Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? 

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to
clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve
user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking
power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous. 

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There’s also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a “perfect” redirect

A
perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your
content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL
stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When
done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a
301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The
new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity,
but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to
non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant
content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity.

For
example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page
about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about
“tacos” does not.

A clue to this devaluation comes from the manner in which search engines deal with content that changes significantly over a period of time. 

The famous Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, explains how older links might be ignored if the text of a page changes significantly or the anchor text pointing to a URL changes in a big way (I added the bold):

…the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result.

One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

If these same properties apply to 301 redirects, it goes a long way in explaining why non-relevant pages don’t get a boost from redirecting off-topic pages. 

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy
SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages
to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step
further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s,
or soft 404s at best. 

This
means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may
simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity
at all.

While
it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page
redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of
pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those
redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

Better alternative: When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If
the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better
page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410
status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before
Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and
redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of
an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

Webmasters
often roll up several older domains into a single website, not
realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire
effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks,
it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The
same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect
a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If
you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any
potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by
overly-complex redirect patterns.

While
it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects,
each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text
relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little. 

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent
tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so
often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

Duane Forrester of Bing addressed this in a recent tweet.

So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but
they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.

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Today I’m pleased to bring you Aleyda Solis, Madrid-based International SEO at SEER Interactive, a Moz Associate, and State of Search blogger. We’re excited that she’s bringing her international perspective to MozCon, where she’ll lay out how to make the bold but lucrative move into the international market. You definitely don’t want to miss her talk, “International SEO and the Future of Your ROI,” if you’re interested in growing your online business.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

It’s going to be an exciting adventure, guiding the audience to discover their international SEO potential and what could be the future of their ROI. 

It will be beyond the “ccTLDs vs. subdirectories for country targeting” type of session (although best practices with examples and tactics will be also shared). It’s meant to answer frequent questions I get from strategic, operations, and business perspectives, like: “How do I connect with international audiences and develop an attractive offer and assets when I don’t even speak the language or know anything about the country?” Or, “How can I develop original, localized content for all of these non-English websites if I don’t have enough resources?”

If this is an issue for your business, then it’s highly likely that your international SEO strategy wasn’t planned and established well enough from the beginning, allowing your investment to become cost-effective and scalable in foreign organic search markets.  

I started to cover international SEO from this perspective in a SEER post I wrote about establishing an international SEO strategy. 

Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your presentation?

Because I will be giving away delicious Iberian ham that I will be bringing from Spain to selected audience members in my session! :D (I’m kidding!)

I really wish I could do that, but unfortunately it is forbidden by US Customs. (Nonetheless, you might want to ask for a change in customs law to make it friendlier to Spanish gastronomy so I can do that in the future.)

Seriously, though, it would be really unwise to skip my session because I will be sharing what could be the next step to grow your online business. You definitely don’t want to miss that.

What types of businesses should be thinking about international SEO, and why?

All businesses that might have an audience in other countries or that speaks other languages should be thinking about it. 

Sometimes people think that only huge businesses that already have a multinational physical presence should be thinking about an international web presence and search marketing activity. But this is far from true and is just myopic. For more, take a look at this Moz post I wrote about discovering your international online potential.  

Regarding international SEO, what is the most unexpected thing you’ve learned along the way?

Maybe not unexpected, but unfortunately usually overlooked: The characteristics of audience behavior in each country.

Beyond language differences, there are many cultural, economic and sociological factors that can affect the success of many aspects of your SEO process, like the level of response from a link-building campaign, for example. At the end, beyond search engines that serve as a bridge, SEO is about the people.

You can have a better understanding of what I’m talking about in this post I published at State of Search about different aspects that drive an international SEO industry and audience research.    

What do you do at SEER Interactive?

My activities at SEER are quite diverse: On one hand, I’m helping to grow the international SEO business, giving SEER more visibility by speaking at diverse events in Europe, identifying and validating leads, giving pre-sales support, and establishing and coordinating the best organization and processes for international SEO. On the other, I’m also developing and helping to implement international SEO processes for current clients.

Tell us about the places you’ve lived.

I’m from Nicaragua, a small, tropical country with a lot of volcanoes, lakes, and beaches on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts in Central America. Nicaragua’s natural landscape is breathtaking; here’s a photo of Momotombo Volcano (one of the 12 volcanoes on the Pacific coast of the country):  

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettziegler/7355295166/

I grew up, studied, and worked there until I left to study in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. It’s a beautiful student town full of history, with students from all over the world (a lot of people go there to learn Spanish). It’s also home to the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain (where I went to study), which was founded in 1218. Its front building looks like this:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/3855579280/

I ended up staying in Salamanca after finishing my studies, and got my first SEO job at an online marketing company. I lived in Salamanca for a bit more than 4 years — until I came to Madrid, the city where I live now. 

I came to Madrid after accepting an SEO manager position at a company here at the end of 2010. Madrid is an amazing place, since it has the great alternatives that big cities offer, and at the same time allows you to have a good quality of life. Here’s a view of Gran Via, one of the main streets in Madrid:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nico_/6887000482/

What is it about Madrid that keeps you there?

Madrid (followed by Barcelona) is where most of the bigger types of business activity happen in Spain, from trade shows and professional networking events to a wide range of cultural activities. There’s also good weather (there’s always sun, although it might be a bit cold during winter) and great culinary offerings (delicious tapas everywhere!), so I’m happy here at the moment. Although, of course, I’m quite open to experiencing new places to live in the future. I love to travel and experience new cultures.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were growing up?

I had the somewhat common “dreams” among children of being an astronaut (I really just wanted to go to space, it wasn’t necessarily because I knew what an astronaut actually did). So that’s really a pending point in my life: going to space! I definitely need to start saving more for that.

What is the last thing that you have seen/heard/experienced that has inspired you?

I’ve recently had two experiences that have been inspiring in different ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to go to Israel to speak at KahenaCon and had the great opportunity to spend a Saturday walking around Jerusalem Old City. It was a truly inspiring experience, seeing places with such a rich historical and also religious background, like the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock. Even if I’m not religious myself, it was a somewhat magical experience.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Zucpg1N8yT/ 

Another (and totally different) inspiring moment happened a week ago when I had the chance to try Google Glass. I felt like I was already living in the future, interacting with that small, translucent movie theater-like interface in my glasses with just my voice. Truly amazing.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Z8tuxJt8yd/

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

To ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?” when I’m making an important or scary decision. This question allows me to get my risk-averse considerations under control, and gives me a great opportunity to start assessing a new situation with more balanced criteria. By asking this, I’ve been able to go out of my comfort zone more frequently and live new experiences.

Thank you, Aleyda! It was great to learn a bit about your background and how international SEO matters for all types of businesses, not just the big multinationals.

If, like us, you just can’t get enough of Alyeda, you can find her as @aleyda on Twitter (where she juggles Spanish and English).

Still don’t have your #MozCon ticket yet? Reserve your spot now!

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

Video can be an expensive and time-consuming investment. For small businesses especially, the cost of producing video will always have to be weighed against other marketing investments, and the sad truth is that video can be a tough sell — especially when the ROI from its significant expense is hard to predict or quantify.

I think part of the problem is that most marketers (including SEOs) don’t have a very good understanding of the value that video can provide for them; they see virality, branding, and perhaps increasing conversion rates as the extent of it. Video as a media type, however, has potential on which few people capitalise: the ability to secure fantastic, high quality links back to your site.

In this post, I want to outline nine ways in which video can be used to augment and enhance link-building activity, with the goal of giving you more ammunition to secure an investment in video as part of a wider inbound marketing strategy.

1. Using video as a media type within interactive content

The kind of content you need:

Video is a media type — a form of content delivery — rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function,” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when working out the best way to present a creative idea.

Pages where video is part of the overall sum of a multimedia interactive can be extremely engaging, and as such generate a lot of links.

For example…

http://cloudsovercuba.com/ is a fantastic microsite that uses mixed media to tell the story of the Cuban Missle Crisis. While this was not likely created with links in mind, the page has managed to secure 1,920 links from 266 link root domains (according to OSE).

Two guides from Simply Business, The Small Business Guide to WordPress and the Small Business Guide to YouTube were created with link buidling in mind and include embedded videos within each interactive flow chart. These are currently at 179 and 22 linking root domains respectively

The technical implementation required:

If you’re building a multimedia webpage that can’t realistically be viewed through an iframe on another site, where you choose to host your video ultimately doesn’t matter.

Your main focus should be making the content lightweight, quick to load, and mobile friendly. Therefore, either using the HTML5 <video> tag to display video or embedding all videos through iframes is normally the best way to go, though many other JavaScript-focused implementations are also fine.

JavaScript libraries such as popcorn.js can help you do some really cool things with embedded video, such as changing the way pages look based on playback time.

2. Using video as link bait

The kind of content you need:

Things that go viral socially don’t actually correlate all that well with things that get lots of high quality, equity-passing links. This is because there is a subtle difference between the kind of things you’re happy to share socially and the kind of things you’re happy to include on your own site through embeds/referring links. If someone embeds your video on their site — it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead.

If your explicit goal is to get people to embed and link to your video content, Dollar Shave Club or Old Spice should not be the standards you aspire to. Instead, you should be looking to create something that provides value for a specific target demographic and the content must be informative, entertaining and succinct.

In many instances, this ends up looking something like a video infographic. A great example of this done successfully of late is from CCN, who created an excellent piece on relative salaries which has accrued 43 linking root domains.

The technical implementation required:

When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead, the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. While these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.

Therefore, if you’re creating video link bait — you should (at least during your initial period of outreach) ensure the version of the video embedded on your site is seen as the de facto “canonical” by self-hosting or hosting with a paid third-party online video hosting provider.

I’ve been lucky enough to try out all of the providers below:

To save you the hassle of research, I’d estimate that in 90% of circumstances, Wistia is by far the best solution (unless you’re a large media house looking to serve advertising off your embedded videos, in which case you should look at Brightcove). Wistia has the best tool available for marketers and offers it at an extremely reasonable price. (Note: I’m not being paid or otherwise compensated by Wistia for saying that; I’m just saying it because right now it’s true. If any other online video platform starts outperforming Wistia in terms of their offering, I’ll be sure to let you know.)

After you’ve set up your hosting, you need to ensure that you embed your video in such a way that anyone who clicks an “embed this video” button is given an embed code which will feature a referring href attribution link to the appropriate page on your site where the video lives.

Unfortunately, no online video provider currently offers this as a standard feature (although I know this is in the pipeline for Wistia), so for now, this means you’ll need to manually customise the embed codes for videos you’re trying to use as link bait.

I have a built a tool which will automate this process for you. The “With textarea in textarea” option is what you should choose for the embed on your own site, while the “without double textarea” is the option you should choose when putting together an embed code to send to outreach prospects.

3. Build links off the back of your YouTube presence

The kind of content you need:

While marketers should think of YouTube primarily as a network for increasing brand awareness, if you have videos with a viral/social element that are also likely to generate a number of links, then YouTube can be a useful platform to generate leads for link building.

The technical implementation required:

Anyone who embeds a YouTube video of yours should be seen as a really solid link prospect, as they’ve essentially already linked to your content.

Oftentimes, a gracious and thankful outreach email to anyone who does embed your YouTube videos can be a great way to both build relationships and convert those YouTube embeds into links back to your own site rather than to youtube.com. One angle I particularly like to use when reaching out is suggesting that sites “swap the YouTube video embed for a high quality HD embed that doesn’t include ads,” and then providing them with an alternative, securely hosted video iframe embed which includes a followed attribution link underneath the video.

To work out who has previously embedded or linked to your YouTube videos, you can use a combination of YouTube Analytics and Open Site Explorer.

The video below runs through the process of finding out where your videos have been embedded:

From here, you should also put the following URL variations through Open Site Explorer to find out where your video has been linked to but not embedded (replace the ID string with your own):

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&feature=player_embedded
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&feature=related

Note — if your “link bait” videos have a social/viral element to them, you can put them on YouTube and follow the process above after your period of outreach with a securely hosted video (as detailed in the “using video as link bait” section).

If you have access to a significant budget for promotion and outreach, paying for viral seeding can be a useful way to generate further link prospects from your YouTube videos. I recommend using Unruly Media for such a service.

4. Advertise your content library and permission assets

Everyone hates YouTube ads. The meme above got 1597 upvotes on Reddit and hit the front page, which is more or less proof of objective fact in internet terms.

However, I think this opinion is so widely held not because YouTube ads necessarily suck, but because online video advertising is still a young industry that has yet to mature. The majority of larger companies place their TV adverts on YouTube and pay for seeding, rather than bothering to create content specifically for the platform and target a specific audience accordingly.

One way in which YouTube ads could be more effective is by advertising a free content library or permission asset — like an email list — rather than a specific product or service that costs money.

This way, you can improve visibility of the content in which you’ve already invested and hopefully build additional second-order links to it through this increased awareness.

The kind of content you need:

YouTube ads can be as long as you like, but users will always have the option of clicking away 5, 15, or 30 seconds into the playback (dependent on the specific ad placement). Therefore, you essentially need to grab the attention and interest of the audience within the first 5 seconds, and then effectively communicate the core message to entice clicks by the 15 and 30 second marks. Put simply, your videos will need to sell the virtues of your content quickly, efficiently, and in an entertaining way.

The technical implementation required:

Export your content with the appropriate settings and upload to YouTube. From there, you’ll need to tie your AdWords to your YouTube account and then begin defining the target audience to which you want to advertise.

5. Use video to improve and augment page types

There is some evidence to suggest that by simply using video to improve the quality of your commercially focused pages, you are likely to generate more natural links across the board.

Check out the screenshots from the Majestic Historic Index below for appliances online and Zappos — sites that have both invested heavily in product video to improve their page types:

Zappos.com:

appliancesonline.co.uk:

The kind of content you need:

To a greater or lesser extent, what we’re talking about here is product videos - i.e. videos created to provide information on a specific product or service.

Product videos are most effective when they take an audience member from a place of initial interest further down the path toward conversion by engaging on a personal level with the likely questions and concerns of the interested party. These videos should be mostly informational rather than promotional, more “shopping channel” than “TV ad.”

The technical implementation required:

If you’re creating videos to improve and augment specific pages on your site — e.g. videos for specific products — then these videos should always be either self-hosted or securely hosted using a third-party provider (e.g. Wistia) as mentioned previously.

This is because these videos will likely only make sense within the context of the pages for which they’re created, and therefore won’t provide much value for an audience finding your content through YouTube search or recommendations. Additionally, by hosting such content on YouTube, you can risk your site being outranked by the instance of the video on youtube.com for branded queries relating to the specific product or service covered in the video. For more information on this problem, check out my post on building a video SEO strategy.

For this kind of content, you should also be trying to get video rich snippets in order to drive more clicks from the search results pages. This can be achieved either through implementing schema.org mark-up, or by submitting a video XML sitemap. See here for more information on implementation.

6. Support your blogging strategy

The kind of content you need:

Video for blogs should be primarily informational with reasonably soft branding. “Talking head” videos are perfect for this and if you have the resources, supplementing the footage with screencasts and/or animated graphics is often a nice way to break up the flow and provide interest.

In order to make it scalable and require minimal editing, I’d normally recommend trying to do these videos in one take with minimal scripting prior to recording the content. Watch the video from Wistia feat. MC Fishkin which explains exactly how Moz manages its creative process to scale the creation of Whiteboard Friday videos with minimal effort.

The technical implementation required:

The hosting for your blogging videos should be determined by the answers to a couple of questions.

1. Which is more important to you - greatest possible exposure to your content or individuals only viewing the content in the context of your own site?

The two are fundamentally dichotomous. If you want maximum exposure, your content should be hosted on YouTube, where it will rank well in the search results (normally those for youtube.com, not for your site) and also be visible throughout the YouTube platform. If you want users to only add comments on your site, within your community framework as opposed to YouTube’s; or are keen to re-target visitors with PPC, then self hosting will be the more appropriate option for you.

2. Is there any search volume on YouTube for the topics you are covering?

This can be worked out using the YouTube Keyword Tool. Be advised that data from the YouTube keyword tool is fairly inaccurate, but the relative indicators of search volume should give you a pretty good feel for whether there is any demand for the content you will be creating.

If there is search volume, that’s fantastic and your videos will likely get some good traction on the YouTube platform should you wish to host there. If there’s no search volume, then having your videos on YouTube likely won’t provide much additional value for you. If the latter is true, you’ll always be better off self-hosting your videos (or using a secure third-party solution as explained previously), since this way you can drive all traffic to your own site rather than to youtube.com.

You generally shouldn’t think about doing both. If you decide to self-host your content and also put it on YouTube, this strategy just gives individuals the option of viewing and linking to content on YouTube rather than your own site, while failing to undertake the primary activity that will help boost your YouTube rankings — namely, embedding your YouTube videos and driving views through those embeds. Rather than giving you best of both worlds, it can actually give you the worst of both worlds.

7. Create video content for other sites

Video content can get you top-tier guest posts and linking opportunities. If you’re able to show a proven history of creating valuable and interesting video content for your own site and others, pitching for guest-post opportunities on top sites becomes so much easier than the standard cold approach.

The kind of content you need:

In many ways, the kind of content you’d use to guest post will have a very similar form factor to the kind of video you’d normally include on your own blog — mostly “talking head” focused.

Interviews of your customers/authorities in your industry often work really well here, because the videos can also act as ego bait. If you can make an individual look really professional on camera in a way they would be unable to do themselves, it can be really easy to get some great links from them for doing so.

If you have the resources or skills, you can also create product videos for commercial partners or build ads for content created by others (someone did this for Distilled, for free, and you can bet I gave them a few links).

The technical implementation required:

Ultimately, as long as you get a link, the way in which a video is embedded on someone else’s site shouldn’t matter to you.

However, if the target in question is not particularly amenable to linking out to you, one of the best ways to encourage them is to only provide the webmaster with an embed code for the content, rather than the raw video file. This means securely hosting the content with a platform like Wistia, enabling domain restrictions and then including a text link back to your site at the end of the embed code (as covered above in Idea 2, using video as link bait). 

In the vast majority of instances, webmasters won’t bother to tweak the embed code and remove the link, whereas if they take the embed code themselves from the instance of the video on a social platform (YouTube/ Vimeo etc.), the embed code will not include an attribution link back to your site with it as standard.

8. Build a content series for social video platforms

Blip.tv and dailymotion.com will give you really high authority (DA93 and DA97), followed profile links if you can a get content series accepted onto the platform and with the relevant user status.

The kind of content you need:

For both of these sites, you will need regularly publish content covering a specific theme that is completely non-branded or commercial in nature. You’ll also need to create different videos for each platform. There is a stringent editorial process to get accepted to either site, and unless your content is relevant to their target audiences, you won’t be granted the Dailymotion motionmaker status (which includes a followed link) or a blip.tv channel profile.

Creating a content series specifically for a single link is obviously a huge investment in time and money, but remember that the benefit here will be brand awareness and hopefully referring traffic, too. If you’re in a particularly “tricky” niche to which it’s difficult to build links, but you have a lot of expert knowledge within your company, this might be a useful technique for you to leverage.

The technical implementation required:

None. You just need to ensure your content is exported in 16:9 at a decent frame size (I normally recommend 1280×720 HD) and uploaded to the respective platform.

