Category: Digital Marketing

Posted by HeatherPhysioc

As an industry, we talk a good game about collaboration, but the truth is it’s not really happening the way we tell our clients and bosses it happens. We stroll into new business pitches and make big claims about how “integrated” we are. We preach that our recommendations are better because we have a more “holistic” offering. But whether it’s across agencies working on the same client, different teams working within the same agency, or different teams in-house on the client side, collaboration is much harder to achieve in reality than we make it look on the outside.

More often than not, experts get sucked into their respective silos, buried by the day-to-day task lists of their jobs, focusing on their own areas of expertise. Agencies write SEO scopes and PPC scopes separately, often without accounting for content resource needs to make the channels successful. Teams bring recommendations forward to their bosses that don’t have buy-in from their peers. We don’t bring each other in, but we complain about not being brought in.

Learnings from multiple mergers

My company has gone through many mergers and acquisitions over the years, and just in the last three, we’ve merged with three other agencies in our network. We doubled in size and tripled our global footprint overnight. With those mergers came tons of complementary skill sets and client lists we could do great work for.

Through the mergers, we had a unique opportunity presented to us to solve persistent collaboration and content problems by bringing the organic search, paid search, and performance content teams together under one unified group. Now our “Discoverability” group is nearly 35 people in four offices across North America.

With all this change and merging of teams, we had some hard choices to make and hard work to do to make this integration of different capabilities and cultures successful.

Introducing interdisciplinarity

I want to introduce you to the concept of interdisciplinarity.

It’s an academic term describing when two or more areas of expertise join forces to solve new kinds of problems together. It’s when they combine and bust traditional silos to solve shared challenges, benefiting from integrating and updating their individual approaches into a new, holistic approach. Interdisciplinarity helps with the negative effects of siloing and over-specialization.

In the rapidly evolving and increasingly commoditized field of search, we need to be talking about this.

Interdisciplinarity is common in well-known technical and scientific fields like neuroscience, biochemistry, and cybernetics. There is new ground to be forged in our industry.

There is a key difference between complementarity and interdisciplinarity. Just about anyone can go online and learn SEO or PPC. Plenty of companies do “complementary” search work — sitting next to one another and at least not harming each other’s work.

But few do truly interdisciplinary work — offering new, evolved capabilities in search. In the next five years, interdisciplinarity will be the difference between search teams with a competitive edge, and search teams that stagnate.

True interdisciplinarity is when the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. It’s the Gestalt benefit of bringing distinct specialties together to create a completely custom solution for a problem. People with relevant expertise bring unique knowledge and experiences for a more cohesive, end-to-end offering that is bespoke for each need. But the work is repeatable and refinable as similar problems arise.

This concept has been a driving force guiding our way through merging teams to create something new. And now we consult with clients in complex organizations to help them achieve interdisciplinarity, too. This is more than enhancing our implementation of tactical SEO and PPC. This is about helping companies evolve how they think about and deliver on the promise of search.

Why bother with integration?

As a search professional, you have probably been perfectly smart and successful independently, so why go to the trouble of moving away from separate swim lanes to one cohesive, unified practice? And equally important, how?

Increase advocacy

The majority of our growth typically comes from better serving and expanding existing relationships, not winning big chunks of new business. You go from a select few team members on different teams advocating for their own work, to a combined force of all the team members advocating for all of each other’s work.

Cross-sell and up-sell more

An integrated search team finds it easier to cross-sell and up-sell when clients get stuck on related services. Merging our teams helps us shift budget seamlessly between practices based on demand, pilot other services to our clients, and show our chops and prove outcomes we can earn. We can also talk to our clients about capturing every opportunity possible on whole search engine results pages, instead of thinking of SERPs in chunks.

Increased speed and scale

Having an integrated team with areas of overlap allows leaders to better distribute labor across the team. For example, our performance content team now writes SEO metas and PPC ad copy. Our paid and organic search teams are conducting keyword research and competitive analysis together, reducing duplication of effort. We’re dividing and conquering to cover more research ground more quickly, share learnings from our own areas of expertise, delivering a stronger product, and speeding it up by weeks.

Create a culture of knowledge-sharing

Data-sharing becomes second-nature to an integrated search and content team. It helps you to find opportunities you wouldn’t have spotted before. A deeper and wider pool of knowledge builds a deeper and smarter search talent bench. This creates a culture of crowd-sourcing and sharing where no one feels the pressure to know everything. We solve digital marketing problems faster by pooling our knowledge.

Reduce cannibalism and competition

When individual teams have individual objectives, it runs the risk of being “every team for themselves.” But ultimately, everyone in the company or at the agency is held to a set of central, core objectives. A unified team can help search and content practitioners stop worrying about whose budgets and whose targets, and instead focus on what’s best for the business. It allows you to steer resources to where the greatest impact will be felt. It doesn’t matter so much which channels deliver — as long as we deliver.

Increase trust in recommendations

Recommendations have more weight and credibility together when they’re vetted from multiple experts. Experts should talk about joint opportunities, discuss how channels perform together and separately, and balance paid and organic recommendations. A more thoughtful, utilitarian approach is more easily defensible to a client. Demonstrating more bang for their marketing bucks makes it easier for them to say yes and invest.

Identify new capabilities

When you integrate different specialties, you are likely to develop new capabilities at the intersections between those practices. This enables you to build and launch new, unified services that increase the value we can add for clients. In our case, this led to an end-to-end digital shelf optimization offering and enhanced landing page development.

Create competitive advantage

True interdisciplinarity is difficult to accomplish, so it’s hard for competitors to replicate. Competitive advantage happens when you put in the legwork that competitors can’t, don’t, or won’t. Mastering integrated services can give you unique points of distinction that competitors don’t have, and you become increasingly indispensable to your clients and your company.

Risks and roadblocks to integration

There will be no shortage of risks, roadblocks, and obstacles to integrating teams. Following are some of the growing pains you can anticipate as a driver of change.

Moving from theory to reality

We deceive ourselves into thinking we collaborate well for so long that it’s easy to become complacent and fail to see how things could be better. We have to make the case for the benefits of working together to our colleagues and counterparts. As a group, we have to agree on the importance of collaborating on projects and proving joint outcomes with meaningful case studies. It’s a massive cultural shift to change from individual athletes on three different teams to a single, all-star, world champion team. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Risk of becoming less agile

Counterintuitively, the larger the team, the harder it is to collaborate. This is especially true when the team does several different things. Integration runs the risk of making your group too big to move quickly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to force adoption of one team or the other’s way of doing things, or to collaborate constantly on everything. But we quickly learned that design-by-committee doesn’t work and we can’t force it. Group identity doesn’t negate the need for autonomy. In fact, interdisciplinary teams fail without being able to maintain their identity and autonomy, and being empowered to make decisions that are right for their team and clients. Now we keep the connective tissue that bonds us as a group, but allow for “slicing and dicing” into smaller teams to serve any need and combat the problem of getting too big to stay nimble.

Negotiating roles and defending turf

When integrating teams, conflicts are inevitable, whether it’s perceived competition for diminishing budgets, or vying for the final say on a course of action. With teams of very smart people in different areas there is bound to be some negotiating of roles, maybe even turf-defending. But through integration, we’re all sharing the same turf. It takes extra effort to give the benefit of the doubt, assume good intent, and get on the same page. It’s an exercise in humility to give everyone’s expertise equal weight, and actively seek perspective instead of it being an accidental afterthought. You have to create a culture where everyone wins when one of us wins.

Merging processes creates complexity in the short-term

Merging processes that worked reasonably well before is a common challenge. Each team had its own comfortable way of doing things, so they might be resistant and slow to change. You may encounter conflicting expertise and opinions. It’s important to understand each team’s processes thoroughly before ripping them apart and sewing them back together — take the time to learn why things are the way they are.

Change fatigue

A constant barrage of non-stop change makes it hard for evolution to stick. It’s too much for people to absorb and adopt. It causes them to burn out and lose interest because it feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Companies that have a culture of ongoing testing, learning and optimization and where change is always expected for growth tend to fare well in the face of change, but everyone has their limits.

12 tips for integration success

Now that you are going into the process of integrating other teams informed on the risks and rewards, here are tactical tips to get it right.

1. Announce change quickly

Search team leaders should move quickly to announce the change and inform their teams. Make it clear what you’re doing and why, make the case for the benefits, and be honest about the challenges to get buy-in. Get the teams involved in the mission as soon as possible. Set the expectation that we sink or swim together. The most successful people in the face of change are those who don’t waste time obstructing the inevitable, but instead roll up their sleeves and look for ways to help.

2. Introduce and immerse immediately

Once announced, quickly take action to bring the teams together and activate. Get search and content practitioners in the room face-to-face as early and often as possible, and start a dialogue about a common mission and vision. Work together to brainstorm ideas on how to move forward. Our integration sessions included introductions and ice-breakers, overarching sessions about the department and teams, capability and case study sharing, and team-building exercises. Once you have established the new team or process, reintroduce the team to the organization to put faces with names, and educate others on what the new group is capable of and responsible for.

Get a sample agenda for an integration workshop here.

3. Implement change jointly and steadily

Announce and immerse quickly, but slow down to speed up when beginning to implement the changes. Don’t try to boil the ocean — focus on one-percent changes, one change at a time at natural points of intersection. Give ownership of different initiatives to people from each side to make sure you’re considering all the angles, which helps with buy-in across the group. Charge everyone with making it successful.

Also, try to make early changes iteratively and at natural points of friction at first, so change actually feels like a relief. For example, every SEO can relate to being left out of the content process, where keyword research is an afterthought (if it happens at all). One simple change is adding keywords and questions to a new content brief prior to creating content. This will make both writers’ and SEOs’ jobs easier. As a bonus, small wins can build momentum and endurance for more change.

4. No process is precious

Process is supposed to be a flexible framework, not a rigid set of rules that stifles innovation. Commit to establishing clear processes that incorporate key search and content stakeholders, and bring those voices to the table to collaborate in creating and refining workflows. Create a living wiki to document recurring processes, which reinforces the message of steady evolution. Update and reorganize them regularly — everyone on the team should have access and trust to refine them. Finally, check in periodically on what isn’t working and discard what doesn’t serve you.

5. Cross-train to build advocacy

Conduct cross-trainings both in immersion and continuously over time. The intent is not to be able to do each other’s jobs, but rather to be able to speak about them, advocate for them and cross-sell them. We’ve done workshops, hands-on training, and even short-term job swaps like having SEOs write e-commerce product detail pages. It creates empathy and builds trust, and makes it easier to advocate for each other’s work. It helps create mental checks, too, for search experts to ask, “Am I including the right people?” or content writers to ask, “Can someone else add value here?” Make it a habit for your group by course-correcting people when they forget, and validating and rewarding when they get it right.

