seo

Posted by aaj_14

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

In 2012, the SEO industry in the UK was worth over £500 million annually, growing 18% from 2011 figures. The US SEO industry is even bigger, topping $16 billion in 2010. In a time of general malaise about the economy, this industry is growing rapidly, and the good times look set to continue.

This is great news for any SEO business looking to expand along with companies’ search marketing budgets, as there is plenty of work to be done. There is so much, in fact, that most SEO departments, consultancies and agencies are looking to hire new employees to keep up with the demand. This does raise the question, however, of what to look for when hiring new SEOs.

So what do the best and brightest SEOs in the US and the UK look for when they are hiring? Read on to find out. Take note: Their answers may surprise you.

Eric Ward – EricWard.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Not joking. A bit OCD, a bit ADD, and experience in marketing, public relations, and library science. When presented with a long page of source code, do they faint or confidently explain the good, bad, and ugly in it without having to see the page in a browser? Do they spend time online when they are not working? Do they have their own individual presence established online? If they saw Matt Cutts at a conference, would they hide?

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Someone that has not learned bad habits, and that will be a leader on their projects. They must be a great written and spoken communicator, they need to know what they do not know and endeavor to fix that, and they have to be excited about problem solving. They need to stick to the methodology while seeing opportunities to surpass the competition. Our ideal candidate is fantastic at time management and organization, is service focused, and lives for internet marketing. Their technical background should be (entry-level) basic, and they need to be a quick and accurate student. At a senior level they need a solid foundation across many markets and technologies, without the baggage of learned spam techniques. They should be able to teach, lead, and communicate as the expert on a complex project. Historically we have found great success in training our employees from an intern to expert level (10 years with our firm). And, yes, we have many technical staff that have been with us that long.

Paddy Moogan – Distilled

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

There are two things we look for in all hires at Distilled: smart and gets stuff done. Other stuff is a bonus but if they have these two qualities, we can often teach them the rest! Personally, I also look for someone who actively learns new stuff in their spare time and seems to have a genuine passion for something. For example, I like SEOs who may have set up their own blog or website and have spent a bit of time knowing how it feels to get it ranking and the challenges that can present. It shows initiative and a passion that is hard to teach.

Julie Joyce – Link Fish Media

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

The ideal SEO employee is someone without a huge ego who realizes that he or she is never done learning, will often be wrong, and isn’t afraid to try something new and forego old methods that no longer work. It’s someone with a brain that’s logical and creative, someone with the communication skills to write well or come up with amazing ideas. It’s also someone with an obvious passion for the work, as if you don’t give a damn about what you’re doing, I doubt you’ll ever be brilliant at it.

Dave Peiris – SharkSEO

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

This is actually quite a tough question because there’s a lot of different types of people who could all be incredible SEOs. SEOs that are analytical often produce great work, especially if they enjoy digging into the data and focus on the story rather than just the numbers to work out why things are how they are. Some of the best SEOs I’ve ever worked with have been highly technical. They’ve got a great understanding for how to structure sites so they’re ideally suited for search as well as users, and knowing how to code helps them talk to developers better. Having said that, there are other skill sets outside of coding that can lead to an excellent SEO employee, like being able to build relationships with site owners with ease. A great SEO employee is also a good communicator, and can easily explain complex technical issues in ways that non-technical people can understand. But overall I think the best SEOs are the ones who are naturally curious and, when they find a problem, can’t help but try to solve it.

Wil Reynolds – Seer Interactive

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Curiosity, competitiveness, and compassion. Curious because I want to work with people who have that curiosity of “how does this work” to always be there, the desire to seek out answers is key too. Competitiveness because I want to work with people who push me to get better, who want to win, and when they lose it stings!! Those are the folks who leave when the job is done, and it personally messes up their day when something goes bad. Compassion means that they don’t let their competitiveness overrun their ability to have compassion for others and to have empathy for other folks.

Oliver Archibald – SEOGadget

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

For any calibre of SEO, whether junior or senior, there couldn’t be a better way to learn about this industry than by maintaining your own site. It’s all very well reading about SEO (and that’s certainly a good thing), but actually doing it enables you to fully understand what you’re recommending to clients or your team. This brings me on to my next point, which is creativity and initiative. These attributes in the ideal candidate shouldn’t just be applied to cool content ideas, but also to how they handle the technical side of SEO. As many of us know, every site is different, and the correct solution to one site’s problem might be vastly different from a similar issue on another site.

Patrick Altoft – Branded3

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

We don’t subscribe to the theory that SEO employees have to be good all-rounders because it’s actually very useful to have specialist technical people and specialist creative people working on the account. How many great creative people also have great technical skills? Very few. We are a 50-person agency, so we have the resources to have specialist teams working on the individual campaign components rather than trying to have generalists who don’t have the detailed skills. We use experienced strategists to run our clients’ accounts, and they are the primary point of contact, so they need great SEO skills and great account management skills. Those are probably the key criteria we look at for this role.

