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How to Track the Online ROI of Offline Advertising

Posted by GeoffKenyon

While I love online marketing and often times think that is a much better marketing investment than offline marketing and advertising, offline ads are important and add value. While we are going to see budget shift significantly from offline efforts to online campaigns, there is still going to be a ton of money going into offline ads.

Much of the value from offline advertising is actually online and is typically attributed to the direct channel. If an ad gives out a website URL, they almost always send visitors to their homepage. When ads don’t give users a website to go to, typically one of the search channels will receive credit for the value created by the ad. The KTM ad below is a prime example of a print ad that will create value, but the value will be attributed to either the search channel or direct channel if the user is already aware of (or simply searches for) the URL for KTM.

As you can see below, in 2012 82% of ad-spend was offline; that is a lot of visitors and conversions that aren’t being properly attributed.

This isn’t just a problem for companies with big ad budgets. In fact, this is more important for small businesses with smaller budgets because often times these expenses come out of the owner’s pockets. Real estate agents are probably the best example of why this is so important. If my friend Hailey is a real estate agent and if she wants to market her self and her properties, she has a lot of options. She could advertise on a big real estate site like Zillow, a niche site, through SEO or PPC, and it’s easy for her to track leads from these. It gets harder, though, when she invests in offline efforts like signs, door hangers, print ads, or any other form of offline advertising. Hailey, and almost all real estate agents, are doing their marketing campaigns on a tight budget, so it is critical for real estate agents (and professionals in many other industries) to understand exactly what is producing value and what isn’t.

The good news is that it’s actually pretty easy to figure out which offline ads are helping you and which ones aren’t doing anything.

Create a custom URL for your ads

The first step is to either buy a vanity domain or to create a unique landing page for each offline effort.

Depending on your niche and ad, it can be important to incentivize the user typing in the full URL (and not just stopping once they type in the homepage) if you are not going to use a vanity domain. This can mean offering the user a special promotion or gift. You would want to reinforce the offer with the URL as well, using something like /free-gift or /special-promo.

Set up redirects and campaign parameters

Once you’ve created your vanity domain or landing page, you’ll need to set up a 301 redirect to the page you want visitors to land on (your home page or a specific landing page) AND include Google Analytics campaign parameters (shown below by ?utm=*)

Adding Campaign Tracking Parameters

If you’re not super familiar with Google Analytics, this guide is a good starting point. If you need help creating the campaign URL, the Google URL Builder and GA Config are really useful tools. Keep in mind, while there are five different parameters you can use, the following three are required at minimum:

  • Source – This should be the specific source of the ad and referral such as “Seattle Times,” “For Sale Sign,” “Flier,” etc. The source parameter will allow you to assign conversions to a specific source.
  • Medium – The medium is simply the high-level channel that your effort is part of. Some examples of good mediums would be radio, magazine ad, or TV. When you consistently use the medium attribution parameter, over time, you will be able to see what high-level channels produce the best ROI for you.
  • Campaign name – The campaign name should refer to specific campaign you are running. You can use this to pull together ads across mediums and sources that are part of a larger campaign, or you can differentiate between different campaigns within the same source.

Track your ROI

At this point, you’ve done all the hard work and have everything set up for Google Analytics to be able to track visitors coming to the site from your ads as well as how many people convert in some form. You will be able to find the number of visitors from your ads under the campaigns tab in Google Analytics, and the number of conversions in the Ecommerce, Goals, or Events tab depending on how you are tracking your conversions.

The campaign view in Google Analytics is where you’ll monitor the success of your offline campaigns.

With this in place you will be able to better invest your offline marketing budget knowing that the channels and campaigns are going to give you the best online ROI.


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4 Conversations That Don’t Involve Rank Reports – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Dana DiTomaso

With personalization and (not provided) keywords, there’s been plenty of debate in recent months over the value of keyword rankings in today’s world of marketing. It’s important to remember, though, that there are many ways of showing success without even mentioning keyword rankings.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana DiTomaso tells us about a few important conversations we can have regardless of our (or our clients’) opinions on rank reports.

