seo

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Update: This post sparked a ton of comments and debate. Read to the end for the latest updates.

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Every two years, Moz runs a scientific correlation study to discover the qualities of web pages that have a strong association with ranking highly in Google. This year, for the first time, Dr. Matt Peters and the Moz Data Science Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings.

The results were surprising.

After Page Authority, a URL’s number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.

Moz isn’t the only one to discover this relationship. Searchmetrics, using a slightly different methodology, found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated factor they studied, and other studies have found similar results.

Here’s the million-dollar question: Can Google+ activity actually help your pages rank higher?

Beyond correlation: Why it matters this time

Back in 2011, folks may remember the controversy that erupted when Moz found a similar correlation between higher rankings and Facebook activity. At the time, Google claimed they didn’t use Facebook shares for ranking websites. Dr. Peters concluded that the relationship between Facebook activity and higher rankings was likely not directly related, but probably caused by overlapping factors such as links and high-quality content.

Now in 2013, there’s strong reason to suspect it’s different with Google+, and that the relationship between +1s and higher rankings goes beyond correlation into the territory of actual causation. (Edit: This should say “posting on Google+” instead of Google +1s. It’s clear that Google doesn’t use the raw number of +1s directly in its search algorithm, but Google+ posts have SEO benefits unlike other social platforms.)

Not only is the correlation for +1s higher than that for Facebook activity, but the Google+ platform has qualities that make it a far superior platform for SEO. These qualities suggest sharing content on Google+ has the potential to influence search rankings in significant ways.

Intentional or not, the engineers who made Google+ built it for SEO. Consider the factors that make sharing content on Google+ far different than sharing on other social networks:

1. Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately

One of the original goals for Google+ was using it to power real-time search after Twitter cut off Google’s firehose access to its data in 2011. Since then, Google has been using Google+ to discover new content, and many web professionals have discovered that URLs shared on Google+ are crawled and indexed very quickly.

Compare this to Facebook, where because of privacy settings and restrictions on data sharing, it’s not uncommon for posts to never be crawled or indexed by Google at all.

Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully accessible to the company that built it.

2. Google+ posts pass link equity

Pages and posts on Google+ not only accumulate PageRank, but because links to posts are followed, they pass link equity on as well.

Using the free MozBar, you can see all of the followed links on a typical Google+ page.

When you share a link on Google+, the anchor text becomes the title of the page you are sharing. Some important things to remember about followed links within Google+:

• Only “shared” links (the links that show up beneath your post) are followed. Any external links you add withing the post body itself are nofollowed, so these don’t pass any link equity.
• For obvious reasons, uploaded images don’t pass external link equity. Some people like to upload a screenshot of a page and then link to it in the body of the post. While a good image may increase post popularity and click-through rate, these posts do not pass link equity.
• Certain links in your Google+ “About” page are also followed and pass link equity.

3. Google+ is optimized for semantic relevance

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, each post you make in Google+ has most of the characteristics of a full-blown blog posting.

• Each post has its own URL.
• The first 45-50 characters of the post appear in the title tag.
• Just like a blog post, entries can be long and complex in order to explore a subject deeply. Various correlation studies have show a strong relationship between longer pages and higher rankings.
• If a post is reshared, it can accumulate internal links from the Google+ platform, all with relevant anchor text.

Because of these factors, each post has the potential to send strong semantic signals to Google’s search algorithm. This not only helps the post itself to rank in Google’s search results, but potentially sends relevancy signals to a URL shared by the post.

What about Author Rank and Publisher Rank?

Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in order for author photos to appear in Google search results. Another hope is that someday Google will use authorship information (and perhaps publisher information) connected to Google+ accounts to actually rank websites.

While there is no evidence that Google uses anything like Author Rank at the moment, many believe it will be here very soon. In the above video, Matt Cutts of Google suggests this is a path he’d like to see Google explore.

Taking advantage of Google+ for SEO

While there are hundreds of ways to optimize your Google+ experience, the most important activities can be summed up by these nine points:

1. Start building relationships now on Google+

It’s never too late to start. Google+ is a social network. Following great people, commenting on posts, and sharing great content not only helps to increase your own influence, but it can be extremely educational as well.

2. Post share-worthy content on Google+ to attract natural links

When you share content, don’t just post a link and walk away. Add additional value with commentary and relevant information.

Consider these examples of long Google+ posts. Each acts like a mini blog post and adds highly shareable, linkable context. I don’t recommend replacing your personal blog with Google+ entirely, but sometimes a few lines of context makes all the difference.

3. Add Google authorship information to your online content

Adding rel=”author” to your website is a no-brainer. If you guest post or otherwise contribute content to other high quality sites, ask the publisher if they will add author markup to your bio. Kane Jamison recently did this for me when I contributed content to his blog.

4. Link out to all relevant profiles from your Google+ “About” page

Think of Google+ as a primary hub of your online virtual identity. Google offers you several places to link to other online profiles, sites that you contribute content to, and simply sites that you want to share.

5. Take advantage of rel=”publisher” by connecting your website to your Google+ brand page

If you are a business, organization or brand, follow these instructions.

6. Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing buttons

You would think everyone wants to add social sharing buttons to their content, but some folks are just stubborn. Don’t be stubborn.

7. Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging information

The information you provide in your profile influences how you show up in Google+ search results and also plays a role in whom Google suggests others to follow.

8. Make it easy for people to add you to your circles

Use Google’s easy-to-create badges, or create your own to place on your own online profiles so that others can easily add you to their circles.

9. Make your posts public
Posts shared privately don’t pass the same juice as publicly shared post. For SEO purposes, you likely want your posts spread as wide as possible. Philipp Steuer made this great Google+ infographic simplifying the complexities of who sees your posts:

Google+ Infographic by Philipp Steuer, used with permission

Additional resources for success

Entire books can now be written on using Google+ to boost your SEO efforts. In reality, there are exactly 3 articles that contain 99% of everything you need to know:

• Google Plus SEO: Everybody Talks About It – How Do You DO It? by Mark Traphagen
• Google+ SEO by AJ Kohn
• 10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google+ for SEO

What’s your favorite Google+ tip? Please share in the comments below.

