MOZ

Stopping SEOcentrism: What Lego Can Teach All Web Marketers

Posted by gfiorelli1

Houston, we have a problem

We SEOs, myself included, have a habit of almost always focusing our attention on what concerns us directly.

We suffer what I call SEOcentrism.

Everything is SEO and, and everything ends in the sphere of influence of SEO, as if Search Marketing was a gigantic black hole.

  • Content? Clearly, it is SEO and SEO should govern Content Strategy!
  • Social Media? SEOs are those who really understand it!
  • Inbound Marketing? Isn't that a synonym for SEO?

In reality, though, things are very different.

Simplifying all components of marketing, SEO is only one small component of a much bigger strategy a brand may have:

That is why most brands, above all, tend to not consider SEO as essential as we would like. Even in the best cases, they usually do not consider SEO (or more broadly Inbound Marketing) as a discipline which could inspire and coordinate all others.

That quadrant can also help us understand why the more traditional media agencies tend to have more success in winning contracts than the new digital ones (not to mention the classic SEO Agencies). The reasons are twofold:

  1. Brands have the ability to have a unique and coordinated strategy designed and built by a single agency;
  2. For a traditional media agency, it is relatively easier to just create a digital (or just SEO) area within its existing structure.

Be aware that I am not saying that this is the best choice a business can make; I am simply describing the reality I see every day.

This Venn by Econsultancy explains all the complexities of a complete integrated Marketing strategy

However, there is another problem.

Even if we are good at analyzing data, fixing technical issues, creating content marketing campaigns, influencing community building… even if we follow the instructions of the "good marketer" book, many times the results we obtain still don't make us feel fully satisfied with our work.

We score a hit, or maybe more than one, but many times that success is extemporary and does not translate into continuous and long lasting improvements... and maybe for that reason our clients may fire us.

Why? It is ironic to say it, but this is mainly because we do not think organically.

Because of our innate SEOcentrism, we lose or do not take into full account the global marketing strategy of our clients, and we do not see how our job is influenced and may influence the overall marketing strategy.

For this reason I am going to describe how Lego has designed its marketing strategy, what principles guide it, how all the channels are connected by a common "brand storytelling" and what we can learn from the success of Lego.

Why Lego and not another brand? Because Lego really is a brand that is winning in marketing. It is a perfect case history and—let's be honest—if The Matrix exists it is built with Lego bricks.

Start with why

Ten years ago, Lego announced losses of over $400 million USD.

In reality, crisis has hit Lego since the '80s because of various reasons including:
  1. The liberalization of the patents related to its famous bricks; and therefore
  2. The birth of numerous competitors that offered to the public substantially similar products at a cheaper price; and
  3. An almost total impermeability to customers and fans.
Crisis derives from Greek word "choice," and any crisis—if well managed—can result in renewal and positive transformations that, remaining within the Greek mythology, can revive a person, a country or a business company like they were a phoenix.
Lego understood that, and everything changed.
Lego understood that it needed to reinvent itself, and it needed to start with its why:

  • Inspire
  • Think creatively
  • Invent

The mission statement is also fundamental for understanding the archetypical figure Lego wants to represent, and that permeates all its messages: the Builder (and it is not a case that, for those who know the reference, we all are "Master Builders").

Reading the "Mission and Vision" page of Lego, then, we are able to understand how Lego pretends to make its Why real:

  1. Pioneering new ways of playing;
  2. Pioneering play material;
  3. Pioneering the business model of play;
  4. Leveraging globalisation and digitalisation.

The last two points (and partly the first) have a direct influence in what Lego did and does in marketing.

Takeaway

We must remember to start always from the "About us" page when pitching and building a strategy for our brand or our clients.

That nearly always-forgotten page is where we can understand the core of the marketing message that must pervade the strategy and work as an unconscious connection with our audience.

Exercise

Pick one of these other great About Us pages and try to define the Why and the How:

Audience

As I wrote before, one of reasons why Lego went into decline was that it was completely misaligned with its audience.

Lego took a long time to realize that it was no longer just a game for children, but that those children who were playing with its bricks had grown up and, because they loved Lego, they wanted it to grow up too and start creating products that could respond to their new needs.

Lego Ambassadors

Lego, then, created the Ambassadors Program (now that I am writing the post, the page is under construction for redesign, but this other page explains what it is quite well).

Lego Ambassadors, because of their über-fan nature and their evangelizing Lego values and initiatives in forums and blogs, have the function to operate like a communication bridge between Lego itself and its wider fan base, and they do it on a daily basis.

Lego Ideas

In 2010, then, Lego created the Legoclick community, which evolved into what now is Lego Ideas, a place where fans do not just discuss and present their own Lego inventions, but also can see them becoming a real Lego product, thanks to other fans' upvotes and a final review by Lego itself.

If we have the Delorean Lego version or the Lego Ghostbusters car, it is thanks to the fact that Lego finally understood how its audience had changed. Moreover, the entire Minecraft Lego series, now quite popular, started as a Lego Ideas project.

I will return to this concept later, when talking about the importance of fandom and prosumers in marketing today.

On the other hand, Lego also created a community place for its yourger target: My Lego Network.

If you click on the previous link, you will see that Lego also prefers not to use social sign-ins, but how it relies on a detailed process for creating "Lego IDs". This is not just for retrieving useful information, but also—from a marketing point of view—for offering children (and parents) the fan pride of owning a well-defined identity in the Lego world.

Letting your audience create what you cannot

Have you ever noticed how Lego City or the simple bricks' boxes present no weapons? This is a voluntary choice by Lego, which does not extend to products created through co-marketing (e.g. Lego Star Wars).

This choice, however, is a problem for many fans who use Lego to recreate, for example, aircrafts, vehicles or dioramas related to World War II.
For this reason, forums or even small companies that filled this void, such as BrickArms, begun to arise.
The reaction of Lego is not to go against this unorthodox use of its name and bricks, but it is quite the opposite:
  1. Lego allows the forums to "live," while maintaining a discreet control over them;
  2. Lego sends very detailed technical specifications to the companies, which manufacture unofficial pieces so that they can accomplish their work while respecting the level of internal quality of Lego itself.

Let's build

Let me finish this chapter describing how Lego did not forget that its other main public are the children. We saw how their mission is all about them.

Lego targeted them anew, not only with a stronger attention to kids' inputs (and possibly answering them), but also with its foundation, which has a similar mission of building a future where learning through play empowers children to become creative, engaged, life-long learners.

Products and marketing around the power of learning through play and through building is at the base of the "Let's build" tagline.

Building the game, for Lego, is the common passion that links its two audiences: children and adults.

Takeaways

We must put the users at the center of our marketing strategy, and this starts with achieving a precise audience analysis.

