seo

Posted by SimonPenson

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck has a point. Outside of being one of America’s most celebrated authors he was also a man that understood the life or death importance of ideas in the context of content.

As a lowly magazine journalist I remember routinely being told that “ideas are the lifeblood of content strategy” and that lesson has lived with me ever since.

It’s why I have spent thousands of hours since the early 2000s iterating my own process to maximize the output from time spent working on creating them.

Creativity as a process

It seems strange, then, to suggest that the process of creating brilliant ideas consistently should be just that: a “process.” After all, isn’t creativity best performed in an environment free from constraint and boundaries? There is evidence to suggest that is the case, but in practice structure ensures that those ideas are consistently award-winning and hit-you-between-the-eyes awesome.

But why is this even important in the first place? I’m sure I don’t have to convince you, as a learned reader of this blog, that content strategy is now the heartland of any effective digital strategy. Content, after all, is what has been creating audiences for thousands of years, and that will not change anytime soon.

In fact, it’s perhaps even more important than you are led to believe, and nobody puts it better than Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang when he said:

“I think that it’s always possible to have a great company if you have great ideas.”

Great ideas permeate every level of an organization, and so while this is focused squarely on digital content ideation, a similarly structured approach will produce equally consistent results across the board. And given that the biological process behind creating ideas (more on this later) is a real process our best bet is to mimic that as closely as possible in the physical world.

The problem with ideas

By their very nature ideas are subjective. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, and so without any kind of structure, the ones that make it onto the final to-do list will often come from one or two that “shout loudest” in any open brainstorm scenario.

Before we even get into the actual structure, then, it is worth considering for a moment how you should set up the actual environment in which you plan to execute your ideation strategy.

Before you start

Deciding how often you want, or need, to create new ideas is the first step in the process, and this will be different for every business. If you are agency-side like us at Zazzle Media then the answer will be multiple times per month, but in house it really depends on how “big” your content ambitions are and an understanding of your audience in terms of what they want and expect you to create.

If you are working in-house at a large brand, then with multiple blog and social channels as well as work “off page” around digital PR, the answer may be once or twice per month. If you only have a single blog and do a “bit in social,” once every quarter may suffice.

How you answer this comes back to what you know about those you are writing for and also what resources you have to create the content.

The environment

The “where” of content ideation is critical to the success of the process. Working in the same room that is cognitively associated with mundane tasks can inhibit key synapses, or brain connections. What your brain is looking for, in simple terms, is to “loosen up.”

This is because our brains look for new experiences and stimulation and will work at their most creative when the three main areas known to be involved in idea creation are at their most relaxed. They are:

The executive attention network

This is the part of the brain used when you are really thinking hard, such as in a conference or client meeting, where concentration is critical. It links to memory, so you “store” those ideas for later and block distractions, allowing you to focus more intently.

The imagination network

This area of the brain is able to process the information and break it down, mixing it with past, present, and future scenarios to create possible new ideas.

The salience network

This monitors what is happening around you and passes the information to the appropriate area of the brain. It is the “switch,” if you like.

New surroundings help stimulate all of these key areas, and if you can get those participating in a meeting to go for a walk first, then you’ll also tick another key “creativity box” in releasing endorphins, which will serve to boost mental capacity even further.

To this end, we will often choose to run content meetings in the café within our offices, at a local bar/pub, or even outside (if the UK weather allows!).

The brainstorm

The key to great content strategy, of course, is variation. I have written previously about how you can check content flow, and it’s really important that you first understand the importance, and second are aware of how well you are performing against this critical content metric.

It’s important because of the way humans are built. For decades print publishers—especially in the world of magazines—have worked on improving the “flow” of their titles to ensure that avid readers keep coming back for more.

You can easily reverse engineer this and check it for yourself to see what I mean, but take my word for it; the more you are able to vary the type of content you produce, the better your return visitor stats will look and the larger your audience will grow.

This means that your brainstorm needs to be built to extract as many different ideas as possible, giving you the ammunition necessary to create such a strategy.

Here’s how. The chart below may look relatively simple, but it is the result of 12 years of trial and error, testing, blood, sweat, and tears to define the most effective roadmap for eking out the right mix of content, irrespective of niche.

