All About Fraggles (Fragment + Handle) – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Suzzicks

What are “fraggles” in SEO and how do they relate to mobile-first indexing, entities, the Knowledge Graph, and your day-to-day work? In this glimpse into her 2019 MozCon talk, Cindy Krum explains everything you need to understand about fraggles in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Cindy Krum, and I’m the CEO of MobileMoxie, based in Denver, Colorado. We do mobile SEO and ASO consulting. I’m here in Seattle, speaking at MozCon, but also recording this Whiteboard Friday for you today, and we are talking about fraggles.

So fraggles are obviously a name that I’m borrowing from Jim Henson, who created “Fraggle Rock.” But it’s a combination of words. It’s a combination of fragment and handle. I talk about fraggles as a new way or a new element or thing that Google is indexing.

Fraggles and mobile-first indexing

Let’s start with the idea of mobile-first indexing, because you have to kind of understand that before you can go on to understand fraggles. So I believe mobile-first indexing is about a little bit more than what Google says. Google says that mobile-first indexing was just a change of the crawler.

They had a desktop crawler that was primarily crawling and indexing, and now they have a mobile crawler that’s doing the heavy lifting for crawling and indexing. While I think that’s true, I think there’s more going on behind the scenes that they’re not talking about, and we’ve seen a lot of evidence of this. So what I believe is that mobile-first indexing was also about indexing, hence the name.

Knowledge Graph and entities

So I think that Google has reorganized their index around entities or around specifically entities in the Knowledge Graph. So this is kind of my rough diagram of a very simplified Knowledge Graph. But Knowledge Graph is all about person, place, thing, or idea.

Nouns are entities. Knowledge Graph has nodes for all of the major person, place, thing, or idea entities out there. But it also indexes or it also organizes the relationships of this idea to this idea or this thing to this thing. What’s useful for that to Google is that these things, these concepts, these relationships stay true in all languages, and that’s how entities work, because entities happen before keywords.

This can be a hard concept for SEOs to wrap their brain around because we’re so used to dealing with keywords. But if you think about an entity as something that’s described by a keyword and can be language agnostic, that’s how Google thinks about entities, because entities in the Knowledge Graph are not written up per se or their the unique identifier isn’t a word, it’s a number and numbers are language agnostic.

But if we think about an entity like mother, mother is a concept that exists in all languages, but we have different words to describe it. But regardless of what language you’re speaking, mother is related to father, is related to daughter, is related to grandfather, all in the same ways, even if we’re speaking different languages. So if Google can use what they call the “topic layer”and entities as a way to filter in information and understand the world, then they can do it in languages where they’re strong and say, “We know that this is true absolutely 100% all of the time.”

Then they can apply that understanding to languages that they have a harder time indexing or understanding, they’re just not as strong or the algorithm isn’t built to understand things like complexities of language, like German where they make really long words or other languages where they have lots of short words to mean different things or to modify different words.

Languages all work differently. But if they can use their translation API and their natural language APIs to build out the Knowledge Graph in places where they’re strong, then they can use it with machine learning to also build it and do a better job of answering questions in places or languages where they’re weak. So when you understand that, then it’s easy to think about mobile-first indexing as a massive Knowledge Graph build-out.

We’ve seen this happening statistically. There are more Knowledge Graph results and more other things that seem to be related to Knowledge Graph results, like people also ask, people also search for, related searches. Those are all describing different elements or different nodes on the Knowledge Graph. So when you see those things in the search, I want you to think, hey, this is the Knowledge Graph showing me how this topic is related to other topics.

So when Google launched mobile-first indexing, I think this is the reason it took two and a half years is because they were reindexing the entire web and organizing it around the Knowledge Graph. If you think back to the AMA that John Mueller did right about the time that Knowledge Graph was launching, he answered a lot of questions that were about JavaScript and href lang.

When you put this in that context, it makes more sense. He wants the entity understanding, or he knows that the entity understanding is really important, so the href lang is also really important. So that’s enough of that. Now let’s talk about fraggles.

Fraggles = fragment + handle

So fraggles, as I said, are a fragment plus a handle. It’s important to know that fraggles — let me go over here —fraggles and fragments, there are lots of things out there that have fragments. So you can think of native apps, databases, websites, podcasts, and videos. Those can all be fragmented.

