seo

Posted by RobOusbey

Six years ago I stood in a client’s board room with a list of SEO recommendations that I was convinced would earn me big smiles, firm handshakes, and and maybe even a celebratory slap on the back. Instead I was met with icy stares and nonchalance to my suggestions.

This was despite all my preparation to understand various intricate SEO best practices, as well as the quirks of their website and CMS. I just had no idea what this team believed in, or what angle I should use to persuade them to get things done.

It was July 2008, and I decided: SEO is easy. Consulting is hard.

Every day that I’ve been at Distilled, I’ve had the pleasure of learning more about online marketing, but I’ve also been able to learn—through research, practice, observation and teaching—lots about the skills that make someone an effective consultant.

There are many many traits of a great consultant that can be developed, but one necessary skill is: getting to know your client and understanding how you can be effective for them. This knowledge is how you unlock your ability to talk to them about the problems they’re facing, discover the problems they didn’t know they had, and lets you be best set up to deliver solutions that they will actually understand and implement—and which will make a real and impactful change to their business.

Obviously this getting-to-know-you phase is important enough to invest real time into, but I’ve found there are a bunch of ‘hacks’ that can help you get up to speed on an organization and its individuals. I want to share these quick tips and tricks with you, as well as a bunch of other questions that are worth answering—either through research, by observing the client, or by asking outright.

Throughout this post, I’ve shared examples and anecdotes from my own consulting experiences. If you’d just prefer the TL;DR version, the top two or three questions in each section are highlighted, or you can see the full list of my ’50+ things to learn’ in this downloadable cheat sheet.

How much profit does the company make from each additional customer?

How are the company’s financials; are they profitable, or making a loss?

We’ll begin with this section because it’s so cut-and-dry that it’s little more than ‘business 101′. However, some of the seemingly obvious money-orientated questions can be overlooked; I met with one marketer last year who had absolutely no idea what the profit was on each sale he made, or which sales he was making or losing money on; it reminded me that sometimes you do have to make sure to ask the right questions and then go digging for the answers.

It’s worth approaching this at two distinct levels—from the perspective of individual transactions, and the overall view of the company or department.

On a transactional level, we want to know the revenue & profit. For a retailer, that usually means understanding the average revenue associated with each purchase. For some businesses, there may also be a ‘lifetime value’ (LTV) for each new customer—which takes into account repeat purchases or the average length of time a user stays signed up (for a subscription product, or a SAAS company like Moz).

For those businesses, it’s also important to understand the the ‘marginal profit’ of each purchase. (The amount made on each sale, after the cost of actually providing the product.) Since most marketing teams also have a good handle on their ‘cost per acquisition’ (the amount they spend to attract each conversion, etc) it’s particularly important to view this in the context of the marginal profit from each sale. Where marginal profit is significantly higher than CPA for a particular marketing channel or tactic, it might indicate an opportunity to increase investment in that channel.

As well as understanding profit margin, CPA, etc, for your client’s transaction, it’s worth getting to know what these look like for similar companies or others in their niche. This may take some hunting around and research online, but will give you an insight into how aggressive your client can afford to be when it comes to beating their competitors.

On a business level, it’s worth making sure you have a handle on certain financial metrics such as revenue and operating profit. For larger / public companies, I typically prefer to research these sorts of things myself. If you have the time and interest to read through financial statements, Google is usually the fastest way to find these documents. (Search for the company name plus ‘annual report’ or ‘10k’.) However, various sources have done a good job making financial information easily digestible; I’m fond of MSN Money (e.g.: their page for Yelp, showing an $7.9m loss ) or simply Wikipedia (e.g.: their page on Dell, showing a $2.3b profit.)

For anything other than a fast-growing startup, knowing the company’s current profitability is usually more interesting to me than revenue, as it can often guide their approach to marketing investment. A company with very little profit (or who is making a loss) is likely to be interested in very strategic spending, with a well understood path to return. A company that is flush with profits might be more able to include some more risky tactics in their marketing strategy.

Does your POC have more of an analytical or emotional personality type?

How does your POC prefer to communicate on project matters?

Above everything else, the relationship between a consultant and the people within a client organization is perhaps the biggest factor in determining how successful the engagement will be. Although building any relationship takes time, there are a few things I like to uncover (or just directly ask about) in order to speed up that process.

Beyond just knowing each person’s role in a team, I want to understand what they are responsible for (what do they actually do from day-to-day?) and what they are accountable for. The ‘accountability’ includes what they are measured on. (Which is the most important thing to happen or improve so that they would be celebrated/rewarded; what would they be criticized for if it didn’t happen?)

For my main point of contact inside an organization, we often phrase this as “what would make you look good to your boss?”—which can help set at least one clear objective for the engagement. Plus, helping your contact to be successful has a fantastic side-effect: as they get promoted and move up their organization, it can give you greater access, wider influence, and bigger budgets to work with.

There are many frameworks for how people view situations and make decisions, such as Myers-Briggs, the learning modalities, etc. I love the incredibly simplified approach of assessing whether someone is analytical (driven by data, talks about facts, wants to know about ROI) or emotional (driven by personal connections, talks about vision, wants to hear stories.) Although categorising people in such a binary way is clearly a gross oversimplification of human nature, I’ve found the value in this is that you can make an assessment of someone within just a few minutes of meeting them, and immediately better tailor your approach to them.

