The #MozCon 2014 Agenda is Here!
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
*drumroll* … That’s right, friends, the MozCon 2014 Agenda is here! You can now show this to your boss to get that final approval and start making plans for how many notebooks you’ll be filling with ideas and tips.
But first, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to buy your ticket today, as MozCon has sold out the last several years.
For the best current deal on MozCon, make sure you’re a Moz Pro subscriber. If you’re not, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and get the Pro subscriber MozCon price immediately. Cancel your subscription at any time if it’s not for you, and we’ll see you at MozCon 2014 either way!
Okay, let’s talk about just how great this MozCon’s going to be. We have topics ranging from technical mobile SEO and A/B testing to “big content” idea generation and getting maximum value from your PR efforts. There is truly something for every type of online marketer. We have returning MozCon favorites such as Wil Reynolds, Dr. Pete Meyers, and Nathalie Nahai, as well as new speakers like Kerry Bodine, Cindy Krum, and Jeremy Bloom. Plus, we’re trying a new format—a fireside chat—with our CEO Sarah Bird, so we can really dig into what life at Moz has been like since she and Rand switched places.
Not to mention all the photos with Roger, the wonderful swag, yummy food, and all the other MozCon trimmings you expect. And yes, we’re letting Cyrus Shepard emcee again. (I’m pretty sure it’s in his Moz employment contract.)
Wil Reynolds at MozCon 2013
The MozCon Agenda
8:00-9:00am Breakfast
9:00-9:20am Welcome to MozCon 2014! with Rand Fishkin
As our ever-changing industry keeps us on our toes, Rand gives a look at recent changes and where he sees the future of search and online marketing going.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and helping marketers worldwide level-up their game.
9:20-10:20am Broken Brand Promises: The Disconnect Between Marketing and Customer Experience with Kerry Bodine
Companies chase the business benefits of customer experience, but advertising and marketing communications that aren’t aligned with the true capabilities of the organization foil these efforts.
Kerry Bodine is the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites like Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile apps, wearable devices, and robots.
10:20-10:40am AM Break
10:40-11:20am Improve Your SEO by Mastering These Core Principles with Lindsay Wassell
Discover how SEO tactics that win in the long run complement web-friendly business practices and core principles, and how to incorporate this approach into optimization strategies for changes in search results.
Lindsay Wassell is the CEO at Keyphraseology, an Inbound & Search Marketing agency. Prior to Keyphraseology, she led the Moz SEO Consulting Team.
11:20am-12:00pm How to Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities with Richard Millington
Richard will explain how you can use proven principles from community science to build highly addictive online communities for your organization.
Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee, an organization which has figured out how to apply proven science to build powerful communities from any group of people.
12:00-1:30pm Lunch
1:30-2:30pm Architecting Great Experiments with Kyle Rush
A/B testing will no longer be a mystery after Kyle does a deep-dive on every part of the experimentation process.
Kyle Rush is the Head of Optimization at Optimizely. He uses a data-driven engineering approach to execute hundreds of A/B tests.
2:30-3:10pm Mobile SEO Geekout: Key Strategies and Concepts with Cindy Krum
Learn all the technical nuances necessary to make your websites rank and perform well in mobile and tablet search!
Cindy Krum is CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, a mobile SEO consulting and tools provider based in Denver, CO. She is also author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are, which is the first book to explain mobile SEO and gets 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon.
3:10-3:30pm PM Break
3:30-4:00pm Local Lessons from Small Town USA with Mike Ramsey
Whether your audience is in one region or thousands of major metros across the world, these small town lessons will guide you through the complex world of local search.
Mike Ramsey is the president of Nifty Marketing with offices in Burley and Boise, Idaho. He is also a Partner at LocalU and has an awesome wife and 3 kids who put up with all his talk about search.
4:00-4:30pm Top 10 PR Tactics and Strategies of Successful Content and Link Building with Lexi Mills
Everyone’s had an outreach pitch rejected, but Lexi will show you that by slicing and dicing your content, you can turn those no’s into yes’s.
Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients.
4:30-5:10pm Digital Body Language with Mike King
No matter your business goals, Mike will teach you how to harness the power of lead qualification and nurturing through both implicit and explicit user information.
Currently a consultant, Mike King has led teams covering consumer insights, content, social strategy, and SEO for Enterprise brands. With working for brands like HSBC, SanDisk, Ralph Lauren, Johnson & Johnson, and Citibank, his breadth and depth of experience continues to fuel game-changing insights. Mike is a frequent speaker, blogger, and a published author that loves to share his insights on how to do better marketing.
7:00-9:00pm #MozCrawl
More details coming soon!
8:00-9:00am Breakfast
9:00-10:00am How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas with Pete Meyers
Learn how to stay afloat in the coming flood of content, as Dr. Pete provides concrete tactics for sustainably creating high-value content.
Dr. Pete Meyers is a marketing scientist for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past year building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast Project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History, a chronicle of Google updates back to 2003.
