Have you put much time into your Web Analytics?

Doing SEO and Search Marketing in general without doing Analytics is like trying a new diet and never looking in the mirror or stepping onto a scale.

During the last few months in developing Analytics App I’ve really “re-discovered” Analytics for myself. I thought I knew a lot about web analytics already, but then I really immersed myself into the topic and have learned a ton of new things, some of which I have yet to implement (because there really is so much you can do). I was also accepted to speak at SMX Analytics in Toronto, March 31 – April 1, 2009 in the “Up Close with Google Analytics” session, so I’ve been doing more and more to make sure I can give out some real substantive info during my presentation. (If you’d like to go to SMX Analytics, use SPEAKSA as a coupon code for 15% off!)

Source: SoloSEO

SEO in a Recession

Now that we’re officially in a recession (and have been since December 2007 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research), I wanted to put forward some thoughts about doing SEO in a recession. The last “recession” was the dot-com and 9/11 days (2000-2001), but it was more so a “contraction” as they call it, and it lasted 12-24 months. I don’t know about you but I think we’re in this one for a while…it’s already been 1 year and it’s still compounding.

A great article on how to go about “bootstrapping” your business discusses several things that entrepreneurs should do to save money and get products out the door and launched. It’s great advice that is applicable to doing SEO for your site right now.

Source: SoloSEO

Forget the Donuts: Here’s 5 Ways to Get Buy-In for SEO

Aligning your internal teams for success in the B2B world isn’t easy. And often, in the process of getting all of those moving parts in sync, SEO can become an afterthought.

For example, say your company is redesigning its website. It starts out as a simple reskin. Sounds pretty easy right? Until, of course, it’s also about improving content. And then a new taxonomy. And URL changes. And hey, we should probably consolidate some other domains while we’re at it. None of which can happen without input from multiple stakeholders from wildly different departments across the organization. And then comes the dreaded question:

“This won’t affect SEO, right?”

Matt Crowley, Director of Optimized Services at MoreVisibility, knows this story all too well — and odds are, so do most B2B SEOs.

At the enterprise level, with so many factors to consider, SEO can fall by the wayside. Other factors take priority, like design, IT, QA, and so on. The result is major transformation without SEO buy-in, which can mean major hits to traffic and revenue.

And it’s not just redesigns — unless SEO is integrated into every step of the process, every campaign is at risk. So how can SEOs get stakeholders across their organization to buy into the value of what they do? The answer is simple: flip the script.

According to Matt, the question is not what your business can do for SEO. It’s what SEO can do for your business.

Forget bringing donuts to meetings; the real way to encourage buy-in is to show up to the table with concrete SEO answers to the questions of risk mitigation, value creation, and business growth. Which might sound daunting, but you can pull it off in five steps:

1. Education: Why SEO Matters

• Make sure team members across the organization know what they gain when SEO goes right — and what they lose when it goes wrong.
• Get stakeholders to buy into SEO results before you weigh them down with tactics.
• Make sure the marketing team approaches their job with a user-centric mentality.
• Then you need tools like Conductor Searchlight and SEMRush to present data that shows the link between SEO and revenue.

2. Alignment: Why SEO Means Business

• Make sure your SEO goals line up with the objectives of the organization at large.
• Outline resource requirements and constraints ahead of time, so everyone knows the roadmap.
• Meet regularly with business units to ensure you’re all on the same page.
• Present SEO findings in terms of concrete risk mitigation and growth opportunities.

3. Issues-Based Marketing: Why Your Customer Matters

• Cut the jargon out of your content in favor of the language your customer uses.
• Demonstrate how content can be segmented out to follow the customer journey.
• Give your teams relevant data on what terms are actually being searched for so they can align their language with the customer’s.
• Pay constant attention to the words your customers use.

4. Training: Equip Your Team With the Right Skills

• You may also like...

  Present customized plans for pursuing specific action items to different business units.
• Don’t forget to re-train down the line to ensure the skills stay fresh.
• Offer custom webinars for different teams within your organization.
• Arm the content team with “writing for the web best practices.”

5. Communication: Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

• Don’t miss a chance to make sure SEO is front-of-mind during regular strategic conversations.
• Make sure the SEO team is keyed into major business goals.
• Communicate SEO needs and strategies in terms of the requirements of the business at large.

With this checklist, you’re primed and ready to make it clear how SEO is a core part of the business — and encourage buy-in across the organization. When the value of SEO is clearly communicated, that next site redesign might go a little more smoothly.

Want to see the rest of his Matt Crowley’s presentation at C3? Check out the recording and the slides here.

About the Author: Luke Conley

Luke is a marketing and SEO copywriter known to his friends as the third Winklevoss. He did not appear in The Social Network due to his exceeding humility.

Source: Conductor Spotlight

8 Can't-Miss Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation

Posted by ronell-smith

Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your brand’s online and offline footprint through the use of content, relationships, and links to create an optimal experience for prospects and search engine crawl bots. It typically leads to gradual increases in positive brand mentions, search rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right?

Well, for the attorney seated in front of me in my kid’s elementary school lunchroom, I might as well have just told him the earth is flat.

"That makes no sense to me," he said, pushing his chin forward and tilting his head, as if waiting for me to admit that I was pulling his leg. "You mean, there’s all this stuff [an SEO] does on my site? And there is stuff that we — me, my team and [the SEO] — should be doing off our site as well? That’s like telling me, 'It’s not enough that you live and pay for a nice house in a gated community. You also need to guard the gate to the community and pick up trash along the road leading up to your driveway.'"

His example could not have been more apt.

