seo

Posted by KelseyLibert

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 SEOmoz, Inc.

Let’s assume you know the basics: content marketing is one of the best ways to engage with audiences and potential customers online. It is useful for improving search rankings, increasing brand engagement and loyalty, increasing brand visibility, and encouraging social sharing and interaction. If you are a consumer-facing company in this day and age, you simply cannot keep up with the competition if you are not actively building your content marketing skill set. 

Easier said than done though, right? You’ve probably dabbled in content marketing before, or maybe even hired a “top agency.” Maybe you have even seen some results; a few links here, a few hundred shares there, but then what? Certainly no fireworks, no massive ranking improvements, and no lead or sale increases. Maybe it wasn’t the panacea you’d hoped it might be. Short on time and money, you probably gave up and reinvested your money into tried and true marketing practices that could at least drive a few conversions. You chalked content marketing up to something too expensive or too difficult to find any real success with.

If any of this resonates with you, you are most definitely not alone. Doing content marketing properly is no easy task, and to beginners it can seem to be next to impossible to create anything that will stand out and get noticed. Add to that the explosion of agencies who claim to be gurus and deliver tragically poor results, and the whole “content marketing” arena can start to feel like a convoluted mess that can’t deliver on its promises.

So, what do you do? Other tactics are losing efficacy, your site is losing rankings, you can’t get social engagement for the life of you, and your frustration level is at an all-time high.

You go back to the beginning, and you relearn the truth about what it takes to come up with content that works: content that shows what content marketing can really do for your business. Content marketing that can transform a company overnight.

When content goes viral: The example above shows a near 10 fold increase in our client’s organic search traffic (from Google alone) after a single successful viral campaign. The big spike in the beginning of December marks the launch of the campaign.

Step 1: Understanding the truth about your competition

You may assume when you first begin that your only competition are your business competitors, the companies online that fight for the same search phrases, or sell the same products or services. When it comes to content marketing, these businesses are only the beginning. What you must remember is that when creating content, you are fighting for attention against EVERYONE; all content creators, not just businesses. Your content must stand its ground against those who are creating content for entirely non-commercial reasons. This means that when coming up with your campaigns, you must not only do better than your competitors, but you must do better than almost everyone talking about your subject area.

Step 2: Engagement is good, but viral is better

In content marketing, going the incremental route can be an effective way to go. Loyal audiences can be built by creating a great deal of relevant, useful, but not particularly viral content. Through persistence and often grueling content creation schedule it is possible to find a positive ROI over the long term. If you have the capacity to pump out 5-7 thoughtful and moderately useful pieces of content weekly, eventually you will likely see good results. However, as Rand Fishkin said, you have to “be willing to fail for a long time.” 

In fact, for companies that can afford it, this can be an essential piece of the content marketing pie, and it is often something we recommend to our clients who have longer timelines. But this style of content marketing will not change your business in the short term. It can take years of consistent effort to see substantial improvements in rankings and in audience growth.

What if you don’t have years; don’t have the time, energy, or budgets to create compelling content on a regular basis; or simply need to build an audience fast? The answer is this: you must create something viral; content that can spread in a way that creates massive attention. Content that will boost you above the writhing masses, and make others take notice.

Below, you can see our viral content marketing campaign results, which impacted our client’s 271% organic traffic increase. It’s important to note that these results were generated by a single outreach placement on Buzzfeed.com, with a nofollow link.

