us an estimate of how likely a change in a certain range is. To continue with the dice example, we saw an increase in conversions by 76%. Calculating confidence intervals allow us to say things like:

• We’re 90% sure B will increase the number of 6s you roll by between 19% to 133%
• We’re 99% sure B will increase the number of 6s you roll by between -13% to 166%

Note: These are relative ranges. That being -13% less than 17% and 166% greater than 17%.

The three questions you might be asking at this point are:

1. Why is the range so large?
2. Why is there a chance it could go negative?
3. How likely is the difference to be on the negative side of the range?

The only way we can reduce the range of the confidence intervals is by collecting more data. To decrease the chance of the difference being less than 0 (we don’t want to roll out a version that performs worse than the original) we need to roll the dice more times. Assuming the same conversion rate of A (0.17%) and B (0.3%) – look at the difference increasing the sample size makes on the range of the confidence intervals.

As you can see, with a sample size of 100 we have a 99% confidence range of -13% to 166%. If we kept rolling the dice until we had a sample size of 10,000 the 99% confidence range looks much better, it’s now between 67% better and 85% better.

The point of showing this is to show that even if you have a statistically significant result, it’s often wise to keep the test running until you have tighter confidence intervals. At the very least I don’t like to present results until the lower limit of the 90% interval is greater than or equal to 0.

Calculating average order value

Sometimes conversion rate on its own doesn’t matter. If you make a change that makes 10% fewer people buy, but those that do buy spend 10x more money, then the net effect is still positive.

To track this we need to be able to see the average order value of the control compared to the test value. If you’ve set up Google analytics integration like I showed previously, this is very easy to do.

If you go into Google analytics, select the custom variable tab, then select the e-commerce view, you’ll see something like:

• Version A 1000 visits – 10 conversions – Average order value $50
• Version B 1000 visits – 10 conversions – Average order value $100

It’s great that people who saw version B appear to spend twice as much, but how do we know if we just got lucky? To do that we need to do some more work. Luckily, there’s a tool that makes this very easy and again this is made by Evan Miller: Two sample t-test tool.

To find out if the change in average order value is significant, we need a list of all the transaction amounts for version A and version B. The steps to do that are below:

1 – Create an advanced segment for version A and version B using the custom variable values.

2 – Individually apply the two segments you’ve just created, go to the transactions report under e-commerce and download all transaction data to a CSV.

3 – Dump data into the two-sample t-test tool

The tool doesn’t accept special characters like $ or £ so remember to remove those before pasting into the tool. As you can see in the image below, I have version A data in the sample 1 area and the transaction values for version B in the sample 2 area. The output can be seen in the image below:

Whether or not the difference is significant is shown below the graphs. In this case the verdict was that sample 1 was in fact significantly different. To find out the difference, look at the “d” value where is says “difference of means”. In the example above the transactions of those people that saw the test version were on average $19 more than those that saw the original.

A free tool for reading this far

If you run a lot of CRO tests you’ll find yourself using the above tools a lot. While they are all great tools, I like to have these in one place. One of my colleagues Tom Capper built a spreadsheet which does all of the above very quickly. There’s 2 sheets, conversion rate and average order value. The only data you need to enter in the conversion rate sheet is conversions and sessions, and in the AOV sheet just paste in the transaction values for both data sets. The conversion rate sheet calculates:

1. Conversion rate
2. Percentage change
3. Statistical significance (one sided and two sided)
4. 90,95 and 99% confidence intervals (Relative and absolute)

There’s an extra field that I’ve found really helpful (working agency side) that’s called “Chance of <=0 uplift”.

If like the example above, you present results that have a potential negative lower range of a confidence interval:

• We’re 90% sure B will increase the number of 6s you roll by between 19% and 133%
• We’re 99% sure B will increase the number of 6s you roll by between -13% and 166%

The logical question a client is going to ask is: “What chance is there of the result being negative?”

That’s what this extra field calculates. It gives us the chance of rolling out the new version of a test and the difference being less than or equal to 0%. For the data above, the 99% confidence interval was -13% to +166%. The fact that the lower limit of the range is negative doesn’t look great, but using this calculation, the chance of the difference being <=0% is only 1.41%. Given the potential upside, most clients would agree that this is a chance worth taking.

You can download the spreadsheet here: Statistical Significance.xls

Feel free to say thanks to Tom on Twitter.

This is an internal tool so if it breaks, please don’t send Tom (or me) requests to fix/upgrade or change.

If you want to speed this process up even more, I recommend transferring this spreadsheet into Google docs and using the Google Analytics API to do it automatically. Here’s a good post on how you can do that.

I hope you’ve found this useful and if you have any questions or suggestions please leave a comment.

