Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '[Infographic] The Secrets of a
Killer Blog Post'
These days, just about everyone has their own blog. With an estimated 2 million
blog posts being posted online every single day (I know, crazy right!?), knowing
the secrets of creating a killer blog post is more important than ever if you
truly want your blog to be successful. It doesnt matter what industry youre
[][Infographic] The Secrets of a Killer Blog Post is a post from: Convince and
Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing-2/infographic-the-secrets-of-a-killer-blog-post/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=infographic-the-secrets-of-a-killer-blog-post
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday, 19 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] The Shape of Things to Come: Google in 2014
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Shape of Things to Come:
Google in 2014'
Posted by gfiorelli1
We can't imagine the future without first understanding the past.
In this post, I will present what I consider the most relevant events we
experienced this year in search, and will try to paint a picture of things to
come by answering this question: How will Google evolve now that it has acquired
Wavii, Behav.io, PostRank, and Grapple, along with machine learning and neural
computing technology?
The future of Google will be based on entity search, semantic search, and
¼ber-personalization, and all the technologies it acquired will interact
with one another in order to shape the Google we will experience in 2014. I'll
show you how to deal with it.
The past
Last year, in my "preview" post The Cassandra Memorandum, besides presenting
my predictions on what would have been the search marketing landscape during
this 2013, I presented a funny prophecy from a friend of mine: the "Balrog
Update," an algorithm that, wrapped in fire, would have crawled the web,
penalizing and incinerating sites which do not include the anchor text "click
here" at least seven times and do not include a picture of a kitten asleep in a
basket.
Thinking back, though, that hilarious preview wasn't incorrect at all.
In the past three years, we've had all sorts of updates from Google: Panda,
Penguin, Venice, Top-Heavy, EMD, (Not Provided) and Hummingbird (and that's just
its organic search facet).
Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and other inbound marketing outlets also had their
share of meaningful updates.
For many SEOs (and not just for them), organic search especially has become a
sort of Land of Mordor...
For this reason, and because I see so often in the Q&A, in tweets sent to me,
or in requests for help popping up in my inbox, how many SEOs feel discouraged
in their daily work by all these frenzied changes, before presenting my vision
of what we need to expect in Search in 2014, I thought it was better to have our
own war speech.
Somehow we need it:
(Clip from the "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" by Peter
Jackson, distributed by Warner Bros)
A day may come when the courage of SEOs fails. But it is not this day.
A methodology
"I give you the light of Earendil ... May it be a light for you in dark
places,
when all other lights go out."
Even if I'm interested in large-scale correlation tests like the Moz Search
Engine Ranking Factors, in reality I am convinced that the science in which we
best excel is that of hindsight.
For example, when Caffeine was introduced, almost no one imagined that that
magnification of the SERPs would have meant its deterioration too.
Probably not even Google had calculated the side effects of that epochal
infrastructural change, and only the obvious decline in the quality of the SERPs
(who remembers this post by Rand) led to Panda, Penguin, and EMD.
But we understood just after they rolled out that Panda and Co. were needed
consequences of Caffeine (and of spammers' greed).
And despite my thinking that every technical marketer (as SEOs and social
media marketers are) should devote part of their time to conducting experiments
that test their theories, actually the best science we tend to apply is the
science of inference.
AuthorRank is a good example of that. Give us a Patent, give us some new
mark-up and new social-based user profiling, and we will create a new theory
from scratch that may include some fundamentals but is not proven by the facts.
Hindsight and deduction, however, are not to blame. On the contrary; if
done wisely, reading into the news (albeit avoiding paranoid theories) can help
us perceive with some degree of accuracy what the future of our industry may be,
and can prepare us for the changes that will come.
While we were distracted...
While we were distractedâfirst by the increasingly spammy nature of
Google and, secondly, by the updates Google rolled out to fight those same
spammy SERPsâBig G was silently working on its evolution.
Our (justified) obsession with the Google zoo made us underestimate what
were actually the most relevant Google "updates:" the Knowledge Graph, Google
Now, and MyAnswers.
The firstâwhich has become a sort of new obsession for us
SEOsâwas telling us that Google didn't need an explicit query for showing
us relevant information, and even more importantly, that people could stay
inside Google to find that information.
The second was a clear declaration of which field Google is focusing its
complete interest on: mobile.
The third, MyAnswers, tells us that Personalizationâor, better,
¼ber-personalizationâis the present and future of Google.
MyAnswers, recently rolled out in the regional Googles, is a good example
of just how much we were distracted. Tell me: How many of you still talk about
SPYW? And how many of you know that its page now redirects to the MyAnswers one?
Try it: www.google.com/insidesearch/features/plus/â.
What about Hummingbird?
Yes, Hummingbird, the update no SEO noticed was rolled out.
Hummingbird, as I described in my latest post here on Moz, is an
infrastructural update that essentially governs how Google understands a query,
applying to all the existing "ranking factors" (sigh) that draw the SERPs.
From the very few things we know, it is based over the synonym dictionaries
Google was already using, but applies a concept based analysis over them where
entities (both named and search) and "word coupling" play a very important role.
But, still, Google is attending primary school and must learn a lot, for
instance not confusing Spain with France when analyzing the word "tapas" (or
Italy with the USA for "pizza"):
But we also know that Google has bought DNNresearch Inc. and its deep
neural networks, which had gained great experience in machine learning with
Panda, and that people like Andrew Ng moved from the Google X team to the
Knowledge Team (the same of Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts), so it is quite
probable that Google will be a very disciplined student and will learn very
fast.
The missing pieces of the "future" puzzle
As with any other infrastructural change, Hummingbird will lead to visible
changes. Some might already be here (the turmoil in the Local Search as
described by David Mihm), but the most interesting ones are still to come.
Do you want to know what they are? Then watch and listen to what Oren
Etzioni of Wavii (bought by Google last April 2013) says in this video:
As well described by Bill Slawski here:
The [open information] extraction approach identifies nouns and how they
might be related to each other by the verbs that create a relationship between
them, and rates the quality of those relationships. A âclassifierâ
determines how trustworthy each relationship might be, and retains only the
trustworthy relationships.
These terms within these relationships (each considered a
âtupleâ) are stored in an inverted index that can be used to respond
to queries.
So, it can improve the usage of the immense Knowledge Base of Google, along
with the predictive answers to queries based on context. Doesn't all this remind
you what we already see in the SERPs?
Moreover, do you see the connection with Hummingbird and how it can link
together the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, and MyAnswers; and ultimately also
determine how classic organic results (and ads) will be shown to the users over
a pure entity-based and semantic analysis, where links will still play a role,
but not be so overly determinant?
So, if I have to preview the news that will shake our industry in 2014, I
would look to the path Wavii has shown us, but also especially to the solutions
that Google finds for answering the questions Etzioni himself was presenting in
the video above as the challenges Wavii still needed to solve.
But another acquisition may hide the key to those questions: the team from
Behav.io.
