seo

Posted by iPullRank

As someone who is fortunate enough to get invited to speak at numerous conferences I pride myself in not reusing presentations unless someone specifically requests it. However, for the SEO audience, there has always been a huge disconnect between the concepts of quality and scale when it comes to content. To some degree, this makes sense because until 2011 content quality didn’t really impact Organic Search performance. 

Fortunately, we’re now in a post-Panda era where Google has effectively killed the “SEO” page through a combination of FUD and algorithm improvements. I, for one, love it, because it gives us the opportunity to step our game up and deliver higher quality web experiences. As a result I’ve made it a bit of a personal goal to share approaches to achieving quality at scale that drives measureable results with my Scaling Quality Content presentation. Let’s talk about how we can make things users actually want that help us hit our business goals.

Here’s the deck. Over the several times I’ve presented it, it has gone through many iterations where I’ve added things based on new tools that I’ve discovered in my own client work and things that have been highlighted within the industry; hence the version 1.4. I’m not going to highlight every single slide, just the ones where I’ve made key points.

Everybody’s talking about content

The Content Marketing conversation has reached a deafening pitch within the past two years. Content Marketing software companies like Compendium and Eloqua have been acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller tools like Contently have been effective at raising multiple rounds of funding and every single marketer you know, myself included, has uttered the phrase “Content is King.”

And why not? The statistics are staggering, with 92% of marketers reportedly doing content marketing and 58% of B2B marketers (60% of B2C marketers) planning to increase their content marketing spends this year! So what makes content marketing such a magic bullet? And why so much talk about an old practice that has just become new again?

It’s simply because the idea of Content Marketing has been sold very well. Some people are seeing great results.

Eloqua and Kapost partnered up to release a study on Content Marketing ROI wherein they compared Paid Search, which they call the most efficient digital marketing channel, with Content Marketing. The study concludes that over time the quantity and cost per lead (CPL), therefore your ROI, from Paid Search will remained fixed if your budget remains the same. However, your CPL for Content Marketing drops substantially over time since content is a brand asset that will continue to compound traffic from multiple channels if you continue to invest in it.

These are the types of expectations that have been set by the marketing of Content Marketing. Marketers expect the gobs of traffic, links and likes, but instead users effectively respond like this:

Your content launches. You get no shares, no likes, and your traffic looks like a half cycle of a sine wave. You think you’re playing the long game so you keep at it, but months turn into quarters and quarters turn into years, while the reaction remains the same. Why doesn’t it work like it does in the movies?! I’ll tell you why…

It’s pretty simple. You’re not making usable or useful content that anyone wants or cares about. It’s also pretty hideous. Someone would be ashamed to share or link to it especially when your awful piece of content is competing for attention with the hundreds of thousands of other great examples of content marketing every single day. Oh yeah, and Buzzfeed. You’re competing with Buzzfeed too.

There’s no excuse for bad content in 2014

As much as we, as SEOs, want to hold onto the glory days of content spinning and farming out product description copy to Mechanical Turk, that era is over. Luckily for us though, the post-Panda era comes at the same time that traditional journalism stands on its last legs, and there are more graphic designers than there are available creative roles.

We are now in the era of the marketplace where sites keep springing up that allow marketers to handpick the writers, graphic designers, developers and even data scientists they want to work on their project based on their portfolios and reviews. Marketplaces breed competition, so you can get high quality work at rates that are much lower than you would expect.

That said, a common question that I hear at every conference is “how do I make content for a boring niche?” or “how do I come up with content ideas?”

I find that one particularly perplexing because there is more data out there than ever before. According to an IBM study from 2011, we were creating 2.5 quintillion Bytes of Data every day.

Three things. One, I don’t know how many zeroes that is. Two, that was in 2011. And most importantly, three, much of that data is people’s attitudes, interests and opinions on virtually every concept imaginable.

For the rare situations where you can’t find data that you want there are many platforms for creating custom data and discovering new and different content ideas.

Ultimately, it’s never a question of whether there are enough content ideas or producers to go around. It’s always a question of whether you, as a marketer, are creative enough to capitalize on them in a way that is useful, usable and/or entertaining for your audience and helps you meet your business goals.

But that’s just it! For many SEOs or performance marketers, creating quality content is undiscovered territory. Overnight, we went from data wranglers and tactical magicians to low-budget creative agencies. Our fail-fast attitude made the jump with us, and Content Marketing’s “make something, put it out, see what happens and improve” ethos is very much in alignment. As a result we skip a lot of useful steps.

Oftentimes I see the terms “Content Strategy” and “Content Marketing” used interchangeably. Even in “Epic Content Marketing,” a book written by Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute, he has a long list of terms that he believes are synonymous with “content marketing” where he mentions “content strategy.”

I could not disagree more. And many others feel the same.

A brief explanation of the difference between the two disciplines comes with two quotes from “Content Strategy for the Web” author Kristina Halvorson. She describes Content Strategy as “a shared set of goals, guiding principles and success metrics that guides the creation, delivery and governance of content across an organization” and Content Marketing as “multi-channel custom publishing.”

Let’s unpack that for a second. If you have an idea for an infographic, make it and release it, you have performed content marketing. If you, however, identify and understand your audience, business goals, metrics by which content will be measured, ensure that the content is both useful and usable for your target audience, plan out the metadata and CMS requirements, develop or adhere to a brand messaging architecture (voice and tone), develop a process and identify resources for creation, release, and maintenance of the infographic, well, then you’re doing content strategy.

Content strategy is the answer to scaling quality content that performs

I like to think of Content Strategy as the operating system of digital marketing campaigns. Similarly, I think of Social Media Strategy as just channel-specific Content Strategy. This content lifecycle image by Erin Scime of dopeData does a great job of illustrating how CS works operationally, but it’s better explained in the context of workflows that I’ll be discussing later on.

Additionally, there are a few other things that should be kept top of mind when creating quality content at scale.

• Diversify content types – We need to expand our idea of what content types are available for use in content marketing as well. As soon as we start talking about content marketing it is generally assumed we’ll be doing blog posts, white papers, infographics and video. That’s it.
  

  

  Everything you see in the above image is content. Invest in big content types and repurpose them into the smaller more readily used content types. For example, MozCon as an event is a giant piece of content that is repurposed in the form of blog posts, SlideShare decks, videos, data, memes, infographics, user generated content, press, animations and in some cases products and tools as well. 
  
  Take a step back and think about what type of content your audience would love before just settling into blog posts, white papers, infographics and videos. Think about how you can be a content purple cow in your space.

