Welcome to the long overdue second segment of my podcast series Talking with Industry Experts.

In this podcast I speak with Captain Todd Malicoat, Author of the Stuntdubl SEO Blog, Faculty SEO Chair at MarketMotive, and Fishing Charter Captain at Miami Fishing Charters.

Listen to Todd and I discuss his thoughts on Panda’s integration into Google’s normal algorithm, negative SEO, link building, and find out the one tip that Todd has for all SEO’s.

Nick: Hey, guys! I’m here with Todd Malicoat one of the first SEO’s that I ever started reading back in God, it had to be 2004-2005. He has been nice enough to give us a little bit of his time today and answer a couple of my questions that I sourced from a bunch of my readers.

This is the second edition of my SEO podcast, talking with experts and I hope you guys like it. So without further ado, we’ll get started.

How are you doing, Todd?

Todd: Fantastic.

Nick: Good to hear it, man.

The first question I’ve got coming at you has to do with Panda being integrated into Google’s normal algorithm. A couple of people, including myself are just really curious as to what the effects professionals and experts, people like yourself think that it’s going to have on just the overall search engine landscape?

Todd: Yeah, I think we’ve seen this with a lot of different types of algorithm updates in the past, really. Google’s just always given different names and have targeted different problems associated with relevance.

One of the big problems they were having with relevance was there was such a heavy emphasis and heavy importance placed on off-site equity and link equity that they needed something to balance that, and that kinda is what Panda was in my mind, is they had to take care of this big relevance issue.

And they did, through a series of iterations that’s now becoming part of the overall algorithm. Those iterations are so subtle that you don’t really notice them anymore. I think that’s happened in the past with lots of different changes.

This one, however, was obviously a huge one. That they did it so many times and that it was noticeable, so many times is a big thing. And really what came out of that as what I noticed most was having that audition period for almost any landing page and that overall score for any type of website.

So we saw between Panda and Penguin, two different issues that we’re solving that emphasis on too much offsite. But with Panda, it was just ranking garbage content on a quality domain, and so that’s always been an issue.

That’s starting to get solved and I think we’ve seen that the solution is working. If a site has 80% bounce rate, it’s no longer ranking for its term, number one, for a very long or more than a short time.

So with Panda overall, we see that you can’t rank a crappy landing page anymore. That’s what it solved. That’s what it’ll continue to solve. You have to be watching bounce rates and kind of those exit rates in your analytics, in order to solve that and be prepared for that. If you’re not doing that, you have to know that you’re not going to rank well.

Nick: I think that’s a fantastic point. Coming back to the piece you opened up with, more about the focus on off-page link equity. That leads me really well actually right into our next question, which is,

Have you ever seen or experienced negative SEO firsthand?

Todd: I’ve seen some examples, more so I think of hacking. Negative SEO is kind of an all-encompassing term, for anything negative that happens to your site that you really don’t have control over it.

Nick: Very good point.

Todd: The most malicious of this was once called Google bowling, pointing a bunch of blog spam links at a site to tank it. I have seen it happen in competitive verticals.

I’ve seen some examples. I’ve never really played in verticals competitive enough where it was an issue. Personally to me, I have had sites hacked where there was malware installed, and that impacted the rankings which is similar in ways, but not quite what I deemed the Google bowling, I suppose.

So it does exist to a certain point. You know I think Google finally admitted there’s an issue with that, by releasing the disavow tool.

But overall, unless you’re really in that competitive vertical, it’s not a huge issue, and if you are in those verticals, you’re kind of a little bit more prepared for it, and understand that SEO in those spaces is a little bit different.

Nick: I think those are all really good points. I think the most interesting thing in my experience is probably on the flip side of negative SEO, which is people who aren’t trying to do it to have a negative impact on their competitors’ sites from people who are using lots of just crappy spam and drip links, Xrumer, and all that good stuff to get their stuff to rank.

And probably, I think what’s amazing to me is the amount of proliferation I’ve seen, with those types of very spam-heavy link-building packets in, like the payday loan SERPs specifically, which I think and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s probably one of the more volatile SERPs within search.

Todd: Yeah, those payday loan guys have been aggressive with it for quite some time and it’s an interesting space to watch. I think even things like Viagra are a little less competitive now, because they’re a little bit more regulated. Payday loans really have been sort of the Wild West kind of industries.

It’s interesting to watch those search results sometimes. You have to probably have a high-level of security on your computer, and not allow any malware or Adware of any sort to be installed.

But they’re interesting to watch, because there’s a little bit different space and it fluctuates a lot, by watching those results change you can kind of get a feel for what’s going on sometimes, some of the things that Google’s trying to prevent in competitive industries or other industries by watching those most important ones.

Nick: That’s a very cool idea. This is actually a perfect segue into my third question which is:

In your opinion, what would you consider to be one fail- safe link-building strategy that still works in 2013?

Todd: I think the one that people can agree on is guest posting to a certain extent. Guest posting absolutely works. It’s kind of the foundation for content marketing in a lot of ways, which is kind of, I don’t know if it’s making a resurgence or what.

In my mind it will always be link development and content building, and they’re kind of married together.

But the idea of content marketing without link development, I suppose is kind of being brought back. That’s creating something and sharing it, having a linkable asset, that asset can be content. That asset can be a widget. That asset can be a tool. That asset can be software, a PDF, whatever it is.

But you have to have something to be offering. You can’t just go out and kind of rob people for links anymore, hold your email gun up and say, “Give me a link,” or can I have a link. It just doesn’t work. Even in the past, people were sending thousands of emails and getting 1.0% response rate.

Even at that level, those have gone down. That was really never my approach, but I think people did that in the past and webmasters fell for it, and now those same webmasters are upset about it, and they’re never going to fall for it again.

So you have to have something to offer, you have to have something that’s safer, and there’s that validation later now with social to say this is a real person, send me a real request, not a pseudonym made-up person sending a request, for a payday loan site that won’t exist three days from now.

Nick: Yep, I absolutely agree. Beyond links what are some of the strategies that you’re using to help your websites, and your clients gain just more visibility overall in the SERPs?

Todd: I was needed there for a second. Can you ask that one again?

Nick: Sure.

Beyond links what are some of the strategies that you’re using to help gain more visibility for your websites within the SERPs?

Todd: I think it’s a combination of social as an outreach platform, and content as the asset, so it really has to be all kinds of cylinders on the engines firing at once.

Being you have a good content creation process, you have a good outreach process, and then you’re following up with social media, and you’re doing it consistently. So that’s overall the best strategy. I think we’re seeing more of that importance going towards authorship and towards personal authority, so I think that’s important.

For my sites personally, I’m just actually getting ready to launch a big project. I’m doing a FishingCharters.com. For that one, it’ll be me writing articles about fishing.

I kind of went back to basics, with what would work for SEO and it’s not kind of the mass outreach anymore. It’s just not going to be effective, so the stuff that works for rankings is being genuine, is creating something, is doing something that people want to read and participate in.

So that’s community, that’s linkable assets. That’s the things that the web was founded on, and Google is doing a good job of making sure that’s the things that you find, instead of the things you don’t want to find when you click the back button. That’s what Panda is and that’s what Penguin is and that’s what they’re continuing to do.

SEO’s have a problem with some of the decisions Google makes sometimes, but I think relevance as a whole by the general user is always well-received.

Nick: I think you’re absolutely right there, so sort of a fun question to close out the podcast with.

If there were some magical loudspeaker that was tuned to every SEO on planet Earth, and you could tell every SEO just one thing, what would it be?

Todd: Probably stay humble. What works today isn’t going to work tomorrow. The idea of optimization as a whole is kind of staying on the forefront of what works. And it’s disappointing for me to see five years later people selling directory submission packages.

After there are only four or five directories that work; or selling reciprocal link packages, or selling page ranks, three links, thousands of them for two dollars; all that sort of thing.

Most of it never worked for long and to see people still sell it is disappointing to me as a whole. I think some of those things get passed down as information, and then it becomes old information and then year’s later it’s rancid, stagnant information. And even the people that are on the forefront, even the people that are really actively creating sites, and doing things innovating, even those folks get caught up in a rut sometimes, I think.

So to truly be optimal, you’ve got to always be learning, always be reading, and certainly stay humble, because you never know when the next Zune animal is going come along.

Nick: I think that’s a fantastic piece of advice. Okay, man thank you so much for taking some time to answer some of my questions, and really, really happy and excited to have you on here.

Todd: My pleasure. Thanks, man.

Nick: All right, man. Take care, Todd.

The post Talking SEO – Interview with Todd Malicoat appeared first on SEO Nick.

Curating links for my weekly newsletter has built up a rather large collection of useful content.

Reading back over some of the posts that have been shared, I realized many of the links are not as main stream as I believe they should be. So I poured through what has become a library of links and selected the most useful, evergreen pieces.

I sincerely recommend reading everything on this list, and it’s a long one, so take it a section at a time – and bookmark it for later.

I promise you will come out a better marketer if you make it all the way through.

My Evergreen Content Criteria

Most evergreen content isn’t really evergreen, at least not in our technology-related vertical.

In dynamic verticals that change on an almost daily basis (search, social, design, ad tech, etc.) it’s difficult for content to stay perpetually useful, unless it is maintained and cared for.  Sometimes big changes can make an entire marketing channel obsolete overnight.

So for this list I will be using my own, slightly modified, definition of evergreen content.

Here is the criteria for the content I have included on this list:

• Provides relevant information or a perspective that will remain useful for a minimum of 2 years.
• Comprehensively covers a topic or process that is unlikely to change.
• Aggregates disparate information to be more accessible to a larger audience.

Evergreen Content Categories

Click on any of the buttons below to jump ahead to a specific section.

In The True Spirit of Evergreen Content

This post is going to remain a living document, so please share your favorite evergreen content link in the comments below so I can add them. Thanks!

The post An Evergreen Content Forest of Digital Marketing Resources appeared first on SEO Nick.

I really enjoy doing keyword research for SEO.

It is the one search-related process that I bring up in conversation with almost every website owner I meet, and I’m constantly impressed with the different tactics and techniques that business owners are using to expand their online visibility.

I like keyword-level strategy so much that I am going to give one away, for free!

One lucky winner will receive a keyword strategy complete with:

• Keyword Analysis of Existing Traffic
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Opportunity Model

Disclaimer

By entering the giveaway you agree to the following terms:

• You are willing to share your average costs when it comes to developing content
• You are willing to share some of your employees average hourly rates, whether contractors or Full-Time Employee’s
• You are OK with your keyword opportunity model being public on SEONick.net

All existing traffic analysis and keyword research will be kept CONFIDENTIAL, however, I will be recording my screen as I build out the winning keyword opportunity model and plan to host the video within a post on this website.

How To Enter

• Sign in with your Facebook or Email address below
• You will be given the opportunity to earn more entries, this is optional and you can skip these using the ‘skip’ link in the bottom right hand corner
• When the giveaway is over 1 winner will be chosen and all entrants will be notified
• Good luck!

The post SEO Giveaway: Enter To Win A FREE Keyword Strategy appeared first on SEO Nick.

When it comes to business – SEO is a unique monster, because unlike most vertical markets, you don’t need products, vendor relationships, distribution channels, or even start up capital.

But without the right strategy, leveraging search for business can feel a lot like trying to capture lightning in a bottle.

In this post I am going to step through creating a keyword opportunity model to project estimated revenue from SEO.

I am going to do this 2-fold:

1. With an simplified model to help develop the initial concept, and then
2. With a detailed, assumption-based model as an example

This approach is meant to help you weigh different keyword opportunities and uncover where your SEO priorities should be focused. Make sure you use this in conjunction with SEO competitive analysis and are leveraging on-page optimization for your target URL’s.

The Simple Keyword Opportunity Model

The simple model is meant to get you thinking about the implications of cost versus revenue in terms of return on SEO.

For revenue I will be using the following formula, where monthly search volume is representative of [exact] searches from Google’s keyword tool.

Conversion value will vary depending on the goal of your SEO campaign, for example; E-commerce sites could use average order value where lead generation sites might use their average lead value, in any case make sure you use an actual dollar amount.

The value of a keyword is pretty subjective based on your conversions, and therefore you need to utilize goal-specific conversion rates to customize this formula to fit your business.

For average SERP click-through I prefer to use an aggregate measure to project returns from larger scenarios, for example if I designed a model to target page 1 of Google I would use a 6.1% click-through rate, but if the model was specifically focused on top 5 rankings I would use 12.1%. These are just my starting point figures.

If you want to use more approximate measures of average click-through for exact rankings, a very helpful case study from Slingshot SEO on SERP CTR produced this lovely graph (click to enlarge).

Slingshot dives into the details of their study here on SEOmoz, and very recently Geoff Kenyon posted his thoughts on SERP click through rates, so you have some starter data.

18% lines up much closer to my historical SERP performance data than the previously reported data from Optify, which posited a potential of a 36.5% CTR for position #1.

Using just the four metrics from the simplified model, I have created a Google Spreadsheet that  you can access below.

Important Note; once in the document click File > Make a Copy so you can edit the file and add your own data.

View Example Google Spreadsheet

Within the spreadsheet you will see there are 2 sheets; Simple and Advanced, and all values that drive the model are highlighted in yellow.

Use the simple model to get a basic sense of how things work; how different values for different metrics will impact your total monthly revenue, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments and get creative.

Try inputting the lifetime value of a customer to forecast far into the future or bake in a measure for time on site and how certain thresholds may lead to higher variable conversion rates. If your goal is to drive newsletter signups, measure it; think outside the box! Then share what you did.

For cost assumptions I’m going to use average costs associated with developing one URL targeting one primary keyword. In this scenario I’m assuming the website already has a baseline of steady traffic, but not much, say 5,000 visits per month or so. This is important to note because it reduces the need for additional link building or paid advertising promotion for posts to gain enough rank signals to make it to page one.

For this model, the costs associated with content  development are:

Research
This represents the average cost to do post-level keyword research and compile a matrix for the URL.

Writing
This represents the actual ideation and writing of all of the content for the URL.

Production
This is representative of the editing and actual production of the content; final proofreading, formatting images, and loading into the content management system for publication.

Adjusting For Competitiveness

A critical part of any good business model is adjusting for relative competition.

I use a relative measure of keyword difficulty to do this, either average domain authority or competitiveness index, but you could just as easily use keyword difficulty score.

In the simple model I call it ‘Average SERP CI,’ but it doesn’t have to be, feel free to throw average SERP DA in there and everything will still work, just make sure you keep your metrics consistent between column G and the competitive weightings in H2 and H3 (click to enlarge).

About Those Competitive Weightings

Cell H2: Cost Multiplier – The cost multiplier is pretty much exactly what it sounds like; it multiplies your cost based on the competitiveness threshold you set.

This represents how much more expensive it is for you to create content that can compete for a first page ranking based on your website’s relative authority. If your website has a DA of 60, it is going to be easier for you to compete in SERP’s where the average is only 50 versus 70.

Cell H3: CI Threshold – This is the authority or competitiveness threshold where it becomes more expensive for you to compete.

This threshold should be relatively close to your website’s authority score, so if you have a DA of 40, you might want to set this at 50.

PLEASE NOTE: As is the case with this model in general, both of these measures that drive the cost side of this evaluation are extremely subjective. You will need to dial them in over time, so start conservatively and try to glean data from your website so these are as accurate as possible.

Let’s Build A Test Case

For this example I am going to use an SEO vertical market and focus on a set of closely related keywords both in terms of semantic relevance and related user intent.

Just for fun I’m including tools, services, and consultant queries (click to enlarge).

If you haven’t already opened the spreadsheet, do that now ›

You will see that I have loaded all of the above keyword data into the model and plugged in some test conversion data.

I created a column titled (Optional) where you can enter in a specific SERP rank between 1 and 5 and it will adjust the potential visitors based on the CTR values entered in F2 through F6, currently it’s configured with the CTR data from the Slingshot SEO case study.

To make this applicable to your website:

1. Replace the SEO keywords with your keywords and their estimated [exact] monthly search volume
2. Enter your average costs (or total cost into D6) for creating a new URL

In case you’re not sure what your costs are, here’s an approach to estimate them:

Estimating Your Development Costs

Everyone’s costs are different and some are not straightforward.

Do your best to average out what it costs to produce a piece of content from start to finish, and try not to leave out any piece of the development life-cycle.

For example, a company’s content development process might look like this:

Try to boil down all of your costs to an hourly rate and then average them across each functional department, so you end up with a representative cost for each piece of your process.

However your process works, try to capture all of the costs. If all of your resources are salary, figure out what their hourly rate is and estimate their average production time for all of their tasks on one piece of content.

Once you have a handle on the costs, input them into the model in D3 through D5, or place your total cost into D6.

Estimating Your Revenue

Revenue is going to be a bit easier to estimate, especially if you already have analytics or tracking in place and you know exactly how much you make per visitor or per conversion.

The model is setup to take care of estimating how many visitors you can acquire each month and your revenue per conversion, all you need to provide is your:

• Average conversion rate, and
• Average conversion value

Input these into cells B4 and B5, respectively.

The Advanced Keyword Opportunity Model

Hopefully by now you’ve taken some time to test out the simple model within the spreadsheet. Now it’s time to drill down into more specific costs, adjusting for a wider range of variables based on more specific heuristics.

In the simple model we used a base cost and a multiplier, for the advanced model we will still assume a base cost, adding in an average cost per link and discount rates based on some additional competitive factors.

The competitive factors we will use to augment costs in the advanced model are:

• Domain Authority (DA), and
• Page Authority (PA)

To take into account both the logarithmic nature of DA and PA I will be using discount rates for each of these metrics, to compute an estimated net present value to be used as our multiplier.

Baseline Assumptions

First it is important to understand a little bit about the discount rates.

The purpose is to allow for the model to be adjusted for volatility and the specific nuances of your website(s).

The best way to get started is to set a conservative cost multiplier (higher versus lower) for both DA and PA and then dial in discount rates to help represent variable ranking factors such as temporal ranking factors, query deserves freshness, or even brand bias.

Newer, less established websites can outrank their older, higher authority competitors – the SERP’s are different on an almost case by case basis.

As your website authority grows, your link profile gains velocity, and builds trust – you should be able to adjust the discount rates downward to reflect less cost to reach page 1.

I have ranked pages with a DA/PA of 50% less than the SERP average, sometimes with only a few links and within a few short days or weeks. This type of volatility is not predictable, but that’s the not the end-goal here.

The reason you are making assumptions and dialing in ranking variables is to develop a measure within an ‘order of magnitude‘ so you can begin to project cost and performance return from SEO.

Adjusting Metrics to Capture Cost

Now that you have your average cost per URL, you need to figure out the adjustments for the model based on  additional external factors and work these into your discount rates.

Average cost per link is a tough one, so my recommendation for the purposes of this model is to use a minimum DA threshold of 30, i.e. link cost is representative of a link from a website with DA 30+.

Discount rates are going to take you the most time to develop, where as your threshold and multiplier you should be able to figure out in a few weeks.

If you would like help getting started, I will be sending out some example discount rates to my subscribers – so if you haven’t already, take a moment and sign up for updates »

Measuring Potential Return – Evaluating Based on MER

MER stands for mean efficiency ratio, and is the metric I use to evaluate keyword opportunities.

It is a simple computation done by dividing total revenue by total cost, which provides you an at a glance metric for gauging profitability. An MER of 1.0 means that you broke even and made 100% of your initial investment back – so anything greater than 1.0 is gravy profit.

If you’re tracking all of your costs and revenue at the keyword level, this is a great simple metric for measuring ROI. I have set up some simple conditional formatting within the spreadsheet so positive MER cells render green.

Adjusting Based on Actual Performance

Your SEO business model is only as good as the data it is built on, so if you want it to be usable, it needs to be accurate. Set aside time to update and refine your model to be as accurate and representative of your business as possible.

Treat it honestly and with respect; if your costs go up, change them. If you find that your carry costs for getting to page 1 are higher, increase your discount rates.

In Conclusion

This is by no means a perfect system or evaluation platform. It is, however, a lesser discussed element of SEO and keyword evaluation that I would like to discuss.

What are your thoughts?

The post SEO Strategy For Business – How To Build A Keyword Opportunity Model appeared first on SEO Nick.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Paddy Moogan published a book on link building.

It’s really good.

Paddy was nice enough to send me an advanced copy to check out, and I was so impressed with how thorough, well laid out, and well explained the content in the book was, I decided to write this post.

To get a sense of what’s covered in the 65,000 words I recommend checking out the table of contents.

I also got a chance to ask Paddy a few questions on the book , and here they are:

What Can a Seasoned Link Building Veteran Hope to Take Away From This Book?

Paddy Moogan

I think that I’ve been pretty open about my own approach to link building both in the full process that I outline and the case studies.

I would like to feel that a seasoned link builder would appreciate a potentially different approach or perspective to the link building process and would perhaps try some of my ideas  and techniques themselves.

I feel like I’m an experienced link builder but I learn a lot from getting inside the mind of other SEO’s to see how they work, and I hope I’ve managed to do this with my own writing and openness.

There is also a lot of information about the next steps of link building such as hiring a team, keeping them motivated and outsourcing link building. I’ve even talked at a high level about effecting change in organisations through link building which I feel adds a lot of value for SEO’s who already know a lot of the basic and  intermediate stuff.

In the book you provide a handful of real case studies from your personal experiences with some fantastic real-world examples – what motivated you to share so much actual information?

Paddy Moogan

People always ask for them

This is the one area where (understandably) SEO’s do not share as much information, in fact I struggled myself because it is quite tricky to write a case study that is useful but doesn’t give away too much that could harm the client behind it.

Feedback so far indicates that this was actually the favorite section for a lot of readers so I may try to see if I can expand it in the next edition.

I also understand the frustration of people trying to learn because as much as theory, techniques and tactics help, it isn’t quite the same as seeing it in action.

You provide a set of questions for SEO’s to ask both their client’s and themselves prior to jumping into a link building campaign.

Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with these questions, and how you have used them personally to help guide your campaigns?

Paddy Moogan

These questions were heavily influenced from my time at Distilled and in the last few months working on my own projects.

I once attended some training at Distilled that sought to teach us about decision trees and how a series of good questions could lead you to the right answer.

This has always stuck with me, particularly with link building where it can be quite easy to spend lots of time on it and not get much in return. Asking hard questions of yourself and the client can at least mitigate some of this risk and help make you more likely to succeed.

Check out The Link Building Book

The post Interview with Link Building Book Author Paddy Moogan appeared first on SEO Nick.

Keyword research is quite possibly the most important part of SEO.

You cannot begin to plan for a campaign unless you know which phrases you are targeting, and you cannot estimate costs and returns from SEO unless you first know who you’re competing against.

This post is pretty long and I will be keeping it up to date, so I have created a table of contents to make it easier to jump ahead to a specific section.

• 2 Schools of Thought
• The Value Of A Keyword
• Researching For Searcher Intent
• Time To Do The Research
• Validate The Big Opportunities
• Create A Keyword Evaluation Model
• Closing The Loop

Getting Started

The goal of this post is to approach keyword research for SEO from it’s roots and build toward the more technical aspects.

Keyword research is the practice of identifying which phrases are used on search engines when people are looking for information, and usually includes finding both the search volume and relative competitiveness of the terms.

Keyword research is a critical component for search engine optimization because when used correctly it provides a road map for both the design and execution of building websites and developing content.

Keywords are usually broken up and grouped based on the number of words within the query phrases. The more words in a keyword phrase usually the easier it is to rank for the term, since usually there is less relative competition.

The reason for all the “usually’s” is that this not absolute, as is the case with most things, there are exceptions…

Here is an example of how keyword difficulty relative to long tail keywords versus head and body keywords usually works:

And here is an example where both the body and the long tail keywords are equally as competitive:

And here is the exception, where a long tail keyword is actually more difficult than the body:

The keyword difficulty data above was gathered using SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool on 1/5/13.

It’s worth mentioning that in my experience, this really only ever happens with queries that contain  brand names, 9 out of 10 long tail terms are going to be less difficult to rank for than their body and head counterparts.

2 Schools of Thought

In my opinion, SEO tends to focus on one of two areas;

1. Optimizing for traffic, or
2. Optimizing for conversion

Most SEO’s (and dare i say internet marketers) fall victim to optimizing too heavily for traffic, and not conversion.