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Update:

This post caused quite a bit of controversy. Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren’t used directly in Google’s algorithm.

While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn’t use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I’m hoping Google will clarify.

Mark Traphagen said it best in this comment:

It is not the +1’s themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1’s on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It’s instant organic link building.

The point is not to go out and accumulate a bunch of +1s.The point is, and the evidence seems to suggest, that earning a link on Google+ is like earning any other type of editorial link, and these links have actual value with real benefits.

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!

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Posted by SteveOllington

What’s this about?

Having worked in-house at one charity and provided some volunteer consulting to a couple of others, I decided it would be good to write about some useful ways that charities can increase their online exposure, without the need to drain too much of their already limited resources.

Many of the examples below are from my experiences working as the digital strategist for the British Humanist Association, where I learned that it can be very different from working at an agency, or in-house for a for-profit company.

How is online marketing for charities different?

There are advantages and disadvantages in digital marketing for charities. The advantages are the passion of the staff, the compassion of the audience, and the natural, powerful content that comes about through its work. The disadvantages are primarily the lack of resources and budget in comparison to the business world. What resources exist come from the generosity of people through donations and volunteering, and the willingness by staff to work twice the number of hours for half the pay.

So, here are a few tips that might help to offset the resource limits.

Google Grants for AdWords

As long as you have a registered charity number you can apply to Google Grants and receive $329 USD per day in free advertising with Google AdWords. Whilst this has to be in USD, it’s not confined to America only; UK charities (and others internationally) get the equivalent amount to spend on their ads.

Until recently, it was difficult to use up this budget, as there was a maximum per-click bid limit of $1.00. This meant you could only really go for keywords which didn’t have very much competition (and there’s a reason for that). However, in early 2013 this was increased to $2.00 per click, which makes a huge difference, allowing you to advertise with more highly searched keywords and bringing you more of the traffic you want.

How to set up Google Grants

Setting up Google Grants can take a few weeks because once you apply Google will need to assess your eligibility. The eligibility criteria and restrictions on use for Google Grants can be found here, but the main items are:

Restrictions on use

• Only run keyword-targeted campaigns
• Only appear on your country’s version of Google (this will differ depending on where your charity is based)
• Only run text ads

Eligibility guidelines

• Hold current and valid charity status
• Acknowledge and agree to the application’s required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.

If you have a registered charity number and are not yet using Google Grants, set up a Google AdWords account here (don’t complete the billing section upon setup), then apply to Google Grants here. Once you get going you’ll be offered the help you need from Google and you’re on your way to getting free advertising that can make a big difference to your online presence.

*Where I’ve taken so long about writing this, I have been pipped to the post (pun intended) by another Mozzer. They’ve got lots more detail on Google Grants in their post here.

Effective use of video

Videos can have a huge impact for charities because they offer a chance to show viewers the problems they’re trying to combat, allowing them to spread awareness about the charity and/or individual campaigns whilst triggering an emotional response that other media types might not.

Video doesn’t have to be expensive. There are plenty of volunteers out there at both the amateur and the professional level who will help out (there’s more on recruiting volunteers later), and for the video content there are student actors to act, staff members to interview, or people who have been affected by issues you’re campaigning on that are happy to talk about those issues.

If your charity is environment- or wildlife-based, contact Environment Films to have a video created. They’re a non-profit organisation too, and if you’re lucky you might even end up with Distilled’s Margarita Iosif working on your video!

Have a look at these clips worked on by a team including Margarita:

Whips Hurt. Ban Them. – A video for Animal Aid. This is a campaign-based video about horsewhipping (45 seconds).

The Soi Dog Foundation – A trailer for the Soi Dog Foundation. This is a video about the charity itself (4 minutes, 19 seconds).

In just a few minutes, the clips above are able to communicate their message in a way that people are often more willing to engage with than with plain text, and the short duration means they’re more likely to be both watched and shared online.

There are lots of different types of videos that your charity could consider, including trailers, animations, discussions, interviews, and debates. The most important thing in the video is the message.

Video marketing

It’s important to determine the goals for your video before you market it (or even create it). Is the primary goal to spread awareness, or to encourage donations? The goals of the video will make a difference in how you should market it, such as on which platform (because it’s not always YouTube that you should go for).

Phil Nottingham, whom I have the honour to sit opposite, is the video marketing specialist, and if you’re going to make a video, you HAVE to watch this video of Phil explaining how to do it right. Also, check out the Distilled Video Marketing Guide.

Video outreach

Videos, just like any other content, should be promoted through outreach. Outreach in its simplest form is contacting others in the relevant field with the hope they will publish, share, or promote something for you (there’s more on this later).

Below are two videos that were released by the BHA.

Video One was published on July 30, 2012, and Video Two was published on December 3, 2012. So there is more than four months between them, but look at the difference in the number of views. By the time the first video reached 8-9 months in (as the second has now) it had a lot more than 8,575 views. In fact, it had that within the first couple of weeks. Why is that? Both videos feature the same people, and are on the same subject appealing to the same audiences. It’s because the first video had a lot more outreach done for it. At the time the second video was released, there was a lot else happening with a new site going live, etc. As a result, not as much outreach was done as with the first video, where many people were contacted early and offered the story on the day of the release so it was still new news for all. Lots of people were emailed and asked if they could tweet or blog about it, and they did. Outreach is an important component of online marketing, and it can mean the difference between success or failure of a marketing campaign.

YouTube Nonprofit Program

If you have videos, you likely have at least some of them on YouTube (any/all videos for which the primary goal is lots of views). But do you know about the free benefits you can have on your channel if you’re a charity?

If you sign up to YouTube’s Nonprofit program, you will have access to a number of exclusive features, and features you would normally have to pay for.

Donation button

There is the option of a Donation button on your channel page, which could increase your donations if you get many visitors to your channel. You’ll need to sign up to Google Wallet for this, if you don’t already have an account.