If you want to learn more about the numbers behind this spreadsheet and statistics in general, some blog posts I’d recommend reading are:

Why your CRO tests fail

How not to run an A/B test

Scientific method: Statistical errors

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Posted by MichaelC

The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and—perhaps most pressingly—what in the world can we do to befriend the bear?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Michael Cottam explains what these things are, and more importantly, what we can do to be sure we get the nod from this particular bear.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Lisa-Mozstaff

On being TAGFEE

I’m a big advocate of the TAGFEE culture at Moz. It’s one of the big reasons I joined the team and why I stay here. I also recognize that sometimes it can be hard to practice it in “Real Life.” 

How, for instance, can I be both authentic AND fun when I tell Anthony how angry I am that he took the last two donuts? I can certainly be transparent and authentic, but, anger and confrontation…where does that get fun?

But those times when you need to be authentic—those are the times when being generous and empathetic matter the most. It may seem more generous and empathetic to just withhold that difficult feedback, but it’s not. Giving that feedback can be scary, and most people imagine things going horribly wrong and leaving everything in ruins when you really just wanted to help.

Having a little bit of self-awareness and a whole lot of hold-on- there-a-minute can really help with this. I’ve been sharing with other Mozzers a way to be Transparent AND Authentic AND Generous AND Fun AND Empathetic AND Exceptional. And I thought I’d share a little bit of it with you too.

Conflict can be productive

Why it’s important to have productive conflict

Why it matters

If you read about the psychology and physiology of confrontations, you’ll realize that our brains aren’t at their best when we’re in a confrontation.

When threatened, our bodies respond by going back to our most basic, primal instincts, sometimes called the lizard brain or (cue scary music) “amygdala hijack.” Blood and oxygen pump away from your brain and into your muscles so you’re equipped to fight or run away.

However, having your higher-order thinking functions deprived of oxygen when confronted by an angry customer or coworker isn’t such a good thing. Your lizard brain isn’t well-equipped to deal with situations diplomatically, or look at ways to find common ground and a win-win solution. It’s looking to destroy or get the heck out of there (or both), and neither of those approaches work well in a business environment.

To really communicate,*everyone* has to feel safe. If you are calm and collected and using the collaborative parts of your brain, but the person you’re talking to is scared or uncertain, you can’t communicate.

Fighting the lizard

Control the physiological and psychological reactions of fear

When you’re in a confrontation, how do you control the physiological and psychological reactions of fear so you can choose to act rather than react?

To bring your brain back, you need to force your brain to use its higher-order thinking functions. Ask yourself questions that the lizard brain can’t answer, and it’ll have to send some of that oxygen and blood back up into the rest of your brain.

Once you’ve freed your brain from the lizard, you have access to your higher thinking functions – and the resources to have a productive confrontation.

Questions to fight the lizard:

• Find benevolent intent. Ask yourself what you really want from this interaction. Find an intention that’s benevolent for both you and the other person. Draw on your Empathy and Generosity here. 
• Get curious. Ask yourself why you or the other person is emotional and seek to understand. The lizard brain hates “why” questions. 

This lizard has no choice, but you do! (Image by Lisa Wildwood)

What does productive conflict look like?

Giving up “winning” to win

Give yourself permission to try something new. Even if you don’t do it perfectly, it’s better than the lizard.

These steps assume you’ve got some time to prepare, but sometimes, you find yourself in a confrontation and have to do the best you can. Give yourself permission to try something new. Even if you don’t do it perfectly, it’s better than the lizard taking over. And the more you practice these, the easier and more natural they’ll feel, and the more confidence you’ll have in the power of productive confrontations.

Once I’ve walked you through all of these steps, I’ll talk about how to put it all together. Also note that these steps may be contrary to how you are used to behaving, particularly if you come from a culture that values personal success over teamwork. It may feel strange to do this at first, and it may feel like you’re giving up the chance to “win”… but it’s worth it.

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Steps to productive conflict:

1. Change your story.
2. Talk about the right things. 
3. Get curious.
4. Inspire and be inspired
5. Follow up.

Create a benevolent story and a positive intent

The first step to Productive Conflict is to change your story. And to do that, you first have to realize you’re telling stories in the first place…

We’re all amazing storytellers

We all make up stories every time we see something happen. It’s human nature.

Here’s my story:

This is Anthony, stealing my donut. He saw me coming and grabbed it before I could. He’s munching on my donut while I despair of ever getting a donut. I don’t get why he’s so selfish that he took two donuts. I mean, didn’t his mama raise him right?

Imaged cropped from an image courtesy of Stéfan under Creative Commons license

My story is one we all make up sometimes. We paint ourselves as helpless victims thwarted by an evil villain. Sometimes we don’t see them as stories, however, but as reality, and that’s where we get into trouble.

The victim/villain story may get you sympathy, but it takes away your power. During a confrontation, it helps if you remember that it *is* a story, and it’s also:

• Internal – Something you made up based on what you’ve seen, assumed, or experienced in the past in a similar situation
• Of questionable validity. It could be true, partially true, or completely bogus 
• Mutable!

