Posted by JoannaLord

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

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

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

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

What are the different types of analytics?

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

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

Descriptive analytics:

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

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

Predictive analytics: 

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

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

Prescriptive analytics:

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

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

So, are you doing enough?

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

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

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

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

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Posted by willcritchlow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get real

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

Social Media

Beware management tools for Facebook — Jen Lopez

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

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

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

Check out G+ ripples to find influencers — Jen Lopez

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

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

Technical SEO

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

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

Split test your SEO — Mat Clayton

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

Create site speed videos — Annie Cushing

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

Clean your sitemap with Screaming Frog — Annie Cushing

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

CRO – Conversion rate optimisation

What nearly stopped you buying? — Stephen Pavlovich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email marketing

Encourage people to reply to your email marketing — Patrick McKenzie

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

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

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

Facebook retargeting with “dirty” lists — me

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

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

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

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

Send your competitors’ email marketing to Evernote — Stephen Pavlovich

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

Online advertising

Swap retargeting pixels — me

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

Combine Facebook demographic targeting and retargeting — Guy Levine

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

Drive reviews with retargeting — Guy Levine

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

Better content

Use HARO to solicit content input — Wil Reynolds

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

Screencast your interactive infographics — Lexi Mills

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

Management

Individual contributor tracks — Rand Fishkin

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

Reach out to your employees’ heroes — Rand Fishkin

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

Some general marketing/web tips

Build your personal brand by owning a topic — Justin Briggs

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

Run wpscan — Paul Madden

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

Take screenshots of your competitors every day — Mat Clayton

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

Put your best content on your about page — Mark Johnstone

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

Link building and PR

Turn your link developers into content producers — Lisa Myers

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

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

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

Video marketing

Sign up for YouTube advertising — Phil Nottingham

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

Local businesses

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

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

Giving away the videos

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

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

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

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

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

London Let’s Get Real

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

Boston Let’s Get Real

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

Get tickets to see us live in London or Boston

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

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

London LinkLove, 15th March 2013

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

Boston SearchLove, 20th & 21st May 2013

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

Interested in the west coast?

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

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

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

Posted by randfish

User experience and SEO: friends or enemies? They’ve had a rocky past, but it’s time we all realized that they live better in harmony. Dispelling the negative myths about how UX and SEO interact is the first step in improving both the look and search results of your website. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some persistent UX myths that we should probably ignore.

Have anything to add that we didn’t cover? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to talk a little about user experience, UX, and the impact that it has on SEO.

Now, the problem historically has been that these two worlds have had a lot of conflict, especially like late ’90s, early 2000s, and that conflict has stayed a little bit longer than I think it should have. I believe the two are much more combined today. But there are a few things that many people, including those who invest in user experience, believe to be true about how people use the web and the problems that certain user experience, types of functionality, certain design types of things cause impact SEO, and they impact SEO negatively. So I want to dispel some of those myths and give you things that you can focus on and fix in your own websites and in your projects so that you can help not only your SEO, but also your UX.

So let’s start with number one here. Which of these is better or worse? Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of form fields that you need a user to fill out to complete some sort of a registration step. Maybe they need to register for a website. Maybe they’re checking out of an e-commerce cart. Maybe they’re signing up for an event. Maybe they’re downloading something.

Whatever it is, is this better, putting all of the requests on one page so that they don’t have to click through many steps? Or is it better to break them up into multiple steps? What research has generally shown and user experience testing has often shown is that a lot of the time, not all of the time certainly, but a lot of the time this multi-step process, perhaps unintuitively, is the better choice.

You can see this in a lot of e-commerce carts that do things very well. Having a single, simple, direct, one step thing that, oh yes, of course I can fill out my email address and give you a password. Then, oh yeah, sure I can enter my three preferences. Then, yes, I’ll put in my credit card number. Those three things actually are more likely to carry users through a process because they’re so simple and easy to do, rather than putting it all together on one page.

I think the psychology behind this is that this just feels very overwhelming, very daunting. It makes us sort of frustrated, like, “Oh, do I really have to go through that?”

I’m not saying you should immediately switch to one of these, but I would fight against this whole, “Oh, we’re not capturing as many registrations. Our conversion rate is lower. Our SEO leads aren’t coming in as well, because we have a multi-step process, and it should be single step.” The real key is to usability test to get data and metrics on what works better and to choose the right path. Probably if you have something small, splitting it up into a bunch of steps doesn’t matter as much. If you have something longer, this might actually get more users through your funnel.