6. Productize service offerings

As your search and content (or other integrated) team develops all-new joint services and processes, appoint small, cross-team committees to productize those offerings. They should clearly articulate the service, define the value, identify inputs and outputs, and ballpark costs and timing. These should be simple packages that can be “pulled off the shelf” when a relevant opportunity arises. For our team, these included things like search-driven content insights to support big burst campaigns, an end-to-end e-commerce discoverability process, and a meticulous approach to website rebuilds and redesigns.

7. Recommend and report together

Integrated search and content teams should be recommending and reporting together. It sounds obvious, but it’s rarely done well. Too often, experts regurgitate data in a silo and then smash some slideware together. Instead, compile and discuss your data together to identify the story the information tells, and how clients and marketers can make decisions across channels to best optimize. Search and content practitioners should be working together to roadmap and prioritize where to focus for the biggest opportunities, rather than one channel dictating to the other or operating on independent tracks.

8. Monthly account strategy sessions

It’s easy to retire to our individual corners and get stuck in the status quo, where search and content teams don’t talk to each other. These account strategy sessions are bigger than a task list — they are a time to collaborate, share what’s happening, and talk about the future. Discuss how the brand is performing in each channel, problems the search and content experts are solving, opportunities we see, big risks or threats, and potential joint efforts, tests, or case studies. This simple meet-up model can benefit any group you’re trying to collaborate with. Establish recurring round tables between search and other departments or global regions.

Get a sample account strategy discussion guide here.

9. Build a networked team

As your teams grow in size, geography, and complexity, a “networked team” model might make sense. A networked team has central sources of truth and process (we document ours on Confluence in living wikis), but the operations and execution are decentralized. In this model you have common standards and best practices that all practitioners can draw from, but a networked team can shapeshift and adjust to deliver the work however necessary. It’s a balance of centralized control and local team empowerment.

10. Create a culture of feedback

When merging search and content teams, coaching and direct, immediate feedback greatly speeds integration. Make transparency and accountability a part of your group’s culture. This means providing feedback to each other and feedback to you. It means peer reviewing each other’s search and content work. It means scrutinizing your shared processes and ways of working. It makes the discoverability work stronger and reduces the margin for error. Creating a culture of feedback depersonalizes the feedback and makes it about the quality of the work.

11. Market collaborative successes

Marketing success can be a major driver of integration across discoverability teams. You should always look for wins (or warnings) to create case studies that demonstrate how your team is most effective together. Find meaningful wins that cross teams, and make sure your team, clients, bosses, and colleagues hear these stories. It increases buy-in, understanding, and engagement with your newly integrated group.

12. Stay close to collaborate

Who you “sit with” matters — even in a world where a majority of us are now working from home. Connect your search and content experts as much as possible. Make it easy to strike up a conversation about things they’re working on, and turn around their chairs (or turn on their video chat) and ask questions of each other. While rearranging the floorplan at the office isn’t in the cards for everyone, or if people in different cities or companies are collaborating, look for every possible opportunity for human connection. That means video chat, traveling for in-person meetings, desk drive-bys, spending part of your day parked with colleagues in their part of the office, real-time instant messaging, or phone calls. Do whatever it takes to be present and engaged with people in other disciplines as much as possible.

Integration is the future of search and content

To quote my colleague, Britt Hankins, “As individual teams, we’re experts. As an integrated practice, we’re a powerhouse.”

Creating whole, end-to-end services that have greater impact together than separately makes us more indispensable to clients who can’t imagine going back to the disjointed world of silos. Combining and evolving our search and content capabilities into one discoverability group helps us stand out from the competition.

The cultural shift can be huge, but worth it. It’s an iterative process with plenty of growing pains along the way. Even if it doesn’t make sense to reorganize or merge teams, it does make sense to break down barriers between other disciplines. These steps can help integrate search with any other department. It could be as simple as creating a competency circle around a certain type of work or client that transcends your org chart.

As time goes on, new things are created, the group and its processes mature, and the lines between them start to blur. When your new culture is established, hire and promote for the traits to sustain it, like communication, collaboration, accountability, transparency, and empathy.

There will always be bumps along the way as you integrate search with other practices like content, technology, analytics, or user experience. It can be frustrating and time-consuming up front. People won’t always agree and conflicts will happen.

But as a leader of discoverability in your organization, you can create a culture of openness, vulnerability, and feedback. You can create the expectation of iteration, evolution, and change. You can push through obstacles together and forge something entirely new.

Remember that competitive advantage comes from doing the work your competitors can’t, don’t, or won’t. Because if it were easy, everyone would do it.

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source https://moz.com/blog/interdisciplinarity-in-seo

Posted by ChristopherHofman

Currently, many businesses face challenging times and are moving their SEO budget to disciplines which offer quicker wins.

But you can also create instant results with SEO, and it can be done on a small budget even when you are up against bigger players in your industry.

In this blog post I will show you my framework to do SEO sprints. I will show you how you can use Google’s ability to index and rank faster to your advantage. Later, you will be presented with a case study, where we used SEO sprints for a chain of opticians. The result: an increase in bookings of vision tests of 73%.

But first, let’s have a look at the layout on page one of Google (for most queries).

Google never took SEOs into account when designing for the user. As a result, their transformation over the last few years from the “10 blue links” format to “the portal” has pushed the organic results on page one down by several pixels.

Today, the four Google Ads at the top of the SERP cover most of the pixels above the fold. In many cases, your screen can also be covered with a Google Shopping ad. Apart from the ads, Google fills up the space on page one with SERP features such as featured snippets or their own platforms such as Youtube or Google Maps.

In some industries, Google will even place their booking search engine at the top. Examples are Google Flights or Google Hotels.

During the last few months we have seen more desktop traffic, but in general users are moving to mobile. An iPhone’s screen of 758 pixels makes it nearly impossible to rank above the fold for an organic result.

We, as SEOs, have to rethink our way of doing SEO.

The Google challenge

Do you know your numbers?

For a particular query, how high is the expected click-through-rate if you rank number one? Is it 20%? Twenty-five? These are the typical estimations coming from CTR benchmark studies. But in reality, for competitive queries, the right CTR will be much lower, which means that you could be basing your business case on the wrong numbers.

Instead, I would recommend looking at your Google Search Console data to see what your CTR is when ranking number one for a non-branded term.

As an example: In the retail industry I have a client ranking consistently at number one for a broad generic term with a monthly search volume of 2.8K. How high do you think their CTR is?

3.8%!

They are not the only ones with a meager CTR. Doing some research, I discovered that positions three and four for this query had CTRs of 1.1% and 2.4%, respectively.

When CTRs used to be higher, I went after the big keywords. At the peak of my “Big Keywords” career, I reached the number one ranking in Google (Denmark) for the biggest keyword in the banking industry: “Lån” (loan). It took one and a half years to go from the bottom of page three to number one in Google, and the investment paid off handsomely for the client.

The strategy was straightforward, with a focus on technical SEO, on-page, and off-page factors. In other words, SEO as we have always approached it. However, working with SEO in a silo frustrated me, because I felt that we could get better and faster results by working together across disciplines and across departments.

In October 2018, a new insight gave me the chance to rewire my SEO thought process. This led me to develop a new framework aligning SEO with other marketing activities.

The big insight: Google indexes and ranks faster

Back in the year 2000, Google updated their index every five to eight weeks. This gave SEO a reputation as a discipline where patience was key, and where results were a long-term project. This understanding is still common inside the industry, and many SEOs will still tell their clients to be patient and expect the results to come inside one or two years.

However, if you do it right, this is not the case anymore.

Let’s fast-forward to 2018: I discovered that Google had changed gears.

My client was planning to run a marketing campaign starting in October. My SEO team was invited late to the party, as I only met with the client two weeks before the campaign launch.

I was not too optimistic about the time frame to get them results, but we gave it a shot.

The results surprised me.

Inside 20 days, they went from not being indexed to ranking in the top three for their main keyword.

I was baffled. This was not the Google I knew.

This insight was huge, because it meant that SEO could break free of the classic silo and be part of other marketing activities.

The idea of the SEO sprint was born.

What is an SEO sprint?

Let’s stop and think for a minute.

How often do marketing campaigns ignore SEO? SEO data can actually be a central element in marketing, because the data reveals the inner feelings of users when they search on Google. This is data which would be very hard to get from qualitative interviews.

Have you tried to convert mentions to links months after a PR campaign ran?

Ever worked on an SEO project where you never talked to the PPC team (even though they have valuable information, like which keywords convert, that you can use for your SEO work)?

Have you delivered a tech audit with a long list of to-dos without really knowing what the business strategy was, hence the priorities of the SEO tasks?

These are examples of SEO working in a silo. Silos waste knowledge and they miss the big picture. Instead, SEO activities should be aligned with the marketing plan.

When you rank at the top of Google for the keywords and user intentions which support your business strategy, it is due to teamwork across your marketing department.

This is what SEO sprints are all about: Based on the company’s business strategy, SEO sprints are an integrated part of your marketing mix. They are SEO activities which support a marketing campaign, where the objective is to be present at the most important touch points in Google for particular customer journeys.

An SEO sprint consists of five steps:

1. Strategy
2. Data
3. Insights
4. Execution
5. Measurement

I’ll dig into each of these steps in the case study below.

The secret behind a successful SEO sprint

In late 2018, I performed other SEO sprints, which proved to me that there was an opportunity to work differently within SEO. For example: a New Year’s campaign where the client’s main keyword went from out-of-index to the bottom of page one within 10 days. While they didn’t make the top three, they still obtained a 6% CTR from a ready-to-buy audience.

So, how can you use a sprint to rank faster in Google? Do sprints focus on links, content, or page speed?

Those factors are only partly important. The main ranking factor is the competition. Let’s face it: You rank number one at the mercy of your competition. It matters a lot for your ranking if competitors don’t focus their SEO efforts in the same direction as you.

In my experience, when broad media sites and forums rank, it’s a good sign that competition is not so strong. The ideal scenario is when competition is manageable and Google results have low volatility, meaning the results don’t fluctuate much. This is a signal to me that I can rank quickly and remain at the top of Google for a longer period.

While you should try to rank for all your keywords, the key is to identify and prioritize important, low-competition keywords to get results quickly. When you have established yourself, then you can start to build out your topical authority and aim for the keywords with tougher competition.

The DriveSafe case study

Let’s put the SEO sprint framework into practice. Nyt Syn is a Danish chain of 57 opticians. They have a 6% market share in a market dominated by three bigger players. During 2018 and 2019, I ran two successful SEO sprints for their DriveSafe campaign.

DriveSafe glasses are glasses produced by ZEISS. You can use them as normal eye glasses, but they are particularly useful to avoid being blinded by the headlights of oncoming cars at night. They retail at $500 (USD), so it is not a low-priced item, but they are the safest solution in the market.

