Posted by Matthew Brown

Try Fresh Web Explorer

Why did we build Fresh Web Explorer?

One of the most challenging tasks as an online marketer is keeping track of all the latest blogs, forums, and news sites on the web that mention your brand or site. Many of the tools out there can be frustrating to use and don’t have the metrics, scalability, or features that I need to effectively keep track of important links and mentions. Google Alerts can be hit or miss. Topsy is terrific, but it only covers social mentions. Trackur, Ubervu, Buzzstream, and SocialMention all offer a unique set of features, but I frequently rely on a number of different tools to provide me with an instant look into mentions of the sites and brands I track.

What’s different about Fresh Web Explorer?

Fresh Web Explorer (FWE) functions a lot like Open Site Explorer, so the interface will be familiar to OSE users. However, the data is extremely recent, and rather than just show you links, we grab full text content of articles, blog posts, forum threads, user comments, and other web content. FWE doesn’t just show you links, but all term, brand, or phrase mentions as well. 

 

FWE is powered by our Freshscape Index, which is a 30 day index of 4.3 million feeds (and counting). There’s a new Freshscape index every eight hours, sortable by one week, two weeks, or 30 days of mentions. You can also sort your data by Feed Authority, our new metric created specifically for Fresh Web Explorer:

 

 

Feed Authority directly measures the importance of any feed on a scale of 1-100. It is a machine learning model that predicts the number of subscribers for a given feed and distinguishes among the many different feeds on any site. For example, it wil assign a lower score to a comment feed associated with a six-month-old blog post than the main feed associated with the blog. In this way, it is analogous to Page Authority, but applied to feeds. We currently use features extracted from crawling the feed (number of posts, post frequency, etc.) as well as Mozscape metrics to compute the score. Our data scientists are working to improve this metric, so expect to see some of the scores change as they refine the algorithm and introduce additional features.

 

Warning: We’re going to get even more nerdy about Feed Authority for a quick second. The chart below shows the distribution of Feed Authority across the Freshscape index:

Approximately 25% of the index has a Feed Authority less than 2.0, with the other 75% having higher values. The feeds with low scores are mostly stale (no longer updated), have very few or no links, or have malformed XML. A similar graph for all feeds on the internet would have the opposite shape, with 75%+ of feeds having Feed Authority less than 2.0 (we confirmed this with a random sample of feeds from our Mozscape index). We minimized the number of low-quality feeds in our index by carefully building it from a set of high-quality blog directories and a curated list of feeds.

 

Smooth Operator

Bringing it back to using FWE, there are a number of operators you can use to customize your search:

 

 

In particular, you may find yourself making extensive use of the ‘Match phrase exactly’ operator, by using double quotes around your search term or phrase. This cues Fresh Web Explorer to only return results where your phrase of terms appears on a page exactly as you searched for them in FWE, rather than returning results where the terms may appear anywhere on the page and in any order. When searching on non-branded or very popular terms, using this operator may surface a more precise set of results from FWE.

 

Export FWE data to customize your reports

If you’re inclined to mix and match this data with other sources, FWE provides you with the ability to export up to 10,000 mentions in the Freshscape index, in .csv format:

 

 

This export allows you to sort a large number of mentions by date found, Feed Authority, domain, HTML title, and URL. One of the additional fields available in the export that’s not in the FWE web interface: the feed source where FWE found the page containing the mention. This can provide useful insight into why a Feed Authority score might be low, even though the page mentioning your search is located on a strong domain.

 

We’ve put together a video walkthrough and a detailed FAQ to get you started as well as answer additional questions.

 

Getting agile with FWE

Fresh link and mention data have become critically important to online marketers. If you’re engaged in link building and outreach, having the ability to quickly sort recent mentions by source and date can make a world of difference in quick outreach to build audience for your content or brand. If you’re in the SEO trenches, you’re probably all too familiar with how freshness plays a role in Google and Bing search results. If you’ve watched the meteoric rise of sites like Buzzfeed, Business Insider, or Huffington Post, the formula to their success is pretty clear: Match content to the most recent user intent you can surface, then build links and social mentions to that content like crazy.

 

To get started, you can use FWE to engage in several high-ROI activities:

• Find recent mentions in FWE where you aren’t being linked to – On news publications and high-volume blogs, the quicker you ask the writer for a link, the better chance you have of actually getting it. It’s much harder to convince them it’s worth the effort a month later. An effective technique that increases your chances even more is to add something new to the content that increases its value or changes the narrative of the story. 
• Competitor analysis –  Where are your competitors being mentioned? Are there feeds that highlight their content frequently? FWE is a good tool to build up your outreach list.
• Content Strategy – FWE allows you to check on or keep track of a set of terms over time, and helps you get a sense for what type of content gets a lot of mentions, shares, and links. For instance, a term like “World Cup 2014”  is already drawing significant interest as we get closer to the 2014 event in Brazil. Sites like Bleacher Report and Goal are already starting to stake out their claim in the SERPs.