10:00-10:30am Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient with Stacey Cavanagh
Stacey will talk you through tactics and tricks to help you scale your content marketing efforts without cutting corners on quality.
Stacey Cavanagh lives in Manchester, UK, and works as head of search for Tecmark. Stacey also blogs regularly on digital marketing, social media, and her favorite TV ads.
10:30-10:50am AM Break
10:50-12:10pm Community Speakers!
While not finalized, community speakers are one of our most popular sessions. Four speakers from our community will give 15 minute presentations on what they’re passionate about. This year, Moz’s Director of Community, Jen Lopez, will be introducing them.
12:10pm-1:40pm Lunch
1:40-2:20pm Keep the Focus on the Doughnuts with Marshall Simmonds
If you’re in a time and resource crunch, Marshall will share which tactics you should implement and prioritize, from the basic to the highly technical, based on measured and quantified data from billions of page views.
Marshall Simmonds has been involved in the search industry since it began. Over the past 17 years, he’s solidified himself as one of the top consultants in publishing and enterprise audience development. Many of the tactics you continue to employ today as best practices were either developed or refined by this guy; he’s “Internet Old.”
2:20pm-2:50pm Dare to Fail: How the Best Lessons Come in the Form of Defeat with Jeremy Bloom
Everyone experiences failure, but Jeremy will share the lessons he’s learned from an athlete to start-up CEO in how to leverage adversity and turn it into a road-map for success.
Jeremy Bloom is a world-champion skier, a two-time Olympian, a World Cup gold medalist, and a member of the United States Skiing Hall of Fame. He played professional football in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 2008, Bloom founded Wish of a Lifetime, which grants lifelong wishes to 80-, 90-, and 100+-year-old people, and in 2010, Bloom co-founded the marketing software company Integrate. Integrate has raised over $20M of venture capital from Comcast, Foundry Group, and Liberty Global. It was named “Best New Company” at the 2011 American Business Awards in New York.
2:50-3:30pm Supercharging Your Digital Analytics! with Justin Cutroni
Despite having lots of analytics tools, we too often settle for the default data and reports so let’s look at a few ways that you can get more insightful, actionable data to make better decisions!
Justin Cutroni is an author, blogger, father, skier, and the Analytics Evangelist at Google. He is a long-time fixture in the digital analytics community and has been nominated as the most influential industry contributor for the past four years.
3:30-3:50pm PM Break
3:50-4:20pm Developing a Formidable Social Platform with Amber Naslund
Learn what makes for a compelling online presence, balance your personal and professional self, and build a system to keep yourself sane.
Amber Naslund is a business strategist and the president of SideraWorks, a social business advisory firm that helps companies adapt their culture and operations to the demands of the social web. She’s the co-author of The Now Revolution, and you can find her on Twitter at @ambercadabra.
4:20-4:50pm Shop ’til You Drop: Google Shopping PPC with Elizabeth Marsten
If you’re wondering what happened to Google Shopping, Elizabeth will explain all, including how to set up PPC the right way and why it matters for your overall marketing.
Elizabeth Marsten is the Vice President of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc. here in Seattle. She is a PPC person at heart, but also oversees the SEO, Social, Content, and Project Management teams.
4:50-5:30pm YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For with Phil Nottingham
Phil will take a deep-dive into YouTube, the world’s second biggest and most forgotten search engine, looking at the best ways to use the channel on both a strategic and tactical marketing level, no matter your budget.
Phil Nottingham is the video strategist at Distilled, where he works with businesses of all shapes and sizes to define their approach to video on both a creative and technical level. He joined Distilled in April 2011, after impressing the company founders with his ability to look like a serviceable pirate, following minimal costume changes, and has since spent loads of their money on cameras and lights.
7:00pm-12:00am MozCon Party at Garage Billiards (MozCon badge required!)
8:20-9:20am Breakfast
9:20-10:20am You Are so Much More than an SEO with Wil Reynolds
The label’s irrelevant as you have skills, tools, and knowledge to help get rankings and so much more, and Wil will show you the marketing goldmine you’ve been sitting on.
Wil Reynolds founded SEER Interactive in 2002, which now employs over 70 people and is among the 100 fastest growing companies in Philadelphia. In addition to digital marketing, Wil is also passionate about giving back to the community and sits on the advisory board of Covenant House.
10:20-10:50am Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign with Paddy Moogan
Everyone talks about the need for SEOs to diversify, but Paddy will give you actionable tips to go away and do it, no matter what your current role is.
Paddy Moogan is Head of Growth Markets at Distilled, working in their London office. He is a comic book geek and loves Aston Martins. His heart lives with the Hobbits in New Zealand.
10:50-11:10am AM Break
11:10-11:40am A Mozzy View with Sarah Bird and John Cook
Moz CEO Sarah Bird sits down with GeekWire’s John Cook for a candid discussion about risk-taking, thriving with constant change, and the future of Moz.