The version you see here is a static version of the animated process you can play with by clicking on the image or right here (a version on our own site, which then links through to the various tools we use to make the process as effective as possible).

The idea is that you split each brainstorm into eight constituent parts. Let’s run through each stage in turn now…

1. The brief overall strategy

A critical component of any content process is to ensure there is a clear, shared understanding of the overall aim or strategy of the campaign. Like a company vision statement, it should permeate every level of the business and everyone working on the campaign should be able to recite personas and align everything to the overall aim of the work they are doing.

Sounds simple, but the number of times we see businesses without this kind of alignment has made this a very important first-port-of-call in the process.

It is a relatively easy entry into the overall ideation process and requires a simple conversation and initial centering of all ideas around the objective.

For instance, that may be “to grow an audience of 30-40-year-old white-collar workers who are into skiing.” Centering all ideation on that will keep ideas focused and in line with overall objectives.

An example idea: A series of image-based “how to” guides covering ski techniques (this site does a good job of this), distributed via targeted social amplification to our target demographic.

2. Data/personas

This then ties into a deeper conversation around what key data we have, or can create, to improve existing or “reach” audience insight.

A previous post of mine on the Moz Blog detailed a way in which we leverage data from social to help inform audience understanding, and often we will run this process beforehand to give us an initial swathe of audience profiling data.

This is also where existing persona detail will be shared so we can ensure that we are coming up with ideas fit for the different “types” of audience being targeted.

A 35-year-old married father of two working in insurance will be intrigued by very different content than a 60-year-old widower looking to invest cautiously for retirement when they are considering financial services businesses, for instance.

This is where we create those audience-centric ideas, and this section can often be one with the greatest depth.

Based on insight into our skiing business example, we may discover that there is a high correlation between our audience and those that also like surfing. If that is the case, an example idea may be a list-based feature looking at X ways in which surfing techniques can help you become a better skier.

3. Long-tail opportunity

Long tail is an increasingly major opportunity, especially for those leading their digital marketing charge with content creation. Google’s Hummingbird update is also designed to better surface more precise answers to queries, and that should mean more traffic for what traditionally we had traditionally known as the long tail.

Creating content that is based squarely on existing search volume as opposed to simply guessing and hoping it may attract visits is a critical component of any strategy.

The research for this can be carried out beforehand, but often we find it more useful to run tools such as Ubersuggest and Grepwords during the session to make it inclusive and more interesting. More people suggesting input phrases can also mean you end up with a wider selection of potential terms to run through.

The idea then is to prioritize those phrases either on potential search volume or ‘fit’ with the mix of the overall content plan.

Here is a snippet of what the former tool has surfaced for our skiing example; clearly there is opportunity to utilize this information in the formation of a daily article creation strategy:

4. Semantic phrases

The marketing world is awash with talk of entity search and semantic association. For those that haven’t the time or inclination to go away and read awesome guides on this area by the likes of Aaron Bradley or Moz’s own Matthew Brown, in simple terms it is the concept of organizing information by understanding individual “things” (entities) and their relationships with other “things,” without there already being an explicit link between them.

Semantic search understands those relationships, and therefore (in theory) the implicit part of any query, and can thus deliver a richer list of results.

Understanding what other phrases, or words, may be semantically linked can be useful in ensuring that you are “whole-of-market” going forwards, and can expand laterally into relevant content areas.

Few tools really help with this at present, well but one we do use is LSI Keywords, which provides a very simple way of exporting other similar or relevant keywords. Google’s own database of entities, Freebase, is also quite useful, and its search functionality will list other associated entries, giving you a simple map of subjects you could still cover while staying relevant. If you type the word into the top search bar, you are presented with a list of themes relevant to the topic:

You can further expand the list by clicking on the “view more” link at the bottom of the drop-down. This list can give you an amazing framework from which you can work on wider topic areas.

5. Trending content

One of the easiest ways to capture large amounts of new visitor traffic is to jump on existing conversations around trending content themes.

Again, it can pay to get everyone involved in the brainstorm to spend five minutes before the meeting researching news-related blogs, news sites, and social channels for ideas to expedite the process, but it is not impossible to do this live, either. Google Trends, Social listening tools, Fresh Web Explorer, and other tools can be great to get the latest angles on relevant themes.

