seo

Posted by Aleyda Solis

We live in a multi-device world, and if you’re still focused on improving your visibility, traffic, and conversions solely for desktop users, you’re losing a great opportunity. This gap, coupled with the fact that you’re probably staying behind your competitors and unconnected with your audience, is not great for business. Not convinced? Let’s see some data… 

Mobile search is booming. 

It’s already driving important multi-channel conversions.

However, we’re still not doing our best for mobile and are losing opportunities.

Despite the multichannel conversions that mobile search drives, we’re still not making the most out of it. There are people that feel it is still too complicated and insecure to purchase goods on their smartphones: 

Unfortunately, what are now fundamental aspects on our desktop-focused optimization activities are sometimes still unknown when developing a mobile-focused presence, even for some very important websites. For example: 

A. Some websites don’t have a mobile-focused presence

Remember that, despite having an audience that may be using the most advanced smartphones and tablets, they still need an optimized offer that fulfills their specific behaviors (not necessarily the same than the one from the desktop users), providing the best experience according to their device characteristics (and device-specific restrictions).

For example, can you guess which of these two sites provide me the best experience, is really optimized for me, will make me stay (as a consequence), and have a higher chance of conversions from me?  

Although I have an iPhone 5 and my fingers are tiny, it’s very difficult for me to browse, interact, and consume information if the site doesn’t have a version well-optimized for the device I’m using. 

B. Some sites have a mobile presence, but forget about optimization fundamentals

On the other hand, other websites have a mobile presence (websites and apps included), but that doesn’t mean they’re really optimized. As I mentioned before, basics from our day-to-day “desktop focused” optimization activities are for some reason forgotten when we go mobile or tablet. 

For example, many websites love promoting their apps with intrusive interstitials that disrupt the user mobile web flow, requiring interaction from the user in order to continue:  

What about relevant, descriptive titles? This optimization basic is frequently forgotten, even by big websites when they go mobile (although these are well-optimized in their desktop versions): 

How about businesses that forget to create a landing page on their site for their own mobile apps? When you search for the app, you get the first results with iTunes store profiles that may confuse you (which one to choose?) featuring not-so-great descriptions, along with some posts with negative reviews: 

Time to get better control of your own app web results? Yes, please. 

Two questions arise from these situations: 

• Can you blame people for not converting from their mobile devices?
• How can you change it?

First, let’s acknowledge the challenge of a multi-device ecosystem. Once we get a handle on it, we’ll have an overall vision in order to make the best decisions, optimize your presence accordingly, and maximize your opportunities. 

Mobile, Tablet, Web vs. App: The Segmentation Challenge

Usually, the first question we need to answer when we go mobile (whether smartphone or tablet focused) is: do I develop a website or an app? 

As I shared in this State of Search post, your decision should be based on certain factors such as your business model; the goals you’re trying to achieve; how important is for your content to have a wider reach, and if it is web indexable or not; whether or not you need to provide a complex functionality that requires a higher hardware integration or connection independence; and if your audience is highly-concentrated in few devices types and platforms. You’ll need to asses these characteristics along with mobile web and apps pros and cons:  

When you’re deciding whether going mobile with a website or an app is the best option for you, use the following visualization to analytze the alternatives: 

You’ll see that is easier to target your mobile audience with less web presence than to do so with an app that is much more segmented.

However, when you think beyond the development alternatives to target your mobile audience with the required functionalities and start thinking about how you can optimize, grow the visibility, and generate conversions, you’ll find that most of the principles and good practices are the same (or can be easily extrapolated):

Realize that, despite the many segmentation levels a multi-device presence may have from a development and audience perspective, there are optimization principles that are the same for any type of approach, platform, and device type that you should be taking into consideration in order to make the most out of the organic search channels to connect with your audience.

It’s now the time to identify these similar principles and good practices to make the most out the multi-device search opportunity, instead of focusing on its complexities as an excuse. Otherwise, you will stay behind.  

3 Steps to Improve Your Visibility in a Multi-device Search World

1. Optimize your presence for multi-device search visibility 

People not only search for websites through web search, but also for apps (whether from smartphones, tablets, or desktops, remember we’re in a multi-device world), so it’s fundamental that you don’t forget about creating and optimizing a mobile web presence to increase your mobile app visibility through web search, too. 

Take a look at the exact-match local monthly search volume for some mobile apps related keywords in the US, from desktop and laptop devices:  

And the volume for the searches from mobile devices with full Internet browsers: 

So, if you want to maximize the chances that your mobile presence (web or app) gets the search visibility, users, and conversions it deserves, then you need to make sure that it’s easily found through the web search results. If you have a mobile app, you’ll also need to take into consideration your visibility in the app store search. Let’s see how!     

1.1. Mobile web: select and optimize the best mobile web approach for your situation

When you’re developing a mobile website, the key is to select the best setting according to your characteristics, restrictions, and needs. These settings include responsive web, dynamic serving, or parallel mobile sites. 