It’s not necessarily bad to optimize for traffic, it depends on your goals; if you’re in e-commerce or a service based business it is more valuable to invest your resources in making sure you rank well for the terms that are most likely to lead to a sale; optimize for conversion, not just to gain the visitor.

Where as if you are in the advertising or publishing business, where your revenues are directly correlated to the number of visitors and pageviews, or in other words the volume of eyeballs, then optimizing for traffic is going to be a better strategy.

Like any good SEO campaign, your optimization strategy should be dictated by your campaign goals. If your top level goals are straight-forward, such as increase revenue, then decide which optimization path is going to be the most effective based on your business:

1. Does more traffic directly imply more revenue?
2. Or do you need to make sure you are acquiring more traffic for specific conversion-focused keywords?

The Value of a Keyword

Within these two school’s of thought a keyword’s value is based on either:

1. The monthly search volume relative to the level of competition, or
2. The revenue acquisition potential (or conversion rate)

Finding the relative monthly search volume can be done very easily using Google’s keyword tool, but this doesn’t give you any visibility into the competitive landscape for organic results, as the competitive index metrics displayed are for AdWords™.

You need to take into consideration the  authority of the websites that are already ranking for these keywords, and get a sense of the competitiveness of that particular organic SERP.

There are a few key signals I look at when doing a 30 second synopsis of a SERP, and my favorite tool to get an on the fly sense of relative competition is the Mozbar extension for chrome, which gives you some at-a-glance SEO data at the URL level conveniently right in the SERP interface.

For a more comprehensive macro analysis of an organic SERP, I’m really liking SerpIQ, shown below:

SEOmoz has a version of this called their keyword rank report, as pictured below for the keyword parking blocks:

But this doesn’t take a look at the SERP as a whole… it doesn’t provide me with quick insight into what it is going to take to compete with these 10 URL’s and get  on page 1, at least not without some more in-depth analysis.

To get a good sense of the competition at the aggregate organic SERP level, I prefer to use SerpIQ.

SerpIQ offers a snapshot of the average Competitiveness Index (CI):

An estimate of the search intent of the query:

A quick overview of the SERP including the breakdown of the competitiveness and both the on-page and off-page use metrics for the keyword (click to enlarge):

The highest, lowest, and average CI of the SERP (click to enlarge):

The highest, lowest, and average PageRank of the SERP (click to enlarge):

The highest, lowest, and average number of backlinks (click to enlarge):

And finally the oldest, youngest, and average domain age of each result (click to enlarge):

So as you can see, this offers me an at-a-glance snapshot of the both the upper and lower maximum’s in terms of overall SERP competition.

The keyword opportunity model I talk about in my SEO competitive analysis post explains the idea of taking a macro approach to dissecting SERP’s at the keyword level, which in my opinion, is necessary for enterprise SEO and growing websites to over 100,000 visitors per month.

The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites (and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification.

Researching for Searcher Intent

When optimizing for conversion, it is critical to gain some perspective into the psychographics of your target audience, and also understand the most common segments of search intent. While all 4 of the most common segments offer opportunities for conversion, only 2 are of truly high value and worth targeting; commercial investigation and transactional queries.

The best way to get a handle on all this data is to group and categorize your keywords to look at the potential stage of the conversion funnel the searcher is within. By segmenting your keywords into funnels you can begin to paint a picture with your data that allows you to disseminate search intent.

Taking this even a step further, you can begin to understand keywords as they relate to search context. Where even something as simple as word order can play a crucial role when defining the meaning behind the query and ensuring you are selecting the right keywords to target.

Time to Do The Research

You can’t build the right house without the right tools, and search engine driven websites are no different.

The good news is at this point in time SEO has been around long enough that there is a whole slew of great tools you can use to assist you with your research efforts.

Tools run the gamut in functionality from pulling search volume, to providing related suggestions, to competition in AdWords, and many other helpful bits of information.

Here are some of my favorite tools:

Call me traditional, but for getting search volume (and pretty much only search volume) I still use Google’s keyword tool.

Tip: to get a realistic sense of the average monthly search volume make sure you set the matching criteria to [exact], look for the box below in the left hand side of the tool:

The output from Google’s keyword tool will look something like this (click to enlarge):

showing you the average monthly search volume, both globally and locally. It is important to know that the term local here can be a bit confusing as it is representative of the local country index, so local in this case means United States not Philadelphia (my actual local area).

This gives you just enough data to get started building your keyword prospect list, but to really make this comprehensive (and I recommend the shotgun approach when doing keyword research – starting with a large population of targets and narrowing it down based on specifics) you need to leverage a few other tools.

The first of which is good ‘ol Excel. Use the download button in the upper left corner of Google’s keyword tool to export your list (and Google’s related suggestions) into a CSV for Excel file.

Next, take your top-level target keyword phrase and throw it into a tool like übersuggest.

Übersuggest is a Google suggestion keyword scraper, which goes out and does the tedious work of running your keyword phrases along with every letter of the alphabet from A to Z, capturing the most frequently searched permutations.

Ubersuggest essentially takes your root phrase, for the purposes of this example I’m using keyword research, and then scrapes all of Google’s suggested results, so instead of just this:

you get this (click to enlarge):

This is really helpful because it captures all of the potential permutations related to your target keyword based on actual search behavior.

You can now drill down into phrases and select the child keywords to be added to a list. Then click the ‘get’ button to generate a modal window that allows for you to copy and paste.

Paste your selected related keyword back into the google keyword tool and rerun for more keyword data goodness.

Tip: I’ve found that the Google keyword tool provides more suggested keywords when you put in less than 10 keywords at a time.

Wordtracker also has a keyword suggestion tool although to really get any of the juice out of it you need to sign-up for a paid plan :/

There are also a variety of tools that provide keyword usage and competitiveness between both paid and organic search – some of which are pretty good.

SEMrush - Gives you fantastic insight into search volume, average cost per click, number of competing pages, related keywords, rank results, and even companies currently buying ad space (click to enlarge).

SpyFu – Provides search volume, number of clicks per day and their average daily cost, the actual number of advertisers currently bidding on the keyword and the actual AdWord ads that are running (click to enlarge).

Keyword Spy - Is one of my favorites for getting a quick sense of the landscape. It very quickly (through use of tabs) gives you access to data on PPC ads, related keyword phrases, your paid and organic competitors, and my favorite; misspellings!

Did you know that keyword reserach has an estimated 110,000 searches per month! See a screenshot of the dashboard below (click to enlarge).

Validate The Big Opportunities

Once you have a good list going in Excel it’s important to gain visibility into your big opportunities, or as my team has come to talk call them; your golden tickets.

First you will want to get a sense of seasonal volatility by running your top queries through Google Trends (click to enlarge):

Pay attention to the average index of interest over time, since it can be a bit confusing; 100 here represents the highest search volume there has ever been, it is not the integer for number of searches. So what you are looking for is that the current interest has not fallen off completely, looking at the graph it seems the current search volume for keyword research is down about 50% from what it was in August 2010.

Next you use a bit of a 3rd party litmus test to see how popular a topic really is, and a safe bet here is to use the worlds most popular encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Domas Mituzas has built a statistical engine that tracks Wikipedia’s pageviews.

And looking at it over the past 90 days we can see that the term has been viewed 7,554 times (hat tip to Glen Allsopp for sharing this). Click to enlarge.

Create Keyword Evaluation Model

Evaluating keywords for relative opportunities is still very tough.

Without massive stores of data and detailed insights into the competitive landscape it is easy to throw a  lot of time and money at targeting keywords that will never deliver a stable return.

In order to avoid this and instead focus only where there is rank to be had and money to be made, I believe it’s best to use an evaluation method.

There are a number of methodologies ranging from complex formulas including many different heuristics to more simplified models designed just to give you a sense of the opportunity.

I have developed a simple keyword opportunity model to help with this process, but for this post I am going to use a  simplified version.

This is meant to be more of a barometer than anything else and this data should not be used to make a business case, but more so just to give you a sense of opportunity.

I’m going to use keyword competitiveness scoring from SerpIQ, but you could also do this with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty score or something similar.

Scoring the opportunities takes some simple math. So for this version we are going to discount monthly search volume by multiplying is against the inverse discount rate of the competitive scores (1 minus the competitiveness index percentage).

For this example I’m going to stick with our root phrase, keyword research, and use 2 other closely related variations:

Using our quick and dirty evaluation model of (exact monthly search volume x (1 – CI%) we get:

keyword research opportunity score (4,400 x (1-.68)) = 1,408

keyword research tools opportunity score (720 x (1-.65)) = 252

keyword research software opportunity score (480 x (1-.56)) = 211.2

Showing (quickly remember) that even though keyword research is significantly harder in terms of competition, it is still the clear winner in terms of keywords to target for search traffic.

This is useful because it takes into account the opportunities as related to monthly search volume and then discounts the traffic potential based on the average competition.

Closing the Loop

Part of doing successful keyword research is setting time aside each month to analyze what’s working, and adjust your content and link strategies accordingly.

Where are you seeing the fastest movement in the SERP’s?

Are some terms moving between the top 10/30/50 positions faster than others?

Which keywords are the fastest to page 1? Fastest to the top 5?

Ask yourself these questions and please share your thoughts with me in the comments below – let me know your hypotheses or better yet your actual data; share your research and tell me what worked and what didn’t, I would love to chat with you.

Once you have completed all of your research, it’s time to move onto the next step and build your keyword opportunity model »

The post How To Do Keyword Research For SEO appeared first on SEO Nick.

This is the first part of what will become a series of interviews with experts in the field of content strategy.

In this segment I speak with Kristina Halvorson, Author of Content Strategy for the Web, CEO at Brain Traffic, and Founder of the Confab Content Strategy Conference.

Listen to Kristina and I discuss her inspiration for the book, some of her favorite content on the web, and why the notion of ‘is long-form content better’ makes her cringe.

Can’t Listen? Read the Full Interview Below

Nick: Hello, guys. Nick Eubanks here. This is my first-ever podcast on SEO Nick, so I hope you like it.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Kristina Halvorson, the author of ‘Content Strategy for the Web’, CEO of Brain Traffic, and founder of the ConFab Content Strategy Conference. How are you doing today, Kristina?

Kristina: I am great, how are you?

Nick: I am very good, thank you. I know you have exploded onto the scene,although I know you have been doing this for many years, and you have a background in marketing software. You are at the forefront of the whole concept of content strategy, so I thought it would be really cool for some of my readers, and just some of the people within the industry, to hear some of your thoughts on what I would consider to be some of the less-asked questions in the realm of content strategy and content marketing.

Kristina: Excellent.

Nick: Awesome. I guess we will just get started. The first question is:

What was your single biggest inspiration for writing ‘Content Strategy for the Web’?

Kristina: My single biggest inspiration was probably frustration and rage.

I was a web copywriter for many years, and I got very frustrated, because I was being called in at the last minute for all of these really large web projects. None of the documentation would be ready for me. There would be a ton of source content that was missing, there were a lot of assumptions about content that clients would be creating. Oftentimes, I was handed a list of SEO requirements that I did not know what to do with because they did not necessarily serve the audience needs and the page.

I just ended up backing into content strategy, which I often refer to as just asking the right questions about content early enough in the process. No one was talking about it; there were not any other books out there really addressing it. I figured that there were other people that were out there talking about it, so I went and tracked those people down, got a lot of their insights, and wove them together in this little red book, and that is the story.

Nick: It is crazy to think that this was not just commonplace, as far as the industry goes, at some point in time. It is also crazy to think that TVs were black and white, because now they are sheets of paper. It just seems to crazy at the end of 2012 to consider a time when content strategy was not just the focus of most marketing efforts, especially in the digital space.

Kristina: It was recent. When I went searching, my colleagues make fun of me because I love telling this story, but when I went searching for information about content strategy online, there was nothing. Google turned up 8,000 results, and most of it was not related to the information I was looking for. That was early 2008. I think that once people figured out that there was a name for this, that this is a huge missing link in online marketing, in online user experience, and how we were crafting that, it was just the time was right.

Nick: That makes perfect sense.

Coming from a background in software marketing, what drove you to take, and this is a repeat of the last question, but what really drove you to take the interest?

I guess you just saw a need and you said, ‘Nobody else is doing this. I have to do something about this’?

Kristina: That was a lot earlier in my career. I was doing marketing and public relations for a software company here in Minneapolis, and it was just a small company. Even the small changes that I was able to make to the copy on their website, the way that I was telling the story to the media and PR folks, it was just really striking to me how shaping that story online was so effective, with regard to how people were responding to and talking about the software.

That was really inspirational to me, just seeing that it is not necessarily all about the features that you design, it is not necessarily about bombarding people with all the benefits, it is about really beginning to inspire this conversation, or inspire interest and trust versus just this push of information. That was where I really became interested, I guess, in storytelling online, and the opportunities there, where you have multiple audiences that you can be reaching out to from a single platform.

Nick: I think that makes a lot of sense. A question that I think everyone is very curious to find out the answer to.

What would you say is some of your favorite content that is out there, and what makes it stand out to you, personally?

Kristina: I think that the easiest way to respond to that question is, I would say; what are the websites that I depend on? What are the ones that I have a really good experience with that I go back to over and over? I do a lot of shopping online. There have been a couple of companies that have earned my business simply by remaining very consistent and respectful in their communications, giving me choices about how I interact with their site, how often they email me, and so on.

I think an example that is brought up so often is Zappos I think that there is something to that. They have invested a lot in content. If you are buying shoes, many of those pairs of shoes will have a little 30-second video that they took time to record, and it is just one of the employees talking about, ‘Check out this shoe; how awesome this shoe is.’ Spending those 30 seconds is such an easy way to draw me in and begin that sales conversation with me. I really appreciate the voice and tone of their emails, and how consistent that is across the site.

I think that from a media standpoint, a publication I have really been enjoying is called ‘The Week’. I like that publication because they are essentially curating news content, but with a real editorial point of view. They are not just aggregating it; there are people going out there, reading about these different topics, making editorial decisions; with regard to what the most important things that people need to be aware of on the frontiers of politics, the arts, or entertainment? and delivering that information in a way that is really easy for me to read and useful to me. I am really enjoying that website a lot, as well.

Nick: That is a really good example, and that cracks open a whole other realm of curation, with the deluge of content that is being produced now. Something like 60 hours of new audio and video content is being produced every couple of minutes now. With just this massive amount of content, having somebody to distill down what is really important, what is really going to make sense, and impact your life is probably increasing in importance at an exponential rate, I would imagine.

Kristina: I think, too, what is critical about that, and the only way that it is going to be effective, is if you really know and understand your audience. I cannot tell you how many clients will come in and sit down, and these are clients who are passionate about their product or their service, and they are Fortune 500 companies who are successful for a reason. They all really want to do the right thing, but we will start asking them, and they will say, ‘Our audiences are like this, and our customers are like this.’ We will say, ‘Great, OK. How do you know that?’ It will turn out that the majority of the information that they have been acting upon is assumption, opinion, or based on research that was done 18 months ago, which frankly, even research that was done 6 months ago is probably no longer relevant.

You have to understand your audience in order to be able to, even if you are just talking about curating, deliver things in a way, in a format, and on a timeline that is going to be useful to them. For example, ‘The Week’ is perfect for me, because I get a Tweet once a day that says, ‘Here are the top ten things that you need to know today.’ Now I can click over, I can skim those top ten things, I can feel like I am fairly caught up in what is going on, and get on with my day.

Nick: That is such a good example. I also think that it is really interesting that you mentioned respect, and Zappos stands out to you specifically, because they respect you as a customer, they respect you as a stakeholder, potentially, in one way or another, of their brand and of their business. From what you have said, it seems like that really comes across in their communication with you.

Kristina: Yes, it really does. It is not just . . . People talk a lot about, ‘Zappos, they embody customer service,’ which is really true, but you cannot fake that in your communications. It is not just about, ‘They will ship for free both ways.’ It is also about their continually inviting my feedback in a way that is not a freaking popup poll the minute I get to a certain page.

Nick: Those are the worst.

Kristina: Or, ‘Do you want to chat live with a representative right now?’ No, I do not. Get out of my way. They invite that input. When they send me email confirmations, they are direct, to the point, and they are not trying to market other stuff to me, they understand that all I want in that email is just confirmation that this has been sent.

I think that so often marketers are so focused on eyeballs, because that is the rule that we have always had; we need to get eyeballs. SEO is like that, social media, product placement, and all of that stuff; we need eyeballs on our stuff. There are a lot of people competing for the same sets of eyeballs, so why not take this opportunity to create, share, and take care of content that resonates with
people, moves them, or that is at the very least, clearly relevant to what it is that they need to do every day?

Nick: You are hitting the nail on the head. If you are not going to be the best in the industry, why bother doing it at all these days especially?

Kristina: Yes. At the same time, I will say this, I think that part of what is difficult or challenging about content marketing and SEO is that everybody is really focused on this ‘Top Ten’ anything,’ this ‘Top One’, ‘Top Two’ anything. The fact of the matter is that not everybody can have those top spots. I think that what is important is to identify your audience, and do not be afraid to be niche, do not be afraid to identify, whether it is demographics, preferences, or whatever. Here is who it is that you are talking to.

Again, you do not have to be the best in the business.

Everybody wants to be Apple, which makes me want to slam my head into the wall. You do not have to be Apple. Figure out what it is that you care about, get a good writer, get
somebody that is good at planning communications, and invest and empower them to do their job.

I think that is another big problem, that we do not give enough credence or empowerment to the very people that we are asking to create this content for us, nor do we invest in the infrastructure that we need within our companies to take care of it over time. I think that that is part of the mind shift that the discipline of content strategy can really bring into organizations; this content is an asset of ours, and it does deserve our strategic consideration.

Nick: This next question is something that I have heard just as an undertone within more so the SEO industry, probably, than anything. I think obviously, as marketers are beginning to try to embrace this concept of using content as communication, and again like you said, not just to get the eyeballs, not just to get the rankings, but to engage their audience.

There seems to be this common problem that the people who are trying to implement content strategy from the top-down are running into, which is getting over that ‘stay on brand’ hurdle, which I think sometimes can seem nearly impossible when it comes to brainstorming new content with the client.

What are the some of the ways that you have gotten clients to accept some fresh or sort of out-of-the-box ideas?

Kristina: I think that probably the best thing is showing them the success that other people . . . I am so sorry. I am not going to . . .(laughing)  I will just interrupt your podcast and tell you. I got a sick kid at home who will not leave me alone, so I am running all over the house. Sorry, podcast listeners (laughs). Welcome to the life of a working mom. I am trying not to crack up.

Nick: (laughing) No, that is totally fine.

Kristina:

How do I get my clients to embrace new ideas?

I think there are two things.

First of all, either they are open to it or they are not.

I think that with content strategy in particular, ensuring that you have got a sponsor within an organization is really critical. When people call us, and this does not happen so much anymore, but in 2009 or 2010, when we first stepped up and said, ‘We do content strategy,’ people would call us and they would ask, ‘What is this content strategy thing, and why do we need it?’ What we found is that we were spending so much time trying to convince people of the value of the work that we did, when nobody in the organization got it. Nobody understood that this is an old-new thing, that just embraced best practices of creating awesome content, and that until you get that foundational work set out, you cannot really start talking about any of the risky, highly-visible, or new different storytelling that are available online. It is interesting that the new stuff that we needed to sell-in was the most basic.

You need an editorial calendar.

You need to have somebody within your organization that actually owns the content. You have got to have actual funding, not just for the big, fancy campaign, but also for the technology infrastructure and the right skill sets to be able to execute on this stuff, and to care for it over time.

How did we sell that in? Unless we had somebody that really got the value of it and understood the foundation that needed to be laid, it was really hard, it was really difficult. That was part of why I took to the road, banging the drums for content strategy.

Look, we are all talking about the next viral YouTube video, or we are all excited about our Facebook page, but this is all dust in the wind when it comes to being able to respond to whatever the next new big thing is, in terms of being able to deliver good content that is going to be consistent across channels for our audiences.

Nick:

Do you have a process for testing new content?

I guess if you are able to have an internal, I do not want to call them an internal champion; that seems so out of date. If you have a sponsor, I think that is a much better word, a sponsor within an organization who trusts you, who is willing to put their name on the chopping block and say, ‘This is a good idea. We do need to do this.’

Is there a way or a process for testing those new content ideas before deciding to commit a chunk of the budget to them?

Kristina: Yes, that is a good question. I think that the age-old answer of ‘it depends’ plays in here, because it really depends on what it is that you are trying to do. It depends on what audience you are trying to reach, what you are trying to build.

Are you trying to launch something or are you trying to revitalize a brand? What are the different ways to test those? You guys live and breathe metrics. That certainly is something, the age-old AB testing. You can do user testing of actual content, with regard to where it is placed on the page, how they are navigating through a site to get at it. Doing qualitative content testing is something that people are trying to figure out how exactly that works, and I think there are some people that really . . . One of the things that we do at Brain Traffic is we will offer what is called a ‘qualitative audit,’ where we will sit down with the client and we will dig into what are their objectives? What do they know about their audiences? What is going on with their current clients?

We will literally go through with a score card, and identify, ‘Here is what is of value to you. Here is what not of value, from a best practices standpoint. Here is what is working, here is what is not.’ I think that that is the crazy thing with content, that it is not just a numbers game. I do not believe that you can simply depend on quantitative analytics to measure content effectiveness, that you actually have to get people in there, either people with an editorial viewpoint, content experts, or your customers to figure out what is working and what is not.

Nick: I do not need to tell you how well you know this stuff. I guess, to come back to, once the content is created, once you have a piece of content that has proven itself valuable within some period of time, whether that is resonating with your audience, driving more sales, driving more eyeballs, or expanding on the reach of the brand and what the brand stands for,

how do you approach maintaining a piece of content to maximize its lifetime value?

Kristina: I am sorry. Can you repeat that last part, how do you approach doing what?

Nick: Maintaining a piece of content.

Kristina: Maintaining, right. I think that the first thing is certainly to put into place a rolling audit process, where you know where that content is, who owns it, the last time it was updated, and why it was published in the first place. Then when you can return to it, you can better assess its value based on your current business objectives, what you have learned about what is working with your product or service, what is not, what your audience responses are. Simply going back, it is critically important that you keep track of that content and that you maintain, basically, a scorecard of what is working and what is not. Some of it may very well be, ‘This is out of date. This is no longer relevant.’ If content was migrated, now we have an audit plan, and now we go in there and, ‘This whole section that we assumed was really valuable turns out to be really bad, and is not up to standards, or off brand, or whatever.’

I think it is a matter of just ensuring that your content success metrics are really kept up to date and really mapped back to whatever your business objectives are, and then ensuring that you have the right people who are just continually looking at and caring for that content. I will say that this has been an interesting thing, that I think CMS vendors have been promising that for 15 years; ‘We are going to take care of that. We will keep track of all your content for you. We will make sure that all of it is where it is supposed to be and it is being updated and checked over time.’ You cannot just make that happen with electronics, or technology, sorry.

Nick: That is such an interesting concept, because honestly, any SEO listening has probably just cringed when they thought of deprecating a piece of content. It is like, ‘What do I do with my URL now? What do I do with all of the signaling factors that I have built up to that URL?’

Kristina: Right. Exactly.

Nick: I think that is a really important point, that is coming away from being a marketer and just focusing more on, coming back to your Zappos point, that is really focusing on your audience and what is going to best suit the people who advocate for your brand, who appreciate your brand, and it is almost like showing respect, to a certain extent, that if this piece of content does not offer any value anymore, it should be deprecated.

Kristina: Not only that, and this is what I have always said, and I want to get back the role of SEO in just a second, but this is what I have always said for years. If your content sucks, it does not matter if you are in the top ten results on any search engine, because they are go click through, the content is going to suck, it is not going to draw them in, they are not going to see anything relevant, they are going to be overwhelmed by the amount of content on the page, and they are going to click the back button. That happens immediately. Then what is your investment worth?

I think that the SEO folks today really get that, they are getting their heads wrapped around it, they are understanding that they cannot operate in a silo apart from designers, developers, the editorial team, or even stakeholders, they have to understand, who is it that we are trying to get on this page, and what expectations are we setting once they get there? Again, there are a ton of really great SEO people out there who are working from exactly that vantage point.