These will obviously be time-sensitive, so it is important that you brainstorm for this content on a regular basis and leave placeholders within your content calendar for what you find. So, for instance, once a week (say every Wednesday) you’ll enter [news-led article], and the subject matter will be decided based upon the maximum possible impact.

The idea, also, is that you move the debate forward. Don’t simply rewrite what has already been said. Look for exclusive, interesting angles to throw in the mix.

For instance, if I use Social Mention to look at the latest skiing chatter, I soon discover that there is some cool content being shared via Facebook (use the search filtering options in the left column to drill down to specific platforms, sort by sentiment, and look for top users, etc.). Perhaps you can come up with Part Two to the epic “Star Wars Meets The Winter Olympics?”

6. Evergreen content

And then we come to one of the most important areas of all: evergreen content. Why is it so important? Quite simply, it’s the content you will put the most effort into perfecting, that will attract the most traffic, and that will have the most longevity.

It is imperative that you really understand the core concerns, frustrations and gaps in knowledge your audience has so you can fill those gaps in great detail and build trust, association, and engagement with your brand.

So, how do you go about working out what kind of content you should be producing here? The answer lies in keyword analysis, competitor analysis and audience data insight once again.

Tools like Searchmetrics can also help here; its long-tail opportunity tool can help you see what some of the most successful sites rank for alongside their traffic volumes and value. This makes finding the opportunities you don’t have and ranking them in order of priority that much easier. Sort by either volume or opportunity, and you have a list of content creation to-dos right there!

For this section to run smoothly, you should prepare a spreadsheet of keywords with search volumes for your target country. This will help validate any ideas that come out of the brainstorm. Ensuring that what you think is a good idea for a lengthy evergreen piece actually matches real-world search demand. If you’re putting in a heap of effort then this is crucial in ensuring positive ROI from the activity.

You should end up with a list of five to 20 ideas to go away and begin work on.

7. Content types

By now you should have a long list of possible ideas. The key at this point is to start classifying them into “content type” piles. To do this, create a spreadsheet with all the relevant content types for the brand along the top, and then drop in your ideas below. That way you can see which content types may be a little light on the ideas front, and you can further brainstorm around that specific area, filling in the gaps. Here’s an example of such a table:

8. Purchase funnel

The final discussion centres squarely on ensuring that the range of content covers the entire purchase funnel. For those that do not have the classic funnel engrained, you can see the various stages to the right here in the widely accepted classic purchase funnel, based on the AIDA principles first set out by marketer E. St Elmo Lewis.

AIDA stands for:

• A – attention (or awareness): Attract the attention of the customer.
• I – interest: Raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional advertising).
• D – desire: Convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
• A – action: Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

What regularly happens with ideation is a team will end up with lots of content that sits at the top of that funnel, helping with brand discovery and touching on consideration.

It is critical, however, to brainstorm content ideas that help people through that buying process and also help turn them into evangelists and long-term clients/customers.

This is where in-depth, unbiased buying guides and looking after your posts comes in. You can also improve retention with work to build a community around your offering (Moz is the perfect example!), offers and competitions, “exclusive” member clubs and offers, and so on.

We had this missing from the mix until around six months ago, but since introducing it we have managed to add a powerful new dimension to the overall content plan, and it works really well.

So, you now have your list of ideas. The next phase is then what we class as content planning, which is a subject all of its own. In short, you then need to distill those ideas into realistic, deliverable, concepts, and once you have that editing process complete you then place those ideas into an editorial calendar that can be delivered with the resources you have available.

Example for each stage of this funnel may include:

• Exposure/awareness: The “Star Wars Meets the Winter Olympics” idea mentioned above.
• Discovery: A thought-leadership piece on why the brand believes a new country is the next big “skiing Mecca”
• Consideration: An expert buyer guide on the products and wider choices, such as the “best skiing holiday for under $1,000”
• Conversion: Trust-building content, such as an honest comparison table comparing our brand with other competitors, proving why we are best.
• Customer relationship: An amazing editorial email concept introducing them to the brand initially, with offers, etc.
• Retention: Exclusive offers for those “in-the-club/VIPs” (existing customers).