I’ve posted and presented about these many times, so it may be easier to check out what I’ve shared before and avoid repeating myself. You’ll see that each one of these alternatives have their pros and cons, as well as specific and general SEO best practices that I discussed in this Moz post and Mozinar some months ago about mobile SEO: 

Nonetheless, beyond specifically optimizing each mobile web alternative according to their characteristics, there are mobile web optimization fundamentals that should always be followed:  

1.1.1. Reorganize your content to be correctly displayed in mobile devices

Prioritizing the devices used by your audience (that you can identify through your Google Analytics “Audience > Mobile > Devices” report) gives the required visibility to the most important elements of your content. Think about your user’s goals as well as your own, and align them to reorganize your web interface:  

Beware of elements (like flash or interstitials) that are not correctly displayed, don’t work, or provide a bad user and search experience. Take a look at the following Mobile usability resources: 

• Organizing Mobile by Luke Wroblewski
• Nielsen’s Mobile Website and Application Usability Report and  Mobile Site vs. Full Site article
• Brad Frost post about Content Parity

1.1.2. Optimize your mobile pages relevance

Make your titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and, of course, your page’s main content relevant for your mobile web audience. Take your keywords into consideration, and the visibility limitation of mobile search results in the different type of devices: 

Use mobile emulators and user agent switchers to easily validate by yourself how your own pages are shown in mobile search results (for smartphones and tablets, too), along with your competitors. 

1.1.3. Enhance your pages visibility with structured markup and Google+ presence

Use structured data markup (reviews, people, businesses, apps, etc.), Google’s authorship, and create a presence in Google+ for your business to enhance your page’s results visibility, not only in desktop results, but also in your mobile search results (where the visibility provided by these can be even higher in comparison): 

Google has also recently announced content recommendations for mobile sites with a Google+ presence that will make the visibility obtained with it even higher. 

1.1.4. Make your mobile site fast

Your mobile site has higher speed restrictions due to mobile networks and CPU capabilities, which means it’s even more important to optimize its speed.

Use your Google Analytics site speed report information to easily identify your pages load times and analyze them with Google’s PageSpeed Insights mobile filter to identify opportunities to improve them:  

Follow PageSpeed’s mobile best practices and take into consideration what’s explained in this “Make the Mobile Web faster” article. 

1.1.5. Serve the right web version according to the used device

It’s important to effectively identify the type of device (desktop, tablet, smartphone) used by your visitors and provide them the right web version by using different techniques according to the Mobile Web approach you’re following:

• With CSS media-queries with responsive Web
• With User agent detection with dynamic serving
• With User agent detection and redirects with a parallel mobile site

1.2. Mobile apps: create and optimize landing pages for apps in your site

Give visibility to your app beyond the app store search results by creating a landing page for each of your mobile apps on your own website. Make the landing pages relevant, and optimize them to rank for popular searches of users looking for your apps: 

Make sure to feature testimonials and reviews, and add a visible link to your app store page with call to actions to incentivize downloads: 

Integrate your social presence as well, inviting for shares in social networks:  

Additionally, Google has recently announced even more integration with Google+ for apps by showing Google+ Sign-In app activities in their results, which would also give your results more visibility: 

1.2. App Store Search  

Although app store search optimization is still in early stages when we compare it with web search and is specific to each app store (Android Market and the Apple App Store), it’s also evolving, aligning each time more with web search type of factors, with an algorithm that is looking to reward:

• Relevance: with the relevant terms in the App name, description, and keywords
• Popularity: with download rate, install base, ratings, comments, and even external review sites 

Take these into consideration for your app store presence, by optimizing the different elements of your profile:   

In addition to promoting, gamifying your mobile experience (with profiles, levels, badges, rewards, lists, etc.) to incentivize your app users activity is a huge download driver. Take a look at how successful apps do it, like Foursquare:  

You can additionally promote your app through relevant sites in the sector, such as app review blogs and communities: 

On the other hand, take into consideration that sometimes app store preview pages also rank in web search results and that there’s also a specific “Applications” search feature in Google, listing only application related presence, for which these optimization best practices would be also beneficial in order to get a better visibility: 

There are also sites and tools like App Annie and Searchman that provide free app store statistics about the top apps per store, category, and country, which can serve you as an input when optimizing your app: 

---

2. Cross promote between your multi-device presence

Create awareness of your multi-device web and app presence through each other. Promote your mobile app in a non-intrusive way (no interstitials) by inviting users to download it when accessing the mobile site with a relevant device or to switch to another web version, as shown in these images: 

Make sure you also create awareness about your different multi-device presence through all of your channels, from email signatures to social profiles to your home page and emails, with updates and specially targeted mobile offers:

  

---

3. Measure to improve your multi-device presence

You cannot improve what you cannot measure, so it’s fundamental to track, continuously analyze, and make improvements not only to your desktop, but also to your mobile presence based on their analytics data. You can still using Google Analytics for this, which provides an SDK for mobile app analytics.

3.1. For your web presence

You can use Google Analytics mobile reports and default segments along with your own advanced segments and dashboards to follow-up and verify if you’re advancing as expected with the traffic and conversions volume and trend per device type, keywords, and pages:

To easily check your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your mobile site (or your competitors), you can use user agent switchers along with Google Analytics debuggers extensions for your browser: 

• For Firefox: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
• For Chrome: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger

Unfortunately, there are issues with the search referrer data that are not passed from the Safari search box in iOS 6, and as a consequence, it’s shown as direct traffic in your analytics platform. Something similar also happens for Android 4 mobile search traffic. Check out this post by AJ Khon showing how we can create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to calculate the approximate amount of the lost search traffic. 

3.1. For your apps

The mobile app analytics will give you information about the amount of active users, screen views, sessions to demographic information, used app versions, goal completions, and in-app revenue:  

Additionally, to verify your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your mobile app (or your competitors), you can set a proxy on your own computer, using a software like Charles Proxy (available for Windows and Mac), so you’ll be able to monitor the HTTP traffic that goes through it, even the one from the apps installed on your mobile (that you’ll need to set so it uses your computer as proxy). 