"Not caring about off-site SEO is like having that great house in the gated community, but none of your friends want to visit because they’ve heard from others that it smells like vomit on the inside, and no one they talk to can either confirm or deny it."

By imagining your website as a home you'd like people to visit, it's easier to see the value of off-site SEO.

I continued: "It’s not enough to only care about your website/brand or your house/neighborhood; you must always be working to enhance its reputation to ensure others will desire to visit/learn more about it."

He saw the light.

"So basically we do off-site SEO to ensure the work we do onsite and as a brand are most effective?" he asked.

Exactly!

What off-page SEO is and why your brand cannot afford to ignore it

In the SEO world, we don’t need to be convinced of the value of off-page SEO.

We know that well before people seek our brands out, they have formed an opinion of it based on reviews, comments from friends, family members, or online acquaintances, and whatever information we can glean online or offline (apart from your website).

Therefore, we’d be fools to disavow making off-page SEO a priority, given how important it is.

However, the more common mistake — among SEOs at least — is to see off-page SEO through only the prism of link building, which, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of off-page SEO.

That is, in working to build your brand’s off-page SEO prowess, links are certainly a benefit, not the goal.

Think of it this way:

• Goal of off-page SEO: To accumulate positive signals and interactions for your brand, with the hope of those factors being a net positive.
• Benefit(s) of off-page SEO: Brand mentions, positive reviews, links, etc.

So while it’s important to think of links when making off-page SEO a priority, it’s also vital that you (a) view them in context (important but not singularly so) and (b) give priority to the host of factors that lead to off-page SEO providing a boost for your brand.

Those factors include, but are not limited to, creating an excellent, worthwhile product or service; guest posting on popular, relevant blogs; building relationships with influencers; earning positive press; capturing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews; and monitoring mentions of your brand, to name a few.

Because our goal is to create a post that’s accessible, interesting and immediately useful, we’ll break down what we think are 8 key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO under three umbrellas:

• Brand
• Audience
• Content

The intention is to provide a prism through which you can more easily categorize your efforts and a framework by which you can make those efforts a reality.

Brand

"No amount of SEO in the world can help a crappy product or service (at least not for long)." This is a sentence I frequently utter to folks who refuse to prioritize what they offer in favor of trying to put lipstick on a pig.

#1: Create a 10X product or service

When your product or service is recognized as the best in its class, your job as SEO becomes much, much easier.

That’s because both online and offline, people are likely saying great things about the product and brand, which leads to visits to your website, positive reviews on third-party sites, and increased sales of the product.

This only occurs, however, if you focus first and foremost on creating the best product you can.

Easier said than done, I know.

Here’s a great place to start, depending upon where your product/service is in the evolution cycle:

• Existing product: Deliver the goods on features customers would most benefit from based on requests and complaints online regarding competing products.
• New product: Focus on the most essential benefits your new product can provide to the prospective audience. When you do this, you remove objections and features present themselves.

#2: Customer service

No one who’s watched the United Airlines meltdown needs to be sold on the value of customer service as an effective asset for off-site SEO. The brand will be paying for that epic disaster for years as millions of folks continue to share the video and images of the event.

It’s not hard to imagine how poor customer service has made the brand’s SEO and PR teams’ reputation management efforts a nightmare.

For your brand, focus on a singular goal: Leaving everyone your brand/brand spokespeople comes into contact with — online or offline — feeling as though the interaction could not have been more positive.

For example, at in-person events, make sure staffers wear a smile, empathetically interact with everyone they meet, and go out of their way to answer questions or provide general help. It also means ensuring any content you create leaves people feeling good about your brand.

It’s unlikely this billboard was much of an off-page SEO benefit to SouthBendOn.com.

# 3: Focus on web searchers' intent

Turns out the old cliche that “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” is very relevant to SEO. People are typically more willing to buy and use your products and services if they can first find them.

A lot of times, our products and services fail to live up to their full potential because we aren’t matching our offering to the needs of our prospective audiences.

A great example of this is creating and sharing content without keywords the audience might be using to look for a similar product.

In addition to matching titles, descriptions, and keyword phrases to searcher’s intent, make sure you focus on where the content is shared and discussed.

It also starts with putting the needs of the audience first.

“For uncovering searcher intent…[s]earch, refine, broaden queries, talk to people, read discussion threads, have empathy,” wrote Rand Fishkin in a recent tweet.

Use Google Autosuggest, Keywordtool.io, and Answerthepublic.com to get in front of what it is people are looking for online relative to your product or service.

Audience

The better you know your audience, the more easily you can interact with, share with, and learn from them.

What does this have to do with off-page SEO? Everything.

Next to no one wakes up and decides to interact with your brand.

#4: Have a responsive social media presence

A typical search comes about because a person has an unmet need (e.g., "where is the nearest pizza joint?") or has a question they’d like answered (e.g., “how tall is the biggest building in Tokyo?”).

After using Google Autosuggest to find the answer, they’re likely to visit social media to learn more, ask questions, and interact with their friends, family members, and acquaintances.

You see where we’re going here, right?

Social media must be an invaluable component of your off-page SEO strategy.

It’s much easier than most brands think, too:

• Be there: If you have a social media account, make sure someone is monitoring it and can answer questions and respond to comments in a timely fashion.
• Be human: People online expect genuine interaction, not robotic responses or constant brand promotion.
• Be proactive: One of the best things you can do to help your brand is to use social media to be seen as a resource for the online community in the vertical you serve. Even if someone asks a question about a product or service you don't offer or that is offered by a competitor, don’t be afraid to chime in and offer praise when due.