Conversations that Don’t Involve Rank Reports – Whiteboard Friday

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

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans. I’m not Rand today. I’m Dana DiTomaso from Kick Point, and I presented at MozCon about next-level local SEO tactics. One of the things that I talked about and one of the things people asked me about, I said, this was a little throwaway comment, “Don’t have conversations with your clients that end in rank reports, because it ends up in a bad conversation, and it focuses on the wrong kind of metric.” People at the party afterwards said to me, “That’s nice, Dana, but seriously we have clients, and they want rank reports. So what are we supposed to do?”

So today I am doing a Whiteboard Friday on conversations with clients that don’t end in a rank report, because I feel like this is a really important way for our industry to move. It’s a really important conversation you need to learn how to have, and if you come armed with all this stuff, when you go meet with a client, eventually when you get to the end and you drag them through this process, they’re going to love you forever. I promise. I promise. If it doesn’t work, then I will send you Smarties, which are delicious chocolate treats from Canada. I promise, just e-mail me.

So we’re going to start with things that we talk to clients about when we start working with them. The first thing is I say to them, “How much new business do you want?” Before they say to me, “Oh, I’m not showing up in the map, or I’m not ranking for these phrases,” I say, “How much new business can your company take in, say, the next month?”

These are actually real numbers from one of our real clients. So this isn’t me just making up some crap. So they said to me, “I can take 200 new customers.” It’s a service-based business. So they really do have an upper ceiling on how much new business they can take before they run out of people and they have to hire again. Okay, so 200.

Now I say, “So how many calls and people walking in,” and it’s a medical industry. It’s not a lot of people who walk in, but they mostly get phone calls. How many new calls do they get now? They said, “Well, we track.”
They’re good at tracking. If your client isn’t good at tracking, then get them good at tracking. Then they say, “Okay, we got a 148 calls now.”

So I know that from the number of people who sign up with them, I say, “How many people who call actually make an appointment?” They say, “Well, it’s about 80%.” Okay, so that means that you have 118 new leads.

Okay, so you have 118 new leads that you get, and they look in their numbers and they say, “Yeah, that seems about right. That seems cool.” So then I take a look at their website visits for the previous month, for the previous time period, unique, not all visitors, just unique visitors, and I say, “This is how many you unique visitors you got. It was 3,904. So that means that you have about a 3% conversion rate from the number of people who go to your website to the number of people who sign up for your stuff.”

So now we have a number that we can work with. Then I say, “Okay, so if you want to hit 200 pieces of new business, that means that you have to get 250 calls or walk-ins”—perhaps another business, not this one—”which means that you need to get 6,700 visits to your website.”

So this is when we say, “Based on the amount of budget that you’d like to give with us, we don’t recommend that you’re going to hit this number in this first month.” So then we can figure out a plan with them and say,
“Okay, so next month we’re going to start with PPC. We’re going to do some AdWords, because that’s going to convert really well for you, and you really want to get new business in right away. So let’s do some AdWords.”

Then the next month, we’re working on the map stuff in the meantime, and then we can create a plan for them on when we think we’re going to hit these 6,700 visits, when we think that number’s going to happen. Then they know how many months to expect of return.

Then we can also find out from them, “How much is each one of these 118 people worth to you? How much are you willing to spend per lead to get those people in the door?” Then you can also take the math and break that out and determine your ROI for your business. So if you charge them a certain amount each month, which is how we do it, it’s a monthly retainer type project, then we know the exact ROI and the exact cost per lead. So we can say to the client, “Hey, we’re actually making you money.” Then they just keep paying the bills because we’re actually making them money. We’re not costing them any money.

The second part of this is what you report on. So how do you get to these 6,700 visits? We break out all of our reports into five channels. We say how much organic traffic you got, how much paid, how much referral, how much social, how much direct. We show them just the unique visitor counts, and then we try to break down the conversions, although not every website has strong conversions.

Sometimes we can’t say, “Okay, you got X number of calls via social.” We don’t necessarily know that. If we have call tracking set up, we can tell some of that. But it’s not foolproof, obviously, like maybe somebody came via your Facebook page, and then they bookmarked the site, and then they called later. So of course it’s only going to reflect as a social visit, but whatever. So that’s why these raw numbers are so important. You can’t track everything, but you can try to track most of the things.