Even though they don’t have a URL, they might be useful content, because Google says its goal is to organize the world’s information, not to organize the world’s websites. I think that, historically, Google has kind of been locked into this crawling and indexing of websites and that that’s bothered it, that it wants to be able to show other stuff, but it couldn’t do that because they all needed URLs.

But with fragments, potentially they don’t have to have a URL. So keep these things in mind — apps, databases and stuff like that — and then look at this. 

So this is a traditional page. If you think about a page, Google has kind of been forced, historically by their infrastructure, to surface pages and to rank pages. But pages sometimes struggle to rank if they have too many topics on them.

So for instance, what I’ve shown you here is a page about vegetables. This page may be the best page about vegetables, and it may have the best information about lettuce, celery, and radishes. But because it’s got those topics and maybe more topics on it, they all kind of dilute each other, and this great page may struggle to rank because it’s not focused on the one topic, on one thing at a time.

Google wants to rank the best things. But historically they’ve kind of pushed us to put the best things on one page at a time and to break them out. So what that’s created is this “content is king, I need more content, build more pages” mentality in SEO. The problem is everyone can be building more and more pages for every keyword that they want to rank for or every keyword group that they want to rank for, but only one is going to rank number one.

Google still has to crawl all of those pages that it told us to build, and that creates this character over here, I think, Marjory the Trash Heap, which if you remember the Fraggles, Marjory the Trash Heap was the all-knowing oracle. But when we’re all creating kind of low- to mid-quality content just to have a separate page for every topic, then that makes Google’s life harder, and that of course makes our life harder.

So why are we doing all of this work? The answer is because Google can only index pages, and if the page is too long or too many topics, Google gets confused. So we’ve been enabling Google to do this. But let’s pretend, go with me on this, because this is a theory, I can’t prove it. But if Google didn’t have to index a full page or wasn’t locked into that and could just index a piece of a page, then that makes it easier for Google to understand the relationships of different topics to one page, but also to organize the bits of the page to different pieces of the Knowledge Graph.

So this page about vegetables could be indexed and organized under the vegetable node of the Knowledge Graph. But that doesn’t mean that the lettuce part of the page couldn’t be indexed separately under the lettuce portion of the Knowledge Graph and so on, celery to celery and radish to radish. Now I know this is novel, and it’s hard to think about if you’ve been doing SEO for a long time.

But let’s think about why Google would want to do this. Google has been moving towards all of these new kinds of search experiences where we have voice search, we have the Google Home Hub kind of situation with a screen, or we have mobile searches. If you think about what Google has been doing, we’ve seen the increase in people also ask, and we’ve seen the increase in featured snippets.

They’ve actually been kind of, sort of making fragments for a long time or indexing fragments and showing them in featured snippets. The difference between that and fraggles is that when you click through on a fraggle, when it ranks in a search result, Google scrolls to that portion of the page automatically. That’s the handle portion.

So handles you may have heard of before. They’re kind of old-school web building. We call them bookmarks, anchor links, anchor jump links, stuff like that. It’s when it automatically scrolls to the right portion of the page. But what we’ve seen with fraggles is Google is lifting bits of text, and when you click on it, they’re scrolling directly to that piece of text on a page.

So we see this already happening in some results. What’s interesting is Google is overlaying the link. You don’t have to program the jump link in there. Google actually finds it and puts it there for you. So Google is already doing this, especially with AMP featured snippets. If you have a AMP featured snippet, so a featured snippet that’s lifted from an AMP page, when you click through, Google is actually scrolling and highlighting the featured snippet so that you could read it in context on the page.

But it’s also happening in other kind of more nuanced situations, especially with forums and conversations where they can pick a best answer. The difference between a fraggle and something like a jump link is that Google is overlaying the scrolling portion. The difference between a fraggle and a site link is site links link to other pages, and fraggles, they’re linking to multiple pieces of the same long page.

So we want to avoid continuing to build up low-quality or mid-quality pages that might go to Marjory the Trash Heap. We want to start thinking in terms of can Google find and identify the right portion of the page about a specific topic, and are these topics related enough that they’ll be understood when indexing them towards the Knowledge Graph.

