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Introducing Yelp Data Management and Claiming through Moz Local

Posted by dudleycarr

Today we’re making an announcement that’s exciting for marketers at local businesses, enterprises, and agencies focused on digital marketing.

Back in August we announced the industry’s most advanced duplicate detection and closure toolset. And just last month we unleashed our new Moz Local packages, adding Google My Business sync, listing alerts, Apple Maps distribution, reputation monitoring and management, and more to the mix. Well, we have one more announcement to squeeze in before the year ends, and it’s a big deal!

Yelp data management for everyone!

We’re announcing a partnership with Yelp — the leading source for consumer reviews — bringing a new level of Moz Local product integration that will help you make Local your advantage. This integration is the first of its kind in our industry; one that will enable marketers to capitalize on the convergence of local search and consumer reviews more easily than ever before. Whether you have one location or one thousand, you can now claim and manage all your Yelp locations directly from your Moz Local dashboard.


What’s new?

Marketers will now be able to claim and manage data for all of their Yelp listings in Moz Local to increase the likelihood that more new customers will be able to find their business in local and map searches.

Claiming Yelp pages

Businesses can now use their Yelp login to claim and manage their listings through Moz Local — either individually or as a group. Create a new Yelp account or use your existing one, you can manage it all through us!

Ongoing management of Yelp pages

Once claimed, Yelp listings can be accessed and updated by Moz Local. This includes pushing updates to those Yelp pages from the Moz Local dashboard as well as monitoring the status of those updates and getting listing alerts in our recently introduced activity feed.

A Complement to our Reputation Management functionality

This new advanced Yelp functionality in Moz Local — claiming and active management functions — will complement our existing Reputation Management functionality, which provides notifications of new Yelp reviews and review snippets themselves right in the Moz Local dashboard, enabling users to link to the review user experience on Yelp.com in order to respond to a review.


What’s the big deal?

We’re excited about this partnership for a number of reasons. First off, our primary goal has always been to make it easier for brands and marketers to manage their local marketing strategy. As the leading consumer review service, Yelp is one of the most authoritative citation sources in the Local SEO ecosystem, and, as such, is an important source of information to Google. On top of that, Yelp data is critically important to Bing, Apple Maps/Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Yahoo, which use both its location data and reviews directly for their own results.

Everyone agrees Yelp is vital to local marketing strategy, and businesses that employ digital marketing have always told us they would love to be able to update and manage their Yelp listings. In both small and large-scale scenarios, they’ve been waiting for an efficient solution for updating their listings. A comprehensive solution that enables them to do this, as well as manage their Yelp reviews, streamlines the online management process substantially.

Finally, as the leading consumer review site, Yelp attracts over 100 million unique visitors monthly. It provides a critical customer touchpoint for businesses, and having listings on Yelp helps a business rank in local searches.


How will it work?

Moz Local users will provide the email address associated with the Yelp page(s) for their business location(s) to Moz Local, which will then start the claiming process. This will include a bulk claiming process that will prove especially valuable for businesses that have a large number of locations.

Once the Yelp page(s) for their business have been claimed by Moz Local on the user’s behalf, then automatically associated with Moz Local listings as appropriate, the user will be able to monitor and update those pages with all the efficiency and effectiveness that Moz Local provides through its unique, industry leading Active Location Data Management process. This will be available in all Moz Local product packages (Moz Local Essential, Moz Local Professional, and Moz Local Premium).

Yelp review snippets and review notifications are available in the Reputation tab in all Moz Local product packages.

Yelp performance metrics will become available in the Performance and Visibility tabs of Moz Local Professional and Moz Local Premium packages, our product packages that offer SEO analytics.


Cool. When will it be available?

The new Yelp advanced functionality will be available in early 2017.

Questions about this announcement? Leave a comment or contact us at help@moz.com.


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How to Defeat 7 Common Problems for .edu Sites with A+ Content

Posted by syl.deleon

Have you ever…

Have you ever been put in charge of running a website only to find there’s no content management system, when you FTP in to fix a typo there are hundreds of files organized helter-skelter, named with long strings of acronyms, and you can’t find the index file with the misspelled word you’d like to fix to save your life?

Have you ever tried to update the navigation of said site because it’s horrendous and lacks the basic links visitors need to find their way around, only to learn that the nav is held together by a complex overlapping template structure that breaks the entire site when you add an “Apply Now” link?

Have you found that all the events you’re promoting are listed on the website without venue addresses or map links and no convenient parking options?

Have your predecessors riddled the site with multiple H1 tags per page, using them as a design element to make anything that seemed important bigger (like dates and times in the middle of the page) and, of course, made prodigious use of all caps and exclamation points and (AND!) center-justified all text?