“Mutable?” you ask. Why, yes, it is!

Changing the story you’re telling yourself is the key to having a productive (and powerful) conversation.

Make a happy story

You can read body language really well. And so can the person you’re talking to.

If you’re going to make up a story, make one up that helps you resolve an important issue and maintain your relationships.

Change your story to the most kind and generous one that fits the facts you’ve seen, and then believe it. Why? Because non-verbal cues, state of mind, fear or anger, and judgments and stories affect your reactions and approach to the conversation.

If you’ve planned your words out carefully but the intent doesn’t match, the other person can tell. If your intent isn’t good, the interaction won’t be good either. At best, you may appear to be trying to do the right thing but not really managing it. At worst, you appear insincere and manipulative.

Here’s your benevolent story, just waiting to hatch
(Image by Pon Malar on Wikimedia under creative commons license)

How to change your story

To help change your story, ask yourself these questions:

• Why might a reasonable, intelligent, courteous, kind person do that?
• Could there be circumstances I’m not aware of that could be contributing?
• What if it was me? How would I explain what happened from my perspective? Be as lenient/forgiving as you can to your imaginary self

Review the facts… what you’ve seen and what you’ve chosen to pay attention to. They may all appear to support a nasty story, but you don’t know for sure. Think of the Rorschach tests… people see different things depending on how they’re feeling and their unique view on life, so find a benevolent story. My new story So, let’s try this on my story.  I’ll start with the facts, remove my emotional devastation at not getting a donut, and create a benevolent story: My facts are: I saw someone take the last two donuts. My new benevolent story is: Anthony didn’t see me, and didn’t know how much I was craving a donut.

What do you see? (Image by Hermann Rorschach (died 1922), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

But my story is true!

Let’s assume for a moment, your not-so-nice story is completely, 100%, bonafide TRUE. This is hard, but consider this carefully… It Doesn’t Matter!

Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is the best way to motivate them to change. By creating a benevolent story, you give the person a way to improve AND save face. It’s magic!

Assuming the worst can severely damage your relationships, even if it’s true! Getting caught it a mistake makes people immediately defensive, which will hinder the conversation. Give them a chance to just fix things and they’ll be grateful to you and more inspired to make the change stick.

And then there’s the flip side… what if your story is partly or all wrong? This situation, as you can imagine, is much worse.

You’ll probably never find out what truly happened, and may find yourself arguing about the parts you got wrong rather than the real issue. It also damages the relationship, and here’s the key point: even if the person can get past their anger and hear your message, they will likely not like you, trust you, or want to work with you. And I’ve heard crow tastes really bad.

The power of a benevolent story and positive intent

The last part of changing your story is figuring out what you want from the conversation.

Think about what you want to happen, but also what you want from the relationship. The power of a benevolent story and positive intent is that it fosters a better relationship based on trust . That is huge and I recommend that it be part of the intent of all conversations.

Judgment doublecheck!

When you’re done, go back through what you’ve got down and make sure a not-so-nice story hasn’t crept back in:

• Remove judgment
• Check that the issue matches your intent

Some examples

Here’s some examples where I take a nasty story, break it down to the facts, and then create a new, benevolent story and a positive intent for a discussion.

Judgment & Nasty Story	Fact		New Benevolent Story	Positive Intent
What a jerk, he just cut me off! Are you trying to kill me?	A car changed lanes in front of me in a way that I found uncomfortable.		Wow, he must not have seen me.	Let him know a head check was needed.
Sue doesn’t respect me enough to respond to my email. She thinks it’s a stupid idea.	Sue didn’t answer my email when I expected.		Sue’s busy and either hasn’t seen my email or hasn’t had time to respond.	Follow up with Sue on what she thinks
What an idiot! That report Bruce turned in didn’t even try to answer the questions I had. It’s useless!	Bruce turned in a report that didn’t have the information I expected and needed.		Bruce wasn’t aware or misunderstood what information I needed.	Let Bruce know what I need in the reports.

Remember that stories spread…all storytellers love an audience. So make sure your story is spreading positivity

Get clear on what the conversation needs to be about

What do you want from the conversation?

The next step is to think about what the real issue is. What exactly needs to happen? Who is involved? Who is impacted? Which facts are known? What information is available?

In TAGFEE terms, this is where transparency and being exceptional come in. Make sure that you’re talking about the right issue.

Ask yourself:

• What is the impact to you and others?
• What are the facts?
• Scope – is this the first time? The second? The umpteenth?

Can you spot the judgment?

I just broke my own rules… can you see it?

I’ll give you a hint…it’s that last word in the Scope point… it sneaks in, so check!

Are you talking about apples when the issue is really oranges?

Scope is important: If it’s the first time something has happened, you talk about what happened. If it’s the second or third, talk about how it keeps happening. If you can’t remember how many times it’s happened, talk about how the behavior is affecting your relationship.