Step 3: Understanding what it means to “go viral”

If you have done any reading on viral marketing, you have probably come across attempts at formulas for describing virality, but none that have made it very concrete beyond the understanding that to go viral means to have a high level of visibility. The truth is that virality and the act of going viral isn’t really all that complex. Having something “go viral” relies on having specific values for three important variables. These variables include:

I’ve adapted a spreadsheet that looks at how these factors actually influence the anatomy and eventual success or failure of a piece of content. The bones of this spreadsheet were originally created by Mark Devisser. Feel free to make a copy of this document and play around with the three variables mentioned above. As a note, you will likely notice some key aspects of virality just from playing with this including:

• True virality along with the telltale “hockey stick” graph can not be created without a viral coefficient of greater than “1.” The higher the coefficient, the faster the spread of the content and also the sooner and more abrupt the hockey stick you will see on the graph.
• The size of the initial seed is important for the length of time from the initial publishing it takes for virality (hockey stick) to happen. The larger the initial seed, the sooner you will see a potential viral effect, assuming the coefficient is still greater than 1.
• Extending the cycle time will extend the length of time it takes to see a viral effect (hockey stick) Fortunately, with web based content, the cycle time happens extremely quickly thanks to social channels and the nature of digital content. If you were measuring the virality of say a snail mail chain letter, the cycle time would be on the order of weeks, and creating virality would take much longer assuming a viral coefficient greater than 1.
• The size of the Total Available Market has an enormous bearing on the total number of cumulative views. This makes it extremely important to think about your target audience during idea development. If you want a viral smash, you must have content that appeals to the masses (more on this later).

Step 4: Creating content with a viral coefficient above 1

So, understanding what virality is great, and understanding the levers for virality is even better, but how does this translate specifically to content? How do you take the ideas we just learned and make them work for you in your content marketing efforts?

To begin, the first, most important, and most difficult step is to create a piece of content that you think will likely have a viral coefficient greater than 1. When it ultimately comes down to it, there is no perfect way to gauge whether or not a particular piece of content will have a viral coefficient above 1. Ultimately, you won’t know until your content gets out onto the Internet. However, by exploring the top-level qualities that exist within most viral content with a coefficient above 1, it is possible to give yourself a much higher probability of viral success.

Strong emotional drivers

Put simply, emotions drive almost all behavior. When an emotion is triggered in your brain, your nervous system responds by creating a subjective experience (feelings). A great deal of your decisions are informed by your emotional responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to appraise and summarize an experience and inform your actions. The stronger the feeling, the more likely to spur a responsive action.

When it comes to sharing online, the potential actions related to emotional activation are relatively simple. Essentially there are four options for your typical content consumer when approaching a new piece of content.

• Engage or disengage
• Share or don’t share

In order for a content consumer to share, they must engage first with the content, and then make the decision to share that content. These actions are mediated entirely by emotions. Many brain researchers and scientists agree that emotion of interest is continually present in the normal mind under normal conditions, and it is the central motivation for engagement in creative and constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being. Interest and its interaction with other emotions account for selective attention, which in turn influences all other mental processes. Thus, in order to get someone to engage with your content, it must first and foremost pique interest. It is for this reason that titles are so massively important. Without a title that piques interest beyond an undefined threshold, there will be no engagement.

Assuming you’ve piqued your readers interest with an interesting title and have passed the first stage, your content must now convince the reader to share. The decision making process for this, as defined by prominent psychologist Richard Lazarus is as follows:

• Cognitive appraisal: The individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion.
• Physiological changes: The cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response.
• Action: The individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react (or not).

If the cognitive appraisal spurs a strong enough emotion, and resultantly large physiological change, the probability of action is increased. In the case of sharing content, if the cognitive appraisal cues a strong enough emotion and resultant physiological response to overcome factors that antagonize sharing the reader will share the content.

So, how do we create strong emotional drivers in our content?

In the fast paced online environment, you will only ever have a short amount of time to get the attention of a viewer. Your goal should be to capture the attention of a viewer, and then engage them emotionally as quickly as possible. The faster and more deeply you are able to engage their emotions, the more likely the viewer is to invest themselves enough in the content to share it. Let’s by addressing speed:

While this is a great start in understanding the emotional drivers of sharing, it is a very incomplete understanding. In an effort to further detail the real emotional drivers, I sought to understand the emotional impact of content that better fit the criteria of most viral content (i.e. visual, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-consume content).