9. Boost PR efforts with video news releases

The kind of content you need:

The purpose of a video news release is to support a press release with ancillary information that gives further context around the story in question.

Video news releases are a particularly useful asset for any PR campaign, since they allow your story to make it to the top of a journalist’s pile. Reporters don’t always have the time to write up articles for every interesting pitch, but with a video release you’re essentially doing half the work for them. All editors need to do with a VNR is put together a supporting paragraph, embed the video and then click publish.

The technical implementation required:

Video news releases should always be hosted on YouTube, since the majority of sites are comfortable with embedding YouTube videos on their site and know how to get an embed code from a video on youtube.com

The best practice is just to include a link to the YouTube instance of the video within your initial outreach email. If your contact gets back to you in a positive way regarding the story, you can ask for a “credit link” for the video pointing back to your site.

That’s my nine!

I hope you found this post useful! Do you have any other good ways to build links with video? If so, please do hit me up in the comments! I’d love to hear about any new ideas.

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

Video can be an expensive and time-consuming investment. For small businesses especially, the cost of producing video will always have to be weighed against other marketing investments, and the sad truth is that video can be a tough sell — especially when the ROI from its significant expense is hard to predict or quantify.

I think part of the problem is that most marketers (including SEOs) don’t have a very good understanding of the value that video can provide for them; they see virality, branding, and perhaps increasing conversion rates as the extent of it. Video as a media type, however, has potential on which few people capitalise: the ability to secure fantastic, high quality links back to your site.

In this post, I want to outline nine ways in which video can be used to augment and enhance link-building activity, with the goal of giving you more ammunition to secure an investment in video as part of a wider inbound marketing strategy.

1. Using video as a media type within interactive content

The kind of content you need:

Video is a media type — a form of content delivery — rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function,” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when working out the best way to present a creative idea.

Pages where video is part of the overall sum of a multimedia interactive can be extremely engaging, and as such generate a lot of links.

For example…

http://cloudsovercuba.com/ is a fantastic microsite that uses mixed media to tell the story of the Cuban Missle Crisis. While this was not likely created with links in mind, the page has managed to secure 1,920 links from 266 link root domains (according to OSE).

Two guides from Simply Business, The Small Business Guide to WordPress and the Small Business Guide to YouTube were created with link buidling in mind and include embedded videos within each interactive flow chart. These are currently at 179 and 22 linking root domains respectively

The technical implementation required:

If you’re building a multimedia webpage that can’t realistically be viewed through an iframe on another site, where you choose to host your video ultimately doesn’t matter.

Your main focus should be making the content lightweight, quick to load, and mobile friendly. Therefore, either using the HTML5 <video> tag to display video or embedding all videos through iframes is normally the best way to go, though many other JavaScript-focused implementations are also fine.

JavaScript libraries such as popcorn.js can help you do some really cool things with embedded video, such as changing the way pages look based on playback time.

2. Using video as link bait

The kind of content you need:

Things that go viral socially don’t actually correlate all that well with things that get lots of high quality, equity-passing links. This is because there is a subtle difference between the kind of things you’re happy to share socially and the kind of things you’re happy to include on your own site through embeds/referring links. If someone embeds your video on their site — it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead.

If your explicit goal is to get people to embed and link to your video content, Dollar Shave Club or Old Spice should not be the standards you aspire to. Instead, you should be looking to create something that provides value for a specific target demographic and the content must be informative, entertaining and succinct.

In many instances, this ends up looking something like a video infographic. A great example of this done successfully of late is from CCN, who created an excellent piece on relative salaries which has accrued 43 linking root domains.

The technical implementation required:

When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead, the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. While these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.

Therefore, if you’re creating video link bait — you should (at least during your initial period of outreach) ensure the version of the video embedded on your site is seen as the de facto “canonical” by self-hosting or hosting with a paid third-party online video hosting provider.

I’ve been lucky enough to try out all of the providers below:

To save you the hassle of research, I’d estimate that in 90% of circumstances, Wistia is by far the best solution (unless you’re a large media house looking to serve advertising off your embedded videos, in which case you should look at Brightcove). Wistia has the best tool available for marketers and offers it at an extremely reasonable price. (Note: I’m not being paid or otherwise compensated by Wistia for saying that; I’m just saying it because right now it’s true. If any other online video platform starts outperforming Wistia in terms of their offering, I’ll be sure to let you know.)

After you’ve set up your hosting, you need to ensure that you embed your video in such a way that anyone who clicks an “embed this video” button is given an embed code which will feature a referring href attribution link to the appropriate page on your site where the video lives.

Unfortunately, no online video provider currently offers this as a standard feature (although I know this is in the pipeline for Wistia), so for now, this means you’ll need to manually customise the embed codes for videos you’re trying to use as link bait.

I have a built a tool which will automate this process for you. The “With textarea in textarea” option is what you should choose for the embed on your own site, while the “without double textarea” is the option you should choose when putting together an embed code to send to outreach prospects.

3. Build links off the back of your YouTube presence

The kind of content you need:

While marketers should think of YouTube primarily as a network for increasing brand awareness, if you have videos with a viral/social element that are also likely to generate a number of links, then YouTube can be a useful platform to generate leads for link building.

The technical implementation required:

Anyone who embeds a YouTube video of yours should be seen as a really solid link prospect, as they’ve essentially already linked to your content.

Oftentimes, a gracious and thankful outreach email to anyone who does embed your YouTube videos can be a great way to both build relationships and convert those YouTube embeds into links back to your own site rather than to youtube.com. One angle I particularly like to use when reaching out is suggesting that sites “swap the YouTube video embed for a high quality HD embed that doesn’t include ads,” and then providing them with an alternative, securely hosted video iframe embed which includes a followed attribution link underneath the video.

To work out who has previously embedded or linked to your YouTube videos, you can use a combination of YouTube Analytics and Open Site Explorer.

The video below runs through the process of finding out where your videos have been embedded:

From here, you should also put the following URL variations through Open Site Explorer to find out where your video has been linked to but not embedded (replace the ID string with your own):

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&feature=player_embedded
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&feature=related

Note — if your “link bait” videos have a social/viral element to them, you can put them on YouTube and follow the process above after your period of outreach with a securely hosted video (as detailed in the “using video as link bait” section).

If you have access to a significant budget for promotion and outreach, paying for viral seeding can be a useful way to generate further link prospects from your YouTube videos. I recommend using Unruly Media for such a service.

4. Advertise your content library and permission assets

Everyone hates YouTube ads. The meme above got 1597 upvotes on Reddit and hit the front page, which is more or less proof of objective fact in internet terms.

However, I think this opinion is so widely held not because YouTube ads necessarily suck, but because online video advertising is still a young industry that has yet to mature. The majority of larger companies place their TV adverts on YouTube and pay for seeding, rather than bothering to create content specifically for the platform and target a specific audience accordingly.

One way in which YouTube ads could be more effective is by advertising a free content library or permission asset — like an email list — rather than a specific product or service that costs money.

This way, you can improve visibility of the content in which you’ve already invested and hopefully build additional second-order links to it through this increased awareness.

The kind of content you need:

YouTube ads can be as long as you like, but users will always have the option of clicking away 5, 15, or 30 seconds into the playback (dependent on the specific ad placement). Therefore, you essentially need to grab the attention and interest of the audience within the first 5 seconds, and then effectively communicate the core message to entice clicks by the 15 and 30 second marks. Put simply, your videos will need to sell the virtues of your content quickly, efficiently, and in an entertaining way.

The technical implementation required:

Export your content with the appropriate settings and upload to YouTube. From there, you’ll need to tie your AdWords to your YouTube account and then begin defining the target audience to which you want to advertise.

5. Use video to improve and augment page types

There is some evidence to suggest that by simply using video to improve the quality of your commercially focused pages, you are likely to generate more natural links across the board.

Check out the screenshots from the Majestic Historic Index below for appliances online and Zappos — sites that have both invested heavily in product video to improve their page types:

Zappos.com:

appliancesonline.co.uk:

The kind of content you need:

To a greater or lesser extent, what we’re talking about here is product videos - i.e. videos created to provide information on a specific product or service.

Product videos are most effective when they take an audience member from a place of initial interest further down the path toward conversion by engaging on a personal level with the likely questions and concerns of the interested party. These videos should be mostly informational rather than promotional, more “shopping channel” than “TV ad.”

The technical implementation required:

If you’re creating videos to improve and augment specific pages on your site — e.g. videos for specific products — then these videos should always be either self-hosted or securely hosted using a third-party provider (e.g. Wistia) as mentioned previously.

This is because these videos will likely only make sense within the context of the pages for which they’re created, and therefore won’t provide much value for an audience finding your content through YouTube search or recommendations. Additionally, by hosting such content on YouTube, you can risk your site being outranked by the instance of the video on youtube.com for branded queries relating to the specific product or service covered in the video. For more information on this problem, check out my post on building a video SEO strategy.

For this kind of content, you should also be trying to get video rich snippets in order to drive more clicks from the search results pages. This can be achieved either through implementing schema.org mark-up, or by submitting a video XML sitemap. See here for more information on implementation.

6. Support your blogging strategy

The kind of content you need:

Video for blogs should be primarily informational with reasonably soft branding. “Talking head” videos are perfect for this and if you have the resources, supplementing the footage with screencasts and/or animated graphics is often a nice way to break up the flow and provide interest.

In order to make it scalable and require minimal editing, I’d normally recommend trying to do these videos in one take with minimal scripting prior to recording the content. Watch the video from Wistia feat. MC Fishkin which explains exactly how Moz manages its creative process to scale the creation of Whiteboard Friday videos with minimal effort.

The technical implementation required:

The hosting for your blogging videos should be determined by the answers to a couple of questions.

1. Which is more important to you - greatest possible exposure to your content or individuals only viewing the content in the context of your own site?

The two are fundamentally dichotomous. If you want maximum exposure, your content should be hosted on YouTube, where it will rank well in the search results (normally those for youtube.com, not for your site) and also be visible throughout the YouTube platform. If you want users to only add comments on your site, within your community framework as opposed to YouTube’s; or are keen to re-target visitors with PPC, then self hosting will be the more appropriate option for you.

2. Is there any search volume on YouTube for the topics you are covering?

This can be worked out using the YouTube Keyword Tool. Be advised that data from the YouTube keyword tool is fairly inaccurate, but the relative indicators of search volume should give you a pretty good feel for whether there is any demand for the content you will be creating.

If there is search volume, that’s fantastic and your videos will likely get some good traction on the YouTube platform should you wish to host there. If there’s no search volume, then having your videos on YouTube likely won’t provide much additional value for you. If the latter is true, you’ll always be better off self-hosting your videos (or using a secure third-party solution as explained previously), since this way you can drive all traffic to your own site rather than to youtube.com.

You generally shouldn’t think about doing both. If you decide to self-host your content and also put it on YouTube, this strategy just gives individuals the option of viewing and linking to content on YouTube rather than your own site, while failing to undertake the primary activity that will help boost your YouTube rankings — namely, embedding your YouTube videos and driving views through those embeds. Rather than giving you best of both worlds, it can actually give you the worst of both worlds.

7. Create video content for other sites

Video content can get you top-tier guest posts and linking opportunities. If you’re able to show a proven history of creating valuable and interesting video content for your own site and others, pitching for guest-post opportunities on top sites becomes so much easier than the standard cold approach.

The kind of content you need:

In many ways, the kind of content you’d use to guest post will have a very similar form factor to the kind of video you’d normally include on your own blog — mostly “talking head” focused.

Interviews of your customers/authorities in your industry often work really well here, because the videos can also act as ego bait. If you can make an individual look really professional on camera in a way they would be unable to do themselves, it can be really easy to get some great links from them for doing so.

If you have the resources or skills, you can also create product videos for commercial partners or build ads for content created by others (someone did this for Distilled, for free, and you can bet I gave them a few links).

The technical implementation required:

Ultimately, as long as you get a link, the way in which a video is embedded on someone else’s site shouldn’t matter to you.

However, if the target in question is not particularly amenable to linking out to you, one of the best ways to encourage them is to only provide the webmaster with an embed code for the content, rather than the raw video file. This means securely hosting the content with a platform like Wistia, enabling domain restrictions and then including a text link back to your site at the end of the embed code (as covered above in Idea 2, using video as link bait). 

In the vast majority of instances, webmasters won’t bother to tweak the embed code and remove the link, whereas if they take the embed code themselves from the instance of the video on a social platform (YouTube/ Vimeo etc.), the embed code will not include an attribution link back to your site with it as standard.

8. Build a content series for social video platforms

Blip.tv and dailymotion.com will give you really high authority (DA93 and DA97), followed profile links if you can a get content series accepted onto the platform and with the relevant user status.

The kind of content you need:

For both of these sites, you will need regularly publish content covering a specific theme that is completely non-branded or commercial in nature. You’ll also need to create different videos for each platform. There is a stringent editorial process to get accepted to either site, and unless your content is relevant to their target audiences, you won’t be granted the Dailymotion motionmaker status (which includes a followed link) or a blip.tv channel profile.

Creating a content series specifically for a single link is obviously a huge investment in time and money, but remember that the benefit here will be brand awareness and hopefully referring traffic, too. If you’re in a particularly “tricky” niche to which it’s difficult to build links, but you have a lot of expert knowledge within your company, this might be a useful technique for you to leverage.

The technical implementation required:

None. You just need to ensure your content is exported in 16:9 at a decent frame size (I normally recommend 1280×720 HD) and uploaded to the respective platform.

9. Boost PR efforts with video news releases

The kind of content you need:

The purpose of a video news release is to support a press release with ancillary information that gives further context around the story in question.

Video news releases are a particularly useful asset for any PR campaign, since they allow your story to make it to the top of a journalist’s pile. Reporters don’t always have the time to write up articles for every interesting pitch, but with a video release you’re essentially doing half the work for them. All editors need to do with a VNR is put together a supporting paragraph, embed the video and then click publish.

The technical implementation required:

Video news releases should always be hosted on YouTube, since the majority of sites are comfortable with embedding YouTube videos on their site and know how to get an embed code from a video on youtube.com

The best practice is just to include a link to the YouTube instance of the video within your initial outreach email. If your contact gets back to you in a positive way regarding the story, you can ask for a “credit link” for the video pointing back to your site.

That’s my nine!

I hope you found this post useful! Do you have any other good ways to build links with video? If so, please do hit me up in the comments! I’d love to hear about any new ideas.

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

As marketers, we’re trained to think that our audiences consider the rational inputs we display, and through them, come to rational conclusions. But what about cognitive biases that might influence processing and decision making?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand dives into how processing fluency impacts web marketing, and explains why things which are easier for us to digest are more likely to induce action.

For reference, here is a still of Rand’s whiteboard.

Video Transcription

“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.

People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.”

This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that’s not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things.

Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we’ve heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action.

Let’s take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we’re more likely to trust the brand more. We’re more likely to recommend it to others. We’re more likely to use it ourselves.

In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site.

This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website’s or a web page’s layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right?

The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, “Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol.” Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering.

Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience.

The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you’ll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There’s sort of a, “Oh, look at that. There’s the navigation on the left-hand side. There’s a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there’s a chart of data down here.” That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, “Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site.”

There’s a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it’s shared more or less.

The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, “Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great,” and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It’s very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus.

I would urge you, whenever you’re thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that’s green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up.

The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I’m going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I’m likely to be on a device where I’m more likely to share? Maybe that’s mobile if it’s a retweet. Maybe that’s desktop if it’s something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet.

The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information.

In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content.

Again, another really good example, Moz’s own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we’re coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you’re producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you’re hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do.

All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

As marketers, we’re trained to think that our audiences consider the rational inputs we display, and through them, come to rational conclusions. But what about cognitive biases that might influence processing and decision making?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand dives into how processing fluency impacts web marketing, and explains why things which are easier for us to digest are more likely to induce action.

For reference, here is a still of Rand’s whiteboard.

Video Transcription

“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.

People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.”

This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that’s not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things.

Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we’ve heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action.

Let’s take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we’re more likely to trust the brand more. We’re more likely to recommend it to others. We’re more likely to use it ourselves.

In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site.

This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website’s or a web page’s layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right?

The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, “Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol.” Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering.

Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience.

The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you’ll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There’s sort of a, “Oh, look at that. There’s the navigation on the left-hand side. There’s a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there’s a chart of data down here.” That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, “Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site.”

There’s a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it’s shared more or less.

The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, “Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great,” and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It’s very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus.

I would urge you, whenever you’re thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that’s green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up.

The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I’m going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I’m likely to be on a device where I’m more likely to share? Maybe that’s mobile if it’s a retweet. Maybe that’s desktop if it’s something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet.

The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information.

In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content.

Again, another really good example, Moz’s own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we’re coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you’re producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you’re hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do.

All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

As marketers, we’re trained to think that our audiences consider the rational inputs we display, and through them, come to rational conclusions. But what about cognitive biases that might influence processing and decision making?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand dives into how processing fluency impacts web marketing, and explains why things which are easier for us to digest are more likely to induce action.

For reference, here is a still of Rand’s whiteboard.

Video Transcription

“Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess.

People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.”

This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that’s not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things.

Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we’ve heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action.

Let’s take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we’re more likely to trust the brand more. We’re more likely to recommend it to others. We’re more likely to use it ourselves.

In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site.

This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website’s or a web page’s layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right?

The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, “Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol.” Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering.

Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience.

The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you’ll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There’s sort of a, “Oh, look at that. There’s the navigation on the left-hand side. There’s a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there’s a chart of data down here.” That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, “Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site.”

There’s a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it’s shared more or less.

The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, “Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great,” and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It’s very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus.

I would urge you, whenever you’re thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that’s green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up.

The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I’m going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I’m likely to be on a device where I’m more likely to share? Maybe that’s mobile if it’s a retweet. Maybe that’s desktop if it’s something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet.

The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information.

In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content.

Again, another really good example, Moz’s own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we’re coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you’re producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you’re hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do.

All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

This
is a post that has been gnawing at the edges of my brain for years, and I think
the time has finally come to write it. Our recent Moz re-brand launched the
inevitable 4,789th wave (and that’s just this year) of “SEO Is Dead” posts.
This isn’t a post about our reasons for broadening our brand (Rand has talked extensively about that)
– it’s a post about why I think every declaration of SEO’s demise misses
something fundamental about our future. This is going to get philosophical, so
if you’d rather go make a sandwich, I won’t stop you.

The Essence of
Search

Let’s
start with a deceptively simple question – How big is the internet? I’ll
attempt to answer that by creating a graph that borders on being silly:

The
internet is so big that even Google got tired of counting,
and it’s growing exponentially. Five years have passed since they announced the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL variations now make the
potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

We
can’t just print out the internet and read it at our leisure. We need a filter –
a way to sift and sort our collected content – and that’s essentially all that
search is. However search evolves or whatever happens to Google, the expansion
of human knowledge is accelerating. Unless we suffer a technological cataclysm,
we will need search, in some form, for the rest of human history.

Searchers and
Searchees

As
long as search exists, it also stands to reason that there will be two groups
of people: (1) People who want to find things, and (2) People who want to be
found. On any given day, we may each be both (1) and (2), and the “people” who
want to be found could be businesses, governments, etc., but for every search
there will be some entity who wants to have a prominent position in that search
result.