Ask questions to understand and get to the root causes

Be an information maniac

Find out how the other person sees the situation.

Before you trip too far down that happy path, get more information. Seek to understand. Use Empathy and Generosity, and be Authentic. Ask neutral questions to create safety, and give the other person a chance to respond – you might find out something you didn’t know.

Asking neutral questions can create a space of collaboration, where you are both on the same side trying to figure out how to solve an issue you both agree needs to be resolved. It’s not always possible to turn a conflict into a collaboration, but you’d be surprised how many times it does work that way.

Another benefit of asking neutral questions is that it puts off conclusions and judgments until you have talked to the person involved and heard what they have to say. This is critical to keeping the conversation safe and collaborative.

Questions to ask:

• What is your perspective? What do you see going on?
• What’s important to you? Tell me more about that.
• Here’s what I notice… What do you notice?

State conclusions tentatively

You can state a conclusion tentatively, making it clear you’re looking for their input on whether that conclusion is valid or if they have more information.

Listen carefully and continue to put off judgment until you’ve heard what they have to say.

Putting off judgment makes it easier for *you* to admit that you’ve been wrong. You may find what you thought was going to be a difficult conversation instead opens up a new level of authenticity and collaboration in your relationships.

Make sure anything you state definitively are only facts, devoid of judgment.

Be open to being wrong!

Or being surprised by more information that turns your story on its head.

Just maybe it wasn’t Anthony I saw “stealing” donuts in the stormtrooper outfit…

Create a mutual purpose or common goal that inspires everyone to move forward

It’s all upside

Why inspire others? Well, why not? There is no downside to inspiring people: it benefits everyone.

The earlier steps talk about getting clear of the negative. This is where the good stuff happens. The Fun in TAGFEE! If you start from what felt like a conflict and end up with a mutual understanding with someone about what an issue is and how to resolve it, all things are possible. It can feel like magic! You move from confrontation to collaboration and win-win thinking that can help you both step outside the box.
Here’s a chart that’s totally made up, but it communicates a key point in communication. Collaboration happens when you both trust and respect the people you’re talking to!

True collaboration

You need both a willingness and freedom to disagree, and mutual trust and respect to get into the “Collaboration Zone.” The key to inspiring others is to seek to understand their point of view and their goals, and work together with them to find common ground.

Start the collaboration engine by asking some powerful questions and seeing what you can agree on and brainstorm solutions.

Collaboration engine questions:

• What’s working?
• What do you think?
• What can we agree on?
• What are we both interested in achieving?
• What’s important about resolving this?
• What can we try?

A rainbow of solutions

Solutions often go from the black and white “my” vs. “your” choice to a synergistic combination of mine and yours and other ideas we brainstormed along the way.

You may disagree on how to do something, but if you can agree on a common goal, you’re one step closer to a win-win solution.

Instead of accusing Anthony of taking the last donut and demanding that he promise to never do it again, or be reported to Team Happy for a happiness “adjustment,” my conversation is now about fair access to donuts at Moz. The entire conversation’s focus has shifted from “I want Anthony to know how angry I am he stole my donut” to “how can we make sure no-one at Moz is donut-deprived?” Magic!

Fair Access to Donuts at Moz – Possible solutions:

• Work with Team Happy to make sure there’s enough donuts for everyone who wants them
• Ask everyone at the company to only take one
• Get a fresh donut machine where we can all make our own donuts on demand

Agree on what to do next and circle back around
This is a little step with a big impact.  Make sure you’ve captured your conversation and everyone is on board to take action to make your solutions a reality. Being Exceptional and Authentic come into play here. You’re collaborating on a solution and then making it happen.

Once you’ve established a shared understanding of an issue that needs to be resolved, it’s time to figure out how. Solicit ideas for how to solve the problem. Listen, acknowledge feedback and discuss pros and cons on the solutions until you both agree the solution is a good approach.

Make sure everyone is in agreement on:

• Goals. How will you measure success?
• Due dates. Who will do what by when?
• When to check in: What time will we check to see how we’re doing?

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Wrapping it up

Have productive, inspiring conversations, whether you agree or disagree

Before you talk to someone

At first, it may help to write down what you’re planning on saying.

I’ve broken this down into discrete before and during steps, but it doesn’t always end up being that way in practice. Use these steps to plan and practice until it comes naturally.

Steps to prepare:

• Calm down! Lizard brain begone!
• Create a happy story
• Make sure you’re talking about the right thing
• Write out what you want to say and check for your old story & judgments
• Remember your benevolent intent

Have the conversation

Steps:

1. Ask if the person has time to talk
2. State your benevolent intent
3. Keep to the facts
4. State conclusions tentatively
5. Get curious – seek to understand their point of view
6. Be open to being wrong. Change your mind if needed.
7. Aim toward collaboration.
8. Finish with summarizing what you’ve discussed, and who will do what, when.

