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How to Avoid the Unrealistic Expectations SEOs Often Create – Whiteboard Friday

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How to Avoid the Unrealistic Expectations SEOs Often Create – Whiteboard Friday

With all the changes we've seen in the field of SEO in recent years, we need to think differently about how we pitch our work to others. If we don't, we run the risk of creating unreal expectations and disappointing our clients and companies. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how to set expectations that will lead to excitement without the subsequent let-down.

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

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about the expectations that SEOs create and sometimes falsely create. It's not always our fault, but it is always our responsibility to fix the expectations that we create with our teams, our managers, our executives, and, if we're consultants, with our clients.

So here's the problem. This is a conversation that I see happen a lot of the time. Here's our friendly SEO guy over here, and he's telling his client, "Hey, if we can rank on page 1 for even 10% of all these terms that I've selected, we're going to drive a 500% increase in leads."

Here's the client over here, and she's thinking to herself, "That sounds amazing. 500% increase in leads, that's going to do wonderful things for my business. So let's invest in SEO. This is going to be great. We only have to get 10% of these keywords on there. I don't know anything about SEO, but that sounds totally possible." Six months later, after all sort of stymieing and challenging problems, here she is going, "You told me we'd increase our leads by 500%!"

There's the SEO saying, "Well yeah, but we have to get the rankings first, and we haven't done that yet. I said we'd get the leads once we got the rankings."

This kind of expectation and many others like it are a huge challenge. It is the case that modern SEO takes a lot of time to show results. Modern content marketing works the same way. You're not going to start producing blog posts or interactive content or big content pieces and 3 months from now go, "Well, we made 50 new content pieces, and thus our traffic has tripled."

That's not how it works. The problem here is that SEO just doesn't look like this anymore. It did, kind of, at one point. It really did.

We used to engage in an SEO contract. We'd make some changes to the existing pages, do some keyword targeting, some optimization, maybe fix things up that weren't SEO friendly on the site, get our link structure in order. Great. Do a little bit of link building to the right kinds of pages that we need on our site from the right kind of places. We'd get those rankings. Now we can easily prove the value of the search traffic that's coming through by looking at the keyword referrals in our analytics report, because keyword traffic is showing.

This process has been broken over the last five, six, seven years. But expectations have not caught up to where we are today. Modern SEO nowadays is really like this. You engage in that SEO contract, and then the SEO's job is to be much more than an SEO, because there are so many factors that influence modern search rankings and modern search algorithms that really a great SEO, in order to have impact, has to go, "All right, now we're going to start the audit."

The audit isn't going to look at which pages do you have on the site and what keywords do you want to match up and which ones do we need to fix, or just link structure or even things like schema. Well, let's look at the content and the user experience and the branding and the PR, and we'll check out your accessibility and speed and keyword targeting. We'll do some competitive analysis, etc. Dozens of things that we're going to potentially look at because all of them can impact SEO.

Yikes! Then, we're not done. We're going to determine which investments that we could possibly make into all of these things, almost all of which probably need some form of fixing. Some are more broken than others. Some we have an actual team that could go and fix them. Some of those teams have bandwidth and don't. Some of those projects have executives who will approve them or not. We're going to figure out which ones are possible, which ones are most likely to be done and actually drive ROI. Then we're going to work across teams and executives and people to get all those different things done, because one human being can't handle all of them unless we're talking about a very, very tiny site.

Then we're going to need to bolster a wide range of offsite signals, all of the things that we've talked about historically on Whiteboard Friday, everything from actual links to things around engagement to social media signals that correlate with those to PR and branding and voice and coverage.

Now, after months of waiting, if we've improved the right things, we'll start to see creeping up our rankings, and we'll be able to measure that from the traffic that pages receive. But we won't be able to say, "Well, specifically this page now ranks higher for this keyword, and that keyword now sends us this amount of traffic," because keyword not provided is taking away that data, making it very, very hard to see the value of visitors directly from search. That's very frustrating

This is the new SEO process. You might be asking yourself, "Given these immense challenges, who in the world is even going to invest in SEO anymore?" The answer is, well, people who for the last decade have made a fortune or made a living on SEO, people who are aware of the power that SEO can drive, people who are aware of the fact that search continues to grow massively, that the channel is still hugely valuable, that it drives direct revenue and value in far greater quantity than social media by itself or content marketing by itself without SEO as a channel. The people who are going to invest successfully, though, are those whose expectations are properly set.

Everybody else is going to get somewhere in here, and they're going to give up. They're going to fire their SEO. You know what one of the things that really nags at me is? Ruth Burr mentioned this on Twitter the other day. Ruth said, "When your plumber fails to fix your pipes, you don't assume that plumbing is a dead industry that no one should ever invest in. But when your SEO fails to get you rankings or traffic that you can measure, you assume all SEO is dead and all SEO is bad."

That sucks. That's a hard reality to live in, but it's the one that we do live in.

I do have a solution though, and the solution isn't just showing how this process works versus how old-school SEO works. It's to craft a timeline, an expectation timeline.

When you're signing a contract or when you're pitching a project, or when you're talking about, "Hey, this is what were going to do for SEO," try showing a timeline of the expectations. Instead of saying, "If we can rank on page one," say, "If we can complete our audit and fix the things we determine that need to be fixed and prioritize those fixes in the order we think they are, then we can make the right kinds of content investments, and then we can get the amplification and offsite signals that we need starting to appear and grow our engagement. Then we can expect great SEO results." Each one of these is contingent on the last one.