Follow these installation and configuration steps to set your computer as a proxy and configure your mobile network settings to use it as an HTTP proxy (you’ll need to add in the manual proxy settings your computer IP as the server one with the 8888 port): 

Now you’ll able to monitor the HTTP requests made from your mobile through Charles, including the ones made by your apps, as it can be seen in the following example:   

You can use this not only with your own apps, but with your competitor’s to check how they’re tracking their mobile traffic and with your providers or partners to see if they’re effectively tagging their campaigns. 

Be sure to take a look at this Distilled post with a complete check-list that will guide you with the necessary settings and questions to better measure your mobile presence. 

---

Conclusion: There’s no excuse. Start optimizing for multi-device search now. 

As you can see, there’s no excuse to not optimize for a multi-device search ecosystem. It’s true that the landscape may become more segmented, but many of the best practices and optimization steps can be aligned between the different presences, and will give you the chance to connect with an audience that you’re likely already losing. 

Remember that search is always evolving, and if you don’t catch it now, it might be even more difficult with new type of device and search interactions in a future that look even more segmented.

Do you have any questions or would like to share your opinions? I look forward to your comments!

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 →

Posted by Aleyda Solis

We live in a multi-device world, and if you’re still focused on improving your visibility, traffic, and conversions solely for desktop users, you’re losing a great opportunity. This gap, coupled with the fact that you’re probably staying behind your competitors and unconnected with your audience, is not great for business. Not convinced? Let’s see some data… 

Mobile search is booming. 

It’s already driving important multi-channel conversions.

However, we’re still not doing our best for mobile and are losing opportunities.

Despite the multichannel conversions that mobile search drives, we’re still not making the most out of it. There are people that feel it is still too complicated and insecure to purchase goods on their smartphones: 

Unfortunately, what are now fundamental aspects on our desktop-focused optimization activities are sometimes still unknown when developing a mobile-focused presence, even for some very important websites. For example: 

A. Some websites don’t have a mobile-focused presence

Remember that, despite having an audience that may be using the most advanced smartphones and tablets, they still need an optimized offer that fulfills their specific behaviors (not necessarily the same than the one from the desktop users), providing the best experience according to their device characteristics (and device-specific restrictions).

For example, can you guess which of these two sites provide me the best experience, is really optimized for me, will make me stay (as a consequence), and have a higher chance of conversions from me?  

Although I have an iPhone 5 and my fingers are tiny, it’s very difficult for me to browse, interact, and consume information if the site doesn’t have a version well-optimized for the device I’m using. 

B. Some sites have a mobile presence, but forget about optimization fundamentals

On the other hand, other websites have a mobile presence (websites and apps included), but that doesn’t mean they’re really optimized. As I mentioned before, basics from our day-to-day “desktop focused” optimization activities are for some reason forgotten when we go mobile or tablet. 

For example, many websites love promoting their apps with intrusive interstitials that disrupt the user mobile web flow, requiring interaction from the user in order to continue:  

What about relevant, descriptive titles? This optimization basic is frequently forgotten, even by big websites when they go mobile (although these are well-optimized in their desktop versions): 

How about businesses that forget to create a landing page on their site for their own mobile apps? When you search for the app, you get the first results with iTunes store profiles that may confuse you (which one to choose?) featuring not-so-great descriptions, along with some posts with negative reviews: 

Time to get better control of your own app web results? Yes, please. 

Two questions arise from these situations: 

• Can you blame people for not converting from their mobile devices?
• How can you change it?

First, let’s acknowledge the challenge of a multi-device ecosystem. Once we get a handle on it, we’ll have an overall vision in order to make the best decisions, optimize your presence accordingly, and maximize your opportunities. 

Mobile, Tablet, Web vs. App: The Segmentation Challenge

Usually, the first question we need to answer when we go mobile (whether smartphone or tablet focused) is: do I develop a website or an app? 

As I shared in this State of Search post, your decision should be based on certain factors such as your business model; the goals you’re trying to achieve; how important is for your content to have a wider reach, and if it is web indexable or not; whether or not you need to provide a complex functionality that requires a higher hardware integration or connection independence; and if your audience is highly-concentrated in few devices types and platforms. You’ll need to asses these characteristics along with mobile web and apps pros and cons:  

When you’re deciding whether going mobile with a website or an app is the best option for you, use the following visualization to analytze the alternatives: 

You’ll see that is easier to target your mobile audience with less web presence than to do so with an app that is much more segmented.

However, when you think beyond the development alternatives to target your mobile audience with the required functionalities and start thinking about how you can optimize, grow the visibility, and generate conversions, you’ll find that most of the principles and good practices are the same (or can be easily extrapolated):

Realize that, despite the many segmentation levels a multi-device presence may have from a development and audience perspective, there are optimization principles that are the same for any type of approach, platform, and device type that you should be taking into consideration in order to make the most out of the organic search channels to connect with your audience.

It’s now the time to identify these similar principles and good practices to make the most out the multi-device search opportunity, instead of focusing on its complexities as an excuse. Otherwise, you will stay behind.  

3 Steps to Improve Your Visibility in a Multi-device Search World

1. Optimize your presence for multi-device search visibility 

People not only search for websites through web search, but also for apps (whether from smartphones, tablets, or desktops, remember we’re in a multi-device world), so it’s fundamental that you don’t forget about creating and optimizing a mobile web presence to increase your mobile app visibility through web search, too. 

Take a look at the exact-match local monthly search volume for some mobile apps related keywords in the US, from desktop and laptop devices:  

And the volume for the searches from mobile devices with full Internet browsers: 

So, if you want to maximize the chances that your mobile presence (web or app) gets the search visibility, users, and conversions it deserves, then you need to make sure that it’s easily found through the web search results. If you have a mobile app, you’ll also need to take into consideration your visibility in the app store search. Let’s see how!     