• Focus on the ROI – If we don’t look to move the needle on the content we’re creating we are wasting time. As of late I’ve seen a lot more people talking about content marketing as a branding play, more than a direct response play. Ever the skeptic, I read that more as a way to continue to justify doing content marketing that doesn’t perform vis a vis Display Advertising.
  

  

  The reality is we are marketers and our content isn’t all about altruism for users. We need to make strong business cases and build content based on models that perform. My MozCon deck from 2012 has a bunch of tools, tips and tactics for calling your shot and building strong content pitches. Later on in this post you’ll be introduced to some formulas for predicting content success as well.

• Map content to the user journey and KPIs – Understanding the user journey and how it aligns with the content touchpoints is incredibly important for measurement purposes and for driving conversion. It simply doesn’t make sense to measure everything in the same way. Measuring an infographic based on sales will lead to some very disappointed bosses or clients.
  

  

  Instead determine the most relevant KPIs for content by mapping them to the stage in the user journey that makes the most sense. For instance, it makes more sense to judge a buyer’s guide based on sales and the infographic on links and shares.

Content planning tools

When developing your content strategy there are a number of tools that will help streamline the process. Some of these tools may be familiar, so I will just highlight the use case from the Content Strategy perspective.

• Screaming Frog and URL Profiler – When performing Content Audits you’ll need to take a detailed inventory of the URLs on the site. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is by far my favorite crawling tool for this purpose. However URL Profiler has also popped up as an option that fits the content auditing use case a little better due to its readability scoring and content classification via the uClassify API. It pulls link and share metrics via APIs, but can’t quite stand up to the Frog’s SEO auditing-specific features or user interface.
  
  
• Mural.ly – When collaborating with multiple people on content ideas Mural.ly acts as a virtual whiteboard that allows you to use a variety of built-in assets such as post-it notes and process imagery. You can also bring in assets from across the web or your own machine. The drag and drop interface and the various different board types to work on make it very easy for everyone to get their ideas out. Their tagline “Google Docs for visual people” very succinctly explains what it can do. 
• StoryboardThat – Whenever you’re developing video or cartoon content everyone has a different idea in their imagination of what will be created. Creating storyboards helps get all parties on the same page. StoryboardThat features scenery, shapes and character assets as well as a drag and drop interface that makes it really easy to spin up stories in a comic strip format and shoot them over to your team.
  

  

• Balsamiq – The popular wireframing program makes presenting layouts for content pieces such as new site sections, microsites, apps, and infographics a piece of cake. Balsamiq is one of the quickest most efficient ways of communicating ideas for experiences visually and its collaboration features make it incredibly easy to come to a consensus of how to build the right thing.
  
  
• Gliffy – Gliffy is very similar to Balsamiq, however it also features a lot of assets for building workflow diagrams and documenting processes. I use this specifically for building out the visuals that support content governance models.
  

  

• Trello – Already a popular project management tool, Trello is also great for editorial calendars. Check out the Trello “Power-Ups;” they provide a calendar view.
  
  

  

• Great content has great structure
  

  

  If you look at my first post on Moz and then look at everything else I’ve written after that, you’ll see a marked difference in the layout and structure. That was because then-Moz CMO Jamie Steven encouraged me to read this post by the incomparable Cyrus Shepard. In the post Cyrus quantifies the performance difference between two posts of otherwise equal quality by the same author and proves that the post with better structure substantially outperforms the post that appears to be a wall of text. Establishing a style guide for content creation is a critical step to ensure that the structure of all content is homogeneous following the same best practices.

Finding good ideas

Earlier in the deck I make the point that there is no excuse to not come up with strong content ideas. Here are a few things you can do to help with the ideation process.

• Build personas and user journeys – Unless this is our first time meeting, you know that I believe it’s absolutely critical to understand who your content is for. The practice of building personas helps the team frame its content ideas in a way that supports your business goals, but is also useful to that target audience. Building personas is a way to really be mindful of the user needs and to standardize what your company believes and is targeting. For more on this see Personas: Understanding the User Behind the Visit .
  
  
• Use Followerwonk – If you don’t want to go through the process of building personas, and you just want to build ideas based on the users you’ve already captured you can take a shortcut and use Followerwonk’s word clouds. Take two or more keywords in the word cloud to identify what a segment of your follower base might be interested in.
  

  

  Based on this word cloud, followers of FTD are mostly interested in Social Media and also love music and sports. Therein lies an opportunity to create some sort of fantasy sports game powered by social media. FTD could survey their follower base for ways to fine tune that idea further.
  
  There’s one caveat that I’ve noticed with Followerwonk though. Sometimes the sample size of the followers it uses for the word cloud is quite low. If you run into that problem you can use SimplyMeasured’s free twitter follower report and dump all of the twitter bios into TagCrowd and generate a word cloud for up to 10k followers.
  

  

  Additionally, you could use Tribalytics to segment your followers into meaningful groups.

• Bottlenose Sonar – A few years back, upon discovering the correlation between spikes in search volume and social chatter , I built a tool for identifying co-relevant terms by search Twitter to get ahead of them before they show search demand. Twitter has since updated its API numerous times and I haven’t updated the code. However Bottlenose has built something far more robust called “Sonar” that allows you to uncover those same insights with a much more beautiful UI.
  

  

  Similar to how you can use the word clouds in Followerwonk you can identify two or more co-relevant terms on the graph and come up with a content idea. The beauty of this tool is that you can see precisely who tweeted the two ideas together and reach out to them for buy-in, shares and links.

• Quora – This underrated social Q&A site is a breeding ground for great content ideas and often data to back them up. People pose questions and can invite experts to answer them. At any given time you’ll find startup founders or Fortune 500 employees offering a lot of transparency into their companies. You’ll also find people that are incredibly passionate about whatever it is they do giving you detailed insight that is hard to find elsewhere.
  

  

  There is a lot that can be repurposed from Quora, but you can also pose questions to gauge the interest or reception of a content idea. Moreover, Quora also gives you a list of people that are interested in the topic that you can use to help promote the content.
  

• Keyword Research – As the SEER Interactive team often says “Don’t Hit Enter,” when performing searches and you’ll uncover a number of relevant content ideas with built in audiencs. Ultimately, modern keyword research should take steps forward to map keywords to the user journey in order to align with the content strategy. Either way the collective human experience that keyword research represents viable content concepts. Consider Ubersuggest and Soovle in addition to the Keyword Planner.
• Yutongo – Yutongo is a marketplace platform for crowdsourcing ideas. It allows for your internal team to join the platform for brainstorming or you can setup your idea challenge and bring in outside creative thinkers to submit their approaches to solving your creative problem.
  

  

Data collection sources

At this point you have your ideas, you know what you’re building and who you’re building it for, but you need data to build out the experience. There are many ways get existing data and build custom data. Here is a shortlist of data collection sources.