Knowledge Graph build-out into different areas

So I personally think that we’re seeing the build-out of the Knowledge Graph in a lot of different things. I think featured snippets are kind of facts or ideas that are looking for a home or validation in the Knowledge Graph. People also ask seem to be the related nodes. People also search for, same thing. Related searches, same thing. Featured snippets, oh, they’re on there twice, two featured snippets. Found on the web, which is another way where Google is putting expanders by topic and then giving you a carousel of featured snippets to click through on.



 So we’re seeing all of those things, and some SEOs are getting kind of upset that Google is lifting so much content and putting it in the search results and that you’re not getting the click. We know that 61% of mobile searches don’t get a click anymore, and it’s because people are finding the information that they want directly in a SERP.

That’s tough for SEOs, but great for Google because it means Google is providing exactly what the user wants. So they’re probably going to continue to do this. I think that SEOs are going to change their minds and they’re going to want to be in those windowed content, in the lifted content, because when Google starts doing this kind of thing for the native apps, databases, and other content, websites, podcasts, stuff like that, then those are new competitors that you didn’t have to deal with when it was only websites ranking, but those are going to be more engaging kinds of content that Google will be showing or lifting and showing in a SERP even if they don’t have to have URLs, because Google can just window them and show them.

So you’d rather be lifted than not shown at all. So that’s it for me and featured snippets. I’d love to answer your questions in the comments, and thanks very much. I hope you like the theory about fraggles.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Practical Guide to Finding Anyone’s Email Address

Posted by David_Farkas

In link building, few things are more frustrating than finding the perfect link opportunity but being completely unable to find a contact email address.

It’s probably happened to you — if you’re trying to build links or do any sort of outreach, it almost always entails sending out a fairly significant amount of emails. There are plenty of good articles out there about building relationships within the context of link building, but it’s hard to build relationships when you can’t even find a contact email address.

So, for today, I want to focus on how you can become better at finding those important email addresses.

Link builders spend a lot of time just trying to find contact info, and it’s often a frustrating process, just because sussing out email addresses can indeed be quite difficult. The site you’re targeting might not even have a contact page in the first place. Or, if the site does have a contact page, it might only display a generic email address. And, sometimes, the site may list too many email addresses. There are eight different people with similar-sounding job titles — should you reach out to the PR person, the marketing director, or the webmaster? It’s not clear.

Whatever the case may be, finding the right email address is absolutely imperative to any successful outreach campaign. In our industry, the numbers around outreach and replies aren’t great. Frankly, it’s shocking to hear the industry standard — only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.

I can’t help but wonder how many mistakes are made along the way to such a low response rate.

While there are certainly instances where there is simply no clear and obvious contact method, that should be the exception — not the rule! An experienced link builder understands that finding relevant contact information is essential to their success.

That’s why I’ve put together a quick list of tips and tools that will help you to find the email addresses and contact information you need when you’re building links.

And, if you follow my advice, here is a glimpse of the results you could expect:

We don’t track clicks, in case you were wondering 😉

ALWAYS start by looking around!

First, let’s start with my golden rule: Before you fire up any tool, you should always manually look for the correct contact email yourself.

Based on my experience, tools and automation are a last resort. If you rely solely upon tools and automated solutions, you’ll end up with many more misfired emails than if you were to go the manual route. There’s a simple reason for this: the email address listed on your target website may, surprisingly, belong to the right person you should contact!

Now, if you are using a tool, they may generate dozens of email addresses, and you’ll never end up actually emailing the correct individual. Another reason I advocate manually looking for emails is because many email finding tools are limited and can only find email addresses that are associated with a domain name. So, if there is a webmaster that happens to have a @gmail.com email address, the email finding tool will not find it.

It’s also important to only reach out to people you strongly believe will have an interest in your email in order to stay GDPR compliant.

So, always start your manual search by looking around the site. Usually, there will be a link to the contact page in the header, footer, or sidebar. If there’s not a page explicitly named “contact,” or if the contact page only has generic email addresses, that’s when I would recommend jumping to an “About Us” page, should there be one. 

You always want to find a personal email, not a generic one or a contact form. Outreach is more effective when you can address a specific individual, not whoever who is checking info@domain.com that day.

