seo

Posted by bridget.randolph

Kristina Kledzik recently wrote a post here on the SEOmoz blog about responsive design and why it’s often the best option when creating a mobile-friendly online experience. She discussed its advantages in dealing with usability issues, duplicate content, mobile search rankings, and link building. Google recommends using a responsive website design where this makes sense from a user perspective, and Bing encourages a “one URL per content item” approach.

Kristina makes a compelling case for responsive design. However, responsive sites can be tricky to develop, especially if the original desktop version has lots of content and/or navigation options. If you have a business or a client whose site has hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages, it may be difficult to redesign the entire site with a responsive design. A separate mobile site, however, can start with fewer pages, and you can add more as you have time. For some businesses, responsive design is simply not the best option because their mobile visitors’ needs are so different from desktop users, and thus require drastically different content. So we can’t always rely on the advice that responsive design is the preferred solution.

Aleyda Solis recently created this flowchart to illustrate the decision-making process for choosing a mobile-friendly option. Below, I’ve highlighted the “separate URL versions” option, which Aleyda recommends for when ‘you cannot implement’ a single URL/responsive design.

If your site (or your client’s) falls in this “separate URL versions” category, you’re in good company. Among the UK’s top 20 retailers, only 14 have mobile-friendly sites, and 13 of them have separate mobile sites. The pattern is similar in the US, with MongooseMetrics reporting that 73% of websites ranked in the Quantcast Top 100,000 sites used URL redirects to a mobile specific URL.

Here are a few examples of major retailers’ different approaches to mobile:

Apple doesn’t have any type of mobile site; Ebay uses a separate URL mobile site; Currys uses a responsive design.

The good news is that mobile sites, when done correctly, are certainly able to handle these same issues of usability, duplicate content, mobile search ranking, and link building.

So, how do you optimize a mobile site to work as well as implementing a responsive design? You must ask yourself a few questions before reaching your final goal.

Information Architecture

When you’re just starting out, the first thing you need to think about is information architecture. One benefit of a mobile site (over a purely responsive design) is that you can provide the user with a drastically different experience from the desktop version. First, you need to ask some questions:

1. Does your mobile site reflect mobile users’ intent?

When structuring a mobile site, one of the first things to ask is whether mobile visitors are interacting with your site differently than desktop users. If so, your mobile site design needs to reflect this.

If you’re not sure how your users are interacting with your site, have a look at your analytics and segment out the mobile traffic. Google Analytics already has “advanced segments” for mobile and tablet traffic. The mobile segment includes traffic from tablets, though, so you may need to create a custom segment in order to view only non-tablet mobile traffic.

This can be slightly tricky, as you’ll need to use a regular expression (‘RegEx&rsquo . The setup I’m using is:

• Name: ‘Mobile – no tablets
• Include: ‘Mobile (Including Tablet)’ containing ‘Yes’ AND
• Exclude: ‘Screen Resolution’ Matching RegExp (1\d|[7-9])\d\d+x.*

What this regular expression means is that this custom segment should include traffic from mobile devices but exclude traffic from devices with a screen resolution of 700+ by anything. You may decide to tweak the RegEx depending on how large (or small) a device you want to include. (Some of the larger smartphones also fall in this range, but then again, maybe these should be seeing the desktop version, as well.)

Once you have the data, focus on landing pages (are people entering your site in the right place?), conversion rate, and where people leave the conversion funnel (where are they getting stuck?); bounce rate (are people not finding what they’re looking for?); and, if possible, site search and organic search keywords (what are people looking for to begin with?). If you have analytics set up for your mobile site, you should use that data in order to see which mobile site pages are performing above or below average. For a detailed overview of what to look for, see Section 3.1: Your Mobile Users in this great article by Aleyda Solis.

2. Have you designed for the user?

Once you understand your users’ goals, you should design your site to reflect the most common reasons for visiting the site on a mobile device. An obvious example of this is using a mobile phone to find a store location near you. This feature might be less prominent on the desktop site, but for a mobile user, it should be very easy to find on the homepage.

You can also take advantage of mobile-specific features to improve the user experience. Using the same example, you could offer the option of store lookup by postcode, but also by geolocation (“use current location”). When the “nearest store” results come up, include a phone number that is click-to-call.

(Screenshots from m.primelocation.com)

3. What about tablet users?

The current recommendation from Google is to serve tablets the desktop site, rather than the mobile site. This is because user browsing patterns and screen size on a regular-sized tablet like the iPad more closely resemble desktop browsing than smartphone browsing. Also, a site that looks great on a small smartphone browser will appear too big and annoyingly grainy on the much larger tablet screen. Be sure to test the touch screen capabilities of your desktop site.

An exception to the current guideline would be if you want to provide a tablet-specific online experience, in which case you might decide to use a third subdomain (t.domain.com). As tablet sizes become more varied, this guidance may change.

Let’s check out some examples of tablet-specific domains:

Example one: Colbert Nation is the official site for Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

Example two: Mail Tribune is a news publisher.

It’s important to make sure your mobile visitors are being served the correct version of your website. My best advice is to use redirects based on user agent. If you’re not redirecting based on user agent, you should set up redirects based on user agent detection, so that when someone visits the desktop site on a mobile, they are redirected to the mobile version. If possible, use server-side redirects (301s or 302s) rather than Javascript redirects; JS causes a lag in the load time (because the page has to load and then parse the JS), and a page with a Javascript redirect is less likely to be cached. Also, make sure that if someone on a desktop PC clicks a mobile link, they will be redirected to the desktop version.