1.1. Mobile web: select and optimize the best mobile web approach for your situation

When you’re developing a mobile website, the key is to select the best setting according to your characteristics, restrictions, and needs. These settings include responsive web, dynamic serving, or parallel mobile sites. 

I’ve posted and presented about these many times, so it may be easier to check out what I’ve shared before and avoid repeating myself. You’ll see that each one of these alternatives have their pros and cons, as well as specific and general SEO best practices that I discussed in this Moz post and Mozinar some months ago about mobile SEO: 

Nonetheless, beyond specifically optimizing each mobile web alternative according to their characteristics, there are mobile web optimization fundamentals that should always be followed:  

1.1.1. Reorganize your content to be correctly displayed in mobile devices

Prioritizing the devices used by your audience (that you can identify through your Google Analytics “Audience > Mobile > Devices” report) gives the required visibility to the most important elements of your content. Think about your user’s goals as well as your own, and align them to reorganize your web interface:  

Beware of elements (like flash or interstitials) that are not correctly displayed, don’t work, or provide a bad user and search experience. Take a look at the following Mobile usability resources: 

• Organizing Mobile by Luke Wroblewski
• Nielsen’s Mobile Website and Application Usability Report and  Mobile Site vs. Full Site article
• Brad Frost post about Content Parity

1.1.2. Optimize your mobile pages relevance

Make your titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and, of course, your page’s main content relevant for your mobile web audience. Take your keywords into consideration, and the visibility limitation of mobile search results in the different type of devices: 

Use mobile emulators and user agent switchers to easily validate by yourself how your own pages are shown in mobile search results (for smartphones and tablets, too), along with your competitors. 

1.1.3. Enhance your pages visibility with structured markup and Google+ presence

Use structured data markup (reviews, people, businesses, apps, etc.), Google’s authorship, and create a presence in Google+ for your business to enhance your page’s results visibility, not only in desktop results, but also in your mobile search results (where the visibility provided by these can be even higher in comparison): 

Google has also recently announced content recommendations for mobile sites with a Google+ presence that will make the visibility obtained with it even higher. 

1.1.4. Make your mobile site fast

Your mobile site has higher speed restrictions due to mobile networks and CPU capabilities, which means it’s even more important to optimize its speed.

Use your Google Analytics site speed report information to easily identify your pages load times and analyze them with Google’s PageSpeed Insights mobile filter to identify opportunities to improve them:  

Follow PageSpeed’s mobile best practices and take into consideration what’s explained in this “Make the Mobile Web faster” article. 

1.1.5. Serve the right web version according to the used device

It’s important to effectively identify the type of device (desktop, tablet, smartphone) used by your visitors and provide them the right web version by using different techniques according to the Mobile Web approach you’re following:

• With CSS media-queries with responsive Web
• With User agent detection with dynamic serving
• With User agent detection and redirects with a parallel mobile site

1.2. Mobile apps: create and optimize landing pages for apps in your site

Give visibility to your app beyond the app store search results by creating a landing page for each of your mobile apps on your own website. Make the landing pages relevant, and optimize them to rank for popular searches of users looking for your apps: 

Make sure to feature testimonials and reviews, and add a visible link to your app store page with call to actions to incentivize downloads: 

Integrate your social presence as well, inviting for shares in social networks:  

Additionally, Google has recently announced even more integration with Google+ for apps by showing Google+ Sign-In app activities in their results, which would also give your results more visibility: 

1.2. App Store Search  

Although app store search optimization is still in early stages when we compare it with web search and is specific to each app store (Android Market and the Apple App Store), it’s also evolving, aligning each time more with web search type of factors, with an algorithm that is looking to reward:

• Relevance: with the relevant terms in the App name, description, and keywords
• Popularity: with download rate, install base, ratings, comments, and even external review sites 

Take these into consideration for your app store presence, by optimizing the different elements of your profile:   

In addition to promoting, gamifying your mobile experience (with profiles, levels, badges, rewards, lists, etc.) to incentivize your app users activity is a huge download driver. Take a look at how successful apps do it, like Foursquare:  

You can additionally promote your app through relevant sites in the sector, such as app review blogs and communities: 

On the other hand, take into consideration that sometimes app store preview pages also rank in web search results and that there’s also a specific “Applications” search feature in Google, listing only application related presence, for which these optimization best practices would be also beneficial in order to get a better visibility: 

There are also sites and tools like App Annie and Searchman that provide free app store statistics about the top apps per store, category, and country, which can serve you as an input when optimizing your app: 

---

2. Cross promote between your multi-device presence

Create awareness of your multi-device web and app presence through each other. Promote your mobile app in a non-intrusive way (no interstitials) by inviting users to download it when accessing the mobile site with a relevant device or to switch to another web version, as shown in these images: 

Make sure you also create awareness about your different multi-device presence through all of your channels, from email signatures to social profiles to your home page and emails, with updates and specially targeted mobile offers:

  

---

3. Measure to improve your multi-device presence

You cannot improve what you cannot measure, so it’s fundamental to track, continuously analyze, and make improvements not only to your desktop, but also to your mobile presence based on their analytics data. You can still using Google Analytics for this, which provides an SDK for mobile app analytics.

3.1. For your web presence

You can use Google Analytics mobile reports and default segments along with your own advanced segments and dashboards to follow-up and verify if you’re advancing as expected with the traffic and conversions volume and trend per device type, keywords, and pages:

To easily check your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your mobile site (or your competitors), you can use user agent switchers along with Google Analytics debuggers extensions for your browser: 

• For Firefox: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger
• For Chrome: use this user agent switcher and Google Analytics debugger

Unfortunately, there are issues with the search referrer data that are not passed from the Safari search box in iOS 6, and as a consequence, it’s shown as direct traffic in your analytics platform. Something similar also happens for Android 4 mobile search traffic. Check out this post by AJ Khon showing how we can create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to calculate the approximate amount of the lost search traffic. 