If you encounter too many emails and aren’t sure who the best person to contact is, I suggest sending an email to your best hunch that goes something like this:

And who knows, you may even get a reply like this:

If you weren’t able to locate an email address at this point, I’d move on to the next section.

Ask search engines for help

Perhaps the contact page you were looking for was well-hidden; maybe they don’t want to be contacted that much or they’re in desperate need of a new UX person.

You can turn to search engines for help.

My go-to search engine lately is Startpage. Dubbed as the world’s most private search engine, they display Google SERPs in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you just stepped into Times Square. They also have a cool option to browse the search results anonymously with “Anonymous View.”

For our purposes, I would use the site: search operator just like this:

If there is in fact a contact page or email somewhere on their website that you were not able to find, any competent search engine will find it for you. If the above site query doesn’t return any results, then I’d start expanding my search to other corners of the web.

Use the search bar and type:

If you’re looking for the email of a specific person, type their name before or after the quotation marks.

With this query you can find non-domain email addresses:

If that person’s email address is publicly available somewhere, you will likely be able to find it within the search results.

Email-finding tools

There are many, many excellent email finding tools to choose from. The first one I want to talk about is Hunter.

Hunter has a Chrome extension that’s really easy to use. After you’ve downloaded the extension, there’s not much more that needs to be done.

Go to the site which you are thinking about sending an email to, click on the extension in the top right corner of your screen, and Hunter, well, hunts.

It returns every email address it can find associated with that domain. And also allows you to filter the results based on categories.

Did I say “email address?” I meant to say email address, name, job title, etc. Essentially, it’s a one-click fix to get everything you need to send outreach.

Because I use Hunter regularly (and for good reason, as you can see), it’s the one I’m most familiar with. You can also use Hunter’s online app to look up emails in bulk.

The major downside of working in bulk is coming up with an effective formula to sift through all the emails. Hunter may generate dozens of emails for one site, leaving you to essentially guess which email address is best for outreach. And if you’re relying on guess-work, chances are pretty high you’re leaving perfectly good prospects on the table.

There are several other email finding tools to pick from and I would be remiss to not mention them. Here are 5 alternative email-finding tools:

• Sonvio
• Clearbit Connect
• Finder Expert
• Find That Email
• Voila Norbert

Even though I personally try not to be too dependent on tools, the fact of the matter is that they provide the easiest, most convenient route in many cases.

The guessing game

I know there’s no word in the digital marketing world that produces more shudders than “guessing.” However, there are times when guessing is easier.

Let’s be real: there aren’t too many different ways that companies both large and small format their email addresses. It’s usually going to be something like:

• david@domain.com
• davidfarkas@domain.com
• dfarkas@domain.com

If you’ve ever worked for a living, you know most of the variations. But, in case you need some help, there’s a tool for that.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you just pick any one of these random addresses, send your email, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Far from it. There are actually tools that you can use that will indicate when you’ve selected the right one.

Sales Navigator is such a tool. Sales Navigator is a Gmail extension that is easy to use. Simply enter the name of the person you’re looking for, and it will return all of the possible standard variations that they may use for their email address. Then, you can actually test the address from your Gmail account. When you type in the address into the proper line, a sidebar will appear on your screen. If there no is no information in that sidebar, you have the wrong address. If, however, you get a return that looks like this:

Congratulations! You’ve found the right email address.

Obviously, this method only works if you know the name of the person you want to email, but just don’t have their email address. Still, in those scenarios, Sales Navigator works like a charm.

Trust, but verify

There’s nothing more annoying than when you think you’ve finally struck gold, but the gold turned out to be pyrite. Getting an email that bounces back because it wasn’t the correct address is frustrating. And even worse, if it happens too often, your email can end up on email blacklists and destroy your email deliverability.

There are ways to verify, however. At my company, we use Neverbounce. It’s effective and incredibly easy to use. With Neverbounce, you can enter in either individual email addresses or bulk lists, and voila!

It will let you know if that email address is currently Valid, Invalid, or Unknown. It’s that easy. Here are some other email verifiers:

• Zero Bounce
• Mail Floss
• The Checker
• Proofy

Subscribe to their newsletter

Here’s one final out-of-the-box approach. This approach works more often with sites where one person clearly does most, if not all, of the work. A site where someone’s name is the domain name, for example.