Nick: You just brought up a point that is at the forefront of the SEO industry, at least this week. There is a lot of talk this week in particular about long-form content. Jonathon Colman wrote this amazing retrospective piece on, ‘We can do better than this.’

Kristina: Yes, that just was published.

Nick: Yes. He is brilliant.

Kristina: Yes, I deeply admire his work; I am already on him to write a book.

Nick: I am jealous. I need to do a better job of getting in front of him and getting a chance to work together with him, because I think his approach to agile management and how it plays a role in the entire user experience lifecycle, I think is phenomenal.

Kristina: Yes, he is a smart cookie.

Nick: There is this big push, or at least there have been post coming out, it seems like every 2 hours there is a new one, this week especially, on long-form content, and it is almost polarizing the industry, with people saying, ‘No, they need to be short, sweet, to the point, and engaging. People do not read long-form content anymore.’ Then there are other people saying, ‘It really takes long-form content to really dive into an idea, distill all of the points, and express truly the deep value of whatever this concept is.’

I guess, generally speaking, have you found long-form content to be more or less effective?

Kristina: Statements like that make me insane. It is just this, ‘This content works for everything and it works for everyone.’ Generally speaking, this is what long-format content does. That is just so outrageous to me, that anyone would think that. In order for Kristina to really, fully appreciate the quality of the leather on these shoes she is looking at, we need to click her through to long-form content about what makes good quality leather, and who makes the best leather. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes people want that long-form content. Who is the audience? What are they trying to accomplish? What are their preferences? What information do we know that they are looking for, or they need to assist them in their customer lifecycle, in the purchase process? What are those things that need to be shared with them, that will help them to take the next step?

Nick: Again, I think, to bring it back to the old adage that you had mentioned earlier, it depends. I think that is always the right answer.

Kristina: Yes, sorry dudes.

Nick: I think it always depends on . . .

Kristina: It depends. Again, that is content strategy; ask the right questions up front. What are our business objectives? What are we trying to do? Who are we trying to reach? What is it that they want? Where do we know that they are? How do they want us to talk to them? That all takes time and it takes an investment, and I think that is the bottom like. People say, ‘We do not need to spend that money, we already know.’ Guess what? The people that are beating you are spending that money.

Nick: I think you are absolutely right. I do not want to tie up any more of your time, especially if you have got a sick child.

Kristina: Let us use the word sick loosely. Let us put some air quotes around ‘sick’. But thank you.

Nick: I cannot thank you enough for taking some time to speak with me this morning. I think this has been just an awesome interview. I personally, gained some insight into a few new items, that extended beyond the book.

Kristina: Great.

Nick: For anybody listening to this, if you have not read ‘Content Strategy for the Web’ yet, go out and buy it. It is a phenomenal book. I bought 5 copies, I have given them to everybody I know who has questions. It answers so many questions, and is just an amazing resource for diving into some of the ideas of what content should be and where it is going.

Kristina: Excellent. Thank you so much for your kind words, I appreciate that.

Nick: Thank you again so much, Kristina. Have a good day, and good luck.

Kristina: Thank you. You too, Nick. Bye-bye.

Nick: Bye.

The post Talking Content Strategy – Interview with Kristina Halvorson appeared first on SEO Nick.

My end goal with every post is to provide insight and hopefully, sometimes, inspiration. And while I have approached the topic of content strategy, I haven’t yet provided any real concrete examples of it in practice…

So I thought I would reach out to some of my favorite content creators and strategists to get their thoughts on something that is not talked about enough; content strategy as it relates to production and results.

Meet The Content Panelists

Dr. Peter Meyers – Probably best known for his useful and actionable posts on SEOmoz, Dr. Pete is the President of User Effect and Resident Mad Scientist at SEOmoz.

Shelli Walsh – Director at Shellshock UK is a self-confessed design snob, passionate internet devotee, creative content marketer and writer of the ShellShock Blog.

AJ Kohn – AJ is the owner of Blind Five Year Old, an internet marketing consultancy that specializes in search. AJ is also a content curator and regular contributor to Marketing Land.

Anthony Pensabene – Anthony is best known for his online persona, Content Muse. When he’s not stirring thoughts on the state of content you can find him hanging out at the Saloon of Literature.

Kieran Flanigan – Kieran loves online marketing. He has worked for both large and small brands to create online strategies focused on international growth. He is currently the Online marketing Manager for Marketo and blogs as Search Brat.

Kelani Nichole – Kelani is the Senior UX Strategist at Big Spaceship, a digital, social, and mobile agency in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about Kelani on her website.

Neal Dougan – Neal is the Owner of Evoke SEO, a London based search marketing and web development company. Neal focuses on the design side of content marketing, as can be seen in his recent You vs. John Paulson campaign.

Onto the discussion:

Where have you seen content strategy have the greatest impact, either within your organization or one of your client’s?

Dr. Pete

I have to admit that, like many people, my past content successes have sometimes been a bit of an accident. Obviously, some pieces were better than others, had more effort put into them, etc., but I can’t say that my approach was particularly strategic. Probably the first exception was the Google Algo History on SEOmoz, because we built it with the intent to make it a “living document” and keep promoting.

The impact of that became evident when Penguin hit and interest in the algorithm jumped. Traffic spiked, months after the document’s initial launch, and it’s only gone up in the 7 months since Penguin 1. It’s been pretty amazing to watch.

Shelli

Unfortunately I am limited as to examples I can provide due to confidentiality. ShellShock are predominantly producing infographics right now and recently had a campaign which worked exceptionally well for the client and achieved great viral uptake through social media and careful seeding. The reason it was so successful is because we had a strong concept targeted at a specific demographic: the right message delivered to the right audience. The graphic has reached #8 on the entire Visual.ly site (over 20K entries) for most viewed, with over 150k views and rising. Between the Visual.ly page and the host page it has had over 70k pins, 130k likes 65.2k stumbles and 500+ tweets. I have been told it is the most viewed page on the client’s website (I didn’t have direct access to analytics).

I know many SEOs are weary and derisory of infographics but they can be a fantastic medium if produced well. You only need to look at work from people like David McCandless, Column Five and Pop Chart Labs (and of course ShellShock!) to see that the medium can be executed beautifully for stunning results.

It’s a shame that such a respected form of design has been hit with a bad name due to all the spammy, cheap, rubbish being pumped out on a budget. A massive proportion of infographics are pushed out with no direction or purpose and fail miserably to engage. Successful content campaigns always come down to the same thing: targeted concept, creativity and execution – and I can’t believe how few people manage to get that right.

All the campaigns I manage have their placements on a variety of blogs and hub sites. We only seed in a handful of the best IG directories and don’t consider this as the strategy for outreach. Campaigns that rely purely on paid directory postings are not going to get the same results as creating something engaging and shared with a target audience. ShellShock infographics have great results time and again.

AJ

On a personal level I decided that sharing more of what I do, of blogging more and answering questions in public would be an effective strategy as I grew my business. Was that a ‘content strategy’? I guess so, though I’m not sure I embarked on it 2+ years ago with that buzzword in mind. Today I do credit much (most really) of my success to producing content and doing so on my own terms.

While many of my posts are more broad in nature I’ve also developed and optimized posts for specific terms with relative success.

Much of what I’ve done over the years on Blind Five Year Old is use it as a dogfooding platform. There’s no better way to learn than by doing.

On a professional level the one client who I can point to as embracing a content marketing strategy is ReadyForZero. They’re in the crazy vertical of personal finance which is rife with link-centric operators.

I worked with them to develop a blogging strategy as well as the creation of resource centers. The most successful example of the latter is around budgeting tips.

I believe these succeed because they provide a robust, up-to-date and valuable resource from multiple sources in a well-designed wrapper. While they aren’t specifically about the ReadyForZero product the content is very relevant which ensures that the audience who finds this content is more likely to convert. In short, the intent behind these resource centers matches ReadyForZero product.

Anthony

Content strategy that is segmented, addressing different stops on the initial sales tube and re-cyclical journey of consumers (additional buy, upgrade, interaction), has the best impact.

Let me use laptops for example. A consumer is at the beginning of the initial sales tube. They want to compare and contrast different machines and manufacturers.  Respective brands are not likely to host on-site information about other brands; that’s found more on a consumer reports-like site.

However, a brand may benefit from emulating the consumer report site, hosting competitor information (just not making the competitor link readily available).  Consumers will get the initial information they seek, and will now be ready for the next portion of their journey, which in the best case leads to a sale.  Addressing the consumer’s need (while seemingly contrary to brand intuition/interest), segmenting the buying journey, makes a powerful impact in this case.

The greatest impact varies.  Follow your consumer to elucidate where to place and how to shape content.  Get in their heads.

Kieran

I think it’s pointless having a content strategy if it doesn’t impact on business metrics (whatever the company defines those to be). It might feel great churning out content and seeing your visitor metrics go up, but if in 6 months there is very little impact on your bottom line, it’s going to leave you with a pretty empty feeling.

I also think it’s important to break down what you mean by content strategy. For example, a company may spend weeks redoing their FAQ page, because they’ve found it’s a really important page in the purchase cycle for certain personas. This is still part of your content strategy but examples like this dont’ get talked about as much in the industry because it’s obsessed with links, so that’s what they define as the core metrics for a content strategy, how many links you get. There is nothing wrong with links being one of the metrics. I think Larry Kims post on getting a link from the Wall Street Journal proves how much link building is just evolving into PR (ironic since PR agencies were being told SEO and Social agencies were going to kill their business). But content strategy is a big topic and runs across your entire business.

From my own experience of launching a pretty successful content strategy, you need to speak business metrics to get buy in, to really help your vision become a reality. That content strategy was successful at driving top of funnel metrics like visits and social shares, but it also delivered a huge amount of leads.

At Marketo I can look at every aspect of our content strategy as we have such great analytics. For example, in a presentation I recently gave in London, I talked about looking at the first touch pipeline and multi touch pipeline created by each content asset. The metrics I shared in that presentation are just a sample of how I can look at what impact content is making across our funnel.

Where content makes the most impact is entirely up to what business problem you are trying to solve with it.

Kelani

Content strategy is a deep sigh of relief for clients. They get it, the pain points of workflow, broken update processes, shitty CMS systems, are things that every organization is aware of and suffers from.. When you tell them there is a cure for that ailment AKA A PLAN, and a system for managing content built around THEM, they get very excited.

Seeing the effect that a well thought out and documented workflow has on an organization is a beautiful thing! Instead of struggling with broken processes content producers suddenly have time and energy to IMPROVE rather than just maintaining status quo.

Neal

We have seen it most effective in boring niches. Because the landscape is so grey and bland, anything a bit different stands out like wearing a white suit to a funeral. Then what you eventually see is other companies in that niche try and do something similar, something more inventive. 9 times out of 10 they don’t and then make’s your content even better.

Basically we have seen content gain links for clients that they would never get without it. We don’t do this because it’s hip or what the cool kids are doing, we genuinely think it’s the best way to get links and create brand visibility.

Tell us a bit about your workflow for content development.

Dr. Pete

For me, the best content always starts with finding a gap – not necessarily something no one has done (that’s rare), but something where I’m just not satisfied with the breadth or depth of what’s out there. From there, it’s a bit organic – I try to find the type of content that best fits the need. In other words, I never think “I should make an infographic!” – I try to let form follow function.

Shelli

First stage of any project is to assess the clients target demographic to scope the forms of content that will appeal to them. It’s essential to put together the right content to engage the niche. From researching the niche you can ascertain popular themes and topics; and any gaps to be filled. The research stage is the most crucial and not to be undervalued, this is the make or break for the project and where the strongest engaging concepts are created.

Second stage: researching your data and information is again very important -the most successful infogaphics have strong concepts and data, finished with great design. You have to be resourceful to find the best data sets and sources to use and I cannot stress how important it is to only use reliable sources.

Design/creative stage turns your information into something visually appealing and makes the information more easy to digest. People make initial judgments on the credibility of content with their eyes, therefore design will impact how your content is perceived.

Outreach and seeding is considered at planning stage so when the content is being designed it should have your end placement goals in mind. Remember you are creating content not for yourself but for your niche community. Another mistake I see often is clients interrupting the flow by having strong design opinions when they lack any visual literacy. The end results always suffer in these cases.

Final stage is tracking, assessment and keeping the momentum of sharing sustained. A strong piece of content can circulate through social media for months. Its a great thing when you spot new mentions on social media for an older piece of content and you watch the new ripples spread for a second wave.

AJ

It actually differs from client to client because of the dependencies on the niche, type of content, current content assets and production resources at hand. So the details of workflow are often quite different client to client. However, there’s a broad framework I often use to help guide content development.

I start by determining different query intent for that product/site/service. Once I have intent down, I map query syntax to that intent which creates, most of the time, a bunch of root terms and modifier combinations that I can assign to a specific intent. From there it’s relatively easy to start creating the right content to match the query intent and ensuring it’s optimized for specific queries.

I’m fond of saying:

‘target the keyword, optimize the intent‘ – Tweet this

Anthony

It depends on the respective project, but I kind of shadow an old reading tactic of SQRRR (survey, question, read, recite, review). So, I’ll (in mind) survey what variety of information (pictures, video, text, etc) best conveys a message. Then, I echo what consumer questions the content will address. The ‘read’ part becomes the composition part. Then, I get in the head of the consumer, reciting the offered information, finally reviewing for modification or improvement.

Kieran

I went through a little of my process on this guest post over on SEOMoz, a guide to TOFU. I am definitely no expert in content development, I am just eager to learn so there are probably lot’s of better methods of doing this. But I would say the workflow depends a lot on the problem you are trying to solve. But everything should usually start with a problem.

For example, if my problem is lack of awareness in my market, I may decide to start a blog (as John says – a blog is not a content strategy), I might start with personas, my content sweet spot, break this into topics, do competitive analysis, look at my available resources and then put an editorial calendar together to cover some of these topics (based on resources I have available).

But I could also have a very specific problem that I try and solve with targeted content campaigns. For example (sorry I can’t give links to the actual content), from looking at the analytics I showed in my presentation above, I can see there is a particular type of buyer (persona) who is struggling to make their way through our funnel. My development process is to do as much analysis I can on where I think that journey breaks down, make assumptions on what the problem is (backed by analytics), create new content to try and address that problem (this resulted in an ebook, slideshare, specific lead nurture track and a couple of other assets). Each of these were designed to address the problems we assumed in the journey. Once completed and set live, you dive back into your analytics to see what worked.

Kelani

I don’t produce content – as a Content Strategist working on behalf of clients I plan for the creation, delivery and governance of it. My work then helps support and empower the people who actually produce the content within an organization. The workflow is different for each case, but should always revolve around the needs and capabilities of real people!

Neal

There’s really not a great deal to it. We like to spend more time coming up with decent ideas that will get an emotional reaction than define our ‘target market’.

• Brainstorm creative ideas
• Edit to a shortlist
• Decide the platform for the content (should it be a video, infographic or post?)
• Figure out what people / websites would talk / write / host that piece of content
• Discuss the ideas with the client
• Research the data needed
• Design / create content
• Approval from client
• Release it
• Get the content in front of people through outreach and manual submission
• Celebrate with a curry and a few bottles of Bangla
• Watch the links and social mentions roll in

With major sweeping changes to the search landscape in 2012, how has this affected your approach to creating content?

Dr. Pete

If anything, the increasing unpredictability of Google and even rankings data has renewed my interest in content. I want to create pieces that actually provide value and have longevity, and not just troll for links.

Shelli

I had already predicted what was going to happen and positioned ShellShock in the right place to take advantage of the new upsurge of content and creativity. Having 15+ years of design and illustration combined with 5 years online marketing put me in a rather unique position being able to straddle the two disciplines which has fast become in big demand. My biggest challenge looking forward is to is to keep evolving and offering new products without relying on infographics. I have some great ideas and can’t wait to get some new projects out there to show everyone.

AJ

It hasn’t really changed the way I approach creating content. It has, however, changed how I pitch it to clients and how it is received. It’s become far easier to secure resources as ‘content marketing’ has become a buzzword and the fear of black and white animals pouncing on search traffic has risen to near panic levels.

Anthony

I look forward to working in a landscape that expects *more thought put forth regarding content. I’m excited, but it hasn’t changed my own original thoughts on creation.

Kieran

This really hasn’t affected me at all.

Kelani

STRUCTURED CONTENT!! Have you seen the amped-up google search pages for someone famous, or well known cultural institutions, movies, music? That is the future of the web. Its being popularized by Google as the Knowledge Graph. You MUST MUST MUST build well-structured content with rich metadata if you plan to survive the next wave of search, and the melting interface paradigms for that matter. Future-proof, people! Shit’s going semantic, we are teaching the machine to think instead of just retrieve…and it wants to think on your content. Mark that shit up yo!

Neal

It hasn’t affected our approach at all. I come from a design led background and consider myself a creative above the title of “Online Marketer”. Its second nature for me to want to create fun and interesting stuff rather than do the traditional / old school methods of link building / marketing.

We are lucky enough to have clients that want to do things differently and have confidence in giving us budget to create things that create a buzz for the brand. This trust enables us to really focus on creating something cool and not on how many links we’ve created, where a keyword ranks (yes I know this is still important!) If what we do isn’t deemed as SEO I’m not particularly bothered.

Do you leverage evergreen content as part of your overall content strategy? If so, how large of a role does it play?

Dr. Pete

Yes, I’m a big believer in evergreen content, but I think you have to be realistic about it. Some pieces naturally fit the evergreen idea and others don’t. If you try to make 100% of what you do evergreen, you’ll end up doing some ridiculous stuff. So, I focus on the small amount (maybe 5%) that has evergreen potential and I put sustained effort into those pieces.

Shelli

I produce more one-off creative content and not high volume content fillers so focus on longevity. Therefore, evergreen does factor in most of ShellShock campaigns – obviously this is not always possible, for example, in situations of topical and seasonal content but I would say a large proportion of our work is with evergreen in mind.

AJ

Evergreen is often vital to a content strategy. I think of a content strategy as telling a story for that client over time. Evergreen are like major plot points in your (never ending) story. You want to be able to refer to them as you move forward and add characters, events and descriptions.

So you’ll have a number of climaxes in your story over time (as pieces go viral) but you want them in the framework of your plot and you want to encourage users to ‘keep reading’ even without those high point pieces.

Analogy pass or fail? You be the judge.

Anthony

The evergreen concept is used well in shaping a brand’s legacy. (AJ’s post on content recall.) How is your brand’s story unfolding through time? What is your brand known for? Evergreen content helps cornerstone legacy. Let’s use Quora as an example. What are your respective vertical’s most pressing consumer questions? What are the benefits of your service/product? Evergreen content needs to address those questions, aligning a brand’s legacy with the needs of its consumers.

Kieran

Quick warning here, I’ve had debates with people on the meaning of evergreen content, so apologies in advance if this isn’t what you asked . For example on GrayWolf’s blog he talks about evergreen content in a lot of different formats, both long and short term. This is what I’ve always taken from the term evergreen content.

If you look at the content we created for the #SocialSuccess site, you can see a lot of it is timeless. We created a lot of pieces that are going to be relevant for years. A great example is this Prezi, which was designed to really show social customer service in action, but in a way that’s really easy to understand e.g it’s a little more product-centric than your average top of funnel piece, but that mapped to how it was promoted.

At Marketo, we do a lot of smart things with our content. A great example is our Definitive Guide to Social Marketing. This was a really successful piece when it was first released a couple of years back, but with social media changing so much, the guys in the U.S. felt it needed an update. They totally rewrote it, added in influencers and released the new version in September. That updated piece has generated a massive amount of traffic, leads and pipeline for the business.

I think the big takeaway for evergreen content is continually look for opportunities to “repimp” popular pieces so you can get the maximum value out of them. This doesnt’ necessarily mean you should just keep rewriting popular content, you could turn them into different formats e.g. article to ebook, ebook to Webinar, Webinar to presentation at a conference.

Kelani

Yes, evergreen content is something that exists in every content strategy I believe. Even the hottest shit minute-to-minute updating blog will have an about statement. It is just one of the important pieces in a larger whole. More often overlooked is ‘Social’ content, i.e. your content that exists on external channels, likely mostly social networks – that content (tweets, comments, facebook posts, etc.) is just as important (if not more so) than the static copy on your homepage.

Neal

I think it does play a big part as we want the content to remain as fresh as possible for as long as possible, but if you’re doing topical / current stuff then you are getting that quick burst of traffic / buzz / links then it tails of to nothing.

Without sounding too cheesy we aim to create content that will always remain interesting, if that’s evergreen then so be it. Combine the topical with something constant, make it look nice and you have great content that will get links, views and visitors in the short and long term. We want maximum ROI (visibility wise) on the lowest possible output (workload for us). This means we have more time to think and create.

Do you design a marketing and execution plan for your content prior to creating it?

Dr. Pete

I’d like to say “yes”, but that’s still something I’m working on. More and more, I definitely think about how a piece will roll out, when and how to do outreach, etc., but that’s a work in progress.

Shelli

I put together a proposal that is to be agreed by myself and client for execution and expectations. This defines concept, timelines, pricing and estimated results. Results can be anticipated but never guaranteed, we make that clear to clients but with experience/case studies you can offer reassurance to clients that you know what you are doing and have the results to prove it.

AJ

Once you have all the variables in terms of niche, type of content, current assets, production resources and have you intent/syntax map you can design an editorial calendar which ensures you’re hitting the right intent at the right time (since many outside factors often trigger different intent). From there it’s a simple workflow process which you can propose and then iterate on as you move forward.

In general, my goal is to get people doing and learning faster rather than investing in an execution plan and process which nearly always changes as you get feedback from your efforts (also see: agile marketing).

Anthony

It depends. Sometimes I’ll write a post for Content Muse to share a message. Sometimes it’s more of a passionate lightning storm. However, client projects have an end goal or goals of metrics in mind. You are a big champion of CRO and A/B testing; considering past successes and receptions is an advantage and tools of creation. Moreover, a piece of content may be a small part of a larger strategy, so execution wise, you have to consider how that piece serves the larger endeavor.

Kieran

Yes, absolutely and this is something I’ve got better at over time. You need to have a promotion plan for any content development you do. This should be part of the initial planning, before you even begin writing. It will help you focus around topics that provide natural opportunities for promotion. You also want to start planning if there are any promotional aspects baked into the content e.g. influencers, some type of cool design or whatever it may be to capture interest for your content. Finishing 90% of the content only to realize there is nowhere to promote it, is a sure fire way to get your budget axed.

Kelani

YES! Don’t make anything without a plan. Not even dinner. Mmmmm dinner. But seriously, I think if you have a solid business case for content, aligned to goals, and a plan for creating it you don’t necessarily need a ‘marketing’ plan for that, you have a raison d’être, that’s the starting point.

For anything else, don’t make it at all! Get rid of it! To help your content spread its wings a dissemination/marketing plan is clutch, but nothing is as important as aligning content to goals, and planning for its creation and governance.

Neal

Yes, a very basic plan. We try not to over complicate things too much. If the piece is very good and we feel it will have a wide appeal then it sort of promotes itself. People sharing it do the work for us.

We tend to work more on instinct than an actual plan. It’s more enjoyable that way and allows you to remain creative when doing the more boring side (outreach, sourcing sites etc.) The plan will vary depending on the content. For example we recently did an infographic that needed very little pushing as the subject was so popular and appeals to so many people. When we have stuff like that it makes our job easy.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated.

If this got your mind racing, you may also want to check out my post Talking Content Strategy with Kristina Halvorson, where I had the opportunity to pick her brain on content planning, production, and management.

Now it’s  your turn to answer, same questions, what do YOU think?

The post Talking Content Strategy with Industry Producers appeared first on SEO Nick.

This is a case study on how I built a website that receives over 100,000 visitors per month, in less than 1 year, without spending $1 on advertising.

This was done 100% through SEO and content strategy.

Before we dive in, allow me to clarify a few things:

1. The website reached over 100,000 visitors in 9 months.
2. This was a new domain, registered just a couple months before launch.
3. This was done in a language I do not read nor speak (Japanese).
4. Japanese is a non-roman character language, making it nearly impossible to use most of the popular SEO tools.