I say team, because Google did not buy Behav.io as a society, but the
entire team, which became part of the Google Now area.
What was the objective of Behav.io? It was looking at how peoplesâ
locations, networks of phone contacts, physical proximity, and movement
throughout the day could help in predicting a range of behaviors.
More over, Behav.io was based over the smart analysis of the all the data
the sensors in our smartphones could tell about us. Not only GPS data (have you
ever looked at your Location History?), but also the speakers/microphones, the
proximity detection between two or more sensors, which apps we use and which we
download and discard, the lighting sensors, browser history (no matter which
search engines we use), the accelerometer, SMS...
You can imagine how Google could use all this information: Again, for
enhancing the predictive solution of any query that could matter to us. The
repercussions of this technology will be obvious for Google Now, but also for
MyAnswers, which substantially is very similar to Google Now in its purposes.
The ability to understand app usage could allow Google to create an
interest graph for each one of us, which could enhance the "simple"
personalization offered by our web history. For instance, I usually read the
news directly from the official apps of the newspapers and magazines I like, not
from Google News or a browser. I also read 70% of the posts I'm interested in
from my Feedly app. All that information would normally not be accessible by
Google, but now that it owns the Behav.io technology, it could access it.
But the Behav.io technology could also be very important for helping Google
understand what the real social graph of every single person is. The social
graph is not just the connection between profiles in Facebook or Twitter or
Google Plus or any other social network, nor is it the sum of all the
connections of every social network. The "real life social graph" (this
definition is mine) is also composed of the relations between people that we
don't have in our circles/followers/fans, people we contact only by phone, short
text messages or WhatsApp.
Finally, we should remember that back in 2011 Google acquired two other
interesting startups: PostRank and Social Grapple. It is quite sure that Google
has already used their technology, especially for Google Plus Analytics, but I
have the feeling that it (or its evolution) will be used to analyze the quality
of the connections we have in our own "real life social graph," hence helping
Google distinguish who our real influencers are, and therefore to personalize
our searches in any facet (predictive or not predictive).
Image credit: Niemanlab.org
Another aspect that we probably will see introduced once and for all will
be sentiment analysis as a pre-rendering phase of the SERPs (something that
Google could easily do with the science behind its Prediction API). Sentiment
Analysis is needed, not just because it could help distinguishing between
documents that are appreciated by its users and those that are not. If we agree
that semantic search is key in Hummingbird; if we agree that Semantic is not
just about the triptych subject, verb, and object; and if we agree that natural
language understanding is becoming essential for Google due to Voice Search,
then sentiment analysis is needed in order to understand rhetoric figures (i.e.
the use of metaphors and allegories) and emotional inflections of the voice (the
ironic and sarcastic tones, for instance).
Maybe it is also for these reasons that Google is so interested in buying
companies like Boston Dynamics? No, I am not thinking of Skynet; I am thinking
of HAL 9000, which could be the ideal objective of Google in the years to come,
even more so than the often-cited "Star Trek Computer."
What about us?
Sincerely, I don't think that our daily lives as SEOs and inbound marketers
will radically change in 2014 from what they are now.
Websites will still need to be crawled, parsed, and indexed; hence
technical SEO will still maintain a huge role in the future.
Maybe from a technical point of view, those ones who still have not
embraced structured data will need to do so, even though structured data by
itself is not enough to say that we are doing semantic SEO.
Updates like Panda and Penguin will still be rolled out, with Penguin
possibly introduced as a layer in the Link Graph in order to automate it, as it
happens now with Panda.
And Matt Cutts will still announce to us that some link network has been
"retired."
What I can predict with some sort of clarityâand for the simple
reason that people and not search engines definitely are our targetsâis
that real audience analysis and cohort analysis, not just keywords and
competitor research, will become even more important as SEO tasks.
But if we already were putting people at the center of our jobsâif we
already were considering SEO as Search Experience Optimizationâthen we
won't change the they we work that much.
We will still create digital assets that will help our sites be considered
useful by the users, and we will organize our jobs in synergy with social,
content, and email marketing in order to earn the status of thought leaders in
our niche, and in doing so will enter into the "real life social graph" of our
audience members, hence being visible in their private SERPs.
The future I painted is telling us that is the route to follow. The only
thing it is urging us to do better is integrate our internet marketing strategy
with our "offline" marketing strategy, because that distinction makes no sense
anymore for the users, nor does it make sense to our clients. Because marketing,
not just analytics, is universal.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/N3sD0R4aDBQ/search-marketing-in-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Google in 2014'
Posted by gfiorelli1
We can't imagine the future without first understanding the past.
In this post, I will present what I consider the most relevant events we
experienced this year in search, and will try to paint a picture of things to
come by answering this question: How will Google evolve now that it has acquired
Wavii, Behav.io, PostRank, and Grapple, along with machine learning and neural
computing technology?
The future of Google will be based on entity search, semantic search, and
¼ber-personalization, and all the technologies it acquired will interact
with one another in order to shape the Google we will experience in 2014. I'll
show you how to deal with it.
The past
Last year, in my "preview" post The Cassandra Memorandum, besides presenting
my predictions on what would have been the search marketing landscape during
this 2013, I presented a funny prophecy from a friend of mine: the "Balrog
Update," an algorithm that, wrapped in fire, would have crawled the web,
penalizing and incinerating sites which do not include the anchor text "click
here" at least seven times and do not include a picture of a kitten asleep in a
basket.
Thinking back, though, that hilarious preview wasn't incorrect at all.
In the past three years, we've had all sorts of updates from Google: Panda,
Penguin, Venice, Top-Heavy, EMD, (Not Provided) and Hummingbird (and that's just
its organic search facet).
Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and other inbound marketing outlets also had their
share of meaningful updates.
For many SEOs (and not just for them), organic search especially has become a
sort of Land of Mordor...
For this reason, and because I see so often in the Q&A, in tweets sent to me,
or in requests for help popping up in my inbox, how many SEOs feel discouraged
in their daily work by all these frenzied changes, before presenting my vision
of what we need to expect in Search in 2014, I thought it was better to have our
own war speech.
Somehow we need it:
(Clip from the "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" by Peter
Jackson, distributed by Warner Bros)
A day may come when the courage of SEOs fails. But it is not this day.
A methodology
"I give you the light of Earendil ... May it be a light for you in dark
places,
when all other lights go out."
Even if I'm interested in large-scale correlation tests like the Moz Search
Engine Ranking Factors, in reality I am convinced that the science in which we
best excel is that of hindsight.
For example, when Caffeine was introduced, almost no one imagined that that
magnification of the SERPs would have meant its deterioration too.
Probably not even Google had calculated the side effects of that epochal
infrastructural change, and only the obvious decline in the quality of the SERPs
(who remembers this post by Rand) led to Panda, Penguin, and EMD.
But we understood just after they rolled out that Panda and Co. were needed
consequences of Caffeine (and of spammers' greed).
And despite my thinking that every technical marketer (as SEOs and social
media marketers are) should devote part of their time to conducting experiments
that test their theories, actually the best science we tend to apply is the
science of inference.