• SurveyMonkey Audience – When you have identified your target demographic and you want to know specifically what they think you can run a custom survey with SurveyMonkey’s Audience product. I really love how SM presents the data once its collected and how they explicitly collect demographic data on the user so you can be sure that your question has been answered by the people you expect.
  

  

• Google Consumer Surveys – Google’s answer to SurveyMonkey Audience is good product for custom surveys as well, but it’s built on the back of the Google Display network. This is an important distinction because that means Google is inferring demographics based on their database of affinity rather than having them explicitly captured from user inputs.
  
• Google Consumer Barometer Google’s Consumer Barometer product gives data and insights into user behavior when making purchasing decisions. You can use different features and demographic data points to get a complete look at who is doing what and why for a variety of product types.
  

  

• Google Public Data – Google’s Public Data product aggregates data from a variety of world government and public data stores to present interesting data experiences such as life expectancy charts per country and European minimum wage comparisons by country . You can also upload your own DSPL-formatted datasets and choose build visualizations yourself.
  
• Marketing Charts – Need marketing stats right now? Marketing Charts is a curation site of relevant marketing statistics and charts. I find this especially useful when building business cases or quick data collection for infographics.
  
• Data Search Engines – There are a variety of tools that I’d classify as data search engines. They all approach have a unique approach to data presentation and some are better than others for certain data types. Whenever I’m looking for data I pop in a few searches into them all until I find what I’m looking for.
  • Zanran – ZanRan is one of the few that is a proper search engine. Search for queries like “Teenage pregnancy US” to find data stores and charts specific to your data needs.
  • DataMarket – DataMarket is also a search engine that returns interactive charts based on the data you’re looking for.
  • Get the Data – Get the Data is a Q&A site where data mongers can ask other data mongers the right places to find the data they need.
  • Data360 – A data journalism site that lets the data speak for itself. You can almost always find the data behind current events here.

Quality outsourcing

The biggest difficulty in committing to building quality content at scale is sourcing that content and assuring its quality. Naturally, there should be people whose job it is manage this process, but for the actual sourcing here are some platforms that make it much easier.

• 99Designs – How would you like dozens of creative people to compete for your project? How would you like all of them to have to submit finished work and you choose to award a winner based on who submitted the work that you loved the most? How would you like that process to be relatively inexpensive? Then you’ll love 99Designs. 
  

  

  The 99Designs network can design apps, websites, branding, books and more. Obviously, the higher you set the prize on the project, the higher quality creative professional you’ll get. Also, if you don’t want to hold a design contest, 99Designs offers a 1-to-1 project model as well.

• Dribbble – As a designer portfolio site Dribbble, on the other hand, is all about the 1-to-1 project model. You can search for the type of designer you need based on skillset and location, look at their work, their availability and then reach out to suggest a project. Be warned, you can lose hours just looking through awesome work on this site.
  

  

• Content Marketplaces – If there’s anything that you take away from this post it should be that there are high end creative people that are ready and willing to take on your content projects. Sure, you can buy a $5 article from one of the lower end providers, or you can spend a few hundred and get a great piece of writing from people that have bylines in the New York Times.
  
  

  

  • Contently – All of the high end content marketplaces offer workflow management tools and editorial calendar tools that connect the authors and publishers and allow for direct connections to their respective Content Management Systems. Contently, however, now offers analytics for content placements and has designers on their platform as well. Before you join you can find portfolio profiles based on the topic by using this advanced search query – “inurl:.contently.com intitle:stories for [keyword].”
  • Skyword – Skyword is virtually identical to Contently, but it may be a little cheaper to get started depending on your business type and how many sites you’re talking about. They are also very SEO-minded so they have keyword research tools built-in. They also integrate with BigStock to make adding licensed imagery easy.
  • Newscred – Newscred offers the type of content quality and similar workflow tools to those at Contently and Skyword, but their USP has more to do with content licensing for re-publishing. They also integrate with paid promotion tools like Taboola and Outbrain.
    

All of these platforms are viable content sources; it’s up to you to decide which one’s nuanced differentiation best supports your use case.

• CopyPress – Hands down CopyPress is the best low commitment content development marketplace. From copywriting to high end interactive pieces they leverage their vetted community to turn out remarkable content. Whereas the previously mentioned tools require a subscription to their software, CopyPress content can be purchased as one-offs.
  

  

• PlagTracker – Depending on the volume of content you’re creating and launching you may not have the resources to scour the web and ensure that the content is original. PlagTracker is a tool to ensure that content is original. They also have an API so marketers may plug these checks into the process programmatically.
  

  

• Grammarly – Checking grammar at scale is no small task. Grammarly is a tool that speeds up the editing process by programmatically identifying grammatical errors with far more accuracy than what is built into Word. To my knowledge, you cannot tap into the tool programmatically, but I guess it’s good that they are more focused on APA than API. Grammarly also features its own plagiarism checking tool as well.
  

  

• Example Outsource Workflow
  Lists of tools with use cases are fantastic, but what’s more important is that we develop repeatable workflows to achieve efficiency. Here is an example of how the tools align with the process for an outsource workflow.
  

  

  • Audit Phase – First step is reviewing any existing content quantitatively and qualitatively to see if anything can be repurposed or needs to be updated or cut. You’ll use Screaming Frog or URL Profiler for this.
  • Strategy Phase – In the strategy phase you’ll use Quora, Bottlenose, Followerwonk and SurveyMonkey Audience to define your idea and collect data on your users. You’ll use Murally to brainstorm with your team and Trello to layout the components of the campaign and manage the project.
  • Planning Phase – You’ll lay out your storyboards and wireframes with Storyboard and Balsamiq and determine how you’ll source your content through 99Designs, Contently and Dribbble.
  • Creation Phase – You’ll create your content using 99Designs, Dribbble and Contently and then assure its quality using PlagTracker and Grammarly.
  • Maintenance – You’ll add your content to the maintenance schedule board in Trello.

DIY quality content

I totally understand that we don’t all work agencies or enterprise businesses with four or five figure content budgets. Fortunately, if you can write, make a spreadsheet and upload pictures then you can make remarkable content yourself. Many of the tools for this should already be familiar and I’ll specifically highlight the ones I hear the least about.

• WYSIWYG Infographics – Infogram and Piktochart have already made their rounds through the SEO space. Both tools allow users to create infographics built on templates with a drag and drop interface.
• Google Fusion Tables – Another SEO favorite for data visualization, Google Fusion Tables allows users to visualize spreadsheets.
• iCharts – Similar to Google Fusion Tables, iCharts allows for the creation of data visualization based on spreadsheets and connect data sources via an API.
• Dipity – Dipity allows you to create interactive timelines by simply uploading pictures and placing copy. Timelines can then be embedded into landing pages.
  