Exclusive Fractl research project: viral emotions 

*It is important to begin by noting here that the following experiment is not scientific or widely comprehensive. Despite this, there is a good deal of preliminary information that speaks to some of the most apparent aspects of the emotional drivers of viral content, and the takeaways found are likely quite valuable. Research of greater depth will likely bear out additional information and more granular insights.* (Raw Data)

I began by selecting a group of content that fit what I believed would be representative of the “best of the best” in viral content. To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I decided only to use static images instead of written or multimedia content. Memes and inside jokes were also excluded as the factors that lead to them becoming viral can be non-emotional and more difficult to analyze or ascertain.

The source of the content I used came from the top 50 image posts of all time on reddit.com/r/pics, a community of 3.4 million plus content voters. I selected 25 images that I felt could stand alone, ones that required no previous knowledge to understand (Reddit tends to boost inside joke type content on occasion, so post that fit that profile were excluded).

I then had each image coded by 50 volunteers for the emotions that were elicited by each image as well as the strength of each emotion. The possible choices for the emotions included: 

Possible emotion choices

What we learned

The results from this informal survey on some of the web’s most viral visual content was actually quite amazing. Much of what we found mirrored the results found by Jonah Berger, but we also found some interesting additional takeaways. What we found was as follows:

1. Positive emotions were much more common than negative emotions (14 negative and 184 positive).
2. Certain specific emotions were extremely common, while others were extremely uncommon.
3. The strength of the emotional impact was a great indicator for the popularity of the content on Reddit. The top four most popular posts on Reddit also had the top four highest aggregate emotionality scores (sum of emotional strength score totals).
   
4. Interest, surprise, and amusement seemed to behave as emotional multipliers for positive emotions, and empathy seemed to act as an emotional multiplier for negative emotions. 12 of the 25 images had Amusement, Interest, and Surprise as 3 of their top emotions and all images had at least 1 of the 3 emotions (either Amusement, Interest, or Surprise).
5. Contrasting emotions seemed to be helpful in increasing emotional impact. In the cases where negative emotions were present, they seemed to directly contrast positive emotions, likely enhancing the emotionality of the image through this contrast. Additionally, empathy seems to be a common emotion found alongside popular content that evokes strong negative emotions.

Enhancing emotionality for higher virality

It’s clear that emotionally evocative content is essential in creating wide-reaching viral content, and that there are even some emotions that seem to work better than others toward this goal, but are there other ways to expand on emotionality for virality? In other words, how can emotionality be enhanced? 

Increasing emotional identification with the content

Make your content visual

On a whole, visual content is better at conveying emotionality and being understood quickly and easily. Therefore, images and video have a leg up against written form content. It is for this reason that image and video sharing dominates online. It is the reason the images and video dominate Reddit’s front page each day and the reason 40 of the top 50 posts of all time on Reddit are either images or videos. It is the reason we have all seen infographics, animated gifs, and image macros have become ubiquitous. As a general rule, visual content is simply more engaging.

Make your content interactive

Interactive content engages the viewer’s senses and attention in a more active way than simple static content. By creating an experience that your viewers must participate in, you necessarily enhance the impact. If there is an emotional angle to your interactive campaign, it can increase the emotional impact substantially. One excellent way we are seeing this happen recently is through the use of parallax treatments like these.

Make your content personalized

Customized or personalized content is, by its very nature, better at engaging viewers emotionally than non-personalized content. Emotions are more easily evoked when the user can actually SEE themselves in the content, instead of relying on empathy to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Some standout emotionally compelling, personalized, content like this, illustrates just how incredibly viral emotionally driven, personalized, visual content can be. Have you ever created something with 12 million + Facebook likes? Try emotionally-driven, visual, personalized, interactive content, and you might just be able to.

Emotional stacking with lists

If you haven’t been paying attention to Buzzfeed.com lately, you should probably start. They have mastered the art of what I like to call “Emotional Stacking.” 

Growing the viral coefficient – Beyond the emotions

While emotions generally play the largest role in determining the viral coefficient of a piece of content, there are other aspects that can contribute significantly to whether or not a that content is ultimately shared. Additional motivating factors can play a key role, specifically factors that convey some kind of social benefit or ego benefit.