That’s the process; here are the tools to help

There are a number of tools we use on a regular basis to make this entire process more efficient and effective. I have listed the best of them below to help you through the ideation process:

1. Ubersuggest – a popular long tail opportunity finder based on Google’s suggest feature of previously searched for phrases.

2. Grepwords – The Instant Keyword Tool provides downloadable ‘csvs’ of related keywords along with search volumes and CPCs.

3. Google Trends – This is generally a very useful tool to find trending content and check for demand but it’s especially useful when you use the 2013 round up of top searches. The how to guides could be gold dust for the right businesses?

4. Magazines – A less obvious “tool,” but certainly a great resource for great content ideas. Choose a specialist title for your niche.

5. Bottlenose – A great content-curation engine built to aggregate content based on social “noise” and sharing.

6. Content Idea Generator – not the best tool on the list here but it can help with idea structuring.

7. Topsy – An awesome Twitter-based analytics and analysis tool that can be used to see most shared content.

8. Inboxq – A great tool for surfacing key questions being asked so you can answer them and create content based on them.

9. Murally – This is a useful tool for helping to curate related concepts and ideas in one place

10. Flickr – A fantastic resource for visual content cues. Stick those you like on a Mural.ly board and you soon have a look and feel understanding.

11. Followerwonk – Useful for finding influencers around specific subject matter to see what’s being shared and engaged with in a space.

12. Trello – This is a great tool for organizing more complex ideas.

13. Quora – A fantastic resource for discovering longer-tail content opportunities to answer questions being asked.

14. Google+ circles – Follow the right groups, and they can be fantastic idea resources.

15. Ifttt – Not an idea tool in its own right, but the automation of certain tasks can make collating ideas so much easier.

16. Alltop – An easy one-stop-shop for latest subject matter articles and other content to ‘borrow’ ideas from!

17. Google Alerts – A must-have for the latest on your niche to help with trending content.

18. Zanran – A brilliant “search engine” for stats and facts, which helps with content based on compelling data.

19. Moz Alerts – Another useful tool for keeping an eye on trending content ideas and competitor activity.

20. LinkedIn Groups – Like Google+ Circles, these are fantastic for finding questions to answer.

21. Link Bait Title Generator – We love this simple tool. It may be limited in terms of ideas but it’s quick and simple to use.

22. Delicious –The original shareable content aggregator and still a great place to discover fantastic content ideas.

23. Trapit – A clever content curation tool that gets the right content to you efficiently

Pulling it together

The next stage of the process, as explained, is to then edit your final list of ideas down into a realistic list of concepts that you CAN deliver with the time and resources you have available, and that can be a significant amount of work in its own right.

Get it right though and you will end up with a content calendar filled to the brim with ideas that grow and engage your audience across every digital channel. That plan becomes the heartbeat of your entire digital marketing strategy.

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Posted by Dr-Pete

Sometime in January, Google quietly rolled out a change that I believe could revolutionize organic search. Currently, the impact is limited, and it may take months or years for the full effect to be felt, but the underlying shift is fundamental to the future of the Knowledge Graph and the delicate symbiosis between Google and webmasters.

Answer box 1.0

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve written a lot about the current generation of answer boxes (sometimes called “direct answers” or “one-box answers”). These display quick answers to what are usually concrete questions. For example, if I want to know when the Willis Tower here in Chicago is open, I can search for [Willis tower hours] and get:

Google’s ability to understand questions has expanded significantly in the past couple of years, probably pushed forward even more by the Hummingbird update. For example, I can get the same answer box by querying [when is the Sears Tower open].

So, where is this data coming from? Typically, it’s coming directly from the Knowledge Graph, and you can spot it pretty easily. Here’s the Knowledge Panel for [Willis tower]:

I’ve added the red arrow – as you can see, the information in the answer box is taken directly from a property in the Knowledge Graph. You can easily reverse it, too, to create endless examples. Let’s take the property “Construction started: 1970” and turn it into a query, like [when was the sears tower built]. You’ll get another answer box:

Most of this information comes from a very limited number of sources, including Freebase, Wikipedia, and Google+. Freebase is structured in terms of entities and properties (think object-based, as opposed to article-based), which makes it a perfect fit for Knowledge Graph.