The
desire to be found isn’t new or unique to online search – just ask Melvil Dewey or call up “AAA
Aardvark Plumbing” in the Yellow Pages. What’s unique to online search is that
the system has become so complex that automated technology governs who gets
found, and as the scope of information grows, that’s not about to change. Ultimately,
whenever a system controls who will be found, then there will be a need for
people who understand that system well enough to help entities end up on the
short list.

This
goes beyond manipulative, “black hat” practices – data needs to be structured,
rules complied with, and many pieces put into place to make sure that the
information we put out there is generally friendly with the systems that
catalog and filter it. Over time, these systems will get more sophisticated,
but they will never be perfect. As long as search exists, there will be a need
for experts who can optimize information so that it can be easily found.

SEO Is Not One
Tactic

When
we say “SEO Is Dead!”, we’re usually reacting to the latest tactical fad or
announcement from Google. Ultimately, though, SEO is not one tactic and even
though Google currently dominates the market, SEO doesn’t live and die with
Google. I’m 42 years old, and the public internet as we know it now hasn’t
existed for even half of my life. Google is a teenager, and I strongly suspect
I’ll outlive them (or at least their dominance).

There’s
no doubt that search is changing, and our industry is barely out of its infancy.
In the broad sense, though, the need for people who can help construct findable
information and attract people to that information will outlive any single tactic, any
individual SEO expert, and even any search engine.

The Construct: Search
in 2063

Sergei
had spent his entire adult life learning how to manipulate The Construct. Fifteen
years earlier, the unthinkable had happened – the collected knowledge of
humanity had grown so quickly that there was no longer enough space in the
accessible universe to store it in. The internet became The Construct, and it now
spanned both space and time.

Since
no human could adequately comprehend 4-dimensional data (early attempts at neural
interfaces drove a few pioneers to insanity), The Construct had to be projected
onto a 3-dimensional orb suspended in a vacuum, affectionately known as the “space
egg.” With more than a decade of practice, Sergei manipulated the egg like an
omelette chef at a 5-star brunch, and what his clients paid him made their $37
mimosas look reasonable.

This
morning was worse than most. The Construct’s AI had detected an unacceptable
level of manipulation and was adjusting the Core Algo. Sergei could already
see the surface of the egg being rewritten, and the change was costing his
clients millions with every passing minute. Luckily, his defensive bots were
already at work, rewriting semantic data to conform to the ripples in the Algo. One thing was certain: the life of a Space Egg Optimizer was never dull.

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

This
is a post that has been gnawing at the edges of my brain for years, and I think
the time has finally come to write it. Our recent Moz re-brand launched the
inevitable 4,789th wave (and that’s just this year) of “SEO Is Dead” posts.
This isn’t a post about our reasons for broadening our brand (Rand has talked extensively about that)
– it’s a post about why I think every declaration of SEO’s demise misses
something fundamental about our future. This is going to get philosophical, so
if you’d rather go make a sandwich, I won’t stop you.

The Essence of
Search

Let’s
start with a deceptively simple question – How big is the internet? I’ll
attempt to answer that by creating a graph that borders on being silly:

The
internet is so big that even Google got tired of counting,
and it’s growing exponentially. Five years have passed since they announced the trillion mark, and the article suggests that URL variations now make the
potential indexed page count theoretically infinite.

We
can’t just print out the internet and read it at our leisure. We need a filter –
a way to sift and sort our collected content – and that’s essentially all that
search is. However search evolves or whatever happens to Google, the expansion
of human knowledge is accelerating. Unless we suffer a technological cataclysm,
we will need search, in some form, for the rest of human history.

Searchers and
Searchees

As
long as search exists, it also stands to reason that there will be two groups
of people: (1) People who want to find things, and (2) People who want to be
found. On any given day, we may each be both (1) and (2), and the “people” who
want to be found could be businesses, governments, etc., but for every search
there will be some entity who wants to have a prominent position in that search
result.

The
desire to be found isn’t new or unique to online search – just ask Melvil Dewey or call up “AAA
Aardvark Plumbing” in the Yellow Pages. What’s unique to online search is that
the system has become so complex that automated technology governs who gets
found, and as the scope of information grows, that’s not about to change. Ultimately,
whenever a system controls who will be found, then there will be a need for
people who understand that system well enough to help entities end up on the
short list.

This
goes beyond manipulative, “black hat” practices – data needs to be structured,
rules complied with, and many pieces put into place to make sure that the
information we put out there is generally friendly with the systems that
catalog and filter it. Over time, these systems will get more sophisticated,
but they will never be perfect. As long as search exists, there will be a need
for experts who can optimize information so that it can be easily found.

SEO Is Not One
Tactic

When
we say “SEO Is Dead!”, we’re usually reacting to the latest tactical fad or
announcement from Google. Ultimately, though, SEO is not one tactic and even
though Google currently dominates the market, SEO doesn’t live and die with
Google. I’m 42 years old, and the public internet as we know it now hasn’t
existed for even half of my life. Google is a teenager, and I strongly suspect
I’ll outlive them (or at least their dominance).

There’s
no doubt that search is changing, and our industry is barely out of its infancy.
In the broad sense, though, the need for people who can help construct findable
information and attract people to that information will outlive any single tactic, any
individual SEO expert, and even any search engine.

The Construct: Search
in 2063

Sergei
had spent his entire adult life learning how to manipulate The Construct. Fifteen
years earlier, the unthinkable had happened – the collected knowledge of
humanity had grown so quickly that there was no longer enough space in the
accessible universe to store it in. The internet became The Construct, and it now
spanned both space and time.

Since
no human could adequately comprehend 4-dimensional data (early attempts at neural
interfaces drove a few pioneers to insanity), The Construct had to be projected
onto a 3-dimensional orb suspended in a vacuum, affectionately known as the “space
egg.” With more than a decade of practice, Sergei manipulated the egg like an
omelette chef at a 5-star brunch, and what his clients paid him made their $37
mimosas look reasonable.

This
morning was worse than most. The Construct’s AI had detected an unacceptable
level of manipulation and was adjusting the Core Algo. Sergei could already
see the surface of the egg being rewritten, and the change was costing his
clients millions with every passing minute. Luckily, his defensive bots were
already at work, rewriting semantic data to conform to the ripples in the Algo. One thing was certain: the life of a Space Egg Optimizer was never dull.

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

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at YouMoz? Here’s an explanation of what we’re looking for, how to put together a good post, and some frequently asked questions.

I’ve had the privilege of being at the helm of the YouMoz editorial team for almost two years now, and have been amazed and awed by the content that you all have shared. On an average weekday, we get 5-10 submissions, and we publish about 10% of our submissions. I wanted to share more about who we are, what makes for a good YouMoz post, and how to get in that top 10%.

Who Reviews Posts?

• Miriam Ellis is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post.
• Melissa Fach is a Moz Associate with extensive editorial experience in the industry. She is one of the people who will closely review your post and provide you with feedback.
• Keri Morgret (that’s me!) I’m a Moz employee on the community team. I also will closely review posts and give you feedback, as well as do a final check of your post before publishing it on the YouMoz blog.
• Erica McGillivray, Jen Lopez, Ashley Tate, and Trevor Klein also help with the review process as needed.

What is the Review Process?

1. All posts are reviewed for obvious spam and if the post has already been published. In these cases, we decline the submission and leave a note for the author.
2. Miriam makes an initial review of the post and leaves internal notes for the team. The post status changes from “Pending Review By Editor” to “Pending - Reviewed By Editor”. This doesn’t mean it’s going to get published, but please know that only about half of the submissions even make it this far. To check the post status, go to Manage Posts (visible when looking at the Moz Blog), click the Posts tab, and then look for the status and any notes from the editor.



3. Melissa or I do an in-depth review of the post, with other people from Moz giving additional opinion or reviewing posts as needed. We’ll make a decision to decline the post, return the post to the author for edits, or to publish the post. We will either leave a note in the editor comments field of the post, or (usually) email the author at the email address on their profile with our decision.

   Don’t panic if your post was returned to you! Many of the posts on the YouMoz blog (and even those that have been promoted to the main blog) have gone through the revision process. This means we think your post has potential, and there are some things that could be improved to make it a great post for YouMoz.

4. When a post is approved for publishing, I do one final check for spelling, grammar, valid links, image attribution, and several other details. We try to notify the author of publication at least several hours to a few days before we publish. It is beneficial for the author to be able to respond to any comments by our readers, and to promote their post (Roger will also share the post on Twitter).

What Content is a Good Fit for YouMoz?

Actionable, detailed content with references tends to do the best on YouMoz, and case studies or examples are particularly popular. Think about the readers of this post, and try to make it so this is something that the reader could take to their boss and say, “Let’s give this a try. Here’s a post where this person tried it, they got good results, and they explain how to implement it.” This post is from a security company, but a wide variety of people could follow their tutorial using Google Analytics to develop an FAQ strategy. This post used screenshots of GA to explain step-by-step what they did complete with an example to cut and paste, and provided information about how it impacted their company.

We want to publish original content that has not been published elsewhere. By original, we mean both “don’t submit an exact copy of a post that is already online” and “don’t take the outline of a post and change word order enough to pass Copyscape”. YouMoz readers are looking for new information that they haven’t already read on another site.

Include enough details so others can replicate your actions or your processes. Try to anticipate the questions someone might ask or alternative explanations and address that in your post. Here are two examples:

• If you’re discussing a tactic that increased your traffic, include additional information that might be relevant. For example, if you’ve been revising content about pumpkin carving and state the increase in traffic is due to the authorship you implemented, yet the traffic comparison is the month of October (the end of October is Halloween in the US and when people carve pumpkins) to the month of September, readers are likely to comment that it was increased search queries that led to the traffic rise, not the inclusion of authorship. Instead, in this case you could compare October this year to the previous October, and compare pages with authorship implemented to pages without authorship implemented.
• If you’re examining a search engine result page, include information about which search engine you were using (google.com? google.co.uk?), your location, if you were logged out (generally, it’s best to use an incognito window in a browser to help minimize personalization based on your search history and cookies), what query you ran, if you modified any parameters in the URL, if other people saw the same results, and any other relevant information.

Back up the “what to do” statements with information about “how to do”. References are often key to a good YouMoz post. You don’t need to explain how to do every single step, but give enough context and a brief explanation, then link to where there is authoritative information. A good example is this post about spring cleaning your website. If this same post with no links had been submitted, it would not have been approved. Instead, the post did well and was promoted to the main blog.

I want to write a case study, but am not able to share sales figures or visitor data. What can I do?

Find out what data you can share. Perhaps you can’t share the exact number of visits the site received or the raw dollar figure of the sales, but you can share that traffic increased by 10% compared to the previous year, or that the time on site increased. This post about opening up content on their website doesn’t have exact visitor information, but does include enough information to show that their experiment had a positive impact.

If you don’t have any data you can share as an example, consider sharing something that you’ve built to help you learn something or be more efficient. This post breaks down how the author reviewed job descriptions to build a list of topics to learn more about, and how he prioritized that list.

Google just announced that they are doing XYZ, and I’d like to write about it for YouMoz!

We usually don’t cover general industry news on YouMoz. There are a number of other blogs that are quite good at covering the latest announcements from the search engines, including Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. What works for YouMoz is a post talking about what Google is doing, and how it impacts the business, what you can do to take advantage of or mitigate the latest development, or other actionable information. An example is determining how the shutdown of Google Reader might impact your bottom line, example spreadsheets, and how to explain this to your C-level executives.

How many words should I write?

We don’t have a minimum or maximum word count. Generally posts run from 1000-3000 words, but we have published posts that were fewer than 500 words and posts that were over 10,000 words.

What about links?

Relevant links are encouraged in posts. The previously mentioned post about spring cleaning your website had a considerable number of links to resources. You can link to your own site or a client’s site in your post, if it is relevant and on-topic. In this post about lessons from a 100k pageview post, the author links to content from his company’s blog. The YouMoz is all about how that post got over 100,000 pageviews, and is a very appropriate example.

Unfortunately, we often see posts that start out “My coworkers at our Springfield SEO agency were having coffee the other day” with a link to the SEO services page of their agency and a post that has no inherit need for that link. If your post only links to your own properties, that’s going to be viewed by many users as a bit too promotional for your own site. There is a Blog Bio section of your profile where you can have a link back to your company in your bio that will show at the bottom of the post (it’s not displaying at the moment, but it will be fixed shortly).

Affiliate links are not allowed.

Do I need to have a degree in writing to write for YouMoz? What if English is not my first language?

You don’t need to have perfect spelling and grammar to have a post published on YouMoz, nor does English need to be your native language. However, we are not a college writing lab. We will give you feedback about what could make your post work better for our readers, and we will check for spelling and obvious grammar mistakes, but we are not able to go through a post line-by-line and help you rewrite it.

Give yourself plenty of time to research the post (including finding the examples, references, and images), write the post, have others review what you’ve written, then come back and look at your writing anew after you’ve had a break from it. Take in the feedback other people have given, and do one last review in a word processor for spelling and grammar mistakes. This post about Author Rank needed only two typos fixed out of 2600+ words, and needed very little work from the editors. The author later revealed that four coworkers had reviewed his post and given feedback. The post has 166 thumbs up, only one thumb down, and from the first comment had requests to promote it to the main blog.

Be aware that people from all over the world read YouMoz, and may not understand references that are regional in nature or specific figures of speech. It can be helpful to avoid some idioms, and add additional information for context.

Technical Details

Finding Images

Images are great to have in a post! If you’re not making screenshots of your own material (info on that below), please be sure that you have the right to use the images you are submitting. Here’s one post on finding photos for your blog post, including using stock photos, Creative Commons pictures, and commissioning your own photos. Including a note at the end of your post about your image sources would be really helpful! We will erase before publishing, but this saves us from having to email you asking about the image source.

Adding Images

Here are some tips that will help your image look good in the post, and minimize the amount of back-and-forth needed with the editorial staff.

Our biggest request is that you resize your browser or your spreadsheet before taking screenshots. Often a computer screen is set at 1200 pixels wide, and the site (or application) adjusts to fill that whole space. When you take a screenshot and that width and then need to reduce it to the 730 pixels wide for the blog, the image can be hard to read.

If you adjust column headings to remove extra horizontal space (wrapping the text can help), or adjust the width of your browser before taking a screenshot, it can make a big difference. The two images below are before and after examples of removing extra space in a spreadsheet. Both are the exact same width, but one is much more readable.

You don’t need Photoshop or fancy image editing tools. I’m on a PC, and use a combination of Paint and Irfanview (free) to resize images, automatically crop extra white space, and with the RIOT plugin you can “save for web” and have a reasonable file size for your image.

To insert an image in your post, you’ll first need it hosted somewhere (your own site, or a free hosting site like imgur.com (if your post is published, we’ll automatically copy your images to our CDN). In the post, click the Insert Image icon, then paste in your image URL. Your image will now appear in the post.

Formatting your post

Using headings is a great way to help organize your post! If you’re using our editor to compost your post, headings can be found when you click the paragraph icon. Text alignment is adjusted when you click the icon shown below.

If you’re accustomed to our old editor and resistant to change, you might give this editor a try. We have no relation to and do not support it, but it may be a more familiar interface for you. You can paste the source code from that editor into the source code view of our editor (click the </> button in the toolbar for that view).

Spelling and grammar checking

After you’ve finished your post and had it reviewed by some trusted people, do one last check for spelling and grammar. One method that works well to catch many mistakes is to paste your post as plain text into Word, then select the language as your local language, and make sure that “do not check spelling or grammar” is unchecked. I’ve often found that Word decides that part of the text is a different language, or that you somehow don’t want it to check all of your document. Here’s a handy page on setting your language in Word that will help you find this semi-hidden setting.

FAQs

How does a post get promoted to the main blog?

This is the most common question! There is no exact formula, but instead we look for how the community has felt about the post. Some indicators of this are the number of thumbs, the number and type of comments, reaction on social media, and post analytics. If you wrote an awesome post that got on Hacker News but didn’t get a ton of thumbs or comments on the post itself (because it was discussed on HN and those users didn’t sign up here just to thumb), we’re going to notice that and take it into consideration.

Did you know that we have post analytics that are available on every post? Take a look!

We generally promote posts within a week or two of them going up on YouMoz. We’re considering looking back a couple of months and evaluating posts that were slower to catch on with the audience but did well and were not time-sensitive. Please give us your feedback about this in the comments! 

Why do some posts go straight to the main blog?

The technical infrastructure we have is responsible for some “YouMoz” posts going straight to the main blog. For our regular main blog authors, we have special permissions for them to be able to post directly to the main blog. For authors doing just a single post on the main blog, having them submit to YouMoz and promote it right away is the easiest technical way to do things.

Why is the review period so long?

We strive to be TAGFEE in our reviews, and give quality feedback to all legitimate posts, even the ones we decline. Sometimes it takes a while to read through the post and get into the author’s head and understand where they are coming from, what they are trying to say, and compose an email back to the author explaining how their post could be improved.

The editing team has a wide variety of knowledge, but we sometimes need to send a technical post off to another Moz employee or associate for them to review. We don’t want to publish a post that has incorrect information that could do harm to a site, for example.

Various things can interfere with author communication. The email address in the profile might be sales@somecompany.com and the email doesn’t get passed along to the author, or the email goes into a spam bucket. Sometimes we have posts that are 90% there and just need a couple of small tweaks, and we never hear back from the author for whatever reason.

Sometimes we’ll be short an employee because of a vacation, we’ll launch a new product, migrate domains, or need to email every single Moz user and answer their questions. Sometimes, it all happens in the same week. The awesome thing about this team is that we’re cross-trained and can pitch in to help each other. At times, it means we’ll have a bunch of people tackle YouMoz and the review period is nice and short, and at other times it means that we need to devote our energies to other tasks and the YouMoz queue grows again.

We Want You to Write for YouMoz!

Are you ready to write a post? We hope you can take what you’ve learned here and decide to Submit a YouMoz Post!

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

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at YouMoz? Here’s an explanation of what we’re looking for, how to put together a good post, and some frequently asked questions.

I’ve had the privilege of being at the helm of the YouMoz editorial team for almost two years now, and have been amazed and awed by the content that you all have shared. On an average weekday, we get 5-10 submissions, and we publish about 10% of our submissions. I wanted to share more about who we are, what makes for a good YouMoz post, and how to get in that top 10%.

Who Reviews Posts?

• Miriam Ellis is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post.
• Melissa Fach is a Moz Associate with extensive editorial experience in the industry. She is one of the people who will closely review your post and provide you with feedback.
• Keri Morgret (that’s me!) I’m a Moz employee on the community team. I also will closely review posts and give you feedback, as well as do a final check of your post before publishing it on the YouMoz blog.
• Erica McGillivray, Jen Lopez, Ashley Tate, and Trevor Klein also help with the review process as needed.

What is the Review Process?

1. All posts are reviewed for obvious spam and if the post has already been published. In these cases, we decline the submission and leave a note for the author.
2. Miriam makes an initial review of the post and leaves internal notes for the team. The post status changes from “Pending Review By Editor” to “Pending - Reviewed By Editor”. This doesn’t mean it’s going to get published, but please know that only about half of the submissions even make it this far. To check the post status, go to Manage Posts (visible when looking at the Moz Blog), click the Posts tab, and then look for the status and any notes from the editor.