Have you ever been asked to update a sentence on a webpage, only to find that the entire content area is actually a large image and not real, crawl-able text?

Have you ever received someone’s bio via email with a request to please update the website, only to find that the attachment is a single page-long paragraph that’s a JPEG file of a scan that was saved upside down and, from what you can figure, was written in German? And you don’t speak German. And your website is not in German.

If any of these scenarios feel painfully familiar, you, my friend, have likely worked in marketing at a higher education institution (whether you had the formal title or duty to do marketing in your role or not).

Table of Contents

Challenge 1: Scattered messaging across departments
Challenge 2: Limited web resources and website access issues
Challenge 3: Getting the scoop – collecting engaging content
Challenge 4: Information overload – cutting through institutional jargon
Challenge 5: Acronyms – just don’t
Challenge 6: Print-focused marketing in a digital age
Challenge 7: Getting results

The struggle is real.

As university marketers, we love commiserating over the unbelievable obstacles that make our jobs seemingly impossible. Colleges and universities have a bad reputation for ugly, unusable websites that are filled with maze-like link loops, pages of irrelevant content, and impossible-to-follow instructions for how to get anything done according to policy and on time. Why not just fix all that? Well, sometimes we simply can’t do much for reasons beyond reason, even though it pains us deeply.

If your job is to promote college programs or recruit students, but your department lacks the tools, skills, and tech support to use a .edu website effectively, here are a few tips for leveraging what you often CAN work with. Content.

Challenge 1: Scattered messaging

When various departments are sending out numerous messages that are not aligned, it’s easy to understand how people on the receiving end can get confused (at best) and completely disengaged (at worst), clicking the unsubscribe button regardless of how awesome or important your email is. At Emma’s Marketing United conference in 2016, a panel of university marketers discussed the strategies they use to segment audiences, which is no easy task when you’re targeting “a vast amount of people and different audiences,” as Mathew Toy of Trevecca Nazarene University said. Here are a few tips from that presentation.

Solution 1 – Centralize.

One way to rein in the chaos is to funnel the outflow of marketing content through an approval process. This has worked for Ethan Parry of University of Pennsylvania.

“A lot of us here wear a lot of different hats. We have different groups as far as students, donors, doctors, staff… so we have a pretty wide range of an audience and everything comes through the digital media office.”

Nicole Smith of Alumni Relations at Vanderbilt University also suggests an editorial process:

“With all the content that’s being pushed out in the university, I think it’s really important to put yourself in the seat of the constituent.”

She has found that using a master calendar to manage overlap between schools and departments helps to ensure that alumni and students don’t get overwhelmed by receiving multiple emails in close proximity, with possibly conflicting messaging.

Solution 2 – Speak specifically to your audience and stay on target with goals.

At a college or university, the audience can vary from prospective undergrads, prospective grads, parents, alumni, donors, corporate sponsors, the local community, performing arts event goers, sports fans, and more. Once you pare down the specific group you’re trying to reach, adjust messaging to be appropriate.

Chelsea Allen at the University of Louisville takes both a targeted and cyclical approach.

“Because we’re the office of undergraduate admissions, the audience is very specific. We’re mostly talking to 18–22 year olds. So we have to be cool, or at least act like we’re cool, to get them to want to talk to us.”

And as the year progresses, so does the outreach strategy:

“We are constantly changing our message depending on the season,” she says. “In the fall we’re recruiting. In the winter, we are managing scholarships and trying to provide every student who has the test scores and the minimums required with the money that they deserve. In the spring, we’re yielding them and trying to convince them that yes, this is the place that you want to come and register for orientation. In the summer we are orienting them and eliminating our summer melt.”

Challenge 2: Limited web resources and website access issues

Higher ed websites tend to be huge and sprawling, with endless subdomains and many hands in the pot. Often, red tape and access issues prevent staff from making improvements that we’d consider industry best practices (like including unique H1s on each page). Alternately, they can provide too much access to faculty and staff who are doing their best to communicate what they consider important, but ultimately is all wrong for the web (See challenge 4).

Solution – Get snoopy.

If you don’t have access to make coding or design changes to a website, but can submit or upload content, you can still do keyword research and get insights about your website’s performance in order to advocate for improvements or support your efforts with off-page tactics.

Audit your website using these Moz Blog resources:

No Google Analytics access? Here are other ways to gain insight about your website’s performance:

Inventory your online presence: document your social accounts, listings, blogs, and other online accounts and assets that you can leverage to drive traffic to your website. Bonus points if you have all the passwords on file.