The other part of social, specifically, actually is a lot of really small businesses say, “Yeah, this social thing, I don’t understand. It’s boring, it’s stupid, and only kids are on Facebook. My clients aren’t on Facebook, and I don’t need social.” So we start reporting on social, and there’s a really nice piece of regex that you can use to break out your social visits. Do not include them in the referral traffic. Make sure to break them out as their own separate channel.

Make sure that when you report on social, if you’re getting a lot of social visits, just tell them about it and say, “Hey, I know you’re not doing anything on social right now, but you’re getting a lot of social traffic.”
Or maybe if they’re a home builder, for example, maybe they’re getting Pinterest traffic, or from House.com, which is new house new social network. You say to them, “I know you’re not on any of these places, but people are already coming to your website from it, and they’re converting. So maybe we can put some effort in. Just imagine the amount of business that you would get.” You say, “It would be this much extra each month for us to help you with your social strategies.” This is a good business development tip for you.

Then the last thing that pulls all of this together, and this is another throwaway in my presentation, a lot of people say, “Well, advertising agencies, how do I work with these people?” Part of it is just helping them be better at their job and helping them show that what they’re doing is actually making money.

So you don’t want to go into a client and say, “That advertising company you’re paying all that money to, that stuff is crap. Forget them. You’ve got to go with this SEO stuff instead.” Then you make enemies instead of making friends.

So what we do is we say, “Tell us about all the advertising you’re doing right now, all your print ads, all your radio. Who is doing it? How are you tracking it?” They’ll say, “Well, we have a print ad in the local newspaper, and we do a radio ad on this radio station, which is right in with our demographic.” ‘I’ll say, “That’s great. What I would like to do is I would like to put some call tracking around that, so when you have the ad, and this is, ‘We’re awesome, you should call us, visit our awesomecompany.com, or call number,'” instead it would say, “Visit our awesomecompany.com/radio station name, or this magical call tracking number.”

So people do call from radio. I know they’re usually in their car, totally breaking the law that you’re not supposed to use your cell phones. But they do call. If they visit the website, set up a landing page. It doesn’t have to be like a crazy PPC landing page, where you rip out the navigation and everything else. Just a landing page that says, “Hey, radio station listener.”

In our hometown we have Sonic, so if it’s like our awesomecompany.com/sonic, that’s like a new alternative rock station. So if they visit Sonic, then we know the type of listener who’s coming, and then we can write the content in a way that makes sense to that listener. We know how the DJs are on that radio station, so we can match the tone of the content to match the tone of the person who probably came because they heard the ad on Sonic. We know you’re not listening to classical. You’re listening to Pearl Jam. So we know the kind of music that you like, what type of person that you are, and we can write that content for you. It says basically, “Howdy, Sonic listener, here’s the stuff that we think you should know in order to call. Here’s the information you want to arm yourself with. Hey, give us a call, or fill out this form.” There’s your conversion tactic there. So we can see how many visits we got to that web page.

Then what you do is you talk to your radio rep or your media buyer, or whoever else the client is working with, and you say, “Can I get the media blocking chart?” This tells you when the ad is running. If it’s from the radio station, for example, they can tell you after it’s been done or what hours it was played in. So maybe they decided to only run the ad from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., for example. Then in that case, you can take a look at your analytics on an hourly basis and compare: Did we get more direct and organic visits—this is typically the two that radio converts to—during those times?

You can’t tell with a direct visit if they didn’t go to that fancy URL, if they just typed in the main URL, or if they organically typed in the name of your client and then went to the site. So maybe it’s a brand new visit. More likely it’s just not provided for this particular client, where these numbers in the example, they’re actually up to 50% of not provided now, and I think it’s just a lot of cell phone visits.

So we take a look at these metrics. We compare it to the hours in their media blocking chart, and then we know approximately how much benefit they’re receiving as a result of radio. Then you look good, because you’re able to take an offline piece of advertising and turn it into an online metric, that is a conversion metric for the client, and the radio station looks great, because, “Hey, look at this, now we actually know how much benefit you’re getting from radio, which is a really difficult thing.”

Then because the radio station likes you, radio station reps are actually super friendly. You should make friends with them. They usually have like free swags and stuff and tickets to things. But the other thing is that they work with a lot of small businesses who first turn to radio. They’re not calling you, they’re calling the radio station because they think radio works, and for some clients it does. It really depends.