Number two. Is it true that if we give people lots of choice, then they’ll choose the best path for them, versus if we only give people a couple options that they might not go and take the action that they would have, had we given them those greater choices? One of my favorite examples from this, from the inbound marketing world, the SEO world, the sharing world, the social world is with social sharing buttons themselves. You’ll see tons of websites, blogs, content sites, where they offer just an overwhelming quantity of tweet this, share this on Facebook, like this on Facebook, like us on Facebook, like our company page on Facebook, plus one this on Google+, follow us on Google+, embed this on your own webpage, link to this page, Pinterest this.

Okay. Yes, those are all social networks. Some of them may be indeed popular with many of your users. The question is:  Are you overwhelming them and creating what psychologists have often called the “paradox of choice,” which is that we as human beings, when we look at a long list of items and have to make a decision, we’re often worse at making that decision than we would be if we looked at a smaller list of options? This is true whether it’s a restaurant menu or shopping for shoes or crafting something on the Internet. Etsy has this problem constantly with an overwhelming mass of choice and people spending lots of time on the site, but then not choosing to buy something because of that paradox of choice.

What I would urge you to do is not necessarily to completely get rid of this, but maybe to alter your philosophy slightly to the three or four or if you want to be a little religious about it, even the one social network or item that you think is going to have the very most impact. You can test this and bear it out across the data of your users and say, “Hey, you know what? 80% of our users are on Facebook. That’s the network where most of the people take the action even when we offer them this choice. Let’s see if by slimming it down to just one option, Twitter or Facebook or just the two, we can get a lot more engagement and actions going.” This is often the case. I’ve seen it many, many times.

Number three. Is it true that it’s absolutely terrible to have a page like this that is kind of text only? It’s just text and spacing, maybe some bullet points, and there are no images, no graphics, no visual elements. Or should we bias to, hey let’s have a crappy stock photo of some guy holding up a box or of a team smiling with each other?

In my experience, and a lot of the tests that I’ve seen around UX and visual design stuff, this is actually a worse idea than just going with a basic text layout. If for some reason you can’t break up your blog post, your piece of content, and you just don’t have the right visuals for it, I’d urge you to break it up by having different sections, by having good typography and good visual design around your text, and I’d urge you to use headlines and sub-headlines. I wouldn’t necessarily urge you to go out and find crappy stock photos, or if you’re no good at creating graphics, to go and make a no good graphic. This bias has created a lot of content on the web that in my opinion is less credible, and I think some other folks have experienced that through testing. We’ve seen it a little bit with SEOmoz itself too.

Number four. Is it true that people never scroll, that all the content that you want anyone to see must be above the fold on a standard web page, no matter what device you think someone might be looking at it on? Is that absolutely critical?

The research reveals this is actually a complete myth. Research tells us that people do scroll, that over the past decade, people have been trained to scroll and scroll very frequently. So content that is below the fold can be equally accessible. For you SEO folks and you folks who are working on conversion rate optimization and lead tracking, all that kind of stuff, lead optimization, funnel optimization, this can be a huge relief because you can put fewer items with more space up at the top, create a better visual layout, and draw the eye down. You don’t have to go ahead and throw all of the content and all of the elements that you need and sacrifice some of the items that you wanted to put on the page. You can just allow for that scroll. Visual design here is obviously still critically important, but don’t get boxed into this myth that the only thing people see is the above the fold stuff.

Last one. This myth is one of the ones that hurts SEOs the most, and I see lots of times, especially when consultants and agencies, or designers, developers are fighting with people on an SEO team, on a marketing team about, “Hey, we are aiming for great UX, not great SEO.” I strongly disagree with this premise. This is a false dichotomy. These two, in fact, I think are so tied and interrelated that you cannot separate them. The findability, the discover bility, the ability for a page to perform well in search engines, which remains the primary way that we find new information on the Internet, that is absolutely as critically important as it is to have that great user experience on the website itself and through the website’s pages.

If you’re not tying these two together, or if you’re like this guy and you think this is a fight or a competition, you are almost certainly doing one of these two wrong. Oftentimes it’s SEO, right? People believe, hey we have to put this keyword in here this many times, and the page title has to be this big on the page. Or, oh we can’t have this graphic here. It has to be this type of graphic, and it has to have these words on it.

Usually that stuff is not nearly important as it was, say, a decade ago. You can have fantastic UX and fantastic SEO working together. In fact, there almost always married.

If you’re coming up with problems like these, please leave them in the comments. Reach out to me, tweet to me and let me know. I guarantee you almost all of them have a creative solution where the two can be brought together.

