Posted by Matt Peters
Yesterday at MozCon, I presented the results from Moz’s Ranking Factors 2013 study. In this post I will highlight the key takeaways, and we will follow it up with a full report and data set sometime later … Continue reading →
Posted by Lindsay
As Web Community Manager @ThinkGeek, Carrie Gouldin built the company’s social media presence from the ground up and now engages hundreds of thousands of followers through multiple social platforms.
We’re excited that she is bringing her valuable insights about social media to MozCon! In her talk, “Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement,� she’ll share practical advice about how to track links, read metrics, and keep your followers hungry for more.
Recently, we got the chance to talk to her about her dynamic job, social metrics, and how a well-coordinated social media response helped ThinkGeek turn around an internet meltdown.
Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.
I’m going to talk about how the right content at the right time and the right metrics tracked with the right tools drives ThinkGeek’s social program. I’ll show examples of the kind of stuff that gets us thousands of retweets and a 25-50% Talking About This rate on Facebook, some of our behind-the-scenes data on traffic and revenue, and tips and tests you can try right away.
You’re currently the web community manager at ThinkGeek. Could you tell us a bit about how you got into that role?
I started at ThinkGeek almost five years ago. At that time, ThinkGeek had a very strong brand and passionate fans, but we weren’t really available to our customers out there on social networks. I came in at the right time — before Oprah joined Twitter, even — and was able to start building a community organically and trying new things without the burden of so-called “best practices.” It also wasn’t my only role (and still isn’t; I also head up our email program), so I was able to justify my existence beyond Faceyspaces and Twitlogs to those who were on the fence about the value of social networks for internet retailers.
What do you think are the top three qualities of an effective web community manager?
First and foremost, 100% dedication to the brand, values, and public persona of the company they represent. If they’re going to manufacture the Kool-Aid, they have to drink it first. This is why I feel social media should always be kept in-house.
Second, the ability to communicate clearly, interestingly, and like a real human being — which is to say with humor, compassion, and enthusiasm. That includes strong (and concise!) writing skills, some Photoshop mojo, experience with HTML and web publishing, and unflagging attention to detail.
And lastly, a thick skin and knowing when to take a break. Being at the beck and call of the internet is not easy.
Which social metric do you think is widely undervalued?
Engagement is undervalued, and the metric depends on the network. What good is a jillion followers if none of them clicks your links or retweets or shares your content?
On the other hand, revenue and traffic are valued but traditionally achieved through paid placements like boosted Facebook posts or sponsored tweets, while we treat our social streams like network television with great content surrounding our commercials, which does work for us. We haven’t seen boosted posts pay off for us on Facebook, but remarketing ads (not under the purview of our “community” team) can be successful.
Give us an example of one important test that any business on Facebook should do in the process of building social media engagement.
On Facebook, try the same content two ways at the same time of day, one day apart. It’s hard to do A/B tests given the nature of the tools we have–that is, in most cases, everyone sees the same thing at the same time–so you have to be creative.
I’d suggest an image + text post on Facebook on the same subject versus the same text without an image. Which does better on shares? Clicks? Comments? Reach? Revenue? Facebook targets different kind of content to different users based on their past engagement history, so you might see very different results.
A couple months ago, ThinkGeek was caught in the crossfire between FOX and sellers on Etsy, but ThinkGeek came out of it looking great. Can you share a bit about how social media helped manage ThinkGeek’s reputation in this incident, and any insights you gained from the experience?
For those playing along at home, the issue was over a licensed knit hat from Joss Whedon’s short-lived space western Firefly, owned by FOX. The show ranks up there with Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek in terms of the geek lexicon, and the hat in question became a symbol of both rebelling against the man (because of the character who wore it) and helping others out (with charitable donations from the purchase of hand-made knit hat replicas on sites like Etsy).
So when an unnamed source (a.k.a. the man) went after many unlicensed Etsy sellers (the rebels with hearts of gold) with cease and desist orders, the internet exploded.
Our licensed version of the hat (made by another company that is not us) is visible out there in the geekiverse so we got a lot of questions and accusations about our role in the matter via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, our blog, our Jayne hat product page comments, the phone — every possible method of contact.
First, there was a collective “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” at ThinkGeek HQ, and we told customers we didn’t know what was going on (which was true) but we’d find out. After some triage behind the scenes, we learned it was FOX — generally unloved by fans because FOX is the reason the show was cancelled in the first place — that had contacted Etsy. As quickly as we could, we published a blog post explaining our side of things.