FWE can help you make strategic decisions on how to create and focus both new and legacy content on this type of quickly evolving user search intent. Our engineers have put in a lot of work to make the Freshscape index, and we will be using it to power additional features in the near future.

Ready to give it a spin?

Try Fresh Web Explorer

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Posted by derric

Hello, Moz community! My name is Derric Wise and I am the Art Director here at Moz. After three years here,, I have often been asked the same two questions:

1. How do you pronounce SEOmoz? (It’s not SEEmoz or SUMOZE; it’s simply pronounced “S-E-Omoz.” You can find out more background on the company’s name in one of Rand’s blog posts here.)
2. What’s the story behind your mascot, Roger?

The second question is attached to a longer of an answer, which is what this post is all about. Let me introduce you to Matthew Heilman who, as Creative Director in 2010, hatched the idea that eventually led to the creation of our beloved Roger.

Without further adieu, let’s hear it from the man himself…

 

 

 

Q: Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.

 

 

My name is Matthew Heilman (insert shameless plug) and I currently reside in the perpetually damp city of Seattle (go Sonics!). I’m currently the lead UX designer for the mobile properties over at Nordstrom, which is actually a few blocks north of where the main Moz office is. My number one goal at Nordstrom is to make our customers happy by providing them with intuitive and relevant features, with a sprinkling of fun. I guess if you really want to simplify it, you could say that I make it easy for people to buy nice pants while they’re on the move. Prior to being at Nordstrom, I was the Creative Director at the SEOmoz and was the mad scientist behind the creation of Roger. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create Roger?

 

I remember when I first came to SEOmoz; there was only a handful of people in comparison to the cornucopia of folks there now! With that said, the brand and design were also in their beginning stages. Matt Inman had created a great start and established a consistent design language for the company at the time, which was awesome because I didn’t inherit total craziness. One thing I personally thought that Moz didn’t have at the time was a visual voice or champion for the brand. We did have two things going for us, though: a recognizable logo, and a CEO who was a figurehead in the community.

 

I had sketched up some random ideas prior to creating Roger, one of which was taking Rand and turning him into a cartoon character. I ditched that direction because I felt that, as a brand, we should create a voice that wasn’t anchored by a real human and had more of a 3rd party role. When thinking of a mascot, I wanted to create something that was a little more fun and approachable. With Roger, I really wanted to create was something that would almost make you feel bad when you thought about leaving; kind of like the feeling you get when you try to leaving your house and your puppy is crying. (But seriously, don’t leave SEOmoz because if you do, then you make puppies cry.) Really what came about was a lovable-looking robot that really made you feel good about the decision you made to be a part of the SEOmoz community.

 

Q: Where did you get the name Roger?

 

Honestly, I would love to tell you that it came to me in a dream while I was on a long trek across Tibet, but that one was all Scott Willoughby. Scott was SEOmoz’s Director of Conversion and Retention Marketing during the time that I was working on Roger. He was integral about backing the idea of having a cartoon robot play a role in the brand, and he also had some really stellar ideas about what we could do. I remember brainstorming ideas at the time, and Scott’s suggestion of Roger just seemed to make sense. It really fit the whole lovable robot idea perfectly, in my opinion.

 

Q: Why a robot and not a camelopard (Google it!)?

 

Because a camelopard only has +10 stealth and is susceptible to magic attacks, and everyone knows a robot is impervious to magic attacks. Actually, a camelopard sounds pretty sweet. Maybe you guys can add a little antagonist into the mix and make it a camelopard?

 

In all reality, during the time I was kicking around ideas, the robot just seemed like a good fit with the industry. Something mechanical and a little more sci-fi was more of a natural fit. 

 

Q: What problems were you trying to solve by adding a mascot to the brand?

 

At the time, there really weren’t too many problems with brand identity that I was trying to address with Roger. My main goal was to steer SEOmoz away from what the rest of the industry was doing, which was having real life spokespeople be the identity behind the brand. At the time, we had Rand who was a figurehead in the industry, but it just seemed too familiar in comparison to what other people were doing with brand recognition. We had a real opportunity as a younger company to try something different and outside of the box.

 

I think you run into situations with real life spokespeople that are hard to get out of. Perceptions can change on a dime with real life mascots, and it’s sometimes hard to change direction, especially when the spokesperson is your CEO. With Roger, we could always pull back and try something different if it was a massive fail. I also go back to what I previously said about creating a mascot that has these lovable qualities — qualities that appeal to a broad range of people. 

 

Q: In your experience, has the mascot helped the SEOmoz brand? 

 

Most definitely. Having Roger has helped establish SEOmoz into its own sort of brand niche. The fact that we created momentum and recognition with Roger was great; we made a decision as a company to lead in the industry when it came to mascots and visual recognition. It’s tough to set yourself apart from the competition these days, whether with technology innovation or brand innovation. It’s really about seeing what the competition is doing and going into a different direction that is still relevant.