AuthorRank is a good example of that. Give us a Patent, give us some new
mark-up and new social-based user profiling, and we will create a new theory
from scratch that may include some fundamentals but is not proven by the facts.
Hindsight and deduction, however, are not to blame. On the contrary; if
done wisely, reading into the news (albeit avoiding paranoid theories) can help
us perceive with some degree of accuracy what the future of our industry may be,
and can prepare us for the changes that will come.
While we were distracted...
While we were distractedâfirst by the increasingly spammy nature of
Google and, secondly, by the updates Google rolled out to fight those same
spammy SERPsâBig G was silently working on its evolution.
Our (justified) obsession with the Google zoo made us underestimate what
were actually the most relevant Google "updates:" the Knowledge Graph, Google
Now, and MyAnswers.
The firstâwhich has become a sort of new obsession for us
SEOsâwas telling us that Google didn't need an explicit query for showing
us relevant information, and even more importantly, that people could stay
inside Google to find that information.
The second was a clear declaration of which field Google is focusing its
complete interest on: mobile.
The third, MyAnswers, tells us that Personalizationâor, better,
¼ber-personalizationâis the present and future of Google.
MyAnswers, recently rolled out in the regional Googles, is a good example
of just how much we were distracted. Tell me: How many of you still talk about
SPYW? And how many of you know that its page now redirects to the MyAnswers one?
Try it: www.google.com/insidesearch/features/plus/â.
What about Hummingbird?
Yes, Hummingbird, the update no SEO noticed was rolled out.
Hummingbird, as I described in my latest post here on Moz, is an
infrastructural update that essentially governs how Google understands a query,
applying to all the existing "ranking factors" (sigh) that draw the SERPs.
From the very few things we know, it is based over the synonym dictionaries
Google was already using, but applies a concept based analysis over them where
entities (both named and search) and "word coupling" play a very important role.
But, still, Google is attending primary school and must learn a lot, for
instance not confusing Spain with France when analyzing the word "tapas" (or
Italy with the USA for "pizza"):
But we also know that Google has bought DNNresearch Inc. and its deep
neural networks, which had gained great experience in machine learning with
Panda, and that people like Andrew Ng moved from the Google X team to the
Knowledge Team (the same of Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts), so it is quite
probable that Google will be a very disciplined student and will learn very
fast.
The missing pieces of the "future" puzzle
As with any other infrastructural change, Hummingbird will lead to visible
changes. Some might already be here (the turmoil in the Local Search as
described by David Mihm), but the most interesting ones are still to come.
Do you want to know what they are? Then watch and listen to what Oren
Etzioni of Wavii (bought by Google last April 2013) says in this video:
As well described by Bill Slawski here:
The [open information] extraction approach identifies nouns and how they
might be related to each other by the verbs that create a relationship between
them, and rates the quality of those relationships. A âclassifierâ
determines how trustworthy each relationship might be, and retains only the
trustworthy relationships.
These terms within these relationships (each considered a
âtupleâ) are stored in an inverted index that can be used to respond
to queries.
So, it can improve the usage of the immense Knowledge Base of Google, along
with the predictive answers to queries based on context. Doesn't all this remind
you what we already see in the SERPs?
Moreover, do you see the connection with Hummingbird and how it can link
together the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, and MyAnswers; and ultimately also
determine how classic organic results (and ads) will be shown to the users over
a pure entity-based and semantic analysis, where links will still play a role,
but not be so overly determinant?
So, if I have to preview the news that will shake our industry in 2014, I
would look to the path Wavii has shown us, but also especially to the solutions
that Google finds for answering the questions Etzioni himself was presenting in
the video above as the challenges Wavii still needed to solve.
But another acquisition may hide the key to those questions: the team from
Behav.io.
I say team, because Google did not buy Behav.io as a society, but the
entire team, which became part of the Google Now area.
What was the objective of Behav.io? It was looking at how peoplesâ
locations, networks of phone contacts, physical proximity, and movement
throughout the day could help in predicting a range of behaviors.
More over, Behav.io was based over the smart analysis of the all the data
the sensors in our smartphones could tell about us. Not only GPS data (have you
ever looked at your Location History?), but also the speakers/microphones, the
proximity detection between two or more sensors, which apps we use and which we
download and discard, the lighting sensors, browser history (no matter which
search engines we use), the accelerometer, SMS...
You can imagine how Google could use all this information: Again, for
enhancing the predictive solution of any query that could matter to us. The
repercussions of this technology will be obvious for Google Now, but also for
MyAnswers, which substantially is very similar to Google Now in its purposes.
The ability to understand app usage could allow Google to create an
interest graph for each one of us, which could enhance the "simple"
personalization offered by our web history. For instance, I usually read the
news directly from the official apps of the newspapers and magazines I like, not
from Google News or a browser. I also read 70% of the posts I'm interested in
from my Feedly app. All that information would normally not be accessible by
Google, but now that it owns the Behav.io technology, it could access it.
But the Behav.io technology could also be very important for helping Google
understand what the real social graph of every single person is. The social
graph is not just the connection between profiles in Facebook or Twitter or
Google Plus or any other social network, nor is it the sum of all the
connections of every social network. The "real life social graph" (this
definition is mine) is also composed of the relations between people that we
don't have in our circles/followers/fans, people we contact only by phone, short
text messages or WhatsApp.
Finally, we should remember that back in 2011 Google acquired two other
interesting startups: PostRank and Social Grapple. It is quite sure that Google
has already used their technology, especially for Google Plus Analytics, but I
have the feeling that it (or its evolution) will be used to analyze the quality
of the connections we have in our own "real life social graph," hence helping
Google distinguish who our real influencers are, and therefore to personalize
our searches in any facet (predictive or not predictive).
Image credit: Niemanlab.org
Another aspect that we probably will see introduced once and for all will
be sentiment analysis as a pre-rendering phase of the SERPs (something that
Google could easily do with the science behind its Prediction API). Sentiment
Analysis is needed, not just because it could help distinguishing between
documents that are appreciated by its users and those that are not. If we agree
that semantic search is key in Hummingbird; if we agree that Semantic is not
just about the triptych subject, verb, and object; and if we agree that natural
language understanding is becoming essential for Google due to Voice Search,
then sentiment analysis is needed in order to understand rhetoric figures (i.e.
the use of metaphors and allegories) and emotional inflections of the voice (the
ironic and sarcastic tones, for instance).
Maybe it is also for these reasons that Google is so interested in buying
companies like Boston Dynamics? No, I am not thinking of Skynet; I am thinking
of HAL 9000, which could be the ideal objective of Google in the years to come,
even more so than the often-cited "Star Trek Computer."
What about us?
Sincerely, I don't think that our daily lives as SEOs and inbound marketers
will radically change in 2014 from what they are now.
Websites will still need to be crawled, parsed, and indexed; hence
technical SEO will still maintain a huge role in the future.