A few quick tips for handling redirects to mobile site:

• Google’s most recent guidance states that either a 301 or 302 may be used.
• When using user agent detection, be careful of cloaking.
• Don’t redirect all desktop pages to the mobile homepage; instead, use a mobile page which is relevant to the original. If you don’t have a relevant mobile page, consider creating a page which explains this and offers the option to view the desktop version of the desired page and/or alternate pages on the mobile site.
• Be sure to include a link to “view desktop version” on your mobile site (and vice versa). Use cookies to ensure that if a user clicks on this option the user agent detection will be overridden and they will not be redirected again (unless they choose to switch back via the “view mobile version” option).
• Try to use ‘mirrored’ URL structures (so that www.domain.com/hello redirects to m.domain.com/hello, not m.domain.com/xi3l3kxd. This may not be possible, however, if there’s not a one-to-one relationship between desktop and mobile pages.
• For more information on mobile site redirects, see Cindy Krum’s article on ‘generating mobile redirects properly.
• To avoid the appearance of duplicate content, you should use a special mobile rel=’canonical’ tag. This will be covered in more detail later.

Google Analytics

Once you’re happy with the structure of your site, you need to be able to track its usage. Jeff Tirey at Mongoose Metrics recently wrote about their fantastic study which found that on 37% of websites that are a) using Google Analytics, and b) also have separate mobile versions of their site, the mobile version is not being tracked! This is craziness. And it’s simple to fix.

1. Is your tracking code implemented properly?

If you simply haven’t added the tracking code to your mobile site, go do it now. If you aren’t sure whether to use the special non-Javascript version, keep in mind that you should be able to ignore the special “tracking a mobile site” option. Instead, you should use the same Javascript code that you use on your desktop site.

The (rare) exception to this would be if you have a disproportionately high amount of traffic from feature phone (non-smartphone) users that you need to track. Feature phones don’t support Javascript, so the normal tracking code can’t track these visits. However, this is an unlikely situation, as most websites don’t see much traffic from these types of phones. If you are worried about it, you can check the site’s server logs for visits from feature phone user agents.

2. Is your mobile site data being tracked through your primary domain?

You should track your mobile site on the same web property (i.e., using the same UA-XXXXX-Y account number) as your desktop site. This requires a simple tweak in the code on both versions in order to indicate to GA that your m.domain.com site is a subdomain of your main site. You should also set up a special profile exclusively for traffic to m.domain.com. To learn more, check out these tips from Google:

• How to set up crossdomain tracking
• How to set up a new profile

Technical SEO

1. Do you have a mobile XML sitemap?

Even if you have a mobile HTML sitemap, it is best practice to create an XML sitemap for your mobile site, and submit it to Google and Bing. To learn more about how to create a mobile sitemap, check out this these instructions from the Google Webmaster Tools blog.

2. How will Google know it’s a mobile site and not duplicate content?

To make sure Google know’s your mobile site is a separate entity from your main site, it’s best to implement the special mobile rel=canonical tag. In order to indicate to Google that your mobile site isn’t just duplicate content, you can use a special version of the rel=canonical tag. On the desktop page, add the rel=alternate tag:

< <link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”http://m.example.com/page-1″ >

This tag will point to the mobile version.

On the mobile page, add the rel=canonical tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/page-1″ >

This tag will point to the desktop version. Simple as that!

3. Make sure you’re not blocking the ‘Smartphone-Googlebot’ from your desktop version in robots.txt, and don’t block regular Googlebot from the mobile version.

Bing is a bit more ambiguous in their advice (from March 2012):

“Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices), which you can opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools) or not.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Since the guidance is unclear, I would recommend the less drastic approach. My advice is to allow Bing to crawl your mobile and desktop sites. You can opt to follow my recommendation…or not.

On-page Optimization

1. Are your meta tags mobile-friendly?

Since mobile screens are smaller, there are fewer characters displayed in the SERPs. To adapt to the smaller screen size, it’s important that your meta tags be formatted in a mobile-friendly style.  

For the best results, your title tags should be kept within 40-60 characters. Similarly, meta descriptions should be kept within 90 characters.

2. Are you targeting mobile-friendly keywords?

It’s becoming increasingly important to do your keyword research specifically for mobile traffic. Mobile visitors will likely be looking for different results than desktop visitors, so you must lay the groundwork properly.

Optimizing the content on your mobile site for mobile keywords is also a great way to rank highly in the mobile SERPs (this may or may not be necessary, depending on whether they’re different from your desktop site).

3. Is your site load time too slow?

The goal for your site load time should be around 2-3 seconds. After waiting five seconds for a page to load, 74% of mobile users bounce.

You can check your page load time in Google Analytics. Use your mobile site profile (often the desktop load time is vastly different, which will mess up the averages). If you don’t yet have the data in a separate mobile site profile, you can also check this using your custom segment for non-tablet mobile devices.

Another way to increase you site load speed is to compress large images. Be sure to check other on-page elements, such as Javascript and videos, with a mobile emulator like Google’s Gomometer. Remember that certain formats, such as Flash, aren’t displayed on most mobile phones, so be conginzant of what works and what doesnt.  Also, remember to be careful with Javascript  in order to use the correct approach for your design.

Extras 

I’ve thrown in a few extra pieces of advice for those of you who made it this far. Keep on reading!

1. Are you missing out on easy eCommerce wins (if applicable)?

To keep your conversion rate optimization on track, here are a few points to consider:

• Ensure the checkout/shopping baskets on your site sync across all platforms.
• Implement larger on-site buttons so that visitors don’t have trouble clicking the correct one on their device.
• Feature a “find-a-store” option.
• Use click-to-call for any phone numbers listed on your site.
• Ensure an easy, ideally 1-click checkout for customers to complete their orders.

2. Where appropriate, are you using structured data markup?

Where it makes sense, use appropriate markup on your desktop and mobile sites. This should allow rich snippets to appear in mobile SERPs.

3. Is your mobile site optimised for local search?

Approximately 40% of mobile search is local. There are two big ways to take advantage of this fact:

• Make use of geo-positioning features, such as the HTML5 Geolocation API.
• Optimize your mobile strategy for Local Search. This also ties in with using structured data (as above).