  

• Storybird – Storybird allows users to create interactive books from their existing assets or by uploading pictures and writing copy.
  

  

• Kuler – Color-coordination is key in creating beautiful content and many people simply have a problem with color theory. Have no fear, Adobe’s Kuler product allows creative to share specific color schemes they’ve identified and you can search for the right scheme to fit the look and feel that your content needs.
  

  

• Adobe Edgefonts – While the web has made great strides in improving, there are still many typefaces that are unavailable. Adobe TypeKit and Google Fonts API had a baby called Adobe Edgefonts which gives designers more choices to choose from in quality fonts. Use it to build experiences with better typography.
  
  

  

• HackDesign – I know what you’re thinking. “I’m not a designer. Where do I even start with all of this stuff?” Good question. HackDesign is free design course that comes to your inbox weekly and helps your understand design concepts.
  

  

• Example DIY Workflow
  
  Again, developing repeatable workflows is incredibly important to achieve scale. You’ll notice the Do-It-Yourself workflow is not much different from the outsourced workflow aside from the creation phase. In this case instead of identifying places to source content in the Planning stage we are creating the content ourselves using a combination of Kuler, Infogr.am and Storybird.

Communicating with creatives

Every time a marketer asks for a “simple, clean design” or misuses the term “flat design” Steve Jobs shoots an angel with a plasma cannon controlled from an iPad. Ok, maybe that’s not as succinct as the bullets on slides-kittens thing, but you get the point.

The simple fact is that as marketers we don’t necessarily speak the same language as creatives and that often results in disconnects between what we expect and what we’ve communicated. In my post ” What it Takes to Get Remarkable Content Done” I had a discussion with a Creative Director that I used to work closely with and we developed a deliverable called the Data Viz Brief.

I discuss the brief in-depth within the post, but it contains the personas the piece of content is going after, the story/background for the piece of content, the data and copy, examples of the look and feel and a wireframe for how we’d like the content laid out.

The data section includes the specifically curated data points that we want to add to the experience as well as all of the raw data we’ve collected. This gives the designer more latitude to be creative beyond ideas we may have initially come up with. This is key because designers want to be able to contribute to the project in meaningful ways rather than just being told what to do and what to copy.

The wireframes are a key component in helping to manage your own expectations of what will be created. Not only does it give the designer a good framework to create within, but it also gives both sides the opportunity to hammer out the best idea for the content before any pixels are placed. Ultimately, the end result of the brief you’re seeing screenshots from became infographic you see here.

Content promotion formulas

The good people at BuzzStream wrote the (e-)book on content promotion. Naturally, content promotion organic or otherwise requires money and/or effort and it is well worth the in-depth read as it outlines a fantastic process for doing so.

What I specifically highlight in the talk are the formulas BuzzStream presents for goal setting, knowing how much budget is required per Paid Media channel and how much effort is required for link building outreach.

• Goal Determination Formulas – Determine the goals for your content with these formulas based on how content has performed historically.
  • Download Goal = Goal Leads / Qualified Lead Rate
  • Visitor Goal = Download Goal / Conversion Rate
• Spend Per Channel Requirement Formulas – Determine what type of results you can expect based on your spend in a given channel.
  • Views per Dollar = Views / Spend
  • Conversions per Dollar = Views per Dollar / Conversion Rate
• Outreach Requirement Formulas – Determine how much effort you must put forth in outreach to hit your placement goal based on your response rate.
  • Outreach Target = Goal Links / Response (or Link) Rate
  • Initial List Length = Outreach Target / 20%

These formulas inject some much needed predictability into the content marketing conversation and are ideal for developing quick business cases and projecting ROI.

Wrapping up

Take a step back and look at your Content Marketing programs that have failed. Think about how your goals could have been better met by using higher quality content creation sources or determining clear ownership of tasks and quality assurance. Think about the times you “just shipped it” instead of spending a little more on making “it” something that was usable and useful. Those are all situations where content strategy would have given your work a boost.

Scaling quality content requires a large helping of Content Strategy added your Content Marketing. Quality at scale is more about process and resources rather than technical tricks and agility. Better marketing starts with better experiences and better experiences start with content strategy.

Content Strategy is something I help brands of all sizes do effectively every day. Before I go, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or privately about your experiences, why your content marketing campaigns have fallen short and/or how I can help out.

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 nicoleckohler

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

A few years ago, while I was still on the client side of things, I received an email from a blogger I was working with. As part of our fledgling link building program, my company had been sending out free products in exchange for a review and link to our site. Oldest trick in the book, right? However, the blogger’s email threw me off: she told me her policy was to nofollow links, and asked if this would be all right.

“Uh, sure,” I eloquently responded, having absolutely no idea what she was talking about, “just as long as there’s a link!” I then scrambled to look up just what in the heck a nofollow link was, and roughly five minutes later started cursing at my monitor. We’d just invested thirty bucks in a completely useless link!

While that may have been my viewpoint back then, my opinion on nofollow links has changed. Obviously, for those of us who are trying to earn links for our clients, receiving a nofollow link can feel like a slap in the face. But these links have hidden powers that make them just as important as followed ones.

Here’s why nofollow links are more powerful than you might think.

Links build awareness

A link has a few different connotations these days. It could mean, “this is an article that supports my viewpoint, and you might benefit by reading it, too.” It could mean, “I do a lot of shopping here, and I think you should look at their cute dresses.” Or it could simply mean, “I like cat videos!” But at its very core, a link is designed to create awareness of something on a different page.

When you’re out there trying to make people aware of your business, links are hugely important. SEO companies now offer link building services because businesses realize how important they are. So to that busy CEO who sees his or her website traffic dipping, and believes that links will give them a way to get back on top, a successful link building campaign is going to be really desirable.

That busy CEO is probably going to flip out if you say “well, we got 50 new links this month, and 40 of them were nofollow.” But it’s important that neither you nor the CEO (nor their marketing team) discredit the power of a nofollow link. Links still build awareness, as long as they are seen. They don’t have to be followed. They probably don’t even have to be clicked! They just have to be visible.

How many times a day do you see someone you follow tweet a link to an article with an interesting headline? Let’s say the article is really well written, and is on a site you don’t currently follow. So you add them to your feed reader. A week later, you think “oh, you know, that post I read is really relevant to this blog post I’m working on now!” So you link to it in your post. This accomplishes two things: one, it probably negates that original nofollow link from Twitter (more on that shortly), and two, it has made both you and your followers aware of that site.