Sarah Bird serves as CEO and as a member of Moz’s board. She loves and welcomes conversations on inbound marketing, business models, entrepreneurship, productivity tips, women in tech, and fostering inspiring company culture. Sarah’s sharp business acumen is always paired with her passionate belief in TAGFEE, Moz’s core values.
John Cook is the co-founder of GeekWire, a leading technology news site and community based in Seattle. A long-time tech journalist, John has covered hundreds of startup companies over the years, everything from aQuantive to Zillow.
11:40am-12:20pm Developing Your Own Great Interactive Content – What You’ll Need to Know with Richard Baxter
Even if you’re not a technical genius when it comes to interactive front-end web development projects, Richard will show you how to make something the Internet loves from ideation and conceptualization to rapid prototyping, launch, and huge coverage.
Richard Baxter is founder and CEO of SEOgadget, a digital marketing agency specializing in conversion rate optimization, large scale SEO, keyword research, technical strategy, and link building in high competition industries, with offices in London and San Francisco. He is a regular SEO industry commentator and proud Moz Associate.
12:20-1:50pm Lunch
1:50-2:30pm Demystifying Data Visualization for Marketers with Annie Cushing
We’ve all been frustrated with not knowing how to corral data into cool, sexy visualizations, but Annie Cushing will pull back the curtain and provide tips, tricks, and hacks to transform raw marketing data into works of art in plain English.
Annie blogs at annielytics.com, teaching marketers how to scavenge for marketing data and then make it sexy.
2:30-3:10pm Prove Your Value with Dana DiTomaso
Dana will show you how to report so there’s no doubt in your client’s mind that they’d be lost without you.
Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing BS into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years, she’s seen (almost) everything. It’s true, Dana will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of Dana’s diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
3:10-3:30pm PM Break
3:30-4:10pm The Psychology of Persuasive Content for “Boring” Industries with Nathalie Nahai
If your content needs a jolt of life, Nathalie will show you how to apply targeted persuasion through psychology.
Nathalie Nahai, also known as The Web Psychologist, is a best-selling author, consultant, and international speaker who specializes on the psychology of online persuasion. With a background in psychology, web design, and digital strategy, Nathalie coined the term “web psychology” in 2011, defining it as “the empirical study of how our online environments influence our attitudes and behaviours.”
4:10-5:10pm Mad Science Experiments in SEO & Social Media with Rand Fishkin
Whether it’s anchor text or sharing on Google+ instead of Facebook, Rand’s spent the last few months formulating hypotheses and running tests, and now he’ll share these fascinating results to help you.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and generally trying to be helpful to marketers worldwide.
Now, are you ready to buy your ticket? 🙂 We’ll see you there!
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Continue reading →Penguin Penalties: Do Webmasters Respond the Way They Should?
Posted by russvirante
Penalization has become a regular part of the search engine optimization experience. Hell, it has changed the entire business model of Virante to building tools and services around penalty recovery and not just optimization. While penalties used to be a crude badge of honor worn by those leaning towards the black-hat side of the SEO arts, it is now a regular occurrence that seems to impact those with the best intentions. At Virante, we have learned a lot about penalties over the last few years—discerning between manual and algorithmic, Panda and Penguin, recovery methodologies and risk mitigation—but not much study has been done on the general response of websites to penalizations. We have focused more on what webmasters ought to do without studying what webmasters actually do in response to various penalties.
How webmasters respond matters
As much as we often feel a communion among other SEOs in our resistance to Google, the reality is that we are engaged in a competitive industry where we fight for customers in a very direct manner. This duality of competition—with Google and with each other—plays out in a very unique way when Google penalizes a competitor. We learn a great deal in the following months about the competition, such as the sophistication of their team (how quickly they respond, how many links they remove, how quickly they recover), their financial strength (do they increase ad spend, how much and on what terms), and whether they eventually recover.
It is also important from a wider perspective of understanding Google’s justifications for particular types of penalties that seem sweeping and inconsistent. Conspiracy theories abound regarding Penguin updates; I can’t count how many times I have heard someone say that penalties are placed to encourage webmasters to switch to AdWords.
So, I decided to investigate the behavior of webmasters post-Penguin from a macro perspective to determine what kinds of responses we are likely to see, and perhaps even answer some questions about Google’s motivations in the process.
The methodology
- Collect examples: I collected a list of 100 domains that were penalized by Penguin 2.0 last year and confirmed their penalization through SEMRush.
- Establish controls: For each penalized site, I identified one website that ranked in the top 10 for their primary keyword that was not penalized.
- Get rankings and AdWords data: For each site (both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical rankings and AdWords spend from SEMRush for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0
- Get historical link data: For each site (both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical link data from Majsetic SEO for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0.
- Analyze results: Using simple regression models, we identified patterns among penalized sites that differed significantly from the control sites.
Do webmasters remove bad links?