Neither we nor the licensors who make the hat had any role in it, but then the story changed to “Well, if you didn’t sell it, this wouldn’t happen.” That may or may not be true. FOX would have likely tried to protect their intellectual property regardless, but there we were still selling the hat. So, after much consternation about how to turn our problem into a solution befitting the charitable roots of the hat, we published another post the following day announcing our donation of the proceeds to Can’t Stop the Serenity, a Browncoat charity that supports Equality Now:
Then Nathan Fillion, who starred in Firefly, very kindly tweeted about the steps we’d taken:
Which was very much appreciated by us (because we’re fans so OMG <3 NATHAN)… but crashed our blog, and spawned the hashtag #Fillioned. All in all, a good ending to two long days.
What did we do that made this work out? We were honest, acted quickly, and responded in the manner that honored and respected the spirit of the hat and the fandom surrounding it. Pretty simple, but in practice it takes serious coordination to pull a response like that together.
What is your geekiest hobby?
MY JOB. Seriously. Curating a collection of 100+ fan-made cosplay outfits for a stuffed monkey who meets geek celebrities like Adam Savage, Wil Wheaton, and the voice of GLaDOS should count for something.
What is a quote that has stuck with you, and why?
“Brevity is the soul of wit” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Comes in handy for Twitter-zen.
If you had to be trapped in a TV show for a month, which would you choose?
I should say Game of Thrones to stay on message but that’s just about the very last universe I’d want to find myself trapped in. My top pick would be Downton Abbey so I could I hang with the Dowager Countess.
It was great to speak with you, Carrie! Get geeky updates by following @ThinkGeek on Twitter, and learn test-driven social media tips by checking out Carrie’s presentation at MozCon!
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Posted by Cyrus Shepard
You know the numbers — Google uses over 200 ranking signals, updates its algorithm over 500 times a year, and employs thousands of engineers. We often get so caught up in the minutiae of the algorithm that we forget all this effort serves a single purpose:
Satisfy the user.
This isn’t a touchy-feely post that says “Make great content and visitors will come” or “Delight your customers and magic will happen.”
It’s not magic. Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor.
Unlike other ranking factors, this one is hard to measure because it’s based almost entirely on search engines’ own internal data — something they don’t share. We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google’s most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results.
It’s easy to tweak a keyword. It’s much harder to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don’t find what they were looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that’s why search engines place so much emphasis on it.
Stephen Levy’s excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data (bold added):
“… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the “long click” – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling were the “short clicksâ€� where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. “If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy,” says Patel. “If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy.”
Often called pogosticking, this refers to the behavior of users that click on a result, then “pogostick” back and forth between the search results and different websites, searching for satisfaction.
In 2012, Google released an abbreviated copy of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public. A version of this document is used by Google’s small army of Search Quality Raters to evaluate search results.
One of the highest scores a quality rater can assign to a page is “useful” (bold added):
“Useful pages should be high quality and a good “fitâ€� for the query. In addition, they often have some or all of the following characteristics: highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic). Useful pages are usually well organized and pages you trust. They are from information sources that seem reliable. Useful information pages are not “spammy.”
The problem with quality raters is they can only look at a few thousand websites at any given time. There are millions of sites on the web, so Google invented a new system:
Instead of evaluating results after the fact, Panda gives Google the ability to predict user satisfaction — modeled on actual human surveys — and apply it to every site in its index.
Less satisfying pages are ranked lower in search results, and every few weeks the index is updated with new data.
The chart below shows Panda hitting a site again and again.
Site visits with Panda updates via Panguin Tool and Google Algorithm Change History
If search engines measure user satisfaction and employ it as a ranking factor, our goals as search marketers are to:
As if to put an exclamation point on the whole satisfaction experience, Google recently released free, embeddable customer satisfaction surveys for website owners.
After installing a line of JavaScript on your site, your visitors are presented with the following questions:
If you’d like to customize the questions, Google allows you to do this for $0.01 per response.
It feels like Google wants to give site owners the same type of feedback Google acquires directly from behavior data. Using these forms won’t tell you exactly what to do, but any webmaster using them is sure to get a ton of valuable feedback about visitor satisfaction.
We’ve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors affect rankings.
Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We’re seeing these more and more all over the web.
What if Moz required registration?
The idea is simple: folks click on a search result, see the form and return to the search results to try another URL. After a few hundred times (or less), search engines start to figure out this result doesn’t satisfy users.
At Moz, we’ve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, there’s anecdotal evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers.
We know that faster websites are good, but page speed has two mechanisms by which to influence rankings:
Google obsesses over speed, and scientists at Microsoft have shown that users will visit a site less often if it’s only 250 milliseconds slower than the competition.