So six months later, your boss, your manger, or your client is going to say, "Hey, how did those content investments go?" You can say, "Well look, here's the content we've created, and this is how it's performing, and this is what we're going to do to change those performances." The expectation won't be, "Hey, you promised me great SEO." The promise was we're going to make these fixes, which we did, and we're going to complete that audit, which we did. Now we're working on these content investments, and here's how that's going. Then we're going to work on this, and then we're going to work on that.

This is a great way to show expectations and to create the right kind of mindset in people who are going to be investing in SEO. It's also a great way not to get yourself into hot water when you don't get that 500% increase 3 months or 6 months after you said we're going to start the SEO process.

All right everyone, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Look forward to chatting it up and having a discussion about modern SEO and old-school SEO and expectations that clients and managers have got.

We will see you again, next week, for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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By |December 12th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments

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HTTP/2: A Fast, Secure Bedrock for the Future of SEO

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HTTP/2: A Fast, Secure Bedrock for the Future of SEO

Posted by Zoompf

In prior articles, we've written extensively about website performance and securing your website, both factors Google has publicly announced as search ranking factors. These articles provide extensive tips using existing tools and technologies to improve your site performance and security (tips we highly recommend you follow). But did you know Google also developed and is championing a new web transport protocol called SPDY that addresses many of the inherent performance and security flaws in the web today?

In this article I will dive into more detail on how this new protocol works, why it is important to you, and how you can get started using it today.

From experiment to standard

Google created the SPDY protocol as a multi-year experiment to find a faster way for browser and servers to communicate. The results have been so positive that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is using SPDY as the basis for HTTP/2, a replacement to the current network protocol that powers all Internet web traffic today. While technically HTTP/2 is still an evolving specification, many web browsers, web servers, networking devices, and websites already support both SPDY and HTTP/2 in its current form.

While there are some subtle differences between SPDY and HTTP/2, for the purposes of this article it's safe to use those terms interchangeably. As HTTP/2 rises to prominence in the popular vocabulary, the SPDY vernacular will fall out of use in favor of HTTP/2. For this reason, I will simply refer to SPDY as HTTP/2 for the remainder of this article.

What problem is HTTP/2 trying to solve?

To understand why Google and the IETF are creating a new version of HTTP, we need to understand the fundamental performance limitations we have today. It helps to consider this analogy:

Imagine if all the roads in the modern world were built back during the age of horse drawn carriages: narrow, bumpy and with low speed limits (still true in some cities...). Sure it took a while to get anywhere, but the delay was mostly due to the speed of your horse. Flash forward to today: same bumpy roads, but now everyone is driving a car. Now the horse is not the bottleneck, but instead all those cars piling up on the same log jammed road!

Believe it or not, most website traffic today is not far from this analogy. The original HTTP protocol dates back nearly 25 years. The most recent update is HTTP/1.1 which was standardized back in 1999. That is a lifetime in Internet time!

Like those narrow, bumpy roads of yore, the web back then was a very different place: smaller web pages, slower Internet connections, and limited server hardware. In a sense, the "horse" was the bottleneck. HTTP/1.1 was very much a product of those times.

For example, when web browser loads a web page using HTTP/1.1 it can requests resource (like an image, JavaScript file, etc) one at a time, per connection to the server. It looks like this:

You'll notice the browser is spending a long time waiting on each request. While HTTP/1.1 won't let us make multiple requests at the same time over the same connection, browsers can try and speed things up by making two connections to the same server, as shown in the diagram below:

Using two connections is a little better, but the browser still spends a lot of time waiting to get a download. And we can only download two resources at a time. We could try and making more connections to download more resource in parallel. Modern browsers try to do this and can make between 2-6 connections per server. Unfortunately this is still an poor approach, because each connection itself is used so inefficiently. Since the average web page has over 100 resources, the delay in making all those individual requests one at a time over just a few connections added up and your page loads slowly.

You can actually see this inefficiency by looking at a waterfall chart. We discussed waterfalls in a previous Moz post on optimizing Time To First Byte, and we also have a detailed guide on how to read waterfall charts. Most waterfall charts will show long green sections which represents the time the browser is waiting to download a resource. All that time wasted on waiting instead of downloading is a major reason why websites load slowly.

This inefficient waiting on resources is why optimizations like combining JavaScript or CSS files can help your site load faster. But optimizations like this are just stopgap measures. While you can (and should) continue to optimize our pages to make fewer and smaller requests, we're not going to truly evolve to the next level of performance until we "fix the roads" and improve the fundamental way in which the web communicates. Specifically, we need to find a better way to utilize those network connections.

This is where HTTP/2 comes in.

The solution: HTTP/2

At its core, HTTP/2 is about using the underlying network connections more efficiently. HTTP/2 changes how requests and responses travel on the wire, a key limitation in the prior versions of HTTP.

HTTP/2 works by making a single connection to the server, and then "multiplexing" multiple requests over that connection to receive multiple responses at the same time. It looks like this:

The browser is using a single connection, but it no longer requests items one at a time. Here we see the browser receives the response headers for file #3 (maybe an image), and then it receives the response body for file #1. Next it starts getting the response body for file #3, before continuing on to file #2.