Gain quality links to boost your content. This could also include links from other departments or subdomains of the university, as well as links from community websites and news and media outlets. Check out The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

Challenge 3: Getting the scoop

When working in a higher ed setting, there’s never a lack of news or good stories. In fact, there are boundless amounts of content just waiting to be harnessed. But, when it’s your job to strategize, collect, write/edit, and post online across all your platforms (web, social, newsletter, email), while running events and budgets and campus tours, etc. — who has time? If there’s not a dedicated content strategist or writer on your team, working with words can take a not-surprisingly-huge amount of time.

Solution 1 – Evergreen content.

Tap the experts and provide tools for content submissions. Your faculty are knowledge factories. Create a questionnaire and reach out to them for answers. Students want to know who they will be studying with, what they will be learning, and how it affects their life. Focus on gathering unique details that will answer these questions.

Solution 2 – Fresh content.

Put students in the limelight by letting them post stories, contribute to blogs, or “take over” social media accounts like Instagram to share their student experience. “Students are already self-generating tons of great content, and they strike the right messaging and tone for their demographic much more naturally than faculty and staff members,” says Briana Harris, who heads marketing at the University of Northern Colorado College of Performing and Visual Arts. She’s found that “student-generated content often gets the highest number of views and story completion rates. We’ve had great success doing student takeovers of our Snapchat channel at UNC, for example.”

Solution 3 – Gather quotes.

Record interviews with students, alumni, faculty, and visiting speakers. These might be more time-consuming to pull together, but are well worth the effort as your content becomes more relatable and unique. Ask for permission to use an audio recording app on your phone while conducting the interview and then transcribe the conversations. You’ll have a pool of great quotes to use on the website, for social posts, and in newsletters, as well as feature stories.

Challenge 4: Information overload

What do you do when faculty and administrators want to use the website as an info dump to post policies and jargon that’s useless to your website’s audience?

As proficient and knowledgeable as faculty and leadership are in their areas of expertise, it can be challenging when these decision-makers have limited knowledge of how websites work, yet influence what goes on them. A common issue is the tendency to overload users with “walls of text,” because “it’s all-important and everyone who visits the webpage needs to know what my brain knows about this issue and will take the time to read every word,” …said no professional marketer ever.

Solution 1 – A walk in the web user’s flip-flops.

Communication and education about your website’s goals and target audience can go far in influencing your constituencies.

“I am most successful when I can help department members start thinking like a web user, rather than the gatekeeper of information,” says Caitlin Felsman Pfitzer, a Communication Specialist at Tufts University. Caitlin uses visualization as a way to guide the content conversation:

“I ask them to think about finding information online for an upcoming event in their own life. Maybe they’d like to attend a baseball game or make a dinner reservation at a new restaurant. What kinds of information do they need the most? How quickly will they become frustrated if they can’t find a key phone number or address? It becomes clear that it’s more useful to know where to park and how much it will cost than it is to know the logic and history behind why the parking garage was built in the first place. This exercise helps clarify how cluttering a website with extensive detail can do more harm than good.”

Solution 2 – Go for the cold, hard facts.

If you do have access to traffic reports or have insights into how users are behaving on your website (see Challenge 2 for tips), you can share those with the most stalwart proponents of terrible ideas and gain some footing. For example, departments often insist that their pet projects need to be linked to from the main navigation because they’re “buried” on the website. Using analytics to explain how users are getting to their page with organic search, direct links, social, and other channels can help them realize that not everyone comes in on the homepage and uses the navigation to get around.

Challenge 5: Acronyms and random DHGSPF

It’s easy to fall into the trap of overusing acronyms and institutional jargon when universities and colleges have such long department and degree names. But when posting online, remember that you’re communicating with prospective students across the globe who might have no idea what you mean. Same thing with search engines, which, as smart as they’re getting, still prefer real, actual words that are also decipherable by humans.

Solution 1 – Use grammar rules.

To increase basic readability and comprehension, spell it out, then use the acronym. For example, spell out “Master of Applied Industrial/Organizational Psychology” (M.A.I.O.P.) the first time it comes up and then feel free to use M.A.I.O.P. within the text later, because now we know what it is.

Solution 2 – Spell out your acronyms.

Spell out acronyms in important places like headings to improve your SEO and usability. Learn about on-page optimization and code your headings properly for best results in search rankings.

Challenge 6: Print-focused marketing in a digital age

Print is still very much alive in academia. Catalogues, viewbooks, concert and event programs, flyers, posters, calendars, you name it. It’s also true that working on print projects takes an inordinate amount of time, is costly, and mistakes can’t be easily or cheaply fixed. Because printing projects can be so demanding, it’s easy to push online efforts aside into the margins of “when I have time, I’ll update the site.”

Solution – What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Re-purpose print projects to use as online assets and conversation pieces.