After a Penguin 2.0 update, it is imperative to identify and remove bad links or, at minimum, disavow them. While we can’t measure disavow data, we can measure link acquisition data quite easily. So, do webmasters in general follow the expectations of link removal following a penalty?
Aggressive link removal: It appears that aggressive link removal is a common response to Penguin, as expected. However, we have to be careful with the statistics to make sure we correctly examine the degree and frequency with which link removal is employed. The control group on average increased their root linking domains by 41 following Penguin 2.0, but that could best be explained by a few larger sites increasing their links. When looking at an average of link proportions, only about 22% of the control sites actually saw an increase in links in the three months post-Penguin. The sites that were penalized saw a drop of 578 root linking domains. However, once again, this statistic is impacted by the link graph size of the individual penalized sites. 15% of those penalized still saw an increase in links in the three months following Penguin.
So, approximately 22% of domains not impacted by Penguin 2.0 had more root linking domains three months after the penalty, while only 15% of those penalized had more root linking domains post-Penguin. Notice how small the discrepancy is here. Webmasters responded differently only by 7% depending on whether or not they were penalized. While certainly those penalized removed more links, the practice of link building in general was very similarly affected. In the three months following Penguin, 78% of the control websites either dropped links or at least stopped link building and lost them through attribution. This is remarkable. There appears to be a deadening effect related to Penguin that impacts all sites—not just those that are penalized. While many of us expected Penguin to have a profound impact on link growth as webmasters respond to fears of future penalties, it is still amazing to see it borne out in the numbers.
What I find more interesting is the variation in webmaster responses to Penguin 2.0. Some penalized webmasters actually doubled down on link building, likely attributing their rankings loss to having too few links, rather than being penalized. We can tease this type of behavior out of the numbers by looking at the variances in percentage link change over time.
The variance among link fluctuations for sites that were not penalized was .08, but the variance among sites that were penalized was .38. This means that the behavior of websites after being penalized was far more erratic than those that were not. Some penalized sites made the poor decisions to greatly increase their links, although more sites made the decision to greatly decrease their links. If all webmasters responded uniformly to penalties, one would not expect to see such an increase in variance.
As SEOs, we clearly have our work cut out for ourselves in teaching webmasters that the appropriate response to a penalty is very much NOT adding more and more links to your profile, because this behavior is actually more common than link removal post-penalty. It is worth pointing out that it is possible that the webmasters disavowed links rather than removing them. We do not have access to that data, so we cannot be certain regarding that procedure. It is possible that some webmasters chose to disavow while others removed, and that the net impact on link value was identical, thus making the variance calculation false.
Do webmasters increase their ad spend?
I’ll admit, I had my fingers crossed on this one. Honestly, who doesn’t want to show that Google is just penalizing webmasters because it helps their bottom line? Wouldn’t it be great to catch the search quality team not being honest with us about their fiduciary independence?
Well, unfortunately it just doesn’t bear out. The evidence is fairly clear that there is no reason to believe that webmasters increase ad-spend following a Penguin 2.0 penalty. Let’s look at the numbers.
First, across our data set, no one who was an advertiser prior to Penguin 2.0 stopped advertising in AdWords in the three months after. Of the sites that were not advertisers prior to Penguin 2.0, 10% of those not penalized ended up becoming advertisers in AdWords, while only 4% of those penalized became advertisers. Sites that weren’t penalized were far more likely to join the AdWords program than those that were.
It wasn’t only true that those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 were more likely to sign up for AdWords; they increased their average Ad-spend, too. There was a 78% greater increase in ad-spend by those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 than those who were. Moreover, bidding shifts for those not impacted by Penguin remained similar in two month intervals across multiple randomly selected three-month differences, meaning that there appeared to be no related impact whatsoever.
We can safely conclude from this that there does not appear to be a direct, causal relationship between Penguin penalties and increased AdWords spending. Now, one could of course make the argument that better search results might increase ad revenue in the future as Google attracts more users to a better search engine, but accusations of a fiduciary motivation for releasing updates like Penguin 2.0 cannot be substantiated with this data.
Do they recover?
By the 5th month, approximately 24% of sites that were penalized were at or above their pre-Penguin 2.0 traffic. This is an exciting outcome because it does show recovery from Penguin is possible. Perhaps most important, sites that were penalized and removed links on average recovered 28% more traffic in the five months after Penguin than those that did not remove links. We have good evidence to suggest at least a correlation between post-penalty link removal and traffic recovery. Of course, we do have to take this with a grain of salt for a number of reasons:
- Sites that removed links may have been more likely to use the disavow tool as well.
- Sites that removed links may have been more SEO-savvy in general and fixed on-site issues.
- Sites that did not remove links may have had more intractable penalties, thus their lack of removal was a conscious decision related to the futility of a removal campaign.
These types of alternate explanations should always be entertained when using correlative statistics. What we do have good evidence of is that traffic recovery is possible for sites hit by Penguin, although it is by no means guaranteed or universal. Penguin 2.0 needn’t be a death sentence.