Google’s dilemma

There’s a problem, though. The main sources of data for the Knowledge Graph are curated by people. Ironically, Google is facing the same dilemma with Knowledge Graph in 2014 that led to the creation of internet search engines in the first place. Put simply, the scope of information is much too large, and growing too quickly, for any human-edited approach to scale. Google can’t just hire Wikipedia editors – they need a new data source.

Google is hardly blind to this problem. In a research paper published just this year, Google outlines the basic issue (hat-tip to Andrew Isidoro):

The paper goes on to explain a method of extracting missing knowledge graph data on demand, using Google’s existing search technology. Welcome to…

Answer box 2.0

Luckily (for them), Google already has one of the largest data sources on the planet – their index of the worldwide web. What if, instead of looking for answers in a limited set of encyclopedic sources, Google could generate answers directly from our websites?

That’s exactly what they’ve done. For example, here’s what you’ll see at the top of a recent search for [social security tax rate]:

Unlike answer boxes based on the Knowledge Graph, this new format pulls its answer directly from third party websites, giving them attribution via the page title and link. In many ways, this is an additional organic result, and like all answer boxes in the left-hand column, it appears above “#1”.

These longer answers look more like search snippets, but there’s also a second version, triggered when Google can find a definitive answer on a third-party site. Here’s the new answer box for the query [September birthstone]:

This example includes a longer snippet, but the direct answer – “Sapphire” – is highlighted, more in the style of a traditional answer box. Again, the source page’s title and URL is shown below the snippet.

How do we know, beyond the third-party attribution, that this isn’t coming from the traditional Knowledge Graph? Try a variation on the query, like [september’s birthstone]. I get this result:

Here’s the answer box for a longer query [what is september’s birthstone]:

Interestingly, the short answer (“sapphire”) is no longer capitalized, because that’s how Google found it on the source page. In my personal testing, these variations weren’t consistent, so Google may be using some kind of query refinement. Regardless of that, it’s pretty clear that these answers are being generated on the fly.

The new number one

These answer boxes are essentially a new organic result, and clearly disrupt the traditional top results. So, where are these answers coming from, and how do you get one? We don’t have a lot of data yet, but in every case I’ve seen, the URL used to create the answer box also appears on page one of Google results. So, you have to already be ranking well on the term.

In most of the cases that I’ve seen so far (again, the data set is small), the answer is coming from the #1 organic position. For example, here’s the answer box and #1 result I get for [marine corps’ birthday]:

So, military.com is essentially getting two listings on this SERP. In some cases, though, the answer is coming from a result lower on page 1. Here’s the answer box and part of page 1 for [richest man in the world]:

In this case, Time Magazine gets credit for the answer box, even though it’s all the way down in #8, and Forbes has all three of the top organic spots. What’s even worse is that Time article directly cites Forbes as the source, even in the search snippet. So, what’s going on here?

I suspect this comes down to fairly basic on-page factors. The main Forbes article is a bit design-heavy (it has limited crawlable text) and uses an “infinite” scroll approach. None of the Forbes pages directly mention the phrase “richest man in the world”, especially in proximity to Bill Gates’ name.

What if I change my query to something that Forbes targets better, like [world’s richest people]? Here’s the result I get (all of these searches are incognito, but I can’t rule out some sort of query history effect):

It’s interesting that Google seems to be inferring that I want to know the world’s richest person (and is bolding “Bill Gates”), but doesn’t feel that the answer is definitive enough to break it out as a short answer. Even since starting this post, Google has made refinements to the matching system, but currently it seems like on-page keyword targeting is fairly critical.

It’s just the beginning

Google clearly has a long way to go. Some of the answer boxes are pretty ridiculous. Take, for example, a search for [hair color]:

This is a pretty ambiguous query, and it doesn’t seem well suited for any kind of answer box (let alone one that’s one step away from a salon advertisement). Expect Google to put a lot of time and money into improving this system over the next year.