4. Is your video content optimised for mobile viewing?

Video is one of the most common things people do on their mobile devices. To make the process as easy as possible, consider the following:

• Don’t use Flash for embedded video content; use HTML5.
• Check out these tips on optimizing video for mobile.

Well there you have it, folks! Hopefully this list will come in handy for those who want to optimize a mobile site.

Did you find this information helpful? What kinds of experiences have you had in this area? What other tips and tools would you add to this list? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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 matt @ highonseo

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.

(This post is aimed at business owners and new Moz users studying search engine optimization, not full-time, experienced SEOs. This is an in-depth answer to a frequently asked question in the Q&A forums. If you are a full-time SEO, this is one post you can easily skip.)

Regular readers of the SEOMoz Q&A forum will likely notice that the “general” SEO questions come up again and again as new users struggle with the same questions we have all asked at some point.

• “What am I doing wrong on this page?”
• “How can I improve my SEO?”
• “What/where can I do link building?”
• “Subdomains or Subfolders?”

And the one we will address here:

“Why is example.com outranking me for X and Y keyword, even though…?”

This question has been posted in various forms many times in various forms lately on Q&A. Here are a few:

• http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitor-out-ranks-my-site
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-this-website-be-ranking-so-well
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-would-a-site-with-virtually-no-external-links-and-low-authority-rank-very-high
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-this-site-ranking-better-than-me

Non-SEOs, mostly small business owners, come to SEOMoz to learn a bit about SEO and hopefully improve their site. You learn about Domain Authority and Page Authority and work hard to improve your MozTrust and MozRank. Those metrics are readily apparent and easy to track with the SEOMoz trial.

So you sign up for the trial, run your brand new SERP overlay tool and see this:

The Keyword Difficulty score for “credit card debt” here in Australia is 53, which is rated “highly competitive.” Is debtrescue’s very high ranking an aberration? Maybe this keyword is an anomaly and other sites do not “make sense” based on metrics, either. But that is not the case. In fact, this ranking (debtrescue is 2^nd on my search, 4^th by the Keyword Tool’s search) has the lowest Domain Authority by over 15 points and the 2^nd lowest Page Authority by 22 points.

This is not really close – by the stats, debtrescue.com.au has no business ranking on page 1. Just for information, the 9^th site (95 DA, 1 PA) is a .gov site so we know why this particular “PA 1” ranks this well.

So you own a business and you are new to SEO. You have looked at the SERP overlay and it makes no sense. You look at the DA/PA chart on keyword difficulty and it is fairly clear that this site does not rank based on metrics. Let’s pull just one more set of data to make the point.

Our target site has nearly the lowest mozrank, by far the fewest links of the non-.govs, the lowest subdomain mozrank by a lot, the lowest Page authority by a wide margin and the lowest domain authority by a mile. The page 2 results for the same search shows a trusted bank site – NAB.com.au – they have a DA of 82, PA of 44. They have 300,000 links.

So our question is clear now – how can a site like debtrescue outrank anything else on page one or NAB on page 2? The metrics all say these other sites should be winning handily.

So what is the magic answer?

That elusive magic answer …

I could give you twenty, maybe fifty possible answers. Unfortunately, I could give you twenty and the right one for your situation may be #21. So let’s ask the question again and then reword it so you can see the problem clearly.

“Why is example.com outranking me for X and Y keyword even though _________?”

The real question is this:

“Aren’t these Moz metrics what count?”

That leads us much closer to the answer: these metrics count, but they don’t come close to telling the whole story.

According to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors on SEOMoz, many SEOs think Page Level and Domain Level Link Metrics account for roughly 43% of the algorithm. Over half of your total ranking is determined by factors other than Page and Domain link metrics.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture? How sites rank on Google depends on many factors other than the few you are introduced to when you start learning about SEO. Pagerank, number of inbound links, and the main Moz stats tell a story about your site. Unfortunately, it is like a two-part season finale of your favorite show. You didn’t know there was another part next week and now this?

So what is the rest of the story? What else matters?

If you ask 100 SEOs for the top 50 ranking factors, you will get back 100 completely unique lists. The fact is, we don’t know the whole story. Google can’t come out and tell us the whole algorithm because people would take advantage of that information to rank poor quality sites simply by manipulating the ranking factors and focusing on nothing else.

Here is what we know: Google tracks certain data. You should believe that Google tracks data it finds relevant and reliable. So what can you find in Analytics and with a bit of testing?

Visit duration matters. This metric tells Google that someone found your page and enjoyed it enough to stay on site longer than when they went to your competitor’s site. Duration is a sign of the page’s overall quality and usefulness.

Pages per visit matter. If a user searches for “credit card debt” and visits just one page on the #1 site then seconds later bounces back and goes to #2 where they spend 15 minutes and visit 3 pages, any guess which site Google thinks matters more to that search query?

On page factors matter. The days of putting your keyword keyword keyword on the page three keyword times are keyword thankfully over. This will rarely help you and can actually penalize your site. However, having accurate and descriptive titles that match the content of the page and the user intent of a search? That does matter!

Algorithmic and manual penalties matter. If you put that keyword fifty times on your page, as we discussed above, you will run into an algorithmic penalty. This means Google knows you have “stuffed” the page and will take a bit off your ranking. Do it repeatedly and you’ll get a much larger penalty. If a Google manual reviewer catches you doing this, or a competitor reports you for it, you may get a manual penalty. You will get a notification in your Webmasters Tools about this one and you do need to fix it or suffer a harsh penalty.

Social Share Metrics Matter. Some SEOs believe social metrics matter very little. We have tested these ourselves and found that social metrics matter “some.” If you get three retweets on your link, no, it won’t help you very much. You won’t notice a bump. Get 200 retweets on that same link, have it shared 50 times on Facebook and now it is pinned 8 times? Yes, that will affect your ranking.