Maybe from a technical point of view, those ones who still have not
embraced structured data will need to do so, even though structured data by
itself is not enough to say that we are doing semantic SEO.
Updates like Panda and Penguin will still be rolled out, with Penguin
possibly introduced as a layer in the Link Graph in order to automate it, as it
happens now with Panda.
And Matt Cutts will still announce to us that some link network has been
"retired."
What I can predict with some sort of clarityâand for the simple
reason that people and not search engines definitely are our targetsâis
that real audience analysis and cohort analysis, not just keywords and
competitor research, will become even more important as SEO tasks.
But if we already were putting people at the center of our jobsâif we
already were considering SEO as Search Experience Optimizationâthen we
won't change the they we work that much.
We will still create digital assets that will help our sites be considered
useful by the users, and we will organize our jobs in synergy with social,
content, and email marketing in order to earn the status of thought leaders in
our niche, and in doing so will enter into the "real life social graph" of our
audience members, hence being visible in their private SERPs.
The future I painted is telling us that is the route to follow. The only
thing it is urging us to do better is integrate our internet marketing strategy
with our "offline" marketing strategy, because that distinction makes no sense
anymore for the users, nor does it make sense to our clients. Because marketing,
not just analytics, is universal.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/N3sD0R4aDBQ/search-marketing-in-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Easing the Pain of Keyword Not Provided: 5 Tactics for Reclaiming Your Data
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Easing the Pain of Keyword Not
Provided: 5 Tactics for Reclaiming Your Data'
Posted by timresnik
October 18th, 2011, the day Google announced "Secure Search," was a dark day
for many search marketers. We had hope, though; we were told only a small
fraction of search referrals from Google would apply. This was proven false in
just a few weeks as (not provided) quickly hit 10+% for many sites. Then, a year
later, seemingly out of the blue, Google started to encrypt almost all searches.
Today, we are approaching the dreaded extinction of Google organic keyword data:
Oh keywords, how I will miss thee.
Knowing the keywords that send us traffic from Google Search has always been a
major pillar on which search marketers execute and measure the effectiveness of
an SEO strategy. With Google "Secure Search" and keywords being stripped from
the referral string, it's starting to look more like a crutchâor worse, a
crutch that will very soon no longer exist at all. Here are five ideas and two
bonus resources to help nurse keyword targeting and search ROI back to health.
Will they solve all your problems? No. Will they inform a direction for future
"provided" solutions? Maybe. Are they better than nothing? Most definitely.
1. Use custom variables to tag content with categories/topics
Most web analytics software allows site owners to pass custom variables
through. In Google Analytics, a custom variable can be inserted into your code,
and as the name implies, you can pass custom name/value pairs of your choice.
It's one of the most useful analytics tools for web traffic segmentation with
many different applications. Mix this functionality with category, topics or
tags from a page on your site and you can now analyze your organic web traffic
based on those variables. If you are discipline and creative in understanding
and tagging your content, you will get insight about what topics are sending
your traffic.
If you have some programming chops and can extract these variables from your
CMS yourself and append them to your tracking code, more power to you! If not,
and you are a WordPress user, I have some good news: There is a free plugin from
our friends at Yoast. Install it and then simply select the following:
Once it is in GA there are several ways to get at the data. One is to simply
go to Acquisition > Channels > Organic Search, then select the primary
dimension of "landing page" and the secondary dimension with your custom
variable. You now have a list of your landing pages that received organic
traffic and the categories/tags related to each. Valuable stuff.
If you want some ideas of what tags you should be using, there are several
auto-tag generator plugins for WordPress, Zemanta being one.
Requirements:
Programming chops or WordPress and Google Analytics
Being disciplined about entering tags and categories
Watch out:
It's human-powered, for better or for worse, and your data is only as good as
the humanoid at the controls of your CMS
Doesn't help for long-tail targeting and reporting
2. Combining rank data with landing pages from Google Analytics
We can recapture some Google keywords by joining our rankings and analytics
data. Download your rankings data from your favorite rankings tool; the more
data you have the better. In Google Analytics, go to Channels > Organic
Search > Source = Google and add the secondary dimension of "Landing Page."
View the maximum number of rows and download the data into a CSV. Put your data
in two separate tabs in a spreadsheet. Now, all you need to do it join the
keywords from the rankings tab with the keywords from the analytics tab. This
can be done using VLOOKUP. While you're at it, add the ranking data to the
analytics tab. The end result will look like this:
Requirements:
Rankings data
Google Analytics data
Basic Excel or Google Spreadsheet skills
Watch out:
Using the method above with VLOOKUP will only return one keyword per landing
page. With some crafty Excel work, you can figure out how to get all the
keywords for that page
3. Site search: what users are searching for on your site
If you get enough people using the search feature of your site, it can be a
gold mine for keyword data. After all, this keyword data will always be
"provided." Configuring Google Analytics to capture your internal search traffic
is pretty straightforward. Once you have done so, you will be able to see the
top keywords people are searching for on your site.
Step 1: Open the Google Analytics profile you want to set up Site Search for
Step 2: Navigate to Admin > Settings and scroll to the bottom for "Site
Search Settings." Enter in the parameter that is designated for a search query
on your site; for example /search_results.php?q=keyword. If you use a POST-based
method and do not pass through a parameter in the URL you can either configure
your application to append one, or you can trigger a virtual pageview in your
Google Analytics snippet, such as:
analytics.js: ga('send', 'pageview', '/search_results.php?q=keyword')
The category option allows you to look for an additional query parameter that
can later be used to group the site search data. For example, if you had search
on your site in different sections that you wanted to keep separate: help,
content, documentation, etc.
Step 3: Let GA collect some data for a day or so and check out your results.
Navigate to Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms to see a complete list
that users search for on your site. To dig deep add the secondary dimension of
"destination page" to see where the user landed after seeing the search results.
Then, be sure to check out the secondary dimension of "search refinement" to see
which keywords your users searched for after they searched for the original
content. This can clue you into gap between what people are looking for and not
finding on your site.
Requirements:
A search box on your site
Google Analytics
Watch out:
It's a limited data set (on Moz only about 1/2 or one percent of visits end
up using our search)
4. Google (and Bing) Webmaster Tools
Google has created the headache with "Not Provided," but they have also given
us a bit of medicine in the form Webmaster Tools. Released a few years back
within Webmaster Tools, "Search Queries" provides webmasters with some basic
information around their keywords, including average position, impressions,
number of clicks, and click-through rate (CTR).
This data should be used, but has a few major limitations. First, only a
small, Google-selected subset of the keywords is represented. There is no
transparency about how or why they select the keywords, so using it to measure
results of specific content optimization efforts can be inaccurate and even
misleading.
Second, the data is limited to 90 days. If you ranked for a query 91 days ago,
you'll never know. Webmaster Tools also has an API, but unfortunately the
"search queries" data isn't available through it yet. According to Mr. Cutts,
that is imminent. If you want to store your data for longer than 90 days and
know how to program, you can use this PHP library or this Python library.