Key Drivers of Traffic Growth

There were a few key elements that led to the widespread and sustained growth of the project, these range from commonsense to technical, but come down to three main focus areas:

• Math - we took a mathematical approach to designing an evaluation model that would allow us to gauge opportunities based on their potential returns. Ultimately this led to the creation of what we now call our keyword opportunity evaluation, which is a financial model that measures the approximate output (traffic) based on a finite set of inputs, including elements like average DA, number of links / linking domains, age of site, content footprint, etc.
• Analysis – Using our newly built algorithm we got to testing, creating websites to test content patterns and architecture. We were quick to declare defeat within verticals without traction, and paid close attention to where the traffic was growing the most. The algorithm started to take shape and after roughly 3 months was able to identify within an order of magnitude the amount of traffic we could acquire for a given set of costs.
• Pumpkin Hacking – This is a term that I came across (thank you Peter Da Vanzo) that seems to describe exactly what we did to continue to grow our traffic by double and even triple digits, month after month. The core concept is simple; focus resources on building what works. What this meant for us was paying attention to the search verticals and content that received the most traffic, most comments, most social shares, and being quick to cut the cord on traffic that didn’t perform.

First Month After Launch

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With zero promotion and no advertising, we had a decent first month, bringing in over 2,000 visitors. This was mostly due to our pre-launch strategy – which I’ll explain more later in this post.

Nine Months After Launch

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After only 9 months we were 3 months ahead of schedule to pass 100,000 visitors with no signs of slowing down.

Traffic Sources

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As you can see in the screenshot above, organic search drives the most significant portion of our traffic. Referral traffic is almost entirely from blogs and industry publications, and campaigns is representative of the ads that we place, only on our website, to test different language and call to actions to drive conversions.

Building a Keyword Database

This is an obvious no-brainer for all SEO’s, however, unlike most search campaigns – this was a big keyword database, to the tune of 50,000 keywords.

The main idea here was leave no stone un-turned. Since we were of the mind to test everything and let the performance metrics dictate where to allocate resources, we had to get creative with query combinations.

We first went through all of our target search verticals, as dictated by our chosen go-to-market categories, which I think was roughly 19 to start. The next step was to identify the top 100 highest search volume terms within those verticals and scrape the top 100 URL’s that were currently ranking.

From here we began what started out as an exhaustive process of evaluating the opportunities for each keyword, and then aggregating opportunities to discern which categories we needed to focus on to grow traffic.

Essentially we targeted the low-hanging fruit; keywords identified by our model that could generate a minimum level of traffic  in 3 months or less, with a minimum investment in content development.

I watched (obsessively) which phrases and topics generated the most traffic.

As soon as a topic began to grow legs, we would focus additional keyword research on finding concepts and phrases that were both complimentary and contextually relevant.

Designing a Content Strategy

This is the single hardest part of any content-focused website or project.

The key to success on this particular project was taking a page out of Jeff Bezos’ book, and becoming obsessed with our customers.

We not only embarked on an aggressive a/b testing schedule, but we constantly reached out to our users for feedback.

We asked tough questions, ranging from what users’ liked and disliked (colors, fonts, and layouts) but also the specific components of the website they found to be less than ideal or even ‘sub-par.’

We took the responses seriously, making changes as they came in, trying to take something constructive from every piece of feedback, and pushing as many as 10 deployments a week.

It started to work.

Once we saw the needle begin to move on our user engagement metrics; time on site, pages per visit, and direct or branded traffic, we moved onto the next phase of our strategy; analyzing our audience.

Targeting the right audience is so much harder than it sounds.

I can honestly say from the experience of working on this project it is almost never as it seems. We began with targeting a very large segment of users (remember that time I talked about a keyword database of over 50,000 keywords?) but after a few months it turned out our largest (and most active) users were finding us from only a handful of targeted categories.

Information Architecture with SEO in Mind

Please allow me to preface this by saying that I am bias; in my opinion the architecture of a website is critical to achieving SEO success.

My largest successful SEO projects have come due to a variety of factors, but tend to come down to 3 core components of architecture:

• It’s Scalable
• It’s Crawlable
• It’s Tiered

Scalable architecture is an obvious one; you need a system that can grow as large as you want/need it to.

Crawlable is nothing new to anyone in SEO; this simply means that the structure of our pages allowed for all of the most important content to quickly and easily be crawled and indexed by search engine robots. It actually sounds easier than it is… ensuring that the content is rendered (code wise) in the most ideal format for robots to parse takes more consideration than just laying out your div’s to properly render your designs.

To do this properly you need to make sure all of your code is in the right place, and more so, check how each crawler sees your page.

Take every opportunity to DRY out your code as much as possible, remember modern code is designed to cascade for a reason.

Information tiering… is a concept I have long-time preached to anyone who has ever talked with me, at length, about SEO. It means that your URL architecture should be built in a way so authority flows upwards through your directories.

For example, if I wanted to build authority around a core concept, I would focus my domain on that concept. If I then wanted to build relevance around specific locations for that concept, I would structure my URL’s so that all relevant content for that location fed upwards to a location specific directory.

So let’s say I had an SEO consulting firm with locations in several cities across the U.S., I would design an architecture that would allow for location-specific information to feed upwards through my directories.

So something like NicksSEOFirm.com/Philadelphia/Specific-Location-Content. The specific location content could be the team, any value-add competencies, anything geo-specific that was relevant to operations at that location, flowing relational authority upwards to the parent directory of /Philadelphia/.

Link in sub-directories can feed authority to parent directories.

A perfect example of this is local sitelinks for popular categories; tertiary directories with the most links and content which cause their upstream sub-directories to receive authority translating into higher rankings and local sitelinks.

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Launch Before The Launch

The easiest way to ensure a successful product or website launch is to launch before you actually launch.

What I mean is to build your prospect list well in advance of pulling the trigger to go live.

John Doherty wrote a great post on ProBlogger that talks about the power of leveraging list-building pre-launch pages. By building a list of users before publishing your full website you are essentially guaranteeing traffic immediately upon launch.

Our pre-launch is how we were able to generate over 2,000 visitors within the first 30 days of taking the website live.

Since our platform is not built on WordPress we didn’t get to use any of the fancy plugins available, and instead created a basic one-page site that allowed visitors to convert the same way the full website would support, just on a much smaller scale.

The most important part of our pre-launch page was that it not only supported social sharing, but was able to track and aggregate shares to give active users more points; gamification is cool.

Some of the major benefits of a well planned pre-launch are:

• Your website is already being crawled and indexed by major search engines.
• You begin building your user base and audience.
• You can gain invaluable feedback while it’s still easy to make changes.

Choosing a Platform

Let me start by saying not all platforms are created equal.

It’s also worth sharing that it is not always better to build versus buy, as there are a lot of smart people building a lot of slick content platforms.

However, we chose to build.

Once we had laid out all of the project requirements, including URL architecture, conversion funnels, user permissioning, design templating, and localization, it became clear that in order to get exactly what we needed – we were going to have to build it ourselves.

One major benefit of building is we were able to design a system that would support both our internal and external processes right out of the gate. This also meant it was going to take a lot more time and a shitload more money to bring our website to market.

Hosting & Evolution

This is a known but rarely talked about factor – hosting infrastructure is critical.

Once we were ready for public launch we setup chose a reasonably affordable VPS provider with what seemed like more than enough memory, and it was at first.

By month 4 it was clear we were going to have to make some changes; load times began to bloat and large content pages were timing out. We beefed up the space and quadrupled the memory, which solved the problem temporarily until…

We got some press.

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On June 5th we were featured by one of the largest news publications in the world. We were able to handle almost 40,000 visits before out VPS crashed, hard.

It was that week we made the move to localized cloud hosting from Amazon Web Services.

We haven’t crashed since.

The End Result

Not really the end result since this project is still enjoying a healthy and fruitful life, but after 9 months of careful planning, remaining flexible to the marketplace, and nurturing our most valued asset; our users, we surpassed our milestone of 100,000 visitors.

Click to Enlarge

Great, But Is It Repeatable?

In case you weren’t already thinking it, you are now.

The answer is Yes.

Taking what we learned and applying the concept of pumpkin hacking, we started a new blog at the end of July 2012 to test the transferability of our strategy, and here were the results:

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In the first 12 days we had over 17,000 visitors. In the first full month, we had over 50,000 unique visitors coming to the website over 100,000 times (see below).

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And it didn’t slow down…

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By the end of the 3rd month we were receiving over 100,000 unique visitors, and over 200,000 visits.

Conclusion

This is very possible.

With careful planning, an SEO focused content strategy, and an understanding of the power of information architecture – you can grow a new website to over 100,000 organic visitors per month in less than 1 year.

Please share your thoughts, feelings, and questions in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

The post How To Grow a New Website to Over 100,000 Organic Visits Per Month appeared first on SEO Nick.

If you are reading this, chances are you are not new to the idea of split testing, but just in case, here’s a quick and dirty definition:

A/B testing or split testing compares the effectiveness of two versions of a web page, marketing email, or the like, in order to discover which has better response rate or better sales conversion rate.

Source: Wikipedia

In my opinion, split testing should be the most frequently used tool in your CRO toolbox. Split testing alone is one of the greatest sources of ‘Ah Ha!’ moments and insights into exactly how your customers think about and perceive your brand.

For some of my specific thoughts on conversion rate optimization, please check out my recent CRO interview with Ben Beck. Also, stay tuned for a special offer at the end of this post.

So What’s the Big Deal?

Simply put, if you are not actively and rigorously testing the stages of your conversion funnel, you are leaving money on the table.

The fact of the matter is, guessing is not testing.

While I am a firm believer that you should test vertical markets, testing for conversion is a different monster all together. If your website (or business) relies on conversions, at the end of the day, you are only as successful as your conversion rate.

What if a single test campaign could yield a 58% increase in conversion rate? What if that was only scratching the surface? I’m beating a dead horse at this point, but unless you are testing your hypotheses, that’s all they will ever be.

Stop guessing, stop making excuses, JFDI.

What’s With the Attitude?

Honestly, I just hate excuses.

What has become an almost weekly frustration for me, is meeting website owners, talking with them about their business, and asking them questions they don’t know the answers to.

Simple questions, like:

• How many steps are in your conversion funnel?
• What language resonates most with your audience?
• Which layouts have you found work best with your content?

More so, the reason they don’t have the answers is because they are not doing anything proactive to go out and get them.

This is exactly what A/B testing provides you with; the opportunity to get answers to your questions, for example:

• Want to know if a different color button/text will increase conversions? Test them.
• Wonder if you are not providing enough social proof? Test more.
• Is your workflow confusing your visitors? Test it.
• Is your headline not compelling enough? Test another one.

Worse still, are the ridiculous excuses website owners tell me in attempts to justify why they are not testing;

• They don’t have the budget
• They don’t have the technical expertise
• They don’t understand the value
• It’s just not a priority right now

Let’s Talk Through These

When you say “I don’t have the budget,” I hear “I haven’t bothered to look.” Google has a free split testing tool.

When you say “I don’t have the technical resources,” I hear “I haven’t researched any solutions.” There are insanely easy to use A/B testing tools.

When you say “I don’t understand the value,” I hear “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” Companies have seen 100%+ increases from very simple tests.

When you say “It’s not a priority right now,” I hear “I think I’m a Guru and I enjoy hoping for success.” A bit harsh? Yes, but seriously… if this sounds like you, then you are probably one of the people that needs to ask yourself if you deserve a first page ranking.

Split Testing is Not Rocket Science

Again, I realize this may seem harsh to anyone who has not gotten started with testing, or is putting off getting started, so let me clarify:

• Designing tests can be very easy; start with your most obvious questions, and focus on variations that are simple.
• Split testing is very different from multivariate testing, just pick one element, and create an alternate version.
• Testing is most effective when lifts can be properly attributed; the benefit of split testing is that it focuses on one element at a time.

Where it Gets Technical

When it comes to testing, what seems to scare most people is actually not that complicated, but tends to involve math.

If you are not into math (which puts you in the vast majority) then phrases like confidence interval, statistical significance, and population size can immediately make your mouth dry and your vision blurry.

Let’s look at some of these a bit closer in an attempt to reduce the fear factor and shed some light on their importance;

• Confidence interval is used to communicate the reliability of an estimate. Just like with grades on a report card, a 90% is good, but a 95% is better; a 95% confidence interval means that the outcome of your test will hold up in 95% of scenarios.
• Statistical significance is a measure of whether or not your sample size (or population) is large enough to allow for assumptions to be made, specifically, that the outcome is based on a pattern rather than just chance.

The reason these measures are so important is that they are literally the measurements that impact the outcome of your tests. Your confidence interval will measure the likelihood of your testing pattern, and your population size will ensure that your sample is large enough to be statistically significant.

Translation: your test is effective and the outcome is accurate.

This is All Well and Good, But How Do I Get Started?

1. Choose a Testing Tool

This is often times the most daunting task for many folks as they look to embark on a split testing campaign. Your choice will vary on a lot of things, but more times than not, I’ve found it comes down to comfort with code and data.

If you are a Google Analytics™ wizard, and are comfortable with creating advanced segments and events, I might suggest Google Content Experiments.

However, if you are looking for an extremely simple, robust, and user friendly testing platform, I have to recommend Visual Website Optimizer.

I have been using VWO since the end of 2009, and in my experience, nothing is easier for designing, implementing, and managing split tests – this is why great CRO companies like Unbounce integrate their technology.

Additionally, if you are using wordpress, they have a very easy to use, free plugin.

2. Design Your Split Test

I find test design to be the most fun part of testing, well, other than seeing huge increases in conversion rates. But for many people knowing what to test is the most frustrating part.

I consistently get inspiration for new tests from what I like to call, reference cases. These are examples of other sites within your niche, or even more generally just within your space, that are commercially successful.

By commercially successful, I mean the big players – that are effectively closing in on their target conversions and creating revenue. It’s more than likely that these website have already invested a lot of time, energy, and money honing in on what works – so why reinvent the wheel?

I have found that using reference cases has allowed me to realize some rather large gains in short periods of time.

Analysis is simple; spend roughly an hour a day analyzing a collection of screenshots and looking for elements that your site lacks, things they are doing differently. You will eventually notice that patterns will begin to emerge, things like colors, functionality, and language. For more information on reference cases check out my post on Kaiser the Sage; moving from SEO to CRO.

3. Segment Your Population & Data Collection

You have some basic decisions to make before you deploy your test.

These have to do with who is going to see the test pages, how much traffic you want to test, and what you will measure as the conversion goals.

Some of the powerful features of VWO are:

• Geo Behavioral Targeting – Show different content to visitors based on the countries, cities, and even regions they are in.
• Heatmaps and Clickmaps – See where your visitors are hovering the longest and clicking the most. This is the same insight that provided Derek Halpern with the data to increase his conversion rate on Social Triggers.
• Split Testing URL’s – Split traffic between 2 variations of a landing page.

4. Specify Your Goals & Conversion Points

What good is testing if you do not have a clear criteria for success?

Before you deploy your first test, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want the outcome to be.

Just like Coach Klein said to the Waterboy, “Visualize and Attack.”

If you know that you want to increase sign-ups by 20% going in, this will change the way you approach the test and also your takeaways after it is over.

Tip: Don’t just track your main conversion. You have the opportunity to track any and all potential conversion points during your tests, and all data – is good data. VWO gives you the opportunity to track multiple goals beyond your main conversion point, including downloads, clicks, time on page, and more – see my example below:

Click to Enlarge

5. Create a Testing Schedule

Tests are easy to lose track of, especially if you get addicted (like me) and start testing everything.

It’s important to create a testing schedule before you get started. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy, try to go out a month into the future if possible. If you simply can’t come up with that many tests, or don’t have enough traffic, shoot for a minimum of 2 weeks.

Use your baseline data to figure out approximately how long tests should take to complete. Also, check out this handy split test duration calculator.

On the flip-side, if you have a lot of testing opportunities and sufficient traffic, you will benefit from VWO’s ability to run simultaneous tests on the same pages. Not to mention real-time reporting and test intelligence can be invaluable for higher traffic sites.

What’s more is they have a pretty handy test scheduler that allows you to schedule tests to start and stop at future dates, pause after a certain number of visitors, or automatically re-occur every day, week, month, etc.

Let the Data Be Your Guide

So hopefully this post has inspired you to get started with split testing (or if you are already testing – to take it more seriously and start doing more of it).

One word to wise; make sure you to take action with your data once you have. The greatest downfall of testing is not letting your results inform your changes and shift your overall strategy.

Split testing gives us incredible visibility into the psyche of our visitors, and allows you to fine tune your website’s experience to meet the needs of the majority of your audience.

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments, if you enjoyed this post share it on twitter, and never hesitate to hit me up with any questions, critiques, or feedback.

Thanks for reading.

The post Stop Making Excuses, Start Split Testing appeared first on SEO Nick.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with a friend and inspiration of mine, Alex Hillman.

Alex is the Founder of Independents Hall, a coworking community in Philadelphia. Alex has succeeded in building a large, constantly growing, and intertwined community of creative and driven people . His model for cultivating relationships is now being used around the world to start growing other communities in cities from Australia to Las Vegas, in large part through his Community Builder Masterclass.

I have been an Indy Hall member for over a year and am continuously impressed with the level of interaction between my coworkers; it’s nearly impossible to leave the Hall in a bad mood. Seriously, I can’t begin to describe the level of positive energy here, you need to experience it for yourself.

Communities are built by their users, supported by participation, and solidified by the deep friendships that occur as the byproduct of people’s everyday interactions. The experience of each user member is critical in defining both what the community is, and more so where it’s going.

Alex was nice enough to take some time and let me pick his brain on how he approaches managing the experience of Indy Hall, as it continues to grow, passing 200 members this year.

As a former software developer, how do you approach gathering requirements for developing a community?

One of the things that I learned as a software developer was that my customers never cared about my tools as much as I did. Clean, compliant code and well structured databases were important for efficiency and maintainability.

But those are foundation elements of the work; like the stuff closer to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. These foundation elements are important because without them we can’t climb closer to the top of the pyramid. But the customer [user] doesn’t really care about those elements, only the effects the presence of those elements have on their ability to kick ass at doing whatever they are using the software to do.

Having empathy for the users – and understanding what THEY care about, in their terms and priorities without dragging my own terms and priorities into the mix – is probably the single most valuable skill that I’ve been able to draw out of software and bring into community building.

This might be my favorite posts on the topic

The best online experiences focus on serving the behaviors of their audience. How has Indy Hall, as an audience, guided your approach to building an ideal experience?

Being offline gives us a really powerful tool in the fact that we have the ability to let our members co-create the experience. Literally, we design Indy Hall to be very special kind of “incomplete” at every turn with the intention being that our members see that incompleteness as an invitation to be a part of completing it. I liken it to “sanding off the rough edges”.

The power of this is that their experience steps up another level on Maslow’s Pyramid, past simply having a place they can ‘belong’ to a sense of achievement and self-actualization. The ONLY way I think this can be done is by getting people past the level of “attendance” and into the level of “participation.”

This is really hard to do online.  Like buttons and share widgets aren’t participation, in fact I think they’re probably worse because they trick people into thinking they are participating, but you’re really just trying to squeeze a little bit of juice out of their attendance.

Be honest with yourself: there’s nothing self-actualizing about clicking a “like” or “share” button.

The closest thing I can think of to a layer of participation in software is something along the lines of being a forum moderator. Mods have a critical participatory role that shapes the experience for themselves and for others. Obviously, a given forum can only have so many moderators, but then Reddit does things like their Gift Exchanges that are HIGHLY participatory, and extraordinarily self-actualizing (even if it’s just in fun).

The takeaway from all of this, though, is that participation is the holy grail. And there’s no point in faking it. Everyone can tell.

How have you incorporated user experience design into your process for managing growth?

Growth offline is an interesting subject because when you’re dealing with physical space, you have a different set of constraints than in an online experience. Cost vectors are also more complicated (and burdensome).

But at the end of the day, it’s still all about the people. Growth presents two primary challenges:

1. It gets harder to know everybody
2. It becomes more challenging for a newbie to enter into a place where it feels like culture is established

The first issue is Dunbar’s Number in effect. We have an approximate maximum number of relationships we can manage, around 150. Beyond that, something has to give. But even well before that, people max out.

How many people do you really know, that you really trust?

The second issue is a bit harder to battle because you need to design an on-boarding experience that makes the community feel like something they can break into, usually through a much smaller subset of the people. Once they establish trust with one person, the likelihood of them connecting with the second person skyrockets, and continues to grow with each conniption.

So we do two things, intentionally:

1. We create experiences that are specifically designed to get people to know each other on a basis other than their work. We design socialization experiences – for us things like Show and Tell, Happy Hours, and other events give people the ability to more fluidly work on building trust without the pressures of networking.
2. We embrace fragmentation. This is a bit counter intuitive but even in online communities and user bases, there is natural fragmentation. You can try to squeeze people back together but it’s more like squeezing sand – the harder you push, the faster it runs through your fingers.

The challenge is to keep fragmentation from turning into a clique. So we head it off by looking for people within the fragment and encourage them to be a “fractal” of the macro community – abiding by some of the major cultural norms while establishing some new ones of their own.

We also apply the same kind of socialization experiences for groups. The same way we work to help individuals “collide” serendipitously and get to know each other without the pressures of networking, we look for ways to apply this to sub-communities. This gives us a strong deterrent for isolationism – which is where cliques thrive.

One mark of a healthy community is that it has sub-communities (this is a sign of healthy growth), but the related mark of health is that the people within those sub communities are active participants in multiple sub communities.

Essentially, we design experiences at different zoom levels, but the general principals continue to apply at each zoom.

How do you balance a great user experience with the commercial interests of your projects?

You’re going to have to read my upcoming book for the nitty gritty details, but the gist is that the two need to be symbiotic. Generally, when user experience and commercial interests are put together, it’s like two animals fighting to the death. Only one is going to come out alive, and it’s probably whichever one was stronger (or hungrier).

The two need to be treated as equal, first class citizens, in order for balance to be maintained. This means looking at business a bit differently, but also means that the community needs to be a profit center rather than a cost center. We use participation as our measuring stick for everything, and our business approach is no exception.

As a user base grows and begins to separate into groups of sub-communities, how do you maintain the identity of the community as a whole?

I think I addressed this in my previous answer – the truth is that there will never be only one identity as it grows. There never was a single identity anyway – once there were two people, they each owned their own perspective of what the identity was.

The best thing you can do – and you shouldn’t wait until you’re growing to do this – is establish a higher purpose, a set of common goals that everyone can participate in fulfilling together. Developing this is more challenging than designing a “feature” or “identity” because what you’re really creating is a bearing, or a vector, for all of your future features or identities to fall into with some standard deviation.

This design process is at the core of what we cover within the Community Builder Masterclass, and we use that common purpose as THE foundation element for an experience design process that gets applied to EVERYTHING – from the layout of the room to the communication to partnerships to the business model.

The post Commuity Building & User Experience, Interview with Indy Hall Founder Alex Hillman appeared first on SEO Nick.

Jon Cooper’s Link Building Course is a comprehensive approach to explaining how to build links in plain language.

He put several months of research, interviews, and tests into practice to write one of the most definitive guides I have read on how to approach link building.

He steps through specific strategies, research tactics, and even gives you an up to date list of places to acquire authoritative links.

Special Offer
Stay tuned for free preview on Jon’s course at the end of this post.

A Quick Introduction

In case you are unfamiliar, let me give you a little background:

• Jon’s blog archives show that he first became serious about blogging in August 2011, having written nearly 100 high quality posts in just over a year.
• He currently holds Google’s #1 position for the highly competitive term ‘link building strategies’.
• He has interviewed some of the brightest minds in SEO.
• He has made some great additions to SEOmoz (with more to come).

The course gives you a lifetime membership to it’s content, which Jon updates regularly to maintain algorithm standards and best practices.

The very first sentence under ‘The Beauty of This Course’ is

It is, and always will be, a work in progress.

This means for about what most people spend on coffee in a month you have lifetime access to an evergreen content library on how to identify, develop, and manage your link building efforts.

Jon provides his contact information and invites anyone to email him with any questions, to which you can expect a speedy reply.

He also has a 60 day money-back guarantee, no questions.

Other Reviews of The Link Building Course

My Personal Review

I got to take a sneak peek at this course while it was in progress.

It took me a while just to make it through the first couple of chapters because it provides a lot of information, in detail.