Kelvin Newman – Sitevisibility

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

A while back I wrote a free book about Link Building called “How to Become a Clockwork Pirate,” and while a lot of that advice was pre-Penguin, there’s one area I think I was on the right page: The ideal SEO has two different skills sets, the creative and the methodical. People are going to sit at different places on the spectrum, but the most successful SEOs I’ve worked with sit somewhere in the middle. They’re people prepared to come up with good ideas but accept that a great idea without hard work is useless. Equally, they understand sometimes it’s about putting in the hours and follow-up; that’s the difference between success and failure. I think Seth Godin summed it up really well: “Real Artists Ship.”

Image credit Wordle.net

Conclusion

Each expert answered a single question — What makes the ideal SEO employee? — in incredibly different ways. Some wanted specialists, and some preferred all-rounders. Some liked to build the new employee’s knowledge almost from scratch, while others were looking for people with solid knowledge of the industry. Still, time and again the same qualities popped up.

The ideal SEO employee should:

• Be smart.
• Be motivated to learn — even off the clock.
• Be a problem solver.
• Maintain their own site in their off-time.
• Be both logical and creative.
• Be an excellent communicator who is able to build relationships.
• Have a passion for technology and the internet.
• Be willing to try new things.
• Constantly push to improve themselves, their approach to SEO problems, and others.

At the end of the day, few of these qualities have much to do with HTML or information architecture. Instead, they seem to focus on personality traits like leadership, tenacity, curiosity, and self-motivation.

The next time you find yourself searching for the ideal SEO employee, just remember that the ideal SEO employee is someone with the right personality. The technical know-how can be taught.

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Posted by robiganguly

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

Mobile app growth is stunning (and changing your business)

As I shared in a prior post about inbound marketing for mobile, the growth of the app ecosystem is simply extraordinary. A few weeks ago we learned that total app store downloads have eclipsed 100 billion with no signs of slowing down. The tremendous growth in this ecosystem is a testament to something that every marketer needs to understand:

Your customers are all moving to mobile.

Whether it’s the mobile web or mobile apps (the chart below tells us it’s all mobile apps these days), the evidence that consumers are flocking to their mobile devices is overwhelming. As a marketer, our first task is to find where our audience is and where it’s going.

Today, the answer to both questions is increasingly: mobile.

Mobile’s unique properties present us with a new set of marketing opportunities — new ways to learn about and connect with our potential customers. To name a few:

• Because your mobile customers are treating their phones like extensions of themselves (check out this recent Pew Internet study), they have invited us into a more personal and immersive aspect of their lives.

• This new dynamic means that we, as marketers, can develop truly deep connections with our customers through digital channels.

• The kinds of relationships we have been able to foster in person are now possible through software.

This very personal device has a downside

There are some meaningful challenges to the mobile app channel, however. The market for apps is already extremely crowded. The quality bar continues to rise rapidly and the era of the “get rich quick” apps has long since passed.

Because consumers download so many apps on a regular basis, they’re very used to abandoning your software and maybe even deleting it. As a result, the largest problem in the mobile app ecosystem is really app retention. Within 3 months, over 3/4 of your customer base is gone, never to be seen again.

With average pay-per-install prices costing over $1.50, the shape of this retention curve is really disheartening to app marketers. It means that a lot of installs are going wasted and customers aren’t really happy (one huge reason why mobile app tracking rules).

In thinking through this problem and working with thousands of app publishers, we’ve come to realize that there’s a simple equation behind each and every business in the mobile app space. We find that it’s a helpful way of understanding how to grow and build your business. Understanding the math of the app business helps marketers, product managers and mobile business owners prioritize their investments in order to grow their business.

In today’s mobile environment, many marketers are myopically focused on the installation number. While that input is important and a very strong reason to invest in a proper App Store SEO strategy, our equation clarifies that it is but one of three crucial components. App marketers need to be more focused on:

• Increasing their mobile app retention in order to maximize LTV

• Analyzing and improving their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

So, how do you grow your app’s retention?

As the CEO of a mobile app feedback and engagement company, I get to talk to a lot of mobile teams about the problems they face on the retention and monetization side of the business. There are several key ways in which innovators are increasing mobile retention and driving meaningful business results.

Analytics and iteration

Many app publishers are working with analytics packages from Google, Flurry, Kontagent, or New Relic in order to better understand their customers’ behavior inside the app. By creating various events to track specific actions taken and watching the breadcrumbs of data left behind from consumer interactions, app publishers are able to get a much better sense of what happens once they’ve launched their app. Using that data helps identify places of popularity and places of exit. Using analytics to drive iteration on the product is a helpful piece of growing your retention numbers.

Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement is a phrase that’s used often these days but that requires more specificity in order to truly be helpful to app marketers. Engaging with your customers helps you make a product that will drive better retention, higher customer satisfaction and inform your product roadmap. In the mobile app world, there are 3 important ways in which you can connect with your customers:

1. Feedback: Listening to your customers and making it incredibly easy for them to give you feedback is a must-have for every app. There are people who are willing to look for a way to talk with you and tell you what they like, what they’d like improved and what is causing confusion already. These are your most engaged customers. Embracing and empowering them drives their investment in your app and company even higher.

2. Customer research: Every company with an app has a built-in audience of customers to conduct research with and learn from. Tapping into that audience for specific research (i.e. Did this product feature land as we expected it to? What are the demographics of our audience?) is an important engagement mechanism that often informs the product, marketing, and executive teams at the same time as involving customers in the betterment of the product. These involved customers tend to stick around a lot longer.

3. Targeted and personalized communications: Because mobile is such a personal experience, the old methods of communicating with customers (email blasts to your list, direct mail to everyone, advertising spend to find your audience) are not nearly as useful. More importantly, in the face of the tactics others are using, they make your brand look a bit clueless. Instead, it’s possible to communicate with your mobile customers based upon the actions they take, the groups that they fall into and the questions they ask of you. Using intelligent in-app communications to generate conversations and follow-up in a personalized manner allow your brand to deliver a 1:1 experience for every consumer, which brings them back to your app on a regular basis.

Interested in more specific resources about driving retention?

We’ve scratched the surface about the retention problem and how to address it, but there’s a lot more in the way of resources out there for mobile marketers. Here are a few that are helpful and specific:

• Urban Airship’s white paper on “good push” can help you understand push notifications and the difference between a well-targeted campaign and spam

• OMI’s piece on using analytics to boost retention is a helpful overview of setting up studies and using data wisely

• The Apptentive guide to increasing mobile app retention was compiled after 100s of customer interviews and walkthroughs of tactics and specific outcomes

Retention’s downstream impacts:

In addition to driving up the retention aspect of the app business equation, increased retention actually fuels two significant long-term benefits, illustrating how interconnected each of these components are:

Boosting downloads

When apps increase their retention, their overall audience grows. As a result of the growth in their audience they end up with better app store performance because their larger, happier customer base is more likely to talk about them and share great ratings and reviews in the app store. In addition, the larger, more engaged audience is more likely to spread the word with their friends about the app. A more engaged, larger audience proves to be a significant engine for organic download growth.

Understanding your customers better

In order to drive higher retention, marketers need to understand their customers better and develop better relationships with them. The side effect of the work required in order to get to know customers better is that you understand the language that customers use and the things that customers care about most. Using that understanding to shape your further marketing efforts can yield significant increases in efficacy because you’re using customers’ language instead of your own. Very few things are as powerful as speaking to someone in their own words.

The deeper goal: meaningful customer relationships

Ultimately, mobile marketers should be focused on developing long-term value for their clients and brands. Through the mobile channel’s unparalleled ability to deliver a personal experience and the opportunity to be with a customer everywhere they go, the notion of lifetime value (LTV) has become even more important. As inbound marketers, many of us have felt first-hand the effects of measuring traffic sources and understanding that the most relevant, invested, interested customers are our most profitable customers. We are past the days of trying to acquire every customer possible and have moved on to doing much more value-oriented great marketing, marketing which invites our customers into an ongoing conversation that is more give and take and less broadcast and pray.

When you create meaningful relationships with customers, customers see your company as a more human organization, one capable of listening and learning. Along with this more personal perception comes a more robust public image — consumers give your company leeway and understand that you will make mistakes along the way. Developing organizational tolerance for mistakes extends to your customer base: a deeper understanding of the people behind the app helps you keep your base of supporters on board when you make mistakes.

Because of the mobile device’s always on, “five minutes of use at a time” paradigm, it’s incredibly important to try and become a habit of some sort for your consumers. By putting a personal face and voice to your communications with customers, you’re more likely to earn that habitual usage of your app, resulting in outstanding performance.

Finally, a bonus: presenting the case

We know that as marketers many of you struggle to make the case for new initiatives, investments and strategies inside of your organization. Often the question of where to put resources comes down to an analysis of cost/benefit or, put another way, ROI. As we’ve worked with a number of companies where this has been an important piece of the puzzle, we’ve created a simple sample equation you can use to highlight the benefits of investing in customer retention and happiness.

In this example, we’re making very conservative assumptions about the impacts on installs and retention and not even assuming any impact on ARPU. Many businesses find that their happiest customers spend 1000% or more of the average consumer, so this is a place where a lot of ROI is uncovered over time as well.

Feel free to borrow it for your own purposes, we hope it’ll help you grow your business and be more successful.