Links lead to profit

A nofollow link can also directly lead to someone spending money on your company’s products or services. If you consistently create awareness and engage with people, those nofollow links may earn you way more than domain authority. Don’t believe me? Here’s the story of how I became a paying Buffer customer.

A few months ago, I saw a tweet with a link to this case study about how Buffer responded to being hacked. I had no idea what Buffer was, but it gave me an idea for a blog post. After I wrote my post, I followed Buffer on Twitter. I engaged with them a few times (for example, mentioning them after my post went up), and they engaged right back.

Over the next few weeks, I visited the Buffer blog when they tweeted links to new posts, learned about their company, and admired the heck out of their content marketing skills. I’d say it was at about the two month mark that I decided to actually give them a try. A month later, I upgraded to the Awesome plan and began using it daily to manage not only my accounts, but also our agency’s accounts.

To recap, this is how it all went down:

1. I became aware of Buffer through someone else’s Twitter link
2. I followed Buffer on Twitter
3. I engaged with their content
4. I tried, subscribed, and ended up forking over $10 a month (well worth it!)

This was all because of a single nofollow link. Over the course of three months, my general awareness turned into lifetime value for Buffer. That one nofollow link directly led to profit.

You can make an equation out of this:

a + e = p

Awareness + engagement = profit. By becoming aware of Buffer, and having opportunities to engage regularly with them, I converted into a paying customer. This all happened because of social media, and all those links you see on social media are nofollow. (Who said there’s no ROI in Twitter?!)

Links lead to more links

A few years ago, Joshua Unseth wrote a post for YouMoz explaining how a single nofollow link earned him a second link that was followed, increased his traffic, and boosted his article to the top of the SERPs for a specific phrase. His post, titled “The Importance of nofollow Links,” has a really great conclusion that stresses the importance of even a single link:

To put it into context, of the people that came to the article as a direct or indirect result of the nofollow, ~1% made a comment on the article itself, and ~2% blogged about it – actually, if you count this article, then the results were blogged about by 3% of the visitors.

While I don’t think that these numbers would hold on a site with more viewers, I think that they represent the way in which content ends up going viral. In the end, ALL IT TAKES IS ONE LINK, and its follow status doesn’t seem to make a difference.

I couldn’t say it any better! What Joshua wrote still holds true today – and in fact may be even truer, considering how many of us use Twitter to amplify messages and blog posts we enjoy, or rely on a feed reader to provide us with interesting content that we want to share on our websites.

Here’s a real-life example of the potential power of a single nofollow link. Back in March, we published two maps showing the ISP landscape in the United States, and how the potential Comcast buyout of Time-Warner would affect it. The post was picked up by the Amazing_Maps Twitter account, which has more than 160,000 followers.

This was a nofollow link, obviously, as were the retweets that followed.

Two days later, we made it to the front page of the Huffington Post.

After HuffPo picked up the story, the maps spread to several other websites, most of which had followed links back to our blog post or homepage. But even if those links hadn’t been followed, we still would have created new awareness of WebpageFX, our blog, and the work we do.

Like Joshua said: it only takes one. One link can lead to many.

How to make the most of your nofollow links

“Okay, Nicole,” I can hear you skeptics saying, “I’m on board. nofollow links are powerful. Magical, even. But you don’t see any of my tweets getting picked up by HuffPo.”

Well, food for thought: we’ve published hundreds of blog posts, and only one of them led to a Twitter link (not ours) that led to HuffPo. Success on the Internet is all about being at the right place with the right content at the right time, and with all of the blogs, websites, and companies vying for attention, your chance at getting noticed is lower than low.

Here are some ways that you can make the most of your nofollow links, whether they’re on social media, someone’s blog, or elsewhere.

Motivate viewers to click your link. This might mean testing headlines, trying different tweets, or coming right out and saying, “look, if you click this, this cool thing will happen.” For example, Buffer found that one tweet earned a blog post 100% more clicks than another, just because they changed the language surrounding the link.

Increase your audience. Want more people to see, click, and act on your nofollow link? Get a bigger audience. This may be as simple as following industry figureheads who are likely to follow you back, directly asking for shares, or sharing your post multiple times. Try emailing people of authority and asking (nicely) for them to check out your content. If it’s really good, it may earn you a share.

Another trick: if you write blog posts or product content that references someone else, make sure they know about it. It may seem like you’re just trying to stroke their ego, but it works. If someone wrote a blog post about me, heck yeah I’d tweet the link out to everybody I knew! (Unless it was bad. Then I’d just cry.)

Ensure your link is relevant. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important aspects of a nofollow link. So many links on social media go unclicked simply because the content isn’t relevant to them. This one is hard to control, because it’s pretty difficult to know when your audience is going to be in the mood for your blog posts vs. photos of puppies, but you can still get ahead by thinking very carefully about what you share, when, and why.

Make sure your content is relevant, too. Okay, so your link got clicked. Great! But your bounce rate is at 99%. Not great. You can write the best headline in the world, but if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is empty, nobody’s going to stick around. Avoid misleading headlines, unfulfilling content, or just plain marketing to the wrong people.

This is honestly the biggest flaw of the ISP map I linked above. Lots of people checked out the maps, and even visited our blog to see the rest of the study, but then they left. Probably 99% of our visitors to that post have no idea who WebpageFX is and what we do. That doesn’t mean the content was bad, but it just wasn’t relevant to the kind of audience we want to attract (that is, potential clients).

Optimize your landing pages. What do you want someone to do after they visit your link? What’s the next step for this visitor? Keep them around a little longer. Use a related posts plugin to provide some additional reading, or try a service like snip.ly to suggest relevant content or links.

Don’t complain. If someone gives you a link and it’s nofollow, please don’t storm into their inbox with guns blazing. Maybe they just don’t know you well enough to follow your links yet. If you’re cool about it, the second link they give you may be a followed one. And even if it isn’t, you’re still getting exposure out of it, right?

A nofollow link isn’t the end of the world

As SEO professionals, I know we’re all aiming for followed links that pass a lot of “juice” to the websites of our clients. If we all had our way, earning links would be easy, every link would be followed, and Google would never, ever penalize websites for having too many links, or too many links of a certain type. We would all have millions of dollars, and would spend our days on the beach drinking fancy cocktails. Unfortunately… that’s just not the way things are.

Honestly, a nofollow link isn’t the end of the world, either for you or for a client. These links are valuable, and important for anyone trying to build their brand online. As I’ve shown, they hold significant power, and more than you might expect.

Instead of focusing on whether or not a link is followed, we should do our best to get those links in front of the right people at the right time, crafting content beyond the link that motivates conversions. As it is for everything in SEO, obtaining links is all about balance: the balance between followed and not followed, “juicy” links and dry ones.