But that radio rep will say, “Hey, do you have a website? We want to mention your website in the ad.” The company will say, “No, I don’t know about this web thing.” The radio station will say, “I’m working with this amazing company, and they have done this great tracking for one of our other clients, and look at what they’ve done, and look at the stuff they can report on.” They’ll say, “That’s amazing. I clearly need to spend all my money on these services, except for the money we’re going to spend on radio.” Then you get new business out of it.

Somebody asked on the last day, “How do you get a seat at the table with the advertisers?” It’s by playing nice with them. It’s by saying to them, “Look, I know that you can’t do this level of tracking with the offline advertising to the actual leads, but I bet you can, and I’m going to teach you how. But I’m also going to show everything and how it relates to the client, all the pieces and how it all comes together.” Then when you, as the business, as your consultant, when you report on this, that turns into this complete marketing reporting for the client, and they love this. They get really excited about it. Like when I give a client a report and I say, “Look at this, your cost per lead went down two bucks,” that’s really exciting for a client.” They think, “Wow, this company is making even more money for me. What would happen if I gave them more money? Then what happens when I refer my friends to them to make more business?” It’s a way to make a rapport that turns into a business building tactic for you.

I hope you find this helpful. Again, if you didn’t, e-mail me and I’ll give you some Smarties. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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New and Improved Custom Reports Added to Moz Analytics

Posted by Miranda.Rensch

Hello everyone! Miranda here. I’m a Product Manager at Moz and I’m excited to announce that we’ve added custom, automated reporting to Moz Analytics. This is something that already existed in PRO (the predecessor to Moz Analytics), but the new version has some cool upgrades I’d like to point out, so here goes a quick walk-through.

Walk-through of the new custom reports

With the new version of custom reports, you can select (almost) any visualization or data list from within Moz Analytics to be included in a custom PDF and emailed regularly.

To access the new reports, just go into any campaign and click “Custom Reports” in the top right and then click “Create / Schedule Report” to get started.

Next, you’ll begin filling in the details of your report. You can give it a name and a description to appear at the top of the PDF:

In the “Add Modules” step you use a left navigation similar to the normal Moz Analytics experience so you can quickly navigate to your favorite data / visualizations and click the + sign to select them. In the next step you’ll be able to organize them and add notes.

In the “Design Report” step, you can re-order your modules, add notes, and if you have access to branded reports, add your brand logo to be printed on the PDF.

In the next step you can preview your report. Click “Generate PDF Report” to view and save as an actual PDF.

Finally, you can schedule the report to be emailed regularly to you and any others that you specify. You can now also customize the text of the email that gets sent out!

When you’ve finished setting up your report, you can see all active reports on the main Custom Reports page. From there you can see the next scheduled send date and edit your reports.

Other new stuff in Moz Analytics

While we’re at it, we’d like to mention a few other improvements in Moz Analytics:

Crawl diagnostics updates

We made some improvements to the design to make it easier to find the issues exposed by our custom crawler. You can now see a breakdown of your top High, Medium, and Low priority issues at the bottom of the Crawl Diagnostics overview page.

You will also see the issue counts included in the issue drop-down.

We’ve also made sure that all of the crawl data is included in the .csv export. We are still working on making views of duplicate pages and titles visible outside of the .csv.

Keyword opportunities improvement

With this smaller update, we added a button to the keyword opportunities report in the rankings section, allowing you to quickly add an attractive keyword to your list for rank tracking.

Fresh Web Explorer alerts

In case you missed it, we also recently released a big update to Fresh Web Explorer that lets you create and save custom alerts. Use it to get prompt alerts when someone publishes content mentioning your brand, your competitors, or even discover interesting link and outreach opportunities. Cyrus even wrote a whole blog post about it.

What’s next for Moz Analytics?

Here are some of the projects that are currently in-progress and up next for Moz Analytics. This is just the top of our list, but we’d love to know what you think! Please let us know in the comments or on our feature request forum.

  • Monthly timeframes: We are still working on adding monthly timeframe options into custom reports and the rest of the Moz Analytics app. We hope to have that in by the end of the year. Also, we are aware that there are some issues currently with monthly custom reports in PRO causing them to be delayed. We hope to build these monthly reports into the new version of custom reports in a more scalable way and we apologize for the issue in PRO.