Takeaways
So, in a few weeks, we are likely to see another Penguin update, assuming Google follows its late-spring release date. When Penguin hits, be ready—even if you aren’t going to be penalized. Here are some things you should be doing…
- Know your bad links already. There is no reason to wait to be prepared for removal or disavowal. While I personally think that preemptive disavowal is likely the best practice, there is no excuse to just wait.
- Don’t worry about AdWords. There is no statistical evidence that your competition will surge post-Penguin in any meaningful fashion. The competitors who might come to depend move on AdWords also have less organic revenue to invest in the first place. At best, these even out.
- Don’t double down. While we can’t be certain that link removal gets you out of penalties (it is merely correlated), we can be certain that even a correlation doesn’t exist for increasing links and earning recovery post-Penguin penalties.
- Never assume. The behavior of your competitors and of Google itself is far more complex than off-the-cuff assumptions like “Google just penalizes sites to force people into AdWords” or that your business will know intuitively to remove or disavow links post-Penguin.
Hopefully, this time around we will all be more prepared for the appropriate response to Google’s next big update—whether we are hit or not.
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Continue reading →Starting Over, Part 2: Launch
Posted by Dr-Pete
This post is a part of the “Starting Over” series, the story of starting a blog (MinimalTalent.com) from scratch. See the end of the post for links to the rest of the series.
Launching a new site is exciting, and it should be, but we sometimes let excitement get the best of us. After months of building and planning, it’s understandable to want to finally pull the trigger, but launch is important and rushing it can delay real success. This is the story of how I got Minimal Talent off the ground.
Goods news and bad news
Online marketing has evolved a lot in the past decade, and changes to search and social have brought good news and bad news for webmasters. First, the good news – it’s relatively easy to get a new site indexed in 2014, and even ranking for long-tail terms. You don’t have to wait for Google to discover you or pay a search submission service (remember those?). Unfortunately, the bad news is that ranking on real, competitive terms has gotten harder, and it takes longer. Why am I telling you this up front? You need to have realistic expectations, or launch will be an unpleasant and ultimately unproductive experience.
Alerting the bots
You can’t win if you don’t play – if you want to eventually rank in search, you need to get indexed. In part 1, we set up Google Webmaster Tools and created an XML sitemap, which can be great for discovery. Next up is to submit your site.
Yes, submissions services may be [mostly] [hopefully] dead, but Google does allow direct submission of new pages. Go to Webmaster Tools, select the “Crawl” menu and click on “Fetch as Google” – you’ll see something like this:
To submit your home-page, just leave the field blank and click [FETCH]. Your URL should show up at the bottom, and your “Fetch Status” should soon return “Success”. Once it does, just click [Submit to index]. There is a limit to how many pages you can fetch, but typically I only use this to launch a site or refresh a page that is outdated or isn’t getting re-cached.
Within minutes, I was showing up for a “site:” search (site:minimaltalent.com), with seven pages indexed (which was about right):
I promised this series would be transparent, so I have to admit that I messed up a little here. Apparently, Google had managed to crawl the site prior to my official launch, and had actually cached it a few days earlier (checked with cache:minimaltalent.com).
For me, this was no big deal, but it bears warning that, if you don’t want your site to be out in the world prematurely, you may have to take steps to keep Google from crawling. Google has a way of finding new sites, which can be good and bad, depending on your plans.
Later on launch day, I was also ranking for my tagline (“Misadventures in Minimalism”), on page 1 in the #2 position:
I’d highly encourage you to track a few non-competitive, long-tail phrases (and, if you’re a Moz customer, set them up in Moz Analytics). They may not seem sexy, but you’ll see progress much sooner than with competitive phrases. It’s important to know that your site at least has the ability to rank, in order to detect any issues early.
Link chickens & Search eggs
Which came first, the link chicken or the search egg? Ok, let me try again. If you want to rank, you’re going to need links, but you can’t get natural links if no one can find you to begin with. This is the fundamental problem of modern search marketing.
Yes, you can manually build links (and there’s a place for that, done well and in moderation). Sometimes, though, we get so hung up on the mechanics of SEO that we forget that there are plenty of other channels to get the word out.
Alerting the humans
In other words, it’s time to tell people you launched. I’m not one to broadcast every post I write to my friends, family, and tax guy, but launch is different – if you’ve created something you’re excited about, then tell people. Who did I email?
- Friends (IRL)
- Industry peers
- Co-workers
- Private mailing lists
In most cases, the email was customized to the list and even the individual. These things are worth the effort. As a marketer, emailing my peers isn’t just about a few pageviews – it’s a way to seed social sharing and potentially even drive links.
The other way around the chicken-and-egg problem is taking full advantage of social. We tend to obsess about whether or not social signals (Tweets, Likes, +1s) have a direct impact on ranking, and when we do that we miss two important points. First, sharing equals visibility, regardless of what happens on Google. Second, sharing can drive links, and better yet, those links are editorial, or as we call them, “natural”.