As part of ‘getting close to your client’, I also like to ask (to individuals or a team) what they have been excited about recently. When you have to start making recommendations to them, knowing what excites them gives an insight into the kind of answers they’ll respond well to, or what is most likely to get implemented quickly.

Working quickly to understand how different individuals like to communicate can reduce friction and repays the time invested very quickly. I’ve worked with people who will reply to emails within minutes, people who prefer you to pick up the phone and call them, people who are great at running meetings, even people who always respond to messages on GChat / Skype. (And conversely, some people will have an out-of-control inbox, some never listen to voicemails, and some never get anything done in meetings.)

Related to communication styles, it’s valuable to understand how people like to receive reports & updates—whether from consultants or their own team-members. Find out how often you’re expected to prepare reports, the style (lots of data, bottom line metrics, written explanations?), the formats (email, spreadsheets, slide deck format, online dashboards?) and the audience (a project lead, a whole team, executives, juniors?).

From a reporting perspective, I’ve worked with a branding guy who “left the numbers up to other people”, and was more interested in a monthly face-to-face where we recapped the status of each initiative & campaign, and I’ve known a successful CMO who reviewed a three-page spreadsheet/dashboard each morning and would chase down different team members to ask about the story behind changes in different numbers. In both cases, providing metrics & updates in a way that fit their existing process let them understand my information and respond to me more effectively.

Who will be making the decisions that affect your project?

What constraints does the team have to balance when making decisions?

Early on in my consulting career, I overlooked the value of investing time in how organizations make decisions. Naively, I would deliver ‘the right answer’ for a client, and be frustrated when they didn’t decide to immediately put all hands on deck implementing my brilliant ideas.

Through conversation with members of your client’s team, you will hear about decisions that have been made—at both the high/strategic level, and down at the tactical level. Within those stories is the information about what criteria were important, and who the influential people were. To kick-start these conversations, you can ask “which projects were big successes internally?” or “which big decisions do people still talk about?”

It’s easiest to understand the decision making process when you’re clear on how a team’s success is measured. I once worked with a marketing team who were measured and bonused on overall conversion rate of visitors. I failed to persuade them to invest in SEO because even though it would have brought a fire hose of new traffic and customers, organic visitors to their site converted at ~6%, which brought down their current ~8% average. I was gobsmacked, but once I understood their situation, I realized I had to go to the CMO instead to explain why the teams current objectives were counterproductive.

An aspect of this which can take longer to grok are the constraints, roadblocks and objections that a team faces. While some are quite easy to ask about (eg: the team that has a limited budget to invest in marketing activities), some are only uncovered throughout a project (eg: the boss who wouldn’t A/B test pricing in marketing emails, in case a customer found out that someone else was offered a deeper discount.) Effective consultants will be respectful of an organization’s history, values and beliefs—but great consultants can balance this with knowing when to challenge those things.

Finally, a great ‘hack’ I learned from one colleague at Distilled is that there’s a lot of discovery value in asking a new client “what made you hire me for this project?” This forces them to provide insight into how they made a very real, very recent decision. Plus, by exposing what they valued in making the decision, it also does a lot to set expectations and an agenda for the engagement.

What criteria are used to prioritize new tasks or projects?

How does the team tend to run / use meetings?

How risk tolerant is the team?

Beyond just how plans are made, I always want to discover how work is prioritized, the criteria for that prioritization, and how the plans are shared with the team. Occasionally, a team will perfectly implement the Agile methodology, others rely on an odd Waterfall-esqe model, many have something less formal still. Understanding their processes lets you know, for example, whether quick & easy wins can be hustled up the backlog, or whether they will have to ‘wait their turn’.

Related to processes are the tools a team uses for project management. They may rely on Trello/Basecamp/MS Project, or a wall full of sticky notes—and it’ll be up to you to integrate yourself.

I’m always fascinated by the ‘meeting culture’ at different companies. I’ve seen companies where the most effective work happens during impromptu five-minute stand up meetings, and organizations that are crippled by the archetypal ‘terrible’ meetings (too long, too many people, no agenda, no actions, etc.) Understanding whether I need to be ‘in the room’ to help make decisions, or whether to avoid any unproductive time-sinks, improves my effectiveness as much as my sanity.

There are myriad other cultural factors worth picking up on relatively quickly. How you behave with them, and the recommendations you make could be influenced by:

• a team’s degree of risk tolerance (eg: a marketing team might be happy with a PR story that raises some controversy around their brand, but wouldn’t do anything that puts their rankings at risk of a Google penalty)
• their bias to action (are they in the Facebook-esque mold of ‘move fast and break things’?)
• their hunger for success (how invested are the team members in the organization’s achievements, or to what degree is this just a job for them?)

For some cultural factors, you just need a trusted person who can give you the inside track, rather than waiting to recognize them yourself. For example: I’ve seen everything from companies that were run like non-stop frat parties, to companies where bad language was highly frowned upon—so it’s good to know which sort of team you might be talking to.

What is the company’s mission / vision?

Does the team you’re working with believe in these things?

There are bunch of very straightforward questions here, which typically don’t have simple answers. What is the company’s vision? (IE: what do they believe about the future and their place in it?) Do they have an explicit ‘mission’ or ‘purpose’? What are their stated values? (For instance Distilled, Moz and Amazon are all very public about these.) Do they have a BHAG?

Beyond these things, do they have a company strategy (or marketing strategy) that is congruent with the vision/mission/purpose?