3. Melissa or I do an in-depth review of the post, with other people from Moz giving additional opinion or reviewing posts as needed. We’ll make a decision to decline the post, return the post to the author for edits, or to publish the post. We will either leave a note in the editor comments field of the post, or (usually) email the author at the email address on their profile with our decision.

   Don’t panic if your post was returned to you! Many of the posts on the YouMoz blog (and even those that have been promoted to the main blog) have gone through the revision process. This means we think your post has potential, and there are some things that could be improved to make it a great post for YouMoz.

4. When a post is approved for publishing, I do one final check for spelling, grammar, valid links, image attribution, and several other details. We try to notify the author of publication at least several hours to a few days before we publish. It is beneficial for the author to be able to respond to any comments by our readers, and to promote their post (Roger will also share the post on Twitter).

What Content is a Good Fit for YouMoz?

Actionable, detailed content with references tends to do the best on YouMoz, and case studies or examples are particularly popular. Think about the readers of this post, and try to make it so this is something that the reader could take to their boss and say, “Let’s give this a try. Here’s a post where this person tried it, they got good results, and they explain how to implement it.” This post is from a security company, but a wide variety of people could follow their tutorial using Google Analytics to develop an FAQ strategy. This post used screenshots of GA to explain step-by-step what they did complete with an example to cut and paste, and provided information about how it impacted their company.

We want to publish original content that has not been published elsewhere. By original, we mean both “don’t submit an exact copy of a post that is already online” and “don’t take the outline of a post and change word order enough to pass Copyscape”. YouMoz readers are looking for new information that they haven’t already read on another site.

Include enough details so others can replicate your actions or your processes. Try to anticipate the questions someone might ask or alternative explanations and address that in your post. Here are two examples:

• If you’re discussing a tactic that increased your traffic, include additional information that might be relevant. For example, if you’ve been revising content about pumpkin carving and state the increase in traffic is due to the authorship you implemented, yet the traffic comparison is the month of October (the end of October is Halloween in the US and when people carve pumpkins) to the month of September, readers are likely to comment that it was increased search queries that led to the traffic rise, not the inclusion of authorship. Instead, in this case you could compare October this year to the previous October, and compare pages with authorship implemented to pages without authorship implemented.
• If you’re examining a search engine result page, include information about which search engine you were using (google.com? google.co.uk?), your location, if you were logged out (generally, it’s best to use an incognito window in a browser to help minimize personalization based on your search history and cookies), what query you ran, if you modified any parameters in the URL, if other people saw the same results, and any other relevant information.

Back up the “what to do” statements with information about “how to do”. References are often key to a good YouMoz post. You don’t need to explain how to do every single step, but give enough context and a brief explanation, then link to where there is authoritative information. A good example is this post about spring cleaning your website. If this same post with no links had been submitted, it would not have been approved. Instead, the post did well and was promoted to the main blog.

I want to write a case study, but am not able to share sales figures or visitor data. What can I do?

Find out what data you can share. Perhaps you can’t share the exact number of visits the site received or the raw dollar figure of the sales, but you can share that traffic increased by 10% compared to the previous year, or that the time on site increased. This post about opening up content on their website doesn’t have exact visitor information, but does include enough information to show that their experiment had a positive impact.

If you don’t have any data you can share as an example, consider sharing something that you’ve built to help you learn something or be more efficient. This post breaks down how the author reviewed job descriptions to build a list of topics to learn more about, and how he prioritized that list.

Google just announced that they are doing XYZ, and I’d like to write about it for YouMoz!

We usually don’t cover general industry news on YouMoz. There are a number of other blogs that are quite good at covering the latest announcements from the search engines, including Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. What works for YouMoz is a post talking about what Google is doing, and how it impacts the business, what you can do to take advantage of or mitigate the latest development, or other actionable information. An example is determining how the shutdown of Google Reader might impact your bottom line, example spreadsheets, and how to explain this to your C-level executives.

How many words should I write?

We don’t have a minimum or maximum word count. Generally posts run from 1000-3000 words, but we have published posts that were fewer than 500 words and posts that were over 10,000 words.

What about links?

Relevant links are encouraged in posts. The previously mentioned post about spring cleaning your website had a considerable number of links to resources. You can link to your own site or a client’s site in your post, if it is relevant and on-topic. In this post about lessons from a 100k pageview post, the author links to content from his company’s blog. The YouMoz is all about how that post got over 100,000 pageviews, and is a very appropriate example.

Unfortunately, we often see posts that start out “My coworkers at our Springfield SEO agency were having coffee the other day” with a link to the SEO services page of their agency and a post that has no inherit need for that link. If your post only links to your own properties, that’s going to be viewed by many users as a bit too promotional for your own site. There is a Blog Bio section of your profile where you can have a link back to your company in your bio that will show at the bottom of the post (it’s not displaying at the moment, but it will be fixed shortly).

Affiliate links are not allowed.

Do I need to have a degree in writing to write for YouMoz? What if English is not my first language?

You don’t need to have perfect spelling and grammar to have a post published on YouMoz, nor does English need to be your native language. However, we are not a college writing lab. We will give you feedback about what could make your post work better for our readers, and we will check for spelling and obvious grammar mistakes, but we are not able to go through a post line-by-line and help you rewrite it.

Give yourself plenty of time to research the post (including finding the examples, references, and images), write the post, have others review what you’ve written, then come back and look at your writing anew after you’ve had a break from it. Take in the feedback other people have given, and do one last review in a word processor for spelling and grammar mistakes. This post about Author Rank needed only two typos fixed out of 2600+ words, and needed very little work from the editors. The author later revealed that four coworkers had reviewed his post and given feedback. The post has 166 thumbs up, only one thumb down, and from the first comment had requests to promote it to the main blog.

Be aware that people from all over the world read YouMoz, and may not understand references that are regional in nature or specific figures of speech. It can be helpful to avoid some idioms, and add additional information for context.

Technical Details

Finding Images

Images are great to have in a post! If you’re not making screenshots of your own material (info on that below), please be sure that you have the right to use the images you are submitting. Here’s one post on finding photos for your blog post, including using stock photos, Creative Commons pictures, and commissioning your own photos. Including a note at the end of your post about your image sources would be really helpful! We will erase before publishing, but this saves us from having to email you asking about the image source.

Adding Images

Here are some tips that will help your image look good in the post, and minimize the amount of back-and-forth needed with the editorial staff.

Our biggest request is that you resize your browser or your spreadsheet before taking screenshots. Often a computer screen is set at 1200 pixels wide, and the site (or application) adjusts to fill that whole space. When you take a screenshot and that width and then need to reduce it to the 730 pixels wide for the blog, the image can be hard to read.

If you adjust column headings to remove extra horizontal space (wrapping the text can help), or adjust the width of your browser before taking a screenshot, it can make a big difference. The two images below are before and after examples of removing extra space in a spreadsheet. Both are the exact same width, but one is much more readable.

You don’t need Photoshop or fancy image editing tools. I’m on a PC, and use a combination of Paint and Irfanview (free) to resize images, automatically crop extra white space, and with the RIOT plugin you can “save for web” and have a reasonable file size for your image.

To insert an image in your post, you’ll first need it hosted somewhere (your own site, or a free hosting site like imgur.com (if your post is published, we’ll automatically copy your images to our CDN). In the post, click the Insert Image icon, then paste in your image URL. Your image will now appear in the post.

Formatting your post

Using headings is a great way to help organize your post! If you’re using our editor to compost your post, headings can be found when you click the paragraph icon. Text alignment is adjusted when you click the icon shown below.

If you’re accustomed to our old editor and resistant to change, you might give this editor a try. We have no relation to and do not support it, but it may be a more familiar interface for you. You can paste the source code from that editor into the source code view of our editor (click the </> button in the toolbar for that view).

Spelling and grammar checking

After you’ve finished your post and had it reviewed by some trusted people, do one last check for spelling and grammar. One method that works well to catch many mistakes is to paste your post as plain text into Word, then select the language as your local language, and make sure that “do not check spelling or grammar” is unchecked. I’ve often found that Word decides that part of the text is a different language, or that you somehow don’t want it to check all of your document. Here’s a handy page on setting your language in Word that will help you find this semi-hidden setting.

FAQs

How does a post get promoted to the main blog?

This is the most common question! There is no exact formula, but instead we look for how the community has felt about the post. Some indicators of this are the number of thumbs, the number and type of comments, reaction on social media, and post analytics. If you wrote an awesome post that got on Hacker News but didn’t get a ton of thumbs or comments on the post itself (because it was discussed on HN and those users didn’t sign up here just to thumb), we’re going to notice that and take it into consideration.

Did you know that we have post analytics that are available on every post? Take a look!

We generally promote posts within a week or two of them going up on YouMoz. We’re considering looking back a couple of months and evaluating posts that were slower to catch on with the audience but did well and were not time-sensitive. Please give us your feedback about this in the comments! 

Why do some posts go straight to the main blog?

The technical infrastructure we have is responsible for some “YouMoz” posts going straight to the main blog. For our regular main blog authors, we have special permissions for them to be able to post directly to the main blog. For authors doing just a single post on the main blog, having them submit to YouMoz and promote it right away is the easiest technical way to do things.

Why is the review period so long?

We strive to be TAGFEE in our reviews, and give quality feedback to all legitimate posts, even the ones we decline. Sometimes it takes a while to read through the post and get into the author’s head and understand where they are coming from, what they are trying to say, and compose an email back to the author explaining how their post could be improved.

The editing team has a wide variety of knowledge, but we sometimes need to send a technical post off to another Moz employee or associate for them to review. We don’t want to publish a post that has incorrect information that could do harm to a site, for example.

Various things can interfere with author communication. The email address in the profile might be sales@somecompany.com and the email doesn’t get passed along to the author, or the email goes into a spam bucket. Sometimes we have posts that are 90% there and just need a couple of small tweaks, and we never hear back from the author for whatever reason.

Sometimes we’ll be short an employee because of a vacation, we’ll launch a new product, migrate domains, or need to email every single Moz user and answer their questions. Sometimes, it all happens in the same week. The awesome thing about this team is that we’re cross-trained and can pitch in to help each other. At times, it means we’ll have a bunch of people tackle YouMoz and the review period is nice and short, and at other times it means that we need to devote our energies to other tasks and the YouMoz queue grows again.

We Want You to Write for YouMoz!

Are you ready to write a post? We hope you can take what you’ve learned here and decide to Submit a YouMoz Post!

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

Today’s web search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring whether a web page is related to a given query, based on decades of research in Information Retrieval. Come join me as I explore the inner workings of a search engine’s relevance engine and explain what it means for SEOs.

Determining Relevance

When a user submits a query to a search engine, the first thing it must do is determine which pages in the index are related to the query and which are not. Throughout this post, I will refer this as the “relevance” problem. More formally, we can state it as follows:

Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.

The “document” in this context can also refer to things like the title tag, the meta description, incoming anchor text, or anything else that we think might help determine whether the query is related to the page. Practically, a search engine computes a number of relevance scores using different page elements and weights them all to arrive at one final score.

The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an active area of research. In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.

Relevance vs Ranking

Conceptually, we can separate relevance determination from ranking the relevant documents, even if they are implemented as a single step inside a search engine. In this mental framework, the relevance step first makes a binary (True/False) decision for each page, then the ranking step orders the documents to return to the user.

I’ll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this split and how it relates to different ranking signals.

Query and Document Models

Translating the query and document from raw strings into something we can do computation with is the first hurdle in computing a similarity score. To do so, we make use of “query models” and “document models.” The “models” here are just a fancy way of saying that the strings are represented in some other way that makes computation possible.

The above image illustrates this process for the query “philadelphia phillies” and the Wikipedia page about the Phillies. The final step in computing the similarity score runs the query and document representations through a scoring function.

Query Models

The following image illustrates some different types of query models:

The building blocks at the bottom include things like tokenization (splitting the string into words), word normalization (such as stemming where common word endings are removed), and spelling correction (if a query contains a misspelled word, the search engine corrects it and returns results for the corrected word).

Built on top of these building blocks are things like query classification and intent. If the search engine determines that a particular query is time sensitive it will return news results, or if it thinks the query intent is transactional it will display shopping results.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid are more abstract representations of the query such as entity extraction or latent topic representations (LDA). Indeed, Google knows that the “philadelphia phillies” are a major league baseball team and since it is baseball season returns last night’s score at the top of the search results (in addition to the knowledge graph on the right).

Document Models

Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.

TF-IDF is one of the oldest and most well known approaches that represents each query and document as a vector and uses some variant of the cosine similarity as the scoring function. A language model encodes some information about the statistics of a language and includes knowledge such as the phrase “search engine optimization” is much more common then “search engine walking.” Language models are used heavily in machine translation and speech recognition, among other applications. They are also extremely useful in information retrieval. Yet another class of models uses the probability ranking principle, which directly models the probability of relevance given the query and document. Of these, Okapi BM25 has been shown to be particularly effective.

Correlation study

By now, you are probably wondering if search engines actually use any of these things, and if so, which ones are the most important. To explore this, we designed a correlation study similar to ones we have run in the past (see this for some background on the general approach). In this case, we collected the top 50 results from Google-US for about 14,000 keywords. This resulted in about 600,000 pages that we then crawled and used to compute a number of different similarity scores.

As you can see, the language model approach performed the best with a mean Spearman correlation of 0.10, consistent with results published in the research literature.

If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:

This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.

Relevance vs Ranking revisited

Comparing these correlations vs Page Authority (an aggregate in-link metric in our Mozscape index) on the same data set, we see a substantial difference:

This begs the question: if these sophisticated similarity scores are so useful, why aren’t the correlations higher? The answer lies in the conceptual relevance vs ranking split I discussed earlier.

To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:

To run the experiment, I first took 450 random pages from our dataset stratified across the top 50 results (so that they include nine #1 ranked pages, nine #2 ranked pages, etc.). Then I added the 450 random pages to the top 50 pages in each search result to make one group of 500 pages for each keyword. Since 50 of these pages are in the search result, and 450 are not, 10% of them are relevant to the keyword and 90% are not (the assumption here is that if the page appears in a Google search then it is relevant). Then for each keyword, I collected the Page Authority and Language Model similarity score and sorted by each (the tables in the middle).

Finally, I computed the Precision at 50, which is the percentage of the top 50 results sorted by PA/Language Model score that are actually in the search result. This directly measures the extent to which PA or the Language Model can separate relevant from irrelevant pages. Since 10% of the 500 documents are in the search result, we can achieve a 10% precision by randomly sorting them. This 10% precision is our baseline (bottom gray bars in the image).

The results are striking. The PA precision is very close to the baseline, which says that is does no better then a random number at determining relevance even though it does do a good job at ranking the top 50 once they are known to be relevant. On the other hand, the Language Model precision is close to 100%. Put another way, the Language Model is nearly perfect in determining which of the 500 pages are in the search result, but does a poor job at actually ranking those relevant documents.

Takeaways

This type of query-document similarity scoring is well established in the research literature and underlies every modern information retrieval system. As such, it is fundamental to search and is immune to algorithm change.

Since search engines use sophisticated query and document models, there is no need to optimize separately for similar keywords. For example, any page targeting “movie reviews” will also target “movie review.”

Finally, you can use the conceptual split between relevance and ranking in your workflow. When creating or modifying existing content, first concentrate on making the page relevant to a broad set related keywords. Then concentrate on increasing the search position.

More Ranking Factors results coming soon

These are the first results we’ve released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. As in years past, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I’ll be presenting the results at MozCon this year (so get your tickets if you haven’t already!), and we’ll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.

To dig deeper

Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning et al. It is available for free online reading from their site and provides a comprehensive description of everything discussed in this post (and much, much more). In particular, see Chapters 2, 6, 11 and 12.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!

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

Today’s web search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring whether a web page is related to a given query, based on decades of research in Information Retrieval. Come join me as I explore the inner workings of a search engine’s relevance engine and explain what it means for SEOs.

Determining Relevance

When a user submits a query to a search engine, the first thing it must do is determine which pages in the index are related to the query and which are not. Throughout this post, I will refer this as the “relevance” problem. More formally, we can state it as follows:

Given a search query and a document, compute a relevance score that measures the similarity between the query and document.

The “document” in this context can also refer to things like the title tag, the meta description, incoming anchor text, or anything else that we think might help determine whether the query is related to the page. Practically, a search engine computes a number of relevance scores using different page elements and weights them all to arrive at one final score.

The relevance problem has been extremely well studied in the research community. The first papers go back several decades, and it is still an active area of research. In this post, I focus on the most influential approaches that have stood the test of time.

Relevance vs Ranking

Conceptually, we can separate relevance determination from ranking the relevant documents, even if they are implemented as a single step inside a search engine. In this mental framework, the relevance step first makes a binary (True/False) decision for each page, then the ranking step orders the documents to return to the user.

I’ll present some data later in this post that vividly illustrates this split and how it relates to different ranking signals.

Query and Document Models

Translating the query and document from raw strings into something we can do computation with is the first hurdle in computing a similarity score. To do so, we make use of “query models” and “document models.” The “models” here are just a fancy way of saying that the strings are represented in some other way that makes computation possible.

The above image illustrates this process for the query “philadelphia phillies” and the Wikipedia page about the Phillies. The final step in computing the similarity score runs the query and document representations through a scoring function.

Query Models

The following image illustrates some different types of query models:

The building blocks at the bottom include things like tokenization (splitting the string into words), word normalization (such as stemming where common word endings are removed), and spelling correction (if a query contains a misspelled word, the search engine corrects it and returns results for the corrected word).

Built on top of these building blocks are things like query classification and intent. If the search engine determines that a particular query is time sensitive it will return news results, or if it thinks the query intent is transactional it will display shopping results.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid are more abstract representations of the query such as entity extraction or latent topic representations (LDA). Indeed, Google knows that the “philadelphia phillies” are a major league baseball team and since it is baseball season returns last night’s score at the top of the search results (in addition to the knowledge graph on the right).

Document Models

Like query models, there are several different types of document models commonly used in search.

TF-IDF is one of the oldest and most well known approaches that represents each query and document as a vector and uses some variant of the cosine similarity as the scoring function. A language model encodes some information about the statistics of a language and includes knowledge such as the phrase “search engine optimization” is much more common then “search engine walking.” Language models are used heavily in machine translation and speech recognition, among other applications. They are also extremely useful in information retrieval. Yet another class of models uses the probability ranking principle, which directly models the probability of relevance given the query and document. Of these, Okapi BM25 has been shown to be particularly effective.

Correlation study

By now, you are probably wondering if search engines actually use any of these things, and if so, which ones are the most important. To explore this, we designed a correlation study similar to ones we have run in the past (see this for some background on the general approach). In this case, we collected the top 50 results from Google-US for about 14,000 keywords. This resulted in about 600,000 pages that we then crawled and used to compute a number of different similarity scores.

As you can see, the language model approach performed the best with a mean Spearman correlation of 0.10, consistent with results published in the research literature.

If we do some stemming of both the query and document first and recompute, the correlations increase slightly across the board:

This suggests that Google is indeed doing some type of word normalization or stemming in their relevance calculation.

Relevance vs Ranking revisited

Comparing these correlations vs Page Authority (an aggregate in-link metric in our Mozscape index) on the same data set, we see a substantial difference:

This begs the question: if these sophisticated similarity scores are so useful, why aren’t the correlations higher? The answer lies in the conceptual relevance vs ranking split I discussed earlier.