 

However, I wish it was just as easy as creating a mascot and, wah-lah, you have a recognizable brand. You almost have to tread a fine invisible line with mascots, because you can really get into a situation where you overexpose the mascot and dilute the true focus, which should be that of product innovation and customer service. I think the mascot is really secondary, or even tertiary, to good product design when it comes to visual hierarchy in the brand. A good user experience and useful features is really where the focus needs to be when it comes to the brand of the company; this is really what keeps people coming back.

 

It’s really easy for people to create a mascot and put it on everything imaginable, but you can get to a point where people just don’t want to see it anymore and it loses its impact. I would almost compare that scenario to an overplayed song like “The Macarena.” I really think SEOmoz has done a great job of not over exposing its users to Roger. Moz has really used Roger as the sort of loveable hook to get people in, but has also focused on the priority of creating great features and providing outstanding customer service.

 

---

Thanks, Matt! And there you have it, folks. That’s the backstory of Roger. Let’s all marvel at his work for a second: 

 

However, the story does not end there. Matt and I go way back. I mean WAAAY back — like all the way to second grade back. As you can see, we have always been hard at work creating things together.

 

 

When I started at SEOmoz, my first project was to expand the Roger character. I have a background in illustration, so I broke out my trusty pencil and started animating Roger in alternate poses, adding different costumes and situations, the works. To this day, I literally have piles of hand drawn Roger images and assets that we then scan and rebuild in Adobe Illustrator. Currently, we are developing new landscape scenes for Roger to live in, which we call the “Land of Moz” around the office. Ultimately, this expansion to Roger’s lifestyle helped redefine Roger to become the robot we all know and love today.

 

 

The changes made to Roger are both minute and drastic at the same time. Rather than list out each difference, I will just show you. After all, I am a visual type of person. Check it out! 

 

 

 

Roger has also recently achieved a healthy dose of anthropomorphism by adding a super simple phoneme chart so he can express emotion more effectively. For you non-designy people out there, a phoneme chart is a fancy name for a list of mouth expressions. We have really seen a difference in the reactions towards Roger after his recent redesign, as minimal as they may seem to be. Roger was huggable before, but now he is irresistible. 

 

 

Mascots like Roger help with emotional engagement with customers, and they also add authenticity and help users connect with a website on a personal level. If you can empathize with customers and keep users interested, you have created a powerful win for your brand. The fact of the matter is that SEOmoz is filled with lovable robots (which we call “employees&rdquo doing their best to provide an optimal user experience every day. This is what Matt strived to illustrate with Roger back in 2010, and what I am continuing to work towards in 2013.

 

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 derric

Hello, Moz community! My name is Derric Wise and I am the Art Director here at Moz. After three years here,, I have often been asked the same two questions:

1. How do you pronounce SEOmoz? (It’s not SEEmoz or SUMOZE; it’s simply pronounced “S-E-Omoz.” You can find out more background on the company’s name in one of Rand’s blog posts here.)
2. What’s the story behind your mascot, Roger?

The second question is attached to a longer of an answer, which is what this post is all about. Let me introduce you to Matthew Heilman who, as Creative Director in 2010, hatched the idea that eventually led to the creation of our beloved Roger.

Without further adieu, let’s hear it from the man himself…

 

 

 

Q: Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.

 

 

My name is Matthew Heilman (insert shameless plug) and I currently reside in the perpetually damp city of Seattle (go Sonics!). I’m currently the lead UX designer for the mobile properties over at Nordstrom, which is actually a few blocks north of where the main Moz office is. My number one goal at Nordstrom is to make our customers happy by providing them with intuitive and relevant features, with a sprinkling of fun. I guess if you really want to simplify it, you could say that I make it easy for people to buy nice pants while they’re on the move. Prior to being at Nordstrom, I was the Creative Director at the SEOmoz and was the mad scientist behind the creation of Roger. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create Roger?

 

I remember when I first came to SEOmoz; there was only a handful of people in comparison to the cornucopia of folks there now! With that said, the brand and design were also in their beginning stages. Matt Inman had created a great start and established a consistent design language for the company at the time, which was awesome because I didn’t inherit total craziness. One thing I personally thought that Moz didn’t have at the time was a visual voice or champion for the brand. We did have two things going for us, though: a recognizable logo, and a CEO who was a figurehead in the community.

 

I had sketched up some random ideas prior to creating Roger, one of which was taking Rand and turning him into a cartoon character. I ditched that direction because I felt that, as a brand, we should create a voice that wasn’t anchored by a real human and had more of a 3rd party role. When thinking of a mascot, I wanted to create something that was a little more fun and approachable. With Roger, I really wanted to create was something that would almost make you feel bad when you thought about leaving; kind of like the feeling you get when you try to leaving your house and your puppy is crying. (But seriously, don’t leave SEOmoz because if you do, then you make puppies cry.) Really what came about was a lovable-looking robot that really made you feel good about the decision you made to be a part of the SEOmoz community.

 

Q: Where did you get the name Roger?

 

Honestly, I would love to tell you that it came to me in a dream while I was on a long trek across Tibet, but that one was all Scott Willoughby. Scott was SEOmoz’s Director of Conversion and Retention Marketing during the time that I was working on Roger. He was integral about backing the idea of having a cartoon robot play a role in the brand, and he also had some really stellar ideas about what we could do. I remember brainstorming ideas at the time, and Scott’s suggestion of Roger just seemed to make sense. It really fit the whole lovable robot idea perfectly, in my opinion.