However, beyond the presence of things like a mission statement or values, I like to understand how much the team members have bought into all of these things, or whether the CEO is alone in believing these things. This tells me how much to rely on those values in working with the team. For example: I’ve seen Amazon employees make certain decisions explicitly because “this demonstrates a bias for action”, but that ‘buy-in’ doesn’t exist at every company.

Does everyone in the the team have a good understanding of the company’s USP, customers, etc?

How much knowledge of your niche (SEO, social media, etc) does the client’s team have?

With each new client, you may have to invest time in reading and learning about an industry that you’re unfamiliar with. (The client can obviously explain lots to you, but probably shouldn’t be your only source; they may be snowblinded, or only viewing the niche through the lens of their own organization.)

But as a sense-check: don’t be afraid to get your client’s team members talking to you about the company’s work and their industry. A memorable experience was being in the room with the marketing department from a tech company, where 50% of the team admitted to not really understanding the industry, or their company’s services.

In the other direction, don’t skip over getting a sense of the team’s understanding of your industry, whether that’s marketing, social media, SEO, UX, etc. I overlooked this with one of my early clients, and realized far too late that I was talking to a room split between experienced marketing people, and product people who didn’t know the first thing about SEO. (One quote that stuck in my head, maybe 45 minutes into the session: “so you’re saying that links are good?” I learnt my lesson very quickly at that moment.)

Research senior people and your point-of-contact online to find their favorite concepts or metaphors.

Sign up to all of their marketing emails.

Beyond just asking questions or reading about the things I’ve mentioned, I also like to do a bit of stalking to see how a company’s leaders talk—for example—about their industry and how they use their values when speaking.

The company’s CEO, CMO and your point-of-contact are great people to research; Twitter feeds, blog posts and bylined articles are easy places to start, but you can usually find webinars, keynotes or presentations to watch as well. Framing concepts using their own favorite words, phrases and metaphors can be a quick route being better understood.

In terms of ongoing research of a client, there’s an old (but still worthwhile) recommendation to set up a Google Alert for their name—both to watch the organic chatter that exists around the brand, to make yourself look very on-the-ball, but also just to find out about the other marketing/PR activity that your contacts may not have known enough about to mention it to you.

In addition, I suggest signing up for all of the client’s email marketing lists, in order to see a side of their content that is hidden from the web or search engine spiders.

One of my colleagues will routinely go through the ‘customer process’ for every new client, to learn more about how they manage their funnel. (She now has everything from insurance quotes for her fake grand piano, to a contractor listing for her fake plumbing company—but always find insights that would have been missed otherwise.)

Finally, spending time in a client’s office can be an expensive, but worthwhile endeavor—particularly early on in a relationship. While trying to discover the answers to everything I’ve talked about above, it’s illuminating to have a room with a good mix of team members. While one person is talking, watch everyone else for their reactions. A nod of approval, a roll of the eyes, pursed lips, or a deep breath can all mean different things—and it’s worth catching that person later to ask their opinion, or (if you’re feeling really confident) mine for conflict there-and-then with the group.

I hope you’ve been able to find at least one new question or shortcut here, to give you extra insight into new clients. The  summary cheatsheet is here, and can even be downloaded in PDF format—so you can load it onto your phone/tablet/Kindle and take it with you to client meetings. Download it now!

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Posted by ShellShock

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.

The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can’t adapt, evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.

Be more creative, is a phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative?

There is much confusion about what creativity is and a general misconception of mistaking style for creativity. Most designers are stylists: they make things look good. Creativity is about concepts, ideas and innovation. In art school, I was always taught that being able to justify the concept was the most important element of creativity. You had to argue your reason for why the design piece was a solution to the problem. I can still recall how nervous I used to get before a group critique session (the phrase blood bath comes to mind) even though it was over 20 years ago. It’s not about how good it looks – it’s how well it answers the questions.

Creativity is a skill we can all access. Everyone has the capacity to generate ideas. Admittedly, some people are more inclined towards creative thinking, just as some are able to figure large maths calculations in their head or swim like Michael Phelps. But anyone can increase his or her level of creativity by learning the skills of thinking and exercising their idea muscle.

I recently published a free ebook called ‘What is Creativity?’ and the following are six ideas extracted and expanded from the book to increase your creative thinking and improve your online campaigns:

“Creativity is not a talent, it’s a way of operating.” John Cleese

Learning to switch into open mode
Ex Monty Python, John Cleese understands and defines the creative process as learning to switch between two states or modes: open and closed. When we are under pressure and stress to deliver, such as in our everyday working lives, we are in closed mode. When we are relaxed, detached from problems and playful, we are in the open mode. Open can be considered playful (lateral thinking) and closed logical (vertical thinking). Just as we need both lateral thinking and vertical thinking, we need open and closed states to solve a problem: the open state allows us to develop creative ideas and then the closed state to plan and implement the idea. These are similarly aligned to vertical and lateral thinking processes.

1: How to achieve an Open state
Schedule time to avoid being distracted and remove the pressure to instantly generate ideas; your brain needs time to open up. The optimum amount of time is 90 minutes, it takes a minimum of 60 minutes for the brain to focus on a task and after 90 minutes will be prone to distraction and need a break.

Place of work is essential for creatives to get into state – most writers and artists will follow a routine and often have isolated spaces such as garden offices to minimize distraction. Some artists need to be surrounded by ephemera such as the collection of memorabilia that Paul Smith surrounds himself with for inspiration. Others, like Maya Angelou, prefer minimalism and, like myself, need an uncluttered desk and space for an uncluttered mind to be able to think.