Finally, please let me know in the comments if you have other tips for making the case for customer engagement and retention or if you’ve employed other tactics that I haven’t mentioned.

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Posted by Nathan_Safran

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

A Conductor study finds that the more explicit a headline is as to the reader takeaway, the more the headline resonates.

The new digital economy has created a wealth of new opportunity for modern marketers across search, social networks, and digital channels. Digital marketing has brought with it the opportunity to create leads, drive engagement, and drive sales at costs far less than traditional offline channels.

In some ways, though, online marketing has been victimized by its own success. Viral media site Upworthy’s co-founder Peter Koechley describes it this way:

“When we look at the media landscape, we see there being more of a demand problem than a supply problem — how do you get people to care about important stuff amidst the avalanche of content we all face each day?”

With the growth of online marketing, both the channels and volumes of content competing for our readers’ attention has exploded, making it increasingly challenging to stand out. Consider the following statistics:

• Explosion in content competing for readers’ attention: A Day in the Internet shows that 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, and 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Each day also brings 400 million tweets.
• 80% of readers never make it past the headline: According to some sources, on average, eight out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only two out of 10 will read the rest.
• Traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline: According to Koechley, tests show that traffic to content at Upworthy can vary by as much as 500% simply because of the headline. “The headline is our one chance to reach people who have a million other things that they’re thinking about, and who didn’t wake up in the morning wanting to care about feminism or climate change, or the policy details of the election,” he said.

Measuring which headlines resonate with readers

Given how significant a headline can be to click-through rate in both search and social online channels, here at Conductor we decided to test different headline types to determine those that resonate most with readers. Although it would be interesting to measure this by analyzing actual click traffic (and we know that there can be a difference between how respondents say they will click and how they actually do), it can be difficult to precisely test by getting multiple headlines for the same article in front of readers. Taking the survey approach also gave us the ability to gather demographic data about respondents to determine if headline preferences differed across specific groups.

To start, we analyzed a large sample set of headlines across multiple online publications and social networks to determine if there are general ways in which headlines are written. We determined there to be five high-level headline types:

• Normal (Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
• Question (What are Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful?)
• How to (How to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
• Number (30 Ways To Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)
• Reader-Addressing (Ways You Need to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful)

Using actual headlines from multiple content sources including BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and the Conductor blog as starting points, we showed respondents headlines written in each style for three different articles and asked them to select the headline that resonated most.

BuzzFeed is onto something with its headline choices

Before we dig into the findings, I want to draw your attention to content aggregator BuzzFeed and its quirky CEO, Jonah Peretti. A recent New York Magazine profile of Peretti describes how he began a study of what makes content resonate after accidentally creating a viral sensation as a graduate student at MIT (and later as part of the team that created the Huffington Post). “I’ve spent over a decade thinking about how ideas spread,” he says.

Close analysis of the front page of buzzfeed.com shows a number of things. First, what in the world is a boozy milkshake, and how could there be 26 different ways to make one? Second, and more to the point, they use ‘number’ headlines a lot. In fact, at the time of this writing, every other headline on the front page is in number format:

Turning now to our findings: As you have probably guessed by now, “number” headlines resonated most by far — a full 15% more than the second place “reader-addressing.” (More on what we think this means in a bit.)

Looking at headline preferences across gender groups, we can see that females were even more predisposed to “number” headlines than males. Interestingly, across all the questions we asked, this was the only one in which we saw any significant difference among demographic groups:

Superlatives: Either hit me with it or understate it

Next, we tested respondent tolerance for superlatives in a headline. We showed them several different headlines that had between 0 and 4 superlatives in the headline and asked them to pick their favorite:

• The 27 Ways to Train a Dog (0 superlatives)
• The 27 Best Ways to Train a Dog (1 superlatives)
• The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Dog (2 superlatives)
• The 27 Best Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (3 superlatives)
• The 27 Best and Smartest Ways Ever to Train a Perfect Dog (4 superlatives)

The data shows more than half of respondents (51%) like the understated approach, preferring to click headlines with 0-1 superlatives. Interestingly, tolerance for superlatives tailed off until the headline packed with 4 superlatives, which had a full quarter of respondents stating they preferred it. These findings suggest readers prefer an understated approach or that the author shoot for the stars and tell the reader in strong terms why their content is worth reading, but the middle ground is to be avoided.

One out of five respondents don’t seem to mind if you YELL AT THEM

Next we surveyed respondents about their headline capitalization preferences. Several headlines with distinct capitalization styles were shown to respondents and they were asked to select the one that resonated the most with them:

• The 5 steps to prepare for the impending zombie apocalypse (lower case)
• THE 5 STEPS TO PREPARE FOR THE IMPENDING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (capitals)
• The 5 Steps to Prepare for the Impending Zombie Apocalypse (sentence case)
• No preference

The data showed that respondents strongly preferred sentence case, but, surprisingly, 1 out of 5 respondents preferred the more authoritative capital letters. As described above, there was little difference in responses across demographic groups. While we don’t recommend that content creators suddenly start writing their headlines in all capitals, it was interesting to see that a significant segment preferred that style. Otherwise, the group overwhelmingly preferred traditional sentence case.