  • Lots of bug / UX fixes: We’re working on continually responding to feedback and bugs in the new application. We’ve gotten to many, but not all of them. Thank you for your patience!

  • Contextual help: We’re working on ways to bring help guides and videos directly into the app so that when you need help you can find it quick.

  • Add individual keyword history to Custom Reports: There are a couple of modules that can’t be added to custom reports yet—Analyze a Keyword (individual keyword history), Grade a Page, and Analyze Page Issues. We hope to make those available in the next few months as well.

  • Per-page PDF downloads: We are currently working on allowing PDF downloads of any page in the app. We hope to have that done in the next month or so.

  • Customized timeframe options: We’re in the process of researching our ability to provide more customized timeframe options. It’s a bit complicated due to the variety of data we include in our app, but we’re looking at our options.

  • Multi-user accounts: We’re working on supporting multiple users per account.

  • You tell us! If you have any other feedback or ideas for how this software could be better and save you more time, please let us know on our feature request forum!

That’s all! If you have any questions or comments, chances are other people will too, so why not ask it on the Moz Q&A forum! Looking forward to hearing your feedback. If you’d like to volunteer a half-hour to give more in-depth feedback about this section or reporting in general, please email miranda@moz.com.

Happy reporting!
Miranda Rensch
Product Manager @ Moz


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4 Social Media Tag Templates for Sharing and SEO

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of content that we publish. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions, images and more appear in social streams.

Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure.

The implications for SEO are also significant. We know from experience and studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions. We also know from correlation studies that content with higher social metrics exhibits many of the same qualities as content that performs well in search results.

Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to experienced webmasters. This post by Micheal King is a huge help, and Wordpress publishers who use Yoast’s SEO plugin are well ahead of the game.

For the rest of us, consider the different structures supported by the major social platforms:

  • Twitter Cards: Summaries, Images, Galleries, Apps, Video, Audio, and Products
  • Pinterest Rich Pins: Products, Recipes, Movies, and Articles
  • Google+: Articles, Blog, Book, Event, Local Business, Organization, Person, Product, and Reviews
  • Facebook: Articles, Photos, Audio, Video, and more

To help ease this problem, I created four social media tag templates that you can fill out, customize for your own use, and share with your team and others.

How to use these templates

Simply copy and paste the template into the text editor of your choice. Make sure to replace any orange or green text with your own data, and customize, eliminate or add any tags you find necessary.

The first three of these templates are optimized using a typical “article” markup and data, ideal for blog posts and most written content. The final template contains markup for product pages.For other post types, such as book or recipes, refer to documentation linked at the end of this post for reference on what to customize.

When you are done, don’t forget to test and apply for approval.

1. The Minimal Template

This slimmed back version runs lean and fast. It contains a bare minimum of data for optimized sharing across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

Title tags and meta descriptions are included even though they aren’t technically social media meta tags. This is because they can be used by Google+ and other social media platforms, and it is best practice to include them on every page you publish.

Minimum Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” value=”summary”>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />

2: The Standard Template

The standard template represents a more robust implementation of social tags and is meant to work across all platforms. In addition to all of the features of the mimimal template above, the standard template includes the following:

  • The basic Twitter Summary card
  • Twitter thumbnail image
  • Facebook Page Insights

Standard Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle“>
<– Twitter Summary card images must be at least 200x200px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numeric ID” />

3: The Full Monty

This is the monster! In addition to all the data contained in the standard template, the full template contains:

  • Google Authorship and Publisher Markup. Although this data doesn’t change your content appearance in Google+, it potentially add links to your Google+ pages in search results.
  • Schema.org article markup
  • Twitter Summary card with large image
  • Expanded Open Graph article data

Full Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Article”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Google Authorship and Publisher Markup –>
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Profile]/posts”/>
<link rel=”publisher” href=â€�https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Page_Profile]“/>

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<!– Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image:src” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”article:published_time” content=”2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:modified_time” content=”2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:section” content=”Article Section” />
<meta property=”article:tag” content=”Article Tag” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numberic ID” />

4. The Product Template

For merchants, product markup is very popular, and usually easy for developers to implement in their shopping cart software. The product template differs from article markup in only a few ways:

  • Modified <html> tag to reflect schema.org product data
  • Twitter Product Card includes required data labels
  • Open Graph data includes price and currency data