Each section is laid out with step by step instructions on the logic behind the strategy, the changes to your website to need to implement it, and the types of results you can expect..

As part of the course materials Jon provides an excel sheet and documentation on some exact sources for link opportunities, with detailed layouts and diagrams on how to identify and build the most effective links, and an engine for generating ideas.

If you are still not ready to buy the course, download the free preview below.

Link Building Course Free Preview

As I mentioned earlier in this post, Jon has provided me with a preview of his course.

Download Free Preview

325 KB PDF

*Update – Paddy Moogan has released an epic Link Building Book you should also check out.

The post Point Blank SEO Link Building Course Review & Free Preview appeared first on SEO Nick.

Think about it.

Does your content really deserve to rank on page one for your target keywords? Is it one of the 10 best, most informative, most useful pieces of content on the internet?

If not, the answer is probably no.

Recently I saw this tweet from Russ Jones:

The first question you should ask a client is whether they are commited to creating 1 of the 10 best sites in their industry.

September 26, 2012 9:11 am via Osfoora for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@rjonesx

rjonesx

This may seem harsh, but you know what – he’s right.

I really like this concept, especially since the days of link building seem numbered and the shift towards link attracting has already begun.

It’s not news that brands are winning the fight against Google, to the extent that there is a pretty obvious bias towards brands within the SERP’s. And as Aaron Wall mentions in his post, Eric Schmidt has been quoted affirming this suspicion:

Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.

- Eric Schmidt, Google’s Schmidt Says Internet ‘Cesspool’ Needs Brands

Beyond being a brand, there are a lot of reasons why your content may not be attracting natural links.

You Need to Be Worthy of Ranking

Back to Russ’s tweet, and why I think this is important.

The idea behind this concept is that the game has changed for the better. It’s no longer about gaming the system, it’s about being worthy of the attention that top rankings in a competitive industry will bring you.

Companies Websites ranking on page one who are not among the best in their niche are squandering an opportunity that would be better served by their competitors. If you are getting the right traffic but can’t make the conversion, you don’t deserve that ranking.

Furthermore, it is not good enough to think you are the best or say you will be. In order for this approach to take shape and drive results,  this commitment must flow through your organization from the top down. It is a mindset that must be accepted by every person on your team and they need to believe in it.

Part of this mentality is developing a culture of testing and constant improvement; where any day you are not getting better you are getting worse.

You need to evolve your goals and their supporting process to be more agile, you need to dissect your competitors, you need to shift from SEO to CRO, you need to obsess over customers…

You need to be better.

Current State of The SERP’s

I wanted to go out and take a look at the first page of Google across a variety of vertical markets to see if after the Zoo Updates, only the best, most rank-worthy websites are holding the top spots.

I picked a variety of large, very competitive markets, to see how the big brands stack up against other websites competing in their space.

The verticals I’m looking at are women’s fashion, children’s products, technology hardware, software, and then some of the less savory verticals like credit cards, car insurance, and payday loans.

Google SERP for query “black dress”

As you can see this SERP is dominated by all big brand sites, not too surprising for a search term with 288 million competing results.

Google SERP for query “childrens bicycle”

As you can see from my red highlighted boxes above, this SERP contains some instances where the sites ranking are not major brand e-retailers or big box stores.

In fact, a deeper look at each reveals some interesting information. I personally had not heard of Meijer before, but upon clicking through their search result I arrived on their children’s bicycles page:

which as you can see, is fitting of it’s 3rd position ranking; it is a well designed, well built website offering a lot of options for searchers looking for children’s bike’s and is a relatively established internet retailer.

Moving on to ibike.org:

this page is quite the polar opposite of the retailer pages filling up most of this SERP, but due to it’s comprehensive evergreen content including a number of useful references and a very helpful age and size chart, it ranks appropriately.

Moving on to the final non-brand website in the SERP, ConsumerSearch.com:

Again, this is an example of another great content page. This particular page provides some really helpful advice for parents who are both shopping for a children’s bike and also some general information on sizing, quality, and what to look for.

Google SERP for query “laptop”

This one surprised me at first. With nearly 1 billion competing pages, I figured for sure the first page would only be name brand companies, and for the most part it is, except for one. Geeks.com (pretty decent domain) is outranking officedepot.com.

Let’s take a look at the page:

as you can see, upon a closer inspection, they are in fact in the Inc. 5000 list and on top of it their inventory is HUGE. Seriously huge… I had to crop the page (horribly yes I know) because it was over 20,000 pixels long.

Google SERP for query “email marketing software”

This SERP is a great example of what it takes to compete in a large software vertical filled with savvy technology companies.

These are all major players in the email space, and while domains like email-marketing-software-review.toptenreviews.com and massmailsoftware.com look spammy, the are in fact, legitimate. The previous you may have noticed is on one of the most trusted brand domains in the consumer review space; toptenreviews.com, and the other is the website for one of the oldest email software platforms, Atomic Mail Sender.

A Look at The ‘Less Savory’ SERP’s

Now I would like to look at SERP’s for some of the traditionally spam-riddled search verticals, and see if the ‘best of class’ brands still hold the top rankings.

Google SERP for query “credit cards”

Not many surprises here, although there is one thing worth noting; the top ranked spot is not a brand at all… it’s an affiliate site.

So what’s the deal? If you take a look at CreditCards.com you will quickly realize why this website is ranking among the major brands in this space; it deserves to be.

This site is a well-built, well-maintained reference guide for any user looking to learn more about credit cards, offering detailed and accurate information on credit scoring, interest rates, types of credit accounts, and a slue of helpful tools to guide users toward making an informed decision.

Google SERP for query “car insurance”

Just like the previous example, the SERP for “car insurance” is blanketed with brand names less one site, carinsurance.org.

Taking a closer look at the website:

Not only is this website a fantastic resource for comparing car insurance information, it has a comprehensive information center stuffed full of well written unique content and a large catalog of up to date statistics and nuances by state.

This website is better than some of the big brands and certainly deserves to be here.

Google SERP for query “payday loans”

Yes, that is not a payday loans site ranking on page 1 in Google.

Not terribly surprising since payday loans are pretty much the bottom of the online lead generation barrel, but in the above SERP we see what appears to be a hack on a legitimate Neurofeedback firm.

If you click-through from this SERP to eeginfo.com, you will notice the page title is NOT “Payday loan in 15 minutes. $100-$1000 Loans.” and the meta description is NOT “Get your payday loans online in USA. No phone. No tax. No fuss…”

So what’s the deal? Why is this ranking?

A quick look at Ahrefs.com gives us some insght:

That’s a big jump in backlinks, I wonder what the anchor text looks like?

Now this is starting to make a little more sense.

What’s not clear is why this domain was chosen; possibly due to something as simple as it being on a shared hosting plan and it was an easy target? Maybe the hacker was looking for an older site, as eeginfo.com is 12 years old, we can’t be sure.

What we do know is that this website has no place ranking in this SERP, and my guess is this will not last for very long.

What it Means to Be the Best

So you’re ready to make the commitment to creating one of the 10 best websites in your niche, where do you start?

Well this is going to have a lot to do with your type of business and your content strategy. If you are a content resource it means you have thoroughly researched, up to date, and comprehensive information on your topic areas. If your content is driven by your users (think Yelp, Trip Advisor, Facebook, etc.) it means you need to have an interface that makes it enjoyable to submit content and easy to share.

Things begin to look different when we move into Ecommerce… for starters there are some basics that you need, for example:

•  An SSL certificate
• Multiple payment options
• A trusted merchant gateway or payment processor
• Customer reviews
• Shipping options

On top of these the ‘nice to haves’ that will set you apart from your competition are things like:

• A money back guarantee
• Warranty options
• A loyalty rewards program
• Coupons and discounts

Key Takeaways

Search engines and their users are demanding the highest quality experiences from companies and their websites.

If you are not ready or willing to make the commitment to be the best in your industry, you don’t deserve to be on the first page of Google’s search results.

Commit to serving your audience and the links and rankings will come.

This post is a bit more of a rant than I usually write, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

The post Do You Deserve A First Page Ranking? appeared first on SEO Nick.

I invited my friend Anthony Pensabene to participate in this conversation with me; if you are reading this I would also like to invite you to add to our open conversation via the comments.

Anthony is a talented content strategist who has always expressed strong feelings about the role content should play within overall marketing strategy.

What you are about to embark on is a relatively informal set of questions and responses that dives into content marketing from the strategy perspective.

This is intended to be an open conversation, meaning we want to hear read your responses to these questions, your responses to our responses, and in general get your feedback on the topic. Thank you for reading.

What is the true impact of content on SEO?

Anthony Pensabene

I might blow some minds right now.  So be it.  I don’t really like “SEO.”  Let me explain.  I like SEO theory not SEO application.  Peoples done ruined it.

Marketing necessitates content, not SEO.  SEO was inspired by the structure of the Web.  ”Search engine optimization” is just a theory.  ”Optimization” is a theoretical ‘zen.’  You can never truly optimize anything…

The search engines are in a state of complete flux.

Dr. Pete who is a puppeteer, genius, and good citizen of the community, established that via his Mozcon presentation.  He also explained in his 2 Metrics That Matter post, that good rank (which is the best an “engine” can give?) does not guarantee good on-site stats or eventual conversions (yeah..conversions..that’s really what brands are ultimately after, right?)

So marketing always necessitated content.  Business always necessitated marketing.  You need some basic content to start search engine optimization.  I don’t think the content need be stellar for ‘engine optimization’…

If we’re talking about business optimization and achieving conversions, then CONTENT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.  It’s largely how a brand communicates with its target market…done and done.

Nick Eubanks

I couldn’t agree more. Marketing implies content which implies SEO, and not the other way around.

I think this is one of the fundamental downfalls of SEO’s turned content marketeers. Content should be created to serve a purpose, provide a solution, or at the very least provide a perspective.

More often than not it seems many internet marketer’s are writing for the sake of writing because SEO has become synonymous with content. This is wrong.

I feel like content has become a crutch for SEO.

I am not so ignorant to believe that SEO can exist exclusive of content; but when content serves and fulfills a need, SEO can be approached after the fact.

Anthony Pensabene

I believe the nature of SEO in its beginning (and to an extent now) inspired some sort of notion associated with a circumvention of… offering quality, knowing people, knowing business… those things (imo) that beget success.

Penguin was a huge marketing litmus test. It’s kind of becoming “if you don’t offer quality or understand marketing, get out the kitchen” scenario..

Nick Eubanks

Completely agree. Suddenly you were able to circumvent all of the usual customer acquisition channels and grab buyers directly from search engines and hurdle them through your conversion funnel.

I think to some extent you still needed to know business, but maybe not – perhaps this was more about knowing your audience and being able to trigger the emotions required to create conversions.

The Penguin update was the wheat farmer finally separating out the chaff. I would even take that one step further and say we have arrived. The days of using methods that can be completely automated to build links and generate content are numbered, they still work in a limited capacity but it is diminishing with each passing month.

How does content engage a target audience? What is the net impact of this engagement when it is positive or negative?

Anthony Pensabene

There are no guarantees in marketing.

Let’s do ourselves a favor as marketers; let’s be sadistically realistic. No one is harder on me than my mom me; and I’m willing to admit marketing failure or a level of ‘not as good as should have been’ at times.

Wil Reynolds, who is one of the most entertaining speakers I’ve observed, mentioned failure in his presentation, observing how in doing real company shit, sometimes you fail (failure is a reality.); but real companies are also passionate, keen, and tenacious.

To engage a target audience, one does research of comparable audiences, takes notice of personas, takes notice of popular trends then superimposes them against personas (check Marty Weintraub’s moz presentation), writes for the target audience, observes and tests, and revises moving forward to better the chances of good reception.

Also, time and patience is a huge, less-discussed factor. Great, well-thought, devised-for-end-user, time-devoted, quality-not-quantity devised content (in theory) is a sound method.

Are there guarantees? No.

Just ongoing, founded-due-to-experience-and-passion ‘best’ practices, which should be ever tested and modified; because people are dynamic and ever changing; therefore, tactics in getting their attention and respect being seen in terms of ‘timeless’ or ‘like clockwork’ is better left as exceptions more than rules. (Trying and ever-attending to consumers is timeless…) meaning to continue to ‘aim to please’ .. there is no such thing as a clear-cut formula..their good reception to the brand is not ‘timeless’ or ‘guaranteed’.. brands always need to work consumers.

Good content marketing is like facilitating a good relationship.

The relationship is valued but never ‘given.’ To think so is foolish. The repercussions of content which entertains, stimulates, teaches, and resounds with consumers…is priceless. Providing your end user with shit, tainted with noticeable traces of hastiness and half-assed-ness, has endless potential to do irreparable damage to one’s company.

Again, content is communication. Who/what is your brand? It’s like personal conversations.

Reputation and image is huge. A brand’s content is ALWAYS making some sort of impression.

How important is securing the right message? To me, it’s everything.

Nick Eubanks

I believe the brand comes first.

If the greatest link-building or press-grabbing campaign ever designed has the potential to skew the brand perception of a customer segment toward the negative, it fails.

To regurgitate my earlier statement; content needs to serve a purpose, effectively.

It needs to fulfill a desire, need, solve a problem, be entertaining.

Engagement is about finding that virtual park bench where you and your reader sit and chat. Even if you’re doing all of the talking, you can still engage in a conversation-like relationship through your content. You can reinforce ideas they believe in, speak to issues they stand for, make them laugh, cry, angry, excited, all based on the purpose of your content.

Writing with purpose sounds so easy. But so does writing for comprehension, i.e. making something simple to grasp and easy to understand.

Neither of these are true.

The easier something it is to read and relate to, or understand, chances are the harder it was to write.

Net impact of content engagement can be extremely positive and extremely negative.

Content that serves a purpose and engages with readers for the right reasons leads to brand evangelists, product advocates, and near-permanent mind-share.

Content, in almost any form, that is forced, thin, or just plain insulting can degrade and upset your customers.

Anthony Pensabene

I’m close with a family who owns a restaurant.  They truly enjoy the food, operating the restaurant, and the ‘community’ environment they created.  I observe them, and I’m like, “they get it.”  But if I asked them about ‘stratagems’ to use on customers, they would scratch their heads.

They are by no means dense.  They would just not ‘get’ the idea of trying to ‘game’ marketing or not be completely forthright with customers.

It’s a restaurant.  To borrow a line from Dr. Huxtable (80’s child), the proof is in the pudding.  I was talking to the owner the other day.  We were discussing the money-hungry, faceless nature of some larger-sized businesses.  I recognized how he had better control over his brand.  He agreed.  “I’m only as good as my last serving,” he said.

I liked that philosophy a lot.  Under that umbrella, image is everything; and one’s image is contingent on consumer reception.

Nick Eubanks

That makes perfect sense. After all a brand can spend tens of years building their image, positioning their products, and some poorly managed content can destroy their customer mind-share overnight. In the instance between Ocean Marketing (the agency/brand representative) and the customer, the content was their email correspondence (literally the communication) and it’s mismanagement resulted in, in my opinion, degradation to the brand.

I recently read a blurb in the August issue of Fast Company magazine covering the “Rules of Social Media” and it made me stop and think… it was: “your customers own your brand.”

This stuck out. Most of time we think of the company as the owner of the brand, after all they control it right? I mean I understand that customers perception of the brand is the brand. But to take that one step further I would go so far as to say a brand’s perceived value is it’s value. As you mentioned; a brand is simply as good as it’s last serving.

So a brand’s reputation is only as good as their last customer interaction; they are only what their customers believe they are.

How is content used for brand positioning? What are examples of where this worked and where it didn’t?

Anthony Pensabene

I think branding is inextricably connected to content (and just about everything a brand does for that matter).

Again, if we’re thinking of content as ‘communication’ then one can theoretical leverage the content to ‘speak’ upon anything.

However, what I think maybe you’re getting at is issuing content to consumers as a ‘branded producer.’  For instance, you want your brand’s personality and unique style to exude from the content while it may not be the immediate focus of it…

A great examples is the Vans brand has a separate media site, OfftheWall.TV.  Vans has always been a brand aligned with ‘counter culture,’ especially counter-culture sports, such as surfing and skating (though I think those sports are anything but counter #ohthetweenageirony).

They know their market; and their market has come to expect particular media and notions from the brand (such as regularly hosting offsite surf events like Vans Triple Crown) Perhaps some of you have noticed Vans shoes ‘coming back‘ in a big way of late?  Vans is very aware of its connection to skating/surfing and the growing popularity of those sports and associated goods/trends.

Another example is REI (they have that smart dude that works for them.)   The ‘travel with REI’ section off their main page caters to their targeted market.  Their content attempts to do everything content should… it’s entertaining, unique, communicative, and tailored toward the target market.

I purposely used Jon Colman.  He’s hella smart regarding UX and could probably provide some insight as to how REI’s attention to UX and purposeful content benefits the brand and drives sales…

As far as some poor examples…I don’t like calling people or businesses ‘out’ as bad examples.  But conceptually, any instance where consumer reception is placed in ancillary focus, one can expect a lesser chance of success.  Sorry is that sounds too theoretical.

My answer, to include all readers, must be:

Readers, content marketing is about your communication with the target market.  Be continuously interested and invested. It’s ongoing.  You’ll get better at ‘reading’ the market, the more interested/invested you become…

There are some examples of intent-to-implement disparity in this article, and BlueGlass provided a good post on ‘reviving a content promotion campaign.‘

Nick Eubanks

Wow. REI and Vans are really good examples of utilizing content for positive brand positioning.

What immediately comes to mind for me is Windell’s Snowboard Camp, and how a number of their instructors are Burton riders.

Burton is not only a pioneer in the winter sports industry, but they realized a long time ago that the young enthusiasts of today are the Burton professionals of tomorrow.

They have long supported educational programs for young riders, donating gear, lessons, and lodging to help aspiring young riders reach their goals.

This positions them in the minds of their key demographic by supporting their interests, supporting their improvement through education, and the trifecta; putting products in their hands.

Another great example that comes to mind is OK Cupid’s blog, OK Trends.

OK Trends provides detailed data analysis and findings based on the millions of data points that the parent website, OK Cupid, gathers operating as an online dating website.

OK Cupid is not directly in the data business, but this content positions them well on two fronts:

1. They convey to their users the power of their algorithm, and
2. They show their level of sophistication and understanding regarding user’s greatest interests; meeting other users.

They have built their brand on “math to get you dates,” and this is in large part due the mounds of time they spend reporting on the research they conduct, which they have found is very sticky for their audience. They combine this data along with some cheeky and fun writing to keep people coming back.

Anthony Pensabene

In reading the question a second time, many of our peers come to mind.  For a one-person to boutique brand setup, content is the front line for branding.

When I come across some “how to gain the attention of an influencer” posts.  I get the same feeling related to some brands using SEO as a sidestep.  Well, to start, think about why they gained attention.  If they are an influencer in our field, it’s likely they regularly offer content in some fashion, whether it’s guest posts, their own blog, helping on forums and Q&As, etc.

AJ Kohn and Dan Shure are two peers I highly respect.  Both gentleman mold their brands via their personalities and industry applications, showcased through their respective brand websites/blogs.

AJ is into the graphic nature of the Web.  He walks his talk on his blog and Gplus profile.  Dan Shure is superman-helpful, always offering help in Moz’s Q&A, lending advice on Twitter, and has even scored some clients by expressing to them what they could be doing better via his blog.

Nick Eubanks

Spot on.

I can think of a handful of people right off the top of my head that directly position themselves as thought leaders through the creation of content. In my opinion these are Ross Hudgens, Todd Malicoat, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Alex Hillman to name a few. All thought leaders within their respective industries who as you put it, walk their talk.

I think the main difference here is these people are all very successful content marketer’s because their passion comes through their content (Gary’s book literally calls out ‘cashing in on your passion’). There is nothing more engaging than having a talented person show you their talent, because they love it – and for no other reason.

How can a piece of content build advocacy and mindshare? How is this leveraged in terms of inbound marketing?

Anthony Pensabene

Again, in thinking of content as communication, it’s similar to asking how speaking builds interest/admiration and supplants ideas in peoples’ minds.

The notion is very simple.  What’s difficult is earning the interest, admiration, and ongoing consideration.

Marketing can be incredibly creative and stimulating; but it’s limited to the brand.

If the brand and respective product or service is not grand, the marketing content can only do so much.

Content should  never be misleading or ambiguous.

If your brand’s message, and associated product or service which serves as a physical implementation/extension of that message, is ‘for’ the target market, then it’s all about finding fresh angles to communicate the message to those who are hearing, are willing to hear, and have been listening for some time (if you’re listening right, the market will tell you what it wants…).

It’s a marathon and never a sprint.

Sure, some pieces of content can serendipitously run a viral race; but that’s usually a derivative of savvy, ongoing marketing and not due to an immediately genius idea.

Nick Eubanks

For me I think of reading some of Aaron Wall’s stuff back in 2004 when I first found out that what I was doing had a name and even it’s very own acronym.

I remember reading a post , I think it was backlink and pagerank lookup tools, and being excited about finding new information that was helping me think about a relatively new process (at the time there was not widespread awareness of SEO). I subscribed to SEOBook and became a loyal reader. Aaron knew what information I was looking for, he put the time in to do the research, he wrote well and provided me with value I was able to realize.

My readership turned into advocacy , all the while building mind-share through the continued communications and value-add content. Over the next 8 years I would share his content, tell people about his resources, tools, and success with pride and admiration because I believed it was truly helpful… I’ve never met or even conversed with Aaron Wall; this was all through the power of his content.

How is content used for signaling to search engines, your target audience, and other influencers within an industry?

Anthony Pensabene

Good question.

Intent largely shapes content… Let’s start with our users and consumers… Wil Reynolds shows a simple but highly useful tactic to start sleuthing toward user intent.  Just start toying with the Google search box..  For instance, if we had a tire company, I’d put in “tires” then start typing other letters and let the auto suggest give me searcher intent ideas..  Some will be more intuitive.. for example “how to select a tire.”

From there..the producer has to think about what medium is most educational/entertaining for their end user.  For instance, if we were to reference visual cues in tire selection, we’re better off expressing that information through a series of pictures or through video.

The type of results the content is to-be included is also crucial.  Without a brand and advocates actively sharing, the content is logged in an engine’s library.. It’s important to use each engine’s respective ‘dewey decimal system’ to ensure future learners can find the content via associated terms and subject.

If timing is an issue, it would lead me to think about leveraging pay-per-click ads as well as some social media ad platforms (such as Facebook).  I would also think about a landing page just for the time-sensitive content (Bill Sebald just wrote about that).

Authority… I do think (visually) those who implement the rel=author will gain some added perception of authority.  Furthermore, I do believe a regular content provider’s communication to search engines about the subject matter of their regular writings will influence “search authority.”

For instance, AJ writes about Twitter cards.  I believe his focus on the topic, coupled with his blog authority, and personal participation in social media will ‘signal’ engines to serve up his content on behalf of the subject. (I just did a quick search for “Twitter Cards.”  Yoast and AJ are within first seven SERs.)  I do think social cues will come into play, so say for instance if I write something more popular than Danny Sullivan (yeah right) and though Danny has more author ‘juice,’ I do think the popularity of my article would trump his authorship authority (or at least you would hope it would work that way..).

I’m still a strong believer in word-of-mouth… I guess now online, it’s social media.  The content has to be orchestrated for the end user.  Pick a medium and platform.  In theory, I champion the sentiments of marketing.. but we must obey the logistics of search..

AJ Kohn’s mozcon presentation on Google+ really opened my eyes… I always thought of it as a social media platform (like a Facebook); but AJ really opened my eyes to how Gplus implementations graduate on to Web search results.  He showed some examples I couldn’t dismiss… So, I guess where I’m going with that is no matter the nature of your content… first and foremost be mindful of the end user… but be mindful of how to communicate and log that content into the engines…

Take notice of practitioners in the space who place focus on particular mediums and platforms.. for instance.. if I were taking notice of Pinterest and visual platforms, Colby Almond is my guy… Joe Youngblood is into YouTube and music… AJ is your Google+ guy..  and I know Anthony Nelson is savvy with video…

Nick Eubanks

I think content can be used to signal all matters of a brand’s capacity. From capabilities and competencies to mindset, direction and approach.

A piece content, as you mentioned, can provide the end-user with enough information to empower them, hopefully enough to make decisions.