The target group of the DriveSafe campaign is primarily 35-year-old women and above. They are not worse off than men when it comes to seeing badly at night, but our research showed that they are more ready to do something about it. Our main objective was to have them book an eyesight test at their local Nyt Syn optician.

The results

After running the first DriveSafe campaign in Q4 2018, which was fairly successful, we managed to triple the organic traffic during the second SEO sprint a year later.

During the period, 23.7% of the organic traffic to nytsyn.dk went to the DriveSafe pages. More importantly, Nyt Syn increased their bookings by 73% for the second campaign when compared to the first.

How we did it

1. Strategy

Before we started our SEO tasks, we needed to understand the objective of the DriveSafe campaign and how SEO would support the business goals.

In order to translate the marketing strategy into SEO activities, I use customer journeys to map out the customer needs and define the content touchpoints on Google.

This was our SEO mission statement:

“We are present in Google when users make queries related to night vision with the intent to solve a user challenge leading to the booking of an eyesight test.”

2. Data

You need to understand user behavior before you can execute your strategy. Fortunately, it has never been easier to get access to data. While many still stick to one tool (e.g. Google Keyword Planner or Moz), I have come to realize that the more tools you add, the more you will identify your user’s intentions. I use Google’s own tools (Google Search Console, Google Analytics) and different Clickstream tools (e.g. Moz Keyword Explorer). Each tool will bring something new to the table.

To this stack I also add the company’s own data sources, like live chat. It’snot only a tool to communicate with your customers! No one ever contacts a company simply to engage in small talk. The data from the chat history is a gold mine of user questions. Zendesk and Internal Site Search are two other underestimated resources, where small observations can turn into big insights.

In the end we managed to identify hundreds of keywords within the range from general symptom searches to specific product requests.

3. Insights

Insights depend on the strength of your data. If you don’t dive deep enough during data retrieval, you won’t get a full understanding of user behavior, thus missing out on important user intentions. By looking at the keyword list, we identified various user intentions. With them in hand we created customer journeys to map out which content to build or repurpose.

Here are the user intentions mapped out in different stages of the customer journey for this campaign:

Awareness: What is night blindness?

Consideration: Do I have a bad night vision? Can I use glasses with yellow tint?

Decision: DriveSafe glasses from ZEISS

We discovered four interesting insights from the data:

1. Early funnel content is notoriously underestimated. We identified the bridge between the symptom searches for “night blindness” in the early stage of the customer journey and the need to drive safely at night. By creating the page “What is night blindness?”, we answered the users’ symptom questions and moved them on in the funnel towards our solution.

2. The keyword data revealed a need from users to test their eye sight online. We converted a general eye vision test into a night vision test. The test took off. More than 180,000 users ended up completing the test via different channels.

To boost the general authority of the DriveSafe pages and this particular online test, we also acquired links. Apart from the extra authority, the referral traffic was decent.

3. We could see that users went for a premature choice when looking for a solution. If you are a mountain bike rider, you probably use cheap plastic glasses with yellow tint. These are not good for driving at night, but this was the best guess for many users.

An interview with a professor from the School of Optometry in Denmark revealed that glasses with yellow tint let in too much blue light. This is the light which our eyes are exposed to at night. Instead of ignoring users searching for yellow tinted glasses, we decided to warn them instead. The page “Don’t use glasses with yellow tint!” attracted a lot of traffic. It also showed that you can rank number one for keywords which counter the primary user intention on page one of Google.

4. The optometry industry jargon is different than the terms that users search for. Company policy can sometimes prevent you from optimizing your site for the user terms, but Nyt Syn embraced the opportunity.

There are 800 monthly searches for the query “natbriller” (night glasses). This is not an industry term, but we decided to create a page with it anyway It paid off. Nyt Syn has now ranked consistently number one and two on Google for this important keyword for more than a year, bringing in lots of profitable traffic.

The search terms mentioned in the last two insights. are low competition, low volatility keywords, which made us rank quickly. An instant result motivates the team, and it builds authority in the eyes of Google. Subsequently, this enabled us to rank for more difficult search terms. Today we rank in the top three for over 100 non-branded keywords, and every tenth search results in a click on a DriveSafe page.

4. Execution

From these insights, the Nyt Syn content team went to work on the pages we needed to be present at every important touch point in Google.

The team is small with only one content writer. However, this case shows that you don’t need to be a big team to beat your competitors as long as you know where to focus. In total, five pages were created and a couple of existing pages were repurposed.

You need some time at this step, since it takes time to write great content. At this point we also prepared a link building strategy based on advertorials, which we rolled out during the campaign.

We were ready to launch.

5. Measurement

We use a dashboard to constantly measure the performance and gain new insights. This enabled us to change course midway if necessary.

Here are two good examples:

1. One month after the launch of the second SEO sprint, Nyt Syn decided to run two Facebook campaigns based on the SEO data. The first campaign aimed at getting users to take the online night vision test. The second campaign told users to avoid glasses with yellow tint for night driving.

The two campaigns worked great and increased the number of bookings significantly. This was a perfect example of using SEO data across channels.

2. During the campaign we obtained some nice customer testimonials. With the customers’ permission, we placed them on the DriveSafe pages. This enabled us to display the five star ratings in the Google SERPs, which lifted the general CTR overnight by 2-5%.

Learning and adjusting is central to SEO sprints. With Google’s ever-changing landscape, we need to be agile and ready to adapt. We learn from each SEO sprint and use what worked for the next sprint to constantly improve the results.

The third SEO sprint for DriveSafe is set for September. What can we do to build upon our past achievements?

Let me leave you with some insights gained, which you can hopefully use for your own campaigns:

1. GSC data tells us when users will start searching for night vision search terms. This means that we know when to launch our campaign next time. For SEO sprint one, we had a blank page. We could only use Google Trends data, so it started in October. Now we run it from mid-September because the data tells us that users are asking Google earlier.

2. GSC data will reveal new user intentions because we are building up more data. This data, coupled with customer feedback, creates a base to produce even more relevant content and thereby a better chance to own the most important touch points on Google.

3. From our PPC data, we now have more data to know which keywords generate orders and vice versa. We will have more GSC data to add new keywords to our Google Ads.

4. By A/B testing the communication on Google Ads and Facebook, we know which words and which USPs work. We can use these insights to update titles and meta descriptions to communicate more directly on Google.

5. We know that SEO insights can be used to create successful Facebook campaigns. We will double down on Facebook and test other channels such as Instagram.

6. We know which links brought us referral traffic, so we will focus on similar links for the third sprint. While it is only correlated data, we can compare the ranking history with the publication of advertorials to look for keyword jumps. Some advertorials are duds. Some are gold. It does help us to pick the better link opportunities.

7. We got the star ratings for the DriveSafe pages. By studying the Google landscape, we can see which other Schema markups we should add.

Summary

Companies are currently looking for instant results, which make them put SEO on hold. However, with SEO sprints you have an agile framework to get quick results — when done right.

You can use Google’s speed in indexing and ranking results to your advantage. It will enable your organization to integrate SEO as part of the marketing mix. While you can now rank inside a few days or weeks, fast rankings will depend on the level of competition on page one in Google. When you have low competition and low volatility for keywords with strategic importance, then you have found your sweet spot for quicker results and stable traffic long-term.

SEO sprints consist of five steps, and they can be performed on a small budget inside a short period. The learnings from one SEO sprint are passed on to the next one, so you can reuse what worked efficiently.

Good luck with your SEO sprint!

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/quick-results-with-seo-sprints

Posted by rjonesx.

Building links is an incredibly common request of agencies and consultants, and some ways to go about it are far more advisable than others. Whether you’re likely to be asked for this work or you’re looking to hire someone for it, it’s a good idea to have a few rules of thumb. In this classic Whiteboard Friday chock full of evergreen advice, Russ Jones breaks things down.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, folks, welcome to another great Whiteboard Friday. I am Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist here at Moz. I get to do a lot of great research, but I’ll tell you, my first love in SEO is link building. The 10 years I spent before joining Moz, I worked at an agency and we did a lot of it, and I’ll tell you, there’s nothing more exciting than getting that great link.

Now, today I’m going to focus a little bit more on the agency and consultant side. But one takeaway before we get started, for anybody out there who’s using agencies or who’s looking to use a consultant for link building, is kind of flip this whole presentation on its head. When I’m giving advice to agencies, you should use that as rules of thumb for judging whether or not you want to use an agency in the future. So let me jump right in and we’ll get going.

What I’m going to talk about today is risk-averse link building. So the vast majority of agencies out there really want to provide good links for their customers, but they just don’t know how. Let’s admit it. The majority of SEO agencies and consultants don’t do their own link building, or if they do, it’s either guest posting or maybe known placements in popular magazines or online websites where you can get links. There’s like a list that will go around of how much it costs to get an article on, well, Forbes doesn’t even count anymore because they’ve no-followed their links, but that’s about it. It’s nothing special.

So today I want to talk through how you can actually build really good links for your customers and what really the framework is that you need to be looking into to make sure you’re risk averse so that your customers can come out of this picture with a stronger link profile and without actually adopting much risk.

1. Never build a link you can’t remove!

So we’re going to touch on a couple of maxims or truisms. The first one is never build a link you can’t remove. I didn’t come upon this one until after Penguin, but it just occurred to me it is such a nightmare to get rid of links. Even with disavow, often it feels better that you can just get the link pulled from the web. Now, with negative SEO as being potentially an issue, admittedly Google is trying to devalue links as opposed to penalize, but still the rule holds strong. Never build a link that you can’t remove.

But how do you do that? I mean you don’t have necessarily control over it. Well, first off, there’s a difference between earnings links and building links. So if you get a link out there that you didn’t do anything for, you just got it because you wrote great content, don’t worry about it. But if you’re actually going to actively link build, you need to follow this rule, and there are actually some interesting ways that we can go about it.

Canonical “burn” pages

The first one is the methodology that I call canonical burn pages. I’m sure that sounds a little dark. But it actually is essentially just an insurance policy on your links. The idea is don’t put all of your content value and link value into the same bucket. It works like this. Let’s say this article or this Whiteboard Friday goes up at the URL risk-averse-links and Moz decided to do some outreach-based link building. Well, then I might make another version, risk-averse-linkbuilding, and then in my out linking actually request that people link to that version of the page. That page will be identical, and it will have a canonical tag so that all of the link value should pass back to the original.