Anchor text matters. Don’t misunderstand what I am saying here. Anchor text can be positive *and* negative. If you over-optimize a handful of keywords, it will be a negative effect. If you balance these, include branded anchor text across a variety of link types, it will have a positive effect.

301 redirects matter. Your competitor with the poor metrics may actually have fantastic metrics – on another site. They may have changed domains and redirected all that great SEO juice over to the new site, which looks like it has no value but is absorbing a lot of the value from the previous domain.

We could keep playing this game for a while but we won’t. You should understand that the metrics you start with are a small part (less than half) of the overall picture. We also know of certain “exceptions” to all these rules, such as the ranking bonus new sites get when they first appear on the SERPs. You can’t control how Google sees other people’s sites so try to stay focused on what you control.

For even more information, be sure you go back to Eppie Vojt’s phenomenal “How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: A Case Study”

Eppie posited that manual penalties may occur because “Google just can’t allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms” and I tend to agree with him. Sites that do not “deserve” their ranking often fall off quickly or get manual penalties. Ask yourself if this site was there a month ago – and then check whether it still ranks in another month.

When you are done with Eppie’s excellent article and you want to learn even more about how truly bad sites rank, continue your education with Wil Reynolds’ “How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO”

I hope this explanation helps some of you who are just learning and starting your SEO journey. I also hope the more experienced SEOs jump in and give a few of their ideas on ranking factors, why some sites rank well despite their average or even poor Moz metrics.

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 Cyrus Shepard

The past 12 months have been brutal for many traditional forms of link building. Techniques that once worked are now penalized. Webmasters wonder what tactic will fall under the hatchet next – infographics, guest post blogging, or something else?

Never fear! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, we discuss how to future-proof your links from penalties and, at the same time, deliver higher rewards – no matter what tactic you use. Be sure to check out the supplemental links included in the transcription below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard here at the world famous SEOmoz studios. Today we’re going to be talking  about building high reward, future proof links.

There’s a lot of comments and discussion in the SEO world today about what link strategies work and don’t work. I want to kind of shift the focus away from what works now, because Google keeps changing what works now. I want to shift the focus into what Google is rewarding, to get the most bang for our buck from the links that we’re building.

The last year has been really, really brutal for links. It used to be, prior to 2012, SEOs would say, “Links can’t hurt you.” Google would say, “Links can’t hurt you.” There was no worry about negative SEO or building bad links. They may not work that well, but they wouldn’t have a negative effect.

But then in the last year, in 2012, Google brought the hammer down. I made a list of different link building strategies that people have tried over the years, from good to bad, all the way from paid links and link wheels up to content marketing and user generated content and real company stuff.

In 2012, we saw Google draw a line in the sand. Pretty much after that point if you were using these unnatural, low quality types of links, for the first time, in the history of SEO, bad links could hurt you. It really confused and scared a lot of webmasters.

Google started sending out unnatural link warnings. It’s kind of hard to define what an unnatural link warning is, but they generally have three characteristics. Unnatural links, the kind that Google doesn’t like, are typically scalable. They can be automated somehow sometimes. They create patterns that Google can detect through their algorithms, either over-optimized anchor text or network of blogs or something like that. But they create patterns that aren’t found in the wild. More often than not, they’re the types of links where you, the SEO, the webmaster controls the anchor text. That’s kind of a funny concept, that you’re building links, you’re putting links out there on other people’s sites, but yet you’re the one that controls the anchor text. That’s a pretty defining characteristic of what Google would call an unnatural link.

The high reward link on the other hand, the kind that Google seems to reward with higher rankings, better indexing and crawling are links that aren’t easy to scale. You can’t just pop them into a crawler and scale them out throughout the web or pay somebody to build them for you. There are very few patterns that Google can detect, and more often than not you don’t control the anchor text, which is a completely more natural state if you think about it. If people are linking to you, if it’s an editorial type link, you probably don’t have control over how people are linking to you. Those are the high reward type links that people like.

One of the hardest things that I do as an SEO, people come to me and they ask for consulting, is talking to webmasters that have been building up their site, working hard building up their family business for a year, 5 years, 10 years and doing the things that worked. Then all of a sudden the hammer is laid down and they’re done. Their business has evaporated. They’re laying off people. They don’t know what to do, and they have to start over. Their income is up. That is so hard.

We know from Google statements, from watching Google over the past year, that this line is moving. The threshold for unnatural links keeps getting broader as Google gets better and better at finding these patterns and rooting out these unnatural links. So, as SEOs, we need to stop asking what works now and think about high reward links, because if you’re just working on what works now, this line is going to keep jumping, and we’re going to be left on the other side of that line.

Now some of these tactics on the border, a lot of people are asking, “Well, what about infographics? I hear those are going to be next? What about guest blogging? I hear that’s going away. Or press releases, are those working?”

Well, let me share some startling news with you. It’s already happened. It’s already happened. Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Cyrus, wait, people are using infographics. They’re ranking for it. I’m using guest blogging, and it’s working for me.” Yes, of course, these tactics do work. But the problem is a lot of people are using these techniques the unnatural way. We see this all the time, people spammy guest blogging with those unnatural author profile links or infographics with all the exact same anchor text over 100 blogs, and they aren’t ranking for their terms. But the people who are doing it the right way, using these on the border techniques the natural way, those are going to work every time. They’re not only going to work every time, but they’re high reward, and Google is going to continually encourage this sort of behavior.

But as an SEO, as a webmaster, how do we know if our technique is working or not? Well, Google doesn’t care about the type of link building you do. They care about the implementation. So it’s never a matter of comment spam, because you can make comments on blogs. That doesn’t make it spam. But when you scale it, when you create patterns, when you use unnatural anchor text, it’s the implementation that matters and not the method itself.