While this post is focused on answer boxes, Google is using a similar approach to expand knowledge panels. For example, here’s a search for [biology]:

Notice the “Related topics” section – only one of those results is coming from Wikipedia. Google is building a decent chunk of this knowledge panel on sites in their index. The attribution on these is much more subtle – only the small, gray text goes to the source site. The blue links (except for “Wikipedia” at the top) go directly to more Google searches.

Is the balance shifting?

It’s easy to see how this progression is inevitable – Google has to expand the Knowledge Graph, and they can’t rely on human editors and static data sources. While this data may be good for users, it represents a shift in the balance between Google and webmasters. There’s always been an implied symbiosis – Google crawls our sites and extracts information, but they send us traffic in return. We may not always like how they do things, but the end result has benefitted millions of site owners.

What happens when a user can get a simple answer quickly, and that answer is extracted from a third party page and cannibalizes the organic clicks? What happens when third-party data is being used not to drive traffic to the source, but to more Google searches? It seems to me that the symbiosis is threatened.

For now, there’s not much you can do. You can work to retune your on-page content to appear in these new entities, but you do so at the risk of harming your own organic traffic. It’s probably better to be in the answer box than let your competitor be there, but it’s hardly an ideal choice. The best I can say is to be aware of your money terms – not just how you’re ranking, but how those SERPs actually look in context. At some point, we may all have to decide if giving away our data is worth what we get in return.

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Posted by katemorris

It’s the bane of every business that relies on local traffic: reviews. Reviews are not new to business. We have been dealing with them in business since we had businesses and people could talk. In the last few years, we have been able to participate in the conversations that happen between consumers. Local reviews are just an extension of word of mouth marketing. It’s a permanent record of consumer’s thoughts of your business much like social media.

The worst part is having no reviews, or having reviews (GLOWING reviews) from real customers, and Yelp doesn’t show or count them. Reviews are the links of the local world. They drive new business and are imperative to growth. However, if you ask for one or incentivize their posting, they might not count.

Yelp Review Guidelines:

“You shouldn’t ask your customers to post reviews on Yelp.”

Google+ Review Guidelines:

“Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased … Don’t offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of soliciting reviews.”

What’s a business owner to do?!

Learn from link building

This is going to come at an odd time as link building (guest posting) is hot in the search media right now, but the link building world has been through this exact situation and local businesses can learn from it.

Don’t chase tactics. Look for inspiration from other businesses but modify ideas to your business and your users. Just like link building, if your reviews show up in a pattern, that pattern is detectable by a computer algorithm and will likely be discounted.

Anything that is pattern-based is detectable, including:

• IP address of the reviewer: Never ask for reviews from your location(s).
• Timeline: This means if a number of reviews come in together over a period of time, think all in one day or one week. It reflects that they were asked to leave a review in one big push.
• Same phrases: If many reviews use the same phrasing, it can look orchestrated.

Scale is the enemy. Along the same lines as the patterns discussion above, trying to scale reviews is going to produce detectable trends. Don’t try to go out and get reviews en masse. You need them, yes, but a slow trend is the better way to get them. This brings us to the next point: influence.

Influence and integrate

We just covered what not to do; now let’s review how to go about getting reviews that are approved, shown, and can help grow your business. Just like links, reviews are best when they are placed there without your interaction, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the matter completely. Businesses can influence people to leave reviews. Influence, not entice or coerce. Influence with communication.

Guaranteed reviews: knock down, drag-out fantastic customer service

This is the one solid way to get reviews without ever having to mention the word review. I’m talking Zappos, Nordstrom, and Amazon level of customer service. You treat your customers—all of them—like they are kings and queens. Give them no choice but to tell people about you. The following is a review for one of my favorite food trucks in Seattle:

This is a long time investment though and I know not everyone has the time or thinks about leaving reviews. You can’t make great customer service happen IRL sometimes, it’s not always you in control. Regardless, this is still the best long-term solution.

But businesses have immediate needs, so here is how to address getting more reviews now.

Define your customer lifecycle

The key is laying out the standard lifecycle of a customer. I am going to pick on a favorite local business that inspired this post: Dreamclinic Seattle. The blue is online interaction, purple is in-person interaction. You can get more color coded with medium (email, organic, yellow pages, etc.) but I went with simple.