  • Create PDF versions of printed event calendars or flyers and post as links or downloads on the website.
  • Use variations of images used in print when posting online to create a seamless visual experience.
  • Use the front cover of a concert program or poster as the image to promote the event on social or as a thumbnail on the website.
  • Repurpose content from print publications like viewbooks to use in interactive media, like 3D Issue.
  • Use online channels to announce the release and location of print publications like periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and pieces that can be picked up in person.
  • Even if you must prioritize print, remember to always include a simple URL to bring people back to the website for more information. Use vanity URLs if needed to avoid overlong URLs that no one will take the time to type into the search bar.

Challenge 7: Getting results

When a website is used effectively, it can drive incredible results. This might be standard knowledge in the business sector, where sales can be easily tracked back to web conversions, but college enrollments and budget goals have not traditionally been directly linked to website use. Departments sometimes undervalue, or aren’t able to realize, the full potential of a smoothly running, conversion-optimized tool. It’s not always easy for us to connect the dots from web visits to enrolled students to students who graduate successfully. As marketers for higher ed institutions, whether we have the word “marketing” in our title or not, we may not be able to use the website more effectively to drive results even if we wanted to (due to time, budget, skill, resource constraints, et al).

If you’re overwhelmed and have too much to fix all at once, take a breath and triage for results.

Solution 1 – Triage: Optimize the application page.

When all is said and done, can a prospective student easily find the “Apply” button on your website and actually apply, without ever calling for help or contacting you? If not, start by fixing that.

“In our industry, we have to recognize that the number of people who intentionally move around a traditional recruitment process is increasing.” Zachary McFarlane, Head of Marketing at Colorado State University Online, has found that ‘stealth’ applicants apply without first contacting departments or admissions offices to learn more. “National data suggests that number has grown from 40% in 2012 to 70% in 2014. Our own data supports that trend.”

To help students complete the application process on their own, include clear, detailed instructions along with the link to apply. Put effort into making that page as easy to get to as possible and don’t muddy the message by cluttering the page with other, unrelated news.

It’s also helpful to have a printable version of the instructions and program details in a checklist format so students can stay on track and mark their progress.

Solution 2 – Get to the point.

Prioritize entrances and conversions. The point is to give visitors what they’re looking for as clearly and quickly as possible.

  • Put effort into top landing pages, which are the pages visitors see first. This isn’t always your homepage. If you can get a report of which pages are visited first or most often, focus on updating these to be accurate, easy to read, and make them look as good as possible. If you can’t get a report, use your best guesstimate and make sure that your homepage and pages linked at the top of the navigation hierarchy are as user-friendly as possible.
  • Make sure there’s something for visitors to do on each page, like download a PDF, donate, request info, sign up for email, apply online, etc.
  • Learn about conversion optimization.

Solution 3 – Cover the basics. The importance of N.A.P.

Did you see how I just broke my own acronym rule there? N.A.P. stands for name, address, and phone number. These should be consistent across your site (yes, even though you actually have hundreds of phone numbers). As much as possible, strive for a matching N.A.P. in places like the footer and header and main pages, as well as on your social accounts and online listings. Not only is this good for your online presence across accounts, but will also make it quicker and easier for users to find.

Thanks for fighting the good fight.

To all you unsung heroes of higher ed marketing, take heart. The good news is that Google continues to get smarter and .edu sites do tend to carry more authority in searches, which offers some advantages in an otherwise challenging realm. Although I can’t give you a much-deserved raise, I commend your efforts and tenacity. We are a clever, scrappy bunch, making do with what’s available, spinning straw into gold. If you’ve got more hacks or pointers for us, please share them in the comments. Hats off.


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Goodbye News, Hello Top Stories

Posted by Dr-Pete

In October of 2014, Google launched “In the news“, replacing their traditional news vertical results with a broader range of sources from across the web. Last week, Google’s news results were shaken up again with the launch of “Top Stories”, a card-style set of featured stories. Here’s an example from a search for “John Glenn”:

Even John Glenn’s death somehow can’t escape becoming a Trump story, but that’s a topic for another time. What do we know about the shift to “Top Stories”, and does this indicate a change in the way Google defines what’s newsworthy? Let’s start with the data…

Vital statistics

The following data was captured on Friday, December 9th across a tracking set of 10,000 keywords. These keywords cover a wide range of categories and types. Prior to the changes last week, “In the news” fluctuated on a weekly cycle (peaking mid-week), but occurred on somewhere between 10-15% of the keywords we track daily:

As of Friday, “In the news” had fallen to less than 2% of searches in the tracking set, and “Top Stories” spiked quickly to almost 13% (in the same range as “In the news” previously). None of the searches in our tracking set had both “In the news” and “Top Stories” on the same results page. It seems clear that “Top Stories” is replacing all news searches, and we can expect “In the news” to be completely phased out soon.