Product Social Media Tag Template

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”product”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>
<meta name=”twitter:data1″ content=”$3“>
<meta name=”twitter:label1″ content=”Price“>
<meta name=”twitter:data2″ content=”Black“>
<meta name=”twitter:label2″ content=”Color“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”og:price:amount” content=”15.00” />
<meta property=”og:price:currency” content=”USD” />

Tools for testing and approval

A. Twitter Validation Tool

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator


Before your cards show on Twitter, you must first have your domain approved. Fortunately, it’s a super-easy process. After you implement your cards, simply enter your sample URL into the validation tool. After checking your markup, select the “Submit for Approval” button.

B. Facebook Debugger

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug


You don’t need prior approval for your meta information to show on Facebook, but the debugging tool they offer gives you a wealth of information about all your tags and can also analyze your Twitter tags.

C. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


Webmasters traditionally use the structured data testing tool to test authorship markup and preview how snippets will appear in search results, but you can also use see what other types of meta data Google is able to extract from each page.

D. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator

http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/


Like Twitter, Pinterest requires an approval process to enable Rich Pin functionality. Use the Rich Pin Validator tool to test your data markup and apply for approval at the same time.


Tips and best practices

Optimizing for images

The image you link to in your social data does not actually have to be on the page, but it should represent your content well. The image allows you to controll what people see when they share your content, so it’s important to use quality images.

Every social platform has different standards for sizing. Typically, it’s easier to keep it simple and choose one image size that will work for all services.

  • Twitter thumbnail: 120x120px
  • Twitter large image: 280x150px
  • Facebook: Standards vary, but an image at least 200x200px works best. Facebook recommends large images up to 1200px wide.

In short, larger images offer you the most flexibility. When in doubt, test each page using the appropriate tool below to see exactly how your images will appear in snippits.

The importance of Open Graph data

If you could choose only one type of meta data to include, your best bet is Open Graph. That’s because all the platforms can use it as a fallback, including Twitter to a large degree.

Facebook page insights

The meta property “fb:admins” requires that you enter your numeric Facebook id number, and gives you access to analytics about how your website content is shared on Facebook. Read more about Page Insights, including how to set it up and discover your numeric id.

Further resources

Use these templates as a starting point, but you can customize them in millions of ways. A few valuable resources to aid your journey:

What are your best tips for optimizing your content for sharing? Let us know in the comments below.


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

Continue reading →

3 Must-Have Social Media Tag Templates for Improved Sharing and SEO

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of content that we publish. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions, images and more appear in social streams.

Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure.

The implications for SEO are also significant. We know from experience and studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions. We also know from correlation studies that content with higher social metrics exhibits many of the same qualities as content that performs well in search results.

Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to experienced webmasters. This post by Micheal King is a huge help, and Wordpress publishers who use Yoast’s SEO plugin are well ahead of the game.

For the rest of us, consider the different structures supported by the major social platforms:

  • Twitter Cards: Summaries, Images, Galleries, Apps, Video, Audio, and Products
  • Pinterest Rich Pins: Products, Recipes, Movies, and Articles
  • Google+: Articles, Blog, Book, Event, Local Business, Organization, Person, Product, and Reviews
  • Facebook: Articles, Photos, Audio, Video, and more

To help ease this problem, I created four social media tag templates that you can fill out, customize for your own use, and share with your team and others.

How to use these templates

Simply copy and paste the template into the text editor of your choice. Make sure to replace any orange or green text with your own data, and customize, eliminate or add any tags you find necessary.

The first three of these templates are optimized using a typical “article” markup and data, ideal for blog posts and most written content. The final template contains markup for product pages.For other post types, such as book or recipes, refer to documentation linked at the end of this post for reference on what to customize.

When you are done, don’t forget to test and apply for approval.

1. The Minimal Template

This slimmed back version runs lean and fast. It contains a bare minimum of data for optimized sharing across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

Title tags and meta descriptions are included even though they aren’t technically social media meta tags. This is because they can be used by Google+ and other social media platforms, and it is best practice to include them on every page you publish.