Now, I’m not asking you to build a thousand doorway pages or anything of that sort, but here’s the reason for the separation. Let’s say you reach out to one of these webmasters and they’re like, “This is great,” and they throw it up on a blog post, and what they don’t tell you is, “Oh yeah, I’ve got 100 other blogs in my link farm, and I’m just going to syndicate this out.” Now you’ve got a ton of link spam pointing to the page. Well, you don’t want that pointing to your site. The chances this guy is going to go remove his link from those hundreds if not thousands of pages are very low. Well, the worst case scenario here is that you’ve lost this page, the link page, and you drop it and you create a new one of these burn pages and keep going.

Or what if the opposite happens? When you actually start ranking because of this great content that you’ve produced and you’ve done great link building and somebody gets upset and decides to spam the page that’s ranking with a ton of links, we saw this all the time in the legal sector, which was shocking to me. You would think you would never spam a lawyer, but apparently lawyers aren’t afraid of another lawyer.

But regardless, what we could do in those situations is simply get rid of the original page and leave the canonical page that has all the links. So what you’ve done is sort of divided your eggs into different baskets without actually losing the ranking potential. So we call these canonical burn pages. If you have questions about this, I can talk more about it in the comments.

Know thy link provider

The other thing that’s just stupidly obvious is you should know thy link provider. If you are getting your links from a website that says pay $50 for so and so package and you’ll get x-links from these sources on Tier 2, you’re never going to be able to remove those links once you get them unless you’re using something like a canonical burn page. But in those cases where you’re trying to get good links, actually build a relationship where the person understands that you might need to remove this link in the future. It’s going to mean you lose some links, but in the long run, it’s going to protect you and your customers.

That’s where the selling point becomes really strong. Imagine you’re on a client call, sales call and someone comes to you and they say they want link building. They’ve been burned before. They know what it’s like to get a penalty. They know what it’s like to have somebody tell them, “I just don’t know how to do it.”

Well, what if you can tell them, hey, we can link build for you and we are so confident in the quality of our offering that we can promise you, guarantee that we can remove the links we build for you within 7 days, 14 days, whatever number it ends up taking your team to actually do? That kind of insurance policy that you just put on top of your product is priceless to a customer who’s worried about the potential harm that links might bring.

2. You can’t trade anything for a link (except user value)!

Now this leads me to number two. This is the simplest way to describe following Google’s guidelines, which is you can’t trade anything for a link except user value. Now, I’m going to admit something here. A lot of folks who are watching this who know me know this, but my old company years and years and years ago did a lot of link buying. At the time, I justified it because I frankly thought that was the only way to do it. We had a fantastic link builder who worked for us, and he wanted to move up in the company. We just didn’t have the space for him. We said to him, “Look, it’s probably better for you to just go on your own.”

Within a year of leaving, he had made over a million dollars selling a site that he ranked only using white hat link building tactics because he was a master of outreach. From that day on, just everything changed. You don’t have to cheat to get good links. It’s just true. You have to work, but you don’t have to cheat. So just do it already. There are tons of ways to justify outreach to a website to say it’s worth getting a link.

So, for example, you could

• Build some tools and reach out to websites that might want to link to those tools.
• You can offer data or images.
• Accessibility. Find great content out there that’s inaccessible or isn’t useful for individuals who might need screen readers. Just recreate the content and follow the guidelines for accessibility and reach out to everybody who links to that site. Now you’ve got a reason to say, “Look, it’s a great web page, but unfortunately a certain percentage of the population can’t use it. Why don’t you offer, as well as the existing link, one to your accessible version?”
• Broken link replacement.
• Skyscraper content, which is where you just create fantastic content. Brian Dean over at Backlinko has a fantastic guide to that.

There are just so many ways to get good links.

Let me put it just a different way. You should be embarrassed if you cannot create content that is worth outreach. In fact, that word “embarrassment,” if you are embarrassed to email someone about your content, then it means you haven’t created good enough content. As an SEO, that’s your responsibility. So just sit down and spend some more time thinking about this. You can do it. I’ve seen it happen thousands of times, and you can end up building much better links than you ever would otherwise.

3. Tool up!

The last thing I would say is tool up. Look, better metrics and better workflows come from tools. There are lots of different ways to do this.

First off, you need a good backlink tool. Our new Link Explorer is 29 trillion links strong and it’s fantastic. There’s also Fresh Web Explorer for doing mentions. So you can find websites that talk about you but don’t link. You’re also going to want some tools that might do more specific link prospecting, like LinkProspector.com or Ontolo or BrokenLinkBuilding.com, and then some outreach tools like Pitchbox and BuzzStream.

But once you figure out those stacks, your link building stack, you’re going to be able to produce links reliably for customers. I’m going to tell you, there is nothing that will improve your street cred and your brand reputation than link building. Link building is street cred in our industry. There is nothing more powerful than saying, “Yeah, we built a couple thousand links last year for our customers,” and you don’t have to say, “Oh, we bought,” or, “We outsourced.” It’s just, “We just do link building, and we’re good at it.”

So I guess my takeaway from all of this is that it’s really not as terrible as you think it is. At the end of the day, if you can master this process of link building, your agency will be going from a dime a dozen, where there are 100 in an averaged-sized city in the United States, to being a leading provider in the country just by simply mastering link building. If you follow the first two rules and properly tool up, you’re well on your way.

So I hope to talk more to you in the comments below. If you have any questions, I can refer you to some other guides out there, including some former Whiteboard Fridays that will give you some great link building tips. Hope to talk to you soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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source https://moz.com/blog/risk-averse-link-building

Posted by Dr-Pete

On May 4, Google announced that they were rolling out a new Core Update. By May 7, it appeared that the dust had mostly settled. Here’s an 11-day view from MozCast:

We measured relatively high volatility from May 4-6, with a peak of 112.6° on May 5. Note that the 30-day average temperature prior to May 4 was historically very high (89.3°).

How does this compare to previous Core Updates? With the caveat that recent temperatures have been well above historical averages, the May 2020 Core Update was our second-hottest Core Update so far, coming in just below the August 2018 “Medic” update.

Who “won” the May Core Update?

It’s common to report winners and losers after a major update (and I’ve done it myself), but for a while now I’ve been concerned that these analyses only capture a small window of time. Whenever we compare two fixed points in time, we’re ignoring the natural volatility of search rankings and the inherent differences between keywords.

This time around, I’d like to take a hard look at the pitfalls. I’m going to focus on winners. The table below shows the 1-day winners (May 5) by total rankings in the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set. I’ve only included subdomains with at least 25 rankings on May 4:

Putting aside the usual statistical suspects (small sample sizes for some keywords, the unique pros and cons of our data set, etc.), what’s the problem with this analysis? Sure, there are different ways to report the “% Gain” (such as absolute change vs. relative percentage), but I’ve reported the absolute numbers honestly and the relative change is accurate.

The problem is that, in rushing to run the numbers after one day, we’ve ignored the reality that most core updates are multi-day (a trend that seemed to continue for the May Core Update, as evidenced by our initial graph). We’ve also failed to account for domains whose rankings might be historically volatile (but more on that in a bit). What if we compare the 1-day and 2-day data?

Which story do we tell?

The table below adds in the 2-day relative percentage gained. I’ve kept the same 25 subdomains and will continue to sort them by the 1-day percentage gained, for consistency:

Even just comparing the first two days of the roll-out, we can see that the story is shifting considerably. The problem is: Which story do we tell? Often, we’re not even looking at lists, but anecdotes based on our own clients or cherry-picking data. Consider this story:

If this was our only view of the data, we would probably conclude that the update intensified over the two days, with day two rewarding sites even more. We could even start to craft a story about how demand for apps was growing, or certain news sites were being rewarded. These stories might have a grain of truth, but the fact is that we have no idea from this data alone.

Now, let’s pick three different data points (all of these are from the top 20):

From this limited view, we could conclude that Google decided that the Core Update went wrong and reversed it on day two. We could even conclude that certain news sites were being penalized for some reason. This tells a wildly different story than the first set of anecdotes.

There’s an even weirder story buried in the May 2020 data. Consider this:

LinkedIn showed a minor bump (one we’d generally ignore) on day one and then lost 100% of its rankings on day two. Wow, that May Core Update really packs a punch! It turns out that LinkedIn may have accidentally de-indexed their site — they recovered the next day, and it appears this massive change had nothing to do with the Core Update. The simple truth is that these numbers tell us very little about why a site gained or lost rankings.

How do we define “normal”?

Let’s take a deeper look at the MarketWatch data. Marketwatch gained 19% in the 1-day stats, but lost 2% in the 2-day numbers. The problem here is that we don’t know from these numbers what MarketWatch’s normal SERP flux looks like. Here’s a graph of seven days before and after May 4 (the start of the Core Update):

Looking at even a small bit of historical data, we can see that MarketWatch, like most news sites, experiences significant volatility. The “gains” on May 5 are only because of losses on May 4. It turns out that the 7-day mean after May 4 (45.7) is only a slight increase over the 7-day mean before May 4 (44.3), with MarketWatch measuring a modest relative gain of +3.2%.

Now let’s look at Google Play, which appeared to be a clear winner after two days:

You don’t even need to do the math to spot the difference here. Comparing the 7-day mean before May 4 (232.9) to the 7-day mean after (448.7), Google Play experienced a dramatic +93% relative change after the May Core Update.

How does this 7-day before/after comparison work with the LinkedIn incident? Here’s a graph of the before/after with dotted lines added for the two means:

While this approach certainly helps offset the single-day anomaly, we’re still showing a before/after change of -16%, which isn’t really in line with reality. You can see that six of the seven days after the May Core Update were above the 7-day average. Note that LinkedIn also has relatively low volatility over the short-range history.

Why am I rotten-cherry-picking an extreme example where my new metric falls short? I want it to be perfectly clear that no one metric can ever tell the whole story. Even if we accounted for the variance and did statistical testing, we’re still missing a lot of information. A clear before/after difference doesn’t tell us what actually happened, only that there was a change correlated with the timing of the Core Update. That’s useful information, but it still begs further investigation before we jump to sweeping conclusions.

Overall, though, the approach is certainly better than single-day slices. Using the 7-day before-vs-after mean comparison accounts for both historical data and a full seven days after the update. What if we expanded this comparison of 7-day periods to the larger data set? Here’s our original “winners” list with the new numbers:

Obviously, this is a lot to digest in one table, but we can start to see where the before-and-after metric (the relative difference between 7-day means) shows a different picture, in some cases, than either the 1-day or 2-day view. Let’s go ahead and re-build the top 20 based on the before-and-after percentage change:

Some of the big players are the same, but we’ve also got some newcomers — including sites that looked like they lost visibility on day one, but have stacked up 2-day and 7-day gains.

Let’s take a quick look at Parents.com, our original big winner (winnerer? winnerest?). Day one showed a massive +100% gain (doubling visibility), but day-two numbers were more modest, and before-and-after gains came in at just under half the day-one gain. Here are the seven days before and after:

It’s easy to see here that the day-one jump was a short-term anomaly, based in part on a dip on May 4. Comparing the 7-day averages seems to get much closer to the truth. This is a warning not just to algo trackers like myself, but to SEOs who might see that +100% and rush to tell their boss or client. Don’t let good news turn into a promise that you can’t keep.