In my case, that nofollow link I talked about at the beginning of this post went live, the blogger was happy with her product, and the review she wrote was fantastic. It led to a fairly high amount of clicks through to our site… and what do you know, even a few purchases. Seeing was believing for me, and now I’m an advocate of earning links in general – not just the followed ones.

Image Credit: Public domain images from Pixabay (links, beach); cat screencap from Maru’s YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/mugumogu); Twitter & snip.ly screencaps I took; Buffer blog (source linked in post)

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

Continue reading →

Posted by randfish Bigger audiences and less competition aren’t actually that hard to find; we just have to reach a bit farther up the funnel. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the benefits of this largely unexplored place, showing you how t… Continue reading →

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

The countdown to MozCon—July 14-16 in Seattle—is on! We’ve finalized the agenda and our speaker selection, put in our swag orders, and choreographed happy dances for Roger. We’re also counting down as ticket sales speed up and are getting closer to selling out. That means:

For the best MozCon deal, make sure you  take a 30-day free trial and register as a Moz Subscriber. If our software’s not for you, cancel at anytime, and we’ll still look forward to seeing you at MozCon.

To get you a little more excited, we’re sharing these seven future-forward videos from talks from our past two MozCons. This is the first time that these videos have been available for free! That’s right, all-new content just for you because we love you. 

If each of these videos doesn’t make you a little more happy to be part of this industry, thrilled to dive into your work, and overly-eager to attend MozCon yourself, then I suggest some cat video therapy. 😉

1. Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy with Phil Nottingham

Tweet about this video

Want more Phil? He’ll be back on stage with “YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For” this year. He also rocked it on the blog last year with a strategy for the kind of videos you should create for your business.

---

2. The D-Word: Leading the Way to Great Design with Jenny Lam

Tweet about this video

You can never spend too much time thinking about your design and how to make it better.

---

3. Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking with Dr. Pete Meyers

Tweet about this video

Noted as the scariest presentation from last year, Dr. Pete takes you on a journey through the SERPs. Don’t miss his “How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas” this year.

---

4. 35 Ways to Get Links with Paddy Moogan

Tweet about this video

And pencils down… Paddy will be bringing his great ideas and beer challenge back this year with “Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign.”

---

5. Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out with Dana DiTomaso

Tweet about this video

“Wow.” That’s pretty much what I thought after seeing this presentation live. Dana will be give a talk titled “Prove Your Value” this year.

---

6. A New Form of CRO with Joanna Lord

Tweet about this video

You’ll never look at conversion rate optimization the same way again.

---

7. Strings to Things: Entities and SEO with Matthew Brown

Tweet about this video

Yep, Matthew basically predicted Hummingbird before it hit Google’s Algo.

Now are you ready for MozCon?

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 n8ngrimm

The eCommerce SEO community is ignoring a huge opportunity by focusing almost exclusively on Google. But Google is the biggest search engine, right? Actually, if you are in eCommerce, Amazon should be far more important to you than Google, because it has roughly three times more search volume for products.

In 2012, The New York Times reported:

“In 2009, nearly a quarter of shoppers started research for an online purchase on a search engine like Google and 18 percent started on Amazon, according to a Forrester Research study. By last year, almost a third started on Amazon and just 13 percent on a search engine. Product searches on Amazon have grown 73 percent over the last year while searches on Google Shopping have been flat, according to comScore.”

When researching this post, I searched Moz.com for already-published material about ranking in Amazon. All I found was a single Q&A with five responses and little information. Conversely, there are many, many questions on Moz about how to rank your Amazon product pages in Google. It’s all very Google-focused.

I joined DNA Response and the eCommerce vertical from the world of education lead-gen where most of our traffic came from Google. I empathize with the Google myopia from which most SEOs suffer. My goal with this post is twofold:

1. First, I want to convince all of the eCommerce search marketers to spend a lot more energy optimizing Amazon.
2. Second, I want to provide marketers with a basic understanding of Amazon’s organic ranking algorithm.

Due to the lack of existing content on this topic, I felt the need to be somewhat comprehensive. I will address several conceptual problems I encountered when switching from a Google-focused niche to Amazon then share everything I have learned about Amazon’s ranking algorithms.

(Side note: I would like to apologize in advance that many of the links in my article require an Amazon Seller Central login to view. Amazon requires a login for most of their seller resources.)

Table of contents

• Key Differences Between Amazon and Google
• Results Page Mechanics
• Ranking Factors
• Track your Progress
• Other Visibility Systems
• In Closing

This section is mostly theoretical. Amazon is a fundamentally different search engine than Google so my thinking necessarily evolved when I made the switch from optimizing websites in Google to optimizing products in Amazon.

Conversion vs. user satisfaction

Google built a search engine so they could sell ads. Amazon built a search engine so they can sell products. That creates a basic difference in how each measures success. Google is successful when you find your answer quickly because you will return, perform more searches, and click on ads. Amazon is successful when you to find a great product at a great price and buy it because you will return and buy more products. Google’s search success metrics will revolve around dwell time, click-through-rate, search refinement rate, etc. Amazon can measure success by revenue or gross margin per search. If Amazon can sell more products by rearranging their search results, they will do that.

Because the two search engines measure success differently, the metrics you analyze to predict rankings success change. When optimizing for Google you focus on improving user engagement metrics and building external trust factors, because those factors tell Google that the users it sends to your website will be happy. Happy users equals more money for Google. When optimizing for Amazon, focus on improving conversion rates. More conversions equals more money for Amazon.

Structured vs. unstructured data

While Google has been encouraging site owners to add more structured data to their websites, the data in Amazon’s index is already completely structured. Here’s a screenshot of the page where a seller enters data about a product. Every field has a name, a definition, and sometimes a defined list of valid values:

Now compare that to the basic way to build a web page.

Site owners have a blank slate where they can express… anything. In Amazon, you need to give Amazon exactly what they want in the format they specify. Because Amazon has already determined the type of information you can give them about your product, spend time providing accurate and complete product data.

On-page vs. on-page + off-page

With Google you spend a lot of your time optimizing your off-page signals. You build links, manage a social media presence, and encourage brand mentions because Google is measuring those signals to calculate the popularity and trust of your website. While these activities may have secondary effects on a products ranking in Amazon (greater brand awareness creates more branded search leading to a higher sales rank and conversion rate leading Amazon to rank you higher), building a link to your blue widget page on Amazon will not directly improve its ranking for the search term “blue widget.”

On Amazon, that leaves you with optimizing for conversions, which can be frustrating due to the sparse user behavior data. Here’s all the data you get about user behavior on your listings.