Think of multiplexing like going to the grocery store and calling your spouse just once to get the full list: "Okay we need milk, eggs, and butter. Check." Compare this to HTTP/1.1 which is like calling your spouse over and over: "Do we need milk? Okay, bye." "Hello me again—do we need eggs too? Yep, okay.", "Okay sorry one last question, do we need flour too? Nope, good."

All of that data is interwoven much more efficiently on that single connection. The server can supply the browser with data whenever it is ready. There is no more "make request; do nothing while waiting; download response" loop. While slightly more complex to understand, this approach has several advantages.

First of all, network connections don't sit idle while you are waiting on a single resource to finish downloading. For example, instead of waiting for one image to finish downloading before starting the next, your browser could actually finish downloading image 2 before image 1 even completes.

This also prevents what is known as head-of-line blocking: when a large/slow resource (say for example a 1 MB background image) blocks all other resources from downloading until complete. Under HTTP, browsers would only download one resource at a time per connection. HTTP/2's multiplexing approach allows browsers to download all those other 5 KB images in parallel over the same connection and display as they become available. This is a much better user experience.

Another great performance benefit of HTTP/2 is the "Server Push" feature: this allows the server to proactively push content to a visitor without them requesting it. So for example, when a browser visits your website, your server can actually "push" your logo image down to the browser before it even knows it needs it. By proactively pushing needed resources from the server, the browser can load pages much quicker then was previously possible.

Last, but not least: HTTP/2 works best with http. As we mentioned before, both performance and security are an ever increasing component of search ranking. While the HTTP/2 specification technically allows for use over non-http connections, Google's earlier SPDY protocol required http. For compatibility reasons, most web server software will only use HTTP/2 over an encrypted http connection. Getting on the http bandwagon not only protects the security of your users and is good for your search ranking, but also is the most effective way to adopt HTTP/2. For more information, see our prior post on enabling http.

The future, today!

So clearly HTTP/2 offers some great benefits for both speed and performance, but what does this mean to you right now? Well, you may be surprised to learn, HTTP/2 is already available, and can be supported by you without impacting your old users running on HTTP/1.1.

You can think of HTTP/2 just like any other protocol, or even a spoken language. For it to work, you just need an agreement from both the sender and receiver to speak the same language. In this case, the "sender" is the web browser and the receiver is your web server.

Browser support

Since it's unlikely you will create your own web browser like Microsoft, Google, Apple or Mozilla, you will not need to worry about the "sender" side of the equation. Support for HTTP/2 in the web browser is already in widespread use across the modern browsers of today, with adoption only increasing as older browser versions age out.

In fact, the latest versions of all the major desktop web browsers already support HTTP/2. Chrome and Firefox has supported it for several years. Apple added support to Safari in fall of 2014 with Safari 8. IE 11 supports HTTP/2, but only if you are running Windows 8.

Similarly, there is already widespread HTTP/2 adoption on smart phones as well. Android's older web browser, helpfully named Browser, has support HTTP/2 for several years. The current default browser for Android is Google's Chrome browser. Mobile versions of Chrome use the same networking code as Desktop Chrome. This means that both Chrome on Android devices, as well as Chrome on iOS devices, both support HTTP/2. Apple added support to the iOS version of Safari with iOS 8.

Your best best is to look at your website analytics and see what web browsers your visitors are using. Chances are, the majority of visitors have HTTP/2 capable web browsers (you can check against this list of desktop and mobile browsers that support HTTP/2). In that case, you can safely move on to the next step.

Web server support

While you have little control over which browsers your visitors use, you do have direct control over your web server. Put quite simply, to support HTTP/2 you need to select a web server that supports HTTP/2 and enable it. And of course, that server should also continue to support HTTP/1.1 as well because you will always have users using older browsers.

Continuing our "spoken language" analogy from before, you can think of HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 as different languages like English or French. As long as both parties can speak the same language, they can communicate. If your server only supports HTTP/1.1, then visitors can only speak to it with HTTP/1.1. But, if your server also supports HTTP/2, then your users browser will also choose to speak (the faster) HTTP/2. And finally if your server does speak HTTP/2, but your users browser does not, then they will continue to speak HTTP/1.1 just as before, so there's no danger in "breaking" your older users.

Right now, both the Apache and nginx web servers support HTTP/2. nginx supports HTTP/2 natively, and Apache supports it via the mod_spdy module. Since Apache and nginx serve traffic for 66% of all active web servers, chances are good that your website's server can support HTTP/2 right now.

If you aren't using nginx or Apache you still have other options. There are a number of smaller, more specialized projects that support HTTP/2. You can also place a reverse proxy that support HTTP/2 like HAProxy in front of your existing web server to get the same benefit as having a web server that directly supports HTTP/2.

If you run your site through a hosting provider, check with them to see which web server version they are running. Major sites like WordPress.com and CloudFlare all already offer HTTP/2 support. If your provider is not yet supporting HTTP/2, let them know this is important!

Adding HTTP/2 support

As I mentioned, HTTP/2 is simply another language your web server can use to communicate. Just as a person can learn a new language while remembering their mother tongue, your web server will continue to know how to communicate HTTP/1.1 after you add support for HTTP/2. You aren't in danger of shutting anyone out from speaking with your site. People using newer browsers will communicate using HTTP/2, and older browsers will continue using the older HTTP/1.1—nothing breaks. If you have the time, there really is no reason not to update your site to support HTTP/2.