Remember the conversation may dictate you take a different path.

If the conversation starts to get heated, re-establish safety:

• Restate your intent
• Explicitly state what you’re not trying to do. For example, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m trying to help us come to a solution that works for both of us.”

When conflict finds you

If you find yourself in a conversation unexpectedly, these steps can still help. Get curious, find out what they want, how they’re feeling, and tentatively state your perspective and ask for feedback. Some other ideas:

• Accept the input and acknowledge the emotions but don’t reciprocate. Ask yourself “what do I want from this interaction” to rescue your brain from the lizard.
• Do your best to establish safety for you and the other person by establishing a positive intent. It can be as simple as “Wow, Lisa, I can see you’re really upset about not getting a donut. I’d like to figure out how I can fix this – can I ask you a few questions?”

Don’t hesitate to take a break

If the conversation is heated, it may be better to step away and take the conversation up later. You might say:

“I can see this is an subject we both care deeply about. I’d like to take some time to prepare for a productive conversation, can we take a break and meet back here in an hour.”

An example conversation

So, my side of the conversation with Anthony about the donuts might go like this:

“Anthony, do you have time to talk?” “I’d like to talk to you about making sure everyone at Moz has the opportunity to get a donut. ” “I saw someone taking the last two donuts this morning, and I was disappointed that I didn’t get one.” “I thought it might be you, so I wanted to talk to you to see what happened.” “I’m not accusing you of taking the last two donuts. I’m trying to figure out what happened and then work on how to make sure the donuts are evenly distributed at Moz” “Oh, so you were grabbing a donut for Crystal too! Wow, I totally misinterpreted what I saw!” “Can you think of ways we can ensure everyone gets a donut?” “Great, so I’ll contact Team Happy about getting a donut machine tomorrow, and you’ll approve the expense report on Friday.”

Image from Nostalgia Electrics

Perfection not required

Not everything will always turn out wonderful, but at least you’ve approached the problem and given feedback in a way that has the best chance for a positive outcome for everyone involved.

Maybe you’re a little closer to what the real issues are, or you’ve agreed to disagree; even those outcomes will keep miscommunication or confusion from being a source of problems.

If I really feel that donut was mine, and Anthony really thinks that donut was promised to Crystal, we may not agree, but at least everything is on the table where we have the chance to deal with it. And, we’re not telling our nasty stories to everyone but the person we need to talk to.

Feedback is a gift

Annette Promes, our CMO, said to me, “Feedback is a gift,” and it is.

Most folks want to know, and are truly interested in being better… better coworkers, friends, and humans. So let’s all resolve to give that gift in the best way we can. And receive it gratefully when it comes to us.

Oh, and that donut conflict… totally made up. I’m gluten-intolerant girl, so you can always have my share, Anthony! 🙂

Give me feedback

I experimented with converting a training class into a blog post, and would love to have your feedback on what works for you and what could be better.

You can also download this blog post in slidedoc format. It’s a communication technique that’s halfway between presentation and documentation. I learned about it at Write the Docs this year. You can read more and get the free slidedoc ebook at their site. What do you think?

Other resources

You may find these resources helpful too:

5 Rules for Productive Conflict (TED talk)

6 ways to make conflict productive

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Posted by Dr-Pete

As a group, we SEOs still tend to focus most of our attention on just one place – traditional, organic results. In the past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time studying these results and how they change over time. The more I experience the reality of SERPs in the wild, though, the more I’ve become interested in situations like this one (a search for “diabetes symptoms”)…

See the single blue link and half-snippet on the bottom-left? That’s the only thing about this above-the-fold page that most SEOs in 2014 would call “organic”. Of course, it’s easy to find fringe cases, but the deeper I dig into the feature landscape that surrounds and fundamentally alters SERPs, the more I find that the exceptions are inching gradually closer to the rule.

Monday, July 28th was my 44th birthday, and I think Google must have decided to celebrate by giving me extra work (hooray for job security?). In the month between June 28th and July 28th, there were four major shake-ups to the SERPs, all of them happening beyond traditional, organic results. This post is a recap of our data on each of those shake-ups.

Authorship photos disappear (June 28)

On June 25th, Google’s John Mueller made a surprise announcement via Google+:

We had seen  authorship shake-ups in the past, but the largest recent drop had measured around 15%. It was clear that Google was rethinking the prevalence of author photos and their impact on perceived quality, but most of us assumed this would be a process of small tweaks. Given Google’s push toward Google+ and its inherent tie-in with authorship, not a single SEO I know had predicted a complete loss of authorship photos.

Yet, over the next few days, culminating on the morning of June 28th, a  total loss of authorship photos is exactly what happened:

While some authorship photos still appeared in personalized results, the profile photos completely disappeared from general results, after previously being present on about 21% of the SERPs that MozCast tracks. It’s important to note that the concept of authorship remains, and author bylines are still being shown (we track that at about 24%, as of this writing), but the overall visual impact was dramatic for many SERPs.