Write headlines that leave no ambiguity

Although a follow-up study that thoroughly examines why certain headline types resonate over others would add greater insight for marketers and content creators, we can offer a hypothesis about what the research findings say about how to craft headlines.

As we started out saying, there has never been more content vying for reader attention — more channels, more content, more publishers all competing for our time and mind share. This means the modern internet user is forced to be more discerning about the headlines they click on, and is hyper-cognizant of where they are investing their time.

The commonality among the top three resonating headline types vs. the bottom two is that the more the headline type resonated, the more explicit the headline was as to what the reader was going to get out of reading the article.

Put another way, humans don’t like uncertainty. A headline like “30 Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful” removes any ambiguity about what the article is going to do for me. It tells me exactly what I will and will not get from it: It is going to give me a specific number of ways to make drinking tea more enjoyable. This may be a reason why BuzzFeed has found such success with readers using these headline types.

Likewise, the second most popular headline type, reader-addressing, is also very explicit and direct about what I will get out of the article (Ways You Need to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful).

Contrast that with the least popular headline type, the question (What are Ways to Make Drinking Tea More Delightful?), which, perhaps given the phrasing, leaves in place a certain amount of ambiguity for the reader.

Conclusion: three essential tips when crafting your headlines

While we are not saying it makes sense for every publisher to try and become the next BuzzFeed, and we don’t think the data suggests a directive to publishers to write every headline in “number format,” we do think it serves as a reminder to publishers of the following guidelines:

1. Don’t forget the headline!
   Too many content creators invest a great deal of time and energy creating awesome content, but then tack a “meh” headline on as an afterthought. Remember — 80% of readers never make it past the headline, so spend the extra bit of time to create a great one that grabs the reader’s attention.
   
2. Be as explicit as possible about what your content will and will not do
   There are a bazillion pieces of content clamoring for your audience’s attention. Our data suggests that the clearer you can make your headline as to what the content will and will not do, the more that headline will resonate with your audience.
   
3. Don’t forget to craft “headlines” in search, too
   The search results are no less of a “headline click decision” for your audience than other online channels. Make sure you are putting your best foot forward when enticing readers to click on your website in the search results by following rich snippet best practices, and by leveraging schema.org to include visual markup (shown to increase CTR in many cases). (This is a great resource for more information on implementing schema.org markup.)

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Posted by richardbaxterseo

Howdy Moz fans! It’s been a while since I’ve been up on the Moz Blog (and boy have I missed it), but as a huge thanks to the Moz team for such a fantastic MozCon, I thought I’d get a write-up of my session submitted just as soon as I arrived home.

MozCon 2013 was the biggest, best, and most exciting yet. It’s really nice to meet so many good people, and I’m always left with heaps of ideas to implement when I get back to the office.

Outreach is getting harder

Over the years, it’s become harder and harder to find websites and link prospects using classic outreach and guest post queries in Google. I think maybe webmasters as a whole are pretty blind to unsolicited “we’d love to write for you” style outreach, and I also think that the sites that tend to rank in Google for those queries may be of a lower quality (certainly not always, but there are plenty of bad sites out there inviting guest posts. You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them, and I don’t really want a link from them!).

My session at MozCon was called “Really Targeted Outreach,” and I looked at an alternative method to find sites that our target audiences may be sharing on Twitter. With that data, you can build content strategy, understand your market a little better, and construct an alternative outreach plan based on what real people are sharing and engaging with, rather than starting with sites that just rank for guest post queries.

Should we stop using Google for guest post outreach?

Something I found really interesting during my study was that sites that influential people share on Twitter tend to be really good websites! Compared to sites that simply rank for outreach queries, I felt a lot like the social data was a better source of inspiration.

Not to mention the obvious; my target market is engaged with the sites it’s sharing on Twitter. That’s huge! Let me rephrase: People in your target market are telling you what content they love and where they’re finding it. Using that data is really targeted — we know where to be if we want to speak to our audience.

To an extent, starting with Google leaves us in the dark.

TAGS – Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet

About eight weeks ago, Geoff introduced me to TAGS – a really clever Google Spreadsheet that archives Twitter data. It’s really brilliant at collecting Twitter advanced search data and storing it in a spreadsheet. The best bit: It can update hourly. It’s created by Martin Hawksey — a bit of a star in my opinion (thanks for the spreadsheet, Martin!). Here it is:

Targeted search queries with TAGS and Twitter advanced search

Did you know that you can search Twitter for only Tweets that contain a shared URL? The query looks like this:

Filter:links from:@richardbaxter

You can add more usernames with a simple OR operator, like this:

Filter:links from:@richardbaxter OR from:@wilreynolds OR from:@randfish (result)

So, with TAGS, you can archive Tweets from people you’re interested in.