As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO:

Source

#5: Build connections with social media/online influencers

When people say “Social media does nothing for my brand,” most SEOs must think, “Oh, but how wrong you are.”

Whether it’s the largely unmeasurable dark traffic social sends to your site or the connections with a base of people who could be customers or supporters at some point, social media can be an asset for any brand, if used wisely.

For off-page SEO, one of the biggest benefits of social is the ability to create and nurture lasting relationships with influencers, those people with huge reach in the way of name recognition, myriad followers and fans, and connections with numerous high-ranking websites.

They’re also typically very much connected with other influencers.

As we see in the image below, even if Google isn’t using social signals to help determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they represent, like, and visit makes being on their radar a positive.

Image source

An effective strategy for enlisting the help of influencers to boost your off-page SEO is to get to know them in person, at events, and online via group chats/tweets and such, which puts you on their radar without much heavy lifting on your part.

Then, in the future, when you do create and share content, they’re more likely to recognize you and your brand and might share the content themselves.

Even better, later on, after you’ve developed a stronger relationship, you might even collaborate on a piece of content — for their site, your site, or a publisher such as an online magazine.

#6: Recommit to frequenting forums and discussion boards, and comment blogging

Want to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow?

Visit the most popular blogs in your vertical, and leave comments. In recent years, comment blogging has fallen off in popularity, in large part because comment spam led to most blogs no-following their links.

For the purpose of off-page SEO, links are less of a priority.

Your goal is simply to be where the action is and to leave a thoughtful comment that might catch the eye of the blogger, the platform’s editor, and any influencers who might be reading the content.

The same applies for sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can follow topics specifics to your brand or vertical and quickly get noticed for being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and empathetic in answering others’ questions or helping to drive discussion.

The SEO subreddit is very popular, frequented by many of the big names in SEO.

The relationships formed on these platforms have a way of paying huge dividends and can be invaluable for off-page SEO and reputation management.

Often someone notices your comments on one of these platforms, starts following you there, and then later does a Google or LinkedIn search to learn about you or your brand, which ultimately leads them to your website, where they might sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog.

#7: Quit guest blogging for links

You read that right.

Instead of guest blogging solely for links, use this tactic to help you build a rapport with some of the top publishers, editors, influencers, and brands online.

If done correctly, the links do come. But as long as you make links the priority, whereby it’s obvious that you’re looking for a transactional relationship as opposed to one that is mutually beneficial, the tougher it’ll be for you to use guest blogging effectively for off-page SEO.

Read, leave comments on their blogs, and connect with the top publishers in your vertical — or publishers that cover your vertical. Once you have developed a rapport and, hopefully, have a reputation for creating quality content, inquire about creating a guest post for the platform, assuming that option is available.

Even if that door doesn’t open, you’ll be able to hone your pitch and eventually get a foot in the door with other publishers.

Remember, too, that your website is but one tiny fish in a vast ocean of options. You need to connect with others in many places off-site to build the reach and influence that’ll drive attention and visits to your site, which is where guest blogging can big a huge asset.

Your brand's success depends upon a lot of factors outside your website. Image source

“Should you do guest posting for SEO? As a primary objective, I’d say no. But… reality is that the indirect impact remains very powerful,” wrote Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. “There is nothing like building your reputation and visibility to cause people to want more of your content. You get to build up your own audience, and ultimately some of these people will find their way to your site, find great content there, and link to it.”

Content

When most people say, think, or write "content," they most often think of text, images, videos, and information shared via social media.

In reality, content represents the entirety of the experience your brand designs, creates, and shares online and offline, from logos and tag lines to personnel, phone calls, signage, blog text, images, videos, etc.

If a prospect or customer can interacts with it, you’d better believe it’s content.

And before you offer up, "Well, Ronell, what if one of my staffers has mustard on her shirt in a video we post online?" (Trust me, someone would ask that.) "Is that content, too?" Yes, that faux pas is part of the content experience a prospect or customer could have with your brand.

In fact, it's the sort of thing that can lead to someone seeing your company as not having all of its ducks in a row, injuring your reputation in the process.

#8: Experiment with content types

But don't fret. When it comes to off-site SEO, the main thing I want you to focus on with regard to content is to see beyond text.

I’m a writer. I love words.

As a newspaper reporter, I always argued with my editor when he said “Words without images lead to words getting ignored. Images sell.”

The same for video. People eat it up.

You’ve no doubt heard that mobile is gobbling up the world as I write this. Well, guess what those untold millions are doing on their mobile devices?

Largely consuming videos, which are expected to account for 85% of the content being shared online by 2019. Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Live, anyone?

Image source

Videos and images can be a huge boon to your brand's off-page SEO, largely because they can both be a low-investment/high potential vehicle used to drive awareness and traffic back to your site, enhancing your off-page reputation in the process.

A few low-cost, low-effort ways to use video and images include:

• Post how-to videos on YouTube, which is the second-most visited website in the world and the #2 search engine behind parent company Google. What's more, popular videos can and do rank in the SERPs.
• Share daily musings or recaps of distillations of recent events via Facebook Live
• Snap meeting or office funnies via Snapchat
• Compose image albums on Imgur, Flickr, and other popular photo-sharing sites
• Tweet videos of interesting things you notice throughout the day

Video and images are great way to show some personality and make your brand feel human, real, and alive to people who might not have heard of your company, or who've only recently discovered it.

They can also work wonders for your off-site SEO.

For example, say your brand has found that customers who visit your white papers have an increased likelihood of becoming customers. You might shoot video interviews of the subjects or clients featured in the most popular websites, then post the videos to YouTube, in addition to sharing them with the clients to post on their site and disseminate via social media.