Remember, HTTP/2 is just a better way to transmit web content than HTTP/1.1. Everything else about your website (the URLs, your HTML markup, your redirects or 404 pages, your page content, etc) all stays the same. This makes adding support for HTTP/2 fairly straight forward:

Make sure your website is using http. See our previous article on implementing http without sacrificing performance.
Verify your server software or infrastructure can support HTTP/2.
Update and configure your server software or infrastructure to support HTTP/2.

That's it. Your website is now using HTTP/2.

Well hopefully it is. The steps involved to update/configure your website will vary depending on your what software you use, so we cannot provide you with detailed guide. However, we did built a free tool, SPDYCheck, which you can use to verify you have properly configured your website to HTTP/2 (aka SPDY). SPDYCheck works like a checklist, verifying each step of how a browser negotiates with your server to communicate via HTTP/2. It can tell you where in the process things are not working, and it also provides helpful recommendations like enabling Strict Transport Security. With SPDYCheck, you can be sure that everything is functioning properly, and verify that you site supports HTTP/2.

Conclusion

We all know that faster sites help improve search engine rankings, but faster sites also offer better user experiences. Faster sites engage your users longer, and promote sharing further sharing and linking. HTTP/2 is an amazing leap forward that can help improve the performance and user experience of your website. However, HTTP/2 is not a silver bullet. Optimizations like losslessly optimizing your website's images can have a big effect on your site's performance and will still be needed. In short, while you should add HTTP/2 support to your website, make sure you are doing other optimizations and following performance best practices to ensure the best possible user experience. If you are looking for a place to start, or want to see how your site is doing, Zoompf's free performance report is a great way to understand what you can do to make your website faster.

By |December 11th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments

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Lessons from the Front Line of Front-End Content Development

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Lessons from the Front Line of Front-End Content Development

Posted by richardbaxterseo

As content marketing evolves, the list of media you could choose to communicate your message expands. So does the list of technologies at your disposal. But without a process, a project plan and a tried and tested approach, you might struggle to gain any traction at all.

In this post, based on my MozCon 2014 presentation, I'd like to share the high level approach we take while developing content for our clients, and the lessons we've learned from initial research to final delivery. Hopefully there are some takeaways for you to enhance your own approach or make your first project a little less difficult.

This stuff is hard to do

I hate to break it to you, but the first few times you attempt to develop something a little more innovative, you're going to get burned. Making things is pretty tough and there are lots of lessons to learn. Sometimes you'll think your work is going to be huge, and it flops. That sucks, move on, learn and maybe come back later to revisit your approach.

To structure and execute a genuinely innovative, successful content marketing campaign, you need to understand what's possible, especially within the context of your available skills, process, budget, available time and scope.

You'll have a few failures along the journey, but when something goes viral, when people respond positively to your work – that, friends, feels amazing.

What this post is designed to address

In the early days of SEO, we built links. Email outreach, guest posting, eventually, infographics. It was easy, for a time. Then, Penguin came and changed everything.

Our industry learned that we should be finding creative and inventive ways to solve our customers' problems, inspire, guide, help – whatever the solution, an outcome had to be justified. Yet still, a classic habit of the SEO remained: the need to decide in what form the content should be executed before deciding on the message to tell.

I think we've evolved from "let's do an infographic on something!" to "I've got a concept that people will love – should this be long form, an interactive, a data visualization, an infographic, a video, or something else?"

This post is designed to outline the foundations on an approach you can use to enhance your approach to content development. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this:

The first rule of almost anything: be prepared or prepare to fail. This rule definitely applies to content development!

Understand the technical environment you're hosting your content in

Never make assumptions about the technical environment your content will be hosted in. We've learned to ask more about technical setup of a client's website. You see, big enterprise class sites usually have load balancing, pre-rendering, and very custom JavaScript that could introduce technical surprises much too late in the process. Better to be aware of what's in store than hope your work will be compatible with its eventual home.

Before you get started on any development or design, make sure you've built an awareness of your client's development and production environments. Find out more about their CMS, code base, and ask what they can and cannot host.

Knowing more about the client's development schedule, for example how quickly a project can be uploaded, will help you plan lead times into your project documentation.

We've found that discussing early stage ideas with your client's development team will help them visualise the level of task required to get something live. Involving them at this early stage means you're informed on any potential risk in technology choice that will harm your project integrity later down the line.

Initial stakeholder outreach and ideation

Way back at MozCon 2013, I presented an idea called "really targeted outreach". The concept was simple: find influential people in your space, learn more about the people they influence, and build content that appeals to both.

We've been using a similar methodology for larger content development projects: using social data to inspire the creative process gathered from the Twitter Firehose and other freely available tools, reaching out to identified influencers and ask them to contribute or feedback on an idea. The trick is to execute your social research at a critical, early stage of the content development process. Essentially, you're collecting data to gain a sense of confidence in the appeal of your content.

We've made content with such a broad range of people involved, from astronauts to butlers working at well known, historic hotels. With a little of the right approach to outreach, it's amazing how helpful people can be. Supplemented by the confidence you've gained from your data, some positive results from your early stage outreach can really set a content project on the right course.

My tip: outreach and research several ideas and tell your clients which was most popular. If you can get them excited and behind the idea with the biggest response then you'll find it easier to get everyone on the same page throughout your project.