However, we must always remember that the audience is not something monolithic and abstract, but that the data derived from our analysis are a reflection of real people and, as such, subject to changes.
For this reason, the audience analysis should not be conducted only at an early stage, but repeated over time so to identify as early as possible any possible change in the personas, that we have identified.

We must always remember that our audience is multifaceted and that, often, there may be personas with totally opposite characteristics, but having in common the love or interest for our brand.

Finally, let's remember that it is in our nature to be data-informed, and that it is in our DNA to retrieve and understand data points that are not the ones commonly taken into consideration by more classic marketers. We must use this as one of our competitive advantages.

More about Audience Analysis:

The Fandom/Canon pendulum

Whenever we deal with a Brand, especially if it targets the main public, we should always remember that there exists a constant dialectic between the Canon and the Fandom. Let me explain:

The Canon represents the official branded content and messages produced by the brand, and it is defined by the official marketing strategy.

Moreover, the Canon develops its actions in the so-called "cultural industry channels (e.g. a movie like "The Lego Movie").

The purpose of Canon is always profit, even if it may be through actions that deal with or encite fandom.

Fandom, on the other hand, represents the original content fans create using the same brand's products—a repurposing of the original content a brand creates.

Fandom is usually delivered using channels independent from those of the brand. To use the Lego example, Vine, Instagram, and YouTube were used by Lego fans far before Lego started using them. Those channels follow very different production principles (e.g. crowdsourcing), and it's main purpose is pleasure.

The importance of strategy in marketing and brand storytelling

Lego is very much aware of this dialectic, and explores every possible way of taking advantage of it while spreading its own brand storytelling.

From the canonical one, Lego creates (using a typical Transmedia term) a "Bible" for each one of its campaigns and products' lines.

The Bibles, which we might also call strategic plans, are documents where everything related to a campaign is defined:

  • Business model
  • Audience
  • Brand storytelling
  • Media/Platforms
  • Execution
  • Experience
  • How all these elements interact between them and when.

Moreover, for every single action previewed in the campaign, the strategic plan also defines:

  • Business model (because a website follows different rules than a TV series);
  • Audience (a campaign may target just one of the different personas we have defined);
  • Premise (what is causing and justifying, from a storytelling point of view, this action?);
  • Genre (in our cases this could be the kind of content: long forms, infographics, white paper, video...);
  • Theme (or what facet of the general storytelling the action will be about);
  • Narrative synthesis (somehow a sort of adaptation of what the content will narrate);
  • Technical Specification (a field where we can contribute, as demonstrates Richard Baxter in his latest posts here on Moz and on Builtvisible
  • Expansion (the content created can possibly expanded, and this is where we should think about repurposing the content we create).

Now let's take Yoda Chronicles, and let's consider it as complex marketing campaign for giving new force to the Lego Star Wars products.

If we look at the Yoda Chronicles campaign by Lego, we can easily find all the elements described above:

  1. The general business model is the co-marketing with the Star Wars brand, which is at the base of the Lego Star Wars' product line (generic business model);
  2. Yoda Chronicles is a spin-off of Lego Star Wars (premise);
  3. It it set in the Lego version of the Star Wars universe, in a consistent continuity with it, and it narrates the adventures of a group of young padawans and their master, Yoda;
  4. The audiences targeted are both the Star Wars fan (Yoda) and their sons (the Padawans);
  5. The media/platforms used were:
    • TV (the 8-episode miniseries aired on Cartoon Network, but we should also consider the classic promotional teasers and trailers);
    • Microsite (intelligently hosted inside the main Lego Star Wars section in the Lego.com site);
    • Online videos, hosted both in the Lego Star Wars section and in the Lego YouTube channel;
    • Images of any kind (wallpapers, avatars, ready-for-memes images);
    • Several apps, for pre and post-launch, and for iOS, Android, and desktop browsers;
    • Billboards;
    • Guerrilla marketing actions;
    • Books.
  6. The TV Series is produced by Lego itself, while external companies take care especially of the pre-launch marketing actions (Execution);
  7. Users have plenty of occasion for engaging with Yoda Chronicles, and are enticed to revamp their own fans' nature, thanks in particular to guerrilla marketing actions, games and message board on the site (Experience);
  8. The games allow users to relive the adventures of Yoda and his Padawans, and the games incite players to discover secret codes to use on the site, guiding them into a web ecosystem that see also the possibility to buy the Lego Star Wars products and discuss them (interactions between all elements).

3,000,000+ bricks were needed for creating this 1:1 X-Wing Fighter. The buzz was of similar scale.
(Photo by Pascal on Flickr)

When it comes to Fandom, Lego simply allows fans the freedom of doing (almost) everything their imagination inspires them to create, and doesn't try to control (at least in most cases) their creativity.

This attitude is key for letting consumers becoming prosumers—people who create new original content from brands' products, helping grow the brands' recognition and

The "philosophical" reason is that products become part of the life of the buyer, and extension of his personality, which shares the same values of the brand. Letting the buyer freely share and produce content with its own products, then, is like creating a promotional force for the brand at zero cost.

Remember, fans look for pleasure... so we should concede them the liberty of finding pleasure with our products.

The liberty of building, then, is extremely consistent with the company's Why, and denying the freedom of literally building content would be going against its own principle.

For this reason, too, Lego lets fans doing everything with its bricks and does not commit the mistake George Lucas, for instance, did not understand about the force of Star Wars fandom when he tried to block it.

Takeaways

When we design a strategy for a brand, even if it is "just" a search marketing strategy, we should always remember to ask the right questions, which can help us understand the general marketing landscape our action will be a part of (it will determine ours).

Consistency is key in marketing. If it is not present, then the message fails to pass or our actions can even produce results opposite to those desired.

Creating a "Bible," which not only takes into consideration all the possible connections our strategy has with other marketing channels, but also defines and describes the specs of every action and the brand storytelling consistency common to all them, will help us with the following:

  1. Maintaining control over the development of the campaign;
  2. Developing campaigns aligned to the general marketing campaign of the brand we work for;
  3. Getting inspiration for new actions and new campaigns; and
  4. Offering clear expectations to the client.

When creating this document, then, we must always answer these questions:

  1. What facet of the brand storytelling do we want to narrate?
  2. How are we going to narrate it?
  3. What is the genre we will use?
  4. If we use different elements for narrating a story, how do they relate to each other?
  5. What kind of engagement are we looking for?
  6. Will this engagement influence the evolution of the campaign and of the storytelling?
  7. How will we manage the engagement and what control we will let the users have over the story?
  8. How can we create synergy between online and offline engagement?
  9. What platform will we use (and not use)? And do any of them really add value to the users?
  10. Will we start targeting a massive audience or a small subset?
  11. Will the experience be free for everyone, or will we go for a freemium or invite-only model?