I shared the initial site and blog post on my main Twitter, Google+, and Facebook accounts. Since this project naturally has a visual aspect (the parody logos), it was well suited to Google+ and Facebook sharing, which tend to benefit from strong visuals.
I’ve wanted to put some time into Pinterest, so I set up a new folder just for the blog in my existing account, re-organized that account a bit, and then pinned some of the logos from the first post. Again, this project is visual, so Pinterest was a good fit.
My social screw-up
Ironically, I did on Pinterest what I tell everyone not to do on social media. I went to an account I rarely use and just started posting my own content. Since I’m not active, and I’m not sharing anyone else’s content most days, guess what happened? That’s right – absolutely nothing. A social media account is not a dumping ground for your crap. I failed to participate, and it’s going to take time to make up that lost ground. Luckily, I’m more active on other networks, but give-and-take matters quite a bit.
You may be thinking that, because I have a strong existing network, success with a new project on social is guaranteed. I wish it were that easy. A year or so ago, I launched a personal project that soundly flopped. Part of that was in my execution and commitment, but part of it was that the topic was a bit far afield for my existing audience. One of my goals with Minimal Talent was to find a topic that could tie minimalist design into something my existing audience was already interested in – in this case, branding. Be aware how your audiences overlap (or don’t).
Monitoring results
It can be hard to wait for results to come in, and patience is not one of my virtues. Luckily, Google gave us real-time analytics. While watching your numbers in real-time is an exercise in vanity most days, it can be very useful on launch day and during other big events. Are your social shares resonating? Which networks (if you stagger them in time) were most effective? Is it worth re-sharing on any particular network? Your real-time numbers can help make these calls.
I’m happy to say that I could actually see the needle move on launch day:
Fourteen active visitors isn’t going to make me rich, but it was definitely a start. At least I could tell that my social shares were leading to actual visits.
As the days went by, traffic from my launch and first post showed a pretty normal pattern:
Opening day was solid, with 383 visits, there was a tiny bump a couple of days later, and then little or nothing (the bigger bump on the right is the second post and sharing). This is the reality of most launches – sustainable traffic comes later. For now, you’re fighting for traffic post by post. If you expect launch day to be a benchmark of your day-to-day activity, you’ll be in for a very rude awakening.
I especially liked Moz Analytics overview of my first week’s traffic:
That’s right: PLUS INFINITY AND BEYOND!
Finally, I set up Fresh Web Explorer (available to Moz Pro subscribers) – FWE lets you track fresh mentions of your site and keywords. Unfortunately, my brand “Minimal Talent” contains common words, and can trigger false alarms, but FWE also lets you track things like root domains. Here’s how I set that up:
You can use the “rd:” operator to find new links to a root domain. On the main FWE screen, just click “Show search operators” to see a full list of options.
It felt good to be finally off the ground, and now I had the tools to start measuring my progress. Next time – how I handled initial SEO problems I discovered and finally started ranking for more interesting terms.
Read the full series
Use the links below to explore the entire “Starting Over” series:
- Part 1 – Pre-launch
- Part 2 – Launch
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Continue reading →Building a Brand Online: The Golden Age of Digital
Posted by willcritchlow
This post is based on a talk I gave at our SearchLove conference in Boston last week. It ties quite closely with the post my colleague Ron Garrett wrote last week: Search Marketers Need to Evolve. You can probably tell we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this.
When I gave this talk at SearchLove, I hoped that it would put in context why we bring such a range of speakers and topics together at our conferences and to inspire the attendees to go back to their companies and make real changes. I hope this post will do the same for you.
Photo by Zwickerhill Photography
As digital marketers, our focus on analytics has served us well in driving direct, measurable sales. The dominant form of brand marketing, however, has remained offline with TV taking the lion’s share of the budget and attention. We believe that as TV faces disruptive technology and business models, digital marketers have an opportunity to grow their influence and impact. In total, this is an opportunity worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
I’d very much like for us—our industry—you and me—to be the ones who benefit.
Despite all the growth we have seen in digital marketing spend, I think that we are only just entering what I’m calling the golden age of digital.
Building brands online first
We’re entering the age when the biggest brands in the world will be built online first. I hope to convince you of two things: first, that this change is happening right now. And second, that we are the people to win in this world.
Starting at the beginning
There are some confident statements above, but the last few years have had their share of introspection and crises of confidence. We’ve put a lot of time and energy over the years into understanding the direction marketing is moving and capitalising on the shifts. Duncan and I originally started by thinking that networked computing was going to be a big deal and then started our company initially on the back of a simple CMS that we built to help small business owners take advantage of the self-publishing revolution.
Photo by Zwickerhill Photography
As we shifted gears to focus more on the dominance of the search channel, we started trying to understand where Google in particular might be taking things.