To convince myself, I constructed an experiment as illustrated below:

To run the experiment, I first took 450 random pages from our dataset stratified across the top 50 results (so that they include nine #1 ranked pages, nine #2 ranked pages, etc.). Then I added the 450 random pages to the top 50 pages in each search result to make one group of 500 pages for each keyword. Since 50 of these pages are in the search result, and 450 are not, 10% of them are relevant to the keyword and 90% are not (the assumption here is that if the page appears in a Google search then it is relevant). Then for each keyword, I collected the Page Authority and Language Model similarity score and sorted by each (the tables in the middle).

Finally, I computed the Precision at 50, which is the percentage of the top 50 results sorted by PA/Language Model score that are actually in the search result. This directly measures the extent to which PA or the Language Model can separate relevant from irrelevant pages. Since 10% of the 500 documents are in the search result, we can achieve a 10% precision by randomly sorting them. This 10% precision is our baseline (bottom gray bars in the image).

The results are striking. The PA precision is very close to the baseline, which says that is does no better then a random number at determining relevance even though it does do a good job at ranking the top 50 once they are known to be relevant. On the other hand, the Language Model precision is close to 100%. Put another way, the Language Model is nearly perfect in determining which of the 500 pages are in the search result, but does a poor job at actually ranking those relevant documents.

Takeaways

This type of query-document similarity scoring is well established in the research literature and underlies every modern information retrieval system. As such, it is fundamental to search and is immune to algorithm change.

Since search engines use sophisticated query and document models, there is no need to optimize separately for similar keywords. For example, any page targeting “movie reviews” will also target “movie review.”

Finally, you can use the conceptual split between relevance and ranking in your workflow. When creating or modifying existing content, first concentrate on making the page relevant to a broad set related keywords. Then concentrate on increasing the search position.

More Ranking Factors results coming soon

These are the first results we’ve released from the 2013 Ranking Factors project. As in years past, the project includes both an industry survey and large correlation study. I’ll be presenting the results at MozCon this year (so get your tickets if you haven’t already!), and we’ll be following it up with a full report sometime later this summer.

To dig deeper

Here are all the slides from my SMX Advanced talk:

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning et al. It is available for free online reading from their site and provides a comprehensive description of everything discussed in this post (and much, much more). In particular, see Chapters 2, 6, 11 and 12.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments below!

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

It’s conference season! Our inbound marketing conference, MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle, is just around the corner, and we often get asked by your our community how to approach your boss, CMO, CEO, etc., about coming to MozCon. You want to know more about the value for you and your company or clients, about how we spend those MozCon dollars, and what you can expect once you’re here. And furthermore, some of you might be considering coming on your own dime, especially if you’re a freelancer, student, or owner of a small business.

Conferences can be spendy when you add up ticket costs, travel, hotel, meals, and more. It’s important that you can justify a positive ROI when it comes to your budget. At Moz, we’re big believers in what you can learn at conferences, whether in sessions or through networking, (clear ROI) and in the power of serendipity (which can have a less concrete ROI).

Let’s take a deep-dive into what MozCon looks like both from a value and a cost standpoint. MozCon’s truly an amazing three-day conference where you’ll take away a ton of actionable tips to implement on your site(s) and make new friends, whether the fellow community member sitting next to you, a Mozzer, or one of our industry leaders who are speaking.

And for those of you ready to take the MozCon plunge:

What’s the ROI of My Ticket

Actionable Tactics

This year, MozCon has an astounding 35 speakers! They’ll be talking about everything from linking building and international SEO to analytics, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing. We have an incredibly strong mix of topics with something for everyone. Our goal is really for you to bring something back with you from every session, which is why every single speaker has a keynote-style session to deliver this information. It’s a bit like the best of 35 college courses distilled down to the heart of the subject.

With the exception of our community speakers, who are selected from your pitches, all our speakers are curated from our MozCon selection committee. After speakers have accepted for MozCon, we work with them to ensure that they’re going to bring their very best, unique content to MozCon. Topics are chosen both by what said speaker’s an expert on, but also what they’re currently excited about. 

This year, every speaker had a kick-off call to establish their topic and set up expectations. Even many seasoned speakers can be intimidated by the MozCon stage, and one of my jobs is to make sure that they are ready and confident about their talk. Speakers are also required to send in a draft or outline of their presentation so we can make sure they’re on track. Every year, our post-MozCon survey shows that MozCon goers have extremely high expectations. By seeing a draft, we can offer advice. A lot of which is based on what you, the audience, expects from speakers. We make a lot of suggestions about actionable tactics, setting up the audience with what Nancy Duarte calls “the new bliss” to conclude their talks, and pushing content to the next level.

Speakers can send in as many drafts as they’d like for us to review, and final drafts are due about a week before MozCon. Which means I hope speakers are relaxing and practicing their talk, instead of hustling to put last minute slides together. For Mozzers, we’ve put together several practice sessions (first one was Friday!) for us internally to run through MozCon presentations.

Every single speaker is incredibly excited to be up on that stage and giving you their best. In fact, last year, Paddy Moogan really showed this spirit when he offered, for anyone who didn’t learn something from his talk, that he’d buy them a beer and talk with them specifics about their website. Talk about TAGFEE! I don’t doubt there will be some similar offers this year.

Inspiration

After actionable tactics, you’re sure to come back inspired by MozCon. I know the best conferences I’ve come back from were the ones that I couldn’t wait to get back to work or dive more into learning. Not to mention, the videos are included in the ticket costs, which means you can share the MozCon love with your coworkers and rewatch them yourself when you need a recharge in-between MozCons.

While we certainly stress actionable tactics with our speakers, inspiration comes through with every talk. The tactics may help you win, but the inspiration will fuel the fire. And who doesn’t benefit by your productivity being up? You may find yourself excited about a topic you’ve delved into or seen yourself doing. You may understand what a coworker does a little better. You may have a deeper understanding of something you’re already very much an expert in. It says a lot that even MozCon speakers hang out for the other talks to learn too!

A lot of us work around people who doesn’t quite “understand” what is we do. Being in a room full of other marketers will keep you on your toes and make you so excited. Who doesn’t want to nerd out about OG tags and that link you got in Forbes.

Making Friends

Other people might call this “networking,” but at Moz, we’re a little more about making friends, who happen to be professional contacts. The MozCon audience is an incredible community. I’ve never met a group of people who were sharper, more giving of their knowledge and time, and, of course, TAGFEE. 

Whether you’re adding industry folks on Twitter or finding a local group to hang out post-MozCon, you’ll probably find that connection at MozCon. I know some employers worry about “networking” at conferences and that their employees might come home with connections for new jobs. But more what I see is excited people, who’ve found connections who often end up solving those “omg, I’m trying to do this and it is not working” and then a community member steps in to share knowledge. This sharing of knowledge doesn’t stop when attendees have returned to their respective homes.

1:1 with Mozzers and Speakers

We highly encourage all speakers and all Mozzers to mix and mingle with attendees. This year, we’ll all be eating in the same room. (Yay for the new venue!) And not to mention, we’ll all be in the same big room as speakers are on stage. In the past, we’ve always had an overflow room for people interested in getting some work done or stepping aside to chat. But this year, there’s going to be a larger space with comfortable furniture — and don’t worry, a screen to watch to the presentations — so you chat and meet-and-greet between sessions or take a brain breather from all the fun.

Most of our speakers are highly approachable to ask them follow up questions after their talks or just in general get to meet them. I mean, who doesn’t want to get their photo taken with Rand? ;) 

This year, all Mozzers will be wearing blue t-shirts labeled with “staff” so you won’t miss us. (Don’t worry, we have three identical ones, so we’ll be fresh smelling during MozCon.) We’re here not only to point out where the coat rack is, but also just hang out and give you insights into what it’s like to work at Moz. Everyone from our engineers and finance team to marketing and help will be attending MozCon for our own learning experience and to meet each and every one of you. We seriously love to talk all things Moz. And who knows, you might get some extra insights into the future of what we’re cooking.

Tuesday Night Party

No one throws a party like that robot Roger. Okay, we can’t always bring Roger with us — those robot repair bills are astronomical! — but we do know how to throw a great party. Okay, this might not be something to write home to the boss about, unless you do solve that work problem that night, but it is a place to make more friends and also relax after all that learning. We provide noms and drinks, not to mention plenty of karaoke. 

This year’s party takes place the EMP Museum. Where you’ll not only be able to sing your heart out on stage, but you’ll also be able to find a quiet place to chat with someone or tour the EMP Museum. You know, they have Daleks in the basement, David Bowie’s infamous Labyrinth gear, and a whole amazing tribute to Seattle’s favorite hometown band, Nirvana. Seriously, for those of you just flying in and out for MozCon, you’ll have a chance to take a tour of one of Seattle’s most unique and fun museums. I think it’s pretty rad.

Roger Hugs

Every year that loveable robot of ours, Roger Mozbot, makes his way out from crunching your data to the breaks during MozCon. He gets his own photo booth, and you can get all the hugs from him. Plan on bringing some props and lots of love. Because this fellow can’t get enough hugs from you.

Fun

See EVERYTHING. If you don’t find some fun at MozCon, I will personally buy you a cupcake. (Cupcakes are the international sign of fun, right?)

Yummy Food

For those of you following us on social media, you may have noticed a theme: we love good food. I can’t think of a Mozzer who doesn’t fancy themselves something of a foodie. We can seriously give Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri a run for their money as our staff includes a former chef, a former bartender, and someone we’re sure has sampled every dessert from Seattle to South Africa. Whether you’re looking for a great steak, an amazing mixed drink, or some blasted broccoli, some Mozzer will be able to point the way. (Seriously, stay tuned because my fellow Mozzers are crowdsourcing a list of the most delicious places in Seattle to eat at and more.) We bring the same enthusiasm to our menus at MozCon. But more on that soon.

Okay, that’s the incredible value you can get from coming to MozCon. But what about the actual price? Why does a PRO member ticket cost $999? What do we actually do with that money?

What’s the Breakdown of the Cost of My Ticket?

Every bit of money made for MozCon goes directly back into MozCon. Moz has actually never turned a profit on MozCon (or covered its costs) from MozCon ticket sales. And that’s okay, because we don’t have to. Other conferences have to get sponsors and have exhibitor halls to make extra cash because they need it to cover conference costs. We’re pretty privileged that we don’t have to. Don’t get me wrong, it’s our goal every year to cover costs; but we’d rather you have a world-class experience you won’t ever forget than say not pay for international travel for some speakers or skimp on a/v.

Let’s get into specific costs. Transparency, ftw. I’ve broken down the costs from a $999 and how much goes to what. (Now, I realize that not everyone bought a $999 ticket; some people aren’t PRO members, some people got early bird deals, etc. But the $999 is our standard ticket, and varying ticket costs cover for those other tickets.)

Food and Beverage - $365

Yep, food and beverage makes up the biggest costs to us. Your ticket includes breakfast and lunch each day (six meals!), two snacks (mid-morning and mid-afternoon), and one Tuesday evening party. As I mentioned above, Mozzers are foodies, and we don’t cut corners when it comes to your meals during MozCon. We do this for a few reasons: it makes your experience more awesome and you’re more likely to stick around during mealtimes, which means hanging out with Mozzers and Speakers.

Let’s face it, no one likes it when you’re handed a cardboard box with a turkey sandwich and a smashed cookie. Or in this vegetarian’s case, some wilted lettuce and a soggy apple. (If I’ve learned one thing from conference and airline catering, it’s that no one thinks vegetarians like cookies!) Not to mention, usually you see the Speakers and others sneaking out when they look at those cardboard boxes.

If we didn’t have meals, it’s true, you might be able to save your employer some monies by eating at Subway every day. (Subway affectionato and Mozzer Andrew Dumont probably has coupons he’d let you have.) But you’re going to have to find where you want to eat, maybe take some friends, leave the conference, find the place, order, put the recipe in that very special place you won’t forget it, eat, and then find your way back. Sure, Seattle has tons of delicious options, but I recommend coming in the weekend before or heading out Monday and Wednesday nights for that sort of exploration.

This cost also covers the catering staff, who besides cooking the food, will be making sure everything goes smoothly with serving and stays neat and tidy. They also assist in special meals for those of you who are vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher, halal, or have other allergens. (Don’t worry, fellow vegetarians, there’s plenty of great noms for us in the main buffet.) Remember, these catering folks are the ones refilling the coffee, so we love them. 

Speakers - $158

MozCon truly brings in top-notch industry speakers who are experts in their fields and great presenters. We cover these speakers travel costs and hotels, and we believe that it’s worth every penny. MozCon speakers are the heart-and-soul of MozCon, along with Roger hugs, so we want all our Speakers to be wrapped in that great Seattle hug.

A/V and Video - $157 

Okay, this is probably another bucket were you’re like “What, Moz, A/V is how much of my ticket cost? Almost as much as Speakers?” Last year, the MozCon crew decided that we really needed to make the next step into making MozCon truly world-class. Many Speakers from 2012 said that they felt like rock stars on our stage. A/V sends all the signals from when to clap for the next speakers to when to quite down after a break. Not to mention, we’ve, by popular demand, baked the price of MozCon Videos into the ticket costs.

Our 13-person a/v crew ensures our speakers’ presentations look sharp and do all the exciting things they’re supposed to. No matter if they’re playing video or rapping Mad Men-style like Mike King did last year, we want to be able to support it. Plus, an impeccable stage means all eyes are always where they’re supposed to be. Our a/v crew does more than just the stage. They also do the lighting — just say no to fluorescents you can’t dim or control –, play any music, make sure we have video in the lounge area, and generally make MozCon feel like one heck of an amazing show. 

A/V also assists with getting us the MozCon Videos all pretty and ready for you. We truly couldn’t put on such an amazing show and deliver such awesome videos post-show. How else are you going to catch all those tips that you missed writing down because they were flying off the stage so quickly? Or share with your coworker, who’s planning on going next year, what happened.

Interior Design and Signage - $75

The Washington State Convention Center is basically a big room with four walls, concrete floors, and fluorescent bank lights. The good news is, unlike a hotel, we can really make it ours. The bad news is that isn’t cheap. Just covering that cement floor with carpet is $30,000. But we wouldn’t want to hear people’s shoes on the floor over analytic tactics from Avinash Kaushik. We also need to make sure we have tables, chairs, registration booths, and all those others conference basics. At MozCon, we don’t make you balance your laptop on your lap with your drink, your phone, and your snack. Instead, we have tables where everyone can put down their laptops, drinks, etc., which leads to far more productivity and less spillage. :) Not to mention my Cliff Bars never fly over seats and hit people in the backs of their heads as I struggle to open the package while holding onto all my stuff. (Sorry, friends at SES NYC!)

Networking Party - $70 

I’ve already talked a lot about the Tuesday night party at the EMP Museum. It’s going to be pretty awesome. Not only are you getting to see the Museum exhibits (normally $20 per adult), but you’re getting food and drink and some amazing extras. Wine, beer, and well drinks are all on us. Anyone who’s ever thrown a wedding, anniversary, office, or birthday party with the cost of alcoholic beverages factored in knows that it starts to add up quickly.

Electrical - $40 

The first time I helped run a large event — GeekGirlCon 2012, approximately 2,000 people over two days — I was shocked to receive a post-event bill in the thousand plus dollar range for overages on electrical even when I’d put down a deposit for overages. Not even counting what was already included in my contract. Electricity runs everything. We not only have our big stage at MozCon, but we also just have to keep the lights on, keep the room temperature optimal, and make sure that you can charge your laptop, tablet, and phone so nothing goes dead during MozCon. MozCon’s a little unique in that each table is equipped with electrical plugs so no one ever cries over a dead battery. Or worse, has to switch to live tweeting on a smart phone! ;)

Swag - $35

This year, each MozCon attendee will get a Roger figurine. Yep, I think that’s all you need know. :) 

We also will give out some other pretty nifty swag items, including limited edition MozCon t-shirts and a host of other Moz-branded items. Yep, be the first one to get some Moz swag at MozCon.

Credit Card Processing Fees - $33

Pretty boring. But have you ever been annoyed when purchasing tickets, say on TicketMaster, at the additional “processing fees”? Unlike other events, who make the price go up in your shopping cart, we adjust for them and pay EventBrite monthly.

WiFi - $28

Yes, yes, we know. WiFi hasn’t been one of our shining moments at past MozCons. However, with our move to a new venue, we are much more confident in the wifi situation for MozCon. Ideally, each and every one of you will be able to log into the MozCon wifi and tweet (#MozCon), email with coworkers (only pictures of you hugging Roger), and Facebook (with grandma, of course) whenever you need to.

Venue - $23

Besides this being a space cost, the venue costs also include convention center staff, aka the green coats, who assist in all things badge-checking, directional, and more. They work about every event at the convention center and know the place inside and out. Just don’t forget your badge in your hotel room!

Misc Labor - $15

While most of our labor costs are tied up either in a/v, catering, or venue costs and Mozzers’ salaries, we do have to bring in a few outside this sphere to help out. You’ll see our photographer, Rudy Lopez, taking all the photos. And there will be some behind-the-scenes magic that happens before and after MozCon like riggers putting up and taking down signs. 

I hope this transparency about values and hard costs of MozCon give you a better insight both into how MozCon operates and what to consider when talking to the person who’s signing off your MozCon ticket and travel. Or heck, maybe helping you make that decision as a freelancer, student, or otherwise self-employed person to send yourself or as a boss, to send your employees. I also hope this might inspire other conference runners to share a little bit about the value and costs of their conferences.

MozCon is truly a celebration of the inbound marketing community. Around the MozPlex, we like to refer to it as a hug from us to our community. My dream is that each and every one of you has the opportunity to join us for MozCon. I can’t wait to meet you and to see you inspired and ready for the next step in your career and your journey as a marketer. Conferences can really be a great stepping stone and have a huge positive ROI for you and your company.

Still in the undecided camp? In the words of LeVar Burton, “but you don’t have to take my word for it”:

“MozCon is like Disneyland for SEO’s, jampacked with super-geeky SEO Magic Tricks and great chances to meet and say hello to others in the search industry.” - Pete Campbell

Why MozCon was the Best Investment I Made in 2011 by Mike King

Plus, if you’re interested in that $999 PRO price, sign up for your 30 day free trial and get that MozCon discount. :)

See you there!

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

It’s conference season! Our inbound marketing conference, MozCon, July 8th-10th in Seattle, is just around the corner, and we often get asked by your our community how to approach your boss, CMO, CEO, etc., about coming to MozCon. You want to know more about the value for you and your company or clients, about how we spend those MozCon dollars, and what you can expect once you’re here. And furthermore, some of you might be considering coming on your own dime, especially if you’re a freelancer, student, or owner of a small business.

Conferences can be spendy when you add up ticket costs, travel, hotel, meals, and more. It’s important that you can justify a positive ROI when it comes to your budget. At Moz, we’re big believers in what you can learn at conferences, whether in sessions or through networking, (clear ROI) and in the power of serendipity (which can have a less concrete ROI).

Let’s take a deep-dive into what MozCon looks like both from a value and a cost standpoint. MozCon’s truly an amazing three-day conference where you’ll take away a ton of actionable tips to implement on your site(s) and make new friends, whether the fellow community member sitting next to you, a Mozzer, or one of our industry leaders who are speaking.