Source: NYTimes
If you ever need to convince your client or boss to improve page speed, try the comparison tool at Webpagetest.com which allows you to export a slow motion video.
Empathy as a ranking factor? “Cyrus,” I can hear you saying, “you’ve been hanging out with Rand too much!”
Consider this comment on a recent Whiteboard Friday. I’ve edited the comment below to highlight the important parts:
When you practice empathy, you put yourself in the shoes of your visitor to try to build a satisfying experience. You accomplish this by
While it’s difficult to prove a relationship between improved user experiences and rankings (because we can’t measure user behavior like Google can) there’s strong anecdotal evidence that search engines aggregate these factors into their algorithms.
One of the best SEO articles I’ve read all year is AJ Kohn’s Time to Long Click, a great article you shouldn’t miss. AJ explains how linking out (and also creating content hubs) can be used to increase user satisfaction (bold added):
What I’m recommending is that you link to other valuable sources of information when appropriate so that you fully satisfy that user’s query. In doing so you’ll generate more long clicks and earn more links over time, both of which can have profound and positive impact on your rankings.
Stop thinking about optimizing your page and think about optimizing the search experience instead.
-AJ Kohn
Think of it this way: It’s far better for users to click away to another URL from your site than for those same users to return to Google to try again. In the first instance, you are the authority hub, in the latter, Google is the authority.
Be the authority.
There are two types of SEOs: those that try to satisfy robots, and those that satisfy users.
The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. If the users aren’t happy, neither are the bots.
The user-focused SEOs works with the same keywords and title tag, but then they go one step further and ask their users to try the site. After that, they do whatever it takes to make their users happy.
Have you seen improvement in rankings after improving user satisfaction? Share your story with us in the comments below.
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Posted by randfish
Late last month, Google made an update to its search algorithm that caused our MozCast to spike to an all-time high of more than 113 degrees. Our work as web marketers can be frustrating when we’re aiming for a continuously moving target. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers how we can keep our cool and learn from those changes when they happen.
How Should Marketers React When Google’s Search Results Have Dramatic Changes – Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here’s a still image of this week’s whiteboard.
Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, I want to talk a little bit about how marketers should be reacting when Google makes big, dramatic changes in their rankings and their algorithm. Now, this can be a challenging topic, right?
So we’ve seen, for example in the recent past, MozCast, which is Dr. Pete’s project that monitors several thousand search results and sort of looks at changes in the top ten and what percent of them are churning in and out, and we saw one of the biggest spikes we’ve ever seen, bigger than Panda, bigger than Penguin, just hugely dramatic.
Dr. Pete represents those in MozCast with temperatures. So the average day temperature is 70 degrees. This one was 113 degrees. Very, very hot, meaning a dramatic amount of change. Lots of things in the first page of results on average moving out and being replaced by other things and lots of positions moving around too.
Now, the way I like to approach big algorithm updates is to look at, number one, what happened? What actually changed in the results? Because sometimes a dramatic variety of different things can be happening. So we see through MozCast and through monitoring lots of search results ourselves, for ourselves and for campaigns that we pay attention to, we can see that you’ve sort of got one, two, three, four ordering. That might shift over to be, oh wow, look. Almost everyone who is in the first page of results kind of fell down or fell out of those results, and now it’s number 11, 19, 4, and 16 that are ranking in there. Wow, okay. That was a big algorithmic shakeup. Push a lot of people down, a lot of new people in.
Or it might just be a reordering. So, one, two, three, four went to four, two, six, eight. Well, okay. I mean, two and four are still in the top four. Six and eight are still in the top ten. But we’ve had some bouncing around. So this is a shift, but not nearly as dramatic as the prior one, and actually MozCast temperatures represent that because Dr. Pete looks at sort of where things are shifting to figure that out.
Or, and we also see a lot of this, Google has introduced new types of results. There’s now a carousel at the top. There are now news results going in there. There are other things that are pushing results off of page one that are shaking things up, that are making things dramatically different, that are making essentially organic visibility quite different from how it used to be.
Those different types of results are of a vast variety, and Google rolls them out in tests all the time and then permanently when they like the results of those tests. Now, if you’re observing these patterns in the change of types of results and observing the patterns in what’s rising and falling, this can really help you get to the bottom of, “What should my strategy be? What tactics should I take?”
But the second question that I want to take you to before we get there is: What is Google saying about the update? Sometimes Google is very quiet and they don’t say anything, and sometimes they’ll give some information. Right?
So, for example, Google mentioned with regards to this big update that happened recently that there’s a rolling update going on, meaning you can see spikes in values potentially over a period of time as they roll out the update, and it will be ending on or around July 4th.