Call-to-action overlay

Any videos uploaded to YouTube can have annotations applied, but with the Nonprofit Program you can have a call-to-action overlay containing a link, which is usually something you’d have to pay for. The overlay shows up at the bottom of the video screen and encourages people to take an action such as following a link or sharing.

Live streaming

If your charity stages events, such as protest rallies, talks, or anything else, you can live stream the event directly to your YouTube channel for all those supporters who couldn’t attend. The most important thing to remember about doing this, is that you’ll need to publicize that people can watch this live first; there’s no point in live streaming to no audience. When you promote your event, be sure to let everyone know that if they can’t make it, they can watch live, providing the date, times (including for different time zones), and a link to the channel.

For details on how to set up live streaming, see this video from YouTube.

Community forum

The Nonprofit Program supplies access to a Community Forum which can be helpful in terms of support. However, most of this support will tend to come from other users (many of whom are very helpful and will do their best to solve your problems) rather than actual Google staff.

Donating on Facebook

If you have a significant Facebook audience, or are working towards one, it’s worth considering adding a way for people to donate through Facebook. If you add a story to Facebook that becomes well shared and brings more people to your page, then some of those people may want to help out in any way they can.

There are a number of solutions for taking Facebook donations. There is an app by JustGiving which can appear in the Facebook navigation, as shown below on the Dogs Trust Facebook page.

You will need a JustGiving account to set this up, but it’s relatively simple to do. You can find out more about it in these slides.

Another option is DonateApp. This solution takes a small commission, but if it’s donations that would not have been received otherwise, then it’s still a net gain.

DonateApp reports that:

• A 2012 study of 3,500 nonprofits found about half of them (46%) have raised funds on Facebook.
• The most popular way to raise funds was to solicit Facebook supporters for individual donations.
• The average value of a Facebook donor was found to be $214.81 over 12 months.

Advertising on Facebook

Sadly, there is no Facebook equivalent to Google Grants, so there is no free advertising for charities (or even discounted), but due to the way audiences can be targeted by their interests it’s worth looking at as an option.

Whatever your charity’s causes are, you’re likely to find plenty of people on Facebook who have declared those causes in their interests, and you can target just those people with your ads. Of course this applies to businesses, too, but the difference is in the number people who tend to join relevant groups or state relevant interests. There are plenty of ‘likes’ for brands, and some products, but generally there’s going to be a lot more people who have interest in causes such as eco-issues than there are for kitchen appliance parts, and you can take advantage of this. There are plenty of other targeting options too, including location, age, gender, and more.

You can put just a small amount of budget into a Facebook ad campaign to run a test and see how it goes, but don’t forget to track the results in your analytics so you know if it’s working or not!

You can find out more about and sign up for Facebook advertising here.

Media Trust (and Community Newswire)

For UK charities, Media Trust is an organisation that provides a variety of support for promoting charities, from marketing and PR classes to information sharing and new initiatives. As far as I can tell, the closest match to this in the US would be Charities.org. However, I can only really talk about Media Trust as I don’t have any experience with other similar organisations.

One thing which your charity may find particularly useful from Media Trust is The Community Newswire. You can submit press releases here that will have increased opportunities to get picked up by news outlets. Media Trust has good relationships with the Press Association and journalists who report in the charity sector. Press releases that go through their system will be monitored by some journalists who know that Media Trust is a credible source and are therefore more likely to run with something that comes through them.

Do have a look at what Media Trust has to offer as a whole (if you haven’t already), but also make sure you submit your press releases (ensuring they’re well written, contain at least one image, and are about something interesting) to the Community Newswire.

GrowYourCharityOnline.com

At the start of this year I attended an opening event for an initiative by Google and the Media Trust. There were lots of charities there, and some Google staff to answer questions. It was the launch of a new website called GrowYourCharityOnline.com. Here you can find information and action steps on the Google products discussed in this post, including Google Grants and the YouTube Nonprofit Program, as well as advice on using Google Plus to promote your campaigns and causes.

Have a look at the website, it’s got some useful tips and will help you organise your efforts with promotion through the Google products.

Text to donate

Most charities will likely already know about donations via text. As I learned, this is not always the best option, as it depends entirely on your channels of promotion. If you’re campaigning mainly online through your website and social media, then people generally seem to prefer following links to donate with something like JustGiving or Razoo. Text-based donations were very few when I tried this. However, if you’re also going to be promoting offline then it’s definitely worth it, as it gives people a way to donate if they don’t have a link to follow. This can be on any literature you’re handing out, or in press releases for local print newspapers, on billboards, presentation slides, T-Shirts and other merchandise, or speaking to people on the street.

This is relatively easy to set up. See JustTextGiving to do so; then all people need to do is text a campaign code and an amount to a particular number.

Quiz apps

This one went fantastically: Everyone loves a quiz, right? At least if it’s a nice short quiz that tells you something about yourself, anyway.

At the end of January 2013, the British Humanist Association launched the simple quiz “Are You a Humanist?”

Since then, it’s been taken over 70,000 times, and continues to be taken a few thousand times per month. This is important because many of the people who are taking the quiz had never heard of humanism before, but they have now. That was the quiz’s objective from the start — to spread awareness to a new audience — which it continues to do.

The quiz has been taken so many times largely because it offers to share the results at the end:

Not everyone shares their results. Many people don’t (and won’t) but there were and are still enough to keep it spreading, and therefore to generate new interest.

Some of the tweets made by people after having taken the quiz indicated their new realisation of humanism as a concept, and sometimes even their intention to become a member of the organisation.

The percentage scores are actually irrelevant in this quiz, and weren’t originally going to be included. However, people like scores. Scores make such things more shareable, and since the point in the quiz was to spread awareness of humanism with a bit of fun, scores worked best.

Your charity should think about doing something like this. Once you come up with the right quiz, meaning something that gives people results they’ll be happy to share, you can find a volunteer developer to help you build it into an app (there’s more about volunteers later).