Why do we keep doing this?

If it seems like I’m calling out the industry, note that I’m squarely in my own crosshairs here. There’s tremendous pressure to publish analyses early, not just because it equates to traffic and links (frankly, it does), but because site owners and SEOs genuinely want answers. As I wrote recently, I think there’s tremendous danger in overinterpreting short-term losses and fixing the wrong things. However, I think there’s also real danger in overstating short-term wins and having the expectation that those gains are permanent. That can lead to equally risky decisions.

Is it all crap? No, I don’t think so, but I think it’s very easy to step off the sidewalk and into the muck after a storm, and at the very least we need to wait for the ground to dry. That’s not easy in a world of Twitter and 24-hour news cycles, but it’s essential to get a multi-day view, especially since so many large algorithm updates roll out over extended periods of time.

Which numbers should we believe? In a sense, all of them, or at least all of the ones we can adequately verify. No single metric is ever going to paint the entire picture, and before you rush off to celebrate being on a winners list, it’s important to take that next step and really understand the historical trends and the context of any victory.

Who wants some free data?

Given the scope of the analysis, I didn’t cover the May 2020 Core Update losers in this post or go past the Top 20, but you can download the raw data here. If you’d like to edit it, please make a copy first. Winners and losers are on separate tabs, and this covers all domains with at least 25 rankings in our MozCast 10K data set on May 4 (just over 400 domains).

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/googles-may-2020-core-update-winners

Posted by Evan_Hall

If you handed someone a blank sheet of paper and the only thing written on it was the page’s title, would they understand what the title meant? Would they have a clear idea of what the actual document might be about? If so, then congratulations! You just passed the Blank Sheet of Paper Test for page titles because your title was descriptive.

The Blank Sheet of Paper Test (BSoPT) is an idea Ian Lurie has talked about a lot over the years, and recently on his new website. It’s a test to see if what you’ve written has meaning to someone who has never encountered your brand or content before. In Ian’s words, “Will this text, written on a blank sheet of paper, make sense to a stranger?” The Blank Sheet of Paper Test is about clarity without context.

But what if we’re performing the BSoPT on a machine instead of a person? Does our thought experiment still apply? I think so. Machines can’t read—even sophisticated ones like Google and Bing. They can only guess at the meaning of our content, which makes the test especially relevant.

I have an alternative version of the BSoPT, but for machines: If all a machine could see is a list of words that appear in a document and how often, could it reasonably guess what the document is about?

The Blank Sheet of Paper Test for word frequency

If you handed someone a blank sheet of paper and the only thing written on it was this table of words and frequencies, could they guess what the article is about?

An article about sharpening a knife is a pretty good guess. The article I took this word frequency table from was a how-to guide for sharpening a kitchen knife.

What if the words “step” and “how” appeared in the table? Would the person reading be more confident this article is about sharpening knives, or less? Could they tell if this article is about sharpening kitchen knives or pocket knives?

If we can’t get a pretty good idea of what the article is about based on which words it uses, then it fails the BSoPT for word frequency.

Can we still use word frequency for BERT?

Earlier natural language processing (NLP) approaches employed by search engines used statistical analysis of word frequency and word co-occurrence to determine what a page is about. They ignored the order and part of speech of the words in our content, basically treating our pages like bags of words.

The tools we used to optimize for that kind of NLP compared the word frequency of our content against our competitors, and told us where the gaps in word usage were. Hypothetically, if we added those words to our content, we would rank higher, or at least help search engines understand our content better.

Those tools still exist: Market Muse, SEMRush, seobility, Ryte, and others have some sort of word frequency or TD-IDF gap analysis capability. I’ve been using a free word frequency tool called Online Text Comparator, and it works pretty well. Are they still useful now that search engines have advanced with NLP approaches like BERT? I think so, but it’s not as simple as more words = better rankings.

BERT is a lot more sophisticated than a bag-of-words approach. BERT looks at the order of words, part of speech, and any entities present in our content. It’s robust and can be trained to do many things including question answering and named entity recognition—definitely more advanced than basic word frequency.

However, BERT still needs to look at the words present on the page to function, and word frequency is a basic summary of that. Now, word location and part of speech matter more. We can’t just sprinkle the words we found in our gap analysis around the page.

Enhancing content with word frequency tools

To help make our content unambiguous to machines, we need to make it unambiguous to users. Reducing ambiguity in our writing is about choosing words that are specific to the topic we’re writing about. If our writing uses a lot of generic verbs, pronouns, and non-thematic adjectives, then not only is our content bland, it’s hard to understand.

Consider this extreme example of non-specific language:

“The trick to finding the right chef’s knife is finding a good balance of features, qualities and price. It should be made from metal strong enough to keep its edge for a decent amount of time. You should have a comfortable handle that won’t make you tired. You don’t need to spend a lot either. The home cook doesn’t need a fancy $350 Japanese knife.”

This copy isn’t great. It looks almost machine-generated. I can’t imagine a full article written like this would pass the BSoPT for word frequency.

Here’s what the word frequency table looks like with some stop words removed:

Now suppose we used a word frequency tool on a few pages that are ranking well for “how to pick a chef’s knife” and found that these parts of speech were being used fairly often:

Entities: blade, steel, fatigue, damascus steel, santoku, Shun (brand)
Verbs: grip, chopping
Adjectives: perfect, hard, high-carbon

Incorporating these words into our copy would yield text that’s significantly better:

“The trick to finding the perfect chef’s knife is getting the right balance of features, qualities, and price. The blade should be made from steel hard enough to keep a sharp edge after repeated use. You should have an ergonomic handle that you can grip comfortably to prevent fatigue from extending chopping. You don’t need to spend a lot, either. The home cook doesn’t need a $350 high-carbon damascus steel santoku from Shun.”

This upgraded text will be easier for machines to classify, and better for users to read. It’s also just good writing to use words relevant to your topic.

Looking toward the future of NLP

Is improving our content with the Blank Sheet of Paper Test optimizing for BERT or other NLP algorithms? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think there is a special set of words we can add to our content to magically rank higher through exploiting BERT. I see this as a way to ensure our content is understood clearly by both users and machines.

I anticipate that we’re getting pretty close to the point where the idea of optimizing for NLP will be considered absurd. Maybe in 10 years, writing for users and writing for machines will be the same thing because of how far the technology has advanced. But even then, we’ll still have to make sure our content makes sense. And the Blank Sheet of Paper Test will still be a great place to start.

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/blank-sheet-of-paper-test-optimize-natural-language-processing

Posted by Caroline-Forsey

When I first joined HubSpot’s blogging team in January 2018, I loved our writing process. Once a month, we all met in a conference room with a list of ideas on Google Docs which were pitched one-by-one (intricate, I know).

The process was extremely creative, iterative, and collaborative. Of course, it was also often a matter of guess-and-check. Plus, brainstorming can be a bit of a selfish process. The ideas I pitched in those meetings, I pitched in part because I wanted to write them and because I was interested in them as a reader. I could only hope our audience would be interested as well.

While we developed a pulse for understanding what our readers liked from reviewing top viewed posts from the past, our process didn’t enable us to develop content that matched what our potential readers wanted from us.

So, just a few months into 2018, our team pivoted and created a brand new SEO-driven content strategy to address our inability to move forward. Take a look at the organic growth we’ve seen as a result of that strategy over the past two years:

How did we do it? To start, the blogging team partnered with the SEO team. The SEO team now delivers a fresh Search Insights Report (what we’ve come to affectionately call the “SIR”) to us every quarter, which are packed with blog topics vetted for search potential. We diligently move down the list, assigning individual blog topics to be written or updated by writers on the team. From the graph above, you can see the almost immediate growth we expereinced as a result of this new strategy. Within two years, we more than doubled the keywords for which we rank on page one.

As Editor of HubSpot’s Marketing Blog, this left me with a bit of a void. I was thrilled to see the results of the SIRs and recognized how they helped us reach new audiences and rekindle our organic traffic, but, from a personal perspective, I missed the creativity that came with pitching big-risk ideas and watching them pay off. (Believe it or not, articles like “What Is Semi-Structured Data?” wasn’t exactly what I dreamt about publishing when obtaining my English degree.)

However, I’ve learned over the past year that there are ways to remain creative even within a grander, primarily SEO-driven strategy. Here, let’s dive into six tips to ensure you don’t have to sacrifice your own creative freedom for the sake of organic growth.

1. Enlist the help of experts to spark creativity while ensuring posts are still keyword-driven.

A few months ago, I tackled the topic of first versus third party APIs. While I am confident in writing about our product line, “Force quit” is about the extent of my software knowledge (option+command+esc, for those wondering), so I dreaded writing the post. It was both daunting and not particularly inspiring to me as a writer.

Of course, I could’ve written this post the way I’ve written about plenty of other dry topics — by sludging through it, chugging copious amounts of coffee, and listening to Spotify to make it a little more “fun”.

However, when I began writing the post, I wasn’t impressed with my work. Since I didn’t fully grasp the concept, it was surface-level and ambiguous. If a marketer stumbled across it, they wouldn’t learn much.

To solve for this issue, I reached out to a few IT specialists at HubSpot and ended up speaking to two developer support specialists. I even met with one of them via Zoom to further discuss the intricacies of APIs, and recorded the meeting to transcribe later on.

Suddenly, I felt like an investigative reporter. I collected quotes from experts in the field, drafted up a new post that made sense to both myself and the developer support specialists, and published it. I was incredibly proud of the piece because I felt I’d worked as a liaison between the developer world and the marketing world, making the whole concept of APIs a little clearer to my team while ensuring it remained accurate and tactical.

If you’re feeling frustrated by a topic you don’t feel comfortable writing about, don’t hesitate to reach out to experts — even within your own company. Their passion for the subject will fuel your desire to write the piece from a more human angle. Remember, keyword-driven content still leaves plenty of room to angle the piece in a number of interesting directions, as long as the insight you’re providing aligns with the intent of the keyword you’re targeting.

2. Interview leaders in various industries and tell their stories.

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to happiness researcher and speaker Shawn Achor on how happiness leads to success, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson on psychological safety in the workplace, and leadership consultant Simon Hazeldine on using performance psychology to get ahead in the workplace, among many others.

These posts, which enabled me to synthesize complex psychological issues and translate them into tactical strategies for marketers, allowed me to exercise my creative muscle. I interviewed experts via email or on the phone, and used their responses to craft meaningful, coherent narratives. Ultimately, I never felt more “in the flow” than I did when writing these posts.