This increases the likelihood of even more people seeing the videos and wanting to learn more about your brand.

It's time to think holistically

The complete list of off-site SEO tactics that can bring your brand success contains far more than eight elements.

Our goal with this post is to spur you to think beyond what's comfortable or convenient, and instead consider what's (a) doable in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable degree of effort, and that (b) has the potential to yield a significant amount of success.

We're convinced that a brand who works diligently to deploy the tactics listed above will be better able to thrive.

Recommended resources:

Brand

• Why You Must Become a 10x Brand
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?
• Why is Building Your Brand an SEO Strategy?

Audience

• Do Social Signals Drive SEO?
• Tips and Tactics for Amplifying Your Content
• How to Earn the Amplification of Influencers
• How to Hack the Amplification Process
• Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits

Content

• YouTube SEO: The Ultimate Guide
• The 100 Best Infographics
• Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

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!

Source: Moz Blog

The New York Times Makes Poor Argument for Breaking up Google

At the end of April, The New York Times published an opinion piece that was widely circulated among my network entitled “Is It Time to Break Up Google?”. I saw a lot of people excited at the idea, and the concept of a monopolistic Google obviously resonated with many. Unfortunately, I thought that it was a poor article and that there was not nearly enough critical thinking being applied.

When it was shared on an email list I’m on, I hammered out a rant explaining my issues with the article. This post is an attempt to clean that rant up into a reasonable state for wider discussion. I’m sure there are a bunch of areas where I am also wrong, and I’d love to hear others’ opinions.

I should start by saying that I am generally sympathetic to the idea that Google is dominant in search advertising, and is potentially abusing that power. I think that there's a good chance there needs to be some kind of intervention (and indeed I’ve written a few articles about it - since as far back as 2007 1, 2, 3).

But I still didn't like the article, and here’s why:

It bundles tech companies together while making weak cases for them being monopolies

The article starts by highlighting the size of the tech behemoths that have become the biggest companies in the world. Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have joined Microsoft which was the only tech company in the top five as recently as 2007.

The largest of them all (Apple) is very clearly not a monopoly. Apple is only the sixth-largest computer manufacturer, and even in the high-end (if that is a distinct market) they are likely below 50% market share (they were around 30% in 2007). Smartphones is Apple’s biggest market - in this market they are the largest player, but with less than a 20% share and less than a 60% share of the high-end market (if that is distinct). You may be able to make a case for them monopolising the tablet market, but only because it’s a declining market generally in which other players have declined faster, and iPads make up only about 7% of Apple’s revenue. None of this is addressed.

Instead, we get weak arguments for Google, Facebook, and Amazon being monopolies. The author says:

Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.

Now, I was really pleased to see search advertising identified as the market in which Google is dominant. Too many people talk about “search” share - but while that is interesting in some analyses, it’s not a “market” in the antitrust sense.

The arguments for the other tech behemoths as monopolies misses the mark, though. Monopolies need a market to monopolise, and:

1. There's no way that "mobile social traffic" is a market you can monopolise. Mobile advertising would be an interesting market - but Facebook isn't a monopoly there (Google also has a huge share)

2. You might get away with claiming that “e-books” is a distinct market (and that Amazon has a monopoly over it) but (a) I'm not sure -- I think the relevant market is "books" and (b) if e-books is the thing, it's a tiny part of Amazon's business (it’s hard to find concrete numbers but this article estimates ~$2.1bn in the US, so the global number is probably a few % of the total ~$130bn of revenue). Regardless, it’s certainly not the reason it's a stock market behemoth. Amazon is not a monopoly in any of its interesting markets (retail, even books, AWS, streaming content etc.)

It’s possible that some of this confusion stems from the fact that the author appears to be conflating “monopoly” with “big” - highlighted best by the statement that:

We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis

None of the banks were monopolies.

Poor arguments about innovation and “reallocation” of money

The author claims that:

It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale

Now. I think it is quite possible that they have stymied innovation, but “impossible to deny” is far too strong - especially when coupled with a complete absence of any kind of argument or evidence. I can certainly see specific areas where each of them may have harmed innovation - but they also each have caused or enabled huge innovation on the other side of the ledger. Just look at the innovation that AWS alone has unleashed on a “broad scale” as one example - and that is just Amazon.

The article continues by saying that:

Billions of dollars have been reallocated from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms

Leaving aside the euphemistic use of “reallocated”, this is still a weird claim, because I think it’s pretty difficult to pin this on an abuse (or even use) of monopoly power. Newspapers didn’t lose advertising revenue to Google because Google abused their monopoly. Search adverts are simply better than newspaper adverts. It’s almost perfectly backwards - Google got their financial dominance because their adverts were effective - they didn’t use their financial dominance to stop people buying adverts in newspapers.

There are almost no arguments for the headline’s proposal

Of the 21 total paragraphs, the author spends nine arguing for regulation rather than break-up. This is supposedly based on Google and Facebook being natural monopolies - though there is no argument put forward about why this should be the case. It’s not at all clear to me why it would be in the public interest to have only one search engine and one social platform and to regulate them as utilities.