In my opinion, this kind of influence cannot be bought.

When content transcends from a static piece of information to an reference point that serves to empower it’s audience with the knowledge to drive decisions, I think of this as a digital asset.

Digital assets can be built into a portfolio, in terms of content this would be viewed more so as a library. A great example of this is the large evergreen content portfolio Jason Acidre has built on his blog. This content is just as useful the moment it is published as it is 6 to 12 months later, this is evidenced by the fact that Jason regularly will share posts that are months or years old because they provide value that is relevant to current discussions or topics within the industry.

How does content attract links, not to the first tier or even the second, but the third and subsequent tiers where a piece of content moves from a blog post to a reference point?

Anthony Pensabene

An evergreen project is more easily said than accomplished, for sure… Definitely, having that evergreen mindset helps.

For instance, you wouldn’t want to write about a specific event…unless you think you can do it so well it will be THE reference point… but it’s still difficult to assume such.

Jon’s was/is a great piece… he’ll have to continuously maintain it and remind us… ‘best’ link building strategies will evolve… Even Moz had to revise its acclaimed “Beginner’s Guides” of late…

Recently, I’ve been thinking something that is communal in application can garner ongoing interest.  So, it will have to be similar to a ‘best of’ post, but be approached more like a forum…

If you can inspire people to return to a Jon-Cooper-like post, and continue adding to it from the comments, complementing the host’s maintenance, that would be something pretty cool and valuable…

Nick Eubanks

Anyone ever called you a mind-reader before?

You took the 2 examples that immediately come to mind; Jon’s link building post and the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

To look a bit closer at how these posts continue to attract links, and more so to the question, how these post’s help reinforce concepts to the extent that they can actually motivate readers to link to bloggers who link to them, we need to look at some of the characteristics:

• Both provide near-comprehensive lists on their respective topic
• Both offer a category-esque navigation/filter allowing for only desired chunks to be digested on-demand
• Both are updated often as needed
• Both target an extremely competitive keyword phrase
• SEOmoz offers a lengthy introduction explaining why you need their information and an available PDF download

For all of these reasons these have become staples within the SEO industry and are now commonly used as reference points, not only online but offline in industry-related conversations.

Wow.

That was a long posts, huh? Thank you for taking the time to give us your attention and hopefully gain some useful information.

I am going to finish where I started; please join in our conversation and share your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading.

The post An Open Conversation About Content Strategy appeared first on SEO Nick.

It’s no secret, and it certainly doesn’t happen by accident, ranking in major search engines has become a science.

What used to be a handful of on-page, off-page, and architecture factors has evolved into hundreds of signaling attributes fed through a complex algorithm that is constantly being refined and learning from your behavior.

With search engines becoming smarter and more sophisticated with each passing day, it has become crucial for businesses seeking the benefits of organic search engine optimization to comprehend the undertaking required to rank highly in competitive search verticals.

This post aims to step you through dissecting your organic search competitors so you can better understand the time, money, and effort you will need to put forth to achieve your target rankings.

The Lay of the Land – Understanding Your Competitive Landscape

In the same way a landscape architect needs to understand the elements of the property he is designing for in order to achieve the goals of the project, you need to understand how your website stacks up to your competitors, what gold (or iron) may be underneath the surface, and how your surrounding environment can impact the outcome of your campaign.

First, you need to know what you are getting yourself into. Before you go throwing your clients money at writing content and building links relationships targeting a specific set of keywords, you need to assess the foundations and maturity of your competitive market.

Think of yourself as an asset portfolio manager, because that’s what you are. In the same way fund managers need to analyze company financial data and operational performance before making investment decisions, you need to analyze your SEO competitors to inform your investment decisions.

I see a lot of companies dive right into a new market and immediately start spending money on pay-per-click advertising, landing page design, and social media marketing without really identifying if and where the opportunity lies.

This whole approach of ready, fire, aim may work for some but it is the exception and not the rule.

Instead you should take steps to calculate your risk:

• Analyze your competitors within your target search vertical
• Identify weaknesses in either under-served segments or for under-optimized keywords
• Know your costs
• Project your returns
• Create a realistic timeline for both implementation and break-even

Getting Started with the Analysis

Once you have completed your initial keyword research, review your keywords to identify which are most relevant for your business and which have the highest volume:

1. Start by identifying your core set of target keywords, no less than 5 and no more than 10.

For example, if I were to pick the core keywords that best represent this post and have the highest monthly search volume, they would be:

2. Next, Use Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool to find ideas that Google identifies as semantically related. I ran the above keyword list through and drilled down to the second tier, see below:

3. Group your target keywords into 3 different buckets based on volume. This usually separates out head, body and long tail terms.

This gives you a sense of what kind of monthly search volume you can hope for if you are able to rank within the top 1-5 spots, with the #1 spot capturing on average 36% of clicks.

4. Optimize from tail to head.

For anyone just getting started with SEO this may be a new concept, but you may have also seen or read about ‘the long tail of search.’

Essentially what you are doing here is focusing on long-tail terms which are highly relevant to your business and also offer opportunities to build content for the larger, more competitive head terms.

Let’s take a closer look at this.

Anatomy of a Keyword

With your core keywords grouped into buckets based on exact local monthly search volume, you will most likely notice that the longer the search query, i.e. the more words in the phrase, generally the lower the search volume.

As a general rule of thumb the more words in the query the easier it is to rank for that phrase. This is certainly not an absolute but has been the case for a majority of the terms I have worked with. *If you know of examples where this theory does not hold up, please share in the comments.

Below is a graphical representation of what is meant by the long tail of search:

Image credit: Marketing Hub

As you can see above, shorter query phrases receive the most volume, these are your head terms, followed by body (usually 3-4 words) and then the tail which usually consists of keywords that contain 5+ words.

When optimizing any website digital asset for the long-term it is important to capture the low-hanging fruit to begin creating conversions as soon as possible.

This is best done by optimizing backwards; from tail to head versus the other way around.

What I mean by that is to focus on acquiring traffic for the relatively non-competitive terms and working your way up the tree, by optimizing for your long-tail terms and building toward your head terms over time.

What this allows you to do is create content that is targeted to rank for your long-tail terms in the short-term while building relevance and authority for your body, and ultimately head terms, since these are often included in the long-tail queries.

For example, the head term SEO Blog there are 349 million pages competing for the #1 spot on Google. But for the very long-tail term SEO blog focused on user experience philadelphia there are only 12.6 million competing pages, and this phrase contains your head term.

Looking at Authority

The next concept that it is important to understand is Domain Authority, often referred to as DA.

This is a very handy metric created by SEOmoz that essentially assesses a domain’s potential to rank. The higher the DA, generally the easier it is for the website to rank for a keyword.

For example, in the screenshot below I searched for ‘seo analysis,’ notice that seoworkers.com (#1 spot) is outranking a near exact match domain, seo-analysis.com (#9 spot), who also has more links, 65,341 vs. 41,935, most likely due to the fact that this domain has significantly higher domain authority; 65 compared to 27.

As you can see in the screenshot above, for the query ‘seo analysis’ the DA ranges from 27 to 87.

Please also note that in this example the site with the highest DA, SEOchat.com, is also ranking in the last position (#10). This is a perfect example of how there really is no one metric for determining SEO competitiveness.

Taking a closer look at the numbers in the screenshot you will notice that SEOchat.com only has 12 links coming into this page from 2 domains. Also please note that the only site outranking SEOchat.com with less page links (having only 1) is built on Google Sites, giving it a DA of 100.

DA to rule them all

There are varying opinions as to the true power of domain authority, but in my opinion, it is more or less the holy grail of SEO.

Now that you have your core set of keywords, let’s take a look at the DA of the competing websites. This is easily done in Chrome using the Mozbar extension, which will display a metric bar for each search result right underneath the meta description, as you may have noticed in the screenshot above.

Even though it is not a surefire indicator of ranking potential, I still hold that it is important to first look at competitor’s DA when starting your SEO analysis. In my opinion this will allow you to gain at least some initial visibility into your ranking potential.

Ranking potential is an assessment of where you can realistically hope to get your rankings to; if the top 5 websites have a DA of 90+ and your website is at 20, it is not realistic to think that you will be able to grab one of the top 5 spots. Again this is not always the case, but tends to generally be a safe standard of procedure.

Data Mining – Release the Scrapers

In order to conduct the analysis we are going to need to go out and grab some data; what we are going to focus on for now are the basic elements that contribute to domain authority.

For the purposes of this analysis I am going to pick a body keyword and look at the top 10 ranking websites.

The keyword I will be using is SEO competitor analysis

Here is the page one SERP on 8/3/12:

Next we need to scrape for the data we want to analyze. Fire up your favorite scraping tool, and if your just getting started I recommend checking out Eppie’s slidedeck: The SEO’s Guide to Scraping Everything.

The data elements we are after are:

• URL
• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Number of indexed links
• Number of linking root domains

Compile these in Excel for analysis,  which should look something like this:

Next we will look at the types of links pointing to these websites. My favorite way to do this is to run an Open Site Explorer report through Link Detective.

This needs to be done for each ranking URL, but for the sake of this post, I am going to pick only one. Instead of choosing the big brands, Search Engine Watch and Raven Tools, I’m going to use Web Confs; www.webconfs.com/how-to-analyze-your-competitors-article-39.php

Now we need to generate the Open Site Explorer report, which will look something like this:

Download the CSV and upload into Link Detective. This will return a breakdown of all of the links by type, and look something like this:

This report is helpful because it shows how your SEO competitors are building their links, and whether or not they are using spam tactics to manipulate their link profile.

From the above report we can quickly identify some actionable oppportunities:

• Approximately 30% of the sample links are broken. This is an opportunity for some broken link building, and Anthony Nelson can get you started.
• 15% are from article directories and 5% are from link lists. These are not hard to trump with more authoritative links.

The next thing I recommend is to take a look at what I refer to as the domains link diversity ratio or LDR, a very simple equation for identifying how diverse the website’s backlink profile really is.

This produces a score between 1 and n, with 1 being a perfect score representative of a website where every inbound link is from a unique domain, which is not really possible outside of some imaginary SEO vacuum.

What you are looking for are the outliers; the highs and lows. High scoring websites can be really high, sometimes to the tune of 257.14, which would be a website with 18,000 indexed links coming from only 70 websites. The lower your LDR the better.

Again this is quick and dirty, but can provide some quick visibility into the legitimacy of the links. Often time’s sites with a very high link diversity ratio are buying links, using link networks, or creating microsites to engage in link schemes.

Based on the data from OSE, the link diversity ratio for the webconfs.com competitive analysis URL is 1,775.36 (19,529 links coming from 11 linking root domains) and 156.28 at the top-level domain (1,802,896 links from 11,536 domains)

Now I personally have nothing against webconfs.com, but their link profile for this page is relatively weak. *Hint* if you operate an established SEO Blog (minimum DA ? 30)  this is traffic for the taking.

To take link analysis one step further you should look at a more meaningful measure of the legitimacy of a website’s links by looking at the number of linking C-Blocks, or the number of websites hosted on the same IP address.

Nick W. over at ThreadWatch has created a nice free tool for bulk checking for duplicate Class C blocks.

This is most useful if you have identified a handful of competing domains that you believe may be interconnected and managed by the same company.

Analysis and Opportunity identification

To use an old saying, now we are getting down to the meat and potatoes.

So what do you do with all of the data you have now gathered and some of the surface opportunities you have begun to identify?

Start mapping out a plan for action.

The easiest places to start are obviously scooping links out from your competitors that are either broken, of low-quality, or from the same C-Block.

As for the more competitive terms in your buckets, the ones that will really drive qualified traffic to your website, you need to take a more scientific approach, and here is what I mean.

Usurp The SERP – Planning the Takeover

The example I have provided is very small, to the extent that the nitty gritty analysis could be done manually without taking excessive amounts of time.

However, if you needed to identify tens of thousands of keywords to invest in as part of an enterprise SEO strategy, this would require a more scalable approach to evaluating individual keyword opportunities.

This can be achieved through designing an opportunity evaluation model.

Please let me preface by saying this is not a complete model, it is just an approach to analyzing competitive SEO drivers on a large-scale. However, if refined to project revenues within an order of magnitude, it can become a powerful business driver.

Due to intellectual property rights I can only share some of the model. I believe it is enough to get you thinking and moving in the right direction.

The heuristics I use in the model are as follows:

• Domain Authority (DA) – a logarithmic measure of a domain’s authority and ranking potential.
• Page Authority (PA) – a linear measure of an individual URL’s link and relevancy strength.
• Number of competing pages with target keyword in title (CP) – relative measure of SERP competitive landscape.
• Monthly Search Volume (MSV) – average exact local monthly search volume for individual keyword.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – average SERP click-through rate for URL’s ranking in position ‘y’.
• Conversion Rate (CR)- average conversion rate for target goal.
• Monetization metric (M)- Measure of approximate revenue per conversion, for eCommerce this may be average order size, for display advertising this would be eCPM, or earnings per 1,000 pageviews.
• Discount Rate (dr) – Rate at which the heuristic is discounted to adjust the relative significance within the model.

For DA and PA I used the average of the top n sites. N will vary in size based on your confidence interval requirements.

The model is then built on a spreadsheet so each of the heuristics can be driven by the assumptions, i.e. cost per content, average cost per link, SERP CTR, avg revenue per page or per conversion, etc. And the assumptions can be adjusted as historical data is collected.

What this allows you to do is built a large-scale model for evaluating each keyword, projecting the cost, time, and potential return based on using discount rates to adjust the relative importance of the varying competitive factors; DA, PA, and links. And placing this into a model that discounts each of these heuristics accordingly.

I realize this may be hard to visualize as it is not common in the SEO industry to talk about automating keyword analysis for thousands of keywords.

I will show you an example

Subscribe to my newsletter and I will tell you how I built my model. I will also step you through how to design and build one that fits your business, for free.

As you design your own models that are representative of your business, make sure you take the time to define your success criteria. In other words, set S.M.A.R.T. goals before you start your campaigns. This will allow you to watch the needle as it moves, and understand which direction it’s moving in.

It is not going to be an overnight success. It may take months of adjusting your assumptions and discount rates before it starts projecting accurate costs and returns.

Lastly, this does not make sense for everyone. Spending the time and energy to build an analysis model like this really only make sense if you are working on a project that requires you to look at thousands of new keywords each month.

Otherwise manual analysis and really getting a feel for your search vertical will probably give you a better sense of where to focus your optimization efforts then spending months tuning a formula.

Take the time to identify and accurately track your business’s true key performance indicators.

Wrapping Up

I apologize for speeding through what is probably the most captivating part of this post, the opportunity model, but this was intentional.

This concept is an important and technical approach to enterprise SEO which is too complex to properly explore within this post. You can expect a dedicated post on how to design and build keyword opportunity models in the near future.

In the meantime I hope have provided you with a straightforward path to begin identifying and analyzing your SEO competitors.

As always any thoughts, reactions, or feedback is welcome in the comments. I do my best to respond to each one.

Thanks for reading.

The post SERP Analysis – Dissecting Your SEO Competitors appeared first on SEO Nick.

This is more of a beginner post than I would usually write, but several friends at Indy Hall and around the Philly start-up community have been asking for a while, so I decided to write it.

The goal of this post is to provide a simple, straight forward, and step-by-step guide on how to approach optimizing a page on your website for your target keywords.

This is a pretty long post, so I’ve broken it up into the following chapters:

• Getting Started with Keyword Research
• Finding Related Concepts to Write About
• Designing Your Meta Attributes
• Internal Links
• Next Steps: Off-Page SEO

Time-frame: Depending on the volume of content on your pages, this will probably take you between 1-2 hours your first time. You will become exponentially more efficient, but for the first time plan to set aside a couple of hours.

My hope is that you will be able to take this approach and replicate it over and over again for other pages on your site, to begin to build the content ecosystem you will need to achieve high rankings.

Since this post is for the benefit of start-ups and bloggers, I have created a simplified version of the  formula for on-page SEO. The one I will be using for this post is:

In order to make this post as useful as possible, I am going to run through the research process using a target keyword suggested by Alex Hillman that I know nothing about. I am going to start this process the way I would for any new industry vertical where I have no prior SEO experience or knowledge.

Furthermore, the keyword Alex suggested is a one word head term with Wikipedia in the #1 spot. So this strategy is not going to get him onto page 1, but these recommendations will allow for anyone to at least get started with on-page optimization.

The keyword I will be using for this exercise is Coworking.

Getting Started with Keyword Research

In order to identify your target keywords you need to do a bit of research.

For more advanced strategies you should check out Keyword Research for SEO »

Google has a keyword tool that will allow you to get started quickly with pretty much zero technical knowledge, and here is how you do that:

1. Go to the Google Keyword Tool
2. Log into your Google Account (if you aren’t already)
3. Type or Paste up to 10 keywords you would like to target into the free-form text field, one per line
4. IMPORTANT: Change the ‘Match Type’ in the left sidebar from ‘Broad’ to ‘[Exact]‘
5. Click Search

Your results should look something like this:

Next click the ‘Download’ button and select ‘All search results,’ from here you can export into any one of the standard formats for data – I prefer CSV for Excel. I pull all the keywords into excel so I can sort the suggestions by local search volume in descending order and begin to weed out the terms that make no sense.

Of the 130 suggested keywords, after removing all phrases that were unrelated, location specific (i.e. NYC, Austin, San Francisco, etc.), had less than 100 searches per month,or terms that do no represent coworking, i.e. cheap office space, temporary work space, etc. we are left with the following list of 30 keywords and phrases:

Ok, now does anything jump out at you? For me it’s 2 things:

1. The highest volume search term is the least competitive, and
2. The top 7 highest search volume terms all rank below 0.50 in Google’s competitive index

Please note that the above competitive index is based on bid pricing and activity within paid search, and is not an accurate representation of the keyword’s competitiveness within organic search.

To properly gauge organic competitors for a target keyword you need to analyze many attributes of the current ranking websites by conducting a full-scale SEO competitive analysis.

If you are able to identify relatively non-competitive terms, Jason Acidre shows ways to gain traffic from low-competition keywords in his post: Content Trap Strategy – Drive Massive Free Traffic in 1 Month

There are also a number of other very useful keyword research tools out there, and for starters Richard Baxter has compiled a nice list

What comes next is some simple grouping and prioritization, essentially we need to split these words up into chunks so we can write about them. I find this easiest to do by visually scanning the words (this isn’t always feasible, but since there’s only 30, it’s not a problem) and pulling out what would make good H2/H3′s to break the content up into digestible chunks. If you don’t know what an ‘H2′ is yet don’t worry, I’ll get to this.

I personally try to think of phrase combinations that hit on almost all permutations of the target keywords while not sounding awkward. Here is what I have come up with for the H2′s:

• What is Coworking?
• Why Shared Workspace?
• Sharing an Office, It’s Not So Bad…
• Office Sharing is About More Than Work

Finding Related Concepts to Write About

So now that you have an idea of how to structure some of the content on your page to target keywords, you need to identify some closely-related concepts to bake into your paragraphs to keep your keyword optimization contextual.

Please let me introduce you to Google’s recently resurrected Contextual Targeting Tool »

Using the Contextual Targeting Tool you can enter up to 10 keywords, separated by commas, and the tool will spit out suggested Ad Groups, many of which you can expand, expand, expand. The power here is that Google is showing you what it sees as contextually relevant words within these top level keywords groups; Win!

Here’s an example of what my search for a few of the coworking keywords returned within the tool:

As you can see some of these suggestions are not useful; coworker flirting, annoying coworkers, coworker gifts, etc. but some of these suggestions can be easily used to expand on concepts within your page while staying within Google’s good contextual graces, such as: meeting rooms, coworker appreciation, collaborative workspace, etc.

Now comes the actual hard part, writing for your audience and keeping it useful and engaging. Unfortunately, I cannot do this part for you – but I can give this one tip that helped me when I was getting started:

Write for Humans, Not Search Engines.

I know that may seem counter-intuitive to the purpose of this post, and to the solid point made by AJ Kohn, but I’m a firm believer in focusing on your audience. This goes beyond the basis of SEO and focuses more on user experience and conversion optimization, but at the end of the day SEO is to get the qualified visitor, not the conversion. AJ does go on to explain one point I completely agree with:

“Having that keyword noun in your content frequently doesn’t make it worse, it makes it better.”

Once you’ve written content that makes sense and provides useful information to your reader, then go back over it and look for opportunities to use your keywords but don’t force them. Nothing is more awkward then keyword-stuffing, and search engines see this as a form of spam anyway, so avoid it at all costs. Instead find places where you referred to this, that, its, or other words where your target keyword is actually beneficial as a reference point.

Ok, now that you’ve gotten your on-page copy written and optimized, let’s move onto some stuff for the search engines…

Designing Your Meta Attributes

People will call these all sorts of things, but I prefer to refer to them as meta attributes or elements. What I am essentially talking about are the pieces of your web page that are written almost exclusively for robots search engines. I say almost exclusively because your page title and meta description are also extremely important to humans, but things such as your header tags, alt tags, and internal links are going to be mainly for the benefit of the search engines.

Page Title

Your page title is widely considered the most important search engine optimization and conversion optimization element of your page. This is given a heavy weighting signal by search engines and is also the first thing a searcher is going to see and read within Google or any other search engine. For both of these reasons your page title must contain both your target keywords and incentive for the searcher to click, all within 60 characters.

For a Coworking space in Philadelphia I would recommend the following title: Shared Office Workspace with Better Coworkers | Coworking in Philadelphia

Meta Description

Your meta description is the snippet of 160 characters that Google (or other search engines) show immediately underneath the page title in search results. This description can either be provided by the website, auto-generated by Google, or in some cases Google will even replace your specified description with one they feel is a better representation of your page’s content, with Matt Cutts making this statement regarding this practice:

 ”This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.”

Write your descriptions the same way you would write a short summary as a teaser, don’t just list keywords and phrases but instead try to boil down the value of the information in  your page to a concise teaser that will entice search engine browsers to click-through to your page.

Header Tags

Header tags which range from H1 to h6 provide an HTML hierarchy for the copy on a page. Each and every page on a website should have a unique, keyword focused H1 and then use h2-h6 tags as needed to break up the organization of other ‘sets’ of content.

For example you can look at the structure of this post, right now I am writing under a section called header tags, which is an h4, but underneath (within) the “Designing Your Meta Attributes” section which is an h3; meta attributes contains header tags. I am going to say this again because it does confuse some people, header tags are a hierarchical structure for the content on your page. Also, an important note, pages should only ever have ONE H1 tag, but can generally have unlimited h2-h6′s although as with optimizing any experience; use in moderation.

Alt Text

Alt text is probably most useful for images although I also recommend using it for links. Even though you may believe Google and other search engines can see images, and to some extent Google’s image recognition software is pretty sophisticated, search engine crawlers are looking first at the alt text set on the image and then at the content surrounding the images on the page to determine their context.

For an image tag the alt text is specified right in the call for the image, so <img src=”http://yourwebsite.com/uploads/some-picture.jp” alt=”This is the alt text or image description“/> I realize many of you reading this probably add images without ever seeing a line of code, for you this is usually offered up in a text field when you add the image and may be called alternative text, alt text, or even description within some content management systems.

For links it’s almost identical, with the alt text living right within the <a> tag, so for example <a href=”http://somewebsite.com” alt=”This is the alt text“>some anchor text</a> in addition to providing this for search engines (which likely adds little to no value) this does provide a description for visitors when they mouse over the image or link.

This is becoming a reoccurring theme in this post but don’t stuff your keywords in here either; use them but in the way you would to describe the image or link to a friend if you only had 3-7 words to do it in.

Internal Links

Internal links are exactly what they sound like, these are links on your website to other pages on your website. It is crucial to bake this architecture into your pages to relate content and concepts between pages and also send link-juice flowing from one page to another.

In the old days, before Penguin and over optimization, I would have recommended to always use your target anchor text for internal links. But oh how the times have changed. I would now recommend to instead focus on identifying phrases within your existing page copy where it makes sense to link out to other related content on your site.

An example of this would be if I were writing about improving your website with Google website optimizer, see what I did there?

Next Steps…

While you’re off to a great start, on-page optimization is one small piece of the SEO pie. There are larger site wide SEO contributors that you need to also look at like architecture, speed, security, domain age, web host, and more.