Your industry undoubtedly has leaders that interest you. If you’re a marketer in the catering or hospitality industries, consider speaking to top chefs in the area. Alternatively, if you’re a marketer for an e-commerce website, try reaching out to e-commerce consultants to get quotes about the future of the industry.

It’s not impossible to align your own interests with business impact, even if those interests are outside the scope of traditional marketing. As someone who’s personally interested in psychology, for instance, I was able to find the intersection between psychology and workplace performance, which helps our readers grow in their own roles.

Including feedback from experts can also give you a competitive advantage in the SERPs. For instance, we published “HubSpot Marketers Give 6 Tips for Fighting Burnout”, on January 20, 2020, and within one month, it already had over 5,000 views. This piece, over time, will likely perform better than a more generic “how to fight burnout” piece without the expert angle.

Ultimately, it’s important to consider who you’re interested in speaking with and how that expert’s experience might align with your audience’s interests, and brainstorm ideas from there.

3. Find the human connection.

As marketers, we’re often tasked with writing about less-than-thrilling topics, particularly if these topics are part of a keyword-driven strategy. For example, take a quick glimpse at some of the pieces we’ve seen on our SIR in the past:

These titles are helpful for our readers, but presenting the information in a creative way becomes difficult. I often tell new writers on the team that you can find an interesting human angle to any topic, no matter how boring it may seem, which makes writing about the topic more exciting and offers more ways for readers to connect with the piece.

The easiest way to find the human angle is to consider the reader’s point of view when searching a topic on Google. Start by asking yourself, “why would I ever search for this topic?”

Searches don’t happen in silos. Nowadays, Google is increasingly trying to continue a “searcher’s journey” through People Also Ask boxes, People Also Search For panels, and Related Search links at the bottom of most SERPs. These features enable searchers to rethink their search and find similar, relevant answers to other questions they might have.

Ultimately, anyone searching for one keyword is searching for that keyword as part of a larger marketing and business strategy. As a content creator, it’s critical you find the bigger picture element and use these new SERP features to tell more creative, holistic stories around the topic at hand.

For instance, recently I wrote a post on how to embed videos in emails. The body of the post itself, I knew, allowed for little creativity — it was essentially a brief step-by-step guide to embedding video. However, I could still find space for creativity in my introduction, and I knew that meant developing empathy for my reader.

I started by imagining the motivation behind any marketer searching “how to embed video in email”. They are likely someone who’s struggling to increase CTR or email subscriptions, so I introduced the topic with a brief, big-picture overview on why email is important for a business’s bottom line (in case you wanted to know, it’s because 87% of businesses use video in their marketing tactics).

Then, I empathize with the reader, acknowledging that sprucing up your emails isn’t always easy, and neither is embedding videos — particularly since major email clients don’t support video embeds.

Suddenly, a topic I’d initially found boring became exciting to me because I could sense the urgency and real-world impact that publishing the piece and answering the reader’s query would have. In essence, what they’re really asking is “How can I continue creating engaging content for my audience?”

That’s a human angle to which I think we can all relate.

4. Use multimedia to freshen up old content.

If you’re struggling with a particularly dry topic, you might evoke creativity by adding multimedia elements like podcasts, YouTube videos, images, or graphs — all of which open up new traffic opportunities since you can generate image traffic through the SERPs as well.

These designs can help you stay engaged when writing the piece, and can also help your post rank on Google, since search engines prefer multimedia components such as images or video.

For instance, we embedded a video in “How to Create An Incredibly Well-Written Executive Summary [+ Example]”. Readers have the option of reading my post, but alternatively, they can watch the discussion take place on-screen.

Of course, multimedia depends on your budget. We aren’t able to add a video to every post we produce. However, there are plenty of simpler forms of multimedia that are free, such as embedded images and graphs.

Additionally, if you’re interested in other aspects of marketing besides writing, this is a good chance to expand your professional portfolio and learn a new skill as well.

5. Frame your content from a unique angle that differentiates it from other search results.

It’s important to note: not all posts need to agree with what’s already on the SERPs for you to rank.

For instance, my colleague Lestraundra wrote “10 Reasons Why You Don’t Need a CRM“. This article currently ranks on page one for the search query “you don’t need a CRM” … but the article actually explains why you do need a CRM, in a playfully sarcastic way.

We managed to rank well while also giving readers something they weren’t expecting. You might consider similar provocative arguments you can make, as the uniqueness (and sometimes controversy) of your writing will enable you to rise up the ranks on the SERPs while providing fresh, interesting content to your audience.

6. Engage with your readers in real life whenever possible.

On one particularly uninspiring day, I set up a 30-minute chat with a customer to learn more about her personal marketing challenges.

As we spoke, I realized how out-of-touch I’d become with some of our readers’ primary struggles. For instance, she was a team of one, which meant while she understood the importance of blogging, she didn’t always have time to develop an in-depth strategy since she was juggling content creation for social media, email marketing, and PR for her small business.

When I got back to my desk, I had no problem writing my assigned post about free social media analytics tools, because I understood the real-world importance of this post for that reader’s daily life. Ultimately, she didn’t have time to research the pros and cons of various tools, and she didn’t have a budget for anything fancy. The inspiration and creativity I felt that day derived from my in-person interaction with my reader.

Of course, it’s not always possible to set up a call with a customer, but there are plenty of other options for engaging with readers. For instance, you might consider creating a poll for your social media audience, engaging with readers in a Twitter chat, or sending a survey to your readers in an email newsletter to learn more about what they want from your brand.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it can be difficult to stay creative when your department is primarily focused on using technical SEO to achieve major goals. And, of course, you’d never want to entirely forgo SEO for the sake of creativity, since that prevents you from reaching a larger audience and ensuring your content is useful and actionable for your readers.

Nonetheless, if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past two years as a result of our new strategy, it’s that analytics and creativity can, indeed, work hand-in-hand. Ideally, with these six tips, you’ll be able to inspire some creativity in your daily process. Feel free to comment below with your own thoughts — I’d love to hear them!

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stay-creative-seo-content-strategy

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Smart keyword research forms the basis of all successful SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard shares the basics of a winning keyword research process that you can learn and master in a short amount of time.

Bonus: Be sure not to miss Cyrus’s upcoming webinar, Build a Winning Keyword Strategy: Start-to-Finish on May 21, 2020 at 10am PST:

Save my spot

You’ll walk through his keyword research process start-to-finish with real keywords, topics, and websites to create a complete keyword research strategy. It’s a great follow-up to this Whiteboard Friday!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday talking about keyword research today. Now keyword research, you know how important it is, and it forms the basis of all successful SEO. People who are good at keyword research and having a good research strategy, that often makes the difference between winning and having an SEO campaign that just goes nowhere. 

I love keyword research because we all have an idea of what we think we want to rank for, right, but when you use keyword research, you can use data to find opportunities and surprises that you didn’t even know existed. So I want to dispel a myth about keyword research. A lot of people think it’s about finding the right tool, and you enter the keyword into a tool and you get a list.

Technically, that is keyword research, and that’s a fine starting point. But it’s not so much about the tool. It’s about a process. It’s about a process of creating a strategy for your entire website and finding those winning keywords that you can rank for and getting traffic from that are relevant to your business. So it’s more than just a tool.

It’s a process. There are entire guides and webinars about this. But I think we can simplify it. In the next few minutes, I want to show you the basics of a winning keyword research process that I think you can start to master in just a few minutes and get the fundamentals. In fact, I did write a guide about this. We’ll talk about it at the end of the video. It’s completely available. 

But I want to go over the basics so you can start to get an understanding of the process that will help you win with keyword research. 

1. Seed keywords

So first of all, a concept that you are probably familiar with is the idea of seed keywords. We call them seeds because they help grow your keyword list and expand it. Seed keywords are more important than people think, and I’ll tell you why you in just a second.

So many tools will give you seed keywords. But I want to dismiss the idea of thinking in terms of tools for just a second. When researching seed keywords, I propose that you think of it in terms of questions, questions that you want to ask yourself. 

a. What do I want to rank for?

The first is simply, “What do I want to rank for?” In this hypothetical example, our client sells calligraphy pens.

They’re like, “Cyrus, I want to rank for calligraphy pens.” That’s great. That will be your starting point, your first seed keyword. 

b. What do I already rank for?

So a second question you can ask is, “What do I already rank for?” Well, let’s say the client has an existing website. They sell some pens. Maybe they do well, maybe they don’t.

So we want to dig into the data of what is already sending them traffic, and we can do this with a lot of keyword research tools — Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush. I prefer Moz, 500 million keywords, it’s a great set. But you can use whatever you want. So you want to search keywords by site or keywords by URL. We can enter our client’s site and see that, oh, they rank for “pen starter kit.”

Their rank is number one. It only receives 10 visits a month, so maybe that’s not such a good seed keyword. But “best calligraphy pen,” they rank number 8, 500 visits a month. “Calligraphy supplies,” 14th, 750 visits a month. Those are excellent seed keywords. So we’re going to make note of those and use them a little later in the process.

You can also get this data from Google Search Console, rank and volume. Wherever you get it from, these are what you want to search for great keywords that you already rank for, but maybe not number one, with good search volume. 

c. What do my competitors rank for?

Finally, let’s say you don’t have an existing website, or you’re starting a new project from scratch.

You don’t have a lot of existing data. You want to ask, “What do my competitors rank for or the top ranking sites?” So I might Google “calligraphy pens” and see who ranks number one. Pop it into Keyword Explorer and see all their ranking keywords here and start to find the good seed keywords. So I can see that they rank for “calligraphy kit” — that sounds pretty relevant — 750 visits a month.

“Pen starter,” not so much. I’d probably throw that one out. “Learn calligraphy,” that’s a great seed keyword. I’m going to make note of that, 1,200 visits a month. You can get seed keywords from literally any keyword tool. Some of our favorites, beyond Keyword Explorer: 

• Google Trends
• Answer the Public
• People Also Ask

Anywhere you want to get your seed keywords, that’s where you form the basis of your list. 

2. List building

So next we’re going to start building our list. Seed keywords move into list building. So this is where we want to use a robust keyword research tool, such as Moz, Ahrefs, or whatever you want. We’re entering our seed keywords “calligraphy pens.”

We’re going to get a list of keywords, sorted by relevance and volume. Now there are many metrics in keyword research, such as keyword difficulty, click-through rate, importance, things like that. For right now, we only want to be concerned with two metrics — relevance and volume.

You can concern yourself with the other metrics a little later when we’re sorting and filtering. But right now, we want to find more seed keywords. That’s the key difference here in this process. We’re not just finding related keywords. We’re finding more seed keywords. We’re reiterating. So “calligraphy pen set,” highly relevant.