The author suggests three other non-break-up interventions:

1. Prevent future acquisitions - but this does nothing at all to address the issues the author has been railing against - Google remains dominant in search advertising regardless of whether they can buy Snapchat(!) or not

2. Regulate as a public utility - this appears to be based on the claim that these big companies are natural monopolies - though there is little argument made as to why that should be the case. The interventions are even weirder - I'm not even going to get into how it's very much not patents preventing other search engines competing with Google

3. Remove "safe harbor" protection - probably the weirdest idea of all. For one thing, this appears to be targeted at YouTube, a facet of Google unmentioned up to this point (and he’s surely not arguing that Google is a monopoly provider of internet video / internet video advertising, is he?). Even if you consider it at face value, it’s hard to see how this would do anything to change their position as a monopoly provider of search advertising

Finally, in one brief sentence, we get to a single mention of the headline idea - of breaking up Google. So how should it be done? Which bits should be broken off from the main entity? Apparently they should be forced to sell DoubleClick - the display ad platform. How on earth is that supposed to remedy Google’s dominance in search advertising? This does nothing to undo or prevent any of the harm outlined earlier in the article. So we’re left with a weak argument for doing a thing that won’t help anyway.

Suggested reading

For a clearer view into why big tech companies are in danger of becoming monopolies, and the ways in which US antitrust law (in particular) is poorly-equipped to deal with them, I highly recommend these articles from Ben Thompson of Stratechery (the only paywall I currently pay for - though these are all outside the paywall):

• Aggregation theory - explaining how the current tech environment results in huge companies with massive power

• Manifestos and monopolies - a deeper dive into Facebook in particular (and more on the specific downsides of a Facebook monopoly)

• Antitrust and aggregation - explaining why US antitrust law is poorly-equipped to handle these monopolies because it focuses on direct harm to consumers (which is less clear here) rather than harm to competition (which is much easier to prove). EU law focuses on the latter - so that's my best bet for some kind of action - that we'll see it come out of Europe.

Do we need regulation?

I'm also somewhat sympathetic to the idea that tech monopolies get toppled by new tech faster than by governments (it wasn't the DoJ or the EU that broke the Microsoft OS monopoly, but rather the internet and mobile).

If we do need intervention, I don't know what a good intervention would look like for Google, but for all the reasons above, I do think this NYT article is full of bad arguments and bad interventions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.

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About the author

Will Critchlow

Will founded Distilled with Duncan in 2005. Since then, he has consulted with some of the world’s largest organisations and most famous websites, spoken at most major industry events and regularly appeared in local and national press. For the...   read more

Source: Distilled

How to Implement SEO Changes Using Google Tag Manager

Posted by sam.nemzer

While working at Distilled, I often come across issues with implementing technical SEO changes to websites. This can be for a variety of reasons: some sites have rigid CMSs that don’t allow for customization, while others have development queues of many months (or years, in some cases!).

In these cases, it doesn’t matter how good a job we do identifying the changes that need to be made in order to improve a site’s performance — if nothing can be implemented, our advice is worthless. Something we like to say at Distilled is that “it's not our job to deliver reports, it's our job to effect change.” In order to make this a reality for clients with the types of issues I mention above, it’s necessary to explore alternative ways of getting changes made.

One option for this is to implement some sort of "meta-CMS." This is a system that sits on top of an existing CMS, and allows you to make specific changes to pages on a site, bypassing the technical and/or technical constraints that a CMS may entail. <plug> While also having the ability to split-test SEO changes across groups of pages on a website, our own DistilledODN tool can be (and is being) used for this purpose. </plug>

For sites for which a meta-CMS is not an option, a third solution is to use a tag management system (when one is installed and configured). In this article I’ll be referencing Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is the most widely used tag manager (accounting for 72.6% of the tag management market, according to BuiltWith.com). Tag managers use a single JavaScript container tag to inject various different tags (e.g. tracking, remarketing, and CRO tags) into webpages. The benefit of this is that in order to add or amend tags, it’s not necessary for a developer to make any changes to the page; changes can be made to the tags within a container and these tags will be implemented on the page.

Tag managers are mostly used to implement off-the-shelf tags, like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking. A lesser-known functionality is to implement custom HTML snippets (which can include JavaScript code). This allows you to make any arbitrary changes you like to the HTML of a page (or set of pages) based on rules you define. A benefit of using tag managers is that you can apply changes to pages at scale across a site with a single tag.

This allows us to bypass CMS restrictions and development queues, directly applying changes to things like page titles, canonical tags, and on-page content.

Because tag managers use JavaScript to implement tags, in the past it hasn’t been seen as a reliable way to make SEO changes. The traditional thinking has been that, in terms of making SEO changes, Google (and other search engines) can’t reliably execute JavaScript, so any changes made with JavaScript would likely be ignored. However, recently, we are seeing evidence that changes are being picked up by Google, including implementation through tag managers. This article will show a few examples of this in action, and how to implement these sorts of changes on your site.

How to make any HTML change using GTM

The sorts of changes we’re interested in involve either adding in new elements to a page, amending the content or attributes of elements, or removing elements from a page. For each of these, you’ll potentially need knowledge around:

1. CSS selectors and HTML, in order to know which elements on the page to change/pull data from
2. JavaScript (especially jQuery*), in order to inject elements into the page

For example, there are simple elements you can add into a page that don’t require anything to be extracted from the page (other than the page URL, which is an inbuilt variable in GTM). On the other hand, there are more complex changes, such as adding in product structured data on e-commerce sites, that require you to extract data from the page (e.g. product names, prices, etc).

If you’re not technical and just want to be able to implement changes in GTM, I’ll include an off-the-shelf GTM container at the end of this post, with instructions on how to use it.

*If your site has jQuery loaded, it will be much easier to extract and write elements to a page. In order to check this, you can open the Console while viewing the page in Chrome or Firefox and type “jQuery” (case-sensitive). If jQuery is not loaded, you will see an error message.

Inserting an element

In order to insert an element into an HTML page, you can use a custom HTML tag in GTM. Below is an example of a custom HTML tag that inserts a meta robots noindex tag to the page. This below example uses jQuery, but you can do the same thing without jQuery if need be.