And for those of you ready to take the MozCon plunge:

What’s the ROI of My Ticket

Actionable Tactics

This year, MozCon has an astounding 35 speakers! They’ll be talking about everything from linking building and international SEO to analytics, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing. We have an incredibly strong mix of topics with something for everyone. Our goal is really for you to bring something back with you from every session, which is why every single speaker has a keynote-style session to deliver this information. It’s a bit like the best of 35 college courses distilled down to the heart of the subject.

With the exception of our community speakers, who are selected from your pitches, all our speakers are curated from our MozCon selection committee. After speakers have accepted for MozCon, we work with them to ensure that they’re going to bring their very best, unique content to MozCon. Topics are chosen both by what said speaker’s an expert on, but also what they’re currently excited about. 

This year, every speaker had a kick-off call to establish their topic and set up expectations. Even many seasoned speakers can be intimidated by the MozCon stage, and one of my jobs is to make sure that they are ready and confident about their talk. Speakers are also required to send in a draft or outline of their presentation so we can make sure they’re on track. Every year, our post-MozCon survey shows that MozCon goers have extremely high expectations. By seeing a draft, we can offer advice. A lot of which is based on what you, the audience, expects from speakers. We make a lot of suggestions about actionable tactics, setting up the audience with what Nancy Duarte calls “the new bliss” to conclude their talks, and pushing content to the next level.

Speakers can send in as many drafts as they’d like for us to review, and final drafts are due about a week before MozCon. Which means I hope speakers are relaxing and practicing their talk, instead of hustling to put last minute slides together. For Mozzers, we’ve put together several practice sessions (first one was Friday!) for us internally to run through MozCon presentations.

Every single speaker is incredibly excited to be up on that stage and giving you their best. In fact, last year, Paddy Moogan really showed this spirit when he offered, for anyone who didn’t learn something from his talk, that he’d buy them a beer and talk with them specifics about their website. Talk about TAGFEE! I don’t doubt there will be some similar offers this year.

Inspiration

After actionable tactics, you’re sure to come back inspired by MozCon. I know the best conferences I’ve come back from were the ones that I couldn’t wait to get back to work or dive more into learning. Not to mention, the videos are included in the ticket costs, which means you can share the MozCon love with your coworkers and rewatch them yourself when you need a recharge in-between MozCons.

While we certainly stress actionable tactics with our speakers, inspiration comes through with every talk. The tactics may help you win, but the inspiration will fuel the fire. And who doesn’t benefit by your productivity being up? You may find yourself excited about a topic you’ve delved into or seen yourself doing. You may understand what a coworker does a little better. You may have a deeper understanding of something you’re already very much an expert in. It says a lot that even MozCon speakers hang out for the other talks to learn too!

A lot of us work around people who doesn’t quite “understand” what is we do. Being in a room full of other marketers will keep you on your toes and make you so excited. Who doesn’t want to nerd out about OG tags and that link you got in Forbes.

Making Friends

Other people might call this “networking,” but at Moz, we’re a little more about making friends, who happen to be professional contacts. The MozCon audience is an incredible community. I’ve never met a group of people who were sharper, more giving of their knowledge and time, and, of course, TAGFEE. 

Whether you’re adding industry folks on Twitter or finding a local group to hang out post-MozCon, you’ll probably find that connection at MozCon. I know some employers worry about “networking” at conferences and that their employees might come home with connections for new jobs. But more what I see is excited people, who’ve found connections who often end up solving those “omg, I’m trying to do this and it is not working” and then a community member steps in to share knowledge. This sharing of knowledge doesn’t stop when attendees have returned to their respective homes.

1:1 with Mozzers and Speakers

We highly encourage all speakers and all Mozzers to mix and mingle with attendees. This year, we’ll all be eating in the same room. (Yay for the new venue!) And not to mention, we’ll all be in the same big room as speakers are on stage. In the past, we’ve always had an overflow room for people interested in getting some work done or stepping aside to chat. But this year, there’s going to be a larger space with comfortable furniture — and don’t worry, a screen to watch to the presentations — so you chat and meet-and-greet between sessions or take a brain breather from all the fun.

Most of our speakers are highly approachable to ask them follow up questions after their talks or just in general get to meet them. I mean, who doesn’t want to get their photo taken with Rand? ;) 

This year, all Mozzers will be wearing blue t-shirts labeled with “staff” so you won’t miss us. (Don’t worry, we have three identical ones, so we’ll be fresh smelling during MozCon.) We’re here not only to point out where the coat rack is, but also just hang out and give you insights into what it’s like to work at Moz. Everyone from our engineers and finance team to marketing and help will be attending MozCon for our own learning experience and to meet each and every one of you. We seriously love to talk all things Moz. And who knows, you might get some extra insights into the future of what we’re cooking.

Tuesday Night Party

No one throws a party like that robot Roger. Okay, we can’t always bring Roger with us — those robot repair bills are astronomical! — but we do know how to throw a great party. Okay, this might not be something to write home to the boss about, unless you do solve that work problem that night, but it is a place to make more friends and also relax after all that learning. We provide noms and drinks, not to mention plenty of karaoke. 

This year’s party takes place the EMP Museum. Where you’ll not only be able to sing your heart out on stage, but you’ll also be able to find a quiet place to chat with someone or tour the EMP Museum. You know, they have Daleks in the basement, David Bowie’s infamous Labyrinth gear, and a whole amazing tribute to Seattle’s favorite hometown band, Nirvana. Seriously, for those of you just flying in and out for MozCon, you’ll have a chance to take a tour of one of Seattle’s most unique and fun museums. I think it’s pretty rad.

Roger Hugs

Every year that loveable robot of ours, Roger Mozbot, makes his way out from crunching your data to the breaks during MozCon. He gets his own photo booth, and you can get all the hugs from him. Plan on bringing some props and lots of love. Because this fellow can’t get enough hugs from you.

Fun

See EVERYTHING. If you don’t find some fun at MozCon, I will personally buy you a cupcake. (Cupcakes are the international sign of fun, right?)

Yummy Food

For those of you following us on social media, you may have noticed a theme: we love good food. I can’t think of a Mozzer who doesn’t fancy themselves something of a foodie. We can seriously give Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri a run for their money as our staff includes a former chef, a former bartender, and someone we’re sure has sampled every dessert from Seattle to South Africa. Whether you’re looking for a great steak, an amazing mixed drink, or some blasted broccoli, some Mozzer will be able to point the way. (Seriously, stay tuned because my fellow Mozzers are crowdsourcing a list of the most delicious places in Seattle to eat at and more.) We bring the same enthusiasm to our menus at MozCon. But more on that soon.

Okay, that’s the incredible value you can get from coming to MozCon. But what about the actual price? Why does a PRO member ticket cost $999? What do we actually do with that money?

What’s the Breakdown of the Cost of My Ticket?

Every bit of money made for MozCon goes directly back into MozCon. Moz has actually never turned a profit on MozCon (or covered its costs) from MozCon ticket sales. And that’s okay, because we don’t have to. Other conferences have to get sponsors and have exhibitor halls to make extra cash because they need it to cover conference costs. We’re pretty privileged that we don’t have to. Don’t get me wrong, it’s our goal every year to cover costs; but we’d rather you have a world-class experience you won’t ever forget than say not pay for international travel for some speakers or skimp on a/v.

Let’s get into specific costs. Transparency, ftw. I’ve broken down the costs from a $999 and how much goes to what. (Now, I realize that not everyone bought a $999 ticket; some people aren’t PRO members, some people got early bird deals, etc. But the $999 is our standard ticket, and varying ticket costs cover for those other tickets.)

Food and Beverage - $365

Yep, food and beverage makes up the biggest costs to us. Your ticket includes breakfast and lunch each day (six meals!), two snacks (mid-morning and mid-afternoon), and one Tuesday evening party. As I mentioned above, Mozzers are foodies, and we don’t cut corners when it comes to your meals during MozCon. We do this for a few reasons: it makes your experience more awesome and you’re more likely to stick around during mealtimes, which means hanging out with Mozzers and Speakers.

Let’s face it, no one likes it when you’re handed a cardboard box with a turkey sandwich and a smashed cookie. Or in this vegetarian’s case, some wilted lettuce and a soggy apple. (If I’ve learned one thing from conference and airline catering, it’s that no one thinks vegetarians like cookies!) Not to mention, usually you see the Speakers and others sneaking out when they look at those cardboard boxes.

If we didn’t have meals, it’s true, you might be able to save your employer some monies by eating at Subway every day. (Subway affectionato and Mozzer Andrew Dumont probably has coupons he’d let you have.) But you’re going to have to find where you want to eat, maybe take some friends, leave the conference, find the place, order, put the recipe in that very special place you won’t forget it, eat, and then find your way back. Sure, Seattle has tons of delicious options, but I recommend coming in the weekend before or heading out Monday and Wednesday nights for that sort of exploration.

This cost also covers the catering staff, who besides cooking the food, will be making sure everything goes smoothly with serving and stays neat and tidy. They also assist in special meals for those of you who are vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher, halal, or have other allergens. (Don’t worry, fellow vegetarians, there’s plenty of great noms for us in the main buffet.) Remember, these catering folks are the ones refilling the coffee, so we love them. 

Speakers - $158

MozCon truly brings in top-notch industry speakers who are experts in their fields and great presenters. We cover these speakers travel costs and hotels, and we believe that it’s worth every penny. MozCon speakers are the heart-and-soul of MozCon, along with Roger hugs, so we want all our Speakers to be wrapped in that great Seattle hug.

A/V and Video - $157 

Okay, this is probably another bucket were you’re like “What, Moz, A/V is how much of my ticket cost? Almost as much as Speakers?” Last year, the MozCon crew decided that we really needed to make the next step into making MozCon truly world-class. Many Speakers from 2012 said that they felt like rock stars on our stage. A/V sends all the signals from when to clap for the next speakers to when to quite down after a break. Not to mention, we’ve, by popular demand, baked the price of MozCon Videos into the ticket costs.

Our 13-person a/v crew ensures our speakers’ presentations look sharp and do all the exciting things they’re supposed to. No matter if they’re playing video or rapping Mad Men-style like Mike King did last year, we want to be able to support it. Plus, an impeccable stage means all eyes are always where they’re supposed to be. Our a/v crew does more than just the stage. They also do the lighting — just say no to fluorescents you can’t dim or control –, play any music, make sure we have video in the lounge area, and generally make MozCon feel like one heck of an amazing show. 

A/V also assists with getting us the MozCon Videos all pretty and ready for you. We truly couldn’t put on such an amazing show and deliver such awesome videos post-show. How else are you going to catch all those tips that you missed writing down because they were flying off the stage so quickly? Or share with your coworker, who’s planning on going next year, what happened.

Interior Design and Signage - $75

The Washington State Convention Center is basically a big room with four walls, concrete floors, and fluorescent bank lights. The good news is, unlike a hotel, we can really make it ours. The bad news is that isn’t cheap. Just covering that cement floor with carpet is $30,000. But we wouldn’t want to hear people’s shoes on the floor over analytic tactics from Avinash Kaushik. We also need to make sure we have tables, chairs, registration booths, and all those others conference basics. At MozCon, we don’t make you balance your laptop on your lap with your drink, your phone, and your snack. Instead, we have tables where everyone can put down their laptops, drinks, etc., which leads to far more productivity and less spillage. :) Not to mention my Cliff Bars never fly over seats and hit people in the backs of their heads as I struggle to open the package while holding onto all my stuff. (Sorry, friends at SES NYC!)

Networking Party - $70 

I’ve already talked a lot about the Tuesday night party at the EMP Museum. It’s going to be pretty awesome. Not only are you getting to see the Museum exhibits (normally $20 per adult), but you’re getting food and drink and some amazing extras. Wine, beer, and well drinks are all on us. Anyone who’s ever thrown a wedding, anniversary, office, or birthday party with the cost of alcoholic beverages factored in knows that it starts to add up quickly.

Electrical - $40 

The first time I helped run a large event — GeekGirlCon 2012, approximately 2,000 people over two days — I was shocked to receive a post-event bill in the thousand plus dollar range for overages on electrical even when I’d put down a deposit for overages. Not even counting what was already included in my contract. Electricity runs everything. We not only have our big stage at MozCon, but we also just have to keep the lights on, keep the room temperature optimal, and make sure that you can charge your laptop, tablet, and phone so nothing goes dead during MozCon. MozCon’s a little unique in that each table is equipped with electrical plugs so no one ever cries over a dead battery. Or worse, has to switch to live tweeting on a smart phone! ;)

Swag - $35

This year, each MozCon attendee will get a Roger figurine. Yep, I think that’s all you need know. :) 

We also will give out some other pretty nifty swag items, including limited edition MozCon t-shirts and a host of other Moz-branded items. Yep, be the first one to get some Moz swag at MozCon.

Credit Card Processing Fees - $33

Pretty boring. But have you ever been annoyed when purchasing tickets, say on TicketMaster, at the additional “processing fees”? Unlike other events, who make the price go up in your shopping cart, we adjust for them and pay EventBrite monthly.

WiFi - $28

Yes, yes, we know. WiFi hasn’t been one of our shining moments at past MozCons. However, with our move to a new venue, we are much more confident in the wifi situation for MozCon. Ideally, each and every one of you will be able to log into the MozCon wifi and tweet (#MozCon), email with coworkers (only pictures of you hugging Roger), and Facebook (with grandma, of course) whenever you need to.

Venue - $23

Besides this being a space cost, the venue costs also include convention center staff, aka the green coats, who assist in all things badge-checking, directional, and more. They work about every event at the convention center and know the place inside and out. Just don’t forget your badge in your hotel room!

Misc Labor - $15

While most of our labor costs are tied up either in a/v, catering, or venue costs and Mozzers’ salaries, we do have to bring in a few outside this sphere to help out. You’ll see our photographer, Rudy Lopez, taking all the photos. And there will be some behind-the-scenes magic that happens before and after MozCon like riggers putting up and taking down signs. 

I hope this transparency about values and hard costs of MozCon give you a better insight both into how MozCon operates and what to consider when talking to the person who’s signing off your MozCon ticket and travel. Or heck, maybe helping you make that decision as a freelancer, student, or otherwise self-employed person to send yourself or as a boss, to send your employees. I also hope this might inspire other conference runners to share a little bit about the value and costs of their conferences.

MozCon is truly a celebration of the inbound marketing community. Around the MozPlex, we like to refer to it as a hug from us to our community. My dream is that each and every one of you has the opportunity to join us for MozCon. I can’t wait to meet you and to see you inspired and ready for the next step in your career and your journey as a marketer. Conferences can really be a great stepping stone and have a huge positive ROI for you and your company.

Still in the undecided camp? In the words of LeVar Burton, “but you don’t have to take my word for it”:

“MozCon is like Disneyland for SEO’s, jampacked with super-geeky SEO Magic Tricks and great chances to meet and say hello to others in the search industry.” - Pete Campbell

Why MozCon was the Best Investment I Made in 2011 by Mike King

Plus, if you’re interested in that $999 PRO price, sign up for your 30 day free trial and get that MozCon discount. :)

See you there!

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

Building a community around your brand isn’t just about the strength of your social media presence. It’s not about how you manage your social media outlets or whether you’re on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. It’s not about how many blog posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.

It’s about building a company.

A thriving community — one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust, credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue — is built upon a solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and improving the experience it provides for its customers. 

If you want to build your business and a community around your brand, you’ve got to provide value. You’ve got to create the right content. You’ve got to effectively integrate SEO. And, most importantly, you’ve got to have the right team. 

And I’m not just talking about your marketing team.

Time to drop the silos

If you want your team to be successful at building your community and your business, you’ve got to think differently. And you’ve got to drop the silos.

Your team’s specific jobs and designations are important to the day-to-day running of your company’s business (otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post). But there is one big overarching truth for each and every person associated with the company: In the broad scope, it doesn’t matter what your job title is, what department you’re in, or what your job description is. Your role is to do whatever it takes to make the company thrive.

Everyone who works in your company is on the same team: the team that wants to accomplish the stuff that matters and will make your business a success.

So who’s gonna do the work?

As we’ve worked with companies (in many different industries and all with unique challenges) to build their communities and their businesses, we’ve been asked to help them understand the roles that are involved and also provide guidance as to best structure their team.

In our experience, what follows are some of the roles that are necessary to have on your community- and business-building team.

But before we get into that, please note:

1. I’m not suggesting that you hire one person for each of these roles. Depending on the size (and the goals) of your company you may have many people doing many things. This is simply a rundown based on our experience with both small and large companies who have embarked on this community-building extravaganza. My intention is to provide some general guidance that you can then apply to your unique situation.

2. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that surrounds building your community and your business that goes way beyond defining roles and team infrastructure like earning buy-in, defining goals, developing strategy, execution and testing, and evaluating and adjusting. You can get more information about all that good stuff in my SearchLove slide deck. 



   Today, I’m going to focus specifically on the roles of the team.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. 

Allow me to introduce you to your community building team:

Project management


Who’s responsible

Someone to keep the entire team on schedule and on task. Even if you’re working with an external team (agency or other partners) who will take the lead on this role, you need to have someone inside your company who is responsible for being the internal project manager. 

What’s required

Although this person may not be the one doing the daily nitty-gritty client work, they will interface with all of your internal and external teams on an ongoing basis to ensure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done, and that everyone is working toward the same goals and off of the same creative strategy. 

Ideally, when bringing in an outside agency, you want to work together to clearly define the expectations for this role, how it relates to communication, and who specifically is being held responsible for getting stuff done.

Community management


Who’s responsible

Someone who can represent your brand on social media, as well as monitor and manage the rest of your team’s social media activity.

Depending on your goals, your community manager will most likely assume two identities: one as your brand (your logo is their face):

And one for their own individual presence under your brand:

What’s required

Because this role is so demanding, I would highly recommend (especially for you smaller companies out there) that it’s not filled by your CEO or someone who cannot commit their attention on a daily basis. And, please, for the love of Dr. Pete, don’t assign this role to an intern.

Community management is a lot of hard work (I repeat: A LOT). Especially if you already have a thriving community, managing it requires a great deal of attention, engagement, and consistency on a daily basis. Your community manager is on a podium every day representing your brand, so be sure to choose the person for this role very wisely.

In addition to the normal stuff like sharing value (and not just your own), your community manager will be responsible for communicating what’s going on with your company, like events and products or service stuff. They will take the lead on engaging and answering questions that may arise (with customer or product support). Even more important is facilitating social monitoring and listening (which is imperative) and probably (depending on size) handling some reputation management.

If that’s not enough, there will always be opportunities (things that they observe that could contribute to the growth of your business, or simply to building relationships) that arise in their interaction in and among the community that will require further investigation. That’s a lot of load to carry so your community manager needs to be one amazing (and capable) person.

Hands down, you’ll want to have an excellent communicator in this position as they are the social face of your company. 

If you’re working with an agency to assist with community management, you can share the load, but be sure to work together as a team to develop a plan for how management will work. Be present and involved with strategy, execution, engagement, and ensure whatever is being done is what’s best for your company and is working toward the goals that have been set.

Strategy, creativity, analysis, and direction


Who’s responsible

Someone (or a few someones) who will develop and facilitate the direction of your web marketing and community building efforts. If you’re working with an agency, you can certainly lean on them to lead this piece with your direct involvement. 