All right, gang, love to hear from you, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by gfiorelli1

Last year on SEOmoz, I published The Content Curation Guide for SEO, which – even though it is still valid – I thought it needed a fresh addition. Not only does this post update some of the information shared, but it also digs deeper into an aspect of content curation that is actually the most used and, possibly, useful to SEOs and Content Marketers who must deal with more duties than just curation: social media curation.

For that reason, I gave a Mozinar last week about this topic where I explained why it is important to include social content curation in your inbound marketing strategy; how to prepare, organize, execute, and analyze your social curation activities; and what tools to use.

If you missed the opportunity to attend the live broadcast of the Mozinar, you can watch it here.

Joanna Lord does great social content curation on Pinterest! 

Audience Q&A

1. If you have many clients for which you need to curate content, you need to have so many profiles for all the social media accounts etc for their respective industries. Any good tools for managing these and managing mentions and more across all the accounts?

During the webinar, I praised Buffer for their awesome tools. However, its premium version only allows adding up to 12 social profiles and have up to two team members access the accounts. If you are doing social content curation for many clients, it might not be the best tool to use.

In your case, I would possibly use Hootsuite, whose premium plan allows you an unlimited number of admins for social profiles, a much larger number of social networks (Google+ included), and strongly social web platform like Scoop.it, Tumblr, YouTube, and others. 

2. Can you discuss your methods of not repeating content through different forms of social media (i.e. posting the same link on your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts)?

Ideally, to obtain the best effect from your social content curation, it is always better to craft the message accordingly to the specific nature of the social media you are going to share it. For instance, not only Twitter, Facebook , and/or Google+ have their own specific characteristics that you could miss using at your advantage with a single “standard” message, but they also present very different user behaviors, even in the case the users are the same in those three social networks.

With platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can easily switch from social to social from within the same platform, which will surely help.

3. How do you stay on top of all this content? I have Google RSS feeds, Pocket, Paper.li newspapers, Flipboard, and more continuously feeding in stories on SEO, PPC, social media, etc. – and it just overwhelms me. How do you a) stay sane, and b) decide what and what not to read/create content about?

Good question! Actually, even if I like to experiment and play with as many tools I can, I don’t use many. To be honest, I use only these ones:

1. Zite, Twitter (the selected people/sites I follow and the list I created), Google+, and the posts/comments in the blog I trust the most (i.e. SEOmoz and YouMoz) for discovering new sources
2. Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I select with time
3. Buffer, for the sharing process, and Bit.ly, Followerwonk, Google+ Ripples, and Facebook Insights for the analysis of my social curation activity

How do I “stay sane” and decide what and what not to read/create content about? Experience sure helps me, because with the passing of time, you learn how to easily recognize if one piece of content is so outstanding you should share it with your audience. But here few tips, which may help you:

1. Don’t read first, but “skim” the posts in your RSS Feed. If the first paragraph (more than the title) makes you want to read more, then there’s a chance that the posts is good and interesting.
2. Put a lot of weight in your sharing decision of the conclusions of the post. The best posts usually have amazing last paragraphs, which not only summarize the thesis of the post and its takeaways, but also make you literally say “WTF!”

4. What should the frequency of shareing blog posts be?

If by blogs we mean social shares, the frequency depends on the social network you are sharing your updates. The most common rule is to not overwhelm your audience with an excessive amount of shared content. For this reason, I am not particularly a fan of automation in social media, even if acclaimed people like Dan Zarrella are praising it. Automation, which is not the same as scheduling, takes away the human touch of a real and thoughtful human social curation, which – with the quality of the content shared – is what makes the difference.

That said, especially if your audience is spread all over the world, it is more than probable that you will need to share the same content at least twice in order to be reach the most of them when they are socially active. Luckily, social networks like Facebook and Google+ ( thanks to their Lists and Circles) offer you to make invisible these “reshares” to that part of your audience, who saw it previously.

5. How do you measure the success of content curation?

I measure it considering the two objectives I always want to reach with my content curation activities:

1. The increment of the number of followers/fans my social profiles
2. The number of the authors of the content I curated who thanks me and, possibly, follow me

Why social content curation

We see it everyday in the SERPs, we see it as being in the background of every Google update of late (Panda, Penguin, EMD), and we see it in people’s buying behavior: trusted brands are the entities of excellence for Google.

This positive attitude of Google toward brands is logical. In fact, people tend to trust more a recognized brand rather than some unknown one.
This is even truer online because brands tend to be considered as a reassuring “lighthouse” within the Internet, which is mostly a confused ocean of information.