Finally, there is a limitation in how you can use Webmaster Tools data in
Google Analytics. The good news is that you can integrate this data into Google
Analytics with some basic authentication between the services. The bad news is
that you can only segment the data in Google Analytics with 2 dimensions:
country and Google property. Joining this data with behavior, demographics,
goals, etc. would be extremely valuable.
Requirement:
Google Webmaster Tools account
Watch out:
(Limitations noted above)
5. Deeper topical analysis
Avinash Kaushik, one of my favorite speakers MozCon this year wrote about
understanding the "personality" of the page as a future solution for "not
provided". He says:
"I wonder if someone can create a tool that will crawl our site and tell us
what the personality of each page represents. Some of this is manifested today
as keyword density analysis (which is value-deficient, especially because search
engines got over "density" nine hundred years ago). By personality, I mean what
does the page stand for, what is the adjacent cluster of meaning that is around
the page's purpose? Based on the words used, what attitude does the page
reflect, and based on how others are talking about this page, what other meaning
is being implied on a page?"
I think this could be accomplished by performing topical analysis on body
content of pages as they are published and then passed through to Google
Analytics with custom variables; similar to what I described above with
categories. This could be done by using DBpedia and one of the annotation open
source application that uses it, such as DBpedia Spotlight. Spotlight detects
mentions of terms in your content and scores the relevance of those mentions
against structured data created from Wikipedia. Once the topics of the page are
"extracted" and passed to your web analytics platform, you'll be able to use it
as a dimension against organic search referrals to landing pages. (Thanks to Jay
Leary for walking me through Spotlight)
Bonus: some other "not provided" resources
Mike King is not too worried about "Not Provided." His deck argues we should
be focusing on segmenting our data by personas and affinity groups, and paying
more attention to "implicit" rather than "explicit" intent. Good stuff.
Ten industry experts, including two Mozzers, weigh in here and answer a series
of questions on the "Not Provided" landscape, including tools and techniques
that they use, and even a few "Top Tips for 2014."
Conclusion
Keyword data from Google organic search is owned and controlled by Google and
can never be replaced. Secure Search is here to stay and nearing 100%. There is
no cure-all solution. That being said, search marketers are a GSD and generous
group, and will continue to hack away at the problem and share solutions. What
are some of the data sources and hacks you are using to deal with "not
provided?" Are there future algorithmic solutions to this problem, or are we
doomed to have to take our Google medicine and be happy with what they decide to
provide in Webmaster Tools?
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/iORg5eCwT5g/easing-the-pain-of-google-keyword-not-provided
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Provided: 5 Tactics for Reclaiming Your Data'
Posted by timresnik
October 18th, 2011, the day Google announced "Secure Search," was a dark day
for many search marketers. We had hope, though; we were told only a small
fraction of search referrals from Google would apply. This was proven false in
just a few weeks as (not provided) quickly hit 10+% for many sites. Then, a year
later, seemingly out of the blue, Google started to encrypt almost all searches.
Today, we are approaching the dreaded extinction of Google organic keyword data:
Oh keywords, how I will miss thee.
Knowing the keywords that send us traffic from Google Search has always been a
major pillar on which search marketers execute and measure the effectiveness of
an SEO strategy. With Google "Secure Search" and keywords being stripped from
the referral string, it's starting to look more like a crutchâor worse, a
crutch that will very soon no longer exist at all. Here are five ideas and two
bonus resources to help nurse keyword targeting and search ROI back to health.
Will they solve all your problems? No. Will they inform a direction for future
"provided" solutions? Maybe. Are they better than nothing? Most definitely.
1. Use custom variables to tag content with categories/topics
Most web analytics software allows site owners to pass custom variables
through. In Google Analytics, a custom variable can be inserted into your code,
and as the name implies, you can pass custom name/value pairs of your choice.
It's one of the most useful analytics tools for web traffic segmentation with
many different applications. Mix this functionality with category, topics or
tags from a page on your site and you can now analyze your organic web traffic
based on those variables. If you are discipline and creative in understanding
and tagging your content, you will get insight about what topics are sending
your traffic.
If you have some programming chops and can extract these variables from your
CMS yourself and append them to your tracking code, more power to you! If not,
and you are a WordPress user, I have some good news: There is a free plugin from
our friends at Yoast. Install it and then simply select the following:
Once it is in GA there are several ways to get at the data. One is to simply
go to Acquisition > Channels > Organic Search, then select the primary
dimension of "landing page" and the secondary dimension with your custom
variable. You now have a list of your landing pages that received organic
traffic and the categories/tags related to each. Valuable stuff.
If you want some ideas of what tags you should be using, there are several
auto-tag generator plugins for WordPress, Zemanta being one.
Requirements:
Programming chops or WordPress and Google Analytics
Being disciplined about entering tags and categories
Watch out:
It's human-powered, for better or for worse, and your data is only as good as
the humanoid at the controls of your CMS
Doesn't help for long-tail targeting and reporting
2. Combining rank data with landing pages from Google Analytics
We can recapture some Google keywords by joining our rankings and analytics
data. Download your rankings data from your favorite rankings tool; the more
data you have the better. In Google Analytics, go to Channels > Organic
Search > Source = Google and add the secondary dimension of "Landing Page."
View the maximum number of rows and download the data into a CSV. Put your data
in two separate tabs in a spreadsheet. Now, all you need to do it join the
keywords from the rankings tab with the keywords from the analytics tab. This
can be done using VLOOKUP. While you're at it, add the ranking data to the
analytics tab. The end result will look like this:
Requirements:
Rankings data
Google Analytics data
Basic Excel or Google Spreadsheet skills
Watch out:
Using the method above with VLOOKUP will only return one keyword per landing
page. With some crafty Excel work, you can figure out how to get all the
keywords for that page
3. Site search: what users are searching for on your site
If you get enough people using the search feature of your site, it can be a
gold mine for keyword data. After all, this keyword data will always be
"provided." Configuring Google Analytics to capture your internal search traffic
is pretty straightforward. Once you have done so, you will be able to see the
top keywords people are searching for on your site.
Step 1: Open the Google Analytics profile you want to set up Site Search for
Step 2: Navigate to Admin > Settings and scroll to the bottom for "Site
Search Settings." Enter in the parameter that is designated for a search query
on your site; for example /search_results.php?q=keyword. If you use a POST-based
method and do not pass through a parameter in the URL you can either configure
your application to append one, or you can trigger a virtual pageview in your
Google Analytics snippet, such as:
analytics.js: ga('send', 'pageview', '/search_results.php?q=keyword')
The category option allows you to look for an additional query parameter that
can later be used to group the site search data. For example, if you had search
on your site in different sections that you wanted to keep separate: help,
content, documentation, etc.
Step 3: Let GA collect some data for a day or so and check out your results.
Navigate to Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms to see a complete list
that users search for on your site. To dig deep add the secondary dimension of
"destination page" to see where the user landed after seeing the search results.