The new “Top Stories” UI has two distinct designs. The card-style design above accounted for 78% of the “Top Stories” results in our data set. The remaining 22% looked like this result for “flu symptoms”:

Like the old “In the news” pack, the vertical “Top Stories” list can have from one to three stories. The horizontal version has three stories in every example in our data set (1,011 total).

The Newsmakers

Who’s making the news that makes it into “Top Stories”? Across our tracking data set, we recorded 3,605 URLs appearing in “Top Stories” (some were duplicates, appearing across more than one search). Those 3,605 stories came from 1,319 different domains, suggesting that “Top Stories” is still sampling a very broad set of sources. These were the top 10:

  1. Forbes.com (2.1%)
  2. NYTimes.com (2.0%)
  3. USAToday.com (1.7%)
  4. FoxNews.com (1.2%)
  5. Bankrate.com (1.0%)
  6. Reuters.com (1.0%)
  7. WSJ.com (1.0%)
  8. CBSNews.com (0.9%)
  9. CNBC.com (0.9%)
  10. WashingtonPost.com (0.9%)

The top 10 sources accounted for almost 13% of all stories, and the top 50 accounted for just under 25%. The top 10 generally represented reputable news sources, although you might not think of Bankrate.com as a news source. Bankrate is appearing on commercial searches, such as this one for “buy cars”:

In the context of that particular search, these are fairly reputable sources, but the search itself isn’t one we would usually think of as newsworthy. Like “In the news” before it, Google seems to be casting a wide net with “Top Stories”.

The News-fakers

Given the recent interest in fake news stories, some people have speculated that “Top Stories” is Google’s attempt to address dubious news sources. Google has been fairly quiet so far about the motivation behind “Top Stories”, but my sources suggest that this is primarily a design/UI change. This argument is supported by the fact that “Top Stories” rolled out with a broader redesign, including a new header and updated designs for image results and Twitter results. Additionally, “Top Stories” has been in testing on mobile search for a few months now, prior to the desktop roll-out

Our data also suggests that the number of sources involved in “Top Stories” is still very broad. Is there any evidence of some of the more controversial news sources of 2016? A quick check shows a handful of “Top Stories” results for Breitbart.com, with searches ranging from “second amendement” to “Kellogg’s”:

This is a bit of a grey area – while the Kellogg’s boycott story is certainly newsworthy, and Breitbart’s announcement is the source of that boycott, many people would consider them far too biased to quote as a source on this particular topic. Their inclusion suggests that Google is tapping a very wide range of sources from web results, without necessarily vetting the content of those sources.

Politics aside, other clearly fake sources are popping up in “Top Stories”. Look carefully at this set of three results on a search for “violin”:

While I’m personally a fan of The Onion, I think it’s safe to say that no one should consider the article in the third card to be actual news. The second article, while certainly legitimate, is clearly an opinion piece. Our data set also included a handful of articles from Snopes.com. Here’s one on a search for “lyme disease”:

I’m sure we’re all relieved to know that our Christmas Trees are (probably) not infested with disease-carrying ticks, but while Snopes has become a credible source for debunking bad information, it’s certainly not a traditional news source in most people’s eyes.

What is news?

Google’s job isn’t easy. News is no longer something delivered to us in a 30-minute nightly television program, recapping the same world of hand-picked information for everyone. News is contextual and driven by the information we seek. For example, almost no one would consider Nintendo.com to be a news source, yet take a look at the following set of “Top Stories” results:

These results appeared on a search for “3DS games” – in that context, a recent release on Nintendo’s site is both timely and, in a broad sense, newsworthy. We wouldn’t expect a link to Nintendo when searching for news about the conflict in Syria, but in this context they’re a reputable source.

While “Top Stories” may be primarily a design overhaul for now, I do think that the conscious removal of the word “news” signals Google’s intent. They have to be able to deliver stories in any context, even when traditional, reputable news sources aren’t available (or, at least, when the reputation of those sources is unknown).

If Google sets the reputation threshold too high or restricts “Top Stories” to hand-picked sources, then they’ll only be able to deliver recent news results to a very small set of searches. If they set it too low, then we’ll be inundated with fake news. We’re still a long way from teaching a machine to fact-check, and Google has a tough road ahead.