Asset collection and research

Now, the real work begins. As I've written elsewhere, I believe that the depth of your content, it's accuracy and integrity is an absolute must if it is to be taken seriously by those it's intended for.

Each project tends to be approached a little differently, although I tend to see these steps in almost every one: research, asset collection, storyboarding and conceptual illustration.

For asset collection and research, we use a tool called Mural.ly – a wonderful collaborative tool to help speed up the creative process. Members of the project team begin by collecting relevant information and assets (think: images, quotes, video snippets) and adding them to the project. As the collection evolves, we begin to arrange the data into something that might resemble a timeline:

After a while, the story begins to take shape. Depending on how complex the concept is, we'll either go ahead with some basic illustration (a "white board session") or we'll detail the storyboard in a written form. Here's the Word document that summarised the chronological order of the content we'd planned for our Messages in the Deep project:

And, if the brief is more complex, we'll create a more visual outline in a whiteboard session with our designers:

How do you decide on the level of brief needed to describe your project? Generally, the more complex the project, the more important a full array of briefing materials and project scoping will be. If, however, we're talking simpler, like "long form" article content, the chances are a written storyboard and a collection of assets should be enough.

Over time, we've learned how to roll out content that's partially template based, rather than having to re-invent the wheel each time. Dan's amazing Log File Analysis guide was reused when we decided to re-skin the Schema Guide, and as a result we've decided to give Kaitlin's Google Analytics Guide the same treatment.

Whichever process you choose, it helps to re-engage your original contributors, influencers and publishers for feedback. Remember to keep them involved at key stages – if for no other reason than to make sure you're meeting their expectations on content they'd be willing to share.

Going into development

Obviously we could talk all day about the development process. I think I'll save the detail for my next post, but suffice it to say we've learned some big things along the way.

Firstly, it's good to brief your developers well before the design and content is finalised. Particularly if there are features that might need some thought and experimental prototyping. I've found over time that a conversation with a developer leads to a better understanding of what's easily possible with existing libraries and code. If you don't involve the developers in the design process, you may find yourself committed to building something extremely custom, and your project timeline can become drastically underestimated.

It's also really important to make sure that your developers have had the opportunity to specify how they'd like the design work to be delivered; file format; layers and sizing for different break points are all really important to an efficient development schedule and make a huge difference to the agility of your work.

Our developers like to have a logical structure of layers and groups in a PSD. Layers and groups should all be named and it's a good idea to attach different UI states for interactive elements (buttons, links, tabs, etc.), too.

Grid layouts are much preferred although it doesn't matter if it's 1200px or 960px, or 12/16/24 columns. As long as the content has some structure, development is easier.

As our developers like to say: Because structure = patterns = abstraction = good things and in an ideal world they prefer to work with style tiles.

Launching

Big content takes more promotion to get that all important initial traction. Your outreach strategy has already been set, you've defined your influencers, and you have buy in from publishers. So, as soon as your work is ready, go ahead and tell your stakeholders it's live and get that flywheel turning!

My pro tip for a successful launch is be prepared to offer customised content for certain publishers. Simple touches, like The Washington Post's animated GIF idea was a real touch of genius – I think some people liked the GIF more than the actual interactive! This post on Mashable was made possible by our development of some of the interactive to be iFramed – publishers seem to love a different approach, so try to design that concept in right at the beginning of your plan. From there, stand back, measure, learn and never give up!

That's it for today's post. I hope you've found it informative, and I look forward to your comments below.

By |December 10th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments

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The #LocalUp Advanced 2015 Agenda Is Here

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The #LocalUp Advanced 2015 Agenda Is Here

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

You may heard that in partnership with Local U, we're putting on a local SEO conference called LocalUp Advanced on Saturday, February 7. We're super-thrilled to be able to dive more into the local SEO space and bring you top speakers in the field for a one-day knowledge explosion. We're expecting around 125-150 people at our Seattle headquarters, so this is your chance to really chat with speakers and attendees one-to-one with a huge return on investment.