This last two points are very important, because a strategy should be thought of as a modular building, so that we can start developing it even if we do not have a big budget. Remember, a marketing strategy that previews the deep interaction with the fans can also have its start in something like Kickstarter, which means that it can even be paid for by very engaged fans.

Exercise:

Choose two brands, for instance Betabrand and Beardbrand, and analyze how their marketing is based on the dialectic between canon and fandom.

Experience

If we put users at the center of our marketing efforts, then we should create a marketing strategy that is not only able to answer our customers' needs, but also able to make them feel our brand is partly theirs.

For this reason engagement is so important, as was explained well by Rand Fishkin in his last Whiteboard Friday.

One mistake we do make, though, is considering engagement to be something related only to Social Media.

In fact, engagement is the consequence of a principle, which must be at the basis of every action realized by a brand in every aspect of its relationship with its audience: creating positive experiences for its users.

If we understand this, then we see how all the best practices in every field of marketing have logical meaning, and how all of them have a common purpose: earning such trust and loyalty that when we receive a critique, it will always be a constructive one.

(note: Lego answered to Greenpeace announcing that it will not renew the contract with Shell)

Lego has understood this well, and almost everything I wrote above about Lego proves it.

But there are two areas in which this research of the positive experience is fundamental:
  1. Customer care
  2. Products

Customer care

Lego, even though it also uses its social media profiles for instantly attending to customer care issues, prefers to maintain this facet offline, paying extreme attention to the quality of the service offered.

In some cases, it decides to go further and personalize the experience such a way that a simple customer care answer can become a pure marketing action, as in the case of this letter sent to a kid by a customer care representative, who responds to a problem the child had with the Sensei Wu minifigure:

It is not a surprise that a letter like this saw a viral response on social media last year.

Products

Sometimes we forget that products are marketing. Moreover, sometimes we forget that creating a product that can result in a winning marketing action doesn't necessarily need a huge budget.

A good example of this is a very simple idea Lego had for this holiday season: the Minifigure Family.

Minifigure Family is based on a simple idea: It offers users the possibility to share on their social media profiles a virtual Happy Holidays postcard, where users and their family are portrayed as Lego figures.

A simple product, a simple idea and a great success on social media (here's Twitter data by Topsy).

But if we want to find a product that us SEOs know well, and that the most intelligent brands, and Lego is one of them are starting to offer to its prosumers, that is data under the form of APIs.

Moreover, APIs now for us SEOs are starting to have a new interesting consequence: structured data and better Semantic SEO.

In fact the best APIs (and unfortunately this is not the case of Lego's ones yet, a better example is Marvel's API) can be available also via JSON, and JSON LD is also a way to inject structured data into a website. Hence, APIs can be a bridge to semantically optimize every website using them, and so making the brand, which owns them, more visible.

Drillability

If experience leads to engagement, and engagement leads to spreadability, then we must add that experience and all its consequences can be achieved also thanks to drillability, or the creation of really targeted content/products, which is able to combine two different passions our audience has in a simoultaneous experience.

In the case of Lego this is achieved mainly through franchising and co-marketing actions with other brands, as is in the case of Lego Star Wars, Lego Minecraft, Lego Marvel, Lego DC Comics, etc.

Having found other passions of its fanbase, Lego was able to expand its audience into new markets.

In cases more like the ones we deal with everyday, this may lead to opportunities for writing a regular column in a website our audience visits, hiring an influencer to write for our company blog, or any other "co-marketing" opportunity.

Takeaways

Marketing has changed. All marketing—not just SEO.

Users now are the main protagonists of every action, and sometimes they even are the ones creating the actions that market the brands.

For this reason everything - from the website performance to the product description, from the content we create and the support we offer - must be focused on offering positive experiences to our audience, so to earn trust and loyalty, and having it becoming our main commercial force.

Lego does it, Mattel does not... and the results are here to demonstrate it:

Conclusion

In the past weeks I have been asked several times what my previews about SEO and marketing are for 2015.

Sincerely, I do not have an answer to those questions.

What I know, though, is that more and more, every marketing channel influences every other, and therefore, SEO must be absolutely aware that it is part of something bigger.

It is increasingly clear to me that the boundary once existing between online and offline no longer exists. We should not talk about multi-device, we should talk about OnOff as the only existing reality.

Google itself is urging us to think this way, since we've been many months now with Google Universal Analytics and, recently, with Adwords' In-Store Conversions.

What I do know is that the best brands have become publishers, and Google is well aware of this evolution and rewards it.

Everything is content, I hope we will understand it once for all.

What I see is that there is no more space for extemporary actions, and that with no strategy behind it even the more resounding success will quickly be forgotten and will not help achieving the goals that we have set.

What my intuition tells me is that we are in a transition phase, in a time when we have to decide what we want to be and really understand what our competitive advantages are. Those are the ways we can actually help businesses and assume a well-defined role in their marketing.

If we do not decide and understand, then we will become nerds at the service of the big media agencies, or working in their shadow.

This is why I hope that, more and more, the strategic component of our work will be considered the foundation of every campaign that we SEOs realize.

That's why I wanted to describe to all of you what Lego can teach us about marketing: because it responds to a finely defined strategy, which has helped Lego go from near bankruptcy to dominating the toy industry.

Fewer tips and tricks, less looking for short cuts, and more aspiring to think big: this is what I urge to all of us to do, because the greatest successes have always been the dream someone once had and decided to make real.
Only if we do so, 2015 will be awesome (and Google-proof).
Let's build.


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By |December 29th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments
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The Massive Ranking Factor Too Many SEOs are Ignoring – Whiteboard Friday

The Massive Ranking Factor Too Many SEOs are Ignoring Whiteboard

Posted by randfish

Despite Google's ambiguity about how it's used in the algorithm, we've seen evidence time and again that there's a giant ranking factor that SEOs just aren't optimizing for. In today's very special Whitebeard Friday, Rand (or Randa Claus) shows us how to fill in this important gap in our work.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Ho, ho, ho. Howdy, Moz boys and girls, and welcome to another special Christmas edition of Whitebeard Friday. I'm your host Randa Claus. (pause) I just can't keep making fun of Santa like this. It's just terrible.

I am very thrilled to have all of you with us for the holidays and for this special edition of Whitebeard Friday. We actually have some really important, juicy, meaty SEO material. Hopefully, my beard won't get too much in the way of that. I feel like I have the same mustache. It's just whiter this week.

I want to talk about this big ranking factor that a lot of SEO practitioners and experts are almost ignoring. By ignoring, I don't mean to say we don't know it exists. We just aren't optimizing it yet.