 

Q: Why a robot and not a camelopard (Google it!)?

 

Because a camelopard only has +10 stealth and is susceptible to magic attacks, and everyone knows a robot is impervious to magic attacks. Actually, a camelopard sounds pretty sweet. Maybe you guys can add a little antagonist into the mix and make it a camelopard?

 

In all reality, during the time I was kicking around ideas, the robot just seemed like a good fit with the industry. Something mechanical and a little more sci-fi was more of a natural fit. 

 

Q: What problems were you trying to solve by adding a mascot to the brand?

 

At the time, there really weren’t too many problems with brand identity that I was trying to address with Roger. My main goal was to steer SEOmoz away from what the rest of the industry was doing, which was having real life spokespeople be the identity behind the brand. At the time, we had Rand who was a figurehead in the industry, but it just seemed too familiar in comparison to what other people were doing with brand recognition. We had a real opportunity as a younger company to try something different and outside of the box.

 

I think you run into situations with real life spokespeople that are hard to get out of. Perceptions can change on a dime with real life mascots, and it’s sometimes hard to change direction, especially when the spokesperson is your CEO. With Roger, we could always pull back and try something different if it was a massive fail. I also go back to what I previously said about creating a mascot that has these lovable qualities — qualities that appeal to a broad range of people. 

 

Q: In your experience, has the mascot helped the SEOmoz brand? 

 

Most definitely. Having Roger has helped establish SEOmoz into its own sort of brand niche. The fact that we created momentum and recognition with Roger was great; we made a decision as a company to lead in the industry when it came to mascots and visual recognition. It’s tough to set yourself apart from the competition these days, whether with technology innovation or brand innovation. It’s really about seeing what the competition is doing and going into a different direction that is still relevant.

 

However, I wish it was just as easy as creating a mascot and, wah-lah, you have a recognizable brand. You almost have to tread a fine invisible line with mascots, because you can really get into a situation where you overexpose the mascot and dilute the true focus, which should be that of product innovation and customer service. I think the mascot is really secondary, or even tertiary, to good product design when it comes to visual hierarchy in the brand. A good user experience and useful features is really where the focus needs to be when it comes to the brand of the company; this is really what keeps people coming back.

 

It’s really easy for people to create a mascot and put it on everything imaginable, but you can get to a point where people just don’t want to see it anymore and it loses its impact. I would almost compare that scenario to an overplayed song like “The Macarena.” I really think SEOmoz has done a great job of not over exposing its users to Roger. Moz has really used Roger as the sort of loveable hook to get people in, but has also focused on the priority of creating great features and providing outstanding customer service.

 

---

Thanks, Matt! And there you have it, folks. That’s the backstory of Roger. Let’s all marvel at his work for a second: 

 

However, the story does not end there. Matt and I go way back. I mean WAAAY back — like all the way to second grade back. As you can see, we have always been hard at work creating things together.

 

 

When I started at SEOmoz, my first project was to expand the Roger character. I have a background in illustration, so I broke out my trusty pencil and started animating Roger in alternate poses, adding different costumes and situations, the works. To this day, I literally have piles of hand drawn Roger images and assets that we then scan and rebuild in Adobe Illustrator. Currently, we are developing new landscape scenes for Roger to live in, which we call the “Land of Moz” around the office. Ultimately, this expansion to Roger’s lifestyle helped redefine Roger to become the robot we all know and love today.

 

 

The changes made to Roger are both minute and drastic at the same time. Rather than list out each difference, I will just show you. After all, I am a visual type of person. Check it out! 

 

 

 

Roger has also recently achieved a healthy dose of anthropomorphism by adding a super simple phoneme chart so he can express emotion more effectively. For you non-designy people out there, a phoneme chart is a fancy name for a list of mouth expressions. We have really seen a difference in the reactions towards Roger after his recent redesign, as minimal as they may seem to be. Roger was huggable before, but now he is irresistible. 

 

 

Mascots like Roger help with emotional engagement with customers, and they also add authenticity and help users connect with a website on a personal level. If you can empathize with customers and keep users interested, you have created a powerful win for your brand. The fact of the matter is that SEOmoz is filled with lovable robots (which we call “employees&rdquo doing their best to provide an optimal user experience every day. This is what Matt strived to illustrate with Roger back in 2010, and what I am continuing to work towards in 2013.

 

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 JoannaLord

We all know analytics are important. As marketers, we spend a great deal of time in the data. We all, hopefully, consider ourselves part analyst in many ways. At the foundation of a good marketing team, there is an accessible analytics platform that is set up to provide actionable insights. We should always feel that the data is just a log in away. We should feel we have the data to make great recommendations, troubleshoot issues, and forecast our efforts accurately. We should all feel totally in control of our analytics, and use them daily.

But then unicorns jump out of pink clouds and fly around our heads, because that is simply not the case. Ever.