If you come across a site like davidfarkas.com and you see a newsletter that can be subscribed to, hit that subscribe button. Once that’s done, you can simply reply to one iteration of the newsletter.

This method has an added benefit. An effective way of building links is building relationships, just like I said in the opening. When you can demonstrate that you’re already subscribing to a webmaster’s newsletter, you’ll be currying favor with that webmaster.

Conclusion

When you send a link building outreach email, you want to make sure it’s going to a real person and, even more importantly, ending up in the right hands. Sending an email to an incorrect contact periodically may seem like a negligible waste of time, but when you send emails at the volume a link builder should, the waste adds up very quickly. In fact, enough waste can kill everything else that you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s well worth your time to make sure you’re getting it right by putting in the effort to finding the right email address. Be a picky link builder. Don’t just choose the first email that comes your way and never rely solely on tools. If you email the wrong person, it will look to them like that you didn’t care enough to spend time on their site, and in return, they will ignore you and your pitch.

With the tips outlined above, you’ll avoid these issues and be on your way to more successful outreach.

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!

App Store SEO: How to Diagnose a Drop in Traffic & Win It Back

Posted by Joel.Mesherghi

For some organizations, mobile apps can be an important means to capturing new leads and customers, so it can be alarming when you notice your app visits are declining.

However, while there is content on how to optimize your app, otherwise known as ASO (App Store Optimization), there is little information out there on the steps required to diagnose a drop in app visits.

Although there are overlaps with traditional search, there are unique factors that play a role in app store visibility.

The aim of this blog is to give you a solid foundation when trying to investigate a drop in app store visits and then we’ll go through some quick fire opportunities to win that traffic back.

We’ll go through the process of investigating why your app traffic declined, including:

1. Identifying potential external factors
2. Identifying the type of keywords that dropped in visits
3. Analyzing app user engagement metrics

And we’ll go through some ways to help you win traffic back including:

1. Spying on your competitors
2. Optimizing your store listing
3. Investing in localisation

Investigating why your app traffic declined

Step 1. Identify potential external factors

Some industries/businesses will have certain periods of the year where traffic may drop due to external factors, such as seasonality.

Before you begin investigating a traffic drop further:

• Talk to your point of contact and ask whether seasonality impacts their business, or whether there are general industry trends at play. For example, aggregator sites like SkyScanner may see a drop in app visits after the busy period at the start of the year.
• Identify whether app installs actually dropped. If they didn’t, then you probably don’t need to worry about a drop in traffic too much and it could be Google’s and Apple’s algorithms better aligning the intent of search terms.

Step 2. Identify the type of keywords that dropped in visits

Like traditional search, identifying the type of keywords (branded and non-branded), as well as the individual keywords that saw the biggest drop in app store visits, will provide much needed context and help shape the direction of your investigation. For instance:

If branded terms saw the biggest drop-off in visits this could suggest:

1. There has been a decrease in the amount of advertising spend that builds brand/product awareness
2. Competitors are bidding on your branded terms
3. The app name/brand has changed and hasn’t been able to mop up all previous branded traffic

If non-branded terms saw the biggest drop off in visits this could suggest:

1. You’ve made recent optimisation changes that have had a negative impact
2. User engagement signals, such as app crashes, or app reviews have changed for the worse
3. Your competition have better optimised their app and/or provide a better user experience (particularly relevant if an app receives a majority of its traffic from a small set of keywords)
4. Your app has been hit by an algorithm update

If both branded and non-branded terms saw the biggest drop off in visits this could suggest:

1. You’ve violated Google’s policies on promoting your app.
2. There are external factors at play

To get data for your Android app

To get data for your Android app, sign into your Google Play Console account.

Google Play Console provides a wealth of data on the performance of your android app, with particularly useful insights on user engagement metrics that influence app store ranking (more on these later).

However, keyword specific data will be limited. Google Play Console will show you the individual keywords that delivered the most downloads for your app, but the majority of keyword visits will likely be unclassified: mid to long-tail keywords that generate downloads, but don’t generate enough downloads to appear as isolated keywords. These keywords will be classified as “other”.

Your chart might look like the below. Repeat the same process for branded terms.

Above: Graph of a client’s non-branded Google Play Store app visits. The number of visits are factual, but the keywords driving visits have been changed to keep anonymity.