Five means highly relevant. Volume of 100. All right, we’re going to mark that. That becomes a new seed. “Calligraphy Amazon,” okay, that only has a three relevance score. Unless you’re Amazon, that’s probably not the most relevant keyword. We’re going to cross it off the list.

“Calligraphy fonts.” “Calligraphy pens price,” well, that’s great. “Calligraphy ink,” great with high volume. So what we have done now is we have collected more seeds, and we’re going to throw those seeds back in and discover even more related keywords, more seeds. In other words, we’re going to start building out our list.

That’s the process. Not just get a list of related keywords, but you’re finding more seeds. When you find more seeds, continually do this, these become new pages of your site or a new entire content section. So we could have a section on calligraphy ink. We could have a page on price. We’re going to group these in our spreadsheets together, and every time we find a new seed, it can become a new topic, a new page, a new idea.

The idea is you want to find as many seeds as possible. 

3. Competitor analysis

So when we get these seeds, we’re going to reinsert them back, but we’re also going to do one final step that a lot of people forget or just don’t realize, and that is the competitive analysis. The keyword tool is going to find a lot. Moz Keyword Explorer does a particularly excellent, excellent job of this.

But if you’re not using Keyword Explorer, one thing I like to do is I’ll take my seed keyword, “calligraphy ink,” and I’ll put it into Google and I’ll see who’s ranking in the top 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 positions. I’ll look specifically for sites that specialize in this. I might throw out Amazon or things like that.



But Ink Warehouse, Shop Calligraphy Inks, I’ll take this page and I’ll put it in Keyword Explorer, keywords by site or URL, and I’ll get all the other keywords that this page or site ranks for, because they’ve undoubtedly tried a lot of content. They know what works, what doesn’t work.

I’ll find new seeds that way. So I can see that Ink Warehouse ranks for “best calligraphy ink,” and that’s a good one. “Calligraphy ink set,” great new seed keyword. “Calligraphy ink bottle,” another great seed keyword. So then, we have new seeds, new pages, new topics. We can take these and start the process again, and we do this over and over and over again until we have a complete set of keywords for every page, every conceivable ranking position, and we can start to build a strategy out from that.

After this, we can start to sort and filter by keyword volume and difficulty and things like that. But that’s a process for another time. So I’ve documented this strategy and so much more in a brand-new keyword research guide, “The Master Guide to Keyword Research.” We just released it. It’s available free. It covers this topic in depth, and we try to make these concepts as easy as possible to help you win SEO. We’re going to link to it below. You can download it and let me know what you think. 

Read the new guide

So I hope you learned something today. If you liked this video, please share it with anybody that you can. It would be a great favor to me. Okay. Until next time, thanks, everybody.

Best of luck with your SEO.

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/winning-seo-with-keyword-research

Posted by MiriamEllis

The poet Burns once observed that the best laid plans “gang aft agley.” At Moz, we were about to publish our State of Local SEO industry report, based on our local search marketing survey to which hundreds of you generously replied. Then the public health emergency unexpectedly arose, and we decided to pause in our planning.

The findings of the survey, as they currently stand, contain valuable and surprising insights which are as relevant today as they were pre-COVID-19. Yet, in order to reflect the substantial changes the local business community is currently weathering, we are reaching out to you with a timely additional request.

If you market local businesses in any capacity, whether in-house or for an agency, please take our quick, supplementary six-question survey. Your answers will help everyone gauge the impacts of the past few weeks on our industry, and hopefully help in planning for the future. We would be so grateful for just a few minutes of your time to be sure the final report reflects the full picture of local business marketing.

Take the Survey Now

Thank you for your time, and please know that all of us at Moz are wishing your local businesses and agencies well!

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/covid19-local-search-marketing-business-impact-survey

Posted by Dr-Pete

We want to fix things and believe we’re in control. When your house is filling with water, you grab a bucket. If there’s a hole in your roof, the bucket might help. If your sink is overflowing, the bucket is distracting you from the real problem. If the river is overflowing, that distraction could be deadly.

When traffic is falling, it’s easy to panic and focus on what you can control. Traffic isn’t just a nice-to-have — it puts food on the table and the roof over your head that keeps the water out. In the rush to solve the problem, though, we often don’t take the time to validate the problem we’re solving. Fixing the wrong problem is at best a waste of time and money, but at worst could deepen the crisis.

In any crisis, and especially a global one, the first question you need to ask is: is it just me, or is it the whole world? The answer won’t magically solve your problems, but it can keep you from making costly mistakes and start you on the path to a solution. Let’s start with a fundamental question:

(1) Did your traffic really drop?

My “fundamental” question might sound like a stupid question, especially given the wide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s important to remember that traffic fluctuates all the time — there are weekends and seasonality and plain, old regression to the mean. What goes up must come down, and as much as we’d like it to be true, business is not perpetually up and to the right.

Using Google Analytics, let’s consider some ways we can validate a traffic drop. Here’s four weeks of GA data (March 1-28) for a site which was seriously impacted by COVID-19:

Given the known timeline of COVID-19 (the WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11), this is about as clean a picture of a traffic drop in the presence of a known cause as you’re going to get. Most situations are far messier. Even here, we’ve got the impact of weekends and day-to-day fluctuations. One quick way to get a cleaner view is to summarize the data by week (make sure your date-range covers full weeks, or this data will be skewed).

The trend is much clearer now. In a two week period, this site lost more than half of its traffic. I’m restricting the timeline for clarity, but as we gather more data, we can validate the trend pretty easily. The graph above covers all traffic sources. From an SEO perspective, let’s add in a traffic segment for Google traffic:

This graph is just eight data points, but it tells us a lot. First, we can clearly see the trend. Second, we can see that the trend is almost identical for both Google traffic and overall traffic. Third, we can see that this site is very dependent on Google for traffic. Don’t underestimate what you can learn from small data, if it’s the right data.

This isn’t meant to be a GA primer, but let’s look at one last question: Is this traffic drop seasonal? Usually, your own industry experience and intuition would come into play, but one quick way to spot this is to compare year-over-year traffic. One note: match your full weeks so that you’re covering the same amount of weekdays vs weekends. In this case, I’ve shifted the 2019 range to the four full weeks of March 3-30 …

This isn’t the easiest graph to read, and I probably wouldn’t put it in a report to a client, but you can see from the green and purple lines that both overall traffic and Google traffic for this site were relatively flat last year during March. This really does seem to be an unusual situation. Even if we knew nothing about the context and COVID-19, we could tell from just a few minutes of analysis that something serious is going on here.

(1b) Did your rankings drop?

As a search marketer, and given that we’ve clearly measured a Google traffic drop, the next question is whether this drop was due to a loss of rankings (we’ll get to other explanations in a moment). In Moz Pro, one quick way to assess overall weekly search visibility is to use either the main view under “Rankings” or go to the “Competition” tab. I like the competitive view, because you can quickly see if any changes impacted your broader industry …

I’ve simplified this view a little bit (and removed the site’s and competitors’ names for privacy reasons), but the basic story is clear — neither the site in question nor its competitors seemed to have any drop in visibility during March.

For a richer view, go back to the “Rankings” tab and select “Rankings” (instead of “Search Visibility”) from the drop-down. You’ll see a graph that looks something like this …

This visualization takes some getting used to, but it contains a wealth of information. The bars represent total ranking keywords/phrases, and the color blocks show you the ranking range (see the legend). Here we can see that overall rankings have been relatively stable, with even some small gains in the #1-3 bucket.

If your account is connected to Google Analytics, you can also overlay traffic during the same period, which is shown by the dark gray line. Dual-scale graphs can get tricky, but this visualization really makes it clear that there’s a mismatch between the traffic drop for this site and their search rankings.

(2) Did Google do something?!

Usually, when we ask [demand / shout / sob] this question, we mean “Did Google do something to the algorithm to make my life miserable?” We can argue about whether Google is trying to make your life miserable at another time (preferably, when the bars re-open), but the core question is valid. Did Google change the algorithmic rules in a way that’s negatively impacting your site?

For large-scale algorithm updates, you can check our own Google Algorithm History page. For smaller/daily updates, you can check our MozCast research project. While having a gut-check against major changes can be very useful, the messy truth is that Google rankings are a real-time phenomenon that’s changing minute-by-minute. In 2018 alone, Google reported 3,234 “improvements” to search.

Keep in mind that all Google algorithm tracking tools are based, to some degree, on fluctuations in rankings. In our example scenario, we’re not seeing ranking shifts. Let’s pretend, though, that we have seen a traffic drop with a corresponding ranking drop, and we’re trying to determine if it’s just us or if something changed with Google.

Here’s a graph of MozCast data from my analysis of the January 2020 Core Update …

In this case, we’ve got a pretty clear three-day period of ranking fluctuations. If our traffic dropped during this period, it’s not absolute proof that an algorithm update is to blame, but it’s a solid, educated guess and a useful starting point.

Let’s look at the two weeks around when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic …

I’ve kept the same scale and 30-day average reference (from a relatively quiet period early this year). Note that algorithmic activity (i.e. ranking flux) is way up compared to the period before and after the January Core Update. One day (March 18) doesn’t even fit on the scale of the original graph and came in at 104°F on MozCast.

What does all of this mean? It’s possible that Google is changing the algorithm rapidly to address the broader changes in the world, but I strongly suspect that the world itself is impacting this flux. Sites are changing rapidly, adding and removing products and content, news sources have dramatically shifted their coverage, and some businesses are closing completely. On top of that, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift in searcher and consumer behavior.

Algorithm flux can be a useful answer to the question “Is it just me, or is it Google?” during normal times, but all that it’s telling us right now is that the world has turned upside-down. While that’s an accurate assessment, it’s not particularly helpful. If you’d like to hear more about the impact of COVID-19 on Google rankings, check out “SEOs talk COVID-19 search disruption” from Barry Schwartz with myself, Marie Haynes, Olga Andrienko, and Mordy Oberstein.

If traffic has dropped, but rankings haven’t, it’s also possible that the behavior of searchers has changed. We can get some insights into this by using Google Search Console. Here’s the graph of total clicks for our example site from March 1-28 (corresponding with the GA data) …

As expected, total clicks on Google results show roughly the same trend as Google organic traffic in GA. Total clicks are a function of two variables, though: (1) search impressions, and (2) click-through rate (CTR). Let’s look at those individually. Here’s the graph of total impressions for the same time period …

Now we’re getting somewhere — there’s an overall drop in impressions. This isn’t just about the example site, but searcher behavior before they even see or click on that site. People are searching less for the phrases that drive traffic to our example site. Finally, let’s look at CTR …

CTR has also dropped, even a bit steeper than impressions. This is a bit harder to interpret. Knowing what we know, it’s likely that people are clicking less because of overall lack of interest. This is consistent with the COVID-19 scenario. People are less likely to be looking for the service this site offers. On the other hand, it could be that something about the site or the competitive landscape has changed that’s driving down CTR.