Maybe a handful of you work on teams that are doing all they can do as it relates to analytics. Maybe some of you have even staffed your team with a handful of full-time analysts. More likely, you may all be trying to use data in your jobs, but not doing it as thoroughly or as effectively as you wish you were.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the different types of analytics and common places to start with them. I believe the number one reason marketing teams aren’t as data-driven as they should be is because data is intimidating. However, knowledge trumps intimidation. The more you know, the more comfortable you will be to put on that analyst hat. And analyst hats are cool. So let’s jump in.

What are the different types of analytics?

The goal of all data analytics is to leave us more educated than before so we can perform better in the future. Sounds simple, right? Well, not really. A common misconception among marketers is that all analysis is equal, which isn’t exactly the truth. There are actually three types of analytics; predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive. Most marketers spend the majority, if not all, of their time on only one of them: descriptive. As you can imagine, that leaves a lot of awesome data and innovation on the table.

Let’s run through the three and talk through the differences…

Descriptive analytics:

Descriptive analytics is when we data mine our historical performance for insights. Often, we are just looking to get context or tell a story with the data. This is most certainly at the heart of what most marketers do on a daily basis, particularly in their web analytics. We look at how we are doing, and we try to understand what is happening and how that is affecting everything else.

Typical questions include: “How did that campaign do?” “What sort of performance did we see last quarter?” “How did that site’s down time affect other performance KPIs?”

Predictive analytics: 

Predictive analytics takes that one step further. It’s less about the questions, and more about the suggestions. It involves looking at your historical data, and coming up with predictions on what to expect next. This is most readily used in our industry when we try to predict how next month will perform based on this month’s performance (month over month predictions or MoM). While it seems like an obvious next step for analysis, it’s amazing to me just how many marketers stop at descriptive, and fail to push into this arena of predictive analytics. Often, it’s because this involves predictive modeling which can, again, be very intimidating.

Typical statements include: “Based on the last few months of data and our consistent growth, we can expect to increase another 25%,” or, “Knowing our seasonal drop trend, we can expect to slow down by 10% in the next 6 weeks.”

Prescriptive analytics:

This is where things can get fun. Prescriptive analytics takes forecasting and predictions a step further. With prescriptive analytics, you automatically mine data sets, and apply business rules or machine learning so you can make predictions faster and subsequently prescribe a next move. Marketers tend not to think of this “as their responsibility.” That is for someone else to think about and solve. I think that is a super dangerous mindset, given we are on the hook for hitting the company’s business KPIs. Prescriptive analytics can be a very powerful catalyst for success at a company. 

Typical questions include: “What if we could predict when customers leave us before they do, what could we surface prior to that to change their minds?” “What if we can predict when they are ripe for a second purchase and suggest it along side other products?” “What if we can predict what they would be most likely to share with a friend, how would we surface that?”

So, are you doing enough?

I ask this because somewhere along the way, marketers began to believe that descriptive analytics was our job, and “that other stuff” was for someone else to figure out. At SEOmoz, we are working hard to have each team working on all three types of data analysis in a variety of capacities. It’s not easy. There is a stereotype out there that you have to break through. Data can be fun. It can be accessible, and it can be part of everyone’s job. In fact, it really should be.

Imagine this for a second: just think about how much could get done if every team felt empower to tell a story with the data, make predictions off of it, and then brainstormed ways to operationalize that data to prescribe next steps for the biggest gains.

That is what being an analyst means and I believe we are all becoming more of an analyst as this industry continues to evolve. The platforms out there make it easier than ever, and the competition is more intense then ever. Why not be part of something more than just telling a story with the data? Why not suggest the next move? Why not create crazy ways to use the data? I think it’s time we all put our analyst hat back on and had a little fun with it.

Hopefully, breaking down the types of analytics above is a great reminder that there is more than just descriptive analytics. At the very least, you can share with your team to inspire them to do more with the data in front of them. Best of luck to you fellow data lovers!

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 willcritchlow

I want to tell you a story about one of our favourite sessions – Let’s Get Real – where we have all our speakers on stage at once. In this post, I’m going to:

• Highlight some of the incredible tips and tricks our speakers gave away at our conferences at the end of last year.
• Give away free HD videos of Let’s Get Real from the conferences at the end of 2012 [skip to the video giveaway].
• Share all the details of our upcoming conferences in London and Boston, along with the video deal we have running for SEOmoz PRO members [skip to the conference details].

Some of the earliest conferences I travelled to the US to attend were SMX West and Advanced. Back then, Danny used to have a session called Give it Up that was supposed to be more like the kind of tips, tricks and stories you would normally only hear at the bar (in exchange for delegates promising not to share the stories publicly for a month). Although the formatting is a bit broken, you can get a sense of the kind of topics covered in this Marketing Pilgrim write-up from 2007. I particularly like Matt Cutts’ story:

“Alright, I’ll tell you about my favorite spammer of 06 … When you buy a domain, you own it for a year. Usually you get hosting, or park the domain … You set name server to “lamedelegation.org.” Millions of domains are marked this way. But some are marked “lame-delegation.org” with a hyphen … This spammer … registered lame-delegation.org.”