To get data for your IOS app

To get data on the performance of your IOS app, Apple have App Store Connect. Like Google Play Console, you’ll be able to get your hands on user engagement metrics that can influence the ranking of your app.

However, keyword data is even scarcer than Google Play Console. You’ll only be able to see the total number of impressions your app’s icon has received on the App Store. If you’ve seen a drop in visits for both your Android and IOS app, then you could use Google Play Console data as a proxy for keyword performance.

If you use an app rank tracking tool, such as TheTool, you can somewhat plug gaps in knowledge for the keywords that are potentially driving visits to your app.

Step 3. Analyze app user engagement metrics

User engagement metrics that underpin a good user experience have a strong influence on how your app ranks and both Apple and Google are open about this.

Google states that user engagement metrics like app crashes, ANR rates (application not responding) and poor reviews can limit exposure opportunities on Google Play.

While Apple isn’t quite as forthcoming as Google when it comes to providing information on engagement metrics, they do state that app ratings and reviews can influence app store visibility.

Ultimately, Apple wants to ensure IOS apps provide a good user experience, so it’s likely they use a range of additional user engagement metrics to rank an app in the App Store.

As part of your investigation, you should look into how the below user engagement metrics may have changed around the time period you saw a drop in visits to your app.

• App rating
• Number of ratings (newer/fresh ratings will be weighted more for Google)
• Number of downloads
• Installs vs uninstalls
• App crashes and application not responding

You’ll be able to get data for the above metrics in Google Play Console and App Store Connect, or you may have access to this data internally.

Even if your analysis doesn’t reveal insights, metrics like app rating influences conversion and where your app ranks in the app pack SERP feature, so it’s well worth investing time in developing a strategy to improve these metrics.

One simple tactic could be to ensure you respond to negative reviews and reviews with questions. In fact, users increase their rating by +0.7 stars on average after receiving a reply.

Apple offers a few tips on asking for ratings and reviews for IOS app.

Help win your app traffic back

Step 1. Spy on your competitors

Find out who’s ranking

When trying to identify opportunities to improve app store visibility, I always like to compare the top 5 ranking competitor apps for some priority non-branded keywords.

All you need to do is search for these keywords in Google Play and the App Store and grab the publicly available ranking factors from each app listing. You should have something like the below.

Brand	Title	Title Character length	Rating	Number of reviews	Number of installs	Description character length
COMPETITOR 1	[Competitor title]	50	4.8	2,848	50,000+	3,953
COMPETITOR 2	[Competitor title]	28	4.0	3,080	500,000+	2,441
COMPETITOR 3	[Competitor title]	16	4.0	2566	100,000+	2,059
YOUR BRAND	​[Your brands title]	37	4.3	2,367	100,000+	3,951
COMPETITOR 4	[Competitor title]	7	4.1	1,140	100,000+	1,142
COMPETITOR 5	[Competitor title]	24	4.5	567	50,000+	2,647

     Above: anonymized table of a client’s Google Play competitors

From this, you may get some indications as to why an app ranks above you. For instance, we see “Competitor 1” not only has the best app rating, but has the longest title and description. Perhaps they better optimized their title and description?

We can also see that competitors that rank above us generally have a larger number of total reviews and installs, which aligns with both Google’s and Apple’s statements about the importance of user engagement metrics.

With the above comparison information, you can dig a little deeper, which leads us on nicely to the next section.

Optimize your app text fields

Keywords you add to text fields can have a significant impact on app store discoverability.

As part of your analysis, you should look into how your keyword optimization differs from competitors and identify any opportunities.

For Google Play, adding keywords to the below text fields can influence rankings:

• Keywords in the app title (50 characters)
• Keywords in the app description (4,000 characters)
• Keywords in short description (80 characters)
• Keywords in URL
• Keywords in your app name

When it comes to the App Store, adding keywords to the below text fields can influence rankings:

• Keywords in the app title (30 characters)
• Using the 100 character keywords field (a dedicated 100-character field to place keywords you want to rank for)
• Keywords in your app name

To better understand how your optimisation tactics hold up, I recommended comparing your app text fields to competitors.

For example, if I want to know the frequency of mentioned keywords in their app descriptions on Google Play (keywords in the description field are a ranking factor) than I’d create a table like the one below.