Minimum Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” value=”summary”>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />

2: The Standard Template

The standard template represents a more robust implementation of social tags and is meant to work across all platforms. In addition to all of the features of the mimimal template above, the standard template includes the following:

  • The basic Twitter Summary card
  • Twitter thumbnail image
  • Facebook Page Insights

Standard Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle“>
<– Twitter Summary card images must be at least 200x200px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numeric ID” />

3: The Full Monty

This is the monster! In addition to all the data contained in the standard template, the full template contains:

  • Google Authorship and Publisher Markup. Although this data doesn’t change your content appearance in Google+, it potentially add links to your Google+ pages in search results.
  • Schema.org article markup
  • Twitter Summary card with large image
  • Expanded Open Graph article data

Full Social Media Tag Template: Article

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Article”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Google Authorship and Publisher Markup –>
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Profile]/posts”/>
<link rel=”publisher” href=â€�https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Page_Profile]“/>

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<!– Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px –>
<meta name=”twitter:image:src” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”article:published_time” content=”2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:modified_time” content=”2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00” />
<meta property=”article:section” content=”Article Section” />
<meta property=”article:tag” content=”Article Tag” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”Facebook numberic ID” />

Bonus: The Product Template

For merchants, product markup is very popular, and usually easy for developers to implement in their shopping cart software. The product template differs from article markup in only a few ways:

  • Modified <html> tag to reflect schema.org product data
  • Twitter Product Card includes required data labels
  • Open Graph data includes price and currency data

Product Social Media Tag Template

<!– Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. –>
<html itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”>

<!– Place this data between the <head> tags of your website –>
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Page description. No longer than 155 characters.” />

<!– Schema.org markup for Google+ –>
<meta itemprop=”name” content=”The Name or Title Here“>
<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This is the page description“>
<meta itemprop=”image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg“>

<!– Twitter Card data –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”product”>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@publisher_handle“>
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Page Title“>
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Page description less than 200 characters“>
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@author_handle”>
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.example.com/image.html“>
<meta name=”twitter:data1″ content=”$3“>
<meta name=”twitter:label1″ content=”Price“>
<meta name=”twitter:data2″ content=”Black“>
<meta name=”twitter:label2″ content=”Color“>

<!– Open Graph data –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Title Here” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description Here” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Site Name, i.e. Moz” />
<meta property=”og:price:amount” content=”15.00” />
<meta property=”og:price:currency” content=”USD” />

Tools for testing and approval

A. Twitter Validation Tool

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator


Before your cards show on Twitter, you must first have your domain approved. Fortunately, it’s a super-easy process. After you implement your cards, simply enter your sample URL into the validation tool. After checking your markup, select the “Submit for Approval” button.

B. Facebook Debugger

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug


You don’t need prior approval for your meta information to show on Facebook, but the debugging tool they offer gives you a wealth of information about all your tags and can also analyze your Twitter tags.

C. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


Webmasters traditionally use the structured data testing tool to test authorship markup and preview how snippets will appear in search results, but you can also use see what other types of meta data Google is able to extract from each page.

D. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator

http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/


Like Twitter, Pinterest requires an approval process to enable Rich Pin functionality. Use the Rich Pin Validator tool to test your data markup and apply for approval at the same time.


Tips and best practices

Optimizing for images

The image you link to in your social data does not actually have to be on the page, but it should represent your content well. The image allows you to controll what people see when they share your content, so it’s important to use quality images.

Every social platform has different standards for sizing. Typically, it’s easier to keep it simple and choose one image size that will work for all services.

  • Twitter thumbnail: 120x120px
  • Twitter large image: 280x150px
  • Facebook: Standards vary, but an image at least 200x200px works best. Facebook recommends large images up to 1200px wide.

In short, larger images offer you the most flexibility. When in doubt, test each page using the appropriate tool below to see exactly how your images will appear in snippits.

The importance of Open Graph data

If you could choose only one type of meta data to include, your best bet is Open Graph. That’s because all the platforms can use it as a fallback, including Twitter to a large degree.

Facebook page insights

The meta property “fb:admins” requires that you enter your numeric Facebook id number, and gives you access to analytics about how your website content is shared on Facebook. Read more about Page Insights, including how to set it up and discover your numeric id.

Further resources

Use these templates as a starting point, but you can customize them in millions of ways. A few valuable resources to aid your journey:

What are your best tips for optimizing your content for sharing? Let us know in the comments below.


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

Continue reading →