The social benefits of sharing:

• “Ingroup vs. Outgroup”

• “Altruistic”

• “Self-identity/image bolstering”

Step 5: Decreasing viral cycle time

As I mentioned earlier, viral cycle time can be thought of as the period of time it takes for a viewer to share from the time they view the content. While a viral coefficient above 1 is needed for exponential viral growth, the timeline of this growth can be fast or it can be exceedingly slow. It is the viral cycle time that determines how quickly exponential growth will occur in content that has a viral coefficient above 1. It is in the best interest of the content creator to do everything they can to decrease the viral cycle time, to help achieve exponential viral growth in the shortest amount of time possible. So, what can be done to manipulate viral cycle time? To be precise, pretty much anything that can spur the sharer to consume the content faster and share the content faster. This includes, but is not limited to the following:

Step 6: The limitations of virality and the importance of audience. 

I’ve discussed generalities about the importance of emotional activation in viral content, but creating successful viral content can often be a bit more nuanced than simply creating something that will strongly engage viewers’ emotions. It is also incredibly important to do your best to make sure that your content is well suited for the audience you hope to target.

Now, if you are simply trying to create something massively viral, and you don’t really care about any connection or tie-in to your company or brand, your opportunities for topic ideas are nearly limitless. In practice, though, this isn’t often the case. The goal is usually to create viral content that in some way ties in with the offering of the company creating the content. In this case, it is essential to carefully define a target audience for your prospective content, even before coming up with ideas. The reception of the content you create within this segmented target audience is what will determine whether or not your content will become viral.

The considerations that you may want to make are multiple, and a future blog post will cover this topic in more depth, but in general, it is important to consider the following aspects of your audience in order to determine the potential reception of any viral concept you are considering creating.

1. What types of content does your target audience like to consume?
2. What specific topics tend to be discussed within this community, and specifically, what topics are held as important by this community?
3. What topics are controversial? What gets this community riled up?
4. What is the general Zeitgeist of the community you are targeting? What are their commonly held opinions on social and political topics?
5. Who are their heroes and villains?
6. Who are their niche celebrities?
7. What is their unique history? Their legends and fables?
8. What sorts of emotions typically are expressed by your target audience?

Failing to understand your audience can spell failure. If you are unable to understand them enough to know how to push their emotional buttons, and which ones to push, you will have a high likelihood of turning them off from sharing.

Step 7: Considerations for fractal virality

A fractal is the mathematical term use for a system of self-similar repeating patterns at different scales. In the context of viral marketing, it can be thought of as an apt descriptor for so called “viral expansion loops” which are created when content has functionality built into it that provides for users or viewers to extend or create new viral content based on or as a part of the original content. Generally, fractal content is user generated, either actively (the user actually does something) or passively (the user’s data is used, but they do nothing). Some examples of fractal content include:

1. Elfyourself.com
2. Fatbooth, Oldbooth, and other mobile apps
3. UGC photo or video contests like: crashthesuperbowl.com
4. Altruistic DIY concepts like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign

By giving users an opportunity to utilize their own creativity through personalization and user generated content, it is possible to create fractal sharing and massive exposure. Keep in mind that all of the emotional drivers discussed with viral content apply here as well, we’ve simply added an additional layer or step to expand virality. Some important aspects to consider when attempting to create fractal content include considering:

• How can this idea be adapted, personalized, or altered while retaining the primary message?
• How have you enabled creativity? Is the functionality conducive to ease of creation and creativity? 
• How have you encouraged users to create compelling emotional content?
• How do you plan on curating or controlling the content? Is there a potential for a negative reaction?

Conclusions

Viral and fractal content has the potential to reach and influence massive audiences, but in practice can be exceedingly difficult to create. By understanding your audience and the emotional drivers that motivate them, it is possible to increase your odds of success substantially. Through careful investigation of the elements of virality, in the future it will be possible to continue to improve the odds of success substantially. Here at Fractl, we aim to do just that. Keep an eye out for several new case studies that will help illustrate the points made here through real-life examples of emotionally driven viral and fractal content.