In-depth gets deeper (July 2nd)

Most SEOs still don’t pay much attention to Google’s “In-depth Articles,” but they’ve been slowly gain SERP share. When we first started tracking them, they popped up on about 3.5% of the searches MozCast covers. This data seems to only get updated periodically, and the number had grown to roughly 6.0% by the end of June 2014. On the morning of July 2nd, I (and, seemingly, everyone else), missed a major change:

Overnight, the presence of in-depth articles jumped from 6.0% to 12.7%, more than doubling (a +112% increase, to be precise). Some examples of queries that gained in-depth articles include:

• xbox 360
• hotels
• raspberry pi
• samsung galaxy tab
• job search
• pilates
• payday loans
• apartments
• car sales
• web design

Here’s an example set of in-depth for a term SEOs know all too well, “payday loans”:

The motivation for this change is unclear, and it comes even as Google continues to test designs with pared down in-depth results (almost all of their tests seem to take up less space than the current design). Doubling this feature hardly indicates a lack of confidence, though, and many competitive terms are now showing in-depth results.

Video looks more like radio (July 16th)

Just a couple of weeks after the authorship drop, we saw a smaller but still significant shake-up in video results, with about 28% of results MozCast tracks losing video thumbnails:

As you can see, the presence of thumbnails does vary day-to-day, but the two plateaus, before and after June 16th, are clear here. At this point, the new number seems to be holding.

Since our data doesn’t connect the video thumbnails to specific results, it’s tough to say if this change indicates a removal of thumbnails or a drop in rankings for video results overall. Considering how smaller drops in authorship signaled a much larger change down the road, I think this shift deserves more attention. It could be that Google is generally questioning the value and prevalence of rich snippets, especially when quality concerns come into play.

I originally hypothesized that this might not be a true loss, but could be a sign that some video snippets were switching to the new “mega-video” format (or video answer box, if you prefer). This does not appear to be the case, as the larger video format is still fairly uncommon, and the numbers don’t match up.

For reference, here’s a mega-video format (for the query “bartender”):

Mega-videos are appearing on such seemingly generic queries as “partition”, “headlights”, and “california king bed”. If you have the budget and really want to dominate the SERPs, try writing a pop song.

Pigeons attack local results (July 24th)

By now, many of you have heard of  Google’s “Pigeon” update. The Pigeon update hit local SERPs hard and seems to have dramatically changed how Google determines and uses a searcher’s location. Local search is more than an algorithmic layer, though – it’s also a feature set. When Pigeon hit, we saw a sharp decline in local “pack” results (the groups of 2-7 pinned local results):

We initially reported that pack results dropped more than 60% after the Pigeon update. We now are convinced that this was a mistake (indicated by the “?” zone) – essentially, Pigeon changed localization so much that it broke the method we were using. We’ve found a new method that seems to match manually setting your location, and the numbers for July 29-30 are, to the best of my knowledge, accurate.

According to these new numbers, local pack results have fallen 23.4% (in our data set) after the Pigeon update. This is the exact same number  Darren Shaw of WhiteSpark found, using a completely different data set and methodology. The perfect match between those two numbers is probably a bit of luck, but they suggest that we’re at least on the right track. While I over-reported the initial drop, and I apologize for any confusion that may have caused, the corrected reality still shows a substantial change in pack results.

It’s important to note that this 23.4% drop is a net change – among queries, there were both losers and winners. Here are 10 searches that lost pack results (and have been manually verified):

• jobs
• cars for sale
• apartments
• cruises
• train tickets
• sofa
• wheels
• liposuction
• social security card
• motorcycle helmets

A couple of important notes – first, some searches that lost packs only lost packs in certain regions. Second, Pigeon is a very recent update and may still be rolling out or being tweaked. This is only the state of the data as we know it today.

Here are 10 searches that gained pack results (in our data set):

• skechers
• mortgage
• apartments for rent
• web designer
• long john silvers
• lamps
• mystic
• make a wish foundation
• va hospital
• internet service

The search for “mystic” is an interesting example – no matter what your location (if you’re in the US), Google is showing a pack result for Mystic, CT. This pattern seems to be popping up across the Pigeon update. For example, a search for “California Pizza Kitchen” automatically targets California, regardless of your location (h/t  Tony Verre), and a search for “Buffalo Wild Wings” sends you to Buffalo, NY (h/t Andrew Mitschke).

Of course, local search is complex, and it seems like Google is trying to do a lot in one update. The simple fact that a search for “apartments” lost pack results in our data, while “apartments for rent” gained them, shows that the Pigeon update isn’t based on a few simplistic rules.