Agatha Christie preferred to work in a large Victorian bath whilst eating apples. Benjamin Franklin would work naked for an hour every morning. Maya Angelou preferred the isolation of a hotel room and requested everything removed from the walls; she would bring her own sherry and ashtray. The eccentric poet Dame Edith Sitwell would lie down in a coffin finding inspiration in the claustrophobic and restrictive space.

You don’t need to go to the extremes of a coffin but find a space which is conducive to relaxation and without distraction, anywhere that removes you from association with work or pressure (preferably not home). Try a coffee shop (JK Rowling famously wrote Harry Potter in her local coffee shop), the library, a hotel or even a camper van (Breaking Bad style). Removing yourself from the usual place of work will remove yourself from distraction, help the brain to break pattern which in turn will switch into a more receptive state for ideas.

To access open mode if you are in a group:
The open state thrives in humor and play so try the dinner party technique: create the dream dinner party guest list, such as Einstein, Da Vinci, Churchill, Kennedy or even fictional characters such as Don Corleone, Jack Sparrow and Luke Skywalker. Each person should take a persona and become their character – they must answer questions and think like they would imagine that character to think. The perfect warm up exercise; it is huge fun, encourages humor, it breaks awkwardness and forces the brain to break pattern from your normal style of thinking. Keep this game going for a minimum of 20 minutes before your brainstorm.

To access open mode if you are alone:
Research has shown a correlation between increased dopamine and creativity. Dopamine is a pleasure chemical which the brain releases to signal success but this chemical is not as straight forward and predictable as a reliable tool. The increase of endorphins will elevate our mood and help us achieve our open state: physical exercise is one of the easiest ways to access a rush of endorphins although, spicy food, sexual activity and pain can also trigger release – so whatever gets you going!

Try a walk, swim or bike ride to stimulate feel good. You want to ensure a careful balance of feeling exhilarated but also avoiding energy depletion. Opt for a route that you haven’t been on before to break any automatic behavior patterns. Walking in a new part of town and observing the unfamiliar territory or running backwards will stimulate new thought and movement patterns thus putting you into a more creative and receptive state.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Steve Jobs

2: Make connections with an ideas wall
The ability to make connections and see relationships between seemingly random elements is the secret to creativity. Combining old elements to create something new.

Idea walls solve crimes
It’s no coincidence that you see examples of ideas walls on TV dramas and movies such as: Homelands, Sherlock Holmes, A Beautiful Mind and Three and a Half Days Later. Detectives have long used this technique to assist solving crimes. Placing photographs of the known or suspected perpetrators, victims, crime scenes and evidence on a wall enables items of evidence to be repositioned and grouped; string can link items together for visual affect. A detective can then stand back and mentally take in a great deal of information at once. The brain begins to process and use its natural ability to seek the connections between the items, find the clues and answers to the case.

images from Crazy Walls

When the BBC conducted a site redesign in 2010 they printed out the entire site and mounted on a wall affectionately known as ‘the wall of shame’. To enable them to better visualize what they had and to unify the visual and interaction design of the desktop and mobile sites.

How to create a content strategy ideas wall
Tools needed: paper, colored pens, highlighter pens, print outs of all reference material, colored string and push-pins, post it notes, blu tack or tape, and a large wall space, pin board or sheets of foam board.

• Organize your reference material into themes or groups and pin/stick to the wall.
• Devise a color code system for your different groups with the pen color you have and use the colored pens and highlighter and mark and highlight relevant pages and sections of information. (Homelands style, see above)

• For example, if you are working on content strategy for your site group into:
  • Influencers – list influencers who could help to broadcast your content and sub group in different social media channels, newsletters and authority sites (eg Guardian, Huffington Post, Fast Company)
  • Audit – audit current site content
  • Idea sources – places to mine ideas from such as offline periodicals, online Q&A sites like Quora, social media channels and Google trends
  • Host Locations – potential sites to target for exposure, shares and links: authority hub sites, bloggers, online magazines/publishers, email newsletters and social media sites

• By grouping related themes we start to see patterns. If you have a piece that doesn’t fit into a group this ‘outlier’ could in itself give ideas.
• Stand back from the wall and look for potential relationships or connections between the information. Using push pins and colored string make a visual link between the two. (See photos above)
• The key here is flexibility: move pieces of paper round, create new string links, devise new groups – by repositioning, regrouping and relinking this is where your ideas will start to form and generate as you begin to make the connections.

If wall space is an issue or you prefer a digital version, Mural.ly is an online alternative to creating an ideas wall; describing itself as “an online whiteboard designed to visually organize ideas and collaborate in a playful way.” Mural.ly allows collaboration of team members and you can drag and drop your reference material onto the white board and reposition items and make notes. I have only just begun to play with this tool and it has huge depth and potential to assist in creative projects.

image from Mural.ly

Pinterest is one of my favourite scrapbook tools for collecting visual information as an alternative. I use Evernote extensively for collecting information and research material. Quora is my favourite site for finding ideas for content.

4: How to brainstorm the right way:

Generating ideas for content, marketing strategies or even creative use of data can all be more productive if tackled in a group – the synergy from more than one person will bring fresh perspective, new ideas and energy. But, brainstorming is such a common term that most people don’t consider how to undertake a session effectively.