The main point of outlining the customer lifecycle is to see the cycle part of it and realize you have more than one opportunity to influence a review. Most businesses that rely on reviews have a customer lifecycle. If you haven’t defined yours, do that now.

Integrate with all email marketing

1. Define email contact points

Once you have the customer lifecycle, add in when you normally contact your customers via email. You want to know when they are already online and thinking about you (this is key to online engagement!). There should be a few opportunities like newsletters, offers, post-purchase, post-visit, and confirmations. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a good or a service, there should be communication throughout the customer lifecycle.

2. When will the customer be in the right frame of mind to leave a review?

Now consider when the customer is going to be able to write the best review. Sometimes it’ll be almost immediately after the purchase, sometimes a few weeks after. For example: Dreamclinic needs to have a “Drink water!” reminder email an hour after a massage with a mention of social media and scheduling the next appointment (the mentions being side thoughts and the water being the main purpose).

3. Communicate for something other than a review.

Once you know when the best time is, line that up with a communication with the customer that is not about a review. Find another reason to get a hold of them. It can be a customer service survey or just a check in about their purchase. In this email, don’t attempt to sell them anything, be genuinely interested in how they are feeling. If you get a reply (an engaged customer), then be sure to mention (one-on-one) that you would appreciate a review.

Notice that this whole process is basically identifying people that want to leave a review, are engaged with your brand, and are conversing with you individually. There is nothing about scale here; it’s all about identifying people individually and helping them help your business.

Mention social media in all communication

Beyond email, you should be mentioning your best converting and favorite social media outlets for your business to your customers. Not for reviews, but for engagement. Reviews will come with engagement.

Start with the questions:

• Where do you get the most community involvement?
• Are you a new business? If so, where do your competitors see more engagement?

List those places, don’t just use Facebook and Twitter because you “should.” Once you know your top converting communities, mention them to your customers in all parts of the life cycle. Think about your business cards, mailers, receipts, the chalkboard outside, your menu, and more. Check out some inspiration I found from Heidi Cohen.

Remember, mention your online communities and integrate the mentions into the whole lifecycle, and the reviews will roll in naturally.

Speaking of local search issues, have you heard about the new Moz Local?

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Posted by randfish

Google recently said that mobile search volume could exceed desktop search volume by the end of 2014. Don’t panic, though; there’s quite a bit more nuance to the trend than most people realize.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us understand that nuance, and talks about how we can level-up our mobile game in ways that will benefit our businesses regardless of whether and when Google’s forecast comes true.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Dr-Pete

Google’s recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new, data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool…

Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)

Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:

Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only intended as an approximation of actual Google results.

How the redesign impacts titles

Google’s redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before and after the redesign:

The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After the redesign (bottom), it’s lost six full characters. The old guidelines no longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.

It’s harder than it sounds

You may be thinking: “Ok, so gimme the magic number!”, but unfortunately it’s not that easy. While we try to set a reasonable length limit as a rule of thumb, the reality is that Arial (the title font) is proportionally spaced. Put simply, different characters have different widths. For example, the following two titles are both exactly 40 characters long:

As you can see, these two 40-character titles cover a wide range. Let’s break down what’s going on here…

(1) Narrow letters are narrow

Ok, that’s probably obvious, but let’s just put it out there. The first title is full of lowercase l’s and i’s which take up relatively little space. Meanwhile, m’s and w’s take up quite a bit more space. In this font, three lowercase l’s are actually narrower than one lowercase w.

(2) ALL CAPS take up more space

Capital letters are wider than lowercase letters – again, not a big surprise. All-caps titles also tend to be hard to read and are the visual equivalent of shouting. In some cases, like “LEGO” above, capitalization is important and necessary. In other cases, like “BRIDGEWATER COMMONS”, it’s just noise.

(3) Width varies with the query

Google highlights (bolds) the query keywords, so a longer query will bold more keywords. Bolded characters take up slightly more space. So, even if you found a title that just squeezed into the width limit, the actual display of that title would change depending on the keywords searchers use to find it.

(4) Cut-off titles have less characters

Google is cutting off titles with CSS, and the browser appends “…” whenever a title is truncated. So, a title that’s just slightly too long and gets cut will actually be shorter than a title that barely squeaks in under the width limit, due to the additional space required by “…”.