Giving away content for social shares

Every online marketer looks for existing resources to utilise or recycle. One of the first things you’ll do if you start a new in-house position is poke around in archives both online and offline — in storage cupboards for forgotten leaflets or on the old network drive for forgotten PDFs. Usually, somewhere, there’s some great content lurking about that people will like and share.

On to my example — The charity I worked for gave away hard copies of an interesting book at events, and also to new members. The aim of the book wasn’t about profit, it was about awareness and education, so giving the books away suited just fine. Of course there were limits as to how many could be given away, because printing and binding the book cost money (and so did sending it), and then there were only so many event attendees and new members to whom the book could be given away.

However, it turned out we had it in PDF format, too. So, we set it free as a PDF eBook and offered it via the Pay With a Tweet system. Using Pay With a Tweet meant the only thing people had to do was tweet (or share on Facebook) about the book, and they got a free copy to download. A win-win situation. One click of a button and the user gets a free, interesting eBook, and the charity gets to see more of its books being read. It’s a great book actually, and chances are that at least some of the people who read it will agree with its philosophy enough that they use the included membership form to join the charity.

There’s been over 7,700 downloads since it was launched in October 2012, and hopefully there will be many more downloads in the future, too.

If you want to see how it works by downloading a copy and paying with a tweet, grab it from here: Humanism: A Short Course.

Getting into Google News

Whether or not you currently release news, you should. If you want publicity for your charity and its work, it’s important to get yourself in front of other news sources, and Google News is a great way to do that.

Here are some benefits to being in Google News:

• It can provide high search engine rankings, potentially bringing your site more visitors (the right visitors, too, if they’re arriving because they clicked on your news result after searching something relevant).
• It can mean your content gets republished elsewhere. Other publishers use Google News to draw inspiration on what to write about. This could be anything from bloggers with a small but targeted audience to journalists from national media outlets. Lots of news sources monitor Google News to see recent developments, and often they will pick up stories to run with themselves.
• It may gain you some backlinks to your website (which can help your website with its traffic, and its search rankings overall, especially if the links are coming from a large and popular news site).

Getting into Google News is easier said than done, as Google has strict guidelines as to what passes as acceptable news and it can take a while to get your news pieces right. When submitting your news to Google to appear in Google News, you will provide the URL for the news section of your site, and then you will likely need to wait up to several weeks before being accepted or rejected.

Reasons for rejection may include format, the type of news, or many other issues including being “overly self-promotional.” Now, the overly self-promotional issue is a problem for a lot of charities since they are by their nature releasing news about campaigns and causes they are undertaking themselves. For example, if a charity were to challenge an unjust law at the ECHR then the news is that the charity is fighting the government over a policy at court, for the charity to then exclude itself from that news would be difficult.

One way of dealing with this is to divide your news through categorisation or tagging. On your website’s news section, you can tag or categorise less “promotional” articles to appear under a particular URL away from the rest, then submit only this URL to Google.

Your news releases may well be made up of your general press releases. From my understanding, this won’t work with Google News submissions, and press releases will need to be rewritten as news items in order to get in.

Content and sharing

There can obviously be a lot of impact from having celebrities tweet about your campaigns and charity work, and some charities are very fortunate in having celebrity support for their causes, but of course there are limits to how much you can ask for help from high-profile individuals (especially as many of these people are inundated with requests from charities every day).

The right content on the right subject can still get plenty of traction on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere without the need for celebrities (although it helps, of course). Charities are in a great position when it comes to getting social shares because their content is often naturally interesting — maybe controversial in some way — and likely to trigger some kind of emotion in people (whether it makes them happy, sad, or angry, if it triggers an emotion then people will want to show it to others). However, you still have to do what businesses do, and think about how you’re going to present this content in the first place.

Due to the nature of charity work, a lot of the content to share will come naturally, through stories of campaign successes or losses. There’s bound to be other stuff you can share, too. The trick here is to keep an eye on what others are sharing and how successful their content is on social media platforms. This would be a large and complex task if done manually, but there is a tool for it, and it’s free! Yousaf Sekander of RocketMill created a tool called Social Crawlytics which allows you to enter a web address, and provides you with information on content from the website such as how much it has been shared and on what platforms. Doing this will show you examples of what works, and what doesn’t, so you can adapt similar content strategies for yourself!

Also, have a look at the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report, which offers up tactics that have proven successful for other charities along with data about which channels have been most effective for various types of fundraising and campaigning.

Tracking your success with Google Analytics

In order to know what’s working and what isn’t, you need to track your campaigns. I’ll assume you already have some analytics software such as Google Analytics installed on your website. You can see a lot with that, but you can see and organise far more by using the Google Analytics URL Builder.

How to use the URL Builder is beyond the scope of this article, but here are a couple of posts from Chris Gilchrist of HitReach if you’d like to learn more:

• Why you should use the Google Analytics URL Builder
• How to use the Google Analytics URL Builder

Your authority staff as a marketing asset

Someone in your charity is an authority on the issues you’re campaigning for. You need to use that. It’s important that they’re getting out there in front of people on every possible occasion.

Referring back to the charity I worked for, the CEO Andrew Copson was very good at this. He seemingly worked 168 hours per week, what with running the organisation and travelling around the country (the world even) to give talks and feature in debates. When it comes to the charity and its causes, he is an authority. That means when secular issues come up in the news, journalists want to hear from him. For that reason, he’s often quoted in newspapers, interviewed on TV and radio, and asked onto panel shows to discuss current issues. This exposure of course means more people get to hear him, and if they agree with him (he’s so very reasonable it’s hard not to), it brings more awareness to the charity.

Rand Fishkin gave a talk on using your CEO to spread awareness at the 2013 LinkLove Conference. Normally you’d have to buy this video, which isn’t actually even available to buy yet, but since you’re reading this article, you get to access the video right now, and for free (It’s a must-watch!). Just follow the steps below.