Imagine you’re interested in Tweets containing URLs from Pro Snowboarders. Where would you go to find influential Pro Snowboarders on Twitter? Followerwonk, of course! Take a look:

If you’re looking at the right results, collecting the usernames of the people you’re interested in is a simple matter of copying and pasting. You can construct your search query pretty easily, and from there set TAGS to automatically run every hour.

Making the data actionable

I tend to prefer working in Excel (though most of this can be done in Goole Docs, too), so in my session, I showed the audience how we can fetch data from our Google Docs archive straight into Excel using Data > From Web.

In this screencast, you’ll see how I start with “publish to web” in Google Docs and end with a data import in Excel. Google docs automatically updates what’s shared at the URL, and the refresh button in Excel will make the data update automatically.

Think about that: By the end of this process you’ll have a continuously updating source of data from people you’re interested in on Twitter:

Via: SEOgadget’s Youtube Channel

The Excel file in this video is actually a template I made available at MozCon. If you want a copy, just go to: http://bit.ly/mozcontemplate and download it. I know there’s no audio in the screencast, but it should be pretty self-explanatory.

Tools you’ll need

Every good SEO needs tools! For this method, you’ll need SEO Tools for Excel, so if you’re a MAC user I’m afraid you’ll have to stick with Google Docs, or use a developer. We also use SEOgadget’s Links API Extension for Excel to get Moz / Majestic Data for each of the URLs and Domains we extract from the Twitter Data.

The end result

I think the end result is pretty exciting! Here’s a list of the top domains shared by Chief Marketing Officers (one of the target audiences we track at SEOgadget for our own B2B marketing):

I love the idea that our own target audience can tell us where they are, what they’re sharing and what they love; all we inbound marketers need to do is be there. We’re talking better content strategy, better content planning and outreach — and it’s really targeted!

Here’s the presentation:

Via: Richard Baxter on SlideShare

I hope you enjoy learning this process and find some great sites to contact. Happy hunting, and see you next year!

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Posted by AndrewDumont

I hate the term growth hacker, but I love the concept. The idea that you can grow a business from 0 to thousands of customers without much of a marketing budget is a beautiful thing, and very much the result of growth hacks — free marketing tactics that grow traffic, brand, links, and eventually, a customer base.

Moz is my fourth startup, and at each one, the same question has kept me up at night: What else can we do to expedite growth? You see, an early-stage company is never lacking time and effort, it’s lacking tactics — tactics that earn customers without relying on a big budget.

Which leads me to this post.

I wanted to pull together a list of all of the “hacks” that I’ve picked up over the years, along with those from other startups, into a holistic view on how a startup can grow on the web today. For the sake of this post, I’ve focused the list primarily to software and consumer internet startups — which is where most of my experience lies — but it can apply to nearly any web business. As you’ll notice, I’ve broken the list down into two categories to help you prioritize; low-hanging fruit and long-term investments. The low-hanging fruit tactics are the things that you should be doing today. The long-term investments are those that you should evaluate, but put some thought into whether or not you should pursue, as they may not make sense for every business.

But enough talking, let’s dig in.

Low-hanging fruit

1. FAQ for the long-tail

This one was picked up from my good friend Neil Patel, who is a master of SEO and startup growth. The basic gist is to use your FAQ (or help forum) to target long-tail search queries, specifically those that lead to a buying decision. By the very nature of long-tail queries, the potential customer is usually pretty far along in the buying process. Using keyword research, targeted FAQ topics can help put you in the top of the search results for the questions that your customers are looking for answers to. When you do this, make sure that the FAQ has a clear call to action to sign up for your product or service, as well as a custom domain that doesn’t rob you of the indexed pages and content. Content, mind you, that your community is often times creating. Tools like UserVoice (Perks Listing) and GetSatisfaction are great platforms to use for your FAQ, as they allow for domain customization and the use of your own CSS styles. CrazyEgg (Perks Listing), Neil’s company, is a fantastic example of this in action.

2. Manual outreach to first customers

Your first customers will likely become your biggest advocates if — and only if — you treat them the right way. For your first 100 customers, you should be reaching out to each one, personally. I’m not talking about a canned email or an email from your info@ alias. I’m talking about a personal email. This is your chance to build advocates by thanking them for signing up and offering your help, whenever they may need it. It’s so simple, yet so many companies overlook it. If you’re beyond 100 customers (and have a budget), take a page out of MailChimp’s book (Perks Listing) and make the high-touch process a bit more scalable. After sending your first campaign on MailChimp, you’ll receive the email below, prompting you to claim your free gift — a MailChimp t-shirt (#want).