Okay. That’s potentially very interesting information. That might tell me, “You know what? Before I do a big, wholesale analysis of how this impacted me, I’m going to wait for this whole thing to roll out. Let me just give it a few more days, wait until the 4th of July and see what actually happens at the end of the shakeout.” Gianluca Fiorelli asked Matt Cutts, he said, “Is this a global update or just U.S. or English results only?” Matt nicely replied, “Well, it’s global.”
So that is also helpful to observe and to know so that people can get this sense of, “Oh, wow. I’m targeting mostly Spanish language search results in Spain or in Mexico, or in South and Latin America. I guess I should be paying attention to whatever is going on with this update.”
Third, I like to ask, “How has this update affected me?” Of course, because I’m a marketer who observes broad trends and runs a software company in the field, I like to see what those broad trends are and know about them. But I also really want to see how it affects me, and as a search marketer, that’s certainly what you should be thinking about, too.
So being able to monitor this through data is really important, and there are three points of data that you can collect from your own analytics. Those are the number of pages that receive one or more visits from Google search, the number of keywords that send one or more visits from Google to your site, and the total amount of Google search traffic that you’re receiving.
Then, if you want to get more granular, you can go down to the keyword level and look at what are individual keywords sending. Of course, remember that because of “not provided” a lot of that won’t be trackable anymore, which is frustrating and challenging.
Then the last thing that you’re going to need in order to see how this has impacted you is ranking position. So I like to collect rank position data in non-personalized, non-geographically biased results. This is not perfect. A lot of people are geographically biased, are searching on mobile phones or devices that are location-enabled, do have Google accounts that are biasing them personally. But this is the best that we’re going to do, those non-personalized, non-geo biased results.
You can achieve that by going outside of your country code. So for example, if I’m in Google US, I’m going to go search “Google.co.uk/search?q=” whatever keyword I’m tracking, “&gl=US”. That will bias me back to the U.S., but taking me to the U.K. and then saying U.S. will make it so that I’m not geo-personalized to just Seattle or just Washington, or just wherever I happen to be on the road where I’m searching.
Using “pws=0” will help remove personalization. This actually removes most of the personalization anyway. If you want, you can also log out or use a browser window that is non-personalized where you’re not logged in. From this, you get the best picture we can really get as search marketers about what’s going on and how the shift has impacted you, and you can see really different things.
I mean, if I see that my rankings haven’t really changed, but the number of pages that are receiving one or more visits from Google has dropped dramatically and that’s affecting my overall total traffic, I can presume, “Hey, you know what? This is probably an indexation problem for me.”
Whatever update Google has been making, the way it’s affected me is that I’ve lost pages that used to be in the search results. I’m no longer performing for them at all, and they weren’t the ones that I was tracking. So probably it means my long tail is where this is impacted, and so that can inform my strategy and my tactics from there.
This is the last question that I like to visit whenever something like this has happened which is: Are there actions that I should be taking? Not just what actions, but are there actions? Sometimes I just kind of go, “Hey, it’s cool. I’m going to let Google do what they’re going to do, and I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I’m not going to worry about them.”
But sometimes there are tactical actions like, “Hey, you know what? I need to bolster some individual keywords. We lost rankings on some keywords that are really important. Let’s see if maybe we should produce new pages of content. Maybe we should update the existing content. Maybe we should redirect the old ones to the new ones. Maybe we should be trying to earn some new links and social signals and shares to that stuff, whatever that might be.”
Or there might be more strategic level SEO types of things like, “Man, Google just introduced this big carousel across all these different types of hotel and travel results. I’m not sure that keyword phrase of city name plus hotels or city name plus places to stay is really going to help me anymore. Maybe I should start to consider whether I need to go earlier on in the keyword search funnel.”
Maybe I need to get in here where people aren’t yet searching for hotels, but they’re searching for destinations or places, or those kinds of things, rather than targeting down here where it looks like Google is kind of dominating the search results themselves. That’s a big strategic kind of shift that you’ll have to make with your content and your website and your keyword targeting strategy.
But being able to ask these questions, all of them, and then getting down to the tactical and strategic can really help make you more reactive in an intelligent, considerate way to the big changes that Google might be making.
All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted by Erica McGillivray
When we sat down in our big MozCon command room — think the Enterprise-D’s swank Observation Lounge — we knew we wanted to bring someone who’d worked for the Obama re-election campaign to MozCon. Why? Because no matter your flavor of politics, the re-election campaign was full of internet marketing brilliance and used big data to connect with its audience in a way that affected the world. This is what we’re all trying to do, right?