Keyword	COMPETITOR 1	COMPETITOR 2	COMPETITOR 3	YOUR BRAND	COMPETITOR 4	COMPETITOR 5
job	32	9	5	40	3	2
job search	12	4	10	9	10	8
employment	2	0	0	5	0	3
job tracking	2	0	0	4	0	0
employment app	7	2	0	4	2	1
employment search	4	1	1	5	0	0
job tracker	3	0	0	1	0	0
recruiter	2	0	0	1	0	0

     Above: anonymized table of a client’s Google Play competitors

From the above table, I can see that the number 1 ranking competitor (competitor 1) has more mentions of “job search” and “employment app” than I do.

Whilst there are many factors that decide the position at which an app ranks, I could deduce that I need to increase the frequency of said keywords in my Google Play app description to help improve ranking.

Be careful though: writing unnatural, keyword stuffed descriptions and titles will likely have an adverse effect.

Remember, as well as being optimized for machines, text fields like your app title and description are meant to be a compelling “advertisement” of your app for users..

I’d repeat this process for other text fields to uncover other keyword insights.

Step 2. Optimize your store listing

Your store listing in the home of your app on Google Play. It’s where users can learn about your app, read reviews and more. And surprisingly, not all apps take full advantage of developing an immersive store listing experience.

Whilst Google doesn’t seem to directly state that fully utilizing the majority of store listing features directly impacts your apps discoverability, it’s fair to speculate that there may be some ranking consideration behind this.

At the very least, investing in your store listing could improve conversion and you can even run A/B tests to measure the impact of your changes.

You can improve the overall user experience and content found in the store listing by adding video trailers of your app, quality creative assets, your apps icon (you’ll want to make your icon stand out amongst a sea of other app icons) and more.

You can read Google’s best practice guide on creating a compelling Google Play store listing to learn more.

Step 3. Invest in localization

The saying goes “think global, act local” and this is certainly true of apps.

Previous studies have revealed that 72.4% of global consumers preferred to use their native language when shopping online and that 56.2% of consumers said that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price.

It makes logical sense. The better you can personalize your product for your audience, the better your results will be, so go the extra mile and localize your Google Play and App Store listings.

Google has a handy checklist for localization on Google Play and Apple has a comprehensive resource on internationalizing your app on the App Store.

Wrap up

A drop in visits of any kind causes alarm and panic. Hopefully this blog gives you a good starting point if you ever need to investigate why an apps traffic has dropped as well as providing some quick fire opportunities to win it back.

If you’re interested in further reading on ASO, I recommend reading App Radar’s and TheTool’s guides to ASO, as well as app search discoverability tips from Google and Apple themselves.

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!

Better Content Through NLP (Natural Language Processing) – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

Gone are the days of optimizing content solely for search engines. For modern SEO, your content needs to please both robots and humans. But how do you know that what you’re writing can check the boxes for both man and machine?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy focuses on part of her recent MozCon 2019 talk and teaches us all about how Google uses NLP (natural language processing) to truly understand content, plus how you can harness that knowledge to better optimize what you write for people and bots alike.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I’m Ruth Burr Reedy, and I am the Vice President of Strategy at UpBuild, a boutique technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics. I recently spoke at MozCon on a basic framework for SEO and approaching changes to our industry that thinks about SEO in the light of we are humans who are marketing to humans, but we are using a machine as the intermediary.

Those videos will be available online at some point. [Editor’s note: that point is now!] But today I wanted to talk about one point from my talk that I found really interesting and that has kind of changed the way that I approach content creation, and that is the idea that writing content that is easier for Google, a robot, to understand can actually make you a better writer and help you write better content for humans. It is a win-win. 

The relationships between entities, words, and how people search

To understand how Google is currently approaching parsing content and understanding what content is about, Google is spending a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of money on things like neural matching and natural language processing, which seek to understand basically when people talk, what are they talking about?

This goes along with the evolution of search to be more conversational. But there are a lot of times when someone is searching, but they don’t totally know what they want, and Google still wants them to get what they want because that’s how Google makes money. They are spending a lot of time trying to understand the relationships between entities and between words and how people use words to search.