3. Partner distributions

It amazes me that more software companies don’t do partner distributions. The concept of a partner distribution is simple; a discounted offer on your product or service that you distribute through partners. We’ve done this at Moz, and it’s been a huge channel — over 7,000 free trials and 2,000 paid conversions in under a year. Keep in mind, there’s no cost to running partner distributions, only the increased operating costs of offering an extended free trial (in the case of Moz). To apply this to your business, you’ll need a few things. The first thing is a partner page, a custom URL that you can create for each partner that explains the offer and factors in the discount. Next, you’ll need some platform to return the favor. At Moz, that’s Perks, which allows us to co-market, while providing some awesome value to our customers. Below is an example of a partner distribution that we did with our friends at WPMU (Perks Listing).

4. Track competitor mentions

As many link-builders know, one of the best ways to find link prospects is to monitor where your competitors are getting mentioned. With that context, we built Fresh Web Explorer, to help you understand where your brand and your competitor’s brand is being mentioned. Each mention of a competitor is an opportunity. An opportunity to build a relationship and a link. Along with that, you can find press opportunities by searching relevant subject matter in FWE. For example, if I was in the Wordpress hosting industry, I could search things like “Wordpress Hosting” or “Wordpress Development” to find sources that are covering topics related to my product — example of that below. Let’s call this PR 102.

5. Double loop referral programs

Perhaps one of the most well-known (yet underutilized) tactics is the double loop referral program. Dropbox famously did this with the “invite your friends, get free storage” campaign. In the non-virtual world, DirectTV does this by giving every user that refers a new customer $100 off their bill, forever, along with $100 off to the customer that they refer. The structure can take many forms, but the concept is the same — provide monetary value, from both sides, for your users to refer your product, and they just may. Sometimes the traditional affiliate model just won’t cut it. Pro tip: try just simply asking your users to refer their friends if they like the product or service. Often times, a reward isn’t necessary if the product is good enough.

6. HARO

Wouldn’t it be great if press came to you, rather than trying to guess what they’re going to write about? Well, that’s where HARO (Help A Reporter Out) comes into play. Created by the amazing Peter Shankman, HARO is a twice-daily email that pulls together all of the editors that are looking for quotes or opinions on articles that they’re writing, usually on top-tier publications. It’s free, and a complete no-brainer. HARO was the only reason why I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal about, yes, workplace fashion. Go figure.

7. Verified program

Link building without the manual outreach? Yes, please. It’s amazing how underutilized verified programs are from a marketing standpoint. Some of the best examples of verified programs in the wild are Google Analytics and Twitter. All of these programs provide some sort of verification process or educational program, which in turn provides the individuals and companies that go through that process with a badge to proudly display on their site. As we all know, along with showing some credibility to the individual or company, an embedded certification badge also provides a link back to any site you’d like. Which, I hear, makes the SEO gods happy. We like this idea so much, that we’re kicking around the idea of adding an embeddable badge to the Recommended Companies List.

8. Social prospecting

Consider this the guerrilla marketing tactic of the digital age: social prospecting via Twitter. Run a search on your favorite Twitter client for terms related to your product or service and provide helpful responses to those that are looking for help. For example, we do this for Stride, an app I helped create, by searching for the terms like “CRM recommendations” or “client tracking software.” Having these searches saved pulls in a constant feed of prospective customers. However, I put this out there with caution; don’t be that guy. Don’t just tweet out a link. Provide helpful recommendations, often of your competitors, or engage on a topic that may be different from the keywords that led you. There’s nothing worse than a feed of promotional garbage.

9. Video syndications

Online education is all the rage these days, and rightfully so. There’s platforms like Coursera, Grovo, Udemy, and many more that empowers anyone to learn. If you produce video content and aren’t taking advantage of these platforms, you’re missing out on a great distribution source. We’ve done this with Udemy, utilizing our Whiteboard Friday content, and it’s been a huge hit. What this allows us to do is reach an audience that wouldn’t otherwise know about Whiteboard Friday, and are now exposed to the Moz brand. Like you needed more reason to create video content.

10. Comment marketing

Speaking of Whiteboard Friday, Rand did an awesome one on the next tactic, comment marketing. Using comment marketing intelligently, while providing value, is a great way to build relationships, earn links, and expose your brand to a completely new audience. In attempt to avoid duplicating what Rand said so elegantly, head on over to that Whiteboard Friday post to learn the right way to do comment marketing.

11. In-app sharing

Just putting links to share a page on Twitter or like an app on Facebook isn’t enough these days, there’s got to be more of an incentive for a user to share your site. The best integrations of social sharing come in the context of the application. For example, when a user achieves a certain milestone or unlocks a certain badge, they’re presented with an option to share that achievement publicly. Perhaps the best, and most well-known example of a company that does this beautifully is Foursquare. When you unlock a badge, you’re presented with the option to share that achievement socially. A great way to boost your ego, and an even better way to drive brand impressions for Foursquare.