But chances are you are already off writing blog posts, so hopefully this can at least help you optimize your post content for the keywords you are targeting  for search engine rankings.

In addition to getting everything on your site optimized, you need to begin optimizing off site.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO really boils down to building links relationships and social outreach. Now I am by no means a link building expert, but I will say this, gone are the days of building links just for the sake of building links.

With the recent Panda and Penguin algorithm updates Google has pushed out, now more than ever before you must think about the purpose of each link and pay close attention to the links you receive.

It has been speculated that Google is now attributing more authority to links that send traffic versus those that do not. Personally, this makes sense to me; natural links that are of value to website visitors are usually citations used for editorial purposes, and tend to send traffic to the destination URL’s.

If you know of a good source that reports on this topic please add the link in the comments and I will update this post to include the link and a link back to you.

Links

As I have mentioned above, I am not a link-building expert, so instead I will point you in the direction of some people who you can put your trust in to help you build links relationships the right way:

• James Agate – How to Organize & Nurture Your High Value Link Prospects | Skyrocket SEO
• Richard Baxter – Link Acquisition & Contextual Relevancy | SEO Gadget
• John-Henry Scherck – Using Copyscape for Easy Link Wins | SEER Interactive
• Jon Cooper – Link Building Strategies | PointBlankSEO
• Ross Hudgens – Link Building Strategies | Ross Hudgens

Social Signals

The easiest way to drive social signals is through direct outreach. Social signals offer some varying levels of SEO impact, but the true value in my opinion is 2-fold:

1. They send you traffic, and
2. They spread your brand which has the potential to increase your audience

The post How to Optimize Any Page for Your Target Keywords appeared first on SEO Nick.

Last month’s post on Fresh Insights from Some of Philly’s Top SEO’s generated a lot of great feedback in the form of comments, tweets, and even some very nice emails. The reoccurring theme of the feedback was for more; more Philly SEO, more Q&A, and especially more coverage of the brilliant minds in or from this great city.

This post features some awesome industry feedback and insights from SEO’s who are natives of Philadelphia, some of whom are now kicking ass and taking names in other cities – but just for the record, they all got their start right here.

Just a quick note: this post is long – coming in at just over 4,000 words… so take your time, and perhaps take breaks, so you don’t get burned out on too much SEO (if that’s even possible). In any case, please let me know what you think and if you would like to see more of these. Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy.

Responses in this post are from the brilliant mind’s of the following people:

 John Doherty

Check out his Blog at www.JohnfDoherty.com, his Tweets @dohertyjf, and his Company Distilled.

 Ethan Lyon

Check out his Blog Posts, his Tweets @ethanlyon, and his Company SEER Interactive.

 Devin Concannon

Check out his LinkedIn Profile, his Tweets @devin_concannon, and his Company FreePeople.

 Amanda Orson

Check out her Blog at AmandaOrson.com, her Tweets @Phillian, and her Company The Lacuna Group.

 Adam Melson

Check out his Blog Posts, his Tweets @adammm, and his Company SEER Interactive.

 Adam Sherk

Check out his Blog at www.AdamSherk.com, his Tweets @adamsherk, and his Company Define Media Group

 Chrissy Buckley

Check out her Blog Posts, her Tweets @cbuck1186, and her Company SEER Interactive

 Tom Harari

Check out his Blog at TomHarari.com, his Tweets @tomharari, and his Company Resolution Media

1. With all of the buzz around SEO now encompassing a wide variety of digital marketing competencies, to the extent that some have suggested a re-branding to inbound marketing, how do you see the industry (and responsibilities of those within it) continuing to evolve over the next 1-2 years?

John Doherty

My *hope* is that we can continue to move out of the silo of rankings and be entrusted to deal with more areas of online marketing, which is really what we do. Along with this, I think we’re going to have to specialize. We can’t all be generalists and good enough at linkbuilding, technical issues, email marketing, PPC, and all the rest to do it all ourselves. We’re going to have to work in teams more.

Ethan Lyon

In the coming years, SEOs will need to take on more of the marketing mix, in particular PR.

It’s incredibly difficult to reach out to someone at Wired or Mashable or other leaders in an industry to ask for something when you haven’t given them anything. Why should they care about your linkable asset? 99% of the times you’re just noise and will be tuned out accordingly. However, if you help writers out with a story they might be working on or give them advice when they might need it, they’re much more likely to reciprocate and help you out when you need to share a linkable asset or need feedback on something to make them link to it.

How do you do this? Set up RSS feeds on Quora & Twitter with their username and a “?” to see when they’re asking questions. Use ifttt.com to push all questions to your mobile, then immediately answer them when they have a question. If you don’t have an answer, research it ASAP or recommend someone you know that might be able to help them.

Then, have an RSS feed with anything of theirs in it (including blog posts, mentions, etc), and be sure to comment on them. If you help someone out when they need, it chances are they’ll reciprocate.

Think about the Hare Krishna that gave away flowers at airports… They found when they gave away flowers, people felt compelled to reciprocate (which meant donations). It’s human nature to reciprocate. Robert Cialdini wrote about it in his book, “Influence.” To tap into that for SEO is so powerful.

PR is just one of the many parts of the new SEO’s responsibilities. It’s funny because I used to write business and marketing plans where I would interview customers, perform industry research, have long conversations with the clients about their business and now I’m finding I’m reverting to that cycle to understand how I can build it into the SEO campaign.

SEO is not just about building links, it’s about understanding the goals of the business owners and figuring out how you can meet those goals through online marketing.

Devin Concannon

To me this is such a tired argument. Rather than banter back and forth about the semantics of job titles and the different disciplines our industry encompasses, I try and focus my time on continuing to learn more of the many facets of this profession, putting in practice as many of the constant improvements coming down the pike as I can, and dreaming up & pursuing search marketing, design, and PR ideas. At the end of the day my goal isn’t to have the most creative title on my team, it’s more organic visibility, more customer engagement, and (hopefully) more revenue.

At the end of the day I feel whether you classify yourself as an inbounder, digital marketer, SEO, etc is so subjective too. No two people bring the same skillsets to the table. If you’re an SEO, just because you’ve read about paid search doesn’t make you an SEM expert. Ultimately it comes down to your knowledge, experience, and most importantly, your successes across strategies of different scale. I run a paid search campaign that’s going pretty well for a friend’s barber shop at the moment. If I was given the keys to my employer Free People’s paid search program, best believe it would look like a hot mess for a little while until I gained some insight into running an account that large in scale.

So that in a nutshell is what I feel we have to grow out of as an industry; lot’s of people talking, not nearly as many adding real value. The propensity to market the individual with the same principles we preach to the businesses we help. To add skills to our titles without actually having conceptualized, project managed, and brought any of these grand ideas to a fruition that bore real value to a customer or a business’s bottom line. I understand people have businesses they’re trying to market, but if your posting some useless bullshit why do you have to put it in on Youmoz where people are looking for real ideas and strategies. I don’t post a lot or go out of the way to market myself not because I’m not interested in recognition, but rather because I spend 50 to 60 hours a week actually putting these concepts into practice. Finit! The people that are putting in the 60 and then writing a post, that’s probably who I want to be reading.

Amanda Orson

Over the indeterminable future the “SEO industry” will become more and more mainstream. This is not a shocking or revealing speculation.

The ramifications of it though, I believe, are that small SEO companies will fold or be consumed by larger increasingly more “full service” digital marketing companies. We may also see a stream of individuals begin to work for Fortune 500 corporations as their internal marketing departments become more Internet focused and less comfortable outsourcing the task, both for intelligence and cost reasons.

Some “Freelance SEO’s” will still exist, but as postmodernism dictates, their functions will become more niche as their primary source of income will stem from a single point of expertise – site audits, link building, paid advertising etc. What will be interesting to watch is whether ‘networks’, or referral interdependency, are created between these solopreneurs and tiny agencies that coexist in different cultural shards of the larger digital marketing/ SEO picture.

From the greater affiliate marketing world I can think of at least a half dozen people off the top of my head who, in the last several years, have evolved into SEO consultants for large corporations, gone into building competitive intelligence tools, and founded one of the microniche link-building agencies discussed above.

The irony is that the very marketing agencies the SEO phenomena disrupted suffered because they clung too long to the idea of a mass market and didn’t evolve fast enough on the digital frontier. I think we’re watching the marketing industry ‘grow up’ and reamalgamate in a new form, with new leadership and new companies at the helm.

Adam Melson

Over the next 1-2 years, there are definitely going to be SEO strategies that will fly under Google’s radar & work, but I expect a change. It is going to be increasingly hard to do well in SEO without a face. Google can see sites that have large blog readership, interact on their G+, have an active twitter account, have an increasing number of feed subscribers & more.

Faceless sites won’t make the investment in pumping out new unique content. Fly by night sites won’t publish great articles & promote them with (gasp) a phone call. PR is increasingly a larger component of an SEO strategy & this combined with the efforts mentioned above are ways the engines can identify more quality sites vs the trash.

Adam Sherk

I got my start in online marketing and eventually SEO through public relations, so I’ve always been a proponent of a diversified, multi-faceted approach. But SEO has always had technical, editorial and marketing components so I don’t things are actually that much different now than they were 5-10 years ago.

The tactics have evolved but the fundamentals are the same, and SEOs need to be well versed in all these areas. A lot of what we do in enterprise SEO consulting is making sure all of those departments have a clear understanding of the SEO implications of their work and how they need to collaborate.

Chrissy Buckley

Here are my thoughts: SEO is like the paella of marketing. It takes just about every type of marketing ability one could possibly have and spits out this awesome dish that can feed the masses. On any given day I beckon on my previous PR and marketing work, whether that be outreach messages or thinking about what might appeal to the masses. I don’t think it’s an insult to be considered inbound marketers for the mere fact that just means we have to prove ourselves and challenge ourselves to answer all sorts of questions.

In the next one to two years, I think you’re going to see a lot of traditional marketing and PR professionals cross over into the field and try to glam up the process. I can also foresee SEO professionals becoming more and more desirable to businesses. I see only good things for the SEO business.

Tom Harari

Understanding marketing concepts is critical to successful SEO. The reality is that with GSPYW, Venice, and Panda, Google has forced webmasters to adapt to a broader definition of “search optimization” or be left behind. I’m hesitant to say that to be successful in SEO you have to be an expert in social, content creation, email marketing, etc. – but you do need to be familiar with those channels to the extent that you understand how they play into the overal marketing mix and how they affect search.

Author snippets increase CTR for a reason. As do video snippets. Sure some may be able to game these signals, but in the long game putting an increased effort into building and distributing quality content and digital assets will only help amplify what we think of as “SEO”.

2. Some people believe that all you need to do is write great content and Google will do the rest. Personally I vehemently disagree with this statement and believe it takes a lot of hard work marketing your content, whether it be through well-placed (or earned) links, press, social outreach, paid promotion, word of mouth, etc. What is your stance on just creating value-add content vs. the need to promote it?

John Doherty

While I am a firm believer in content marketing, I absolutely think that you have to do outreach. Part of this outreach is through already established relationships, and letting people know CAN be as easy as sharing it through social media. Other outreach is going to take a professional PR pitching to a large site where you want a link or feature from. I’ll say it again: great content is NOT enough. Promotion is necessary.

Let’s also not forget that creating great content starts with the audience in mind. When you create content with a specific site or set of people in mind, outreach goes much easier.

Ethan Lyon

Guy Kawasaki is a master at promotion. I can’t remember where I saw this, but he said he didn’t write anything really groundbreaking, but he just knew how to promote other ideas better the people who had them. Might want to watch some interviews with him before quoting that but the point is, you can create all of the amazing content in the world, but if nobody hears about it, then how can they promote it?

In an ideal world, great content goes viral. However, I discover great content every day that no one seems to be talking about.

The first step is to find people that might be interested in your content. Stalk them and promote their stuff / answer and ask questions. Then when you have something that might really interest them, then let them know about it. This ties into my first answer.

Devin Concannon

This to me is a simple answer. What’s the likelihood you’ll be able to create a compelling, engaging piece of content or develop something in a relatively short space of time? I’d wager you have an astronomically smaller chance of creating something that captures people’s attention in 4 hours than you do in 2 months. So the success of your idea is all about the expenditure of time. Whether the work goes into the front end in creating something so useful, thought provoking, or compelling that it attains virality or on the back end efforts of marketing and promotion of your product or content, the work is still getting done somewhere.

Whether your creating something relatively simple that fills a need and market the hell out of it or it’s product\content that’s so awesome it takes a hand in marketing itself, figuring out where your opportunities lie is essential to crafting your marketing strategy. But even with great product or content, we’re not at the point where Google will just “take care of the rest”. Our jobs as SEOs is to make things “the best”.

I’m constantly looking for more opportunities, things to improve, and data that I can make actionable improvements from. My company Free People is a perfect example; we make beautiful bohemian clothing and lot’s of our customers are independent fashion blogger’s who blog and style our product all the time. Often I get great links by just reaching out, telling them we love their posts and just asking them to link back to us. That doesn’t mean I’m not constantly looking for other opportunities to get a link. People are rarely successful by accident or in spite of themselves.

Amanda Orson

Far be it from me to say that a guy who makes millions more than I do is wrong, but I believe Kawasaki’s assertion that if you ‘write great content, Google will do the rest’ is flawed. There would be no need digital marketing agencies, right? Everyone would be a copywriter, video editor or < gasp > infographic producer in this Orwellian society where Google determines what gets to live and die in obscurity.

A content strategy focused on just creating good content- that’s it- is like buying a lottery ticket to get rich. You’re banking on variables beyond your control and prediction.

The ratio of content-value to promotion changes with time and topic, but I think we can all agree that a lot of up front hustle (promotion) for quality content can produce big returns over time if it’s consistent, or viral returns (read: little promotion necessary) when you publish really exceptional content later. Wine Library and Mixergy are both examples that come to mind.

Adam Melson

Writing great content – yeah. I can write the greatest article in the world, but if no one is subscribed to my blog then it will never be shared. Promotion is absolutely necessary for everyone except the 800 lb gorilla. Even large sites who write great content will not gain traction without social promotion.

Yes, people should write great content, but they should have a plan on how to push it out.

Adam Sherk

I primarily work with news and content sites with well established brands, and I can tell you that even major news sites cannot simply publish and forget about it. Publishers have large consumer marketing departments and audience development teams for a reason.

It takes hard work to build brands and audience, in any medium. Search is no different. You need mechanisms in place to get the ball rolling and keep up momentum.

Chrissy Buckley

Have you ever slaved over a white paper for weeks and produced AMAZING content only to find out no one read it? I have and it sucks. The most frustrating thing in public relations was that I would write up these beautiful content pieces and really believed that someone somewhere would read them. That was not the case.

I think SEO is different. You have the ability to write kick ass content and then you also have the ability to place that somewhere other than on the desk of a crotchety journalist who for whatever reason won’t read it. It amazes me that I can find dozens of bloggers who would post guests posts about the most ridiculous subject matter. All and all, to have a successful campaign you need great content and a solid outreach campaign AND you need to promote it.

Tom Harari

Maybe it’s because I began my SEO journey doing link building for SMB’s but I’m firmly in the camp that great content needs effective outreach. Truly great content doesn’t necessarily need GREAT outreach, but letting people know about the content is half the battle.

I’ve seen blog posts with very little outreach catch on like wildfire earning links, shares, and a wave of visits simply because the content resonated with the intended audience.

I certainly don’t blog as much I’d like to, but an image post I did in February caught on with only 1 tweet that went out automatically when I published it. (I didn’t think it would catch on at all).

That being said, take the safe route and publicize your content early and often to the people that matter (linkerati, bloggers, journalists, etc.)

3. What type of content marketing strategy have you found to be the most effective and/or sustainable?

John Doherty

As I’ve said before, having an editorial calendar and diversifying your content types while staying on-brand, identifying influencers in your space and engaging with them where they hang out (whether online or in person) is one way to win. I haven’t personally done this, but I think that there is something to Coke’s 70-20-10 principle, where 70 percent of content is low-risk and the bread and butter that they know works. 20% is innovating off of the content that they know works. 10% is just crazy content that they have no idea if it will work, but if it does, the pay-off can be much greater than the other content.

The key to content marketing is consistency, and success does not come overnight. Look at the well-known bloggers. Look at the brands that we admire for content marketing. They’ve been doing it for YEARS. But ultimately, I think it pays off.

Ethan Lyon

1. Find a similar linkable asset.
2. Find who has linked to it.
3. Stalk them.
4. Create your asset and let them know about it or get their feedback before anyone else.
5. Create an event around it (maybe a contest…)
6. Publish it on PR site, write blog posts about it on your site (informed by some KW research), try to create a video, transcribe the video. The point being, you want to promote the asset in every channel possible (video, blog posts, guest posts, PR sites, slideshare, try to speak about it at a conference, etc).
7. Then anytime someone mentions a similar asset or your asset, make sure they know that you did it and should give you proper attribution.

Check up on it every month and there’s your sustainable linking strategy.

Devin Concannon

Well again this to me is a question of what scalable for your business? At Free People I’m fortunate enough to work often with our very talented bloggers, marketing manager, and a PR manager. So aside from putting out consistently interesting content on a daily basis they also take on big initiatives like giveaways, charity auctions, fashion lookbooks, all things that our customers really respond to. Obviously having this many resources to aid in content creation is the exception rather than the rule. To me the most scalable solution for a small business is transparency.

It works so well for a lot of companies because it’s simply giving customers a look behind the curtain at the things you’re already doing. It’s a humanizing effect that let’s customers or prospects relate to your company as people on this journey with them rather than another faceless organization.

With the advent of smart phones, these days you can basically do all your content on one device. Some video’s, pictures, topical blogging, company news and inside jokes and all of a sudden a potential customer who’s 20 states away has a sense of the people he’s buying from on the web. It’s relatively simple idea to but if embraced by your small business it can be powerful stuff.

Amanda Orson

In terms of both efficacy and sustainability, evergreen content with broad appeal is still tops. I think the single best breakdown I’ve come across on how this is done can be found by perusing Tim Ferriss’ requirements for a Guest Post.

Adam Melson

Sustainable content marketing strategies – there are different levels of a content strategy ranging from just above spammy to absolute quality. Strategies should have multiple ways to use content to get traffic & get links. Whether content is created for guest posts, interviews, written to capture the longtail or to spark controversy & get mentions that way, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket & expect to win over the long run in SEO.

Adam Sherk

It sounds cheesy but the best content marketing strategies are typically those that utilize a “win-win” or “give to gain” approach. A “win-win” effort incorporates some kind of incentive for sharing and/or participation. As for “give to gain” in our industry companies like SEOmoz and Distilled have built strong followings and reputations by sharing a lot of useful information and resources, and building a community around that.

Chrissy Buckley

I’ve found a ton of success in the interview marketing strategy. It’s really interesting to see how many people would LOVE to interview someone who claims to be an expert in a field. I’ve also noticed that no matter the content strategy, you have to personalize the outreach to make the strategy successful. The more I can relate to the blogger I’m targetting the faster the response is.

Tom Harari

The most effective content I’ve seen with clients I’ve worked with usually tends to be either image based or video based content. This isn’t the case with everyone, but there is just so much written content out there that to stand out your writing really needs to be top notch.

Many businesses struggle with hiring quality writers, and while a few startups are making it easier to get into the content game (contently, skyword, and techvalidate), depending on the vertical it may be a better option to focus on visual content instead.

Conclusion

First off – thank you all who contributed, this turned out so much better than I anticipated. As has been heavily discussed, SEO is (or has) transformed to encompass so much more than rankings and traffic. One message I see pretty consistently delivered in this post is the emphasis on continuous development of technical expertise in the areas that surround SEO, to make SEO better, things closer to the traditional definitions of public relations.

The other pattern in this post is the lack of pattern when it comes to each persons experience with sustainable content strategies. From mixing up content topics to include 10% of ‘just crazy,’ writing more core audience-focused evergreen content, focusing on mobile readability, leveraging image and video, ‘giving to get’ or simply outsourcing to established writers – I love the diversity.

More than anything else, I think this reinforces that there are so many ways to create sustainable content that will continue to provide value for your readers and produce results in the search engines, so get out there and test them all to see what works for your target audience.

The post More Insights from the Philadelphia SEO Community appeared first on SEO Nick.

In the past 8 months I have been faced with some hard questions.

I have interviewed at least 100 people, 30 or so of which were for SEO positions – if not more, and this was only after completing hundreds of screening calls. I think I was alright at answering most questions, certainly not all, but there were a few that I was never quite sure of.

The types of questions that catch you off guard, or leave you wondering “Was that a good answer?” So I kept a list of these questions to build off of and for future reference during my interviewing and on-boarding. I was never really sure what to do with them, until I saw this tweet:

I'm glad you asked... The Best SEO Interviews You Will Read in 2012 http://t.co/3nEQA0A7*Warning* Does include valuable SEO insights!

January 29, 2012 2:32 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@011100110110010

Sean

and after reading the article I figured since I know some smart SEO’s right here in Philly, I would just ask them.

Below is a short summary of each of the people who were so kind to contribute their thoughts on my questions, and help me gain some insight into what I consider ‘not your average SEO questions.’ Enjoy.

Ian Howells

Director of SEO, TrueAction

Ian is probably best known for his candid, no bullshit approach to SEO. He understands what works and what doesn’t because he’s tried it, not just read about it. With a keen grasp on what really matters to search engines, and loads of hands on experience, Ian is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to search. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out his personal SEO journal at Halo18.com. One of my favorite recent tweets from Ian is:

@NickLeRoy The "but this isn't whitehat!" thing... ugh. Know what else is against the Google guidelines? Rank checking.

December 28, 2011 1:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@ianhowells

Ian Howells

Justin Freid

Media Supervisor, TPG

Justin manages digital media for some of the largest brands on the internet and has a strong reputation for understanding enterprise-level PPC. A frequent contributor to Search Engine Journal on the topic of paid search, Justin has developed a reputation for squeezing value out of PPC campaigns.  One of my favorite recent tweets from Justin is:

Tips for Managing High Spend, High Volume PPC Accounts | Search Engine Journal http://t.co/jywjVh5 via @sejournal

September 5, 2011 6:57 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@Justin_Freid

Justin Freid

Bill Sebald

Digital Marketing Manager, Quench U.S.A, Inc.

Bill is probably best known for his blog Green Lane SEO. Bill is an all around tech junkie and has been involved in digital media since the 90’s. I first stumbled across Bill’s site while poking around Google for SEO’s in my hometown (Bill and I are both from Berks County, just like Taylor Swift). I was not expecting to find much, so it was very surprising when I came across Green Lane SEO, and after hanging out with Bill at a few Grail’s, I started following his work. One of my favorite recent tweets from Bill is:

Hey spammer, I'm not clicking the "someone posted embarrassing pictures of you" link, not b/c I'm wise to you, but b/c that's very probable!

November 17, 2011 3:48 pm via Silver BirdReplyRetweetFavorite

@billsebald

Bill Sebald

Wil Reynolds

CEO, Seer Interactive

In Philadelphia, and throughout most of the search industry at this point, Wil needs no introduction. After gracing the cover of the Philly Business Journal to start the year, and with frequent appearances on SEOmoz, Wil is well known for continuing to find new ways to innovate link building. What many SEO folks don’t know is Wil’s deep commitment to the Philadelphia community, as shown in one of his recent tweets:

WOW last month @SEERInteractive team had 130+ volunteer hrs in 16 orgs! So proud of these guys, but wanna break 200/mo next year.