One of the most important elements within team idea generation is trust and harmony. The group must be able to work well together through respect for each others’ opinions and ability and a general air of amiability. Any disagreeable personalities, critical individuals or large egos are not conducive to successful creative brainstorming and should be excluded from the group.

image from Atomic Spin

The following rules should be set to deter any fear or negativity that can squash creativity so that you can encourage a safe space to open up:

• A diverse range of skills present in the group works well in bringing alternative approaches, as does varying levels of experience, age, gender and personality.
• Allocate enough time to warm up and to focus. Between an hour and 90 minutes is preferable – after this the brain loses focus and needs a break. I recommend the ‘dinner party’ game above or another icebreaker to create an open state.
• Allow the most junior person in the room to speak first and in turn to most senior. This removes any pressure from a junior member who may be intimidated to follow an experienced authority.
• Stay focused on the topic. It is natural in group discussion to lose focus and drift into other subjects. The moderator must be vigilant in this area.
• An experienced moderator is essential to the process and should be able to direct and manage the group without obstructing and keep the group on track and focused and ensure everyone follows the rules (such as not being negative or overbearing). The moderator will take notes (on a white board) and assist as an objective opinion to draw connections between ideas.
• Above all else no judging, criticism or rejection of any idea – anything is valid and can be considered.

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.” Sir Ken Robinson

5: Change your thinking, change your life
If your natural disposition is not creative a creative thinker you can become more creative through repeated action, discipline and learning new ways to think.

Repetition and discipline
The more the brain processes a routine or skill, such as a new language or driving a car, the deeper the synapses physically carve a channel in the brain. Which explains to some degree why when we first learn a skill we have to concentrate intensely; it takes a great deal of energy, but through applied discipline it eventually becomes almost automatic and we don’t appear to think about what we are doing, the subconscious takes over.

Ten ideas lists
One of my favorite exercises to train your brain and develop your idea muscle is to generate lists of ideas everyday. I have to credit James Altucher and I recommend his article on how to become an idea machine here:

The concept is simple but challenging: think of ten new ideas. These can be for anything such as ten new business ideas, ten new ways to obtain quality earned links, ten new ways to improve conversion on a page or ten new ways to save energy, ten new ways to make a better cup of coffee or ten new ways to travel to work. For example:

Ten new ways to travel to work for free:

1. Walk
2. Push bike
3. Run
4. Roller blades
5. Hitchhike
6. Horse
7. Skate board tied to a car (do I need to explain why this is a bad idea?)
8. Get a job next to a canal and kayak to work
9. Move to the Caribbean, live in a beach hut and swim to work
10. Move to the top of a hill and go kart – makes the home journey a challenge (next list?)

The purpose is not to create ideas you will act on or even sensible, rational or reasonable ideas. This is gym training for the mind only so don’t get precious with your lists. Your first few lists may appear deceptively easy but as you begin to run out of obvious ideas you have to work hard just to think of list ideas and ten new ideas for my ten new ideas list is going to make your brain work for it. Don’t make the mistake of underrating this exercise; everything improves and becomes easier with practice and repetition.

6: Garbage in: Garbage out
My advice above all else is to read as widely as possible as I believe this feeds a creative mind more than any other activity. Just as athletes can only achieve their personal best if they eat a highly optimized diet, creatives need quality brain food and mental stimulation on a regular basis to operate at their creative best. You get out what you put in.

This article is an extract from ‘What is Creativity?’ a 76 page free ebook which offers an introduction to creativity with actionable tips to improve your thinking skills. The second part of the book is dedicated to thought leaders interviews who were posed the question: “what does creativity meant to you?”. Contributors include: Rand Fishkin, Bas Van Den Beld, Paddy Moogan, Neil Patel, Dave Trott, Lee Odden and Chris Brogan. You can download a free copy at creativity101 here…

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Posted by jennita

Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?

Think again!

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.

Here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

Video transcription:

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!

Posted by Bill.Sebald

There are some things in life you don’t truly understand until you experience them. I was given plenty of parenting advice when my son was born, but it only took me so far. Nothing prepared me for the first time our baby decided to roll over… right off the bed onto the floor (luckily we had a pile of laundry serving as a cushion). If you’ve never been a parent, you simply don’t have a lot of personal experience to draw from. It’s a complete trial by fire, full of missteps, emotions, and anxiety. 

In a way, starting Greenlane was a similar experience. Greenlane Search Marketing, LLC is my startup boutique SEO agency. It started in 2005 as a sole proprietorship consulting practice. It was my baby, and I had to let it grow up. Now it’s a partnership between myself and a long-time colleague Keith Urban (not the singer). However, differing from the parenting example, I did have some practical experience to guide me this time. I ran an SEO department in a major digital marketing agency. Regardless, it became very clear we didn’t know a thing about truly running an agency. We were new parents.

What to expect when you’re expecting

We expected to be busy. We knew we’d make mistakes, and we thought we had a solid business plan in place. In the end we were busier than expected, made more mistakes than we care to admit, and our plan fell apart on a weekly basis. But I’m proud (and relieved) to say we’re successful. We have a great staff of smart SEOs and digital marketers. We have happy clients. We have a great network of people to tap into. We’re profitable, targeting half a million in fee revenue by the end of 2014. We survived year one, where 25% of startups crash. We’re on yet another phase of growth, with our legal and taxation items well managed, our employment under control, and the company as a whole being positioned to overcome year two.

For me, that’s an enormous win.