Brands like Amazon, REI, CocaCola, Airbnb, and Zappos have a trust advantage that sites as onlinewarehouse.com, outdoors.com, sodabeverages.com, cheaphotels.com, and allkindofshoes.com (any reference to existing sites is purely casual) may have.

The same can be said regarding to people. We naturally tend to consider someone as the trusted reference in a specific niche as we get to know them. For instance, our own Rand Fishkin is a trusted reference in the SEO niche.

Just few examples of thought leaders in different areas, present and past.

As well defined by Forbes: “A thought leader is an individual or firm that prospects, clients, referral sources, intermediaries and even competitors recognize as one of the foremost authorities in selected areas of specialization, resulting in its being the go-to individual or organization for said expertise.”

More over: A thought leader is an individual or firm that significantly profits from being recognized as such.

Thoughtful leadership is the real intangible gold that makes a Brand or a Person a leader in its niche. But none is born a leader.

Throughout the past years, we have understood how inbound marketing (meant as the synergy of SEO, content, and social media marketing) is the correct strategy to use in order to obtain this so dreamt leadership. Content curation, as a facet of content marketing, can be of help in making that objective true.

How to to properly conduct a strategy of social content curation

First of all, you must make sure you’re targeting the correct audience. This section of Followerwonk is a huge help in making that goal possible, and the methodology explained by Peter Bray in this post.

However, while that methodology is useful to understand your potential audience, you also need to understand a second kind of audience: the people who are able to influence the thought leaders in your niche, because nothing is truer – especially for brands in its beginnings – than that it is easier to influence an influencer via the ones who are already influencing them (sorry for the tongue twister).

Once you have determined your audience, you should map it and segment it. After these steps are complete, you can start doing Social Content Curation for real.

How can I find trusted sources of information to curate?

Resource directories and news aggregators

You can use directories like Alltop, where you can find extremely well curated list of blogs for almost any kind of topic.

You can also use curated aggregation sites like Inbound.org or Hacker News in the Internet marketing and technology fields. Sites like those exist in mostly every niche; for instance, www.mortgagenewsdaily.com is news aggregator about mortgage.

Don’t forget about how often news aggregation is conducted via newsletters, especially when it comes to very small and specific niches. Fortunately, you can rely with newsletters aggregators as Smartbrief to dig into these hidden treasures.

Finally, if you are working for an enterprise level company, you can find market content curation enterprise solutions such as Factiva by Dowjones.

Social network personalized suggestions, lists, and groups

Quality resource directories, curated news aggregation sites, newsletters aggregators, and enterprise solutions are perfect for collecting sources, but as time passes and you become more socially active, you should start paying more attention to other sources for discovering new content to curate. A few examples include?

• Twitter Stories
• Linkedin Today
• Slideshare’s recommendations
• Suggested Communities and Google+ suggestions in its Explore section
• YouTube suggestions
• And so on…

As you can see, all kinds of information is based on personalization factors. For this same reason, it is safer not to mix the use of what you are doing on your personal social profiles, or you can literally screw up the quality of the suggestions.

Never forget to log out when letting your kids watching videos on YouTube, or…

A site like Topsy, thanks to its very good internal search feature, is another great source for discovering new content to share with your audience, especially when you must to care also the “freshness” factor of your curation.

Lists, like the ones created by the users on Twitter and Facebook, Groups (FB), and Communities (G+) are usually overlooked. However, they are amazing sources of new and surprisingly good content. They are also an easy way to extend your own audience thanks to the conversations you can create there, and a really easy way of discovering the ones I previously defined as the influencers’ influencers.

The old school (still good) methodology: blogs commenter’s analysis

Personally, this is still the methodology I prefer the most.

It is not scalable and presents many defects in terms of time spent conducting a curation research, but – possibly – it is the best way not only to discover new amazing sources, but also for creating strong relationships with those same sources.

When I was more of a new kid on the block in this industry than I am now, I follwed this tactic. I was able to discover sites like SEOgadget, Distilled, and SEERInteractive, and I also created great relationships with people like Richard Baxter, Dr Pete, John Doherty, Mike King, and many others, all thanks being very active on the SEOmoz community.

How can I organize the sources I have collected?

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure,” Clay Shirky once said. And filter failure happens if you are not able to organize the sources you have collected for performing you social content curation activity.

What I am going to present is my methodology, which I do not pretend is the best one. What I know is that it gives me positive results, and therefore it may be of help to you, too.