Moz Pro or Local U Subscribers $699
General Admission $999

LocalUp Advanced 2015 Agenda

8:00-9:00am	Breakfast
9:00-9:05am	Welcome to LocalUp Advanced 2015! with David Mihm
9:05-9:30am	Pigeons, Packs, & Paid: Google Local 2015 with Dr. Pete Meyers In the past year, Google shook the local SEO world with the Pigeon update, rolled out an entirely new local pack, and has aggressively dabbled in local advertising. Dr. Pete covers the year in review, how it's impacted the local landscape, and what to expect in 2015. Dr. Pete Meyers is the Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He's spent the past two years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History.
9:30-9:55am	Local Battlegrounds - Tactics, Trenches, and Ghosts with Mike Blumenthal Join Professor Maps and take a ride in the Way Back Whacky Machine to look at Google's technologies, tactics, and play books used to create, shape, and dominate the local ecosystem in their image. Learn what's relevant to marketing today and how these changes are shaping Google's coming battles in the space. If you're in Local, then you know Mike Blumenthal, and here is your chance to learn from this pioneer in local SEO, whose years of industry research and documentation have earned him the fond and respectful nickname 'Professor Maps.' Mike's blog has been the go-to spot for local SEOs since the early days of Google Maps. It's safe to say that there are few people on the planet who know more about this area of marketing than Mike. He's also the co-founder of GetFiveStars, an innovative review and testimonial software. Additionally, Mike loves biking, x-country skiing, and home cooking.
9:55-10:10am	Q&A with Dr. Peter Meyers and Mike Blumenthal
10:10-10:45am	Going Local with Google with Jade Wang Learn about local search with Google. We'll chat about the potential of local search and discuss how business information gets on Google. If you've gone to the Google and Your Business Forum for help (and, of course, you have!), then you know how quickly an answer from Google staffer Jade Wang can clear up even the toughest problems. She has been helping business owners get their information listed on Google since joining the team in 2012.
10:45-11:05am	AM Break
11:05-11:25am	Getting Local Keyword Research and On-page Optimization Right with Mary Bowling Local keyword data is often difficult to find, analyze, and prioritize. Get tips, tools, and processes for zeroing in on the best terms to target when optimizing your website and directory listings, and learn how and why to structure your website around them. Mary Bowling's been specializing in SEO and local search since 2003. She works as a consultant at Optimized!, is a partner at a small agency called Ignitor Digital, is a partner in Local U, and is also a trainer and writer for Search Engine News. Mary spends her days interacting directly with local business owners and understands holistic local needs.
11:25-11:50am	Local Content + Scale + Creativity = Awesome with Mike Ramsey If you are wondering who is crushing it with local content and how you can scale such efforts, then tune in as Mike Ramsey walks through ideas, examples, and lessons he has learned along the way. Mike Ramsey is the president of Nifty Marketing with offices in Burley and Boise, Idaho. He is also a Partner at Local U and many other ventures. Mike has an awesome wife and three kids who put up with all his talk about search.
11:50am-12:15pm	Review Acquisition Strategies That Work with Darren Shaw Darren Shaw will walk you through multiple real-world examples of businesses that are killing it with review acquisition. He'll detail exactly how they manage to get so many more reviews than their competitors and how you can use their methods to improve your own local search visibility. Darren Shaw is the President and Founder of Whitespark, a company that builds software and provides services to help businesses with local search. He's widely regarded in the local SEO community as an innovator, one whose years of experience working with massive local data sets have given him uncommon insights into the inner workings of the world of citation-building and local search marketing. Darren has been working on the web for over 16 years and loves everything about local SEO.
12:15-12:30pm	Q&A with Mary Bowling, Mike Ramsey, and Darren Shaw
12:30-1:30pm	Lunch
1:30-1:55pm	The Down-Low on LoMo (Local Mobile) SEO with Cindy Krum Half of all local searches happen on mobile, and that stat is just growing! Map search results are great, but your mobile site has to be great too. Cindy Krum will review the best practices for making your local site look perfect to mobile users and crawlers alike. No mobile site? No problem as you'll also get tips for how to make the most of mobile searches without one. Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, a mobile marketing consultancy and host of the most cutting-edge online mobile marketing toolset available today. Cindy is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are, published by Que Publishing.
1:55-2:20pm	Thriving in the Mobile Ecosystem with Aaron Weiche A look into the opportunity of creating and growing the mobile experience between your customers and your brand: one strong enough to delight fingers, change minds, and win hearts. Aaron Weiche is a digital marketing geek focused on web design, mobile, and search marketing. Aaron is the COO of Spyder Trap in Minneapolis, Local U faculty member, founding board member of MnSearch, and a Local Search Ranking Factors Contributor since 2010.
2:20-2:45pm	Content, Conversations, and Conversions with Will Scott How local businesses, and the marketers who love them, can use social media to bring home the bacon. Helping small businesses succeed online since 1994, Will Scott has led teams responsible for thousands of websites, hundreds of thousands of pages in online directories, and millions of visits from search. Today, Will leads nearly 100 professionals at Search Influence putting results first and helping customers successfully market online.
2:45-3:10pm	Segmentation Domination with Ed Reese Learn how to gain powerful insight by creating creative custom segments in Google Analytics. This session shows several real-world examples in action and walks you through the brainstorming, implementation, and discovery process to utilize segmentation like never before. Ed Reese leads a talented analytics and usability team at his firm Sixth Man Marketing, is a co-founder of Local U, and an adjunct professor of digital marketing at Gonzaga University. In his free time, he optimizes his foosball and disc golf technique and spends time with his wife and two boys.
3:10-3:30pm	PM Break
3:30-4:00pm	Playing to Your Local Strengths with David Mihm Historically, local search has been one of the most level playing fields on the web with smaller, nimbler businesses having an advantage as larger enterprises struggled to adapt and keep up. Today, companies of both sizes can benefit from tactics that the other simply can't leverage. David will share some of the most valuable tactics that scale—and don't scale—in a presentation packed with actionable takeaways, no matter what size business you work with. David Mihm is one of the world's leading practitioners of local search engine marketing. He has created and promoted search-friendly websites for clients of all sizes since the early 2000s. David co-founded GetListed.org, which he sold to Moz in November 2012. Since then, he's served as our Director of Local Search Marketing, imparting his wisdom everywhere!
4:00-4:25pm	Don't Just Show Up, Stand Out with Dana DiTomaso Learn how to destroy your competitors with bringing personality to your marketing. Confront the challenges of making HIPPOs comfortable with unique voice, keep brand standards while injecting some fun, and stay in the forefront of your audience's mind. Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing BS into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years and with a focus on local SMBs, she's seen (almost) everything. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
4:25-4:40pm	Q&A with David Mihm and Dana DiTomaso
4:40-5:20pm	Exposing the Non-Obvious Elements of Local Businesses That Dominate on the Web with Rand Fishkin In some categories and geographies, a local small business wholly dominates the rankings and visibility across channels. What are the secrets to this success, and how can small businesses with remarkable products/services showcase their traits best online? In this presentation, Rand will dig deep into examples and highlight the recurring elements that help the best of the best stand out. Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz. Traveler, blogger, social media addict, feminist, and husband.