We’ve written plenty about that over the years, but we were talking about effects similar to Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird years before they actually came to pass. Panda and Penguin started making our vision come true. We were more effective search marketers than we’d ever been because we’d largely bypassed building the infrastructure for search as it was and tried to build it for how search would be.
And yet something was wrong.
Powerful content was becoming ever more effective. And yet the greatest examples of content that we were seeing at search conferences weren’t built by SEO agencies.
Brands were getting a bigger and bigger advantage in search. And yet the best brand builders weren’t SEO agencies.
For a long time, we’ve talked about how “SEO” isn’t a verb. You don’t “SEO a website.” Ranking well is an outcome, not an activity. It’s like fame. “Famous” isn’t a verb. You don’t “famous someone.” You get famous for doing other things (playing sport, performing music, appearing on TV). SEO is the same.
But what if we weren’t the right people to do those things for people? What if we weren’t the world’s best PR firm, branding agency, or creative producers?
Don’t worry. I got over my insecurity. I believe the capabilities that we have been building are going to grow in power and influence. Here’s how:
The Innovator’s Dilemma
It was Mark Suster who kick-started my confidence with his talk in San Diego [use this link and sign up for an account to get access to the video for free]. He’s an entrepreneur-turned-investor. He’s smart and opinionated.
He talked about maker studios at our conference. You might have heard a few weeks ago that Maker Studios sold to Disney for half a billion dollars.
Maker is a producer and distributor of online video. The turning point for me was in realising that the forces they were betting on were also rampaging towards our quirky, exciting, geeky little corner of the marketing world.
There’s a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma by a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen. It’s a little dry, but if you’re interested in business theory and technology, it’s an absolute no-brainer: You should read it.
It describes two kinds of innovations that hit established markets. So-called “sustaining innovations” make existing processes faster, cheaper, or better. They can be very dramatic, but Professor Christensen’s research shows that they almost always end up benefiting the incumbent players in the market.
In contrast to “sustaining innovations” stand “disruptive innovations,” which are those that attack problems an entirely different way. They typically don’t work as well as the existing solutions, perhaps solving only part of the problem, but have a structurally different cost. So they’re “cheaper but worse.”
Cheaper but worse
Doesn’t sound too compelling, does it?
That’s what the incumbents think. They may spot a potential opportunity, and may even pay lip service to the idea that they should be pursuing it, but ultimately, their economic incentives are skewed towards maintenance of the status quo.
Therein lies the dilemma.
There’s often a subset of the market, for whom the new service is “good enough.” It may not be gold-plated, but it solves their immediate needs and they can afford it. As they invest, it gets better and better, capturing more and more of the market opportunity until it’s meeting the core needs of even the top end of the market while still being structurally cheaper. Money cascades to the new entrant and leaves the incumbents high and dry.
Let’s go back to the “cheaper but worse” innovation for a second. To me, that sounds an awful lot like the idea of building a brand online. Let’s look at the details:
- The established way of building a brand for a generation has been via mass market TV advertising and other classic above-the-line spend. Spends of $100m+ are not uncommon.
- Building a brand online is cheaper, yes, but right now, not as effective.
- The incumbent brand-builders pay lip service to digital, but when you look at their corporate structure, their fee structures, and their economic incentives, and you realise that they’d far rather see TV get bigger than have to do all this messy web marketing.
So I think there is a disruption coming to brand marketing, and I don’t think it’s going to benefit the big guys.
Online first
I’m calling this whole phenomenon “online first”: the biggest brands of tomorrow will be built online. This will be partly because the tools we have available to build brands online are going to get better and better, and partly because money is going to flow to digital from TV. I recently wrote about this in more detail in our Future of TV report:
I am definitely not saying that TV itself is in trouble. We live in an amazing time for TV content. You just have to look at shows like Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and True Detective to see that we have exceptional content and more ways of accessing that content than ever before—and that’s before we even get to Netflix and House of Cards. In part as a result of this resurgence, the total time spent watching video has increased every year recently.
Our devices are also getting better and better. The cost of big screens is coming down; we now have full HD on our mobile devices.
But the way we get our content is changing. 80% of US households have some form of internet-connected device paired with their TV according to gigaom research. Whether it’s an Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, Chromecast or something else, we can increasingly watch anything we like on the big screen. And conversely, we can watch more and more of our “classic TV” content on smartphones, tablets, laptops and any other screen we can lay our hands on.
This particular part of the trend has been analysed to death. I’m not interested in that for the purposes of this analysis. I’m interested in the fragmenting viewership: In general, we’re no longer all watching the same thing at the same time. That has profound impacts on the way TV advertising is bought and sold.
The innovator’s dilemma predicts that the cost per unit of the high end of the old market will continue to rise even as the bottom starts to fall away. It’s becoming ever more valuable to reach consumers on those rare occasions when we do all sit down at the same time to watch the same content.
The complexity of time-shifted internet-delivered content rapidly surpasses human optimisation ability. The upfront media market in which Oprah stands on stage and extols her show and the network and seeks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of spend is a process which can’t survive the move to digital-scale complexity (if you’re interested in this, I wrote an introduction to TV advertising a few weeks ago).