Note: If you enjoyed the video, Distilled is hosting another conference in SearchLove San Diego three weeks from today! This will be our first time heading West, and we’d love for you to be there. Early bird pricing on tickets ends soon, and the kind folks at Moz have even lined up a discount for your ticket over on the Pro Perks page.

Finally, make sure you film every time your CEO (or whoever they might be) talks at any event!

Look at what happened with Philip Wollen. He gave an impassioned speech which went viral on YouTube (there are many videos of the whole debate but here’s one with just the speech to save you time). Lots of people became a fan of his after seeing that, and it brought a lot of attention to The Kindness Trust and all of the charities he supports through it.

Getting volunteers to help with your online marketing

Many of the recommendations in this article are relatively inexpensive, but some funding may still be needed to hire copywriters, developers, designers, a video agency, etc. You don’t have to spend a fortune for this though — not if you get volunteers.

If your charity has followers, fans, connections, and whatever else on its social platforms, use them to recruit volunteers. You may well be doing this already, but remember there’s a difference this time: The types of professions you’re looking for in this case are technology based, meaning there’s a greater chance of them being accessible online than with a lot of other professions.

Tweet for help, and there’s a good chance it’ll get retweeted. The same with Facebook; people may not be able to help with certain tasks but they’ll often tag others into a response who they think might be interested, such as their friend who makes apps and is a keen environmentalist. Many tech savvy professionals will use software to monitor social media channels and alert them when there are mentions offering work. A tweet asking for a copywriter recommendation will often result in copywriters tweeting back because they’re watching any tweets that have that keyword of ‘copywriter’ in it.

There are also websites that may be useful. Reach exists to hook up volunteers from different professions with charities in need of specialist help. Get yourself listed on there and provide a description of what you need, and someone may well get in contact with the expertise you’re looking for. Reach is a UK organisation, so if you’re in America, try CatchaFire instead. I’m not sure about other locations but I’m guessing there will be similar organisations in other countries.

Build a contacts list, and do outreach

Regular Moz.com readers and those in the industry know this well, but if you’re reading this as someone who is volunteering or working at a charity and don’t have much experience in online marketing, then this is important for you.

Remember the two videos above, where one had a lot more views than the other? If you have a great piece of content, whether it’s a video, an app, an eBook, or anything else, tell people about it! Too often there are great pieces of content that get uploaded somewhere on the web, tweeted or shared by a couple of people, and then left without any real promotion (many businesses are guilty of this too).

Build your list of contacts. Find relevant blogs, forums, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, niche news sites, or anything with an online community, and send them a polite message about your content. If you do it right and your content is related to the type of thing they usually post or share, then there’s a good chance they will publish or share your content, too.

Build your outreach list larger and larger over time, and the contents of the list will often help to get the ball rolling for many of your campaigns. Look after it, don’t abuse it, and keep it secure (it’s a contact list and it contains people’s data, so just be careful with it).

Got any tips to add? Let me know in the comments… 🙂

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Posted by Brittan Bright

Whether the objection is over a line in your contract or an aspect of your process, when a client’s thinking doesn’t align with your own, moving projects forward can be difficult or impossible. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Brittan Bright shares her insight into some of the most common objections, along with recommendations for how to get things back on track.

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

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Matt Peters

At Moz, we have been following up on our 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors study by continuing to analyze interesting aspects of the data. One of our most frequently asked questions is, “Do you see any systematic differences in Google’s search results across search volume or topic category?” By design, our main study used a broad keyword set across all search volumes and industries to capture Google’s overall search algorithm. As a result, we weren’t able to answer this question since it requires segmenting the data into different buckets. In this post, I’ll do just that and dig into the data in an attempt to answer this question.

Our approach

We used a subset of the data from our 2013 Ranking Factors study, focusing on a few of the most important factors. In the main study, we collected the top 50 search results for about 15,000 keywords from Google, along with more then 100 different factors. These included links, anchor text, on-page factors, and social signals, among others. Then, for each factor we computed the mean Spearman correlation between the factor and search position. Here’s a great graphic from Rand that helps illustrate how to interpret the correlations:

In general, a higher correlation means that the factor is more closely related to a higher ranking than a lower correlation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is causation!

In addition to search results and factors, we collected the categories from AdWords (e.g. “Home and Garden”) and the monthly US (local) search volume. This allows us to examine correlations across these different segments.

Search volume

First up is search volume. We segmented each keyword into one of three buckets depending on the average local (US) monthly search volume from AdWords: less than 5,000 searches per month, 5,000-15,000 searches per month, and more than 15,000 searches per month.

To begin exploring the data, here is the median page and domain authority in each bucket, along with the total percentage of results with a domain name exactly matching the keyword:

Not too surprisingly, we see the overall page authority, domain authority and the exact match domain (EMD) percentage all increase with search volume. This is presumably because higher-volume queries are targeted by larger, more authoritative sites.

Now, an overall higher page authority for high-volume queries doesn’t necessarily mean that the correlation with search position will be larger. The correlation measures the extent to which page authority (or any other factor) can predict the ordering. As a example, consider two three-result SERPs, one with page authorities of 90, 92, and 88 for the first three positions; and another with values of 30, 20, and 10. The first SERP has higher values overall, but a lower correlation. To examine how these impact search ordering, we can compute the mean Spearman correlation in each bucket:

And for those who prefer a chart:

From left to right, the table lists link-related factors (page authority, domain authority, and exact match anchor text); a brand-related factor (number of domain mentions in the last 30 days from Fresh Web Explorer); social factors (number of Google +1s, Facebook shares, and tweets); and keyword-related factors (keyword usage on the page, in the title, and EMD).

Looking at the data, we can see a few interesting things:

1. The correlations increase noticeably with search volume for link, brand, and social media factors.
2. The correlations are mostly constant for keyword-related factors (keyword usage on the page or in the domain name).

Primarily, point #1 says that these factors do a better job at predicting rank as search volume increases. We’d expect to see a larger discrepancy in the link or social metrics throughout the SERPs in higher volume queries than in lower-volume queries. One corollary is that SERPs from lower-volume queries are more heavily influenced by factors that aren’t represented in the table (e.g. positive or negative user signals).