That factor is engagement. I'm not just talking about onsite engagement. I'm talking about overall web engagement with your site and your brand. That can manifest in a bunch of different ways. A branded search is certainly one manifestation of that. Direct navigation, so lots of people going directly to your website, lots of people typing in searches for clearly your brand. They want to go just to your website. Time on site and browse rate, we've seen a bunch of elements around this. Pogo-sticking, which we've talked about on Whiteboard Friday previously. Traffic referrals, meaning traffic you're sending out to the rest of the web. Google can see this. They have Chrome. They have Android. They have Google Analytics. They have all sorts of plugins. They have the web's biggest advertising network. They can see all of this stuff. Then, finally, amplification in the forms of press and PR and word of mouth, kind of the non-link forms of amplification, which could even encompass social media.

So what is our evidence that these things are real factors in the search ranking algorithms? Well, unfortunately, unlike the early days of links when this was more directly observable and when the search engines were a little more open about this, they've been pretty quiet about engagement. They all talk about it in a broad sense, but they don't specifically say, "Oh, yes, we specifically use time on site and browse rate." In fact, they're very nuanced around this.

The only thing that I've heard engineers or search engine folks say is, "Yes, we do use pogo-sticking, and yes, we will look at some forms of amplification and some things around brand," which you could interpret to mean maybe branded search and some things around brand that could be interpreted as direct navigation. But they are not specific about this.

However, we've seen tons of experiments and lots of information that suggest that even if these aren't exactly what they're using, they're using stuff like it. When you see experiments that show, hey, despite the fact that site speed is a very small factor, we reduced the page load time and saw all these wonderful things happen around search. What's going on there? It's some form of engagement. It's something they're measuring around that, that's not just site speed, but engagement overall. That increases as you bring page load speed down.

So what's the problem here? Why is it that SEOs, many of us at least, are not optimizing for this yet? Well, the answers are oftentimes we don't have the authority. If you go to someone, you pitch an SEO project internally at your company, you're the person who runs SEO, and they're like, "No, you take care of our crawlability. You take care of our links. You're not responsible for how much traffic we send out or the time on site and browse rate or amplification and press." Those are all different departments, and it's very tough to get that synchronization between them.

We may not have access to the tools or the data that we need to measure this stuff and then to show improvements. That's very tough and hard too.

Then the inputs around a lot of this stuff are not direct. Let's go back to links as an example. If you know that links are the big ranking factor for you, you can show, "Hey, we got this many links. Here's how it changed our ranking position. We need more. Here's how we go about getting them." Plan, execution, analysis, it's simple. It's direct. It may not be easy, but it is observable.

This is often indirect. There are so many things that impact this stuff that's indirect, and that's really tough and frustrating.

As solutions, it's going to be our job to do what early SEOs had to do -- socialize. We have to go out to the industry, to our colleagues, to our clients if we're consultants, to other web professionals across all the forms of marketing, and we have to socialize the fact that engagement is a major input into SEO, just like SEOs did starting in about 1999/2000, where we had to explain, "Look, this is how links work. Links are important. It's not just about getting listed in the directory. It's not just about keywords anymore. It's not just about meta tags anymore. Links really matter here. I can show you Google's PageRank paper here. I can show you all these patent applications here. I can show you the impact of links."

We have to do that again with engagement. That's going to be tough. That's going to be an uphill battle, but I believe it's something we're already starting. A lot of industry leaders have done this ahead of this Whiteboard Friday for sure.

Second off, we've got to utilize the tools that we do have available to be able to get some of this data, and there are some. While I am no big fan of Google Webmaster Tools -- I think a lot of the data in there is inaccurate -- we can look at trending numbers around things like branded search, and we can do that through Google Analytics. So Google Analytics, yes, keyword not provided is 90% of your referrals. That's okay. Take the sample 10% and show over time whether you're getting a bigger and bigger proportion and bigger and bigger quantities of branded search. That's a directional input that you can use to say, "Look, our brand is growing in search. There it is."

You can do user testing around search results. This is something I see very few folks doing. We often do usability and user testing on our websites, but we don't do them in the search results. If you ask a group of five users, "Hey, go perform this search. Take a look at these 10 results. Tell me which one you would choose and why. Now tell me your second choice and why. Now tell me your third choice and why," you will get to things like time on site. You'll get to things around pogo-sticking. You'll get to those engagement metrics that happen in the search results.

Then, of course, you can use, if you're a Moz subscriber, Fresh Web Explorer or something like mention.net or Talkwalker or Trackur or something to get these amplification numbers and data that you might not be able to get from raw links themselves. This is gettable data, just in different ways than we're used to.

Finally, we actually are going to have to change what we're comfortable with. We're going to have to get comfortable in a world where the ranking factors are indirectly influenceable, not directly influenceable. That's weird for us, because we've always said, "Okay, algorithm has all these factors. I can influence these ones. That's the ones I need to work on. I'm going to go to work."

Now we have to go, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. In order to influence traffic referrals, I'm going to have to do things around my content, things around how I earn traffic, and then, boy, I don't know if that'll have a direct impact on my rankings." You don't. This is a world of indirect inputs. This thing, this tactic I'm going to pursue is going to lead to this thing, which I hope is going to lead to engagement, which I hope is going to lead to rankings.

That's frustrating. It's harder to sell. It's harder to invest in, but, oh man, the ROI is there. If you can do it, if you can earn that buy-in, you can make these investments, and then through experimentation, you can learn what works for you and where you need to move the needle. This is going to be weird because it's a world where our tactics are correlated, but they aren't explicitly causal into the ways that we influence the rankings. It's a whole new world, but it's about to be a new year, and I think it's a great time for us to invest in engagement.

With that, happy holidays, whatever holidays you celebrate. Happy new year if you celebrate the new year. I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you here on Whiteboard Friday in 2015. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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By |December 26th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments
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Happy Holidays from Moz

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

Ah, the holidays! This is the time of year when we give our thanks and make our wishes, when new and old meld happily together like hot buttered rum and Grandma's pistachio fudge.

There's been a lot of newness this year for Moz. As the smilin' face behind live chat, I've had the good fortune to meet many of you as you embark upon your Mozzy journey for the first time. And throughout 2014 alone, we welcomed more than two dozen new Mozlings into our family!

With all this wonderful change, we've added a few things to our list of office holiday traditions. Party with us as we celebrate the old and the new, the weird White Elephant gifts and the lumpy sweaters from your aunt, and all the good intentions and warm, fuzzy feelings of the season!


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!

By |December 24th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments
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How to Avoid an SEO Disaster When Changing Your Website

Traffic After Redesign

Posted by Richard_Foulkes

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

The first thing any SEO thinks when a client says "I'm redesigning my website" is what impact will this have on all my work? In these events, often the client doesn't even consider telling their online marketing agency about the redesign until two days before launch.