Some local SEOs have commented that Pigeon seemed to increase the number of smaller packs (2-3 results). Looking at the data for pack size before and after Pigeon, this is what we’re seeing:

Both before and after Pigeon, there are no 1-packs, and 4-, 5-, and 6-packs are relatively rare. After Pigeon, the distribution of 2-packs is similar, but there is a notable jump in 3-packs and a corresponding decrease in 7-packs. The total number of 3-packs actually increased after the Pigeon update. While our data set (once we restrict it to just searches with pack results) is fairly small, this data does seem to match the observations of local SEOs.

Sleep with one eye open

Ok, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic. All of the changes do go to show, though, that, if you’re laser-focused on ranking alone, you may be missing a lot. We as SEOs not only need to look beyond our own tunnel vision, we need to start paying more attention to post-ranking data, like CTR and search traffic. SERPs are getting richer and more dynamic, and Google can change the rules overnight.

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Posted by kaiserthesage

It’s obvious that the technology behind search engines’ ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.

The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google’s recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.

Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.

Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site’s search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.

This is where several of the more advanced aspects of SEO can blend perfectly with online branding when implemented the right way. In this post, I’ll use some examples from my own experience to show you how.

Pick a niche and excel

Building on your brand’s topical expertise is probably the fastest way to go when you’re looking to build a name for yourself or your business in a very competitive industry.

There are a few reasons why:

• Proving your field expertise in one or two areas of your industry can be a strong unique selling point (USP) for your brand.
• It’s easier to expand and delve into the deeper and more competitive parts of your industry once you’ve already established yourself as an expert in your chosen field.
• Obviously, search engines favour brands known to be experts in their respective fields.

Just to give a brief example, when I started blogging back in 2010, I was all over the place. Then, a few months later, I decided to focus on one specific area of SEO—link building—and wrote dozens of guides on how I do it.

By aiming to build my blog’s brand identity to become a prime destination for link building tutorials, it became a lot easier for me to sell my ideas on the other aspects of inbound marketing to my continuously growing audience (from technical SEO to social media, content marketing, email marketing and more).

Strengthening your brand starts with the quality of your brand’s content, whether it’s your product/service or the plethora of information available on your website.

You can start by assessing the categories where you’re getting the most traction in terms of natural link acquisitions, social shares, conversions, and/or sales.

Prioritize your content development efforts on the niche where your brand can genuinely compete in and will have a better fighting chance to dominate the market. It’s the smartest way to stand out and scale, especially when you’re still in your campaign’s early stages.

Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph

In the past, most webmasters and publishers would rely on the usage of generic keywords/terms in optimizing their website’s content to make it easier for search engines to understand what they are about.

But now, while the continuously evolving technologies behind search may seem to make the optimization process more complicated, the fact is that it may just reward those who pursue high-level trustworthy marketing efforts to stand out in the search results.

These technologies and factors for determining relevance—which include entity recognition and disambiguation (ERD), structured data or schema markups, natural language processing (NLP), phrase-based indexing for co-occurrence and co-citations, concept matching, and a lot more—are all driven by branding campaigns and how an average human would normally find, talk, or ask about a certain thing.

Easily identifiable brands will surely win in this type of setup.

Where to start? See if Google already knows what your brand is about.

How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online

1. Provide the best and the most precise answers to the “who, what, why, and how” queries that people might look for in your space.

Razvan Gavrilas did  an extensive study on how Google’s Answer Boxes work. Getting listed in the answer box will not just drive more traffic and conversions to a business, but can also help position a brand on a higher level in its industry.

But of course, getting one of your entries placed for Google’s answer boxes for certain queries will also require other authority signals (like natural links, domain authority, etc.).

But what search crawlers would typically search for to evaluate whether a page’s content is appropriate to be displayed in the answer boxes (according to Razvan’s post):

• If the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
• If the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So most of the times, if it’s not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non-biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of “.edu” sites, or news organization websites.

Although, John Mueller mentioned recently that Knowledge Graph listings should not be branded, in which you might think that the approach and effort will be for nothing.

But wait, just think about it—the intent alone of optimizing your content for Google’s Knowledge Graph will allow you to serve better content to your users (which is what Google rewards the most these days, so it’s still the soundest action to take if you want to really build a solid brand, right?).

2. Clearly define your brand’s identity to your audience.

Being remarkable and being able to separate your brand from your competitors is crucial in online marketing (be it through your content or the experience people feel when they’re using your site/service/product).

Optimizing for humans through branding allows you to condition the way people will talk about you. This factor is very important when you’re aiming to get more brand mentions that would really impact your site’s SEO efforts, branding, and conversions.

The more search engines are getting signals (even unlinked mentions) that verify that you’re an authority in your field, the more your brand will be trusted and rank your pages well on SERPs.

3. Build a strong authorship portfolio.

Author photos/badges may have been taken down from the search results a few weeks ago, but it doesn’t mean that authorship markup no longer has value.