One implication of point #2 is that Google’s keyword-document relevance algorithm is the same for high- and low-volume queries. That is, their method for determining what a page is about doesn’t depend the query popularity.

We can make this more concrete by considering two different queries and SERPs: one high volume (“cheap flights” with more than 1 million searches per month), and one low-volume (“home goods online” with less than 500 searches per month). For reference, here are the top results for each search, with the page and domain authority from the MozBar:

Above: Google SERP for “cheap flights”

Above: Google SERP for “home goods online”

When a user enters a query, Google first determines which of the many pages in its index are relevant to the query, then ranks the results. A popular query will likely have several relevant pages (or more) with many links, since they are targeted by marketers. In this case, Google should have plenty of signals to determine ranking. A relevant page with high page authority? Check, put it in the top 10. On the other hand, pages in the dark corners of the internet with relatively few links are likely most relevant to low-volume queries. In the low-volume case, since the link signals aren’t as clear, Google is forced to rely more heavily on other signals to determine ranking, and the correlations decrease. This example oversimplifies the complexity of the algorithm, but provides some intuitive understanding of the data.

Site category

We can repeat the analysis for the different AdWords categories. First, the median page and domain authority and EMD percentage:

And the mean Spearman correlations:

Overall, the trends are similar to search volume, with significant differences in the link correlations, and smaller differences in the keyword-related correlations. The explanation for these results is similar to the one above for search volume. The industries with the largest link and social correlations — “Health” and “Travel & Tourism” — tend to have broad-based queries targeted by lots of sites. On the other hand, the industries near the bottom of the table — “Apparel,” “Dining & Nightlife,” and “Retailers & General Merchandise” — all tend to have specific or local intent queries that are likely to be relevant to specific product pages or smaller sites.

Takeaways

In this post, we have explored how a few individual ranking factors vary across search volume and keyword category. Correlations of link- and social-related metrics increase with search volume, but correlations of keyword-related factors (usage on page and in the domain name) are constant across search volume. Taken together, this suggests that Google is using the same query document relevance algorithm for both head and tail queries, but that link metrics predict SERPs from popular queries better then tail queries. We see something similar across site categories with the largest differences in link related correlations. Industries like “Health” that have broad, informational queries have higher correlations than industries like “Apparel” that tend to have queries with specific product intent.

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Posted by MackenzieFogelson

When it comes down to it, your job is to get stuff done. If you’re in marketing, it doesn’t matter if you work in-house, out-of-house, for a tiny company, or for the largest brand in the world.

Your job is to get results.

I may be biased, but building community sure does seem like one of the best ways to not only keep pace with the continuous change we’re experiencing in the web marketing industry, but also to achieve big goals for your business.

There’s a lot of work that comes along with building a community, and it does take time. But it’s a powerful and sustainable solution to heighten brand awareness, build trust and reputation, establish the right connections, and lower the cost of customer acquisition.

There’s a lot of ways you can build a community around your brand. We’ve found that there are some very fundamental pieces that will make building and managing your community a success (each conveniently falling within a five-step process).

The fundamentals of building your community

We’ve tried a lot of things as we’ve helped many of our clients (and ourselves) build community. We’ve found these five core steps, forming this fundamental structure and process, to be quite powerful.

In a nutshell, here’s how it breaks down:

1. Figure out your goals

Hopefully you’re getting tired of hearing me say this by now, but you’ve got to set goals for your whole business, and not just for SEO or content or social media. These goals are the building blocks for the strategy and direction of your business (not just for your marketing or your community).

You can have huge and lofty goals that are more visionary for your company and then also smaller, short-term project type goals that you have in mind for improving things, building things, and just overall stuff that you’d like to accomplish. Have a mix of both. When you get to the part where you’re developing your strategy, you can prioritize and plan for accomplishing all of these things.

Some really important things that we’ve discovered as we’ve helped companies set their goals:

1. Think voice and buy-in
   When setting goals, it helps with buy-in if you give everyone in your company a voice. That doesn’t mean that everyone and their mother comes to a goal-setting meeting. You can ask individual teams to send a list of their top three goals via email. The marketing team can organize, consolidate, filter, and then use these suggestions as a framework for what the company is looking to accomplish.
   
   
2. Mo’ money, mo’ problems
   The goals you set for your company need to go beyond revenue goals. Certainly the end goal of all of this community building stuff is to grow your revenue. Think beyond that, though, and include the direction that you want to take your brand. Think about how you can focus more on your customer and improving their experience.
   
   

3. Break it down
   It’s okay for goals to be high level: “we want to be thought leaders,” or “we want to improve customer service,” but it’s your job to break those more visionary goals down by asking, “what does that really mean? What does that actually look like?” This will bring these goals down to a more granular level, so that you know what exactly what you’re attempting to achieve.

   When working with clients, we have found that they need our help getting focused and setting the right goals. So we normally ask them to provide us with a list of goals for their company as a whole (they can send departmental goals as well), and then we do a little discovery research in order to propose the set of goals we’d recommend working on. We present these proposed goals and discuss them both for buy-in and to set the tone for the work that’s ahead.

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2. Define meaningful KPIs

Once you have goals defined, you’ve got to work on defining key performance indicators so that you can actually measure the goals that you have just defined (which translates to proving your value). The reason we define KPIs before we develop a strategy is for buy-in. We’ve found that it is important to have a discussion about KPIs to bring unspoken expectations to the surface. This provides an opportunity to get everybody on the same page.

Come to the KPI meeting prepared with the goals you’re proposing in one column and some suggested KPIs in another. Then ask the question:

“What kind of data would you like to see in order to prove that we’re effecting change?”

This provides the C-Suite (or whoever else approves your budget) with an opportunity to review the KPIs you’re proposing to serve as an indication of progress. It also allows them to provide their feedback for additional KPIs they’d like to track. From this conversation you can gauge whether you need to spend some more time on education and buy-in.