This resource will cover how to do SEO checks on your test site/development site to ensure the structure, URLs, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and more all match up properly. It also serves as an SEO checklist touching on things that are often forgotten when a website goes through a complete overhaul.

Why consider SEO in a redesign?

Why is it important to consider your SEO during a website's revamp? In short, you have a lot to lose.

Let's say your site's doing great. Rankings are strong, organic traffic is flowing and revenue is growing. Do you really want to undo all that hard work? I'm guessing not.

This article from SEJ shows how a website redesign ended in disaster for one client:

However, by thinking strategically, you can take the opportunity to improve a site's performance after a redesign. That's what this client did: Organic Performance

As you can see, a steady increase in traffic followed (from the red circle) even during the re-indexing phase. If you do a redesign right, you won't lose any traffic or rankings; in fact, you'll gain them.

Below I outline some steps that can help you understand the test site being built and your current site from an SEO viewpoint. This is vital when changing your website around, and I will cover how to make sure the web development agency keeps the important SEO work that's gone into your website.

Step 1 – Consider the SEO

The first thing you must do is think about SEO. Too often clients don't stop to consider the SEO impact of changing their website. They chuck away valuable content from historical pages or decide it would be a good idea to completely change every single URL without redirecting the old ones.

This only happens because they misunderstand how Google et al. read a website and how URLs hold credibility. It's no fault of their own, but it happens.

Step 2 – Crawl the existing site

Why do I need to crawl my site?

If you don't know what your site's structure looks like now, you'll set yourself up for a massive fall. Grabbing the structure, meta data and URLs is vital to identifying exactly what is changing and why.

How to do it

Your SEO crawl will give you a roadmap of how your entire site is currently set out. The best way to grab this data is to use a tool like Screaming Frog. Once you have the current site's meta data and structure, you will know how to match the new site up.

Step 3 – Audit the old site

Next, you need to audit the site. Free tools like Woorank will do the job, but I strongly advise you to get your hands dirty and manually do the work yourself. There's nothing like getting into the nitty gritty of your site to find any problem areas.

Why audit the site?

You need to know what search engines like and don't like about your site. This can help you spot any problems areas, in addition to enabling you to see which areas must be retained.

What am I looking for?

Here are some of things we check at Liberty. Sometimes it's worth checking more, but these are top-level checks:

Using your Screaming Frog data, I advise checking the following:

  • Missing page titles
  • Duplicate page titles
  • Page titles over 512 pixels
  • Page titles below 200 pixels
  • Missing H1 tags
  • Duplicate H1 tags
  • Multiple H1 tags
  • Missing meta descriptions
  • Duplicate meta descriptions
  • Meta descriptions over 923 pixels
  • Canonical tags
  • Canonicalisation
  • Broken internal/external links
  • Image alt text

You should also manually check for:

  • XML sitemap
  • Robots.txt
  • Duplicate content (do exact match search "insert content" or use Copyscape)
  • Pages indexed by Google (do a site: command in Google)
  • Site speed and performance (here's a tool to check)
  • URL structure
  • Pages indexed by Google using a site: command in Google
  • Site speed and performance using Google's PageSpeed Tools

This data gives you a good understanding of what the website's doing well and areas for improvement.

Step 4 – Noindex your test site

Why do we need to noindex?

This stage is simple; yet it's the point where many redesigns go awry.

If you're working on your test site, the last thing you want is for Google et al. to index it. If you've added great new content, it will get indexed. Then when you launch the new site, the new content will have no value because it will be duplicate.

How to noindex your test site

A site can be noindexed in two ways by your developers.

1 – Tick the noindex box in your site's CMS. If you have WordPress, for example, you simply check the box that reads: "Discourage search engines from indexing this site."

Blocking Search Engines in Wordpress

This adds the following code in the of every page:

No Index Meta Data

2 – Your second option is to block the site in the Robots.txt file. This is a little trickier; hence, why most CMS have a box-ticking option.

If your CMS doesn't allow for this, you can put the following in your Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

No CMS? You can manually insert the code if you have access to the header file by implementing the noindex, follow code as above.

Step 5 – Crawl the test site

Why should I crawl the test site?

You also need to understand how your test site is structured. Using a site crawler, crawl the test site again to see how it looks in comparison to your current site.

How to do it

  1. Open the first crawl of your current site and make a copy. Click "Save+As" and name the file "Current Site Crawl for Editing". This is your editable copy.
  2. Crawl the test site. Export the test site crawl and save it as "Test Site Crawl". Make a copy and name it "Test Site Crawl for Editing"—from now on we're going to use this.
  3. Take the newly created old site crawl (Current Site Crawl for Editing from Step 1) and do a find and replace on all the URLs in Excel. Replace your domain name: "example.com" with your test server's domain: "test.example.com".
  4. Select all the URLs and copy them into a txt file (use something like notepad ++ or similar). Save this as the "Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog". At this point, you should have the following documents:
    • Current Site Crawl (xls)
    • Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
    • Test Site Crawl (xls)
    • Test Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
    • Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
  5. In Screaming Frog, locate the Mode in the menu bar and select List. The system will change slightly, and you'll be able to upload a .txt file to the crawler.
  6. Locate your txt file (Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog) of all the URLs you changed and pop that into Screaming Frog. Hit Start.
  7. If you followed this correctly, you'll end up with all the URLs being crawled. If it didn't, go back and make sure you didn't miss anything. You'll need to allow the crawler to crawl blocked/noindexed URLs. Simply click Configuration and Spider. Then you'll find a tick box that says Ignore robots.txt. You may need to tick this. On the same part in the tab called Advanced, you'll see Respect Noindex; you may need to un-tick this, too. It will look something like this:

screaming-frog-tab.png

Download all of the HTML and save it as an Excel file. Name it "Final Crawled Test Site". This will be the test crawl you'll check through later. Also, hold onto the very first crawl we did of the test site (Test Site Crawl).

At the end, you'll have these docs:

  • Current Site Crawl (xls)
  • Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
  • Test Site Crawl (xls)
  • Test Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
  • Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
  • Final Crawled Test Site (xls)

Okay, you made it. Now you have the data in Excel format, and you can see what works on the test site, and what doesn't. This allows you to understand what's missing from the test site that is on the current site.

Step 6 – Analyse Your Data

What we're looking for

Now that we've done all the crawls, we need to open up the XLS spreadsheet called "Final Crawled Test Site" from Screaming Frog. You should see a lot of data.