I really liked the personal, conversational tone of the sessions and the glimpse behind the curtain. When we started running conferences, we used to end with similar sessions.

Over the years, we felt that the tips being shared weren’t helping our delegates improve their marketing skills (Danny has done some similar soul-searching). They were still fun (and often funny), but they were increasingly unuseful; not something you could go back to the office and implement.

As a result, we introduced the let’s get real panel where we invite all of our speakers on stage for a rapid-fire round of tips and ideas with the crucial difference: all of the tips should be the kind of thing delegate can go back to the office and use for themselves or their clients.

To give you an idea of the difference between a regular talk and let’s get real, check out what Wil looks like on stage giving a formal presentation:

…and what he looks like rocking at let’s get real:

Anyway, in the run-up to our next set of conferences (in March in London and May in Boston) I thought I’d go back to last year’s tips and share the most useful with all of you. Here we go!

Let’s get real

These tips come from our most recent SearchLove conferences in London and Boston. If you’d like to watch them for yourselves, I’m giving the entire videos away for free at the end of this post. The credit for the tips goes to the individual speakers – though I’ve generally rephrased the tips in my own words – I’ve credited them as I go along:

Social Media

Beware management tools for Facebook — Jen Lopez

If you routinely use tools like Hootsuite for managing your social presence between multiple team members and across multiple platforms, beware of the potential effect on the visibility of your Facebook posts. There are two big things to be aware of:

• Posts made via external applications suffer in Edgerank terms and so have lower “natural” visibility.
• If you are unlucky enough to post at a similar time to others using the same application, the Facebook timeline will often group posts together under “updates from Hootsuite.”

It’s an ongoing challenge to manage multiple contributors across multiple platforms and the tools are a huge part of making that possible but it’s worth experimenting to see how your reach is affected.

Check out G+ ripples to find influencers — Jen Lopez

If you do a keyword search in Google+, the default ordering of results is heavily skewed towards heavily-shared content. By drilling into the ripples, you can find the influencers who are sharing content in any given space and who are having a particular influence on which pieces of content get widely shared.

Craig wrote an article on the power of building your filter bubble influence, and Jen’s tip is a great place to get started working out who you need to influence.

Technical SEO

Get a sample of googlebot visits in log file format — Richard Baxter

It can be tempting to spend all our time in graphical tools, but Richard pointed out one specific use-case that has brought old-school techniques back to prominence for him. As googlebot gets better at interpreting JavaScript and attempts to crawl more and more AJAX content, it also increasingly makes mistakes. He and his team saw a major publisher having huge numbers of non-existent URLs requested based on googlebot misidentifying slugs in the HTML as URLs [we’ve seen this as well] – and this led to him recommending that we get our client dev teams to provide us with samples of googlebot log file data.

Split test your SEO — Mat Clayton

Mat is in the luxurious position of having complete control and authority over a massive site that gets loads of search visits, but nevertheless, I thought his stories were interesting and useful even if you’re running smaller sites. He talked about applying the principles of conversion rate optimisation to SEO. Take user profile pages for example (they have millions of them over at mixcloud): split them into two buckets (A and B) and make a set of changes to B designed to improve their search visibility. Treat visitors from search as “conversions” in a CRO sense and test to see if A or B is statistically better.

Create site speed videos — Annie Cushing

A short-but-sweet tip from Annie – check out webpagetest for creating videos of your website loading alongside those of your top competitors. If you have a speed problem, this is one of the most powerful tools for getting management on-side with the (often considerable) investment needed to achieve significant speed increases.

Clean your sitemap with Screaming Frog — Annie Cushing

Remember Duane Forrester talking about how clean your sitemap should be? Annie suggests a simple way of checking (on small-to-medium-sized sites). Use the list mode of Screaming Frog to run through your XML sitemap and check the status code of the pages it contains.

CRO – Conversion rate optimisation

What nearly stopped you buying? — Stephen Pavlovich

Stephen described a simple set of three questions they include on the confirmation page at his experience days startup:

• What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us today?
• How could we make our website better?
• Is there anything else you want to say?

It’s important, he says, to make the answers free-form text areas. The freedom to write what they want is a critical part of the process of getting useful feedback. The idea then is that you can check in regularly and take actions to fix common issues.

Rank for your [<brand> voucher code] search — Dave Peiris

Dave highlighted the example of Argos (a UK high-street retailer) who have a good example of an on-site page targeted to Argos voucher codes (in the US, I think “coupon” or “coupon codes” would be a more common search term). People are increasingly interrupting the checkout process to go and search for discount codes and the search results are typically terrible. If they fail to find anything relevant to your brand, they could easily be diverted to a competitor. By bringing them back to your own site, you reduce the drop-off of your checkout process.