Keep in mind that not everything is easily measured. And not everything is going to be measured in Google Analytics. Be creative with how you can prove the value of your efforts. Avinash has some great posts to get you thinking in this direction.

Side note: I’m hesitant to provide examples of KPIs because they are going to be different for every company and every goal. Defining KPIs isn’t easy. It’s something dynamic for which you’ve got to test, collect data, and adjust. But don’t adjust the KPIs to tweak data to make your efforts look good. It’s okay to own up to data that doesn’t quite get you where you want to be in your initial iterations; that’s the contrast you need to figure out how your efforts need to be adjusted in order to get you where you want to go.

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3. Develop a creative strategy (and select your tools)

Now’s the challenging (but fun) part. You’ve got to come up with creative ways to reach these goals you’ve set. Develop a strategy that will serve as your detailed road map.

Keep these things in mind as you’re working on strategy development:

1. Strategy jam FTW
   Hold a strategy jam session with a small group, and have everyone come to the meeting with ideas ready to roll. During your meeting, don’t filter any of the ideas. Just think up a list of all the creative ideas for reaching the goals you’ve set.
   
   After the strategy jam, schedule an additional meeting to filter, organize, and prioritize the ideas that made the final cut during the jam. This is certainly where you match up budgets (make sure you can actually afford to do what you’re proposing), team resources, and time frames for deliverables.
   
   Once the budget and resources have been vetted, you can throw a high-level outline of the strategy over to your boss, team, or client. That way, if they don’t like the direction you’re headed, you haven’t wasted time by flushing out any ideas in detail just yet. If you have to ditch something, no harm done. This also provides another opportunity for buy-in because you’re showing that you value their input by asking for their feedback.
   
   Once you receive feedback on your high level ideas, you’re ready to develop your road map in detail.
   
   
2. 12-month vision; iterations of 2-3 months
   When working on developing the detailed plan of your strategy, it’s probably a good idea to show all of the creative things you want to accomplish in the next 12 months (that vision or higher level plan), but then of course you want to detail the first 2-3 months on a day-by-day/week-by-week basis so that the whole team has a road map.
   
   Working in iterations of 2-3 months toward your goals will allow enough time to get some momentum and collect some data, but isn’t so long that you can’t change course if your ideas flop and you need to do something different.
   
   As you move along into the execution of all of this stuff, note that you’ll need to hold strategy jams every three months or so and repeat this same process. It’s a lot of work but makes such a big difference in results.
   
   
3. Match tools to goals
   As you’re planning out your creative strategy, now is the time to select the tools that are going to get the job done. Our typical set of tools for building community tends to be SEO, social media, content, email marketing, and outreach. Whatever it’s gonna take to accomplish your goals.

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4. Do all the work in the execution step

Now that you have your plan written, get to work. Make sure the proper tracking and measurement is set up so that you’re collecting data on your KPIs. Then follow your strategy and be consistent. People on your team (and on other teams) are going to keep coming at you with things that will seem emergent but aren’t necessarily part of the strategy. This is where you get to tell them to “check the goals, baby” (and the plan that you’ve established that will get you there). There will be things (time-sensitive things) that may force you to derail your strategy. But be careful to stay focused on goals and keeping your attention on the actionables outlined according to the strategy.

Part of your execution will most certainly be the daily management of your community (and I’ve provided some fundamentals on this below).

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5. Evaluate your progress with analysis

Now’s your chance to figure out what’s working and what’s not. What needs more time? What are you missing? Analyze the data you’ve collected and then do something with it.

Whatever you do, don’t be lame and adjust your goals or KPIs just to make your efforts look good. Part of the process of measuring this stuff is determining what works. You’re going to fall flat on some stuff. That’s what testing is all about (and that’s why you work in iterations of 2-3 months and allow for agility).

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As you build your community (and your business), remember that these are your bones. This is the stuff that will keep you grounded. No matter what comes at you as you’re growing your community, always bring it back to these five core steps.

The fundamentals of managing your community

If you’re working on implementing the five core steps of community building, you’ve got your bases covered. So what about the fundamentals of managing this community? What is your community manager’s role? What are the key pieces that will be part of their job? How do they play a part in this community building stuff?

If we had to pick five things to focus on, this is what we’d choose:

1. Working with strategists and strategizing

So this is the way we work this at Mack Web, but you may have a different dynamic (working in-house vs. agency), so you can shape this however it works best for you.

We have strategists who are responsible for developing and directing strategy and for analyzing everything they possibly can in order to make a difference in our clients’ businesses. In order to effectively do this and help those businesses grow their communities, they need to work in perfect harmony with the community manager.

Depending on who you have on your community-building team, there will be someone (probably your CMO) who needs to operate like our strategists by keeping their fingers on the pulse of the business, setting goals, developing strategy, communicating with internal and external teams, keeping up on product development, engaging with customers, and executing all of the pieces that come along with the strategy so that everyone is getting stuff done and accomplishing goals.

You’re going to have all kinds of other people inside of your company who are also playing a role in executing your strategy and building your community. Some people are going to write content. Some people are going to create assets like infographics and video. Some people are going to be reading and learning and sharing knowledge.

Your strategist is responsible for leading this team. And of course, working closely with your community manager to ensure that they’re maintaining the thriving flow of your community.

Certainly there is strategy to all of this good stuff. Community managers will work with strategists to develop actual strategy and ensure that the base of your community is growing.

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2. Learning and identifying

One of the biggest jobs your community manager has (as well as other people on your team) is to become a subject matter expert in your industry. But they also need to learn about tangential and related industries that may become vertical and new market opportunities.

So the deal with reading and staying up on industry knowledge is that your community manager has to be a lot of places soaking up information that could be valuable to your company (or your clients).

What will help with narrowing focus here (and making the time spent on social media as valuable as possible) is identifying the WHOM:

1. WHOM to follow
   Your community manager will be responsible for doing the digging to identify the people and companies you need to be following on social media. This also means narrowing down the blogs you should be reading and engaging with.
   