What’s required

The most important part of this role is to ensure that all teams (both internal and external) are working together to align all efforts with the goals that have been set for your whole business (not just for SEO, social, and content). Remember all of those departments I talked about above that are part of your whole team? This is where they can play a role and contribute to strategy and direction (and certainly creativity).

It’s important that this role has worked with all of your teams to break those goals down into measurable KPIs that inform the creative campaigns that will accomplish these objectives.

Of course, your efforts don’t mean much if you’re not measuring and analyzing what’s working and what’s not. The person (or people) who are in the strategy/creativity/analysis/direction role need to provide strategic guidance based on actual data so that you can have confidence that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Many of our clients also work with additional partnering agencies that drive offline or PR efforts (more on this below). If that’s the case for you, make sure that all teams and partners are on the same page, working toward the same goals and being extra careful to maintain the consistency and integrity of the brand.

Design


Who’s responsible

Someone who can create any graphic assets that you need (and make you look really, really good). This can be an internal designer or your partnering agency. If you’re working with an external team, again, ensure that you’re maintaining the consistency and integrity of the brand. 

What’s required

Your designer is going to be responsible for designing and styling things like blog posts and infographics, social media assets, email marketing templates, banners and headers, and probably even landing pages.

The deal with the design role is just like every other role on this team. Don’t silo. Your designer is more of a production person who would probably rather be doing the work than dictating strategy, but they still have creative ideas and valuable feedback that would be worth hearing in the initial planning stages. Don’t be lame. Make them a part of the entire process.

Content

Who’s responsible

Someone who can write a variety of content like their life depended on it, because as you know, content is not just blog posts. We’ll just call this genius the content strategist.

What’s required

Your content strategist needs to be able to adapt to the context that’s necessitating the content. And above all, the content they develop needs to be driven by the overarching goals and strategy set forth for the business.

You want a content strategist who can be creative and, well, strategic. It’s important that this person is thoughtful not only about audience but also about how to balance creativity and conversion.

Outreach is going to be a big part of your content strategist’s job, both pre- and post-launch (more on this below). The person who’s creating your content needs to think about who’s going to care about that content before they even write it (Paddy Moogan’s rule. If you haven’t, you should read his book). They also need to be connecting with the SEO in the early planning stages in order to determine how this piece of content will be optimized, as well as determining if it’s been done before (and, in that case, how it can be done different/better).

If you don’t have the resources in-house to develop the content you need, you can outsource this role to an agency. And yes, they can assist you in creating strong, quality content that effectively represents your brand, but this takes a lot of work and collaboration; you need to be present and a part of the process.

You will want that agency to understand your business, so let them ask a lot of questions. If you’re too busy to answer their questions in an email, grant them a phone interview or allow them to sit in front of the CEO (or whoever else they need information from who may not be readily available) so they can extract exactly what they need to produce stellar content on your behalf. Then, of course, provide your input and revisions once you’ve seen a draft.

Like any member of your team, your content strategist can’t work in a silo. Content plays an enormous role in accomplishing the goals you have set for your business, so make your content strategist a part of the entire process from the very beginning (starting with goals and strategy development) so that they fully understand the bigger picture of why this content needs to exist.

After the content they’ve created has been released into the world, be sure to provide them with access to the data so that they can determine how well it performed and what could be done differently the next time around.

SEO

Who’s responsible

Someone who loves research, analysis, keywords, and probably Google so that they can properly and effectively manage and lead the optimization of all the stuff. Ideally, you also want this person to have more than a passing knowledge of strategy.

What’s required

The most important thing to note with the SEO role (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again) is that no man is an island. You need an advanced SEO who will contribute as one of the most powerful players on your team. 

Like all the other roles on your community building team, the SEO needs to be involved right from the beginning. If you have the right SEO on your team, their ginormous analytical brain will be contributing to strategy. Not just SEO strategy, but the strategy you’re using to drive your whole business. They can be relied upon to provide some left-brain steadiness to your presumably right-brained creatives.

And don’t forget content, outreach, creativity, and direction, too. 

The best thing about your SEO is that they can provide you with the information you need to make data driven decisions about your business, but they can’t do that if they’re sitting in the corner building links all day long. Whoever ends up playing this role for you, give them the credit they deserve and know they’re capable of a whole lot more than keywords.

Email marketing
 (and other stuff, too)

Who’s responsible

Someone who can design, develop, and coordinate email marketing campaigns to deliver the value your team is creating in relationship to your strategy (in other words, someone who will know how to effectively use email marketing to build relationships and grow your business). 

What’s required

Email marketing is a great way to build community with the people who want to be a part of it as well as those who already are. Your existing customers are your best brand advocates, so you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got email marketing covered somewhere among the members of your team.

And — wait for it — don’t silo this role either. Because email marketing can be used to accomplish many goals, this role requires big-picture thinking right from the beginning, so don’t leave this person out.

Certainly there will be other tools that you’ll need your team to use besides email marketing (I’m sure Phil Nottingham is wondering when the heck I’m going to talk about video). Whatever vehicles you’ll be using to execute your strategy, make sure you’ve designated someone on your team to fully embrace this responsibility so it can be used to build your community and reach the goals you’ve set for your business.

Reading and learning


Who’s responsible

Several people who are continually reading and learning about your industry, looking for the good stuff to send along to your community and any innovative or creative ideas that might just grow your business.

This role is up to everyone who’s on your team.

But that’s not to say that everyone on your team needs to be on social media. You can involve everyone in the company in the knowledge seeking and soaking portion, and then select specific people (like your community manager and others who want to work with social media) to be the face of your brand and share that information on your social media outlets.

What’s required

A whole lot of reading, learning, and sharing. Internally at Mack Web we use a Google Spreadsheet that allows everyone on the team to contribute to the knowledge that is shared with our community. This not only builds the strength of our team, but also provides our community with a lot of variety.

We each focus on a specific subject about which we’re passionate (content, operations, design, business, marketing, etc.) so that we’re not all reading the same stuff. Each day we put at least one post into the queue for our community manager to use.

I don’t have to tell you that reading and learning is imperative to the success of your business and the development of your team. It’s also integral to the growth of your community. When you’re sharing other people’s useful content, you’re providing your followers with something of value and also opening the door to a relationship with the people generating the content.

If you’re working with an agency, they can help you identify what you can read and share (as well as who you can follow) in order to build your community.

Ideally, your agency partners should be reading all of these things, too, and bringing opportunities to your attention. If you’ve got everyone on your entire team contributing with knowledge, your company will be unstoppable.

Reading and learning is probably the most important of all the roles, and can dramatically accelerate the growth of your business and your community.

Outreach


Who’s responsible

Several people who are developing relationships and helping to keep those people and the rest of your community involved in what you’re doing, so that they can partake in it and benefit from it. Call it link building or relationship building, outreach is something that your entire team can do.

What’s required

Outreach is so much more than getting a link, and it needs to be done all the time, not just online or via email, (and not just when you want to ask someone for a favor).

Everyone can do parts of outreach. Sales can work the in-person and the online relationships. Marketing can do its part to determine where the team is going to earn links with the amazing creative content they’re developing. The best people on your team for outreach are the ones that love combining the digital world with the face-to-face, because that’s where the magic happens.

Because the role of outreach really falls on everyone, find the people who are passionate about people, and teach them authentic ways to make it part of their natural routine at work and throughout each day.

Website stuff


Who’s responsible

Someone who is committed to executing changes on the website. Like everyone on your team, make sure whoever is responsible for this role understands the goals of the company and is part of strategy execution so that they’re able to prioritize. There are always a lot of shiny things (new plugins, new applications, other fancy new doodads) that come in the form of tiny little emergencies. Involving your webmaster with goals and creative strategy will keep things running smoothly.

What’s required

Website work could be anything from revamping the navigation and implementing user experience changes to integrating a blog and executing on-page SEO.

If you’re working with an agency to lead your community building and web marketing efforts, they will most likely provide your internal team or another partnering agency with all of the instructions for what needs to be implemented.

Offline stuff


Who’s responsible

The people who are handling all of the offline stuff like print collateral, events, and maybe PR.

What’s required

Offline stuff often affects the online stuff. Things like events, conferences, and product launches. It’s imperative that internal and external teams work together (and with the direction of the project manager) in order to ensure that everyone is effectively leveraging all efforts and working toward the same goals. 

Now go on, you — go build your team

I’m sure there’s a role I’ve missed, perhaps one imperative to the specific goals of your business. This is just a start. It may be what what works for a little while until your business undergoes a change. At that point, you’ll need to reassess and reconfigure the roles of your team into what works for you.

The biggest thing I can leave you with is this: Think differently about your team and the roles everyone plays. Expand your understanding of what each and every person and department can contribute to your digital marketing. There’s a lot more involved in building your community than managing your social media. By now you know that’s because it’s not just a community you’re building. It’s your business.

If you want all of the benefits that a thriving community brings, focus on building the best company you can possibly build. Move beyond marketing initiatives and focus on your vision. Understand your customers better, and learn what they need to make their lives better. Let the passion and drive for what you do transform your company and your community, and put the right team in place to do it.

Looking forward to your thoughts below.

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

Building a community around your brand isn’t just about the strength of your social media presence. It’s not about how you manage your social media outlets or whether you’re on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. It’s not about how many blog posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.

It’s about building a company.

A thriving community — one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust, credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue — is built upon a solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and improving the experience it provides for its customers. 

If you want to build your business and a community around your brand, you’ve got to provide value. You’ve got to create the right content. You’ve got to effectively integrate SEO. And, most importantly, you’ve got to have the right team. 

And I’m not just talking about your marketing team.

Time to drop the silos

If you want your team to be successful at building your community and your business, you’ve got to think differently. And you’ve got to drop the silos.

Your team’s specific jobs and designations are important to the day-to-day running of your company’s business (otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post). But there is one big overarching truth for each and every person associated with the company: In the broad scope, it doesn’t matter what your job title is, what department you’re in, or what your job description is. Your role is to do whatever it takes to make the company thrive.

Everyone who works in your company is on the same team: the team that wants to accomplish the stuff that matters and will make your business a success.

So who’s gonna do the work?

As we’ve worked with companies (in many different industries and all with unique challenges) to build their communities and their businesses, we’ve been asked to help them understand the roles that are involved and also provide guidance as to best structure their team.

In our experience, what follows are some of the roles that are necessary to have on your community- and business-building team.

But before we get into that, please note:

1. I’m not suggesting that you hire one person for each of these roles. Depending on the size (and the goals) of your company you may have many people doing many things. This is simply a rundown based on our experience with both small and large companies who have embarked on this community-building extravaganza. My intention is to provide some general guidance that you can then apply to your unique situation.

2. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that surrounds building your community and your business that goes way beyond defining roles and team infrastructure like earning buy-in, defining goals, developing strategy, execution and testing, and evaluating and adjusting. You can get more information about all that good stuff in my SearchLove slide deck. 



   Today, I’m going to focus specifically on the roles of the team.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. 

Allow me to introduce you to your community building team:

Project management


Who’s responsible

Someone to keep the entire team on schedule and on task. Even if you’re working with an external team (agency or other partners) who will take the lead on this role, you need to have someone inside your company who is responsible for being the internal project manager. 

What’s required

Although this person may not be the one doing the daily nitty-gritty client work, they will interface with all of your internal and external teams on an ongoing basis to ensure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done, and that everyone is working toward the same goals and off of the same creative strategy. 

Ideally, when bringing in an outside agency, you want to work together to clearly define the expectations for this role, how it relates to communication, and who specifically is being held responsible for getting stuff done.

Community management


Who’s responsible

Someone who can represent your brand on social media, as well as monitor and manage the rest of your team’s social media activity.

Depending on your goals, your community manager will most likely assume two identities: one as your brand (your logo is their face):

And one for their own individual presence under your brand:

What’s required

Because this role is so demanding, I would highly recommend (especially for you smaller companies out there) that it’s not filled by your CEO or someone who cannot commit their attention on a daily basis. And, please, for the love of Dr. Pete, don’t assign this role to an intern.

Community management is a lot of hard work (I repeat: A LOT). Especially if you already have a thriving community, managing it requires a great deal of attention, engagement, and consistency on a daily basis. Your community manager is on a podium every day representing your brand, so be sure to choose the person for this role very wisely.

In addition to the normal stuff like sharing value (and not just your own), your community manager will be responsible for communicating what’s going on with your company, like events and products or service stuff. They will take the lead on engaging and answering questions that may arise (with customer or product support). Even more important is facilitating social monitoring and listening (which is imperative) and probably (depending on size) handling some reputation management.

If that’s not enough, there will always be opportunities (things that they observe that could contribute to the growth of your business, or simply to building relationships) that arise in their interaction in and among the community that will require further investigation. That’s a lot of load to carry so your community manager needs to be one amazing (and capable) person.

Hands down, you’ll want to have an excellent communicator in this position as they are the social face of your company. 

If you’re working with an agency to assist with community management, you can share the load, but be sure to work together as a team to develop a plan for how management will work. Be present and involved with strategy, execution, engagement, and ensure whatever is being done is what’s best for your company and is working toward the goals that have been set.

Strategy, creativity, analysis, and direction


Who’s responsible

Someone (or a few someones) who will develop and facilitate the direction of your web marketing and community building efforts. If you’re working with an agency, you can certainly lean on them to lead this piece with your direct involvement. 

What’s required

The most important part of this role is to ensure that all teams (both internal and external) are working together to align all efforts with the goals that have been set for your whole business (not just for SEO, social, and content). Remember all of those departments I talked about above that are part of your whole team? This is where they can play a role and contribute to strategy and direction (and certainly creativity).

It’s important that this role has worked with all of your teams to break those goals down into measurable KPIs that inform the creative campaigns that will accomplish these objectives.

Of course, your efforts don’t mean much if you’re not measuring and analyzing what’s working and what’s not. The person (or people) who are in the strategy/creativity/analysis/direction role need to provide strategic guidance based on actual data so that you can have confidence that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Many of our clients also work with additional partnering agencies that drive offline or PR efforts (more on this below). If that’s the case for you, make sure that all teams and partners are on the same page, working toward the same goals and being extra careful to maintain the consistency and integrity of the brand.

Design


Who’s responsible

Someone who can create any graphic assets that you need (and make you look really, really good). This can be an internal designer or your partnering agency. If you’re working with an external team, again, ensure that you’re maintaining the consistency and integrity of the brand. 

What’s required

Your designer is going to be responsible for designing and styling things like blog posts and infographics, social media assets, email marketing templates, banners and headers, and probably even landing pages.

The deal with the design role is just like every other role on this team. Don’t silo. Your designer is more of a production person who would probably rather be doing the work than dictating strategy, but they still have creative ideas and valuable feedback that would be worth hearing in the initial planning stages. Don’t be lame. Make them a part of the entire process.

Content

Who’s responsible

Someone who can write a variety of content like their life depended on it, because as you know, content is not just blog posts. We’ll just call this genius the content strategist.

What’s required

Your content strategist needs to be able to adapt to the context that’s necessitating the content. And above all, the content they develop needs to be driven by the overarching goals and strategy set forth for the business.

You want a content strategist who can be creative and, well, strategic. It’s important that this person is thoughtful not only about audience but also about how to balance creativity and conversion.

Outreach is going to be a big part of your content strategist’s job, both pre- and post-launch (more on this below). The person who’s creating your content needs to think about who’s going to care about that content before they even write it (Paddy Moogan’s rule. If you haven’t, you should read his book). They also need to be connecting with the SEO in the early planning stages in order to determine how this piece of content will be optimized, as well as determining if it’s been done before (and, in that case, how it can be done different/better).

If you don’t have the resources in-house to develop the content you need, you can outsource this role to an agency. And yes, they can assist you in creating strong, quality content that effectively represents your brand, but this takes a lot of work and collaboration; you need to be present and a part of the process.

You will want that agency to understand your business, so let them ask a lot of questions. If you’re too busy to answer their questions in an email, grant them a phone interview or allow them to sit in front of the CEO (or whoever else they need information from who may not be readily available) so they can extract exactly what they need to produce stellar content on your behalf. Then, of course, provide your input and revisions once you’ve seen a draft.

Like any member of your team, your content strategist can’t work in a silo. Content plays an enormous role in accomplishing the goals you have set for your business, so make your content strategist a part of the entire process from the very beginning (starting with goals and strategy development) so that they fully understand the bigger picture of why this content needs to exist.

After the content they’ve created has been released into the world, be sure to provide them with access to the data so that they can determine how well it performed and what could be done differently the next time around.

SEO

Who’s responsible

Someone who loves research, analysis, keywords, and probably Google so that they can properly and effectively manage and lead the optimization of all the stuff. Ideally, you also want this person to have more than a passing knowledge of strategy.

What’s required

The most important thing to note with the SEO role (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again) is that no man is an island. You need an advanced SEO who will contribute as one of the most powerful players on your team. 

Like all the other roles on your community building team, the SEO needs to be involved right from the beginning. If you have the right SEO on your team, their ginormous analytical brain will be contributing to strategy. Not just SEO strategy, but the strategy you’re using to drive your whole business. They can be relied upon to provide some left-brain steadiness to your presumably right-brained creatives.

And don’t forget content, outreach, creativity, and direction, too. 

The best thing about your SEO is that they can provide you with the information you need to make data driven decisions about your business, but they can’t do that if they’re sitting in the corner building links all day long. Whoever ends up playing this role for you, give them the credit they deserve and know they’re capable of a whole lot more than keywords.

Email marketing
 (and other stuff, too)

Who’s responsible

Someone who can design, develop, and coordinate email marketing campaigns to deliver the value your team is creating in relationship to your strategy (in other words, someone who will know how to effectively use email marketing to build relationships and grow your business). 

What’s required

Email marketing is a great way to build community with the people who want to be a part of it as well as those who already are. Your existing customers are your best brand advocates, so you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got email marketing covered somewhere among the members of your team.

And — wait for it — don’t silo this role either. Because email marketing can be used to accomplish many goals, this role requires big-picture thinking right from the beginning, so don’t leave this person out.

Certainly there will be other tools that you’ll need your team to use besides email marketing (I’m sure Phil Nottingham is wondering when the heck I’m going to talk about video). Whatever vehicles you’ll be using to execute your strategy, make sure you’ve designated someone on your team to fully embrace this responsibility so it can be used to build your community and reach the goals you’ve set for your business.

Reading and learning


Who’s responsible

Several people who are continually reading and learning about your industry, looking for the good stuff to send along to your community and any innovative or creative ideas that might just grow your business.

This role is up to everyone who’s on your team.

But that’s not to say that everyone on your team needs to be on social media. You can involve everyone in the company in the knowledge seeking and soaking portion, and then select specific people (like your community manager and others who want to work with social media) to be the face of your brand and share that information on your social media outlets.

What’s required

A whole lot of reading, learning, and sharing. Internally at Mack Web we use a Google Spreadsheet that allows everyone on the team to contribute to the knowledge that is shared with our community. This not only builds the strength of our team, but also provides our community with a lot of variety.

We each focus on a specific subject about which we’re passionate (content, operations, design, business, marketing, etc.) so that we’re not all reading the same stuff. Each day we put at least one post into the queue for our community manager to use.

I don’t have to tell you that reading and learning is imperative to the success of your business and the development of your team. It’s also integral to the growth of your community. When you’re sharing other people’s useful content, you’re providing your followers with something of value and also opening the door to a relationship with the people generating the content.