First, delete the row across the top named "Internal HTML". Then do the same for number "2," if this is a blank row. You should have these headings:

  • Address
  • Content
  • Status code
  • Status
  • Title 1
  • Title 1 length
  • Title 1 pixel width
  • Meta description 1
  • Meta description 1 length
  • Meta description 1 pixel width
  • Meta keyword 1
  • Meta keywords 1 length
  • H1-1
  • H1-1 length
  • H2-1
  • H2-1 length
  • Meta robots 1
  • Meta refresh 1
  • Canonical link element 1
  • Size
  • Word count
  • Level
  • Inlinks
  • Outlinks
  • External outlinks
  • Hash

Some of these have the number "1" next to them, signifying that there is only one. If some of yours have number 2 next to them, then you have several of these. The elements you shouldn't have a number "2" on are as follows:

  • Title
  • Meta description
  • Meta keywords
  • Canonical tag
  • H1 (I'll leave that open to debate)

With all this, we'll begin identifying what changes need to be made.

Go to the Status Code header, click the filter icon and select 200 code. This shows all the URLs that are working. You might see "Connection Timed Out" on some of these. This could be because Screaming Frog timed out. Manually check these. If they work, just update the spreadsheet; if they don't work, then you've identified a problem. Let the developer know these are timing out. They should be able to identify a fix.

How to match up the data

I've told you how to test the data, but not what to do with all those crawls. The purpose of crawling your current and test sites in this way is to identify meta data, structure and errors the test site currently has. First, apply a filter to the columns:

Excel Filter

Locate the Level heading, right click and sort from smallest to largest. Now segment all the data. I start with Page Titles (Title 1). Take the first 7 columns on the spreadsheet and highlight them all. Copy and paste these onto another sheet within the same Excel spreadsheet called "Page Titles". Do the same for "Meta Description", but this time pick the first 4 columns, then 8-10. Repeat this for each section to end up with the different sheets as follows:

  • Page Title Sheet
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status code
    • Status
    • Title 1
    • Title 1 length
    • Title 1 pixel width
  • Meta Description Sheet
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status code
    • Status
    • Meta description 1
    • Meta description 1 length
    • Meta description 1 pixel width
  • Meta Keywords Sheet
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status code
    • Status
    • Meta keyword 1
    • Meta keywords 1 length
  • H1 Sheet
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status ode
    • Status
    • H1-1
    • H1-1 length
  • H2 Sheet
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status code
    • Status
    • H2-1
    • H2-1 length
  • Canonicals, Word Count, Level, In-links and Out-links
    • Address
    • Content
    • Status code
    • Status
    • Canonical link element 1
    • Word count
    • Level
    • In-links
    • Out-links

This number of sheets may look like overkill, but in my experience working with smaller amounts of data is much easier than trying to work on one large, data heavy spreadsheet.

Here's the best bit

Remember all the crawls we did before? Well, we'll need to go and open Current Site Crawl for Editing. Filter the Level first so it shows "smallest to largest", then locate the following columns on this spreadsheet:

  • Title 1
  • Title 1 length
  • Title 1 pixel width

Highlight all the data in these three columns and copy them into your test site spreadsheet onto the Page Titles Sheet in the empty columns. Place those three columns apart from Title 1 Pixel Width.

Now that you have the test site's Page Titles next to the current site's Page Titles, you can highlight the duplicates. Highlight both Title 1 columns and go to Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate Values. This will highlight everything that matches.

I have no shortcut for this. You'll need to manually move things around and get them in the right place. I go about this by looking at the Page Title 1 closest to the left, (the one from the test site) then copy the text. Use the Find and Replace box (ctrl+F) to search the text. Hit "next" and go to the next match, where you'll grab the three relevant columns and stick them next to the text you copied. Then repeat.

Sometimes nothing will match. When this happens, try doing this:

  • Search a few words.
  • Remove the brand at the end or beginning.
  • Check if there is a | or - in place.
  • Check for apostrophes.
  • Check for misspellings.

These are a few things that may cause issues with matches, so be sure to check yours with vigilance.

Rinse and repeat

After you've done this process once, you'll need to rinse and repeat for the other sheets to match up all your Meta Descriptions, Canonical Tags, Word Counts, etc. It's important to remember that the point of checking these areas is to ensure that any changes are good changes.

Once you've nailed all 200 codes, you'll want to look at the 404s.

Go to the Status Code header and select 404 on the filter icon again to find URLs that aren't working. This is assuming you have 404s.

This will give you a list of all the URLs that didn't work. In theory, it should give you everything else that needs to be checked. You should only have 200 status codes and 400 status codes, but sometimes you will have 500s or 300s that need further investigation.

404 time

If the URL is a 404, it means that the page doesn't exist. So we'll need to do one of two things:

  1. Create this URL on the test server.
  2. Redirect the old URL to the test server's new URL.

Here's an example of a 404:

Lego's 404 Page

Look at the test server's URL. If you think it needs to redirect, highlight it in red. If you have to create a new URL, fill its cell with the relevant meta data and highlight it green. Don't forget what each colour means.

You'll also need to highlight the corresponding URL that will redirect to the new version on the Current Site Crawl for Editing.

What do to with live URLs that aren't on your current site?

These URLs are most likely new pages. Like with any page on your website, it has to be optimised correctly. There are tons of guides to help you here (this visual guide is my favourite).

Now what?

I'm glad you asked. Now you have a fully comprehensive spreadsheet of everything needed to minimise the damage of moving a site. You need to work closely with the developers to get the changes you've recommended implemented. With the spreadsheets laid out in this way, you can simplify the data and give the developers the bits they need, making their lives easier.

Don't forget, when you redirect pages to a new site, you'll lose around 10%-30% of your link equity. But you're giving search engines the best opportunity to bring over your old site's strong reputation.

From this point onwards, I'll detail things that can go wrong, common problems, and important elements to check along the way to monitor the changes.

Now you've given the new URL structure and changes to your developers, you need to check they've got it right. You've been involved in several meetings discussing the strategy to proactively make sure you don't upset the rhythm and have a positive impact on the changes. But, unfortunately, it doesn't stop there.

You've more than likely been handing over changes periodically and testing as you go. Now, it's a good opportunity to test everything again.

Crawl the test site again—being vigilant in cross-referencing all the relevant meta data and ensuring that the URLs match up. If they are even slightly off, then change them. One way you can check is to use "find and replace" in Excel. This time, swap the test.example.com with example.com, then crawl the URLs with Screaming Frog.

From now forward, make it a habit to check these additional elements.

Step 7 – All the additional checks

Rank check

Why do you need to rank check?

A rank check measures how the site performs for a host of keywords in search engines. You'll use this data as a comparison for the newly launched site. If things change, you can react and identify the problems when you check the results.

What to look out for:

Big movements. If a keyword jumps from page 1 to page 20, you may have a problem. Look out for any big or unusual movements by checking these things:

  • Did the URL change?
  • Did you change the meta data?
  • Has the page lost all its content?
  • Is there a redirect in place?
  • Does it have a noindex tag in place?