There is one rule. I call it the golden rule. How do you know if you’re building high reward links or unnatural links? 80% of the time, the golden rule, you want to pursue links where you do not have control over the anchor text. If you stick to that strategy, 80% to 90% of the time, you’re going to be building links that are high reward, not just what works, because what works may help you a little bit, but high reward links. Not all links are created equal. Different links help you in rankings much more than certain types of links. So we want to focus our link building here, pursuing links where you don’t control the anchor text.

Now a link builder that I really admire, Eric Ward, he’s been building links ever since this industry started, 10 year career. He’s one of the most sought after link builders in this industry. I’ll link to him in the post below. He has never been affected by any of this, and he has never had to ask for links removed. How has he done it? When he builds links, he has never once asked for anchor text. Never. He can ask for a link, but he never demands the anchor text. When he stared doing this years ago, that was unheard of. It has rewarded him today, and all of his links have been in this zone. His clients are very happy. He used to have a newsletter. I think if he still does I think it is well worth subscribing to.

The cool thing about this strategy is, though, you don’t have to give up any of your techniques. You can still use the same techniques you’re using, and it applies to any method of link building that you want.

I brought up some examples right here. So you’re doing infographics. You don’t have to give up doing infographics. You can turn these links, which are potentially unnatural, into high value links. The old way of infographic links was you put the widget in. It had the exact match anchor text, and it got spread out to a 100 blogs. But that can trigger Penguin penalties, over-optimization.

So the smart way of doing it and the way I would recommend now, if you want to be more clever about it, is you rotate the anchor text. Mike King, of iAcquire, wrote a great post a few weeks ago about how to rotate anchor text in WordPress, and there’s a WordPress plugin. Sorry, the plugin is for WordPress. Mike King wrote about different implementations. I will link to that in the post below too.

If you really want to future proof your links, keep it in this natural zone. Even rotating anchors can create some patterns. So if you really want to future proof your links, the way you do it is you just simply ask for attribution. You don’t use a widget or a text box. You just simply give the file to someone and say, “Here download this, link to us, and please give us attribution.” Or use Google’s reverse image search to find who’s already posting your infographic and reach out to them and ask for the link. That way the anchor text becomes natural, and you don’t control it anymore. So high value anchors.

Press releases have gotten a lot of bad rap lately. Matt Cutts saying that press release links don’t add a lot of value, because people abused them and people spammed them. You would have exact match anchor text in those press releases going out to dozens of low quality sites. Wham, you’re not going to rank for that phrase.

The smart way to do it now is in your anchor text, in the press release, you just use your URL – Example.com, SEOmoz.org – or you use something branded – SEOmoz. The smart way to do it, the high value way is you’re not using the press release for links at all. That’s what press releases were intended for. Use your press releases to draw attention to some linkable asset on your site, not the press release itself. Then the press release goes out to hundreds of journalists. Hopefully, if your linkable asset is strong enough, say a new tool or a company announcement or stats or a report that you put out, then all these journalists and news organizations start linking to your work. So it’s not the press release you want links from, it’s your linkable asset. If you don’t have a linkable asset, now is the time to start working on one because they earn more links than anything else.

Guest posting is a huge topic. A lot of SEOs are recommending it as one of the number one tactics for 2013 as a way to build links. But guest posting can also get you in trouble. The old way of doing it, you have this over-optimized anchor text in that author profile box. If you look at the type of links targeted by Penguin, targeted by over-optimization penalties, those over-optimized text links get you in trouble. If your text link is “Dental Hygienist Dallas” over and over and over again, across hundreds of blogs, that’s going to get you in trouble.

The smart way to do it . . . Kate Morris wrote an excellent post last week about how to format these links and guest post. Basically, you don’t want to use exact match, money keywords for your anchor text if you’re going to be repeating them over and over and over again. But the really smart way to do it is sort of like the press release, a natural anchor text in the middle of the guest post, that links to your linkable asset. Say you publish a report or you have a new tool or you have an infographic, this is what you should be linking to. If you don’t have that, you should create that first before you write your guest post. Don’t just link to your blog, to your company website. Create something on your company website that is valuable that is related to your guest post that you want.

Finally outreach, general old writing emails asking for links. I learned a lot about this from Rand Fishkin, who is not here today. Rand doesn’t ask for a lot of links, but he’s a very clever link builder. In the old days, people would write outreach letters, and they would just ask for anchor text. “Could you please link to me, and do it this way?”

Today the smart way is you might influence the anchor text. “Hey, check out my blog about SEO tactics,” and you’d link to SEO tactics hoping that they would link to it the same way.

The really smart way of doing outreach in a natural, not controlling anchor text sort of way, is simply don’t ask for a link. Ask for a share instead. When you write an email, say, “Hey, we have this great resource. We want to get the word out. Would you share it with your audience?” If they’re going to, six times out of ten they’ll actually put it on their blog or their website, and you’ll get the link anyway, with that natural anchor text. The other times they’ll share it with their social network on Twitter or Facebook, exposing it to thousands of people, and potentially getting many, many more of these natural anchor texts than you would have received otherwise.

Going forward, you have a choice. You can ride this line and do what works today and risk continually getting bombed and overtaken by Google’s algorithms. But really I want to encourage us to go for the high value, high reward links for higher rankings, safe SEO so we’re happy, wealthy, and sunny.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 Adria Saracino

This article consists of part selling content marketing, and part how to actually create a content campaign. However, at a more Meta level, it’s also about the idea of “how to be good at getting what you want.” If you want your boss to care about content marketing, you need to know how to pitch it right.

Like everything in business, from sales to link building, “selling an idea” is all about persuasive speech and delivery. However, if persuasion doesn’t come naturally to you, how do you formulate a pitch that will be sticky and affect change?

I’m not here to give vague, unhelpful advice like “be persuasive,” “give solid delivery,” or some other abstract concept that is difficult to act upon. Rather, I will do my best to give you an actionable, step-by-step formula to constructing an effective pitch and convincing your boss that content marketing is the answer to your online business woes.  