Then, be sure to check out the secondary dimension of "search refinement" to see
which keywords your users searched for after they searched for the original
content. This can clue you into gap between what people are looking for and not
finding on your site.
Requirements:
A search box on your site
Google Analytics
Watch out:
It's a limited data set (on Moz only about 1/2 or one percent of visits end
up using our search)
4. Google (and Bing) Webmaster Tools
Google has created the headache with "Not Provided," but they have also given
us a bit of medicine in the form Webmaster Tools. Released a few years back
within Webmaster Tools, "Search Queries" provides webmasters with some basic
information around their keywords, including average position, impressions,
number of clicks, and click-through rate (CTR).
This data should be used, but has a few major limitations. First, only a
small, Google-selected subset of the keywords is represented. There is no
transparency about how or why they select the keywords, so using it to measure
results of specific content optimization efforts can be inaccurate and even
misleading.
Second, the data is limited to 90 days. If you ranked for a query 91 days ago,
you'll never know. Webmaster Tools also has an API, but unfortunately the
"search queries" data isn't available through it yet. According to Mr. Cutts,
that is imminent. If you want to store your data for longer than 90 days and
know how to program, you can use this PHP library or this Python library.
Finally, there is a limitation in how you can use Webmaster Tools data in
Google Analytics. The good news is that you can integrate this data into Google
Analytics with some basic authentication between the services. The bad news is
that you can only segment the data in Google Analytics with 2 dimensions:
country and Google property. Joining this data with behavior, demographics,
goals, etc. would be extremely valuable.
Requirement:
Google Webmaster Tools account
Watch out:
(Limitations noted above)
5. Deeper topical analysis
Avinash Kaushik, one of my favorite speakers MozCon this year wrote about
understanding the "personality" of the page as a future solution for "not
provided". He says:
"I wonder if someone can create a tool that will crawl our site and tell us
what the personality of each page represents. Some of this is manifested today
as keyword density analysis (which is value-deficient, especially because search
engines got over "density" nine hundred years ago). By personality, I mean what
does the page stand for, what is the adjacent cluster of meaning that is around
the page's purpose? Based on the words used, what attitude does the page
reflect, and based on how others are talking about this page, what other meaning
is being implied on a page?"
I think this could be accomplished by performing topical analysis on body
content of pages as they are published and then passed through to Google
Analytics with custom variables; similar to what I described above with
categories. This could be done by using DBpedia and one of the annotation open
source application that uses it, such as DBpedia Spotlight. Spotlight detects
mentions of terms in your content and scores the relevance of those mentions
against structured data created from Wikipedia. Once the topics of the page are
"extracted" and passed to your web analytics platform, you'll be able to use it
as a dimension against organic search referrals to landing pages. (Thanks to Jay
Leary for walking me through Spotlight)
Bonus: some other "not provided" resources
Mike King is not too worried about "Not Provided." His deck argues we should
be focusing on segmenting our data by personas and affinity groups, and paying
more attention to "implicit" rather than "explicit" intent. Good stuff.
Ten industry experts, including two Mozzers, weigh in here and answer a series
of questions on the "Not Provided" landscape, including tools and techniques
that they use, and even a few "Top Tips for 2014."
Conclusion
Keyword data from Google organic search is owned and controlled by Google and
can never be replaced. Secure Search is here to stay and nearing 100%. There is
no cure-all solution. That being said, search marketers are a GSD and generous
group, and will continue to hack away at the problem and share solutions. What
are some of the data sources and hacks you are using to deal with "not
provided?" Are there future algorithmic solutions to this problem, or are we
doomed to have to take our Google medicine and be happy with what they decide to
provide in Webmaster Tools?
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/iORg5eCwT5g/easing-the-pain-of-google-keyword-not-provided
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] Twitter Tailored Audiences: When Does It Make Sense?
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Twitter Tailored Audiences: When
Does It Make Sense?'
If you pay attention to digital advertising, youve probably heard the big news:
Twitter is diving headfirst into retargeting with the launch of a new program
called Tailored Audiences. With Tailored Audiences, its now possible to target
Twitter users based on their actions across the Web. Usinga technique called
cookie-mapping, ad partnersanonymously transfer a segment []Twitter Tailored
Audiences: When Does It Make Sense? is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/twitter-tailored-audiences-when-does-it-make-sense/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=twitter-tailored-audiences-when-does-it-make-sense
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Does It Make Sense?'
If you pay attention to digital advertising, youve probably heard the big news:
Twitter is diving headfirst into retargeting with the launch of a new program
called Tailored Audiences. With Tailored Audiences, its now possible to target
Twitter users based on their actions across the Web. Usinga technique called
cookie-mapping, ad partnersanonymously transfer a segment []Twitter Tailored
Audiences: When Does It Make Sense? is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/twitter-tailored-audiences-when-does-it-make-sense/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=twitter-tailored-audiences-when-does-it-make-sense
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] All About You: Results of the Moz Blog Survey
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'All About You: Results of the Moz
Blog Survey'
Posted by Trevor-Klein
Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought
of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we
got, and we're excited to share what we learned with all of you.
You told us you're squeezed for time in a constantly changing
"need-it-yesterday" world. You told us you're sick of "ultimate guides," and
that you're (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and
are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content
marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.
We hear you.
The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we'll be incorporating
these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The
entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheetâif you're
interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what
we show here, please let us know!
Your job titles
One of the things we've wondered as we've made the transition from SEOmoz to
Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people
from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can't just be SEOs
anymore. So, we did what anyone would doâwe tossed all of your job titles
into a word cloud.
Two things are immediately obvious:
SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it's the largest word in this
cloud
Given how large the word "marketing" is, there are also quite a few of you
whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.
It'd be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two
words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for
now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced
depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone's
up to speed with the changes in the industry.
Your experience
Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner's
Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to
know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out,
we have a pretty good spread:
Your level of SEO expertise
It's no secret that Moz's background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as
no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty
advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or
better, and 14% labeled themselves "industry experts." Given people's natural
inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central
tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results
show.
Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to
SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and
advanced SEO content.
One of the ideas we're considering is implementing more of what I call
"pre-read transparency," making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about
and whether it's relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done
well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find
additional reading that's relevant to your work. (If you've got ideas on ways to
make that happen, we'd love to hear about them in the comments!)
How much SEO?
At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their
time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their
time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your
day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an
expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in
SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.
Your greatest challenges
This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary
goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order
to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry
question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they
pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct
mention of each of those issues.
Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty
clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today's world of
marketing:
Challenge
# mentions
1.
Changing industry
93
2.
Content marketing
70
3.
Clients/customers misunderstand my work
67
4.
Time management
52
5.
Politics and buy-in
43
6.
Too much to learn and keep track of
40
7.
Link building and maintenance
39
8.
Measurement and analysis
38
9.
Google and the algorithm
32
10.
Limited budget/resources
29
11.
Ranking
28
12.
Managing people and relationships
24
13.
Clients/customers are difficult
23
14.