Content

Don't delete anything you don't have to delete. You might think your old blog posts aren't needed, but they are all adding to the credibility of your site. Without these blogs, you'll lose a chunk of value.

Similarly, now's not the time to change your landing page content if you're currently enjoying decent rankings.

Analytics code

This is pretty self-explanatory—make sure you place your analytics code back in the section of the site. It is important to check the ecommerce tracking, goals and event tracking if you currently have those in place.

Unblock the site

It's time to check the new site to see if it's allowing search engines to index it. Simply follow the reverse instructions of blocking the site. Whichever method you used to block it, do the reverse to unblock. Failure to do this could create big problems when you launch the new site.

Summary checklist

Here's the checklist I mentioned earlier. If you skipped to this, then use it as a guide to help you do a redesign with SEO in mind. With this in your arsenal, you never need to fear a website redesign again.

tick-box.pngThink about SEO from the start

tick-box.pngCrawl the current site

tick-box.pngAudit your existing site

tick-box.pngStop the test site from being indexed

tick-box.pngCrawl the test site

tick-box.pngFind and replace URLs

tick-box.pngCrawl those swapped URLs

tick-box.pngCheck test site meta data on live URLs

tick-box.pngCheck 404s on test site

tick-box.pngMap out 301s

tick-box.pngOptimise all new pages

tick-box.pngCheck implementation

tick-box.pngDo additional checks

tick-box.pngLaunch!

Common problems to look out for

Each scenario will differ between websites. It's important to understand how this foundation approach helps segment and break down important meta data so you don't lose SEO value during a redesign.

As with any project, there are common problems SEOs, businesses and developers all come up against:

  • Communication—This is the big one, which is why it's first on the list. We all know how important communication is, and lack of communication is at the center of most problems associated with web redesigns. Right at the start, have your SEO in the initial strategy meeting with the web developers or anyone else who has an obvious connection with the website. From there, keep the lines of communication open.
  • Missing meta data—Crawls can be fickle endeavors. You cannot afford to launch the new site with missing information. If you force search engines to guess what they should be putting there, the ensuing results will not be to your liking.
  • Missing Content—All too often, content isn't given the credit it deserves. Take the time to get the right content in the right places on the new site.
  • Failure to implement redirects—This is a very important step. After you've laid out the redirects, it's vital they're put in place and work as planned.

Additional resources

Once you've checked these elements, you are in a strong position to launch. It's still important to keep a close eye on the performance of the new site. Sometimes a single line of code can upset the rhythm.

Here are some additional resources to reinforce what we've covered here:

Search Engine Journal – Website Redesign Disaster
Search Engine Watch – Website Redesign: Re-launching Without Losing Sleep
Moz – Site Redesign - Checklist for Online Marketing

One last thing…

As with any changes to your website, it is important to monitor the situation. Use whatever tools you have available to keep a close eye on the following:

  • Rankings
  • Organic traffic
  • Indexed pages
  • Webmaster Tool errors

These things will help spot any problems. If you notice your rankings plummet, you can quickly investigate and make any needed changes.

If Webmaster Tools reports errors when Google tries to crawl the site, then you know to be proactive and explore the problem.

Once you are confident there are no issues, loosen up a bit. You don't need to keep such a close eye on these things. You can work on promoting the site and carrying on with your growth and maintenance SEO work.

Give me some feedback

How do you approach a site move?

Do you have any cast-iron techniques you recommend to maintain strong rankings during a move? I'd love to hear from you.


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By |December 22nd, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments
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International SEO Study: How Searchers Perceive Country Code Top-Level Domains

.org cctld survey

Posted by 5le

The decision to focus your site on an international audience is a big step and one fraught with complexities. There are, of course, issues to deal with around language and user experience, but in addition there are some big technical choices to make including what domains to use.

Any authoritative international SEO guide will elaborate on the differences between the options of subdirectory, subdomain, and country-code top level domain (CCTLD). One of the most common suggestions is for a site to opt to use a ccTLD (e.g. domain.co.uk) as the domain extension. The reasoning behind this is the theory that the ccTLD extension will "hint" to search engines and users exactly who your target audience should be versus the other, less explicit options. For example, a search engine and human user would know, even without clicking into a site, that a site that ends with .co.uk is targeting a user looking for UK content.

We have solid data from Google that a ccTLD does indicate country targeting; however, when it comes to users there is only an assumption that users even notice and make choices based on the ccTLD. However, this is a fairly broad assumption that doesn't address whether a ccTLD is more important than a brand name in the domain or the quality of a website's content. To test this theory, we ran a survey to discover what users really thought.

User knowledge of TLDs

Even before trying to understand how users related to ccTLDs it is essential to validate the assumption that users even know that general TLDs exist. To establish this fact, we asked respondents to pick which TLD might be the one in use by a non-profit. Close to 100% of respondents correctly identified a TLD ending with .org as the one most likely to be used by a non-profit. Interestingly, only 4% of people in the US stated that they were unsure of the correct TLD compared to 13% of Australians. Predictably, nearly all marketers (98%) chose the .org answer.

Another popular TLD is the .edu in use by educational assumptions, and we wanted to understand if users thought that content coming from a .edu domain might be more trustworthy. We asked users if they received an unsolicited email about water quality in their town whether they would place more trust in a sender's email address that ended with .edu or .com. 89% of respondents in the US chose the .edu as more trustworthy, while only 79% said the same in Australia. Quite interestingly, the marketer responses (from the survey posted on Inbound.org were exactly the same as the Australians with 79% declaring the .edu to be more trustworthy.

.org cctld survey australia

If users can identify a .org as the correct TLD for a non-profit, and a .edu as a TLD that might be more trustworthy, it is likely that users are familiar with the existence of TLDs and how they might be used. The next question to answer is if users are aware of the connection between TLDs and locations.

Country relationship awareness

Next, we asked respondents to identify the location of a local business using a .ca TLD extension. The majority of respondents across all three surveys correctly chose Canada; and nearly all marketers (92%) got this correct. Oddly, more Australians (67%) correctly identified Canada than Americans (62%). We would have thought Americans should have been more familiar with the TLD of a neighboring country. Additionally, more Americans (23%) fell for the trick answer of California than Australians (15%). Regardless, we were able to conclude that most Internet users are aware of TLDs and that they are tied to a specific country.

canada cctld survey

To really gauge how much users know about TLDs and countries, we asked users to pick the right domain extension for a website in another country. In the US survey, we asked users to pick the correct TLD for an Australian company, and in the Australian survey we used a British company. In each of the questions we gave one correct answer possibility, one almost correct, and two entire wrong choices.For example, we gave .co.uk and .uk as answer choices to Australians.

In both the US and Australia, the majority of respondents chose the correct TLD, although Americans seem to have been confused by whether Australia's TLD was .AU (35%) or .com.AU (24%).