<script>
// Removes any existing meta robots tag
jQuery('meta[name="robots"]').remove();
// Create an empty meta element, called 'meta'
var meta = document.createElement('meta');
// Add a name attribute to the meta, with the value 'robots'
meta.name = 'robots';
// Add a content attribute to the meta element, with the value 'noindex, follow'
meta.content = 'noindex, follow';
// Insert this meta element into the head of the page, using jQuery
jQuery('head').append(meta);
</script>

This snippet will add a meta robots noindex, follow element, after deleting any existing meta robots elements, to every page to which it applies. In GTM, every tag is associated with at least one trigger, which tells the container when the tag should be applied. For any changes we want Google to take note of, we want the tags to trigger as soon as the page loads. We can decide which pages the tag should load on using any variable we like to specify pages.

The above HTML tag can be amended to create other types of elements. These are explored in the example section below.

Extracting data from the page

There are two approaches to extracting data from a page. You can either use GTM’s inbuilt variables, which allow you to extract the text or an attribute of an element based on CSS selectors, or do the same with JavaScript and/or jQuery within the custom HTML tag.

In the context of SEO changes, the most common place where you’ll want to extract data from the page would be to construct structured data markup using JSON-LD. In order to demonstrate the different methods, I’ll show a way of constructing product markup by extracting items both in GTM variables and within a custom HTML tag.

For this example, we can imagine a site with product pages that have data about their products each given unique IDs within the HTML of the page. In reality, you’ll need to find CSS selectors that give you the exact elements you’re looking for. A great tool for this is the Selector Gadget Chrome extension that allows you to find a unique CSS selector for any element on a page.

For our example, let’s imagine the following IDs:

Element ID	Associated Schema Item
product_name	name
product_img	image
price_value	price
price_currency	priceCurrency
ratings_count	reviewCount
avg_rating	ratingValue

Using GTM variables

If you’re using GTM variables to pull the data out of the page, you’ll need to set up a variable for each of the above elements. You can do this by going to the Variables menu and clicking "NEW" under "User-Defined Variables."

For each of the above elements, define a new "DOM Element"-type variable, using an ID or CSS selector appropriate to each item. For all of the above, you’ll want to leave the "Attribute Name" field blank except for the image, where you’ll want to extract the src attribute.

In order to pull these variables into some JSON-LD markup, we’ll need to set up a custom HTML tag that references them.

Note that, in order to reference a GTM variable, you need to wrap them in double curly brackets. Also note that we’ve referenced “Page URL,” which is a default built-in variable in GTM. The last four lines of this script are turning the jsonData element into part of a script element, with type “application/ld+json,” to be injected into the head of the page.

Using jQuery

We can do the same thing as the above without touching GTM variables, instead using a single HTML tag. In this case, we need to use jQuery to do the same job that the GTM variables are doing.

This HTMl tag is very similar to the one using variables, except in place of each variable, it uses jQuery to extract data from the page. Obviously this is only possible for pages that have jQuery loaded, but equivalent expressions are possible in JS without jQuery.

The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to set up individual variables for each element — all of the information is contained in this one tag. On the other hand, if you have variables being referenced by many different tags and/or triggers, it makes sense to use variables, as if and when you need to change the definition of the variable, it will apply to all tags and triggers without the need to change each individual one.

Does it work?

This is all very well and good, as long as Google actually sees and indexes the changes that are being made via GTM. As mentioned above, there is uncertainty as to whether Google can index (and even then, whether it respects) markup and content implemented through JavaScript. I have three examples from the last couple of months of changes being made through GTM, and immediately respected by Google.

1. JSON-LD structured data markup

With the above example, using both the jQuery and variable methods, we can see rich snippets in search results, where there is no structured data at all on the page before GTM applies it. The below snippet is from a dummy page where a product snippet has been applied.

2. Canonical tags

We have also seen evidence of Google paying attention to canonical tags implemented through GTM. The below chart (taken from STAT) shows the number of keywords for which a page ranked, before and after a canonical tag was implemented using GTM. After the implementation, the page stopped ranking for any keywords, and the destination of the canonical tag started ranking in its place.

3. Mobile switchboard tags

In this example, a site had separate desktop and mobile versions on different subdomains. Mobile switchboard tags were implemented on the desktop site using GTM, and immediately pages on the mobile subdomain began being indexed.

Some examples of tags

All of the below tags can be found in this dummy GTM container. They are applicable only for sites that have jQuery loaded. In order to implement the tags, take the following steps:

1. Download the container from Google Drive.
2. Within the "Admin" menu of the GTM container you want to import into, select "Import Container":
3. Select the container file from its download location, and select "Merge" and "Rename conflicting tags…" in order to not overwrite any tags that are already set up.
4. Click "Confirm."
5. Once the container is loaded in, make necessary edits to tags so that they are suitable for your site, and assign triggers to apply only to pages that are relevant.

Tag to insert mobile switchboard tags

If you have a separate mobile site with the same page and URL structure, this tag can add in switch tags, replacing "www" with "m" in domain names. It will also add a canonical tag to mobile pages that don’t already have one, pointing to their direct desktop equivalents. You can customize this tag to have whatever subdomain your mobile site is on by changing the domains on lines 3, 8, 12, and 16.

Tag to add noindex tag

This is identical to the tag mentioned above. Take care with the trigger if you use this — you don’t want to accidentally noindex every page on your site! This tag will remove any existing meta robots tag, and write a "noindex follow" meta robots tag.