December 5, 2011 2:55 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@wilreynolds

wilreynolds

Bill Rowland

Sr. SEO Manager, TrueAction

Perhaps best known for organizing SEO Grail Philadelphia, Philly’s most popular SEO Meetup, Bill has been heavily involved in internet marketing since first getting into eCommerce for a large Philly-based retailer back in 2000. Bill’s fun outlook on SEO and ever-present sense of humor have made him a crowd favorite for chatting SEO over a few beers, and here is an example from one of my favorite recent tweets:

@billsebald Uh, last month. Dude, all I have to say is Yoohoo, Beef Jerkey and Hops/Barley. 'Nuff said. Ohh, lost keys ;)

July 21, 2011 8:55 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@billrowland

Bill Rowland

Eppie Vojt

Digital Marketing Consultant, JPL Creative

Eppie is best known for his development of the CTR Theme, and in many small SEO circles for his uncanny knack for discovering major opportunities that he has become famous for successfully exploiting. When he’s not busy building or flipping websites, you can… actually nevermind, that seems to be all he does all the time. Eppie will occasionally tweet, and when he does you can look our for gems like this:

If you've been secretly yearning to see a white SEO rap about his mustache, I've got the video for you: http://t.co/bzGdhoTh

February 1, 2012 12:01 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@eppievojt

Eppie Vojt

Mike King

SEO Manager, Publicis Modem

Mike is a Philly transplant now gracing Brooklyn with his keyword genius and charm. He is probably best known for his development of keyword level demographics and has recently been speaking all over the world at various search and link-building conferences. Mike’s unique mix of talents, including blind rapping and partnering with Dr. Seuss to teach SEO, come mostly from his previous life as a software and web developer turned SEO Engineer. Mike’s candid approach to all things search make him truly entertaining to follow, as can be seen in one of my favorite recent tweets:

Hate when I have a burning idea and I'm far away from my pc. Can code be written and tested on iPads?

January 31, 2012 11:00 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@iPullRank

MyCool King

Anthony Moore

SEO Manager, TrueAction

I first met Anthony, like many of the people on this list, at SEO Grail. What I like best about Anthony is that he is very down to earth and doesnt seem to take much for granted. This could be due to the fact that he works alongside some SEO powerhouses in his current role, but I like to believe it’s just cause he has his head on straight. Keep your eye out for this guy, I promise you will only be hearing more about him. In the meantime, here is the kind of personal insight you can look forward to on twitter:

Sinage. Phoenixville Style. http://t.co/ef7sM8kp

December 4, 2011 9:47 am via InstagramReplyRetweetFavorite

@amoore138

Anthony Moore

Chris Countey

Director of SEO Strategy, WebiMax

Chris and I first met during October’s SEO Grail Meetup and I very clearly remember being impressed by both the questions he asked and insights he offered regarding his personal experiences with paid search. Chris is relatively new to the SEO space in comparison to some of the veterans in this post, but he’s hungry. Chris’s ambition to learn and close monitoring of social marketing almost guarantee you will you continue to hear about him in the months to come. Here is one of my favorite tweets from Chris:

M&Ms rebrand King Size to Sharing Size #Genius: it's assumed I won't eat the whole bag & sharing is a social media action @MarsGlobal

January 11, 2012 1:33 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@chriscountey

Chris Countey

Jed Singer

Engagement Manager, Stuzo | Dachis Group

Truth be told, I haven’t met Jed in person yet, but I have been following him since the first time I overheard someone mention his name @IndyHall. I believe the context went something like this “Yeah Singer tweeted about it, I didn’t realize either,” referring to data regarding Facebook overtaking Twitter as a mainstream news source; which was more than enough to arouse my curiosity. Ever since I have been enjoying his near real-time updates about all of the different ways to leverage social media and crowd-sourced feedback. Here is a preview of what you can look forward to as a Jed Singer follower:

Jedi Mind Tricks: 17 Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People http://t.co/1EuISHPS via @peeplaja

November 14, 2011 5:29 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@jedsinger

Jed Singer

Martin Weinberg

VP of Digital Strategy, eCity Interactive

I have only had the very brief pleasure of sharing a handful of SEO Grail’s with Martin. He always shows up ready to learn, offer his personal experiences, and ask solid questions. For one of the more executive types at our casual Meet-ups, Martin’s presence is missed when he is not in attendance. Follow Martin on twitter for more tweets like this one:

Startup? #Philly law firm @baercrossey has free office hours to discuss entrepreneur legal issues http://t.co/jQLES7gt

November 17, 2011 9:48 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@MartinWeinberg

Martin Weinberg

Mark Kennedy

Founder, ROI Maximizer, SEOM Interactive

Mark may be one of the best kept secrets for local SEO in Philadelphia. I first encountered Mark not as a friend, but as a competitor, while managing an SEO services firm in my past life. I have clear memories of finding out that prospects were working with his firm, SEOM Interactive, and decided not to waste my time trying to outsell the value he provides. Mark is a committed CEO and very talented SEO. On top of it all, Mark is one of the most humble and down to earth guys I have met within Philly’s SEO circles. Follow him on twitter for more awesome tweets like this one:

Love it when you find a nice little converting gem (tail) in the search query report. Positives among the negatives #ppcchat

December 4, 2011 7:53 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@markkennedysem

markkennedysem

Questions

1. What is the hardest thing to teach in SEO?

Ian Howells

The necessary mindset.

That almost feels like I’m cheating because it’s an umbrella for a lot of things.

You need someone to be prepared and aware that this isn’t an assembly line. You can’t just hit a few buttons and call it a day. (Well. You could – when you get really advanced. But, that’s not the point.) You need someone to understand what Google is trying to do. You need them to get their head around how they would organize all the pages on the web for any given topic. To think through what a “good” web page looks like vs. what a “great” page looks like. Then they also need to be completely willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. And then maybe completely tank the next time Google rolls out something like Panda, only to dust off and get back at it.

This stuff is a long haul business. Chess – not checkers. You need to plan ahead and execute. Frankly – some people are much more fit to just moving in one direction, trying to get kinged. And that’s fine, but this probably isn’t the game for them.

Justin Freid

So much goes into SEO – link building, sitemaps, overall strategy, content, keyword research, keyword mapping, HTML code, javascript and now social. SEO is so much more now then just search engine optimization. Taking an intern or entry level employee and teaching them everything about SEO is a huge task.  All of the tactics/strategy can not be taught right away. You have to introduce an employee to them in stages, which can lengthen the process.

Bill Sebald

I find that the hardest thing to teach is the true concept of SEO ROI.  A lot of my past clients didn’t listen to my explanation of the channel, and how I approach it.  They came back after a long, tedious pitch process asking me “how many dollars will you make me for one dollar?”  I’ve had relationships end because I couldn’t get them out of that mindset, no matter how hard – and honest – I’d been.  It’s a shame, because they’re narrow focus caused them to miss out on all the other marketing values that would have helped them in their long run.  SEO is a really unique, powerful channel.

Wil Reynolds

The hunger, the competitiveness, you can’t teach someone that, once they have that everything else will just happen.

Bill Rowland

Search Engine Optimization continually challenges both practicing and aspiring SEOs. Changes in technology, client needs and misinformation can test the most experienced practicioners. Most SEO functions can be learned by applying some determination and patience however there is one area that is very difficult to teach. Curiosity is one personality characteristic that should be considered an essential skill in an SEO’s toolset. Generally, I think that most people would agree that curiosity is the one trait that many successful SEOs from a diversity of backgrounds share. Therefore curiosity is the hardest thing to teach in SEO.

Eppie Vojt

Tactics aren’t hard to teach.  Strategic thinking is.  For the most part, it’s one of those things that you either have or you don’t.  Anyone can learn how to add directory links or use a private blog network.  Not everyone can see creative ways to build links or spot opportunities to automate mundane tasks.

By going beyond basic tactical implementation you can create solutions that scale better or deliver more authority.  That’s where you start adding real value for clients and start to become a trusted partner, not just search muscle.

Mike King

The hardest thing to teach in SEO is the spirit of continued learning. Typically in other industries people tend to quickly plateau and get comfortable with their level of understanding and in SEO that just doesn’t cut it as it is a forever protean art and science. Also it’s impossible to teach imagination. I would very much prefer to work with imaginative people with far less experience than senior people that are stuck in their ways.

Anthony Moore

I’ll say that strategy (recommendations, analytics, etc) is the hardest thing, in my experience, to teach in SEO.  Learning how to measure the success of your recommendations and using that data to improve performance is one of the most difficult things to impart on someone who is just getting into the industry.

The amount of data that an SEO sees on a daily basis alone should not be recommended for the faint of heart.  Then taking that data, distilling it down and presenting to a client (that probably doesn’t fully understand what it is you do) is a pretty scary undertaking.  While this comes with experience, when you’re first starting out, it’s not easy.

Chris Countey

Expectations. There is no magic bullet that will help a client achieve results. Assigning weight to any part of an SEO campaign can make an SEO and their clients lose site of the overall goal: conversions.

Jed Singer

Optimization can be achieved through a scientific process, but there is also an artistic element to it. You have to be in tune with algorithms across the search platforms, and be able to apply knowledge of your space and your consumers to your presence in the appropriate ways in order to affect those algorithms. The hardest thing to teach is the artistic side of the application; staying abreast of the algorithms, understanding the channels, and each channels’ nuances based on both the consumer and the brand presence being optimized.

Martin Weinburg

The hardest thing to teach is for someone to focus attention on those aspects that have meaningful results to the business. In other words, activity versus accomplishment.

Mark Kennedy

Desire. I know that sounds weird, but it’s the truth. Unless someone has the desire to do this, they won’t like it. Most (if not all of us) are self-taught. They are just touching on SEO in schools, but not heavily and most people who are already in the industry had to learn by doing, experimenting, discussing with colleagues, etc. So if you don’t have the drive to learn and achieve, then you won’t like this world.

You have to “geek-out” a bit when you see a keyword convert into a sale, when you see a keyword jump in the ranks, when you get a sweet link or find a piece of gold in a competition analysis. And that’s something that is hard to teach, you just have to “have” it.

Don’t get me wrong, having different backgrounds and experience will help. Marketing, programming, design, PR, writing, finance, math, etc. But truthfully this industry changes fast and furious, so you have to be willing to learn, test and adapt. If you don’t have the desire to do that, you’ll get left behind.
So typically the person with that desire can learn a lot and are better students of the game. So when we look for people, we tend to focus on two things. The ability to learn (of course) and the desire to learn. If you have that, you can learn anything and be successful.

2. In the SEO industry, what frustrates you more than anything else?

Ian Howells

The cult of the rock star. Currently, you can be viewed as an awesome SEO if you talk a good game and self promote 24/7. No need to have a good spot at a sizable agency. No need to have your own affiliate sites to hold up publicly. No need to have a list of clients that vouch for you. Just guest post enough at the right places and know what you’re talking about and you’re a stud.

Take PointBlankSEO. Kid seems super sharp. Truly. I mean that without a single ounce of sarcasm. And he’s everywhere. To the point where I thought for *sure* that he was either having someone ghost write his blog posts, or he was middle-manning all his work. (Which, should be a testament to how prolific he is, and how I think there’s clearly time put into what he’s publishing.)

Then I found out he’s 18. Kid’s not even in college yet. That’s why he’s got the time to blog all day. He doesn’t have a wife or kid to provide for. He doesn’t have a mortgage. He can just blog. He mentions having clients – but that could be a 10 page site for a local dentist for $200 a month for all I know. Maybe not – maybe he’s ranking 12 different businesses all at once… but based on the time he seems to have to put towards blogging, I doubt it. Though – if I’m wrong, and he’s spending more time doing SEO than blogging about it, my hat is freaking off to him.

But, despite all that. Even if he had *no* clients and we didn’t know it – he’d be a stud in the industry because he can blog.

I’m not trying to pick on him, but I think he’s the perfect example of the dangerous place we’re getting to. Where being able to blog well and self promote and grind out post after post is more praised than actually getting stuff ranked and banking. The big SEO affiliates making ridiculous money aren’t the SEO industry rock stars, even though they’re the most qualified to be. You ask a random group of Search Engine Watch or Sphinn or SEOMoz readers who Eli Aloisi is, and most would have no idea who you were talking about. Part of it is because we’re all largely so hush-hush about where we’re ranking (which I’m completely guilty of), but the other is the rock-star mentality. Where knowing and telling all is more rewarded than doing. That worries me.

It worries me because it seems to push this idea that just knowing theory is enough. That firsthand experience and time spent are secondary to knowing the theoretical best practices and being able to turn them into an infographic or Top Something List.

It worries me when networking with SEOs seems to be the most important part of being a well known SEO – not actually ranking for high competition terms.

Justin Freid

Having worked across many competitive (sometimes sketchy) industries, Finance, Education, Insurance and Health, seeing a site rank ahead of me with blatantly purchased links or low quality content is quite frustrating. It seems that if 85% of the top companies in the space are utilizing grey hat tactics, Google turns the other way and it is accepted.

Bill Sebald

There’s two things that bother me equally.  First, the fact that we teach “content is king” while continually pumping out fluffy, non-specific, non-targeted articles.  Content that has no real value is a waste of time.  It’s noise in the signal.  I see it in the SEO industry too often, when I read a full page article and walk away with nothing I can actually act on.

It’s OK to have op ed pieces from time to time, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to grab an audience with an “I will teach you something awesome” headline, only to not deliver on any of it.  Many of the big guys do it.  They give some light tip, with no details, that leaves you more confused than before you started, while the commenters all praise the tip.  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read this.  I’ve been in this game for over 10 years, and I still walk away scratching my head from a lot of SEO posts that get mad praise.  Come to think of it, sometimes SES and SMX aren’t much better.  I believe SEO is writing for the audience first and search engines second, and you should have the courtesy to make sure you properly teach what you say you’re going to teach.

The second frustration is how certain parts of the SEO industry has become like the entertainment business.  From Sphinn to Twitter, great information lies all over, not just with the celebrities.  I tend to follow people who curate good information over people that have good PR. I think most of the SEO industry is pretty silly, and I have no idea how someone who blogs and tweets all day can be an authority.

Wil Reynolds

How spam works, google talks poorly about spam, but then when you see how well it works, relative to what they tell you to do its frustrating.

Bill Rowland

Our industry possesses many frustrating aspects. From unethical salespeople to bandwagon jumpers trying to benefit from the “newest” trend, our industry is rich with potential aggravation. My primary frustration is the SEO community’s apparent shift from recognizing members for the substance of their work to their personalities. Propagated by social media services like Twitter and legitimized by a presence at seemingly curated industry conferences, SEO has almost become more about who you know versus what you know. And that’s frustrating.

Eppie Vojt

Within the industry, the thing that frustrates me the most are SEOs who don’t test things themselves.  There are a ton of people who are just part of the echo chamber, voicing back what they’ve heard from their favorite SEO celebrity (whether it has merit or not).  This slows the learning curve for a lot of beginner SEOs and stunts their development.

The most frustrating thing about doing SEO consulting for clients is making great recommendations that don’t get implemented.  There’s a host of reasons why this happens — whether the client’s short on budget, doesn’t have the technological skill necessary to act on your findings, or something else.

That’s why it’s important to know how to sell as an SEO.  You need to be able to present your ideas in a convincing fashion and anticipate potential barriers to implementation.

Mike King

I work with a lot of Fortune 500 and enterprise brands and it’s very frustrating that they don’t allow us to get things done and there’s so many capabilities that you have to keep happy in order to get the slightest changes pushed through. The general lack of respect for SEO as a marketing channel is incredibly frustrating but I’m happy to be in a position to speak to big brands and help change the perception..

Anthony Moore

So there are a few things that I get frustrated with.  There seems to be a lot of “who knows who” that goes on in the industry.  While it’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’d rather read or hear about your thoughts and ideas, than who you had dinner with last night.

Another part of the industry that frustrates me is the re-purposing of the same presentations over and over.  We talk about keeping things fresh, it would be nice if we could see some fresh topics on the speaking circuit.  Those conferences aren’t cheap!

Chris Countey

SEO rockstars who forget where they came from. The best thing about this industry is that it is constantly changing and there is no one source that has all the answers. Each new piece of content that enters the SEO space should be evaluated and tested individually, regardless of who the author is. Clearly there are some very knowledgeable people in the industry, but they too are susceptible to algorithm changes and advances in computer learning. Test everything you read and write about everything you test.

Jed Singer

One of the frustrating parts of the SEO industry is a marriage to the way things have been done in the past, despite platforms and users changing rapidly. As the space changes, methodologies and best practices also need to change.

Martin Weinburg

With regards to the SEO industry, I see many companies that provide clients reports that are pure data, without analysis or perspective. Without meaning and context, the statistics alone aren’t delivering real value.

Mark Kennedy

Failure. Yes, it makes you better, but it still sucks. Mainly because failure can be the end result of a lot of time, thought and effort. You come up with this master strategy. You put hours/days/weeks into fine tuning it. You execute it and…it fails. The most frustrating thing.

Sure you will learn from it. And most likely it will lead to something else or a different path. But when I get really excited about a strategy and it falls flat, it frustrates the hell out of me. It just happened to me recently with a project.  Sure, we’ll fine make adjustments or take it another direction, but I really thought it was awesome. Turns out it wasn’t.

One other thing is frustrating – Time. Or lack there of. There’s no doubt this is a growing industry and it moves at a furious pace. Unfortunately, we can’t hit the “pause” button on time. I would pay a LOT of money for that. How many times do you find yourself in a zone and then look up at the clock and see it’s 2am or you’re supposed to be somewhere an hour ago?

Yes, there are a lot of tools to help make you more time-efficient and things that are scalable. But you know there are some things you just have to spend a lot of time doing, research being a big one. I find it hard to believe that there is currently any SEO who is not working during “off” hours. Or even when they are out and about, still not have SEO cross their mind. It’s just the way SEOs are wired.

So for me (and I’m sure others), it can be frustrating when there is just not enough time in the day/week/month/year.

3. If you could give one piece of advice to someone considering getting into SEO, what would it be?

Ian Howells

Start a site – today. Run it for three months. If you still have the drive to do this, then get reading at SEOMoz until you’ve got the ins and outs of on page SEO and keyword research handled

After publishing good, targeted content for a few more months, learn up on link building.

Keep learning.

Justin Freid

If you are not looking for a challenge or an industry where you need to constantly learn, pick something else. SEO/PPC is a very competitive industry where new strategies and tools are coming out every day. It is an extremely exciting and rewarding industry. So if you are just getting your feet wet, start reading as many top blogs as you can, buy yourself a domain and start messing around to see what works.

Bill Sebald

Read everything judiciously, and use it to define what part of SEO you want to excel in.  What part do you believe in?  What part interests you the most?  Focus on that area, turn it into your strength, and branch out from there.  Don’t try to mow the entire lawn with scissors at once – just focus on one area at a time so you’ll get firmer results.  This is like learning an instrument – be prepared to be learning for the rest of your career.

Wil Reynolds

Read everything, help a LOT of people out – just help out SEOs left and right, you’ll network your way right into their inner circle.

Bill Rowland

In short, the one piece of advice to a prospective SEO that I would offer is that to be successful they must be curious, persistent and data driven, not to mention creative. The nature of search engine optimization is one of grey versus black and white, so people with these qualities should find that they should perform well and find the field rewarding.

Eppie Vojt

Build your own sites on the side and experiment with them to rank for competitive terms.  Having complete control over the decision making process (including risk assessment of various approaches) means you can try all sorts of tactics, push hard, and move quickly.

You’ll get to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t and be able to make better decisions about what to recommend for your clients.  You’ll also be much more comfortable discussing tactics with them, highlighting the potential risk vs. reward, and drawing on historical successes when needed.

Running your own sites can also give you insight into a lot of the digital marketing considerations that extend beyond picking up rankings.  You’ll develop a deeper appreciation for the need to assess the conversion potential of keywords, identify additional revenue opportunities, and implement a good user experience.

Having my own side projects has taught me much more than I would have learned from doing client work alone.

Mike King

Test everything you read and never stop learning.

Anthony Moore

Build your network.  Get to know your local community. Hit the meet-ups (even “off topic” ones).  Surround yourself with smart people who are passionate about they do. I would, however, practice some restraint when building this network.  There is a pretty healthy stream of info coming in at a rapid pace and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and keep those you trust at the top of your list.  All killer, some filler.

I have to say, it was fun to put some of these thoughts down on paper. The “hardest thing” question, was real thought provoking and I may have uncovered some other opinions on it…maybe it’ll be a blog post in the future!

Chris Countey

Start with the basics of web design. In my opinion, it’s more important to know what a website can do. Anyone with knowledge of web programming can make those changes, but it’s those who decide what needs to be changed who make the difference.

Jed Singer

Understand where the SEO practices has been in the past, and understand the infrastructure of the search platforms that your consumers use. Social channels, like Facebook, Twitter, and others, are a huge part of search, and big wins – both quick and more drawn out – can be achieved when leveraging both mainstays, like Google, and new channels.

Martin Weinburg

The advice I’d give someone getting into SEO is to realize you are not working in a silo, and this is not a number-cruncher job. You’ll need to coordinate, negotiate and evangelize your recommendations among managers, designers, programmers and copywriters.

Mark Kennedy

Do it. I love it and I’ve never looked back. It’s awesome. But the advice I would give is that you have to want to get into it. It goes back to my first answer. Desire. If you are not sure it’s for you, it’s probably not. You have to have a bit of the geek-gene.

But as for specific advice – test some things. Basic things to start, but those things will take you deeper. Create a blog, try creating a word press site, put Google analytics on a current site and watch the metrics, etc. You’ll learn a lot that way and once you have a little taste of SEO, you’ll have more specific and better questions to ask. And just that much more experience.

Conclusion

First and foremost, a huge thank you to everyone who contributed; it is because of you that this post came together. I love seeing patterns emerge between great minds; with lifelong learning, exhaustive testing, and constant creativity standing out as the real nuts and bolts of the insights provided in this post.

I hope you have found these insights helpful and thought-provoking. If so follow me @nick_eubanks to stay abreast of the latest insights on the SEO industry, Start-up companies, and content strategy. Also if you aren’t already following each of the brilliant minds featured above, make sure you do immediately, you won’t regret it.

Colophon

Inspiration to write this post came to me while reading the best SEO interviews you will read in 2012. Sean Revel, better known as @011100110110010, uses this post to ask some awesome people some great questions, and if you have not read it yet, go do that now.

The post Fresh Insights From Some of Philly’s Top SEO’s appeared first on SEO Nick.

When was the last time you made a comment on a blog post you appreciated that turned into something worthwhile? Like really worthwhile, more than just a blog comment link?

If your experiences are in any way similar to my own, it’s been a long time, if ever.

And Then it Happens

After a very thought provoking meet-up @SEOGrail this past Wednesday, where @IanHowells and @BillSebald faced-off on white hat vs. black hat SEO and the practical applications of each, I decided to check out Ian’s blog, Halo18.

I was immediately greeted by a really cool concept that had never occurred to me; putting my goals into the form of a blog post (Which Ian does in his post titled: Prepping for 2012).

Not only would this help me hold myself accountable for these goals, but it also affords the opportunity to get real feedback from other people that may be reading about them, which in itself could be very beneficial, and potentially cause you to re-think some of your goals and objectives.

Throughout Ian’s post he makes mention of several content development goals, speaking primarily about how often he aims to update the blog with fresh content in the form of posts and new page content.

This Got Me Thinking…

How is he going to develop all of this content? Perhaps he uses guest bloggers… so I decided to ask. Here was my comment:

Ian – What’s your take on guest blogging? Do you do it? How often? Do you try to get other people in the space to contribute on here? Otherwise I like the mention of real estate – a full review of my asset portfolio is SO long overdue, which means that most people in the space probably haven’t given it the thought the should have either… perfect thing to analyze over the holiday break opposed to forcing awkward conversations with 3rd cousins.

Nothing special, just my thoughts – complete with typos. What became of this?

Inspiration

Not for me, but for Ian. This simple string of casual questions led him to instead of responding via comment, write this post: My Take on Guest Posting, complete with a link back to my site, sweet!

Conclusion

Next time you are reading a post by someone you respect, or admire, or hopefully both, and suddenly get hit with a wall of questions, take a moment and ask them… you may be pleasantly surprised by the results. And to Ian, thanks!

The post How Thoughtful Blog Comments Can Build Real Links appeared first on SEO Nick.

In case you missed SEO Grail last month, below is my slide deck from the presentation.

In this presentation deck I cover the basics of user experience testing from square one; paying particularly close attention to the thought processes behind designing and deploying tests. UX testing can be very simple and fulfilling when executed properly, but unfortunately many people get deep into the trenches of the technical nuances and end up designing tests and tactical test plans that are unrealistic and add little to no value.

In this presentation I focus on keeping the tests simple and provide actionable steps on what you should be testing for and how to design your first round of tests.
Improve your website with google website optimizer

View more presentations from Nick Eubanks

The post How to Improve Your Website with Google Website Optimizer appeared first on SEO Nick.