Specifically, what was our secret? Hell if I know. But I think it’s this fuzzy formula: Take what you hear, mixed with what you’ve experienced in life, multiplied by your best guess, and divide by quick, brave decisions. But we also had a motto, one that became our backbone: “Always make it better!”

Making it better for you and your clients

This is a post about some of the more conceptual, “outside the normal” things we implemented to constantly improve our company from the start. These are based on my life experiences and recent business victories. My hope is that this will serve as fodder for your own company, even if you’re not the proprietor. This post is not about tax management, or accounting, or filings—this is about the day-to-day behavioral things that can make your digital marketing company a great place to be, to the benefit of you and your clients.

And to sprinkle in a little fun, since I said life experience fed into many of our first year decisions, I’ll supplement each section with something from my own awkward photo album.

On to the tips…

#1 – Think about your group experiences

For those who played team sports, remember when your parents said, “One day this will make you better at your job!” Go tell them they were right. Working as a team is an invaluable skill, improved only through experience and introspection. We’ve all engaged in group experiences, from grade school to our earliest jobs. Everyone has some kind of group or department participation to draw on. Maybe it’s as simple as cub scouts, a yearbook committee, or in my case, a rock band.

Additionally, we’ve all either seen—or have been—the flunky in the group, doing the least amount to make the group as a whole succeed. There’s also the opposite—a “Johnny-Come-Lately” who shows up with good intentions but sticks a giant crowbar into the gears, grinding progress to a screeching halt. We’ve seen the drama and anger that comes from personalities that just don’t mix. Nothing slows down momentum more than an unfocused crew rowing in different directions. An agency is no different. You will always have bosses, clients, and employees that behave or think differently than you. You simply need to learn how to overcome.

Someone once told me you can’t be a boss and a friend. I’ve never disagreed with something so hard in my life. A friendship presents an amazing bond of trust. At Greenlane we’ve carefully selected co-workers who we enjoy being around. We all have different talents and roles in the company, but you see virtually no instances of “pulling rank” over anyone else. There’s a respect that drives each of us to do a good job for each other. It creates more open and creative dialogue. If you don’t feel like you have anything to prove, you can more easily pause, listen, and learn. We don’t want to let each other down, but we all feel empowered to counter an idea without fear. The best idea wins, and our clients (as well as ourselves) become more educated. We’ve nurtured a really powerful environment. The bigger your group, the harder this is, but certainly not impossible.

We take the same approach with bringing on clients. We call them partners—a term I took from an old gig. Just as we are being paid to help businesses be successful, their actions have a lot of bearing on our success as a vendor—not to mention our own happiness. I’ll often tell a prospective partner, “just as you’re auditioning us, we’re auditioning you too.” That could come off cocky, but any prospects we lost for that statement were probably not going to last in the long run. In fact, I ask all prospective clients to first read our website, where we openly talk about the kind of clients we’re looking for. About two-thirds return super qualified, with the remainder vanishing forever. Those that return often say, “you are exactly what we’re looking for.” It’s a bit like online dating.

I wish we could say we’ve never lost a client due to poor performance. We have. Two of them actually. But in retrospect, this provided good lessons on where we needed to improve. In one case it was due to never being on the right wavelength to begin with, and the other was simply based on poor communicating. We largely (and swiftly) pivoted internally to make sure we never make those mistakes again. As a company, we were all just rowing the wrong way. Catching it early allowed for a very quick adjustment.

By the way, I’m well aware that some internal hierarchies don’t allow you to have a say on the clients that come in. While that is unfortunate, it is also common. But what’s to stop you from climbing the totem pole and pleading your case?

The TL;DR tips:

• Don’t just act like you’re interested in every word of your clients and employees, truly be interested. This is their time to talk, and your time to pause, listen, and ask valuable questions. Work together!
• Ask your clients questions. Let them understand it’s your job to pull information out of them. Don’t be a yes man; be a friendly challenger in order to get everyone nodding in the same direction.
• Work with your team, not against them. If you’re not actively on the account and their day-to-day work, be careful not to break the flow of the meeting throwing out ideas that counter the direction the account managers want to go. Get yourself on the same page, even if you’re the boss.
• Have a postmortem on every lost employee or client account, and drop your defenses. Try to figure out what could have been improved as a group.
• You’ve been an SEO for over 15 years? Good for you. Now sit down and listen to everyone else’s ideas. Be an equal.

#2 – The people you meet could become important

I’m often asked how we perform lead generation. Our primarily lead source is our network. Keith and I are very lucky in that regard, both coming from the big agency world. Big agencies seem to organically create seedlings that go off to start new companies or work with other established businesses. From former clients to former co-workers, developing serendipity every chance you get, should be a 24/7 goal.

You never know when someone you’ve met will hit it big. If you leave a good impression, they may invite you to their next party.

Digital marketing is one of those rare industries. There are millions of lawyers and accountants, as well as designers. There are relatively few SEOs, PPC experts or affiliate marketers. Make the right impression and your name will get passed around quickly. If you have a bad reputation, or are generally unliked, the word spreads just as fast. I’ve picked against vendors for my clients (or when I worked in-house) simply based on how phony they came off. I’ll probably have this put on my tombstone because I say it so much, “Perception Is Reality.” Let that one sink in. It doesn’t mean “fake it,” but be genuine and supportive.

I wrote a post that I still think about often. It was called ” Create Your Own SEO Serendipity.” I don’t know how, or where, or why I started doing it, but I’ve been in the “serendipity” game for a long time. “Karma” might be a possible synonym. Building up your network is one part of the puzzle, but building it so you’re memorable is a whole other piece that may require a bit of introspection on your end.