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How Marketing Like Netflix Will Save Your Lead-Gen Strategy

Posted by chelseascholz

Webinars are an incredibly popular lead-gen tool in most marketers’ toolkits. However, times have changed (and viewer attention spans have changed with it). Rather than try and force your audience to show up on time for live events and stay for a full hour (ain’t nobody got time for that), it’s time to consider delivering content they can watch anytime they want (just like their Netflix experience). We’re talking on-demand video.

giphy (8).gif

Now I know “on-demand” is an all-the-rage word as of late, but I really mean it. When is the last time you showed up for a live event or watched a television show on time? Can you even remember? I can’t. (Except for that time I bought expensive tickets to Wicked.) Now you can bet I’m showing up on time for that, because I paid for it. But if it’s free, my pulled-in-one-million-directions brain is going to forgo the things that aren’t urgent (or costly) – which means all those webinars I signed up for are lost conversions for the marketers who run them.

By thinking and delivering on-demand content like Netflix, the power is put in the hands of your audience to consume on their time – giving the audience edu-taining content to watch when they feel like it and giving us the ability to collect more leads and product sign ups than demanding live events.

Webinars vs. on-demand content

Now as a marketer at Unbounce, I also realize that webinars are a very powerful and well-used channel. Webinars were our bread and butter for a long time, as they are for many other marketing teams, but the shift in attention spans and the way marketers consume content (both professionally and personally) means that we tried to adapt our video content with it and saw great results when we launched The Landing Page Sessions in 2015.

We bounced around the idea of producing pre-recorded videos for our audience, which we saw as having a few benefits over webinars:

  • They give you more time to focus on high production value and fancy video editing
  • They allow the presenter to talk on-screen directly to the audience, as opposed to (less human) full-screen webinar slides
  • They relieve much of the stress caused by technical glitches associated with live webinars
  • They’re a great way to focus on showcasing your product with explainer videos and demos – showing spectators why they should buy your product
  • They have the potential to bring in leads and product signups for months without much active effort after the initial launch. No more breaking your back only to rely on the ROI of a very specific time slot

After all was said and done, this one series with 12 episodes has become an ongoing source of leads for us and brought in 87% more product signups than our webinars over the course of four months. Can I get a “heck yeah!”?!

The Landing Page Sessions was built with the goal of showcasing our product, Unbounce, in a way that was valuable to viewers and great for explaining the use of landing pages. During each episode of LPS, Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner breaks down a full marketing campaign from start to finish and all the videos live on their own microsite where they can be accessed all day, every day.

landing-page-sessions-oli-gardner-screenshot.png

This is a big change from traditional webinars which, as you probably know, include registering for a live event that largely entails 1–3 people chatting over a slide deck for about 30–45 minutes. Not exactly entertaining, but some companies pull them off really well. The problem for us was that while our webinars were well-produced, they had a declining registration rate and, subsequently, attendance rate. As you can imagine, this also lead to a declining amount of leads and product sign ups. The shift to on-demand content was intimidating, but we were pleasantly surprised. There is more work up front with pre-recorded content, but then it lives forever and you can drive as much or as little traffic to it as you want. Let’s break down some of the key benefits of using on-demand content over webinars.

3 benefits of on-demand content

1. Avoid technical snafus that go into running a live event.

A big win from switching over to on-demand content is that we avoid the technical snafus that can often happen in live content. With pre-recorded content you don’t have to worry about GoToWebinar going down, mics going amiss, ill-fitting slides, or power outages.

I used to run webinars at Unbounce when I first started, and I can’t tell you how many near-heart attacks I almost had because of the technical glitches with live events. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

We used pre-recorded video hosted with Wistia, and aside from avoiding live technical glitches, we were also able to optimize our video as we saw fit without the pressure of only getting one go at it. We would adjust our turnstiles and call-to-actions based on real-time stats, like average watch time and which of the episodes were most frequently clicked on.

2. Create more areas for conversion opportunities (turnstiles, overlays, and demo requests, oh my!).

And speaking of optimization, on-demand video also gives you the ability to create a ton of opportunity for conversions that’s otherwise pretty limited with live events (because you only capture when you collect registrations). There are sometimes opportunities post-webinar, but at Unbounce we’ve seen a pattern emerge: most people don’t convert after watching. They often sign up to get the recording but don’t end up watching that either, so whatever post-work you do can often be fruitless. Bummer.

With LPS we capture leads through many different avenues, including:

  • Wistia (lead-generating) turnstiles on each individual episode;
    Screen Shot 2016-12-05 at 10.20.42 AM.png
  • An exit overlay on the homepage of the show to remind people to sign up for new episode notifications;
    landing-page-sessions-exit-overlay (1).png
  • A landing page where we collected submissions (to be featured on the show) before, during and after the season went live;
    screencapture-unbounce-lp-sessions-submit-your-page-1480962165949.png
  • and through a call-to-action to start a free trial of Unbounce at the end of every episode.
    landing-page-sessions-cta-free-trial (1).png

These were all things we couldn’t have done (or done very well) with live shows before, because there just wasn’t room. And if we were putting all this effort into running a show, why shouldn’t we see a good return on it?