3.1. For your apps

The mobile app analytics will give you information about the amount of active users, screen views, sessions to demographic information, used app versions, goal completions, and in-app revenue:  

Additionally, to verify your Google Analytics campaign tagging and referrers for your mobile app (or your competitors), you can set a proxy on your own computer, using a software like Charles Proxy (available for Windows and Mac), so you’ll be able to monitor the HTTP traffic that goes through it, even the one from the apps installed on your mobile (that you’ll need to set so it uses your computer as proxy). 

Follow these installation and configuration steps to set your computer as a proxy and configure your mobile network settings to use it as an HTTP proxy (you’ll need to add in the manual proxy settings your computer IP as the server one with the 8888 port): 

Now you’ll able to monitor the HTTP requests made from your mobile through Charles, including the ones made by your apps, as it can be seen in the following example:   

You can use this not only with your own apps, but with your competitor’s to check how they’re tracking their mobile traffic and with your providers or partners to see if they’re effectively tagging their campaigns. 

Be sure to take a look at this Distilled post with a complete check-list that will guide you with the necessary settings and questions to better measure your mobile presence. 

---

Conclusion: There’s no excuse. Start optimizing for multi-device search now. 

As you can see, there’s no excuse to not optimize for a multi-device search ecosystem. It’s true that the landscape may become more segmented, but many of the best practices and optimization steps can be aligned between the different presences, and will give you the chance to connect with an audience that you’re likely already losing. 

Remember that search is always evolving, and if you don’t catch it now, it might be even more difficult with new type of device and search interactions in a future that look even more segmented.

Do you have any questions or would like to share your opinions? I look forward to your comments!

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 →

Posted by Dr. Pete

Data is everywhere, and companies are virtually climbing over each other to give it away. If you’re a data-driven content marketer, data is opportunity, but accessing that data can take some technical know-how. This is a guide to APIs, one of the key methods for accessing 3rd-party data, and also a mini-directory of some of the most useful APIs currently available to marketers.

What Is an API?

Let’s start with the official definition – API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. Sorry, I’m not the one who lets engineers name things. Put simply, an API is a way to let you talk to a 3rd-party application, usually either to retrieve data or update that application. We’re going to focus primarily on the first use (retrieving data), and it looks something like this:

The API itself isn’t really a box floating in space, so much as a chunk of code that acts as a gatekeeper. That code helps translate the third party’s data into something you can read, and it makes sure that only authorized users can access the data (a process called “authentication”).

Why Should I Care?

There are hundreds of applications on the market that collect useful data, and many of them are making that data available for free or very cheaply. You can use that data to do original research, create unique content or even build your own applications. If you’d rather stick to beet farming, well then that’s cool, too.

Where Do I Start?

Here’s the bad news – APIs are far from standardized, and you’re going to have to understand data structures and write some code. This is not a how-to manual so much as an overview of what’s out there that can help you decide if the world of APIs is right for you. There are some bright spots on the horizon – tools and sites that make programming APIs easier – and I’ll cover some of those at the end.

Following is a list of hand-selected APIs (I’ll do my best not to play favorites, and our competitors are on the list), broken down into a few industry categories, and alphabetical within each category. For each API, I’ll provide a main link, a documentation link (documentation can be way too hard to find), a brief description of what’s available in that API, and whether or not there’s a free version. APIs are split into five sections:

1. APIs for SEO
2. APIs for PPC
3. APIs for Social
4. Miscellaneous APIs
5. API Support Tools

The last section covers sites and tools that can help you if you’re new to APIs, new to programming, or just are hunting for something that’s not on this list.

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(1) APIs for SEO

This section contains APIs for organic SEO data, including keyword research and link profiling.

Bing Search (Docs)

The Bing search API allows you to integrate Bing search results and search data directly into your applications, including web search, images, news, videos, related search, and spelling suggestions.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Majestic SEO (Docs)

The Majestic API includes a wide range of link metrics, including full back-link lists, discovery dates for links, anchor text, redirection information, and ACRank. Some features are limited to the paid version.

Free Version?  YES, but limited functionality.

---

Raven Tools (Docs)

The Raven Tools API lets customers access and update account and campaign information. It can also be used to access link data from your Raven campaigns.

Free Version?  NO, paid accounts only.

---

SEOmoz Mozscape (Docs)

SEOmoz’s API has access to proprietary metrics, including MozRank, Domain Authority, and Page Authority, as well as link metrics such as linking root domains and anchor text data.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

---

WordStream Keyword Tool (Docs)

WordStream’s Keyword Tool API lets you access WordStream’s keyword volume metrics, along with related keywords and structured keyword suggestions.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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(3) APIs for Social

These APIs can access a wealth of information from major social networks and social aggregators.

Facebook Graph (Docs)

Facebook’s “Graph” API is the primariy interface to building Facebook-based apps, updating Facebook accounts, and accessing Facebook social graph data. There are other, secondary Facebook APIs.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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FollowerWonk (Docs)

FollowerWonk’s Social Authority API scores Twitter users on a 1-100 scale, for simple influence scoring and comparisons (Note: FollowerWonk is a part of SEOmoz).

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Gnip (Docs)

Gnip provides an enterprise-level API with “firehose” and filtered streams for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and more. Pricing is custom and is aimed at large-scale applications.