If you’re working with an agency, they can help you identify what you can read and share (as well as who you can follow) in order to build your community.

Ideally, your agency partners should be reading all of these things, too, and bringing opportunities to your attention. If you’ve got everyone on your entire team contributing with knowledge, your company will be unstoppable.

Reading and learning is probably the most important of all the roles, and can dramatically accelerate the growth of your business and your community.

Outreach


Who’s responsible

Several people who are developing relationships and helping to keep those people and the rest of your community involved in what you’re doing, so that they can partake in it and benefit from it. Call it link building or relationship building, outreach is something that your entire team can do.

What’s required

Outreach is so much more than getting a link, and it needs to be done all the time, not just online or via email, (and not just when you want to ask someone for a favor).

Everyone can do parts of outreach. Sales can work the in-person and the online relationships. Marketing can do its part to determine where the team is going to earn links with the amazing creative content they’re developing. The best people on your team for outreach are the ones that love combining the digital world with the face-to-face, because that’s where the magic happens.

Because the role of outreach really falls on everyone, find the people who are passionate about people, and teach them authentic ways to make it part of their natural routine at work and throughout each day.

Website stuff


Who’s responsible

Someone who is committed to executing changes on the website. Like everyone on your team, make sure whoever is responsible for this role understands the goals of the company and is part of strategy execution so that they’re able to prioritize. There are always a lot of shiny things (new plugins, new applications, other fancy new doodads) that come in the form of tiny little emergencies. Involving your webmaster with goals and creative strategy will keep things running smoothly.

What’s required

Website work could be anything from revamping the navigation and implementing user experience changes to integrating a blog and executing on-page SEO.

If you’re working with an agency to lead your community building and web marketing efforts, they will most likely provide your internal team or another partnering agency with all of the instructions for what needs to be implemented.

Offline stuff


Who’s responsible

The people who are handling all of the offline stuff like print collateral, events, and maybe PR.

What’s required

Offline stuff often affects the online stuff. Things like events, conferences, and product launches. It’s imperative that internal and external teams work together (and with the direction of the project manager) in order to ensure that everyone is effectively leveraging all efforts and working toward the same goals. 

Now go on, you — go build your team

I’m sure there’s a role I’ve missed, perhaps one imperative to the specific goals of your business. This is just a start. It may be what what works for a little while until your business undergoes a change. At that point, you’ll need to reassess and reconfigure the roles of your team into what works for you.

The biggest thing I can leave you with is this: Think differently about your team and the roles everyone plays. Expand your understanding of what each and every person and department can contribute to your digital marketing. There’s a lot more involved in building your community than managing your social media. By now you know that’s because it’s not just a community you’re building. It’s your business.

If you want all of the benefits that a thriving community brings, focus on building the best company you can possibly build. Move beyond marketing initiatives and focus on your vision. Understand your customers better, and learn what they need to make their lives better. Let the passion and drive for what you do transform your company and your community, and put the right team in place to do it.

Looking forward to your thoughts below.

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I roundly mocked voice search for such a long time.

I mocked it in public:

And I argued internally at Distilled against it being an important trend.

But I think I might have been wrong.

Before I explain why I think I might have been wrong, I want to give you a few of bits of information in my defence:

• I don’t drive much, and almost never on my own; I commute on the train and most of my driving is with my family.
• I work in an open-plan office without so much as a cubicle to shield my embarrassing experiments with voice search from the world.
• I actually don’t like using the phone much, so it may have passed me by that talking into that small device is a perfectly acceptable thing that normal people do.

My main arguments why voice search wasn’t an important trend were:

1. You look stupid talking into your phone

In hindsight, perhaps this was the most shortsighted of all my arguments. Of course we don’t always look entirely sensible holding a bit of technology up to our ears, but it seems like we have made it socially acceptable in most environments.

Image courtesy of travosaurus

More importantly, I think that I underestimated the speed with which things can become socially normal. I’m personally more up for trying this kind of new thing than most, and I think I underestimated everyone else’s willingness to try new things.

I increasingly make calls on my computer. Between Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and GoToMeeting, I probably average 2-3/day, so even in my cubicle-less existence it’s becoming more and more normal for me to talk to my computer.

2. You can’t edit things easily

Anyone who tried early voice dictation software is familiar with the process of trying to get it to recognise stop words and having it write out what you said:

“Delete word back. DELETE WORD BACK. Screw it.”

My imagined future of voice search had all kinds of similar problems. While some people are reporting that third parties can activate Google Glass, I imagine that is just teething difficulties.

There are two big things that give me hope for the future of voice search in terms of query editing:

(a) So much context is going with each query

You only have to look at Google Now to realise how far this has come:

You know that when they are capable of returning results for things you haven’t even searched for yet (see Danny’s write-up), they must be doing a lot of enhancement of queries with implicit data even when you are explicitly searching. Here’s how we’ve been thinking about it at Distilled:

All of this gives Google ever-increasing ability to get the query right by appending context and other information to it.

(b) Conversational search is amazing

Of all the many things that should impress me (like Google’s ability to return results for a never-seen-before query in a fraction of a second), conversational search is perhaps one of the more gimmicky in its current incarnation.

We’ve long had results that shifted in response to previous queries but it’s new that you are able to explicitly reference previous queries. It’s amazing how slick this is (when it works) and it feels futuristic to be able to ask your computer:

• “How old is Barack Obama?”
• “How tall is he?”
• “Who is his wife?”
• “How old is she?”

Or to ask for the time in multiple time zones:

All of this makes me think that query correction may not be needed too much, and when it is, it may not be too much of a problem. It’s already quicker than typing for relatively easily spoken mid-length queries.

3. It doesn’t matter anyway — they’re just queries

I honestly hadn’t thought too much about the marketing implications, because I figured that not only was voice search not going to catch on, but that even if it did, it would make no practical difference to us as marketers. I figured the way it would work would be something like:

Voice –> text –> query –> result

In actuality, the clumsiness of voice input appears to be a driving force behind Google relying less on the query itself and more on the implicit and explicit input from the user.

I wonder if we should have seen this coming, with “(not provided)” foreboding the death of the keyword? I had interpreted the statements from Googlers about “the death of the number one ranking” as being all about naive personalisation (location, search history, etc.). In fact, it appears that they are talking about the capability to process a whole load of new implicit inputs, including things like:

• Device
• Current activity
• Daily routine
• Interests
• Significant places
• Social network
• Calendar entries
• Gmail information (flight confirmations, etc.)

Voice search is a powerful driver towards queryless search and (more importantly, I think) query-enhanced search, where sparse input information is combined with ambient and personal information to return the results you need right now.

Is voice search the future, then?

I think it’s part of the future. I don’t see it cannibalising much of desktop search, where I imagine it’ll remain a novelty or an add-on, and I expect much of the its application to mobile search is incremental on top of more complex written queries.

The more important part in my mind is the impact of the technology it takes to power voice search. The fact that Google can roll out voice search this effective speaks not only to their natural language processing ability but also to the maturity of their ability to understand the web.

What should we do as marketers?

As web marketers, we need to realise that the dumb robot we’ve been considering all these years is rapidly becoming smarter. I think the actions for marketers have far less to do with voice search itself than with a real understanding of the underlying technology.

If you haven’t seen this video (I found it via Justin), I highly recommend taking the time to watch at least the first half hour (up to the Q&A):

…and that’s from over two years ago. It’s quite stunning how far Google’s understanding of the web has come, and technologies like Google Now are highlighting ability to put it all together.

The biggest actions I would recommend are therefore to prioritise all the things that help Google understand rather than just index your site. That means things like:

• Authorship information
• Structured markup (and structured data)
• Accurate meta information for objects and pages
• Machine-readable feeds of anything they consume (location data, prices, new content)

Conceptually, I think we need to change our mindset around keywords. “(not provided)” isn’t the only thing taking away query information; queries will increasingly be composed largely of implicit information alongside the explicit query.

Even if “(not provided)” rolled back (some chance!), we would still be left with less and less information to explain why and how a particular visitor arrived on our site and why we ranked for them. I see analytics and reporting moving towards a content- and user-centric model (across repeat visits and across devices), and moving away from a transactional, session-based view of keywords. You can set yourself up for future success by moving towards content-centric metrics now, and by implementing user-centric tracking with your analytics platform of choice (or waiting for it to come to universal analytics).

I’m looking forward to some disagreement in the comments, but remember: there’s a lot of science left to come. 

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

I roundly mocked voice search for such a long time.

I mocked it in public:

And I argued internally at Distilled against it being an important trend.

But I think I might have been wrong.

Before I explain why I think I might have been wrong, I want to give you a few of bits of information in my defence:

• I don’t drive much, and almost never on my own; I commute on the train and most of my driving is with my family.
• I work in an open-plan office without so much as a cubicle to shield my embarrassing experiments with voice search from the world.
• I actually don’t like using the phone much, so it may have passed me by that talking into that small device is a perfectly acceptable thing that normal people do.

My main arguments why voice search wasn’t an important trend were:

1. You look stupid talking into your phone

In hindsight, perhaps this was the most shortsighted of all my arguments. Of course we don’t always look entirely sensible holding a bit of technology up to our ears, but it seems like we have made it socially acceptable in most environments.

Image courtesy of travosaurus

More importantly, I think that I underestimated the speed with which things can become socially normal. I’m personally more up for trying this kind of new thing than most, and I think I underestimated everyone else’s willingness to try new things.

I increasingly make calls on my computer. Between Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and GoToMeeting, I probably average 2-3/day, so even in my cubicle-less existence it’s becoming more and more normal for me to talk to my computer.

2. You can’t edit things easily

Anyone who tried early voice dictation software is familiar with the process of trying to get it to recognise stop words and having it write out what you said:

“Delete word back. DELETE WORD BACK. Screw it.”

My imagined future of voice search had all kinds of similar problems. While some people are reporting that third parties can activate Google Glass, I imagine that is just teething difficulties.

There are two big things that give me hope for the future of voice search in terms of query editing:

(a) So much context is going with each query

You only have to look at Google Now to realise how far this has come:

You know that when they are capable of returning results for things you haven’t even searched for yet (see Danny’s write-up), they must be doing a lot of enhancement of queries with implicit data even when you are explicitly searching. Here’s how we’ve been thinking about it at Distilled:

All of this gives Google ever-increasing ability to get the query right by appending context and other information to it.

(b) Conversational search is amazing

Of all the many things that should impress me (like Google’s ability to return results for a never-seen-before query in a fraction of a second), conversational search is perhaps one of the more gimmicky in its current incarnation.

We’ve long had results that shifted in response to previous queries but it’s new that you are able to explicitly reference previous queries. It’s amazing how slick this is (when it works) and it feels futuristic to be able to ask your computer:

• “How old is Barack Obama?”
• “How tall is he?”
• “Who is his wife?”
• “How old is she?”

Or to ask for the time in multiple time zones:

All of this makes me think that query correction may not be needed too much, and when it is, it may not be too much of a problem. It’s already quicker than typing for relatively easily spoken mid-length queries.

3. It doesn’t matter anyway — they’re just queries

I honestly hadn’t thought too much about the marketing implications, because I figured that not only was voice search not going to catch on, but that even if it did, it would make no practical difference to us as marketers. I figured the way it would work would be something like:

Voice –> text –> query –> result

In actuality, the clumsiness of voice input appears to be a driving force behind Google relying less on the query itself and more on the implicit and explicit input from the user.

I wonder if we should have seen this coming, with “(not provided)” foreboding the death of the keyword? I had interpreted the statements from Googlers about “the death of the number one ranking” as being all about naive personalisation (location, search history, etc.). In fact, it appears that they are talking about the capability to process a whole load of new implicit inputs, including things like:

• Device
• Current activity
• Daily routine
• Interests
• Significant places
• Social network
• Calendar entries
• Gmail information (flight confirmations, etc.)

Voice search is a powerful driver towards queryless search and (more importantly, I think) query-enhanced search, where sparse input information is combined with ambient and personal information to return the results you need right now.

Is voice search the future, then?

I think it’s part of the future. I don’t see it cannibalising much of desktop search, where I imagine it’ll remain a novelty or an add-on, and I expect much of the its application to mobile search is incremental on top of more complex written queries.

The more important part in my mind is the impact of the technology it takes to power voice search. The fact that Google can roll out voice search this effective speaks not only to their natural language processing ability but also to the maturity of their ability to understand the web.

What should we do as marketers?

As web marketers, we need to realise that the dumb robot we’ve been considering all these years is rapidly becoming smarter. I think the actions for marketers have far less to do with voice search itself than with a real understanding of the underlying technology.

If you haven’t seen this video (I found it via Justin), I highly recommend taking the time to watch at least the first half hour (up to the Q&A):

…and that’s from over two years ago. It’s quite stunning how far Google’s understanding of the web has come, and technologies like Google Now are highlighting ability to put it all together.

The biggest actions I would recommend are therefore to prioritise all the things that help Google understand rather than just index your site. That means things like:

• Authorship information
• Structured markup (and structured data)
• Accurate meta information for objects and pages
• Machine-readable feeds of anything they consume (location data, prices, new content)

Conceptually, I think we need to change our mindset around keywords. “(not provided)” isn’t the only thing taking away query information; queries will increasingly be composed largely of implicit information alongside the explicit query.

Even if “(not provided)” rolled back (some chance!), we would still be left with less and less information to explain why and how a particular visitor arrived on our site and why we ranked for them. I see analytics and reporting moving towards a content- and user-centric model (across repeat visits and across devices), and moving away from a transactional, session-based view of keywords. You can set yourself up for future success by moving towards content-centric metrics now, and by implementing user-centric tracking with your analytics platform of choice (or waiting for it to come to universal analytics).

I’m looking forward to some disagreement in the comments, but remember: there’s a lot of science left to come. 

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

As a local business owner, it’s important for your business to be
listed in Google’s search results. But how do you fix your business
listing if the information is incorrect? 

In this week’s edition
of Local Whiteboard Friday, David Mihm sheds some light on the
complicated process that Google uses to create its business listings.

For reference, here’s a still of David’s whiteboard diagram.

Video Transcription

“Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard
Friday and in particular a local edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m David Mihm,
the Director of Local Search Strategy for SEOMoz, and I’m here to answer one of
the most common questions that we get asked which is:  “Hey, how come my business information
is showing up incorrectly at Google?”

So they type in the name of their business, and there’s
either a phone number wrong or their address is wrong or sometimes the marker
for where their business is, is in the wrong place. So I want to try to answer
how Google generates its business listings.

So the first step that a lot of business owners take, which
is a great step to take, is they go directly to Google. Google offers a
dashboard for businesses that Google Places as well as Google+, there are kind
of two ways into it right now. A business owner goes and he enters his business
name, his address, his phone number, some categories, maybe the hours that he
operates his business, and he tells that directly to Google. Of course the
expectation is, “Oh well, I’m the business owner. I’m telling Google this
information. That’s how it should show up when Google spits out a search
result.” But in reality that’s not actually how Google assembles a business
listing. So I’m going to erase these lines, and I’ll try to walk you guys
through how this process actually happens.

So for many of you, if you’re business owners, you go to one
of these places, the Google Places dashboard or the Google+ local dashboard,
and you tell Google about your business and you find before you even get there
Google knows about your business. It can guess at what your address and phone
number are for example.

So you might wonder where Google is finding that
information. Actually in the United States
there are three companies that aggregate business data for United States
businesses. Again, this is the United
States only, but in this country those guys
are Infogroup, Neustar and Axiom. So Google buys or leases information from at
least one of these companies and pulls it into its index. But it doesn’t go
right into Google’s index. It actually goes into a massive server cluster that
takes it into consideration as one data source.

So not only is the business owner one of these data sources,
but you would have one data provider, maybe Infogroup is another data source.
Neustar might be another data source and so and so forth. So imagine this
graphic going quite far to the right, even off of the whiteboard just with some
of these data aggregation services.

That all gets assembled at a server cluster, somewhere in Mountain View let’s just
say, that compiles kind of all of this information. These however, aren’t even
the only places that Google gets data. These guys, these data sources actually
also, in addition to sending information to Google, they send data out to a
whole bunch of other sites across the web. So Yelp, for example, gets
information from one of these sources. Yellowpages.com gets information from
one of these sources. Many of you guys have seen my local search ecosystem
infographic that kind of details a little bit more about how this process
works.

Then Google goes out, and it crawls these sites across the
web and again throws that information into this server cluster. So again,
imagine this table here going off basically to infinity, kind of off this page.

Additionally, in addition to these data aggregators, in
addition to websites, Google looks at government information. So if you’re
regional, like your county has a place of businesses that are registered in a
particular county or maybe your secretary of state, Google is either probably
going to crawl that information. In some cases the government publishes this in
PDF format or something like that, and that gets pulled into this cluster again
as one of these data points in this huge spreadsheet.

Another place that Google might get information believe it
or not is Google Street View. Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea recently gave a
keynote at Local University in Baltimore, and there’s information in Google’s
patents that suggest that street view cameras from these cars that they go out
and they drive around trying to find driving directions are taking photos of
storefronts with business name signage, with the address numbers right there on
the storefront, and that information gets pulled into this, what we call the
cluster of information.

So there are all these different sources pulling in, and you
as the business owner, you are only one of these data sources. So even though
you tell Google, “Hey, yes this is my address, this is my phone number,
this is where I’m located,” if Google is seeing bad information, at any of
these other places from these data aggregators, from websites, from government
entities, Google pulls data in from everywhere. So if every other source out,
there or a lot of other sources out there that Google trusts, especially major
data aggregators or government entities, if they have your information wrong,
that could lead to misinformation in the search results.

But there’s one final step actually before Google will
publish the information, the authoritative information from this cluster. Google
actually has human reviewers that are looking at this information. They are
calling businesses to verify things like categories, the buildings that certain
businesses are located in, and these reviewers will again call a real business
offline. So if you get a call and it says, “Hey, Mountain View is calling you, it might
actually be Google.” So pay special attention if your business receives
those kind of calls. They might be trying to validate information that they’re
finding from across the web.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Google accepts data
from other reviewers, from other human reviewers via a website that it operates
called Google Map Maker. So if you’re having trouble with your information from
one of these sources, you might check Google.com/mapmaker. It’s like a
Wikipedia for locations. Anybody in the world can go in there and update data.
So it’s really, really important if you’re a business owner and you’re having
trouble with Google publishing bad information about your business, you can’t
just go into the Google Places dashboard or the Google+ dashboard and fix this
information. You really need to go to all of these different sources. So these
major data aggregators, they’re different in every country. So if you’re from
somewhere else in the world besides the United States, you need to do some
research on who these guys are. You need to update your information at Internet
yellow pages sites. You definitely need to update your information with
government authorities, and you probably want to check your information at
least on this Google Map Maker site, because all of these feed into this
central data cluster that then feeds into a Google search result for your
business.

So I hope that explains a little bit about this very
complicated process that Google has to assemble business listings. If you want
more information in the text part of the page on which this Whiteboard is
published, I’ll reference one of my colleagues at Local University,
Mike Blumenthal. Mike has a great sort of text based layout of what I just
explained visually, and Mike is actually the inspiration for this idea of the
data cluster at Google Local.

So hope you enjoyed that Whiteboard Friday, and again for
more information I’ll link to Mike Blumenthal’s blog down near the comments.

Thanks guys.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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