And if that doesn't quite tickle your fancy... Workshops!

We'll also be hosting workshops with our speakers, which are amazing opportunities for you to dig into your specific questions and issues. I know, sometimes I get a little shy to ask questions in front of a crowd or just want to socialize at the after party, so this a great opportunity to get direct feedback.

Time	Workshop Option A	Workshop Option B
1:30-1:55pm	Reporting Q&A with Ed Reese and Dana DiTomaso Need help with your reporting? Ed and Dana will make sure you're on the right track and tracking the right things.	Google My Business Q&A with Jade Wang Google My Business can be confusing, but Jade Wang is here to lend a hand. She'll look over your specific problems and help you troubleshoot.
1:55-2:20pm	How to Troubleshoot All Things Local with Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling No Local SEO problem can get by the combined powers of Mike and Mary. This dynamic duo will assist you in diving into your specific questions, problems, and concerns.	Google My Business Q&A with Jade Wang Google My Business can be confusing, but Jade Wang is here to lend a hand. She'll look over your specific problems and help you troubleshoot.
2:20-2:45pm	Citation Q&A with David Mihm and Darren Shaw Getting the right citations for your business can be a powerful boost. David and Darren will show you how to wield citations correctly and creatively for your business.	Google My Business Q&A with Jade Wang Google My Business can be confusing, but Jade Wang is here to lend a hand. She'll look over your specific problems and help you troubleshoot.
2:45-3:10pm	Mobile Q&A with Aaron Weiche and Cindy Krum Local and mobile go hand-in-hand, but mobile implementation, optimization, and perfection can be tricky. Aaron and Cindy will help guide you and your business.	Google My Business Q&A with Jade Wang Google My Business can be confusing, but Jade Wang is here to lend a hand. She'll look over your specific problems and help you troubleshoot.

See you in February, friends. And please, don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!

By |December 9th, 2014|MOZ|0 Comments

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The Un-Checkbox Approach to Content Marketing

MOZ

The Un-Checkbox Approach to Content Marketing

Posted by Isla_McKetta

You may have noticed a trend in the blog posts I've written for Moz lately:

Basically, I ask a lot of questions because I don't like or trust hard and fast rules. And while every last one of these posts offers you a little bit of knowledge to then take back to your marketing campaigns and apply in the way that works best for your team and your company, there's not a guaranteed formula for success or correct answer in the bunch.

If you're resorting to tried and true advice, you're missing opportunities to do something better than anyone's ever done it before. Instead, I want you to question everything anyone's ever told you about how to make marketing (especially content marketing) work. You might fail a little along the way, but even the failures will teach you something about what success looks like.

Winning by breaking the rules

Image by laffy4k.

So in honor of the holiday season, let's unwrap our presents early and look at some marketing campaigns that won by flouting some fundamental rules of marketing.

Appeal to a wide audience

Not everyone knows who Skeletor is. And few of those love him, but Honda threw caution to the wind and let him star in their latest commercial.

While they are hedging their bets with other commercials starring Jem, Strawberry Shortcake, Gumby, and Stretch Armstrong, none are designed for mass appeal. Instead, they're taking advantage of random affinities that can help consumers feel deeply connected to your brand. I know I can't stop talking about them.

Stay on message

In 2013, Oreo newsjacked the hell out of the lights going out at the Super Bowl with this now iconic tweet:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

You know what happened. 15,000 retweets later, Oreo had won the Internet and real-time marketing was born. Imagine what would have happened if they'd stuck to their super-sweet pregame message of game day recipes. For one, we wouldn't be talking about them here.

Focus on your competitive advantage

I have no idea if TD Bank has a local branch, what their rates are like, if their tellers are awesome, or if they have an app that will revolutionize the way I do online banking.

But after this commercial, I want desperately to do business with them because of the core values this video speaks to. They're asking us to connect with who they are, not what they do. And it works.

Meanwhile, this commercial for the MacBook Air also skips product info and instead focuses on how people use the product rather than what's amazing about it.

At the end, I have zero idea what the competitive advantages of a MacBook are. But I want one. And I want to put stickers on it.

Don't offend anyone

Remember the Joe Boxer/Kmart commercial from a few years ago?

How could any of us forget? Sure, some people were annoyed when this commercial came out, but the rest of us played it over and over for our co-workers, friends, and family. Daring to be different is daring to be remembered.

Don't be annoying

Speaking of memorable. While this Old Spice commercial is physically painful to listen to:

I can't stop myself. This one will stick with you and everyone else who watches it. They're stretching a little beyond those charming Isaiah Mustafa commercials and into Old Navy territory (please make it stop), but it just might work.

Name recognition is everything

In 2008, hipster author Tao Lin plastered New York City with stickers that read "Britney Spears" in bold black and white. Weird fan geek moment? Actually it was a guerilla marketing ploy for his book, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (which has nothing to do with Britney). The ploy may have made no sense, but publisher Dennis Johnson said soon his phone was ringing off the hook with people who somehow made the connection.