2. WHOM to engage with
   Again, you’re looking to strategically target an audience of both influencers and friends. These are the people with whom your community manager (and of course other key members of your team) are going to focus on building relationships. They’re going to share their stuff, ask them for feedback, and look for ways to engage them in your community.
   
3. WHOM to monitor
   Monitoring and listening is a really important part of your community manager’s work. They’ll be watching for all kinds of opportunity in your community and on social media in general (more detail on this below).
   
4. WHOM to emulate
   Ideally, you’ll want your community manager to find a community management mentor. There are so many amazing community managers to learn from. Your Community Manager will want to find a few to emulate and try the things they do with their community. It’s their job to add your company’s personality, style, and align with the goals that you are working toward.

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3. Blogging

Two things here that we’ve found to work well for community managers in relation to the blog:

1. Manage blog content
   Depending on the size and roles on your team, your community manager could be the one to manage the content that goes on the blog. They can work on scheduling, launching stuff, and making sure there is a variety of content (see the Knowledge Spreadsheet idea below).
   
   Certainly, the community manager is an ideal person to engage with those who comment on your blog. And they can also make sure that spam is being consistently removed.
   
   
2. Generating content and seeking guest opportunities
   Ideally you want all kinds of voices on your blog, and your community manager is one of them. In addition to being featured on your own blog, your community manager can be focused on finding other reputable blogs where your team can contribute knowledge. In alignment with your strategy, your community manager can take the WHOM they’ve identified (above) and seek out matches for guest blogging.
   
   Guest blogging on other reputable blogs is an opportunity to build relationships with key companies and influencers. It allows your company to find other possible communities to strategically attract to your own community by providing them value. Your community manager can find these opportunities and bring them to fruition.

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4. Engaging, monitoring and listening, and brand loyalty

Your community manager is a bridge that connects all of the places where your customers and community members will experience your brand. They can help build that experience that connects the online and offline worlds with your website and social media outlets, the blog, and any other place that is an open door inviting people into your community and your business.

Your community manager can focus on these things to assist with engagement:

1. Relationships
   Your Community Manager will continuously develop relationships both on and offline. They will go to events. Talk to people. Make friends. Among the most important friends that they will make are other community managers. There’s a kinship there that is key to forging beneficial partnerships and also learning to be a better community manager.
   
   
2. Monitoring and listening
   Monitoring and listening is also part of engagement and is a big part of a community manager’s role. Social monitoring and listening is a dirty job. Seriously. It’s a lot of work. There are tools that can alleviate some of the pain, but when it comes down to it, monitoring and listening on social media requires a real human sifting through stuff other real humans are saying and that can be arduous. You really do have to be dedicated to sherlocking (which is the term we use to describe rooting around and researching and otherwise detecting) conversations, and doing what it takes to find opportunities that can be taken advantage of. A community manager’s job is to find those nuggets of opportunity, analyze them, and put them into action.
   
   In general you’ll want to have your bases covered by listening for things like:
   • Brand-specific content (brand name, product names, employee names)
   • Keywords (discovered through SEO research)
   • Competitors
   • Industry-specific content and other content opportunities
   • Relationship opportunities
Your community manager can be looking for possible partnerships, friendships, and relationships. All ways to help people, grow your community, and build your business.


3. Brand loyalty
   Another way to increase engagement and accelerate community growth is by embracing your community members in an expression of gratitude for their brand loyalty (something Joanna Lord discussed at MozCon). These efforts need to be tied to your overall company goals. Your community manager can research, identify, and suggest possible ways to reward your community members and encourage brand loyalty.
   
   Your community manager can create a brand loyalty program. A process they can use to decide how to reward your customers and your community (with all kinds of swag) and when such rewards should be given out.
   
   Cultivating brand loyalty can also come from performing “random acts of kindness” in your community. I remember Moz doing this when my cup broke shortly after returning home from my first MozCon conference.
   

Just as with engaging, monitoring, and social listening, your community manager will want to keep track of all brand loyalty efforts so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of this program. This will certainly be part of setting goals, defining KPIs, and strategy development when you’re back working on building your community base.

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5. Training

Whether your team is in-house or you’re working with clients, education is a really powerful part of your community manager’s routine. Especially because not everyone on your team is going to be overly excited about the power of community and using social media.

As a community manager, you’ve got to rally the troops and get them to contribute to community management efforts. But they don’t need to be on social media to do this.

I’ve talked about this hack before, but we’ve been using this internally to manage the Mack Web community and it’s worked so well for us (and our clients) that I’m sharing it again.

This is a Community Management Knowledge Spreadsheet and it’s made a tremendous difference in the quality and variety of value that we’ve been sharing with our community.

Remember when we talked about identifying the WHOM and finding targeted blogs to be reading and engaging? Share those sources with your team (and encourage them to provide you with others). Then ask them to contribute what they’re reading here on your knowledge spreadsheet.

Everyone in your entire company can contribute here. Your community manager then plays bouncer and decides what is appropriate and useful for your community (making sure it’s actually a fit for your community), where it gets shared (be respectful that each outlet has different needs), and when. Getting your team to participate in ongoing learning is just one way to train your team ongoing and manage your community.

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There are going to be many other things that your community manager can do to contribute to the management and growth of your community. Your community management fundamentals may look entirely different. Again, it all depends on the goals that you’re wanting to accomplish for your business.

Wrapping it up (a.k.a conclusion)

Building a community is a great way to put integrated marketing into action (which is what is going to help you weather the Goog and build valuable assets in your business). These community building and management fundamentals will help you grow your community from the inside out. They will keep you focused on creating quality content and resources. They will encourage you to continually work on improving your products and services. They will motivate you to engage with and listen to your customers and their feedback. Using these fundamentals will help your entire team — strategists, community manager, and the rest — accomplish goals for your whole business.

Have you tested these community building and management fundamentals in your company? What have I missed? Looking forward to our conversation in the comments below.

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