The curator’s best friends

Google Reader and Buffer are my best allies when it comes to content curation. I use the Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I have discovered, and Buffer is the tool I prefer for socially sharing my curated content.

When curating content, it is essential to perfectly categorize the main subject of your curation interest in subtopic. For instance, I subcategorize SEO into its different facets:

• Technical SEO
• Local search
• Link building
• International SEO
• Schema, Authorship, and G+
• Etc., etc.

More importantly, you must maintain the consistency of this categorization in every platform you are saving sources; for your Pocket account, Diigo, or your own browser favorites, and not just in Google Reader.

This is how I categorize the SEO and social media topics in Subtopics

How do I curate things? Do you have an example?

The style and tone to use when doing social content curation varies depending on the social networks you are using for these simple reasons:

• Every social platform offers you different “formal” opportunities for sharing content. The character limitation of Twitter is the easiest difference you can list, but others are present.
• The users’ behavior varies a lot from a social platform to another. On Twitter, they tend to prize timely news shares; on Facebook, photos and videos; and on Google+, long forms works usually better than short ones.

What voice to use is something that you learn with the experience and the analysis of the success (or failure) of the curated content you have shared. For that reason, it is important to use shorteners like bit.ly, or to use proprietary tools like Google+ Ripples and Facebook Insights, which allow you to track the life of your shares.

You can find inspiration from people who master the art of curation. Here is a short list of “non-official curators” people and brands, who are indeed doing great social content curation:

• Avinash Kaushik and Mackenzie Folgerson on Google+
• AJ Kohn on Twitter
• Guy Kawasaki and George Takei on Facebook
• Joanna Lord on Pinterest
• Starbucks on Instagram
• YouTube itself on YouTube

What is the best side effect of content curation?

As I have said since the beginning, social content curation should be meant as a content marketing tactic to help you and your brand become a trusted source of information, and eventually a thoughtful leader, in your niche.

Social content curation can also be a great way to break the ice and start creating bonds, relations, and serendipity with other people, that can then result in future occasions for link building, social shares of your own original content, or even collaborations.

In this sense, social content curation is a great “tool” for what it is normally defined as relationship or influencers marketing, as it shares the same purpose: creating trust.

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Posted by carinoverturf

We’re continuing the trend of two index releases each month by bringing you the latest Mozscape index release today – only 15 days after our last release on February 12th! The latest Mozscape index took about 11 days to process, with a fairly significant portion crawled the beginning of February. The crawl data spans about 38 days, so the oldest crawl data will date back to the beginning of January. You can access refreshed data across all of our applications – Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Our Big Data processing team (Martin York, Douglas Vojir, and Stephen Wood) have been working on some really exciting improvements to our processing code base reducing the length of time processing takes, as well as beginning development on a highly anticipated new Mozscape index feature: 

• The Mozscape index is created in one continuous batch processing pipeline. A massive amount of crawl data is initially downloaded which is first sorted and organized, then the computations and magic are applied. Every so often, files get uploaded in a checkpoint step; just in case something catastrophic happens to the index, we’ll be able to roll back to a fairly recent step.
  
  Recently the Big Data processing team dug through this checkpointing code to see where they could optimize – and they really optimized! The time needed to checkpoint files varies throughout the pipeline, but the longest checkpointing step used to take about 60 hours to complete… With the optimization from Doug and Martin, this step now takes on average 2.18 hours! Holy time savings!!
   
• The first few steps in processing are dedicated to organizing how the work is going to be distributed across the entire Mozscape processing cluster. These files are broken out into what are called shards and then assigned across the entire fleet of machines. Sometimes these shards aren’t always completely full; this means one machine will be all done with work before another machine. Martin revisited this code as well to see what type of optimization could be applied. With the help of our master data scientist, Matt Peters, Martin was able to improve the distribution of work, saving around 25% of time spent processing! 
   
• One feature we hear requested fairly often is including HTTPS crawl data in the Mozscape index. Good news – development on this feature has begun, and we hope to have HTTPS data included in the Mozscape index this summer! 

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

• 82,275,594,589 (82 billion) URLs
• 9,097,532,641 (9.1 billion) Subdomains
• 148,991,416 (149 million) Root Domains
• 829,267,740,331 (829 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.25% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.08% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.92% are external
• Rel Canonical – 15.43% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 73 links on it
  • 62.93 internal links on average
  • 10.33 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.35
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.31
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

As you can see from the metrics above, there continues to be an increase of subdomains as we have discovered a small number of root domains that have a substantial number of subdomains associated with them. 

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you’re ever curious about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

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