In hindsight, I spent my entire professional career mirroring my personal life—be good and helpful to everyone you meet. Sure you get burned if others take advantage, but when a referral comes in from an old colleague, I’m thrilled. It’s that warm feeling that makes “doing business” pretty damn fun.

The TL;DR tips:

• Stay in touch with everyone you can by any means necessary. The tiniest little gestures—like endorsing a skill or expertise on LinkedIn, or buying someone a beer at a convention—can sometimes bring you top of mind when you need it most.
• In my experience job titles don’t necessarily mean everything. Personality and kindness go further. Always be willing to support someone’s little needs. Free advice or work can turn into major opportunities.
• Answer everyone’s emails, tweets, texts, whatever. Very few of us really can’t find the time.  
• Don’t just wait for people to call you. If you generally feel good about all your encounters, there’s nothing wrong with reaching out and saying, “Thanks for the great talk at the meetup last night. I wanted to see if I could help you solve that problem we were talking about.”
• Create serendipity every day.
• Create serendipity every day (worth mentioning twice!!!).

#3 – Hire people smarter than you

Around 2009, I remember the  CEO of GSI Commerce said this at a company meeting I attended (paraphrasing)—”I built this company by hiring people smarter than me.” This off-hand comment was a real wake-up call for me. He’s since sold his company to eBay, and moved on to restart something new. If this tip helped make someone a billionaire, there must be something to it

My partner and I didn’t read many business books. Personally, I tried, but rejected most of them. I stubbornly refused to buy into some of the concepts. However, there were a few where I recognized common threads. Books like Good to Great, How To Think Like A CEO, The Outsiders, and The Corner Office didn’t have a “fake it until you make it,” or “kill or be killed” lesson. Instead, they highlighted leading by example, taking calculated risks, being human, and learning from everyone around you.

We candidly tell our prospects that we hire people with unique experience for the sole purpose of supporting the clients. We reveal that Keith’s background is in data and analytics, Mike’s is in design and development, Jon’s is in PR and outreach, and so on. We’re not all experts at everything. We’re very clear that any of our team may work on an account dependent on a given strategy. It’s honest and realistic, and goes over well with prospects. Meanwhile, in the office, we have a lot of co-mingling, where each teammate may join another to work out a specific problem. I’m the old dog in the group, but I’ll tell you the honest truth—I learn something every day from this team.

The client wins, my company improves, and my own personal development grows. What more could anyone want out of a job?

The TL;DR tips:

• Let smarter (or more experienced) people help guide you. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.
• Don’t act like you know it all. Your employees and your clients will see right through this.
• If you don’t know the answer, let your clients know that you may have someone in your fold that might have the answers. When your company is hired, so is your entire organization. There’s nothing wrong with this!
• Encourage your team to speak their mind, take a chance, and kick your ass. When they do, give them a high-five.

#4 – Don’t be so serious

Last but not least, have fun.

Keith and I don’t need to remind ourselves why we took this risk. It’s fun every day. Business is a game, and we’re enjoying our time on the field. No more toxic relationships, no more loss of control, and no more sitting in the “peanut gallery” watching other people do it wrong.

Be serious enough to hit your deliverables, make your marks count, and help your clients win. But why not do it with a smile? I’ve always heard that working in marketing and advertising is one of the most stressful jobs you could have. It doesn’t have to be.

We didn’t build our company with a textbook or a degree. The more I experience, the more I see most people in our field didn’t follow a rule book either. Great businesses are managed by CEOs who take chances, with varied personality traits and levels of intelligence—something school doesn’t necessarily teach anyway. For years I thought I’d have to be an “American Psycho” type business-genius with an MBA, a big vocabulary, a clean haircut, and a country club membership. I have none of those. In the end, I honestly believe we were guided by our own experience, serendipity, and common sense. It’s been a great ride so far, with a lot more learnings—and laughs—to be had.

Besides, if the business folds tomorrow, at least I achieved the biggest thing on my bucket list. So there’s that. 

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Posted by Dr-Pete

After a period of relative quiet, MozCast detected a major “temperature” spike in Google’s algorithm at some point on Monday, May 19th. This occurred after some historic lows, including the 3rd coldest day on record (May 11th).

Tuesday afternoon, Google confirmed two updates, Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0. Matt Cutts tweeted the Panda 4.0 announcement:

Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed the  Payday Loan 2.0 update. This ended a weekend of wild speculation (including many predictions of a Penguin update), but didn’t leave us with many details about the timeframe or the impact.

Which update was which?

For the moment, we’re going to have to speculate a bit. If the latest iteration of the Payday Loan update is like the first, it hit hard but fairly narrowly. Google laser-targeted some very spammy verticals with Payday Loan 1.0 (back on June 11, 2013), but the overall impact was moderate. That update was also very query-specific. My gut reaction is that it was unlikely that the May 19th update was Payday Loan 2.0 – that update was probably smaller and rolled out over the weekend (possibly May 16th). There was heavy flux around a few potentially spammy queries on May 16th, including “mortgage rate trends” and “cheap apartments”, but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence is unclear.

Google’s numbering scheme suggests that Panda 4.0 is a major update, which probably means that it is both an algorithmic update and a data refresh. This typically means substantial rankings flux, and I think that’s much more likely connected to what we’re seeing on May 19th. While Matt’s tweet implies a roll-out on May 20th, most Panda updates over the past year have been multi-day roll-outs. We should know more in the next few days.