Give your FAQ and T&C pages some love — Hannah Smith

Hannah pointed out how close to converting someone is when they check out your FAQ or T&C pages. When was the last time you read those kinds of page for fun? And yet, so many of us make those pages impenetrable to humans, give them tiny font, even make the navigation non-standard so that it’s hard to get back to the money pages. Don’t do that, says Hannah, quite rightly. (While we’re talking about it, I love the 500px terms and conditions – lawyer and human friendly.)

Email marketing

Encourage people to reply to your email marketing — Patrick McKenzie

Not everyone knew Patrick at our conference – he’s the second-from-top-ranked user on Hacker News under the username patio11. Although his presentation covered a wide range of tips for conversion improvement, it was his email tips that stuck with me and changed our campaigns – literally as soon as I got back to the office.

His top tip was to encourage people to reply to your email marketing. There’s a temptation to think that this is a bad thing and some companies go so far as to send email marketing from a no-reply@ address. By simply ending with the line “Hit reply if you have any questions – I read them all”, you can increase engagement, sell more, get instant feedback and generally get closer to your community. I can vouch for this; we’ve been adding this to most of our emails since Patrick gave away this tip, and I can’t count the number of positive reactions it’s caused.

It’s closely related to his second tip: to give customer services a name and a face. He relates the story of a specific customer services rep who has received three marriage proposals in the last year. No one’s gone that far for me, but they have certainly seemed to appreciate the ability to chat 1:1.

Facebook retargeting with “dirty” lists — me

Everyone who’s been kicking around for a while has a bunch of email addresses they can’t use. The better you are at observing best practices for email list growth, the more you will find yourself with lists of email addresses for people who haven’t opted in to hear from you.

With Facebook retargeting, you can put those email addresses to good use. Use your list of “interested but not opted-in” to build your advertising presence.

Start your subject lines with “RE:” — Paul Madden

Paul’s tip overlapped email marketing and outreach with a suggestion to test different beginnings for your subject lines. In particular, “RE:” can garner much higher open rates by playing on the appearance of an ongoing conversation.

Send your competitors’ email marketing to Evernote — Stephen Pavlovich

Stephen has talked before about the power of Evernote for saving and browsing a swipe file. Since it offers the ability to add notes by email, he recommends subscribing to competitors’ email lists and using gmail filters to direct their emails into your Evernote account. Do this well in advance of needing it of course, and then when a particularly significant time of year is approaching (Valentine’s day for a flower retailer for example), you have a ready-made swipe file of all the things your competitors did this time last year.

Online advertising

Swap retargeting pixels — me

When you have close partnerships with other companies whose audiences’ interests overlap closely with those of your customers and clients, you can quickly grow your retargeting pool by including your pixel on their site. Add them into their own group so that you can run dedicated advertising to draw them into your own site and content.

Combine Facebook demographic targeting and retargeting — Guy Levine

The demographic targeting options for Facebook advertising are well known. By running tightly-targeted adverts driving visitors to your own landing pages, you can cookie those visitors with dedicated retargeting pixels that group them into buckets of people with similar interests. This gives you a powerful weapon for future content marketing (particularly at the agency level where having this kind of retargeting pool can be reused across multiple clients).

Drive reviews with retargeting — Guy Levine

Don’t think only of retargeting being for driving conversions; it can be useful post-conversion, as well. Guy advocated adding a retargeting pixel to your confirmation page so that you have a bucket of people who have bought from you. What should you do with this information? One example use-case Guy mentioned was to ask for reviews of the product purchased to drive rich content on your site.

Better content

Use HARO to solicit content input — Wil Reynolds

You’re all familiar with Help A Reporter Out (HARO), right? Realising that the content his clients are producing is often journalistic, Wil realised that they could be the reporter as well as the user of HARO. He’s had success with soliciting content input from small business owners via HARO – especially photo / image-based content for inclusion in rich posts.

Screencast your interactive infographics — Lexi Mills

As the technology underpinning our creative work has become more modern, we occasionally trip up against news rooms stuck using outdated operating systems and browsers. In these cases, they sometimes can’t access fancy animated graphics, etc. Lexi recommended including a short screencast in your journalist pitches to make it easier to see on any platform.

Management

Individual contributor tracks — Rand Fishkin

Rand decided to cover some areas that are closer to the things that have been taking up his personal time recently, particularly on the management front. One of the things that he talked about was also something he has written about in the context of wider team structure; namely, the need for strong career opportunities in your company for “individual contributors.” He pointed out the need for there always to be progression opportunities for your best people other than forcing them into management if that isn’t their goal.

Reach out to your employees’ heroes — Rand Fishkin

Rand used the example of Avinash as being someone that many of his team look up to. Rand’s relationship with Avinash means that he has a chance of getting him to share great things written by the SEOmoz team. By doing this with great content and in a transparent way (“it would mean the world to X to hear that you had read their stuff&rdquo , he cements both relationships.

Some general marketing/web tips

Build your personal brand by owning a topic — Justin Briggs

Justin pointed out that, for the bigger conferences, if you pitch a session topic and that topic is chosen to be a panel, you are 99% certain to get asked to be involved. So pitch great topics with credibility. He ran through a personal example – from writing an epic blog post and using it to pitch a competitor analysis panel at a major show. If you don’t know Justin’s background, you should read his personal post first time, every time, that explains just what an incredible journey his has been. It’ll definitely make you think you can up your own game.