Free Version?  YES, but trial only.

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Google+ (Docs)

The official Google+ API allows you to manage accounts, build apps, and access to data from user profiles, posts, and comments. It includes some limited search capability.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Klout (Docs)

The Klout API provides access to Klout’s aggregate social metrics, including Klout score, influencers, influence graphs, and topics of influence.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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PeerIndex (Docs)

PeerIndex is another social aggregator, and their API provides data on multiple influence metrics, including activity, authority, and audience scores.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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SharedCount (Docs)

The SharedCount API lets you access sharing stats on a number of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Topsy (Docs)

The Topsy Otter API is an alternative source for Twitter data, including a number of useful search functions – search by keyword, by links mentioned, by popluar stories on a domain, etc.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Twitter (Docs)

The official Twitter RESTful API includes many tools for account management and data gathering, including individual tweet and user data, follower stats, and a variety of search options.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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(4) Miscellaneous APIs

Here are some other useful APIs, including Google products, analytics, and text processing.

AlchemyAPI (Docs)

AlchemyAPI provides a Natural Language Processing engine to perform tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity extraction, author extraction, and topic categorization.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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Google Analytics API (Docs)

The Google Analytics API is a full-featured system to manage GA accounts and profiles, customize tracking codes, and to access and export analytics data.

Free Version?  YES, but authorization required.

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Google Places API (Docs)

The Google Places API allows you to access the entire family of Google local data, including Google Maps, Google+ Local, and Google Places search.

Free Version?  YES, but authorization required.

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(5) API Support Tools

If you’re new to APIs, this section can help get you started or find APIs outside the scope of this post.

CodeAcademy API Track

CodeAcademy is a resource for learning programming concepts and languages. The API track has specific online courses designed to help you learn API coding.

Free Version?  YES.

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Mashape (Docs)

Mashape is an API marketplace that allows you to access over 2,000 APIs from a single account. Mashape also lets you distribute and monetize your own APIs.

Free Version?  YES, depending on the API.

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ProgrammableWeb

ProgrammableWeb is a directory of over 9,000 APIs on a wide variety of topics. ProgrammableWeb has its own API, that allows you to access their search database.

Free Version?  YES.

SEER Interactive SEO Toolbox (Docs)

SEER’s all-in-one interactive toolbox lets you access multple APIs via Excel, including Google Analytics, SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Twitter, and Klout.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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SEOGadget Excel API Extensions (Docs)

The SEOGadget API extension for Excel allows you to easily call link data from Excel spreadsheets, including SEOmoz, Majestic, and additional SEOGadget data.

Free Version?  YES, but rate-limited.

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What Are Your Favorites?

While I don’t intend this to be an exhaustive list of APIs, I’ll try to keep the post up to date with the most useful APIs for marketers (assuming that people are interested). So, feel free to share your favorite data-collection APIs in the comments.

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Posted by randfish

Many owners of established, older pages are facing a similar issue: they’ve been ranking decently for a keyword for some time, but they want to move into the coveted number one spot. However, older pages don’t drive a ton of new press, new social signals, or awareness. If you want to boost your rankings for the same keyword you’ve been targeting for awhile, how can you move up to move the needle on your business?

Adjusting your existing, quality content can be used to help bump your site up in the SERPs. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays out the tactics you can use to boost your older page to the next level!

Here is a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today’s video: 
 

Video Transcription

“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to get a little down in the gritty details. Sometimes you’ve got a situation like this. Someone’s performed a search for air conditioners. You’re ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, “Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels.” It’s, “If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece.”

Hyper-tactical, but it’s good to know all the ways that you can move the needle on this. So if you want to go from number four to number three to number two and you’ve got essentially an older page, not a new page – so you’re not getting lots of new press, attention, or awareness, driving all these social signals, etc. – and you’re not targeting a new keyword, you have this kind of stale, older page and you want to get it ranking, there’s a bunch of tactics that you can pursue, and I want to talk about each of them in a bit of detail.

So number one, point more external links to the URL. This is probably the most classic thing that folks in the SEO field have done over the last decade, 12 years. It does work, and it still does work, although it’s less powerful than it used to be because search engines, Google in particular, are looking at such a broader set of figures and data sources for their ranking signals.

However, a few things about this. This is going to be pretty darn hard to do with commercial content. It’s much easier if you got educational or non-promotional stuff, because reaching out and getting links from other types of folks, from other websites is much easier when it’s authentic and not directly promotional or not directly revenue generating, that kind of thing. Now this is much easier for folks who are in like a non-profit space or in an educational or content space because they can reach out and say, “Hey, I have this great resource. I think your people might like it. Do you want to shoot over a link to it? Can I contribute something to your site and point to it?” Yes.

It’s much harder to do that when you have a page that’s ranking for air conditioners and you’re just trying to beat out three other e-commerce retailers for air conditioners. This is the way it goes.

I do have some specific recommendations. I’m not going to dive into every one of these, but these are the tactics that, in my experience, work the best. So that’s guest content, basically when you’re writing on other people’s sites. Of course, just like everything, it’s got to be authentic, got to be high quality. You can’t just be spamming other people’s sites or submitting to really low quality ones.

Promotions do tend to work pretty well. If you’re doing a promotion on your air conditioners, other people may pick that up. You can get press and attention, social attention. Partnerships can work well. Testimonials and reviews. So other people who are writing reviews about maybe an air conditioner line that you’ve just launched, or someone’s writing a review about a new air conditioner that’s come out, and you happen to be the retailer featuring that, you can be included in those types of places.