What happened to eBay?

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the ” Big 10” (our metric of the ten domains with the most “real estate” in the top 10). Sites shift, and nothing on the level of a keyword means much, so I took a look at the historical eBay data. This is eBay’s share of top 10 rankings for the past week across the MozCast 10K (approximately 94,000 URLs, since not all page-1 SERPs have ten results):

Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25. Change is the norm for Google’s SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st, and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7 place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the ranking real-estate they previously held.

It is entirely possible that this is temporary, and it’s not my intention to “out” eBay – I have no idea if they’ve done anything that merits major ranking changes. This could be a technical issue or a mistake on Google’s part. It’s also worth noting that these results only track the main eBay sub-domain (www.ebay.com), not other ranking sub-domains, including popular.ebay.com.

What exactly did eBay lose?

Looking just at the day-over-day change from May 19-20, I dug into the keywords that eBay lost out on, hoping to find some clues about the broader Google updates. The vast majority of losses were where eBay had one top 10 ranking and then fell out of the top 10. In three cases, eBay lost two top 10 rankings for a single keyword phrase. Those phrases were:

• “fiber optic christmas tree”
• “tongue rings”
• “vermont castings”

Here’s what the top 10 looked like for that first phrase (sub-domain only) on May 19th:

1. www.kmart.com
2. www.walmart.com
3. www.americansale.com
4. www.sears.com
5. www.amazon.com
6. www.christmascentral.com
7. www.ebay.com
8. www.ebay.com
9. www.bronners.com
10. www.ask.com

eBay held the #7 and #8 spots. Here’s the top 10 for the next morning, May 20th:

1. www.kmart.com
2. www.walmart.com
3. www.sears.com
4. www.amazon.com
5. www.americansale.com
6. www.christmascentral.com
7. www.bronners.com
8. www.hayneedle.com
9. www.dhgate.com
10. www.alibaba.com

It’s interesting to note that both eBay losses here were category pages, not specific products. Here’s one example (from  this eBay URL):

For the other two keywords where eBay lost two positions in the top 10, the lost URLs were also category or sub-category pages (not individual auction listings). The remaining losses were either situations where eBay went from two listings to one or one to zero.

Here are the top 25 keywords where eBay lost one top 10 ranking position, ordered by their MozCast temperature:

1. “beats by dr dre” (231°)
2. “honeywell thermostat” (190°)
3. “hooked on phonics” (188°)
4. “fajate” (188°)
5. “batman costume” (181°)
6. “lenovo tablet” (181°)
7. “pyramid collection” (170°)
8. “hampton bay” (170°)
9. “jordan 11 concord” (168°)
10. “pontoon boats for sale” (168°)
11. “mockingjay pin” (166°)
12. “kobe vii” (166°)
13. “food trucks for sale” (166°)
14. “galaxy s2” (166°)
15. “jordan spizike” (163°)
16. “foamposite” (163°)
17. “george foreman grill” (161°)
18. “wholesale jerseys” (161°)
19. “tend skin” (161°)
20. “fender stratocaster” (161°)
21. “rims for sale” (161°)
22. “shed plans” (158°)
23. “hello kitty vans” (158°)
24. “cheap used cars” (158°)
25. “lilly pulitzer bedding” (156°)

It’s very hard to interpret individual keyword changes, but, not surprisingly, many of these phrases seem to be products and product categories, and some are fairly competitive. Most of these drops seem to be from lower positions in the top 10 – I was unable to find a case where eBay lost a #1 ranking day-over-day.

In one case, it appears that both “www.ebay.com” and “popular.ebay.com” lost out. Here are the top 10 sub-domains for May 19th for the query “hooked on phonics”:

1. www.hookedonphonics.com
2. itunes.apple.com
3. www.amazon.com
4. en.wikipedia.org
5. www.youtube.com
6. popular.ebay.com
7. popular.ebay.com
8. www.ebay.com
9. www.time4learning.com
10. www.walmart.com

…and here’s the same SERP the morning of May 20th:

1. www.hookedonphonics.com
2. learntoread.hookedonphonics.com
3. itunes.apple.com
4. en.wikipedia.org
5. www.youtube.com
6. popular.ebay.com
7. www.amazon.com
8. www.amazon.com
9. thekrazycouponlady.com
10. hip2save.com

What does it mean for you?

I’m sorry to say that it’s probably too soon to tell. We’re hearing reports of big losses and gains, which is the norm for any major update – for every winner, there’s a loser. If Google is to be believed, we’re looking at two sizable updates in the span of a long weekend. It’s possible we’ll see even more changes before the US holiday weekend (Memorial Day), so I’d strongly suggest keeping your eyes open.

Update (May 21st – 9:30AM)

Good follow-up post from Rishi Lakhani about eBay’s internal linking structure. Digging deeper, it looks like all of the URLs of the form “ebay.com/bhp” have disappeared from the rankings, at least within our data set. We’ve collected another day’s worth of data since the post was written, and the situation hasn’t changed. This could be a manual action on Google’s part, but it’s hard to tell.

Google is now saying that Panda 4.0 impacted 7.5% of English-language queries. Despite Matt’s “…starting today” statement on May 20th, I (and others) strongly believe the Panda 4.0 roll-out may have begun over the weekend, and is connected to the May 19th temperature spike.

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