Whether you’re selling content marketing to the C-Suite, your manager, a client, or even trying to convince yourself, here is everything you need to make a compelling argument and be on your way to content marketing success.

Step 1: Paint a story

Think of some of the best advertising campaigns you can recall. I get chills every time the Kellogg’s Special-K commercials come on and they end it with the simple phrase, “What will you gain when you lose?” Genius in one simple question.

Just like Kellogg’s stays top of mind by getting viewers to think about the flip side of weight loss, you need to paint a story and deliver an overarching vision in which the decision makers can relate if you want them to support you throughout the process.

Tom Critchlow once told me to “voice a vision” and I literally walked away baffled because it was so non-actionable that I wanted to rampage. However, now being on the other side, I’m going to say this “story painting” part is the most abstract piece of the “making-your-boss-care” puzzle because at the end of the day, each story will differ depending on the company. Since you have more intimate knowledge of the brand than I ever will, this story-painting task lies in your creative ability to succinctly develop a vision for your company.

All this being said, I can provide some tricks for developing your story:

• What is the brand message? If there is a PR team, ask. No sense painting a new vision that doesn’t align. If not, start thinking about what you know about your customers and brainstorming why they chose your brand over another. What is your brand’s USP? Sales and FAQ pages could be invaluable here. You could even bribe the social media manager to throw a question out on Facebook and see what responses you get.

PRO TIP: Send out an email asking all (or a group) of employees to put into an Excel doc words that come to mind when they think of your brand. Throw it into Wordle to create a word cloud to help with brainstorming. You could also add words from the Facebook responses from customers if you ended up bribing your social manager.

• Can you re-position the conversation? Just like Kellogg’s, Taco Bell re-positioned the conversation in its market with the tagline “Think Outside the Bun.” It was in the market of burger joint vs. burger joint, but instead of comparing itself to the competition by creating more noise about “fast food” and “sandwich-like” options, Taco Bell re-positioned the conversation to “us vs. them.”

Can you focus the conversation on another angle in your market? Think about your competition and what all of the marketing noise sounds like. How can you differentiate your message?

• If you’re not a natural storyteller, find someone who is. I personally am hit or miss with storytelling, so I often go to Lexi Mills or Ron Garrett for this skill. The bonus to getting someone else invested in the vision is that it becomes an opportunity to recruit more advocates of content marketing. Think of it as a mini coup, as there is strength in numbers.

• Google it. Hey, if you’re not a great storyteller look to see what other people are saying. I just did to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and found some great resources on storytelling for marketing.

Remember: decision makers need to see, understand, and be on board with your vision if you want to truly get their buy in. Sell the vision and you’re on your way to getting the resources you need to get there.

Step 2: Match it with specific goals

I’ll make it easy for you. There’s only one real goal: conversions. All other “goals” are really just means to this one end. You’re in business, so all goals should end in the monies. Any other goal you think of (links, rankings, domain authority, etc.) will be a short-term checkpoint to reaching the end of the race and improving conversions.

Your long-term goal should be the first thing you pitch: “I want to make us more money.” Perfect; you got their attention and are speaking in their terms. Now, how do you get specific and create a road map of short-term-goal measurement “checkpoints” to show you are coming to the pitch with solutions and not just fanciful stories?

Remember, it’s about painting a story. You want to go all Memento on them. Start with the end of the story (end goal = more money) and then flash back to the beginning – give them a high-level snapshot of your company’s current performance.

For current performance: Usually a few key graphs and specific metrics in areas where the company is under-performing will be enough. If you can pair it with some competitive research, such as “so-and-so is dominating the search results,” that will most likely help. The key is to not get caught up in minutia and to talk big picture. Don’t say, “We are getting a high bounce rate on this one page and I think it’s important to build content to improve it.” You want the conversation to sound more like, “I audited our site and saw there are over 30 pages in which we’re getting X-significant-amount-of-traffic and it has a 100% bounce rate, which is costing us approximately $X a year.”

For future goals: Again, you want to think bigger picture and not get caught up in the minutia. You definitely don’t want to say, “I’m going to make a piece of linkbait that’s going to get us a lot of links.” Business leaders don’t think in links, they think in money so start leveling up your language.

Content marketing isn’t a string of piecemeal linkbait. It is aligning content with a company’s customer funnel to make sure the brand is at top-of-mind throughout the purchasing path. Thus, your pitch should sound more like this, “To improve our organic traffic by X% and bring in $X more a year, we need to dominate the SERPs for keywords relevant to our customers’ purchasing behavior. To get here, we need to do X, Y, and Z.”

Below, we’ll talk more about the recipe for developing a content strategy which, depending on your company’s specific performance, you can most likely plug into this part of the pitch for the X, Y, and Z variables. Also, I really loved Jay Baer’s presentation at Content Marketing World on the four different types of metrics.

Step 3: Pair the vision + goals with the benefits

Kane Jamison of Content Harmony and I were shooting emails back and forth in preparation for our meet-up on content marketing in March, and he explained the core benefit of content marketing so well:

“Tangential/viral campaigns have to be justified to the client like this:

‘Well, viral may results in links/social, which may result in domain authority and may result in ranking improvements across the domain, but if it fails then we don’t have much to show for it.’

That can be too much of a stretch for a client to get on board with. Aligning the content you produce with the client’s sales funnel sidestep that. The discussion turns into this:

‘Well, if it goes viral, then we win the internet, but if it doesn’t go viral then it’s still great for X, Y, & Z business goals, and you can continue promoting it long in to the future.'”

If you have inquisitive management, they are going to start coming at you with questions and rebuttals trying to say what your team is currently doing is enough. Kane’s reasoning will be enough explanation for most, but counteract any serious dubiousness with a list of reasons why content marketing is beneficial. You know your boss best, so you can read whether or not you’ll need to dive into this in detail or just have it ready, but it’s always good to pepper some of these into your pitch.