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Posted by Erica McGillivray

Last year at MozCon, we tried something new: community speakers. The feedback we receieved from those of you who attended was phenomal, and our four speakers were spectacular.

So this year, we’re opening up four community speaking slots again, and we can’t wait to hear from you. I know some of you have been preparing your ideas since last MozCon. Which means this year, I expect even more amazing submissions, harder choices, and to get over 150 submissions (which is what we got in 2012).

We’re looking for four people to deliver incredibly actionable tips in SEO, social media, content, marketing analytics, conversion rate optimization, and any other great inbound subject. You’ll join an already killer line-up of speakers and lots of fun.

Fabio was one of our amazing community speakers last year.

MozCon 2013 takes place July 8th-10th at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. If this past weekend was any indication of how our summer’s going to be, bring your sunglasses and flip-flops for the sunshine. We’re expecting around ~1200 people, and tickets are already 50% sold out. We’ll have all the usual goodies like Roger photos and incredible speakers and a few surprises up our sleeves.

The details about the community speaker submission process:

• Your pitch must be submitted by Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
• Please submit only one pitch. We’re looking for the best of the best.
• Topics can range the inbound marketing spectrum, so submit something you’re passionate about.
• If you’ve never spoke before or have spoken hundreds of times, we want to hear from you.
• Presentations will be 15 minutes long with an added ~5 minutes for questions.
• These sessions will be from 2:00-3:20pm on Wednesday, July 10th.
• Widescreen-format slide decks will be due one week before MozCon.
• If you already have a MozCon ticket, we will refund your ticket; and if you don’t have one, we’ll comp you one! Unfortunately, you will have to book your own hotel, flight, and transportation.
• You will be invited to attend our speakers’ dinner on Sunday, July 7th. And pre-dinner, there will be time to walk on our stage.
• You must be at MozCon in person. Sorry, no Skype, Google Hangout, or other video conferencing.
• Our community speaker selections are final. Everyone who tossed their hat in the ring will be notified via email if they were selected or not.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their community speaker ideas for MozCon 2013. We’ll be in touch very soon!

I can’t wait to see all the awesome submissions for all potential community speakers.

If you haven’t snagged your MozCon ticket yet, do it! Also check out the full line-up, minus community speakers, of MozCon speakers. It’s going to be out-of-this-world.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by bradfriedman

Hey Mozheads, Brad here! It’s a beautiful Friday here in Seattle, and I hope the day finds you well wherever you are.

We’ve got a May Mozscape index for you to check out! As always, the new data can be seen on Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This is a very special release, you guys. This is the first Mozscape index that was processed by our virtual private cloud in Virginia! This is a big part of our long-term strategy to streamline our processing for maximum freshness and value. For now, some of our indexes will be from our Elastic Compute Cloud clusters and some will be from our VPC in Virginia while we figure out how best to use our resources.

Our histogram shows that the index was crawled from the second half of March through the first half of April.

And now, the juicy details — metrics for this latest index:

• 90,875,257,743 (91 billion) URLs
• 8,514,925,232 (8.5 billion) Subdomains
• 163,482,796 (163 million) Root Domains
• 917,461,264,950 (917 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.15% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.4% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.6% are external
• Rel Canonical – 14.83% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 76 links on it
  • 65.49 internal links on average
  • 10.95 external links on average

And here are the correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.36
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.30
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments! And check out a list of our previous index updates with metrics here.

Have a great weekend, everybody, and May the 4th be with you!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by randfish

There’s a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are changing their practices and titles from “SEO” to “online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing.” Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today’s game, or are we missing the bigger picture?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from “SEO” to “inbound marketing” and what the future holds for our industry at large. 

Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a still image of the whiteboard used in this week’s video:

Video Transcription

“Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to address an elephant in the room. It’s a topic that I’ve talked about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know it’s a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org to lots of blogs and news sites. It’s:  Why is it that there’s this movement from some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices, from saying, “We do SEO,” to saying, “We do inbound marketing,” or, “We do online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing”?

I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some really good reasons that I think we’re seeing this shift happen, and I’m actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I’ve revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and I’ve become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I’m seeing this bigger picture, and I want to try to share that picture that I’m seeing with you.

The first one is I can’t argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define or have defined SEO for the last decade. That’s not really true of the 2010 to 2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late ’90s into the late 2000, the “aughts.” What I mean is there are these old-school tactics. “Oh, you’re going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done. You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don’t try to tell me that it’s more than that.”

This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who’s trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, “But wait a minute. This only works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data, domain data, and topic analysis.” Now, we have a lot more ranking factors, right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They’re definitely looking at brand signals. They’re looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are patent applications, thinking about offline data. They’re looking at social graph signals.

What’s an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I’ve got to be able to work on everything that’s marketing. That’s everything from social media to community building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the content. What am I going to do if I’m tasked with SEO, but I’m only given responsibility over these things? It’s just not going to work. In order to influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past. It’s an untenable kind of situation.

Thus, what we’d really like to do and what we’ve been working hard at as an industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding and working really hard to not have the word “SEO” be associated with scumminess and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so hard to change. It’s been established for such a long time now, and the small efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO and get marketing, it’s true.

I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you’ve felt the same pain that I’m talking about. People say, “Oh, SEO. So you’re a spammer. You manipulate things. You’re unethical. You’re breaking the search engine’s rules. What does Google think of you?”

These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it’s pretty clear to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It’s comment spam on their blogs. It’s a spammy, scummy email that’s trying to get them to sign up for something. It’s someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It’s a forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, “Oh, are you wondering why this malware happened? That’s the SEOs doing that.” That’s why all these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs.

To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I’m not innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don’t think we’re winning. That’s another reason why I think it’s really hard to do SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, “I do web marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that leads to more conversions on their site.” They’re like, “Oh, okay. I get it. Web marketing. Understood.” SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels, but one of the channels they focus on.

The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, “I’m an SEO,” your boss, your client, your management says, “Why are you meddling with our design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?” You are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can’t do great even at just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above.

By the way, we’re selling ourselves short even more than just this, because when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels, that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things that influence SEO that we’re trying to move the needle on to get better results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on search. Yet, we’re not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were responsible for it. Again, we’re selling ourselves short.

But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there’s anything that SEOs can be assured of, it’s that things will change tomorrow, that things will change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices don’t mature. I’m clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there’s massive shift or a new industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage.

I think the stage for us is deciding:  Do we want to keep committing to a brand that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too.

An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture, or something like that, and you’re talking about a thousand plus dollars an hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way, the more you can effect change and have a positive influence.

I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I’m sure there will be good comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by David Mihm

Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org. While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.

The best way to get a sense of what’s changed is to run a business search for yourself, but I’ll run through a few brief highlights here.

Faster business lookups

GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that’s the technical term used by our engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds. We’ve cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we’ll be working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client meetings.

More consistent results

Previously, GetListed’s Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect information about clients’ listings. It also made tracking Listing Score progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes varied week-to-week and month-to-month.

The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on “best guess” composite listings.

Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores, including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard. We suggest re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When you do, you’ll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your progress over time.

Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface 

When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add missing information) became muddied.

We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer–to create listings on search engines where they don’t exist, and to update information that doesn’t match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy, and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page.

Cleaner Dashboard interface

The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos (another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your listings from clickable business titles.

U.S. version only

Over the past couple of months, we’ve noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of this release, we’ve decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for 98% of all queries run in April. After we’ve had a chance to analyze our domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year.

Looking ahead

Well, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release.  Feedback, as always, is welcome.  We’ve even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at davidm@seomoz.org.

I hope I’ve laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this release from a user’s perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon!

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