List inclusion, if you know about a list that already exists where people are covering places to get air conditioners online, you can get included in those. Again, be really careful. You don’t want to go to those spammy, generic directories. You want to be going to high-quality lists. CNET Reviews is very different from Articles-about-electronics-online.info. Apologies if that’s your site. If not, we should register it. I’m kidding.

Press and blogs, of course. Social media pushes you can do, especially if you’ve got something to announce around air conditioners. Summer’s coming up, right? A Facebook page, a push on Pinterest, a push on Twitter, or on Google+.

Link reclamation, meaning you go back and find places that used to link to you that don’t anymore, places that used to link to your competition but those links are now broken. You can go talk to those kinds of folks.

Those are the kinds of link building techniques that have worked best, in my experience. Please be so super careful not to build the wrong links. If you haven’t watched it already, Matt Cutts has been tweeting and talking in video – Matt Cuts being the head of the Web Spam Team at Google – talking about how they’re going to be taking even more aggressive action than what they took with Penguin in a Penguin 2.0 algorithm that’s coming out in the next few weeks. So just please be super cautious about where you’re getting these external link sources from.

Especially since links are a little less powerful than they used to be and because a lot of the linking sources are more dangerous than they once were, there are some other ways I want to mention. Those include increasing your click-through rate. Now, I’m not trying to say here that correlation equals causation, or that it even implies that, but what we do know is more people clicking through on your listing means fewer people clicking through to your competitors and a higher chance that some of those people are going to take actions that we know does increase ranking, so things like linking to you and sharing you and those kinds of things. Your page is clearly providing a more compelling experience. That tends to be exactly what Google’s algorithm is trying to accomplish, and so increasing your click-through rate can help with this.

One of the ways that this can be done, and this is not to say that Google is sort of biased to people who do it, but if you supplement with PPC, with paid search ads, it tend to be the case, and lots of people have tried different tests around this and gotten different performance, but, on average, it tends to be the case that one plus one equals a little more than two. I put 2.25 for that. Your mileage may vary. But basically, if I take a look over here and I’ve got my air conditioner page and I also have an ad on the sidebar or on the top up here, it tends to be the case that the click-through rate here, plus the click-through rate here, is a little more than if I just had a paid ad or if I just had the organic listing. So two listings on the page slightly better than one and one. So that’s certainly an angle you can try again.

Again, I urge you to test this, not to just take it on blind faith. Included in that test methodology should be testing modifications to the title and the description. So if your air conditioner page here has got a description and a title and a URL – the URL matters too, and you can do things like 301 redirect the old one to a new one – this can move the needle. I have found a lot of the time that what I’d call keyword-stuffed, kind of SEO 1.0, back in the late ’90s, early 2000s type of things where it says, “Air conditioners, your air conditioners, get the best air conditioners here,” followed by a brand name that’s kind of off, after what people can see in the title in the search results, doesn’t perform nearly as well as a brand people recognize, a compelling title that has a little bit of authenticity, a little bit of your brand and your culture and your unique value proposition embedded right in the title and the description.

The same story with the URL. Lots of hyphens separating something, a longer URL, a dynamic URL versus one that has readable keywords in it and readable text in there. Again, you’re going for authenticity. You’re going for, “Boy, what would I click on? What do I tend to click on? What do people like?” Think of this just like you’d think of a paid search ad. You want to optimize all the areas of this and try and test it and get better performance out of that click-through rate.

Another thing you can obviously do is add rich snippets. These are things like we could add a video to the page and add the video XML sitemap so that we get the video markup next to that result. We could add rel=author and get our profile picture next to it, assuming we connected with Google+. For some types of rich snippet results, recipes in particular, news items, you can add images and get those in there. For other types of results, air conditioners, any ecommerce result, you can have star reviews and number of reviews. All of those things can help move the needle on click-through rate.

Number three, improve and revitalize the page’s content itself. Again, this isn’t always a direct needle mover. It can be indirect. But Google is pretty sophisticated with analyzing content. Better content, I don’t mean better content in terms of it has more keywords stuffed into it, or better content in terms of it just happens to be longer or more in-depth. I mean more compelling, more uniquely valuable, more interesting, more worthy of being shared, more special. That kind of stuff tends to perform better in Google.

They’ve got a wide variety of text-based content analysis algorithms that tell them all sorts of stuff about a page, not just keywords and TFIDF and stuff like that. So things like rich media, video, images, graphics, the layout design, the user experience, the visual aesthetics, how the page looks, these actually can move the needle, not just on how it performs in the search results, but how it performs in terms of conversion rate. Conversion rate actually tends to be tied pretty nicely to how it performs in search results, because again, Google is looking at all those pieces of the algorithm, trying to piece together what provides the best experience for our users. Text content too. I’m not just talking about keywords. I’m talking about that unique value. If you haven’t seen the Whiteboard Friday on unique value versus unique content, you should check that out.

I know I didn’t have enough room, so I switched sides. Number four, internal links and redirects. So there are a few things that can happen here. Sometimes you have an orphaned page. It’s only linked to from one section. You’ve got to drill way deep down into a subcategory or sub-subcategory to find this page on your site. E-commerce sites are particularly messy with this kind of stuff a lot of the time. Make sure that the page is getting link love, internal link love, relevant link love. I’m not  talking about stuffing an anchor text-rich link in the footer of every page or the category section or something like that. I’m talking about when you have pages that are relevant to air conditioning, you have a page on summer appliances, you have a page on electronics, you have a page on what should homeowners be thinking about to upgrade their homes, great. Make sure that you’re linking to your air conditioner page. Those are relevant pages where people would want to see that. If you’re confused, do an “air conditioners”site:yourdomain. See all the pages where you mentioned it, and yet have somehow failed to link over to your air conditioner’s page that you actually got.

Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, “I’m going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together.” We’ve done this a number of times on Moz, because we’ll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, “Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old.” Let’s just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let’s do that. Let’s consolidate so people don’t get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn’t be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I’ve seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff.

Number five, newer signal, but something that I’m pretty sure in this year’s ranking factors is going to prove to be very interesting, and that is branding, co-occurrence, and mentions. What I mean by this is if your brand name, that’s usually your domain name and usually your company name as well, is often connected with the words “air conditioners” – by connected I mean connected when the press talks about you, when third party sites talk about you, when people blog about you, when social media users talk about you – if those words tend to appear frequently together, your brand plus thing you want to rank for, you tend to do quite well. We’ve seen some early signals that mentions, that co-occurrence of terms, phrases plus brand can really move the needle. So don’t ignore that either.

All right. Hope these five techniques are things that you can try out. Share your experiences with the rest of the Whiteboard Friday readers in the comments, and I’ll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Zach Corleissen

Greetings, Mozfolk! My name is Zach, and I’m a technical writer here at SEOmoz.

We’ve consistently heard from you that Mozscape needs better documentation. I’m pleased to tell you: your requests have been granted! The Mozscape wiki just underwent a thorough update and review by developers, help teamsters, and testers. We incorporated your feedback from help tickets and forums to make Mozscape easier for new users to learn, and more functional for experienced users to reference.

Hopefully this documentation update helps you get the most value from Mozscape. If you haven’t taken a look through our documentation yet, we hope it encourages you to see how Mozscape data can help your business grow.

Legacy documentation: a (very) brief history

Like documentation at most startups, the legacy documentation for Mozscape was inconsistent. Not all features were documented; for example, metadata supports a command called index_stats, which returns information about the contents of the current Mozscape Index update. It’s been in production for a while, but hasn’t been documented until now. (Check it out, it’s pretty cool.)

When features changed, sometimes the changes weren’t documented. Well-intentioned authors added and edited content in ways that weren’t always comprehensive, followed by other well-intentioned authors who did the same. Not everything made sense, either; the next_update and last_update features of the metadata API return dates for the next scheduled and most recent Mozscape Index updates, but the value returned is in Unix Epoch format, which only makes semi-intuitive sense if you already understand the “Expires” part of signed authentication.

I compare Mozscape legacy documentation to how pearls are formed: created in gradual layers; often valuable; frequently irritating.

With these updates, the Mozscape documentation is definitely on the mend and ready for your viewing pleasure.

What’s new (and a new feature)

The What’s New page makes it easier to track feature changes in future updates. From now on, any time we add or change features in Mozscape, the change and the date it went live will appear there.

For example: as of May 15th, Mozscape now supports HTTP Secure.

What’s different: easier to learn

If you’re an SEOmoz PRO user and have never tried Mozscape, now is the perfect time!

Our help team emphasized that we need a better introduction to Mozscape, especially for how Mozscape calls are formed. We responded by streamlining the introduction and improving the way we describe Mozscape’s call anatomy.

What’s different: easier to reference

The query parameters are now organized in the way you’re actually using them: Scope and Sort together, and Limit and Offset together. We distributed parameters and values specific to each endpoint into their respective articles; for example, possible Scope values for the links endpoint…

…are discrete from the possible values of Scope for the anchor-text endpoint:

Glossary entries are re-pointed to existing (and often better) resources on SEOmoz’s main site whenever possible, and we added a few much-needed entries. (How did we get this far without defining target and source URLs?)

What’s different: complete parameter value tables

A complete list of parameter values is a big improvement for Mozscape users. For example, the links API accepts the Sort parameter, but the possible values of Sort weren’t listed. Also, only some values of the Sort and Scope parameters are compatible. Today’s doc update addresses both of these:

What’s different: better organization

We’re excited to release re-organized topics and reduced duplicate information. An example of all three is free vs. paid access to Mozscape. Here’s what it looked like before:

Here’s what it looks like with one of the most-requested features: a side-by-side comparison of free versus paid access to Mozscape.

The legacy documentation referred to different “versions” of Mozscape for free and paid users. This isn’t technically accurate, as there’s only one version of Mozscape with different access tiers. Also: notice the cleaner fonts and layout? Our awesome UI guy, Kenny brought the API wiki in line with our site-wide standards.

Best Practices is a single article now. It used to be a category:

Most of the “best practices” in the legacy documentation weren’t best practices per se; they were required practices. For example: there’s no way to use Mozscape without signed authentication, making it a practice that’s “required” rather than “best.” With the update, Best Practices now lives up to its name with value-adding information about batching calls and maximizing your value by making requests in parallel.

What’s different: less information?

Our users are pretty hardcore (a good thing!), so you may notice that two or three topics now contain less information than previously. For example, some response fields were listed as being “for internal use and subject to change”.

If a response field can only be generated from an internal call, there’s no reason to expose it to users, so we removed them from the documentation…and it would be a rare feature indeed that wasn’t subject to change.

I know what you might be saying. “But less information is less transparent! Less transparent is less TAGFEE!”

That’s true; transparency is critical for good documentation. When it comes to user guides, though, more does not always mean better. TAGFEE also means empathy; if extraneous details make it harder to learn Mozscape, then the documentation lacks empathy, and that’s bad. We’re striving for the right balance between abundant information (transparency) and providing knowledge that will actually help you (empathy). Mozscape is awesome, and we want it to be as valuable for you as possible.

Closing with a question

How can we keep improving Mozscape documentation? Please let us know in the comments!

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