Advertising against TV-like content will have to be bought more like AdWords. It has to become real-time (depending on who’s actually watching at a given moment), it’ll have to be market-priced in one form or another (because you can’t negotiate all these things individually on the fly).
I’m in danger of getting dragged into deep economic arguments, but the effect of all this disruption is going to be a whole load of unbundling and a reallocation of budgets.
Of course, in part, this will open up opportunities in video marketing—both in brand-funded TV-like content and in video advertising against internet-delivered video (check out the talk by Chris from Wistia’s [PDF]). I don’t think it’s a given that the incumbent TV advertisers will dominate that space. It’s structurally pretty different. We are certainly betting in this area—between Phil and Margarita, we’re already doing video strategy and execution for ourselves and our clients.
It’s not all about video, though.
How our industry competes
There are three broad areas that we all need to get great at to take advantage of this opportunity. Video fits into the first of these, which is technical creativity—that place where technology and storytelling meet:
1. Technical creativity
I’ve been endlessly frustrated over the years by the creative storytellers who misunderstand (or don’t even care about) technology. The stupid apps that no one uses. The branded social networks that nobody joins. The above-the-line campaigns telling you to search for phrases they don’t rank for.
Old-school SEOs can spot crawl issues or indexing problems in their sleep. We’ve had to get good at things like analytics, UX, and conversion. Indeed, one of the most popular talks last week (and Slideshare of the day) was from Aaron Weyenberg at TED, and was all about UX. The things that stood out to me the most were all about the different ways they listened to their audience and gathered feedback at different stages of the process. This incorporated everything from the standard hall-way tests through qualitative and quantitative surveying to a really nicely-executed beta. You can see the full deck here:
And we mustn’t lose sight of the value of that technical knowledge. Screw up a migration and you’re just as hosed as you’ve ever been.
For me personally, the creative is the more challenging part—but luckily it’s not all about me. We’ve been investing in creative for a while, and I loved the presentation our head of creative, Mark Johnstone gave last week entitled how to produce better content ideas. It really clarified my thinking in a few areas—particularly about the effort and research that should go in early in the process in order to give the “lightbulb moment” a chance. By coupling that with examples of deconstructing other people’s creative (and showing us / giving us further reading on how to practice ourselves) he made a compelling argument that we can all do this so much better—and that not only designers can be “creative.” I’m also looking forward to trying out the immersion techniques he talks about for getting from unstructured to structured. You can check out the full deck here:
[If you’d like to see more of the decks from Boston, you can currently get them here and in the next few weeks the videos will be available within DistilledU]
2. Broad promotional ability
The second capability we need after technical creativity is a broad promotional ability. This is your classic owned, earned and paid media.
As search marketers, we’ve typically focused primarily on the earned side of this—via outreach and digital PR—and my colleague Rob Toledo gave a great presentation about some of the cleverer forms of earned media in his presentation The Hunter/Gatherer. He talked in detail about ways of reaching that tricky kind of influencer—the one who wants to discover their own interesting share-worthy material. It was a funny presentation that contained some exceptional tactics. You can see the full deck here:
I think paid media is going to have an ever-increasing part to play in online brand building though. Pay Per Click is typically measured on direct response metrics—sending traffic to landing pages and converting them—but social and video advertising is on the rise. We increasingly spend money on promoting content instead of promoting landing pages. I expect that trend to continue.
The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that this isn’t inbound. I make no apology for that.
3. Influence and measurement throughout the Customer Lifecycle
Finally, alongside our technical creativity and promotional ability, we need to double down on our ability to influence and measure customer behaviour throughout the customer lifecycle.
We’ve all heard (or even been) the search experts who stand on stage and talk about the measurability of digital. Sometimes they go further and make off-hand comments about how you “can’t measure TV.”
Does anyone really believe that? Anyone think Proctor & Gamble or Unilever really waste half the money they spend?
One of the most mind-blowing talks I ever attended was at ad:tech a few years ago—it was a speaker from Ogilvy talking about the econometric models they use to measure their work for P&G. It was all about how they were tying together the influence of point-of-sale, coupon codes, TV, and other above-the-line advertising to understand what’s making them the money. They are good at it but it’s expensive. Our industry’s stuff is cheap in comparison. It’s not yet good enough but if we work hard and invest, it can be.
What I didn’t say
Remember: I didn’t say TV is dead. I didn’t say search is dead. I said that our crazy blend of technical creativity, promotional chops and measurement skills is going to be the skillset that builds tomorrow’s biggest brands. AND—crucially to the topic near and dear to much of the Moz audience’s hearts, it’s also going to be how you rank in Google.
Advertising is a half-trillion dollar a year industry struggling to understand its place in a digital world. I don’t want the same old guys to win on our turf. The internet is our domain. Let’s go get great at this.
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