When we sent feelers out, Kyle Rush answered our call. He served as deputy director of frontend web development for the Obama for America campaign. Kyle’s currently director of technology at The New Yorker, and he’ll be speaking about how to “Win Through Optimization and Testing” at MozCon, July 8-10. You don’t want to miss this advice about testing and conversion rate optimization. You can follow Kyle on Twitter @kylerush and on his blog.
How did you come to work for the Obama for America campaign?
I’ve always been interested in technology since a young age. In junior high, I would spend all of my free time on the family computer making websites. In my second year of undergrad, I got really into politics and changed my major from advertising to political science. I followed the ’08 campaign closely and really admired how the campaign was able to innovate in the political field because political campaigns are notorious for deploying outdated and unusable technology, if any. After graduation, I worked for Blue State Digital which contributed to the ’08 digital effort. My boss Teddy Goff left Blue State to become the Digital Director at the Obama campaign, and I asked if he needed an engineer. Two weeks later, I moved to Chicago.
What did you learn most about yourself as part of such an intense experience?
A lot of political staffers will tell you that working on a campaign is like building an airplane while you’re flying it, and that’s very much the case. I moved to Chicago, where I had never lived, on a two-week notice. We quickly hired some engineers and built out a team. During the last half of the campaign, we worked seven-day weeks and not less than 10-hour days. We saw all the work we were doing play out on TV every day. There were extreme highs like when we had a 90% chance to win the election a few weeks before the first debate. There were extreme lows like when we lost the first debate badly. We worked 18 months towards one night, and then we won. I think that we all learned that the limits we thought we had don’t actually exist and that we can go as high and far as we want to.
What was your favorite win for the campaign?
The obvious favorite win is election day, which was one of the happiest days of my life. Aside from that, though, I would say the day we tested our “sequential” donate page. At that point, we had already optimized all the low-hanging fruit, and it was time to put some serious investment in a variation to try and beat our control donate page. We put in a lot of thinking, time, and effort, and we ended up beating the control by 5%. That was a huge win, because it taught us that even though you might think your page is optimized, there is always more you can do.
What win surprised you the most?
I don’t know if it qualifies as a win, but the Democratic National Convention was by far the most surprising thing that happened during the campaign. The convention went perfectly, but the amount of traffic we received to the website during the convention was unreal. We blew through our entire test queue for donate pages and were just coming up with tests to do on the fly while the traffic was pouring in.
Okay, for those us who are political nerds, did you get to meet President Obama? What’s he like?
We did get to meet the President! He came to the office several times during the campaign to talk and meet everyone at headquarters. For having the stature of the President of the United States, he is very human. The day after the election, he came and hugged everyone at headquarters. He is a great guy.
Switching gears from your past to your present, what’s inspired you lately?
Web performance is always really inspiring to me because deep down it’s what I care about on my engineering side. Specifically, I really like to read about the way that other engineers make web apps feel like native apps on mobile devices.
We’re all a bunch of data geeks. What are some of your favorite metrics to dig into?
I’m a performance engineer at heart so I really like to look at metrics around page speed. My favorite metric is time-to-paint, which is the amount of time it takes for the browser to do its first render of a web page. This differs from the pageload metric in that the browser often paints the web page before all of the assets have loaded. For this reason, time-to-paint is a more valuable metric to me.
As an engineer obsessed with UX, I also like to focus on metrics that quantify user frustration. On the Obama campaign, I spent a lot of time measuring any form error from a validation error on a certain field to the number of validation errors that occurred for each for submission. On our donate forms, we found that the people most commonly had two errors on their form submission which were the employer/occupation fields. Then we wrote a script that measured if people were entering any data in them at all. Turns out people weren’t entering any data, and we soon came up with solution to fix this problem. Once we solved the problem, our error rates plummeted.
MozCon attendees love to engage on social media with speakers. What’s your favorite social media network?
Instagram is definitely my favorite social medium. It’s beautifully simple, and it doesn’t require a lot of attention, unlike Twitter. You can go a week without opening it and not feel like you missed a lot.
Finally, for some pure fun, what music have you been listening to lately?
I like pretty much all music, but I really like upbeat/dance-y music. Lately, I’ve been listening to Kanye’s new album Yeezus non-stop. Typically though, I listen to house music at work and while working out. Over the past few days, I’ve been listening to songs like “Boy Oh Boy” by Diplo, “Play Hard” by David Guetta, and “Alive” by Krewella.
Thanks, Kyle, for sharing with us. Can’t wait for your talk at MozCon. Follow Kyle on Twitter @kylerush and on his blog. We’ll see the rest of you there!
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