Social media integration and management
23
15.
Strategy and goals
22
16.
Reporting
21
17.
Branding
17
18.
Understanding SEO
16
19.
Conversion rate
16
20.
Competition
14
We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are
constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not
only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how
you might adapt your work. We'll continue to seek out the best advice in that
respect.
Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today's marketers, and
there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own
content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you
level-up.
There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace
productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to
convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we
haven't covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective
marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.
Your reading style
What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable
making posts (we've had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds
of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on
their hands), we're likely to try and keep things compendious so we don't scare
folks away from even starting in.
This also suggests that we shouldn't worry quite so much about the inverted
pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds
that doesn't hold a candle to Strunk and White's age-old advice to "omit
needless words." =)
The devices you prefer
This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back
burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site,
especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for
all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we
figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:
More than 92% of respondents listed "laptop/desktop" as at least one of their
preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the "laptop/desktop" option unchecked.
One of the most interesting comments on the survey's blog post alluded to the
idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what
their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack
responsive design. That's something we'll absolutely work on when we can, but at
the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers
that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.
Relevancy to your work
This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we're
already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the
right:
We're planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a
sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content
audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and
figure we're providing plenty of content that's relevant to their lines of work.
We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we're
missing the mark for them.
As a whole, though, it's certainly encouraging to see that most people find
the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We'll likely
conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure
progress against data like this.
Accessibility
One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are
appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they're not
learning anything they don't already know? Or, are they confused because our
posts go right over their heads?
Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz
Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by
the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder
if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.
As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:
One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think
posts are too basic than folks who think they're too advanced, confounding our
expectation based on Matt's interactions.
Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or
advanced. We asked respondents who chose "too basic" to rate just how basic they
were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose "too
advanced." The average score for people who thought it was too basic was
2.7âright at the middle of the scaleâand the average score for
people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6âmuch higher on the scale.
This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced
readers are bored.
There's a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level
readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips
with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it's a couple
of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant "background content," such as a
chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we're likely to lean
just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to
catch up quickly.
Room for improvement
We asked you all an open-ended question about what you'd like to see different
about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have
to say we're pretty happy with the #1 response:
Feedback
# mentions
1.
Nothing
103
2.
More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts
44
3.
More case studies
39
4.
More video/multimedia content
32
5.
More advanced posts
23
6.
Need to branch out from SEO
20
7.
Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs
17
8.
Needs better categorization/navigation
16
9.
Post more frequently
15
10.
Shorter posts
14
11.
Posts should be more data-driven/scientific
13
12.
Posts need more variety
13
13.
Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design
12
14.
More from Rand
11
15.
Needs more varied pool of authors
11
There's a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation
of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts
that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more
advanced posts.
More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with
many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we're
pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there's something to be
said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many
examples of successful educational videos. We've even begun offering our own
educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for
further exploration.
Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish
before long. =)
Topics
This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about
which topics you'd like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight
into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could
select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO
came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.
If we didn't already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the
forefront of people's minds, this speaks for itself:
We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list,
although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there's no
real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into wisdom is vital for today's marketers, and we'll do everything we can to
equip you all for the task.
We'll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution
of topics we post on the blog. It won't be an exact scienceâyou won't see
exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEOâbut you can expect
we'll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or
community management, and so forth.
We'll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing
that it's impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is
heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a
specific type of content marketing. We'll use what we know about your day-to-day
work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas
in this list.
Types of posts
Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post "The Ultimate Guide to ___"
again. =)
This is no typo or data entry errorâout of the 749 people who answered
this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more "ultimate
guides" on the blog.
We've talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it
is always a false promise. There's no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense
of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people
will consider the best availableâbut if someone else put in enough effort,
they could certainly make a better guide.
One of the many (many) lessons I've learned from Cyrus Shepard is that
headlines are a promise to the readers. If what's behind the headline doesn't
live up to that promise, you've lied about what you have, and are breaking the
hard-earned trust you've built with them over time.
We also think that while some "ultimate guides" are impressive (and are widely
shared as a result), they're usually far too long to actually read through right
away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have,
these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.
That isn't the only useful part of these responses, thoughâit's quite
clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain
truly actionable content. It isn't about inspiration as much as it is about
helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to
be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more
tutorials and case studies as time goes on.
Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds
of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.
Here's a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:
While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the
foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect
that specialization. We should think of our readers as "T-shaped," focusing on
advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social,
branding, and others.
Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they're
required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their
expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in
communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a
need for up-to-date best practices in many areasâespecially content
marketing and link building.
Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they
choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who
are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced
posts.
There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including
tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more
generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.
Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog
as we move forward:
More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic
posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the
more advanced posts
High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace
productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
More "pre-read transparency," offering details to help you determine a post's
relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that's more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That's
our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your
thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic
suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.
We'd also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get
something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely
insightful for us Mozzers!
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/269-hoz5x6c/2013-moz-blog-survey-results
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Blog Survey'
Posted by Trevor-Klein
Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought
of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we
got, and we're excited to share what we learned with all of you.
You told us you're squeezed for time in a constantly changing
"need-it-yesterday" world. You told us you're sick of "ultimate guides," and
that you're (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and
are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content
marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.
We hear you.
The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we'll be incorporating
these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The
entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheetâif you're
interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what
we show here, please let us know!
Your job titles
One of the things we've wondered as we've made the transition from SEOmoz to
Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people
from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can't just be SEOs
anymore. So, we did what anyone would doâwe tossed all of your job titles
into a word cloud.
Two things are immediately obvious:
SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it's the largest word in this
cloud
Given how large the word "marketing" is, there are also quite a few of you
whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.
It'd be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two
words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for
now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced
depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone's
up to speed with the changes in the industry.
Your experience
Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner's
Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to
know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out,
we have a pretty good spread:
Your level of SEO expertise
It's no secret that Moz's background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as
no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty
advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or
better, and 14% labeled themselves "industry experts." Given people's natural
inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central
tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results
show.
Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to
SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and
advanced SEO content.
One of the ideas we're considering is implementing more of what I call
"pre-read transparency," making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about
and whether it's relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done
well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find
additional reading that's relevant to your work. (If you've got ideas on ways to
make that happen, we'd love to hear about them in the comments!)
How much SEO?
At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their
time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their
time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your
day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an
expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in
SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.
Your greatest challenges
This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary
goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order
to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry
question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they
pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct
mention of each of those issues.
Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty
clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today's world of
marketing:
Challenge
# mentions
1.
Changing industry
93
2.
Content marketing
70
3.
Clients/customers misunderstand my work
67
4.
Time management
52
5.
Politics and buy-in
43
6.
Too much to learn and keep track of
40
7.
Link building and maintenance
39
8.
Measurement and analysis
38
9.
Google and the algorithm
32
10.
Limited budget/resources
29
11.
Ranking
28
12.