Run wpscan — Paul Madden

In a lightning-quick tip, Paul recommended that if you run a WordPress site, you should run WPScan against your own site to check for any vulnerabilities. With the increase in hacking for SEO alongside exploits generally for all kinds of other reasons, it’s going to be increasingly important to lock down your stuff.

Take screenshots of your competitors every day — Mat Clayton

Mat and his team built a simple script to take a screenshot of the main pages of their competitors every day. He told a story about how they actually found it easier than their competitors to know which changes were working for them. I recommend reading about webkit2png and PhantomJS if you want to try this out for yourself.

Put your best content on your about page — Mark Johnstone

As we all get better at making “big content” that is closely on-brand rather than just classic “internet bait” (something I know Mark and his team have been working on a lot recently), it makes more and more sense to integrate that great content into your normal website. In particular, try putting your top-performing content on your about page for two reasons: you drive people to your about page where they learn about your company, and potential clients wanting to learn more about your company get treated to your absolute best content.

Link building and PR

Turn your link developers into content producers — Lisa Myers

Lisa described the positive results they have seen from having link developers build out rich online profiles, with posts they’ve written, authorship information, photos, and biographical information. Outreach works so much better when it comes from people who are (and seem) real.

Build hack day projects on APIs and tell the API owners — Rob Ousbey

Rob described a hackday project he built called Get Out Call. Based on the Twilio API, it is designed to let you send a text scheduling a call to your cell phone to get you out of sticky situations. The power of the API means that this was phenomenally easy to hack together but a big part of the PR value comes from the fact that it is built on a service provided by a hot startup. By letting them know that he had built it, he got their PR team to hook him (and Distilled) up with coverage.

Video marketing

Sign up for YouTube advertising — Phil Nottingham

If you do any Google Display Network video advertising, you get to include overlay links on your YouTube videos directing people to your own website. If you have an active YouTube channel, you should sign up and spend a small amount before pausing your campaign; even after you have paused, you can continue to have a clickable area on your YouTube videos. You can see this in action on the Distilled YouTube channel where we have a DistilledU video that we used to run advertising for. Even now that we’ve stopped, there is still a clickable link to the Distilled website.

Local businesses

Leave useful comments on attractions in your local area — David Mihm

David expanded on a tip Will Scott gives for businesses interacting on Facebook: where you can interact as a page (read: business) instead of as a person. Will talks about leaving useful comments on the stories of the local newspaper or other local entities. David expanded this tip to Google+. In the same way as with Facebook, an admin of a business page can choose to browse Google+ as that business. That means you can leave reviews as a business. This is even more useful than commenting on Facebook because it is less transient. Not only are there fewer reviews than comments, but they are on static pages and the most helpful reviews tend to rank towards the top all the time. The example he gave was that if you are a hotelier in Edinburgh, and you do a search for Edinburgh, you see Edinburgh Castle as one of the top places listed. By leaving a comment along the lines of “the top 5 things my guests love about the castle,” you gain permanent mind share on the most prominent points of interest in your town.

Giving away the videos

We record all the sessions at our conferences and make them available to buy (as well as bundling them with DistilledU subscriptions). Although I’ve included many of the tips from the let’s get real sessions above, I wanted to give you all the chance to see the whole sessions; I left out a few juicy tips for the interested reader to find and I think it’s always great to watch the dynamic of people on stage.

So, I’m giving you all access to the videos of both London and Boston absolutely free.

The way our video hosting is set up means that the only way I can get you access is by giving you 100% discount codes to “buy” them on our store. Just a heads-up:

• (Free) registration is required on our site
• You will be presented with a credit card form – but if you enter the code MOZREAL2013 you won’t be charged anything, and you won’t have to enter any credit card information

Incidentally, I’ve added full transcripts to both videos on our site thanks to SpeechPad.

London Let’s Get Real

Get London Let’s Get Real 2012 for free by registering for a free account and entering MOZREAL2013 at checkout.

Boston Let’s Get Real

Similarly, get Boston’s Let’s Get Real 2012 by registering for a free account and entering MOZREAL2013 at checkout.

Get tickets to see us live in London or Boston

At this point, I’m obviously hoping that you are all so excited about the great content getting shared at these conferences that you simply can’t wait to come to one.

Luckily, we have two conferences coming up (again, in London and Boston), and SEOmoz PRO members can use a PRO perk to get free videos added to any ticket purchases (see the bottom of that page).

London LinkLove, 15th March 2013

Check out the schedule and the speaker line-up and book your place here.

Boston SearchLove, 20th & 21st May 2013

Check out the speaker line-up (the exact schedule will be announced soon) and book your place here.

Interested in the west coast?

• First, don’t forget that Mozcon is coming up soon (I’m speaking!).
• We are also hoping to bring SearchLove to the West Coast – you can register your interest here.

Just in case there’s any lingering doubt in your mind, I’ll leave you with a party photo 🙂

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