12. Winbacks

This is one that Justin and Renea on the marketing team have been piloting at Moz, and it’s simplistically brilliant. For most SaaS companies, once a user cancels their account or doesn’t convert on their free trail, they’re forgotten about. Why? Just because the product wasn’t a fit at that time doesn’t mean that it’ll never be a fit. The concept of a winback is to send an email to those in said cohort, with an offer that makes it easy to come back to the product. For Moz, it was an extended free trial period:

13. Customer thank-you cards

On the topic of keeping your customers around, a “thank you” can be so simple, yet so powerful. At Moz, we do this in the form of a “happy package” (yes, really) once a Moz member hits a certain level of MozPoints. But it doesn’t have to be that elaborate. An investment in something as simple as thank you cards, with a hand-written message, can go a long way in keeping your customers passionate about your product — and there’s no better marketing than word of mouth.

14. Influencer program

Taking care of influencers, and getting them into your product early can be one of the most impactful things you can do for your company. For example, if I were creating a new product in the inbound marketing space, Rand is one of the first people I’d reach out to offering him early access. Using tools like FollowerWonk or Klout is a great way to find the influencers in your space — it’s then up to you to provide them with early access, a free account, or anything else to incentivize them to use your product. Nothing fancy here, just good old fashioned influencer outreach.

Long-term investments

15. Tap into the viral loop

If you’re lucky enough to have a product that lends itself well to the viral loop, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. Simply speaking, a viral loop is the idea of utilizing a natural function of your product to expedite growth. Heading back down the path of congratulating MailChimp on all their awesomeness, they do a fantastic job of utilizing the natural viral component of their product. If you’ve ever used MailChimp, it’s likely you’re familiar with MonkeyRewards, an option they offer when sending a campaign that allows users to place a “Powered by Mailchimp” badge at the bottom of their email in exchange for campaign credits. By doing this, they exchange a cheaper bill for free marketing to hundreds of thousands of people. Not a bad trade.

16. Guides

You’re likely all familiar with Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. What you may not know, however, is how powerful it is from a growth perspective. Without digging into too much detail on numbers, it’s suffice to say that the beginner’s guide contributes significantly to our consistent stream of free trial sign-ups. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, that’s just because you’re Moz,” you’re only partially correct. I wanted to test it for myself, with a lesser known brand, so I did. We created a Beginner’s Guide to Sales for small businesses through Stride, and it’s been just as powerful from a growth perspective, only on a smaller scale. But beware, guides, if done correctly, are a huge investment of time and design resources. At Moz, Ashley and her team have been working on some new guides on the topics of social media and content, and they’ve taken months of work. But, from the data I’ve seen first-hand, it’s well worth the investment.

17. OEM deals

Back in the business development camp, there’s a heavy investment opportunity that exists for most products called an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal. Essentially, this is a deeply integrated partnership where a software (or hardware) provider bundles your product as part of their offering in order to fill a need or gap in their offering. The reason why it’s such a heavy investment is that it often requires co-branding work, a separate billing infrastructure, and the negotiation of complex agreements. We’ve gone down this path a few times at Moz, only to walk away because the investment was greater, in our opinion, than the output. OEM deals are more commonly found on the hardware side, where a laptop, for example, ships with a software product pre-installed (example of that below). However, software OEM deals are becoming more and more common. If you’re in the service business, play around with pairing your services with a related software product, similar to what we’ve done with Distilled.

18. Product integrations

The integration of your product into an existing, often much larger product, makes a lot of sense. Depending on how in-depth of an integration you’re looking to do, this could almost be considered a low-hanging fruit option. There’s truly no barrier to do it, only the investment of your time. In the software world, there’s a few examples of great integration marketplaces. Notably Salesforce, Hootsuite (Perks Listing), and Zendesk. From our discussions with Hootsuite, they see an average of 100 to 500 installs per day of each application in their gallery. That’s up to 500 people per day, or 15,000 per month, that could be exposed to your product for zero cost. Not only that, but product integrations are often the entry point to a much deeper relationship — potentially even an acquisition.

19. Industry surveys

Becoming the voice of an industry can have massive implications on growth. One way to do this, as we’ve found at Moz, is to create an industry survey and publish the results. By doing this, you not only get to use the results for your own product intelligence, but also become the point of reference for thousands of people in your industry. This, as you can imagine, is a lot of work. Evangelizing the survey to the point it has enough data to make an impact, putting time into the analysis, and finally visualizing the data in a beautiful way can be a huge time investment. That’s not to say it’s not worth it, only something to consider when prioritizing. Looking back on the impact of industry surveys at Moz, it was definitely worth the time.

20. Rally the troops

21. Free standalone tools

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!