If you see a CTR drop without a corresponding impression drop, review recent changes to the site, especially changes that could impact what’s displayed in search results (including your TITLE tags and META descriptions). In this case, though, it’s reasonable to assume that we’re looking at an overall drop in demand.

(3) Has the world gone mad?

Spoiler alert: yes, yes it has.

The Google Search Console data above has already suggested that we’re seeing a shift in the wider world and searcher behavior, but if you want to get outside of your own data, you can explore the world a bit with Google Trends. For example, here’s a Google Trends search for “movie tickets” for March 1-28 …

Not surprisingly, searcher interest in movie tickets declined sharply after the COVID-19 outbreak. People who aren’t going to movies aren’t going to be searching for showtimes and ticket prices. Google Trends data can be spotty in the long-tail, and we can’t necessarily attribute a trend to an event, but non-brand trends are a good supporting data point for whether your traffic drop is isolated to your site or is impacting your broader industry.

One final tip — everything discussed in this post can also be used to explore a traffic increase. Even during COVID-19, traffic has gone up for many topics and sites. For example, here’s the Google Trends data for “how to cut hair” from the same March 1-28 time period …

Whether or not cutting your own hair is a good idea, people are definitely showing more interest in the topic (I admit I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos myself). We don’t typically dive deep into traffic increases — it’s too easy to just sit back and take the credit. I think this is a big mistake. Understanding whether a traffic increase was driven by changes you made or broader market shifts can help you understand what you’ve done right so that you can replicate that success.

The big picture is everything

Over the last few years, I’ve heard more people say things like “I don’t care about traffic, I care about conversions!” or “I don’t care about Google rankings, as long as I’m getting traffic!” Our gradual move toward bottom-of-funnel metrics makes sense — we’re all trying to make a living. Taken to extreme, though, we lose valuable information. Focusing on conversions is certainly better than focusing on “hits” a la 1998, but no single metric tells the whole story.

Let’s say that the only thing you track is leads. Leads are where the money is. Sales are up, leads are up, times are good. Great. Inevitably, disaster strikes (even if it’s a minor disaster), and your leads drop. What do you do? You’ve cut off your ability to read anything but the last chapter of the story. You know how it ends, but you don’t know how you got there. Without understanding the path from leads back to visits back to rankings back to impressions, you’re not going to see the whole story, and you’re not going to know where things went wrong.

Even when times are good, this approach is short-sighted. Sales-focused culture creates a tendency to celebrate the wins and not ask too many questions. If traffic is going up, why is it going up? What content or keywords are driving that traffic? What industry trends are driving that traffic? If you can answer those questions, you can replicate success. If you can’t, then you’re going to have to start from scratch as soon as the celebration ends (and the celebration always ends).

It may be cold comfort to know that your entire industry or the whole world is suffering with you, but I hope that this process at least prevents you from fixing the wrong things and making costly mistakes. Ideally, this process can help you uncover areas that may be trending upward or at least help you focus your time and money on what’s working.

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!

source https://moz.com/blog/diagnosing-traffic-drops-during-a-crisis

Posted by KristinTynski

For the last decade, I’ve touted the enormous long-term value of a dualistic approach to content marketing for SEO.

By leveraging data-centered campaigns, paired with personalized outreach to top publishers, we regularly garner earned media placements for our clients.

In rare cases, we create content that generates results so far beyond what was anticipated that a single project can greatly move the needle.

I’m going to walk through one such instance to reveal how it all works together, what can be learned from this experience, and the type of result it can achieve.

While typically you need to invest in ongoing content generation and promotion, extraordinary examples like these demonstrate the impact this kind of work has over the long-term.

Content marketing + digital PR case study: ADT

ADT is a household name with good domain authority, providing a great base to start from.

We knew that the content we’d create would likely have a leg up in terms of ranking potential, especially if that content addressed many potential high-intent keywords.

Content production

After speaking with ADT, we determined our joint goal was to create a piece of content that could earn dozens to hundreds of links from top publishers, with another focus on earning links from local news publications.

The client had the idea to create a crime map tool for ADT.com, and it fit the bill for everything we typically look for in a piece of content. But for the purpose of this article, I’ll examine what makes it ideal.

Say you were starting from scratch. You can start with a simple Google search of “crime,” which would serve as a reminder of how localized the topic is.

Just from this search alone, you can identify the desire for crime maps specifically, and you can consider why someone would search for a crime map:

• To identify crime in their area
• To investigate the crime in places they’re looking to visit
• To investigate the crime in places they’re looking to move

Because people might not want to know just about the areas right around where they live, it was a strong idea to create a comprehensive, interactive crime mapping tool that gives users the ability to search local areas and see detailed, local-level crime statistics.

This concept had a high chance of success for other reasons as well, including:

1. It has a practical use. Not all content necessarily needs to be practical — it depends on the industry you’re in and whether you can get by with entertainment value. If it’s not practical, it should reveal insights that speak to the human experience and inform a reader about their context in the world. We actually added this element in the crime map project by building in functionality where you can compare the crime rate in your area to national averages.

However, having a practical element (or actionable advice) means your content has built-in value. It communicates that you care about the person reading it, and they engage with the content more because they feel like they can do something with the information.

2. It’s data-based, making it authoritative and accurate. It’s very difficult these days to pitch publishers anything that isn’t data-based. Not only does it add credibility to what you’re working on, but showing that you did your research also indicates that you’re an authority (or becoming an authority) on the subject. I’ll dive into more on this toward the end of the article.

3. The data can be tailored to countless local angles. If your goal is to build as many valuable links and as much general brand awareness as possible, you should always consider how to localize your content. 

This has to happen at the beginning when you’re collecting your data. Ask yourself: Is the data set comprehensive enough that insights about different segments, like geographic locations, can be gathered? The more people who can connect with and “see” themselves in your content by having it be as personalized as possible, the better.

4. It invokes emotions like safety and concern for loved ones. Tapping into emotional concepts is always a good strategy when creating content. Crime and security inherently come with some obvious emotions: fear, concern, pride in protecting your family, etc. If you’re in a niche that doesn’t seem to have straightforward ties to emotion, ask yourself these questions to reveal the emotions at work in the background:

• Why do people care about this?
• What is our audience’s biggest struggle?
• What might our audience worry most about?

For example, while it doesn’t seem so on the surface, personal finance can be extremely emotional. It involves the way people lead their lives and is tied to the guilt of not saving enough, the pride of being on top of their finances, the fear they won’t have enough money to retire, etc. No matter what vertical you’re in, there are emotions involved, and tapping into them with empathy can make your content exponentially more compelling and helpful.

5. As a security company, it makes perfect sense for ADT to be the brand that’s offering a resource where people can check the crime rates all over the country. When you have this sort of brand alignment with an idea, it’s clear to publishers and readers alike why the brand created it, and it helps build trust.

Always consider these types of criteria when you move forward on a content concept.

Digital PR

Because of the local/regional aspect of the interactive, our outreach approach was to pitch regional news publishers with the exclusive coverage.

We customized pitches for publishers by state for our initial outreach. Here is a sample pitch similar to the one that successfully landed coverage:

Hi [Website Name] team,

In the wake of natural disasters like Hurricane Florence, fears of looting and other forms of crime are often heightened. The newly released ADT crime map wants residents to be aware of crime hot spots in their neighborhoods and use precautionary measures to prevent being victims of crime, especially during hurricane season.

The interactive map allows users to look up specific crime data and compare it to national averages to determine how much crime is happening in their area. For example, Florida’s overall crime rate is 1.21x higher than the national average. That said, the murder rate is relatively low when compared to the rest of the nation (0.03x less).

To explore your city using the ADT Crime Map, please visit https://www.adt.com/crime.

Interested in covering this so that your readers can stay as safe as possible under any circumstance? If so, feel free to use this press release or graphics from the map. We just ask that you attribute ADT by linking to the Crime Map somewhere in your coverage.

Best,

[Your Name]

Each pitch was personalized by adjusting the first and second paragraph to include locally relevant details for that area.

This regional outreach strategy had a high chance of success because:

• The content was highly relevant to local news publishers
• Local news publications are often the best syndicators
• We put together a new, exclusive resource that many consumers would find helpful
• Offering content as an exclusive makes it especially newsworthy and appealing to writers

In this case, the exclusive was given to ABCActionNews.com, a Tampa Bay, Florida ABC affiliate.

Luckily, the publisher liked the story so much, they decided to include it in that day’s nightly news coverage. As one of the largest local news affiliates in that area, this coverage was likely seen on over 25,000 local televisions.

We continued pitching the story, attempting to exhaust our pitch list and support syndication of the exclusive picked up by ABCActionNews.com.

After roughly a month, we compiled a report on all coverage and syndications. We were happy to report to our client that the story was picked up by dozens of local news publishers, eventually generating links from 127 unique linking domains per Ahrefs.

The impact on search

A graph of acquired links shows a very organic progression — something we see often when a story syndicates well across many domains.

Almost immediately the page began ranking — likely a result of the ADT site’s awesome existing domain authority, topical relevance of the project related to the domain, and the massive injection of new unique links to the crime maps page.

Don’t have high domain authority?

While having an authoritative brand can make this whole strategy a bit easier, that doesn’t mean it can’t work for you if you are newer or are trying to keep up with huge, household-name competitors.

It just means it’s even more important that you use data-focused content. We’ve always thought that using data as a foundation for content was the best way to build authority, but a recent study we did with BuzzStream about authoritative content confirmed that.

Having an authoritative methodology can increase the chances people trust your content — and thus your brand — by extension. And when you’re trying to get attention in competitive spaces, every authority signal matters.

Regarding promotions, all of the tips I’ve provided in this article should work for you. Perhaps when pitching, you can provide a sentence or two describing your brand. It’s also best practice to have someone at your company, either the person who knows the most about the topic or the person who did the research, ready to answer questions that writers may have about the content.

But in general, promotional success will be heavily based on the quality of the content you’re pitching, especially if the writer isn’t familiar with who you are.

Conclusion

Is this type of strategy easy? No. It’s much simpler to pay for links or churn out quick blog posts.

But if you’re looking for long-lasting, sustainable, never-to-be-penalized, link-and-authority-building content, this is your best route.

As we can see here, a combination of existing domain authority, an injection of a large number of new high-authority links, and a topically relevant/related piece of content for the brand can generate huge numbers of new ranking keywords extremely quickly.

If you don’t have that level of domain authority, don’t worry! This strategy can still work for you — just don’t expect it to happen overnight (as that’s so rarely the case for anyone).

It’s an investment, but as we’ve seen time and time again, it pays off exponentially.

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source https://moz.com/blog/adt-keyword-ranking-case-study