The lesson here is that shouting your name from the rooftops is not the only way to get people to remember your brand for years. You may not have heard of Tao Lin before reading this post, but the stunt was weird enough that it lives on in publishing (and now Internet marketing) legend even eight years later.

Your turn

But really, other people's presents are boring. Are you ready to bet on out-of-the-box thinking this holiday season (and beyond)? Here are some rules I want you to go break to see what the rewards might be.

Write right

If your brand voice skews toward concision and you're using the Hemingway App (like everyone else is), are you really standing out? If your paragraphs are short and scannable, is anyone really remembering what you had to say? And if you're writing to an eighth-grade reading level are all those simplified words just washing over your audience? There are a lot of rules for writing. They're all made to be broken.

Bigger (content) is better

Simon Penson already covered this fallacy quite well last week in his article about content flow. Just remember that if you're aiming for big bang followed by bigger bang and then even bigger, you could be wearing your readers (and your writers) out. Try out a smaller project. See how people react.

Use storytelling

Stories are awesome. But nothing can make you crave a bulleted list of value props like sitting at a huge gathering with people shouting stories at you (ahem, the Internet). Why not A/B test storytelling versus a more straightforward style and see what converts.

The best headlines follow this formula

I'm all for a good headline. I'll even resort to clickbait (if I think the reward for the reader is high enough). But what's interesting to watch at Moz is that we'll often choose the more academic headline over the flashier one. I'm not saying you should do the same (remember, the only rule here is that you should break all the rules), but consider your audience when writing that headline.

Narrow down your CTAs

Paralysis of choice blah blah blah. If you have only one action you want your site visitor to take, then of course you don't want to confuse them with multiple other things to click. But too often we "simplify" pages by removing options people might actually want. I'm not saying you should add all those "click here" buttons back to your site, but I am saying you should think before turning your homepage into a single "buy here" button.

Make your blog posts actionable/entertaining/educational

One of the rules at the Moz Blog is that our readers like actionable posts. I'm glad we know our audience that well. But we're also not going to sit back and decide that means a theoretical post won't do well because the numbers say actionable=popular.

In fact, this post isn't especially actionable (unless that action is "go back and think about what you're doing"). Is it going to help you? I hope so. Even if it isn't what you've come to expect from us.

Publish or perish

An editorial calendar is a terrible thing to let control your life. While publishing new content on a regular basis can be a very good idea, it's also a good way to get stuck in the flywheel, churning out another interview with a supplier because that's what you do on Tuesdays.

At Moz, we recently decided to let a day pass without publishing a new blog post (long story). As much as everyone on our content team believes in putting out fewer, better posts, it was still challenging to actually follow through with this decision.

But the resulting loss of traffic was negligible.

And while we aren't eager to repeat the experiment (authors, please turn things in on time), we learned that the world does not end when we don't put up a post. Our time on page and page values actually went up. Who knew?

Remember that blogs aren't Twitter and you won't be forgotten if you already have a reputation for good content. Publish when you have something worth publishing.

Create once, publish everywhere

Using one piece of content for multiple purposes seems like a good idea until you've got a LinkedIn feed full of podcasts no one has ever listened to and a Facebook wall covered in blog posts announcements that achieved no reach.

If your gut (and your data) tell you that your audiences on different channels expect different things, find a way to get them more of what they want, don't just feed them what they have. Piece out that infographic so it shows up well on Twitter and your tweeps can get that two seconds worth of information they're looking for. Or record a fantastically fun intro for your webinar and put the intro (not the webinar) on YouTube to see if you can tease people over to your site.

Get social

Social media can be an excellent way to get traffic to your posts. And sometimes it isn't. Copyblogger is just one of the big brands who looked deep into the traffic and engagement they were getting from Facebook before deciding to close their page.

You'll have to look at your numbers to see what the right decision is for you, but when it comes to social media, doing something simply because you've been doing it forever is almost as bad as jumping on every new platform that comes out before investigating it.

Packaging should be practical

While there is always a practical aspect to packaging, once you've seen the Nike Air sneakers packaged in a bubble of air or the labels on Smirnoff's Caipiroska that peeled off like the skins of the fruits the vodka was flavored with, it becomes obvious that an investment of time and creativity in packaging (as with everything you do) can have a much bigger impact than more of the same.

Cover the next How to Train Your Dragon in dragon scales, wrap that hi-tech travel bag in special edition maps of popular destinations, or print your anti-pesticide pamphlet on seed paper that can be used to start an organic garden. Better yet, let your design team loose to create something amazing and brand new that's exactly right for your audience.

Stick to your content strategy

While strategy is a very good thing (and you've likely invested significant money and/or resources into creating that strategy), how do you really know if it's working unless you push at the edges a bit?

Know that your audience likes reading about car parts? See if they respond to a post waxing nostalgic about Knight Rider. Or introduce your organic skincare clients to some of the politics behind GMOs. You might bore someone. You might offend someone. You might also find you've made a stronger connection with some of your core customers.

Go break some rules

So if it's been awhile since you asked "why are we doing this?" or tried something new, go shake it up already. Because unless you're making Nestle Toll House cookies, chances are your recipe can still use some refinement.

Go forth and open your presents early. Enjoy the rush of innovation rather than the boredom of imitation. Then come back and tell us how it worked out and what you learned.