Now, with all this space for opportunity to convert, you still have to be careful you’re not being a marketing jerk. It’s easy to overwhelm the viewer, and we experienced that first hand because we were a little “conversion-happy.” Remember that there are people on the other end trying to watch your awesome content, so try and place your calls-to-action strategically so they aren’t overwhelmed, and then subsequently bounce. So play it cool, folks, but take advantage of all the room for activities!

3. Create content with higher production value (even if the costs are relatively the same!) that people want to watch

And finally, your production value can be a lot higher (even with a budget that’s the same as what you were running webinars with).

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Here are a few takeaways about how to build your own high-quality, on-demand production without it feeling daunting:

The draw of webinars are not after they’ve happened, it’s during (as much as we’d like to believe our webinar recordings provide a ton of value, the fact of the matter is that they often don’t). Take what you know people like about those webinars and build that into your pre-recorded productions! If you’ve run a webinar, for example, where people really liked when a guest dissected email copy, create a short series around that topic.

Listen to your audience and ask them questions about what they’d like to see, then do it. Crowdsourcing is definitely underutilized, and sometimes as marketers we can over-complicate a situation. The easiest thing to do when deciding on new marketing channels is to ask the opinion of those who already love you. I learned this when I sent an email last year just asking “What do you need to get more out of landing pages?”, rather than assuming I knew what everyone’s issue or need was. And the result? I found myself a little surprised by some of the answers, and I was able to craft that into some stories for the show.

Create a production schedule and stick to it. Nothing is worse than putting more effort in than necessary for little to no return (this is the danger of on-demand content, and I get asked this a lot: “When are you done?”). Giving yourself a schedule allows you to build better productions without perfecting them until the end of time. For the landing page sessions, it took us about 3–4 months to build, promote, and release the season, for example.

And finally, a pro-tip: If you’ve got something to show off, do it! Showcase your product! Pre-recorded video is a great way to do that without having the pressure of a live demo.

A new era of content production

All this means that you can get more conversions with on-demand video because it puts the user first. On-demand video lets the consumer watch what they want and when they want – and that’s the whole point, folks. People who watch on their own time are more likely to convert because they’ve taken a vested interest in seeking out (or saving your content) to watch at a time that suits them best. This means they’re already in a position to find more value in what you’re serving up, and reduce friction to converting. So you can create a high-quality production that takes the stress out of those live events and serves up highly relevant calls-to-action for highly motivated watchers. A match made in marketing heaven!

Wanna know a little more about our results?

Crunch the numbers

Compared to Unbounce webinars that were run over the same four months that The Landing Page Sessions was running, the landing page sessions had 41 more product sign-ups than the approximate 4 webinars we ran at the same time (47 product sign ups vs. 88 product sign ups). The Landing Page Sessions also brought in close to 2500 leads in that four months as well (which blew what webinars would usually bring in out of the water). Initial effort was higher for LPS, so that needs to be taken into account, but webinars are not consistent in their results month-to-month, either.

This really highlighted a point that Wistia preaches – people like to watch a video before they buy a product. We showcased Unbounce and made it clear how landing pages can be valuable for anyone’s marketing campaigns by breaking them down and seeing how all the pieces drive to them for optimal conversions.

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My learning: Running continual seasons of LPS (now that we’re off the ground) will be more valuable and less effort in the long run than running monthly webinars, based on the combined effort and return on investment.

Additionally, because this content is pre-recorded, we have a ton of ability to milk it for all it’s worth and give it life even months after it’s debuted.

Optimize, optimize, optimize!

On-demand content can live forever. This means you can continue to drive conversions much longer than a traditional live production recording. The conversion opportunities aren’t limited just to where you can add more, but the time period in which you find them!

Things we’ve tried to do with LPS that you can try too include:

  • Continuing to drive traffic to your page and build social hype – leads beget more leads!
  • Using some paid traffic (Outbrain/Taboola) if you have budget to attract fresh users (but be targeted about it). You want the new watchers to be just as interested as your current audience.
  • If you collect emails, create a nurture campaign to talk to those people based on their interests and needs. Continue serving them relevant content, like an ebook or bonus episodes if you’ve got more footage!
  • Using social share buttons throughout your video (or on the landing page that it’s hosted on) with relevant and unique hashtags. If people like what they’re watching, they’ll share and drive more traffic back to your site through their own social channels.
  • We keep our submissions page for the show live all the time to encourage people to submit pages for critique 24/7. And we still get submissions daily even though we haven’t finished our second season yet. This is great because it continues to list-build if you do a show where you can crowdsource content, and you can talk to them so they don’t go cold before the next show.