There is a common practice of using country-code domain extensions as a vanity URL for content that is not geotargeted. For example, .ly is the domain extension for Libya, but it is frequently used on domains that have a word that ends with "ly." Additionally, .me is the domain extension for Montenegro; however, the TLD is used for many purposes other than Montenegro content.

We wanted to understand if users noticed this type of TLD usage or if they thought the content might still be related to another country. We asked respondents what might be on a website that ended with .TV which is the TLD for the island nation of Tuvalu and is also a popular TLD for TV show websites. 51% of US respondents thought it might be a TV show and 42% chose the "it could be anything" answer. In Australia, 43% thought the site would be a TV show, and 44% said "it could be anything".

tuvalu cctld survey

One of the answer options was that it could be a website in Tuvalu and interestingly twice as many Australian (9%) chose this option vs US respondents (4.5%). This question was one of the areas where marketers' answers were very different from those in the US and Australia. 77% of marketers chose the TV show option and only 19% said it could be anything.

Based on the these three results, it is apparent that users recognize TLDs, know that they are from other countries, and appear to make some judgments around the content based on the TLD.

Decision making using TLDs

Since users know that TLDs are an important part of a URL that is tied to a country of origin, it is important to understand how the TLD factors into their decision-making processes about whether or not they visit certain websites.

We asked users whether they thought medical content on a foreign TLD would be as reliable as similar content found on their local TLD. In the US, only 24% thought the content on the non-local TLD (.co.uk) was less reliable than content on a .com. In Australia, the results were nearly identical to what we saw in the US with only 28% answering that the non-local TLD (.co.uk) was less reliable than the content on a .com.au. Even 24% of marketers answered that the content was less reliable. The remaining respondents chose either that the content equally reliable or they just didn't know. Based on these results, the TLD (at least as long as it was a reputable one) does not seem to impact user trust.

UK cctld survey

Digging into the idea of trust and TLD a bit further, we asked the same reliability question about results on Google.com vs Google.de. In the US, 56% of respondents said that the results on Google.de are equally reliable to those on Google.com, and in Australia, 51% said the same thing when compared to Google.com.au. In the marketer survey, 66% of respondents said the results were equally reliable. The fact that the majority of respondents stated that results are equally reliable should mean that users are more focused on the brand portion of a domain rather than its country extension.

CcTLD's impact on ecommerce

Making the decision to use a ccTLD on a website can be costly, so it is important to justify this cost with an actual revenue benefit. Therefore the real test of TLD choice is how it impacts revenue. This type of answer is of course hard to gauge in a survey where customers are not actually buying products, but we did want to try to see if there might be a way to measure purchasing decisions.

To achieve this result, we compared two different online retailers and asked respondents to choose the establishment that they thought would have the most reliable express shipping. In the US survey, we compared Amazon.co.jp to BestBuy.com. In the Australian survey, we compared Bigw.com.au (a well known online retailer) to Target.com. (Interesting fact: there is a Target in Australia that is not affiliated with Target in the US and their website is target.com.au) The intent of the question was to see if users zeroed in on the recognizable brand name or the domain extension.

cctld trust survey

In the US, while 39% said that both websites would offer reliable shipping, 42% still said that Best Buy would be the better option. Australians may have been confused by the incorrect Target website, since 61% said both websites would have reliable shipping, but 34% chose Big W. Even marketers didn't seem oblivious to domain names with only 34% choosing the equally reliable option, and 49% choosing Best Buy. The data in this question is a bit inconclusive, but we can definitively say that while a large portion of users are blind to domain names, however, when selling online it would be best to use a familiar domain extension.

cctld trust survey australia

New TLDs

Late last year, ICANN (the Internet governing body) announced that they would be releasing dozens of new GTLDs, which opened up a new domain name land grab harkening back to the early days of the Internet. Many of these domain names can be quite expensive, and we wanted to discover whether they even mattered to users.

gtld survey

We asked users if, based solely on the domain name, they were more likely to trust an insurance quote from a website ending in .insurance. 62% of Americans, 53% of Australians, and 67% of marketers said they were unlikely to trust the quote based on the domain alone. Based on this result, if you're looking to invest in a new TLD simply to drive more conversions, you should probably do more research first.

A new gTLD is probably not a silver bullet.

Methodology

For this survey, I collaborated with Sam Mallikarjunan at HubSpot and we decided that the two assumptions we absolutely needed to validate where 1) whether users even notice ccTLDs and 2) if so do they really prefer the TLD of their country. While we received 101 responses from a version of the survey targeted at marketers on an Inbound.org discussion, we primarily used SurveyMonkey Audience, which allowed us to get answers from a statistically significant random selection of people in both the United States and Australia.

We created two nearly identical surveys with one targeted to a US-only audience and the other targeted to an Australian-only audience. A proper sample set is essential when conducting any survey that attempts to draw conclusions about people's general behavior and preferences. And in this case, the minimum number of respondents we needed in order to capture a representative example was 350 for the U.S. and 300 for Australia.

Additionally, in order for a sample to be valid, the respondents have to be chosen completely at random. SurveyMonkey Audience recruits its 4-million+ members from SurveyMonkey's 40 million annual unique visitors, and members are not paid for their participation. Instead, they are rewarded for taking surveys with charitable donations, made on their behalf by SurveyMonkey.

When tested against much larger research projects, Audience data has been exactly in line with larger sample sizes. For example, an Audience survey with just 400 respondents about a new Lay's potato chip flavor had the same results as a wider contest that had 3 million participants.

SurveyMonkey's survey research team was also able to use SurveyMonkey Audience to accurately predict election results in both 2012 and 2013. With a US sample size of 458 respondents and an Australian one of 312 all drawn at random, our ccTLD user preferences should reliably mirror the actual reality.

Summary

There will be many reasons that you may or may not want to use ccTLDs for your website, and a survey alone can never answer whether a ccTLD is the right strategy for any particular site. If you are thinking about making any big decisions about TLDs on your site, you should absolutely conduct some testing or surveying of your own before relying on just the recommendations of those who advise a TLD as the best strategy or the others that tell you it doesn't matter at all.

Launching a PPC campaign with a landing page on a ccTLD and measuring CTRs against a control is far cheaper than replicating your entire site on a new TLD.

Based on our survey results, here's what you should keep in mind when it comes to whether or not investing your time and money in a ccTLD is worth it:

  1. Users are absolutely aware of the TLDs and how they might relate to the contents of a website
  2. Users are aware of the connection between TLDs and countries
  3. Users do make decisions about websites based on the TLD; however there are no absolutes. Brand and content absolutely matter.

As to whether a ccTLD will work for you on your own site, give it a try and report back!


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By |December 22nd, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments
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