A potential use case for this would be to noindex any product pages for out-of-stock products. You could use a trigger that detects an "out of stock" in a particular element on the page, and automatically adds in a noindex tag when that is the case.

Tag to add self-referential canonical

This will add a canonical tag to pages, pointing to themselves — or, if the page has URL parameters, pointing to a parameterless version of the page. Take care when implementing this on pages that are intended to canonical to other pages (including on separate mobile sites), as it will overwrite any existing canonical tags. Also make sure that you do not implement it on a page that has parameters, and is not intended to canonicalize to the version of the page without parameters (e.g. paginated versions of pages).

Tag to insert breadcrumb structured data

This tag cycles through any breadcrumb elements that share a CSS selector on a page, and writes them into JSON-LD. It then takes either the canonical URL of the current page, or the current URL if no canonical exists, and writes that as the final breadcrumb element.

This tag is named "Insert Breadcrumb Markup to Any Page." Within the tag, you should rename the "selector_for_breadcrumb_link" on lines 8 and 29 of the tag to be a CSS selector of the breadcrumb links on the page.

Tag to insert product structured data

This is the jQuery example discussed above. Replace the IDs within the selectors of the specific elements you wish to include in the structured data. If there are no aggregate ratings, remove lines 16–21.

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192: 3 Key Things Bloggers Do to Grow Their Blogs into Businesses

Not Your Dad's Keyword Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Use Cases

Posted by rjonesx.

Historically, keyword research has often been limited to to keyword selection. This is not to say that keyword selection isn't important; in fact, identifying a small set of keywords to write a piece of content on, or target for a particular page, is still one of the most important skills an SEO should master. However, the maturation of keyword tools has given us far more uses than this singular skill. Unlike tools of the past, we aren't limited to the standard process of "keyword in, keywords out." In this post, I hope to show how a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer can be used to accomplish far more than page-level keyword targeting, bringing keyword research out of the realm of mere keyword selection.

Know thyself: What can my site rank for?

The Greek philosopher Plato explained in Phaedrus that it would be silly to investigate things external to him without first knowing the truth about himself. This aphorism is especially true when we consider problems in keyword research where the results returned are only meaningful in the context of our own site. A keyword difficulty score of 60 is meaningless without knowing your current state (perhaps I own Amazon.com and will have no problem ranking for such a term, or perhaps I'm a new site and have no chance). Thus, I believe all keyword research should begin with this simple process of determining your website's current limits. We're going to use Keyword Explorer to identify the average keyword difficulty of keywords for which you already rank so you have a benchmark with which to test all future keywords.

Step 1: Exporting data from Google Search Console

I know some of you are already thinking — hey, Russ, didn't you just write an exposé on how this data in Google Search Console is unreliable? Well, yes, I did. So what? Sometimes you have to work with what you've got. In this case, Google Search Console actually happens to provide more than sufficient information for us to accomplish our goal. The first step is to order your Queries in Search Console by Clicks and choose to show Position as well.

Why GSC? Perhaps you want to use a SERP corpus like SEMRush, SpyFu, or AHrefs for this purpose. I would recommend against it in this case. Using actual clicks rather than estimated clicks can prevent keywords from showing up in your list for which you have a national presence but are actually rarely seen by users because the term generates a geographically influenced SERP.

Step 2: Export the data and filter for position 4 or better

The goal here is to limit ourselves only to keywords that are in a position to drive traffic. Since our data is already sorted by clicks, our most powerful and valuable keywords are at the top.

Pro tip: You might also choose to exclude branded keywords by filtering out your brand in the keyword column.

Step 3: Copy and paste keywords into a Keyword Explorer list

Head over to Moz Keyword Explorer and copy the keywords into a new list. You might want to name the list something like "Keyword Difficulty Average" to remember its purpose. Add your top 750 keywords and hit submit.

Step 4: Analyze the results

Now that your list is complete and Keyword Explorer has finished building your report, you have great data with which to work. You can look at the summary statistics to get an idea of the average keyword difficulty, but I prefer to use the charts. If you look at my example below, it seems like most of my keywords fall in the 21–40 range, and a handful in the 41–60, but there is a stark drop-off in the 61–80. If I imagine a curved line connecting the bars in the chart, I can see that it probably peaks somewhere around the 35–40 range, which is likely the highest I should regularly target for keywords.

Pro Tip: Export the results to Excel and use a histogram via the Data Analysis package to get an even better threshold.

Conclusion

Now that I have a strong understanding of what my site can rank for effectively, I can continue my keyword research in earnest. Keyword difficulty scores now have meaning to me that is relevant and useful — I know what I can and can't rank for. Of course, you can use this metric to help you with your regular keyword research from here on out (I would recommend you update this list with new keywords from GSC quarterly). But let's explore some other interesting uses of Keyword Explorer now that we know our average keyword difficulty.

How long-tail should I go?

One of the great things about keyword lists in Moz Keyword Explorer is the ability to compare a group of keywords, enabling you to make directory and site-wide decisions that are more far-reaching than standard page-by-page keyword discovery. In this first tutorial, I'm going to walk through a hypothetical situation where a website is trying to decide how far down the long-tail they should go in creating product categories.

Imagine for a moment that you have a website that sells apparel — in particular, you sell shirts. You sell both long-sleeve and short-sleeve, and for each of those you sell v-neck, crew-neck, and turtleneck. Finally, you offer 8 colors of each (red, blue, navy, green, orange, white, black, grey). So let's get started. We will consider those 3 different potential levels of site architecture (shirts, collar types, colors).