Both Mark Traphagen and Bill Slawski have shared why authorship markup still matters. And clearly, an author’s authority will still be a viable search ranking factor, given that it enables Google to easily identify topical experts and credible documents available around the web.

It will continue to help tie entities (publishers and brands) to their respective industries, which may still accumulate scores over time based on the popularity and reception from the author’s works (AuthorRank).

This approach is a great complement to personal brand building, especially when you’re expanding your content marketing efforts’ reach through guest blogging on industry-specific blogs where you can really absorb more new readers and followers.

There’s certainly more to implement under Knowledge Graph Optimization, and here’s a short list from what AJ Kohn has already shared on his blog earlier this year, which are all still useful to this day:

• Use entities (aka Nouns) in your writing
• Get connected and link out to relevant sites
• Implement Structured Data to increase entity detection
• Use the sameAs property
• Optimize your Google+ presence
• Get exposure on Wikipedia
• Edit and update your Freebase entry

Online branding through scalable link building

The right relationships make link building scalable.

In the past, many link builders believed that it’s best to have thousands of links from diversified sources, which apparently forced a lot of early practitioners to resort to tactics focused on manually dropping links to thousands of unique domains (and spamming).

And, unfortunately, guest blogging as a link building tactic has eventually become a part of this craze.

I’ve mentioned this dozens of times before, and I’m going to say it one more time: It’s better to have multiple links from a few link sources that are highly trusted than having hundreds of one-off links from several mediocre sites.

Focus on building signals that will strongly indicate relationships, because it’s probably the most powerful off-site signal you can build out there.

When other influential entities in your space are vouching for your brand (whether it’s through links, social shares, or even unlinked brand mentions), it allows you to somehow become a part of the list of sites that will most likely be trusted by search engines.

It can most definitely impact how people will see your brand as an authority as well, when they see that you’re being trusted by other credible brands in your industry.

These relationships can also open a lot of opportunities for natural link acquisitions and lead generation, knowing that some of the most trusted brands in your space trust you.

Making all of this actionable

1. Identify and make a list of the top domains and publishers in your industry, particularly those that have high search share.

There are so many tools that you can use to get these data, like SEMRush, Compete.com, and/or Alexa.com.

You can also use Google Search and SEOQuake to make a list of sites that are performing well on search for your industry’s head terms (given that Google is displaying better search results these days, it’s probably one of the best prospecting tools you can use).

I also use other free tools in doing this type of prospecting, particularly in cleaning up the list (in removing duplicate domains, and extracting unique hostnames; and in filtering out highly authoritative sites that are clearly irrelevant for the task, such as ranking pages from Facebook, Wikipedia, and other popular news sites).

2. Try to penetrate at least 2 high authority sites from the first 50 websites on your list—and become a regular contributor for them.

Start engaging them by genuinely participating in their existing communities.

The process shouldn’t stop with you contributing content for them on a regular basis, as along the way you can initiate collaborative tasks, such as inviting them to publish content on your site as well.

This can help draw more traffic (and links) from their end, and can exponentially improve the perceived value of your brand as a publisher (based on your relationships with other influential entities in your industry).

These kinds of relationships will make the latter part of your link building campaign less stressful. As soon as you get to build a strong footing with your brand’s existing relationships and content portfolio (in and out of your site), it’ll be a lot easier for you to pitch and get published on other authoritative industry-specific publications (or even in getting interview opportunities).

3. Write the types of content that your target influencers are usually reading.

Stalk your target influencers on social networks, and take note of the topics/ideas that interest them the most (related to your industry). See what type of content they usually share to their followers.

Knowing these things will give you ton of ideas on how you can effectively approach your content development efforts and can help you come up with content ideas that are most likely to be read, shared, and linked to.

You can also go the extra mile by knowing which sites they mostly link out to or use as reference for their own works (use ScreamingFrog).

4. Take advantage of your own existing community (or others’ as well).

Collaborate with the people who are already participating in your brand’s online community (blog comments, social networks, discussions, etc.). Identify those who truly contribute and really add value to the discussions, and see if they run their own websites or work for a company that’s also in your industry.

Leverage these interactions, as these can form long-term relationships that can also be beneficial to both parties (for instance, inviting them to write for you or having you write for their blog, and/or cross-promote your works/services).

And perhaps, you can also use this approach to other brands’ communities as well, like reaching out to people you see who have really smart inputs about your industry (that’ll you see on other blog’s comment sections) and asking them if they’ll be interested to talk/share more about that topic and have it published on your website instead.

Building a solid community can easily help automate link building, but more importantly, it can surely help strengthen a brand’s online presence.

Conclusion

SEO can be a tremendous help to your online branding efforts. Likewise, branding can be a tremendous help to your SEO efforts. Alignment and integration of both practices is what keeps winners winning in this game (just look at Moz).

If you liked this post or have any questions, let me know in the comments below, and you can find me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

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