Managing people and relationships
24
13.
Clients/customers are difficult
23
14.
Social media integration and management
23
15.
Strategy and goals
22
16.
Reporting
21
17.
Branding
17
18.
Understanding SEO
16
19.
Conversion rate
16
20.
Competition
14
We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are
constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not
only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how
you might adapt your work. We'll continue to seek out the best advice in that
respect.
Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today's marketers, and
there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own
content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you
level-up.
There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace
productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to
convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we
haven't covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective
marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.
Your reading style
What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable
making posts (we've had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds
of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on
their hands), we're likely to try and keep things compendious so we don't scare
folks away from even starting in.
This also suggests that we shouldn't worry quite so much about the inverted
pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds
that doesn't hold a candle to Strunk and White's age-old advice to "omit
needless words." =)
The devices you prefer
This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back
burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site,
especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for
all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we
figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:
More than 92% of respondents listed "laptop/desktop" as at least one of their
preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the "laptop/desktop" option unchecked.
One of the most interesting comments on the survey's blog post alluded to the
idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what
their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack
responsive design. That's something we'll absolutely work on when we can, but at
the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers
that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.
Relevancy to your work
This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we're
already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the
right:
We're planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a
sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content
audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and
figure we're providing plenty of content that's relevant to their lines of work.
We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we're
missing the mark for them.
As a whole, though, it's certainly encouraging to see that most people find
the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We'll likely
conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure
progress against data like this.
Accessibility
One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are
appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they're not
learning anything they don't already know? Or, are they confused because our
posts go right over their heads?
Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz
Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by
the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder
if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.
As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:
One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think
posts are too basic than folks who think they're too advanced, confounding our
expectation based on Matt's interactions.
Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or
advanced. We asked respondents who chose "too basic" to rate just how basic they
were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose "too
advanced." The average score for people who thought it was too basic was
2.7âright at the middle of the scaleâand the average score for
people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6âmuch higher on the scale.
This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced
readers are bored.
There's a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level
readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips
with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it's a couple
of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant "background content," such as a
chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we're likely to lean
just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to
catch up quickly.
Room for improvement
We asked you all an open-ended question about what you'd like to see different
about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have
to say we're pretty happy with the #1 response:
Feedback
# mentions
1.
Nothing
103
2.
More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts
44
3.
More case studies
39
4.
More video/multimedia content
32
5.
More advanced posts
23
6.
Need to branch out from SEO
20
7.
Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs
17
8.
Needs better categorization/navigation
16
9.
Post more frequently
15
10.
Shorter posts
14
11.
Posts should be more data-driven/scientific
13
12.
Posts need more variety
13
13.
Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design
12
14.
More from Rand
11
15.
Needs more varied pool of authors
11
There's a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation
of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts
that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more
advanced posts.
More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with
many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we're
pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there's something to be
said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many
examples of successful educational videos. We've even begun offering our own
educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for
further exploration.
Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish
before long. =)
Topics
This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about
which topics you'd like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight
into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could
select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO
came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.
If we didn't already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the
forefront of people's minds, this speaks for itself:
We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list,
although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there's no
real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into wisdom is vital for today's marketers, and we'll do everything we can to
equip you all for the task.
We'll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution
of topics we post on the blog. It won't be an exact scienceâyou won't see
exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEOâbut you can expect
we'll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or
community management, and so forth.
We'll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing
that it's impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is
heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a
specific type of content marketing. We'll use what we know about your day-to-day
work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas
in this list.
Types of posts
Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post "The Ultimate Guide to ___"
again. =)
This is no typo or data entry errorâout of the 749 people who answered
this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more "ultimate
guides" on the blog.
We've talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it
is always a false promise. There's no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense
of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people
will consider the best availableâbut if someone else put in enough effort,
they could certainly make a better guide.
One of the many (many) lessons I've learned from Cyrus Shepard is that
headlines are a promise to the readers. If what's behind the headline doesn't
live up to that promise, you've lied about what you have, and are breaking the
hard-earned trust you've built with them over time.
We also think that while some "ultimate guides" are impressive (and are widely
shared as a result), they're usually far too long to actually read through right
away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have,
these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.
That isn't the only useful part of these responses, thoughâit's quite
clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain
truly actionable content. It isn't about inspiration as much as it is about
helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to
be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more
tutorials and case studies as time goes on.
Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds
of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.
Here's a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:
While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the
foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect
that specialization. We should think of our readers as "T-shaped," focusing on
advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social,
branding, and others.
Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they're
required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their
expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in
communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a
need for up-to-date best practices in many areasâespecially content
marketing and link building.
Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they
choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who
are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced
posts.
There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including
tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more
generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.
Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog
as we move forward:
More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic
posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the
more advanced posts
High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace
productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
More "pre-read transparency," offering details to help you determine a post's
relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that's more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That's
our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your
thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic
suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.
We'd also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get
something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely
insightful for us Mozzers!
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/269-hoz5x6c/2013-moz-blog-survey-results
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] Creating and Curating: How to Design a Brand that Acts as a Filter
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Creating and Curating: How to
Design a Brand that Acts as a Filter'
Ever feel crippled by indecision? Where should we eat? What should we do? Many
times, this cycle is broken when somebody in the group suggests a familiar
restaurant. Its a situation marketing and psychology expert Robert Cialdini
calls a paralysis of analysis: times when the complexity of our world overwhelms
our decision-making ability. When the []Creating and Curating: How to Design a
Brand that Acts as a Filter is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media
Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/creating-and-curating-how-to-design-a-brand-that-acts-as-a-filter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=creating-and-curating-how-to-design-a-brand-that-acts-as-a-filter
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Design a Brand that Acts as a Filter'
Ever feel crippled by indecision? Where should we eat? What should we do? Many
times, this cycle is broken when somebody in the group suggests a familiar
restaurant. Its a situation marketing and psychology expert Robert Cialdini
calls a paralysis of analysis: times when the complexity of our world overwhelms
our decision-making ability. When the []Creating and Curating: How to Design a
Brand that Acts as a Filter is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media
Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/creating-and-curating-how-to-design-a-brand-that-acts-as-a-filter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=creating-and-curating-how-to-design-a-brand-that-acts-as-a-filter
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] 4 Steps to Prepare Your Blog for Google Updates in 2014
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '4 Steps to Prepare Your Blog for
Google Updates in 2014'
The much unplanned Google Page Rank update took place in December 2013 and it
basically shocked (partially) the search engine communities around the world.
This update is said to be the toughest or strictest for most of us; I saw
several PR 8 sites dro...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/nIyJNePz8GQ/google-updates-2014.html
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Google Updates in 2014'
The much unplanned Google Page Rank update took place in December 2013 and it
basically shocked (partially) the search engine communities around the world.
This update is said to be the toughest or strictest for most of us; I saw
several PR 8 sites dro...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/nIyJNePz8GQ/google-updates-2014.html
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