Step 1: Find the different potential depths

We're going to start by using a hugely useful tool: Keyword Mixer. We start by putting each one of those categories into one of the columns in Keyword Mixer. When we hit "combine," it will create a list of all the keyword combinations of these 3 potential categories.

Next, we do the same thing, but we put the colors into the 2nd column along side the collar types. This will give us a list like "long-sleeve shirt red" and "short-sleeve shirt turtleneck".

Finally, we make a single list of just all the categories, which will give us a list with keywords like "long-sleeve shirt" or "red" or "v-neck."

Step 2: Create separate keyword lists for each

Copy and paste each of the lists generated by Keyword Mixer into separate keyword lists. As you can see below in this example, I made 3 different lists.

Pro tip: Try changing the order of keywords, like putting the properties before the product type. For example, most people would search for Red Long-Sleeve Shirt, not Long-Sleeve Shirt Red. This will require that you create more lists, but you might find an even better potential architecture.

Step 3: Compare metrics

In the crude example above, the flatter architecture was the best, where we didn't use every possible combination of every type of product. Why? It turns out the long-tail keywords get almost no traffic and the keyword difficulty is just as high, if not higher. Of course, if you follow the pro tip above, you might find an even better combination. Using Keyword Mixer in combination with Keyword Explorer gives the the ability to predict which type of content architecture you should create for your eCommerce site. Finally, you can compare this to your average keyword difficulty measurement above to make sure you use a category depth that is achievable. Perhaps the "best" category option is not actually available to your site because it has too high an average keyword difficulty.

How should I organize my local pages?

One interesting problem presented to me when I was a consultant many years ago was a deceptively simple question: "Which should I use in my local results, zip codes or cities?" The company had an expansive service area and they were trying to decide between having all their local pages organized by zip or by city. At the time, I used an elaborate set of spreadsheets, scraped SERPs, and API calls to try do exactly what takes just minutes in Keyword Explorer. I'll walk you through the details.

Step 1: Build the keyword lists

We return to our good friend Keyword Mixer here. We start by entering in the cities for which we have coverage and the keywords we would like to target. We then repeat the same process but replace the cities with the zip codes.

Step 2: Copy and paste into new Keyword Explorer lists

Follow the normal procedures and copy and paste, waiting for Keyword Explorer to calculate all the important metrics.

Step 3: Compare metrics

Finally, we compare the metrics of the two groups of keywords. In this case, while there was similar keyword difficulty, there was slightly more traffic available when using the city rather than the zip code.

The best part about this methodology is you can answer the question with good data in a matter of minutes. In this example, I only used a couple of cities and a couple of keywords. This could be expanded out to dozens of cities or zip codes and hundreds of keywords, all to the same effect, in just the same amount of time.

A year's worth of content in a day: content calendars

This doesn't exactly take advantage of the list features dramatically, but it does make it easy for you to plan out content several months in advance. The earlier you get writing prompts into the hands of your authors, the more likely they can hit their deadlines. Let's walk through the steps of building content recommendations with Keyword Explorer.

Step 1: Finding related topics

Everyone pretty much knows their primary keywords. If you're an attorney, you know the word "attorney." If you're a landscaper you know the word landscaping. But how do you take that general term and identify topics that might be worth writing on? Well, Keyword Explorer does it better than anyone else (and I'm prepared to go to the mat defending that!)

Head on over to Keyword Explorer and drop in your primary keyword like "landscaping" and choose "closely related topics." Finally, sort by "Volume" rather than relevancy, since you're looking for generally related topics, not highly related terms.

Step 2: Select your topics

Just run through the list and try to pick out a handful of general topics. In this case, from the word "landscaping" we were able to select "gardens," "green roof," "gazebos," "water conservation," "pergolas," "rain garden," "hardscape," and "water garden." Notice that all these great topics showed up in just the top 20 options. We could easily find dozens more just by scrolling down the list.

Step 3: Find and group questions related to topics

Questions make for easy writing prompts, and questions that actually get traffic are even better! Copy and paste each keyword, one at a time, into Keyword Explorer. From the same filter drop-downs choose "Are Questions" and "Group by Medium Lexical Similarity." You can fool around with the lexical similarity metric to have tighter or looser groupings. If you use the word "pergola," as we did in the example below, you will find several questions that are directly related to the topic and, importantly, are representative of several terms. For example, the question "How to Build a Pergola over an Existing Patio" is actually representative of 9 terms, which means writing on this topic will give you a good chance to rank for several terms, rather than just one.

Step 4: Create a new list and start adding the questions you discover

This is the easy part. Just click the checkbox next to the questions and add them to your list. You should repeat this step with every topic you discover. In my case, I was able to come up with over 75 article ideas, each representing 3 or more related questions, in under 10 minutes.

Step 5: Collect and compare metrics

Always remember your original average keyword difficulty number. This is hugely valuable in scoping out your content calendar because you can easily exclude writing prompts that are too competitive. Click into your list in Keyword Explorer and sort by potential, remembering to ignore those with a keyword difficulty higher than your average keyword difficulty.

Pro tip: Group your keywords into topic-specific lists, so you can compare the keyword metrics at a topic level as well.

Use this list to prioritize out a steady schedule of content creation. Of course, a lot more goes into creating a content calendar than just finding content to write about, but I often find that brainstorming content is one of the more time-consuming projects.

Conclusions

Keyword tools aren't just for page-by-page keyword selection anymore. Smart features like lexical grouping, related topics, and list comparison allow you to accomplish far more than ever before, rather than just staring at a long list of phrase-match keywords. Taking the time to learn the features of these more-powerful-than-ever tools will mean greater efficiency and smarter decisions.

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Source: Moz Blog