I wrote an article on aligning content marketing with the customer funnel that had some of these benefits, but here is an expanded list:

It’s safer and actually strategic

Frankly, if a piece of content doesn’t go viral, you have a backup plan if you align content to the broader marketing goal and message.

As Kane mentioned, “viral” content pieces on tangential topics put a lot of strain on the outreachers to deliver links and shares. However, creating sharable content that is also relevant to the top of your company’s funnel can make sure you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. If it doesn’t go “viral,” it could still have other benefits, such as ranking for a relevant term, being used by the sales team, and so on. This is called diversifying your link building plan.

In addition, if you build content around broader PR or social media efforts, you are now integrating campaigns – economies of scale for content marketing. This makes sure you are leaving no stone unturned and capitalizing on all the potential business wins possible.

EXAMPLE: If the social team is hosting a huge contest, is there an opportunity to create relevant content onsite that has the opportunity to rank for keywords relevant to your funnel?

Creates a flywheel

Content marketing is a COO’s operational dream. Over time, it creates a flywheel for efficient content creation. No endless cycle of “think of epic idea, build it, outreach it, repeat.” Instead, you are front loading the research and planning to create a long term road map that follows a strategic set of creative parameters. 

In addition to the internal flywheel, content following a strategic plan can also market itself over time, eliminating the need to keep promoting it manually. For example, if the content targets a low-competition keyword that has decent volume, it can start ranking well on its own. If it’s a topic a lot of other authors write about, when they are researching they could use your content. Furthermore, since users are search heavy during decision making, it’s bringing new potential customers to your site all by itself. If you create content regularly enough, people can come to expect it and start coming to your site to see what you will launch next. All of these are examples of how content can become a snowball effect of wins with little to no redundant work.

Provides consistent user experience

This is the benefit I am personally most passionate about because, at the end of the day, your customers are who matter most. If you are creating inconsistent, tangential content to target who I call the gatekeepers, you run the risk of confusing your customers and irreparably damaging your brand’s trust factor. Here’s an easy rule to follow: all content you create should make sense as coming from your brand. No zombie infographics if you are an insurance company. No cat memes if you are a travel company. Keep it relevant and consistent. I have another version of #RCS: Relevant, Consistent Shit.

Captures long-term traffic

I used this image in my last post and I’m going to use it again because it’s so relevant: content that is relevant to your customer funnel builds traffic over time. Unless they are searching for zombie apocalypse equipment, no one is searching for keywords around your zombie infographic. It will not gain long-term traffic unless you keep pushing it.

However, if you create content that you know targets a topic heavily searched, you could see results like this:

Step 4: Demonstrate potential results with examples

Keep up the storytelling theme by ideally having both good and bad examples to represent the hero and the villain. We are hardwired to connect with storytelling, so it can be difficult for decision makers to resist rooting for the good guys. You want to subtly paint this good vs. bad picture by choosing the right examples. The best “bad” examples usually hit home when they are your own company’s work, but just remember to be tactful when talking about the negatives.

Here are some good examples for you to use. Note, I am showing these because I have access to how the campaigns did and the results are what you need to show your boss this stuff works. There’s a lot of really, really cool content marketing going on out there, and I encourage you to follow up with the companies that are doing them to see if you can get some case studies on the results.

“The Small Business Champions”

Mackenzie Fogelson just talked about them in her building community value post. They even wrote a post explaining their campaign and the results. They might be all over the place, but I’m going to say it again because it has such clear results you can show your boss (remember: show, don’t tell) – the team over at Simply Business is onto something with this whole content marketing thing.

I’ll let you read the post over at CMI that goes into more depth, but essentially SB developed a brand message to become “the small business champion.” As such, it decided to create content around common roadblocks businesses face – successfully navigating all the backend mumbo jumbo around operations. Things like being more efficient, installing and using Google Analytics, hiring your first employee…anything and everything that frustrates business owners.

The results*:

• Moved to 1^st or 2^nd position in SERPs for head key terms
• Ranking for top-of-funnel keywords
• 6% higher first-visit-to-buy conversions
• Improved customer retention by 30%

* Pulled from Simply Business’ CMI post linked above

Platform for #SocialSuccess

Kieran Flanagan revealed the results to Salesforce’s #SocialSuccess content marketing campaign on Moz last year. Similar to Simply Business above, Salesforce identified its brand message, “Get Found,” and embarked on a journey to pull new potential customers into its funnel by creating content around social media issues its tools address.

The result was a #SocialSuccess section of the Salesforce site that included a variety of rich media around social media topics, including interviews with experts and eBooks.

The results*:

• Traffic for launch month up 80% YoY
• Traffic from social sites up 2500%
• 6500 newsletter signups
• 10,000 eBook downloads (and thus 10K leads)
• An ongoing platform for content marketing – Salesforce is still killing it today with #SocialSuccess-themed content

* Pulled from Kieran’s SEOmoz post linked above

Step 5: Outline a “bird’s eye view” plan

Don’t plague them with the minutia. It’s generally a fixed plan with concrete steps no matter the business.  It’s only four real steps with some mini actions in between: research, compile, execute, analyze (RCEA – management loves acronyms, right?).

Note: I am going into more detail for each of these sections so you know what it is and have a starting point for when you get to the execution part. You don’t need to include all this detail in your pitch!

Before you begin: Talk to other teams. You would not believe how many companies silo their teams and waste time, money, and efficiency repeating processes. One of these processes is understanding the customer. Someone in your company might already be an expert, so don’t duplicate the work to find out yourself!

If you don’t have anyone to talk to or a team that did one of the below steps, here is an overview of the type of functions you will need to perform to create a content marketing plan from the ground up.