Data from real-life searches

In order to really understand what’s happening to title tags in the wild, we need to collect the data. So, we set about looking at real searches to understand where title tags were getting cut off after the redesign. Before I get into the methodology, I’d like to thank Bernt Johansson, founder of Swedish SEO firm Firstly for his generous help in hacking together this particular jQuery monster.

We looked at page 1 search results for 10,000 queries. Since not all SERPs have 10 results, this resulted in 93,438 total search results. An encoding error caused some issues with special characters, requiring us to toss out some bad data – this left us with 89,787 titles to work with. Query highlighting was preserved from the original searches. This data was all collected from Google.com using English search queries.

Since Google is truncating the titles using CSS, we have to replicate them as rendered (not just look at source code). Once the titles were extracted, each of them was displayed in a browser (Chrome on Windows 7) at the same size and width as a Google desktop search (18px Arial in a 512-pixel wide <div>). Then, a somewhat bizarre combination of JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX and PHP stored the display length for analysis. Due to minor variations, our display lengths could vary from Google’s by ±2 characters.

Means, distributions & confidence

Sorry, it’s about to get mathy up in here. Let’s look at just the titles that were truncated by Google, to find out how their lengths varied. This leaves 28,410 titles for analysis. I can tell you that the mean (average) length of those titles was 57.7 characters, but don’t run off just yet. If the distribution of these lengths was normal, then setting the mean as a reasonable limit would mean that half of the titles at that length would still get cut off. That’s hardly ideal. Also, this doesn’t account for the titles that weren’t cut off.

Just out of curiosity, though, let’s look at the overall distribution of cut-off title lengths (post-cut-off):

The good news is that this distribution is roughly normal, peaking at about 57-58 characters. Post-cut-off title tags ranged in length from 42 to 68 characters. Here’s a title cut off at 42 characters:

Again, all-caps titles take up more space, and the query (“anywho reverse lookup”) is fairly long. Here’s a title that makes it up to 68 characters after being cut off:

In this example, the query is short (“Giftster”), the title only has two capitalized words, and there are quite a few lowercase l’s and i’s in play. Keep in mind that all of the lengths in the graph above are after the cut-off. Gifster could probably get away with 1-3 more characters beyond what’s displayed. We also need to consider the pre-cut-off length and account for the ellipsis.

So, how do we turn this all into something that’s actually useful? What do we really want to know? Ultimately, we want to find a reasonable length at which we can be fairly confident our titles won’t get cut off. At each length, I looked at what percentage of titles were cut off. Since the distribution is fairly normal, longer titles were (as expected) more likely to get cut off. Here are the cut-off lengths at five different levels of confidence:

• 80% – 57 characters (81.6%)
• 90% – 56 characters (91.6%)
• 95% – 55 characters (95.8%)
• 99% – 53 characters (98.7%)
• 99.9% – 49 characters (99.9%)

Since character lengths are integers, we can’t hit the 80%, 90%, etc. marks right on the money, so these are the closest numbers (the actual percentages are in parentheses). Maybe I’m biased by my statistics background, but I tend to think 95% is a pretty reasonable level. Put simply, if all of your title tags were exactly 55 characters long, then you could expect about 95% of them to be left alone (1 in 20 would be cut off).

There’s no magic number

I feel comfortable saying that 55 characters is a reasonable title-length limit under the new design, but keep in mind that your title lengths may vary quite a bit. In addition, a cut-off title isn’t the kiss of death – Google still processes keywords beyond the cut-off (including for ranking purposes), and other formats, like vertical results and Google+, may display your full titles. Here’s an example from Google news vertical results:

In this example, the first news result actually displays the full title of the article, whereas the second result is truncated. Ultimately, if you’re really concerned about any given result, you need to see it for yourself. In some cases, a mysterious trailing “…” may even make a title more clickable (I wouldn’t bank on it, but it’s possible).

In many cases, like blog posts titles, it’s not worth going back and revising everything based on this new data. I’d look closely at your core pages, view the SERPs for your target keywords, and make sure that your snippets look the way you’d like them to. Use your judgment, and keep the guideline in mind for future SEO efforts, but don’t start hacking at characters. Google could change the rules again.

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!