Compared to an analytics package like Google Analytics, it’s nothing. You can’t even view a product’s page views or conversion rate over time without downloading one report per day, week, or month and combining it in Excel.

Compelling vs. unique content

When I first started working with online marketplaces I thought, “We need to write a unique description and bullet points for every marketplace we sell on or else Google won’t rank us well.” I didn’t realize that the bulk of our search traffic in Amazon comes from internal site search and Amazon doesn’t care if your listing has the exact same title, bullets, description, and images as another website. They just care if it converts their searchers into purchasers.

(By the way, I’m not saying that compelling and unique content are mutually exclusive.)

To properly interpret what a ranking means, you should understand the anatomy of a search results page. Like Google, Amazon’s search results pages can have several different looks depending on what type of search you entered.

Anatomy of the results page

Amazon has two formats for their results: a list view for searches in all departments and a gallery view when you search within a specific department or category. The list view contains 15 results per page (sometimes there are 16 results on the first page). The gallery results have 24 results per page.

List view

Gallery view

Some other important elements of the results page are the filter fields in the left sidebar. When a user clicks on a filter, they will see a subset of the original search results. This is one reason why it is so important to complete as many fields as possible when you create a product in Amazon. For instance, Amazon will not know that a blue widget is blue if you don’t fill out the color map field, which means it will be excluded when a user filters to only show blue products.

Finally, there are sponsored products. These are pay-per-click results that show up on the bottom of a search results page. In my experience, if I would like my ad to appear for a specific query, I must include all of the words in the query somewhere in my title or bullet points.

Query string parameters

Amazon builds the URL of a search results page with query parameters much like Google. There are many parameters that might be used but I will review the three most useful. To learn more about the parameters Amazon uses, play around with the filter fields available in the left sidebar and watch how the URL of the search page changes.

field-keywords: Your query in the search bar

node: A numeric string identifying a node in Amazon’s taxonomy (category tree). To determine which number corresponds to which category, navigate to the category on Amazon and find the number Amazon uses in the node parameter in the URL. For instance, the node ID for the Electronics category is 172282. The node IDs are also available in Amazon’s Browse Tree Guides (Seller Central login required).

field-brandtextbin: This represents the brand field. This field is very useful if you want to track how well your product ranks among other products from the same brand. It will not return results if it is the only parameter you include in the search URL. To ensure that you see all products from that brand, include the brand name in the field-keywords parameter.

Here’s how it looks when you use each of these three parameters in one search:

http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=blue widgets&node=172282&field-brandtextbin=pioneer

That URL will search for blue widgets in the electronics category where the brand is pioneer.

First, let’s see what Amazon themselves say about how they rank products. This is an excerpt from a help file in Seller Central titled, Using Search and Browse (Seller Central login required).

“Search is the primary way that customers use to locate products on Amazon.com. Customers search by entering keywords, which are matched against the search terms you enter for a product. Well-chosen search terms increase a product’s visibility and sales. The number of views for a product detail page can increase significantly by adding just one additional search term – if it’s a relevant and compelling term.

“Factors such as price, availability, selection, and sales history help determine where your product appears in a customer’s search results. In general, better-selling products tend to be towards the beginning of the results list. As your sales of a product increase, so does your placement.”

Several statements in those paragraphs are very illuminating. First, search is the “primary” way customers find products. I interpret this to mean that most of the time, Amazon users will perform a search before purchasing. If you want your products to be found on Amazon you must think about search. Second, Amazon mentions some of the data they use to rank products. Specifically they mention the search terms, price, availability (meaning inventory levels), selection (not sure what that means), and sales history.

I will expand on each of these factors and include several more where I have observed an effect on rankings. To further clarify the type of effect each factor has on rankings I separated the factors into two categories: performance factors and relevance factors. A performance factor improves rankings by showing Amazon they will make more money by ranking the product, a relevance factor shows Amazon that a product is relevant to the search of a user.

Performance factors

Performance factors are pretty simple. Amazon wants to rank the product that will generate the most profit for them at the top of each search result. Each of these factors will indicate to Amazon that a product will sell well when ranked well.

Conversion rate

This is a pretty obvious factor to mention, albeit a difficult factor to improve with confidence. Amazon does share units and sessions but does not provide enough data to run A/B tests or even control for specific traffic sources. To find conversion data in Seller Central, navigate to Reports >> Business Reports >> Detail Page Sales and Traffic. Make sure the Unit Session Percentage column is visible. This is simply the number of units ordered divided by the number of sessions your listing received.

Amazon’s Definition of a session is: Sessions are visits to your Amazon.com pages by a user. All activity within a 24-hour period is considered a session.

If your offer is competing with other offers for the same product, be sure to weight your units ordered by your buy box percentage. Otherwise, you product will look like it converts more poorly than it actually does. Amazon will show you all of the sessions a listing received regardless of who was in the buy box but they only show you the number of units ordered from your seller account. If you had 50% of the buy box for a time period you probably received half of the total orders for the listing. Therefore the unit session percentage reported should be half of the unit session percentage observed across all sellers.

Images

Amazon strongly encourages sellers to follow their image guidelines. On their image requirements page they encourage sellers to upload images larger than 1000×1000 pixels (the size required to activate their zoom feature) by saying, “Zoom has proven to enhance sales.”

By including images that meet Amazon’s guidelines, you will ensure that your listings are not suppressed (which kills all sales) and possibly increase conversion rates. As Amazon stated on their Search and Browse page, more sales equals better rankings.

Price

Price often strongly influences conversion rates and units sales. If the price on Amazon compares well to the same product offered on other websites and retail stores, comparison shoppers will be more likely to buy from Amazon and vice versa.

Also consider how your product’s price compares to other products in the same category. My company used to sell a battery-operated vacuum pooper scooper that cost $150. It never ranked very well for searches like “pooper scooper.” I believe this was partly because every other pooper scooper costs between $10 and $20. If customers are used to paying $10 for a pooper scooper it takes a lot of convincing for them to shell out $150. Amazon either observed a low conversion rate and did not rank the product or predicted a low conversion rate and did not rank the product. Either way, the price probably kept our $150 pooper scooper from ranking well.

Relevance factors

Amazon will analyze the following fields to determine if a product is relevant to a search.

Title

The title of a product is one of the most important places to include keywords. Amazon suggests incorporating the following attributes in product titles.

• Brand and description
• Product line
• Material or key ingredient
• Color
• Size
• Quantity

What they do not mention, probably because they want to discourage keyword stuffing, is that you should include an important keyword in the product title. A title is also critical for earning a high click-through-rate and conversion rate by clearly stating what the product is. Since sales factor prominently in ranking, keyword-stuffed titles that discourage users from clicking will ultimately harm your rankings.