And don’t forget to keep an eye on it! If you notice that there are opportunities for improvement with what you’ve got right now, test them out. There’s an ease for testing with on-demand content because you aren’t pressured by a live time box. Things we’ve tried with LPS include gating specific high-traffic episodes, driving more traffic to a high-performing episode through specific paid channels that have done really well, and using The Landing Page Sessions as a nurture tactic for nurturing our subscribers into qualified leads.

So when’s the next episode?

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We are going to be working on a season 2 this quarter and are experimenting with things like:

  • Releasing all the episodes at once instead of dripping week over week (this will reduce effort on production/promotion and satisfy the binge-watch culture of our consumers, while letting us sit back and relax)
  • Creating a version of LPS specifically for customers (ungated and used to create some evangelism in our community)
  • Optimize the request-a-demo portion of the site and ensure a smoother episode-to-Unbounce journey

So remember, don’t be afraid of trying out on-demand content in a webinar-soaked world. It can actually generate some long-lasting conversion channels with a higher production value and less effort. If you’re interested in doing some on-demand content, take a gander at what we put together at unbounce.com/lp-sessions.

Take a page out of Netflix’s playbook and provide your users with timely content they can consume at their leisure, and watch the relationship bloom between your audience and your product. Now is the time to binge watch everything from cat videos on Youtube to your favorite marketing Podcasts, so don’t wait for anybody to register to give them what they need.

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What Link Building Success Really Looks Like

Posted by mark-johnstone

A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post.

I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it’s based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success.

I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend.

“Trend” is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work.

With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:

  1. How success really looks
  2. Why success looks like it does
  3. Other factors you need to consider
  4. How we can improve our approach

What successful link building really looks like

Simply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be?

I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like.

The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces:

Note: Data missing for the first two pieces of content

That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years.

The myth in question is as follows:

Building lots of links to one piece of content will result in a jump in domain-wide rankings within a reasonable timeframe, e.g. 3 months.

Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works.

An accurate description of what works would be:

Building lots of links to lots of pieces of content sustainably, while taking other important factors into consideration, can result in an increase in domain-wide rankings over time.

To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links?

No. The movement we’re looking for is here:

Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right.

Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site:

At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There’s actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale:

Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think?

Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself?

Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords (“professional indemnity insurance” and “public liability insurance”) move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:

“A position change from 3 to 1 on our top keyword meant a 15% increase in sales.”

That translates to money. A serious amount of it!

Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample:

Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement.

I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as “professional indemnity insurance.” That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets.

Why success looks like it does

I remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow.

That day didn’t come.

I was gutted. I felt robbed!

I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow.

I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too.

It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.

  • In two of the examples, the sites in question had one big viral hit, gaining hundreds of linking root domains, but this on its own didn’t result in a boost in domain-wide rankings. That’s true.
  • Google would have pretty volatile search results if every time someone had a viral hit, they jumped up in the rankings for all their head terms.
  • But if a site continues to build lots of links regularly over time, like Simply Business did, Google might want that site to be weighted more favorably and worthy of ranking higher.

The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear.

Other factors to consider

Link building alone won’t improve your rankings.

There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:

  1. A variety of onsite (and technical) SEO factors
  2. Algorithmic updates and penalties
  3. Changes to the SERPs, like the knowledge box and position of paid results
  4. Competitor activity

I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site’s rankings.

Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links.

As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery.

However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities.

As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings.

You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance.

How can we improve our approach?

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture.

Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:

  • Topically relevant to what you do
  • Integrated into the site architecture to distribute link equity
  • Valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)

This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time.

But let’s look at them in turn.

Topical relevance

If you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal.

To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site.

Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain.

However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links.

As Jasper Martens explains:

“Before I left Simply Business, the guides we created attracted 15,000 unique visits a month with a healthy CTR to sign-up and sales. It was very effective to move prospects down the funnel and make them sales-ready. It also attracted a lot of small business owners not looking for insurance right now.”

Integrating the content into the site architecture

Distilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:

  1. It creates a more immersive and compelling experience. Consider how impactful New York Times’ Snowfall would have been if it had to sit inside the normal page layout.
  2. It prevents conflicts between the site’s code and the interactive content’s code. This can be particularly useful for organizations that have restrictive development cycles, making live edits on the site difficult to negotiate. It also helps reduce the time, cost, and frustration on both the client-side and agency-side.
  3. It looks less branded. If a page looks too commercial, it can deter publishers from linking.

While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further.

Content that’s valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)

Google is always changing. What’s working now and what’s worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online.

So where do we go from here?

Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope.

You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements.

Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration.

It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better.

It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time.


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