Research

Benchmark audit

Look through all of the company’s back-end analytics to get a clear picture of its current performance. You want to find out the answers to questions like:

• What is traffic pattern like? Any seasonality?
• What pages were visited most?
• What is the typical visitor flow?
• What pages get the most conversions?
• Where do visitors spend the most time?
• What are the bounce rates, particularly for high volume pages?
• How long goes the visitor typically stay on the site?
• How did they get to the site?
• What are the predominant referring keywords?
• Any interesting mobile vs. web data?

I call this a “benchmark” audit because you should also be taking out key metrics as the baseline you will compare all future performance to in order to determine ROI of your efforts. While you are doing this, keep in the back of your mind that you will need to develop a way to track all future content goals you develop. 

Talk to your customers

From the benchmark audit, you will probably start seeing visitor patterns in which you can draw conclusions around customer behavior. However, you cannot go solely off this data because it’s usually muddled with a large number of potential and failed customers. 

Instead, pair these metric-driven insights with more thorough market research: talking to your customers. I wrote an article on how to develop personas, so I won’t dive into it in detail here, but this is arguably the most important piece to making #RCS content: you need to know who you are creating it for! Conduct surveys, hold focus groups, do in-depth interviews, etc.; the more info you can gather, the better you will be able to develop clear customer stories.

Keyword research

This is so, so important because if you want to earn those long-term traffic benefits, you need to make sure your content aligns with phrase people are actually using as they search. The key here though is to focus on keywords THROUGHOUT the funnel. This is the number one task I see all SEOs struggle with – they are hardwired to only focus on the conversion, bottom-of-the-funnel-terms. If you are planning for a content piece around “buy X online” and think it will go viral or is even worth outreach time, you are sorely mistaken.

The key here is to dive into research by asking yourself questions as if you were searching yourself. You need to understand the search intent to be epic at more top-of-funnel keyword research. This is a pretty good article on the topic, and there are plenty of tools out there to aid creativity. Also, Kieran Flanagan gets it. Just remember, a winning content strategy is aimed at getting new customers into the funnel at all levels; don’t miss the opportunity to get people in at the top.

PRO TIP: Like above when brainstorming your brand message, when you get a pretty good keyword list, throw it into Wordle after cutting out the redundant terms to get a word cloud that shows the most dominantly searched topic for your funnel. This will help get the content creative juices flowing later.

Content audit

This is essentially taking inventory of all the content on your site so you can conduct a content gap analysis. I wrote an article on conducting a content audit, but the specifics might change a bit depending on your needs. For example, you might stick to just the quantitative parts (pulling metrics) and only assessing qualitatively the content that has gregariously inconsistent metrics (such as tons of traffic, high bounce rate).

Compile

Bring all the pieces together and define goals

I’ll keep this part short and sweet. Once you have all the above pieces:

• Create your customer personas
• Address any outlandish technical woes you found during benchmark audit
• Identify key areas on your site that you need to repurpose content based off findings from benchmark audit
• Figure out what content you are missing based off your content gap analysis and keyword research
• Prioritize keywords
• Start prioritizing areas to focus your content
• Clearly define measurable short and long-term goals

Create an editorial calendar

Once you are done prioritizing your areas to focus on, start brainstorming and filling in the editorial calendar (aka long-term project plan). Depending on factors like whether or not you have a blog, you might need to create a more detailed editorial calendar to keep your daily content creators focused. The key is to plan out all your content so you only have to focus on execution – this is the starting point of that flywheel.

Make sure you have the brand message, standards, and tracking in place

Remember the importance of a consistent user experience? You want to keep it consistent not only through the topics you cover but also the style in which you write. Remember that brand message you developed? All content should definitely align with that. Remember those personas? All of your content should definitely target one persona each.

In addition, make sure you are aligned with your brand/editorial standards that the wider company uses. If there isn’t one, make one. This covers things like grammar, voice, on-page SEO considerations, blog theme style, etc.

PRO TIP: You also need governance standards – trust me, the bigger the organization, the crazier it can get. You want to clearly define dependencies early. This includes answers to questions like what is the editorial review workflow, who owns getting it through each stage, and what are the engagement standards?

Lastly, remember I mentioned during the benchmark audit to start thinking about how you can track goals? By now, you should have goals clearly defined. Make sure you implement any necessary backend tracking so you can start measuring and comparing to those benchmarks right away.

Execute

Easy – get ‘er done. Start creating the content and launching.

Assess

After each larger content piece, you should be assessing how it did. However, you should also plan on assessing long term and conducting a content inventory of this new content (just like the content audit, just smaller scale and more outcomes focused). This is where you will really see the ROI of all your efforts. Check out this great article on measuring content marketing.

Step 6: Manage those expectations

Just like with everything else, you need to give due diligence to managing your boss’ expectations. There are a ton of resources out there around effectively managing expectations, which takes practice. However, some key components include:

• Be honest – content marketing is front loaded, long term, but smart business
• Give clear deadlines – and meet them
• Involve the right people from the start

Step 7: Demand greatness

You’re almost done. One key component to a successful content marketing program is to ensure everyone is on board and the key decision makers are all in. If they aren’t, it will cause unnecessary roadblocks down the road, like cross-team conflict and lack of required resources.

Thus, before beginning, you need to demand greatness. This may be a conversation for after the initial pitch, but it is important. You can’t let your decision makers half-ass their commitment to the program; they are either all in, or you’re not proceeding. In addition, you need to clearly and consistently voice that there is a right way to do content marketing. Remember, this isn’t a plan for putting together a string of irrelevant linkbait pieces.

Step 8: Deliver

If you had to sell the idea in the first place – you better deliver. If you make mistakes, own up to them and devise a solution for how to fix them.

Whew! There is your eight-step program to selling and delivering a content marketing plan. Hopefully you walk away with your boss caring, but if not, keep at it and consider shipping a smaller version of it anyway. Sometimes you need to show those results to get buy in because it puts them in terms they definitely understand: their own business success.

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!