As an example of an optimized title, we sell a mineral sunscreen called Brush on Block. In addition to the brand/product name we want to make sure to include the keyword “mineral sunscreen” in the title. It helps users understand what the product is and it’s a valuable keyword. Our title is Brush On Block Broad Spectrum SPF 30 Mineral Powder Sunscreen.

Brand

The brand field in Amazon appears here on the product page. It will always link to a search result of more products from the same brand. When you list products, always include the proper brand name. It is very common for consumers to search for products based on their brand name, so be sure to include the correct one. If a product has multiple brand names you could use, use Google’s Keyword Planner to see which brand is searched most frequently.

Bullets and description

Anecdotally, the bullet points seem to be more influential on search rankings than the description. One of our clients has a line of products with a celebrity’s name attached to the product. After doing some keyword research in Google, we found that there were several popular ways to search for the celebrity’s name. There were many books written by the celebrity already ranking for these versions of their name. The day after including the celebrity’s name in the bullet points, our products began to appear on the second and third pages of results.

Search terms

If you are used to keywords for SEO and PPC, it’s easy to use the “search terms” fields on Amazon incorrectly. I’ve even seen articles written by industry experts that provide sub-optimal advice for using these fields. If you have a Seller Central account, the Search and Browse help page is worth reading. I’ll summarize what they say as well as give some examples share a few main points here. First, I’ll spell out the guidelines:

• There are five fields that accept 50 characters each.
• You do not need to repeat any words
• Commas will be ignored
• Quotation marks will unnecessarily limit your keyword
• Including multiple variations of the same word is unnecessary
• Including common misspellings is unnecessary
• Order of the search terms may matter
• Do include synonyms or spelling variations (e.g. include sun screen and sunscreen)

When I first started filling out search terms fields in Amazon, I would have done something like this:

Applying all the rules above, you actually want your fields to look like this.

No word is repeated, there are no variations of the same word and I’ve used as many characters as possible for maximum exposure.

The search terms fields do influence ranking on Amazon. As an easy-to-prove example, one of our clients identified a common spelling of their brand name with only a single, outdated result. After adding the term to the Search Terms fields in all of their products, all of their products began to appear for that spelling of their brand name within an hour.

Seller name

I have not seen anything published about Amazon using seller names to build their search results, but I have seen a few situations that lead me to believe your seller name is used in Amazon’s organic search algorithm:

Situation 1: We sell a line of cell phone cases. There are over 17 million cell phone cases listed on Amazon. I have no idea where ours rank, but it’s nowhere near the top. However, if I search for “cell phone case” + our seller name, I can see all of our cell phone cases close to the top of the results.

Situation 2: We sell some workout DVDs. These do not rank very well amongst the 242,000 results for “workout,” but when you add part of our seller name (it’s made up of two words), you can see our workout DVDs on the first page of results.

Both situations demonstrate that Amazon is using your seller name as part of the content they index for search results. It may not be a good idea to change your seller name to optimize for your top keyword, but it will be used in search.

Now that you know what factors Amazon is using to rank products it’s time to get to work. Remember to track your progress to see if your changes help or hurt your rankings. There is a relative lack of testing between ranking factors on Amazon compared to Google, so act with care. To track rankings, I made a simple Google Spreadsheet (which can be improved upon, I’m sure).

UPDATE: The Google Spreadsheet was acting up, so I created this Excel version for you to download.

Here is the process I use to record rankings every day.

Setup

1. Make a copy of the spreadsheet so you can edit it.
2. Enter the ASINs you would like to track in column E (Don’t edit columns F through H).
3. Keep a list of Keywords you want to track in column J.

Daily process

1. Copy the first keyword from Column J and paste it into cell B1.
2. Wait a few seconds for the spreadsheet to load the top 240 ASINs returned by Amazon.
3. When Columns A through C are full of data, you should see your rankings in column G.
4. In the example spreadsheet, I would highlight columns E3:H5 and copy
5. To store the data, go to the Historical Data tab and paste values at the end of the table.
   
   • To paste values only, right click the first empty cell in column A, mouse over “Paste special,” and click on “Paste values only.”
   • If you do a normal paste, it will preserve the formulas and look wrong.

To analyze rankings changes over time, I download the file as an .xlsx, open it with Excel, highlight the table of data on the Historical Data tab and insert a pivot chart.

(Disclaimer: This spreadsheet uses scraped data from Amazon. Amazon may change the structure of their pages at any time, and if it does, this sheet may stop working. If this data is important to your business, make sure you understand the xpath used to scrape Amazon and are ready to fix it if Amazon changes its HTML.)

Here are a few other factors that may help increase your sales or ranking. I do not have any explicit statements, studies, or experience proving a relationship but they are worth trying out. I would encourage you to study the effect of these fields on rankings and sales.

Filter fields

Next to every search result is a list of attributes that allow users to filter their results. For your top keywords, make sure your product has a value filled out for each category of fields to ensure your product is still visible when users filter by color, size, or any other attribute. The Category, Eligible for Free Shipping, Brand, Avg. Customer Review, and Condition fields are visible on most search results.

Reviews

More reviews and better ratings might lead to better sales. Most products that rank well for broad searches have many reviews but it is difficult to tell if the good reviews lead to more sales or if high sales volume leads to more reviews. You can encourage more reviews by emailing your purchasers and asking them to leave a review.

Sales rank

Amazon maintains best sellers lists and reports a listings best sellers ranking for relevant categories on the listing page. This can be a quick way to see how your products’ sales histories compare to similar products.

Parent-child products

What if you could combine the sales histories of several similar products into one? Well, maybe you can. If you sell a product with several size or color options you can list them as a variation and combine them into one listing. While Amazon will combine the reviews from all listings onto the new listing, it’s unclear whether this leads to better rankings by combining the sales histories of the different options.

For instructions on configuring your products as parent/child listings, see the Creating Parent/Child Variation Relationships page in Seller Central (login required).

MPN

We have observed several products with significant search volume for the manufacturer part number (MPN). Check with the manufacturer to make sure you have the correct MPN on your listing.

There are so many topics related to selling on Amazon that I cannot possibly cover them in one blog post. I would like to mention that even with the best organic optimization you can still have poor sales for a product if you don’t understand how to win the Amazon buy box, maintain a good seller rating, or keep inventory in stock. There are a lot of good resources that already exist on these topics.

I hope that, as a community, we can continue to study and educate ourselves on Amazon’s algorithm. It’s a more important search engine than Google in the world of eCommerce, and it continues to gain market share in the US. Ignore it at your own risk.

Did I miss anything? Do you have any questions about your company’s products? Ask away in the comments or get in touch with us at DNA Response.

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 →