The example that Danny Sullivan gave online, that I think is a really great example, is if someone is experiencing the soap opera effect on their TV. If you’ve ever seen a soap opera, you’ve noticed that they look kind of weird. Someone might be experiencing that, and not knowing what that’s called they can’t Google soap opera effect because they don’t know about it.

They might search something like, “Why does my TV look funny?” Neural matching helps Google understand that when somebody is searching “Why does my TV look funny?” one possible answer might be the soap opera effect. So they can serve up that result, and people are happy. 

Understanding salience

As we’re thinking about natural language processing, a core component of natural language processing is understanding salience.

Salience, content, and entities

Salience is a one-word way to sum up to what extent is this piece of content about this specific entity? At this point Google is really good at extracting entities from a piece of content. Entities are basically nouns, people, places, things, proper nouns, regular nouns.

Entities are things, people, etc., numbers, things like that. Google is really good at taking those out and saying, “Okay, here are all of the entities that are contained within this piece of content.” Salience attempts to understand how they’re related to each other, because what Google is really trying to understand when they’re crawling a page is: What is this page about, and is this a good example of a page about this topic?

Salience really goes into the second piece. To what extent is any given entity be the topic of a piece of content? It’s often amazing the degree to which a piece of content that a person has created is not actually about anything. I think we’ve all experienced that.

You’re searching and you come to a page and you’re like, “This was too vague. This was too broad. This said that it was about one thing, but it was actually about something else. I didn’t find what I needed. This wasn’t good information for me.” As marketers, we’re often on the other side of that, trying to get our clients to say what their product actually does on their website or say, “I know you think that you created a guide to Instagram for the holidays. But you actually wrote one paragraph about the holidays and then seven paragraphs about your new Instagram tool. This is not actually a blog post about Instagram for the holidays. It’s a piece of content about your tool.” These are the kinds of battles that we fight as marketers. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) APIs

Fortunately, there are now a number of different APIs that you can use to understand natural language processing: 

• IBM has one: https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/natural-language-understanding/ 
• Google actually has a natural language processing API that’s right here on https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/

Is it as sophisticated as what they’re using on their own stuff? Probably not. But you can test it out. Put in a piece of content and see (a) what entities Google is able to extract from it, and (b) how salient Google feels each of these entities is to the piece of content as a whole. Again, to what degree is this piece of content about this thing?

So this natural language processing API, which you can try for free and it’s actually not that expensive for an API if you want to build a tool with it, will assign each entity that it can extract a salient score between 0 and 1, saying, “Okay, how sure are we that this piece of content is about this thing versus just containing it?”

So the higher or the closer you get to 1, the more confident the tool is that this piece of content is about this thing. 0.9 would be really, really good. 0.01 means it’s there, but they’re not sure how well it’s related. 

A delicious example of how salience and entities work

The example I have here, and this is not taken from a real piece of content — these numbers are made up, it’s just an example — is if you had a chocolate chip cookie recipe, you would want chocolate cookies or chocolate chip cookies recipe, chocolate chip cookies, something like that to be the number one entity, the most salient entity, and you would want it to have a pretty high salient score.

You would want the tool to feel pretty confident, yes, this piece of content is about this topic. But what you can also see is the other entities it’s extracting and to what degree they are also salient to the topic. So you can see things like if you have a chocolate chip cookie recipe, you would expect to see things like cookie, butter, sugar, 350, which is the temperature you heat your oven, all of the different things that come together to make a chocolate chip cookie recipe.

But I think that it’s really, really important for us as SEOs to understand that salience is the future of related keywords. We’re beyond the time when to optimize for chocolate chip cookie recipe, we would also be looking for things like chocolate recipe, chocolate chips, chocolate cookie recipe, things like that. Stems, variants, TF-IDF, these are all older methodologies for understanding what a piece of content is about.

Instead what we need to understand is what are the entities that Google, using its vast body of knowledge, using things like Freebase, using large portions of the internet, where is Google seeing these entities co-occur at such a rate that they feel reasonably confident that a piece of content on one entity in order to be salient to that entity would include these other entities?

Using an expert is the best way to create content that’s salient to a topic

So chocolate chip cookie recipe, we’re now also making sure we’re adding things like butter, flour, sugar. This is actually really easy to do if you actually have a chocolate chip cookie recipe to put up there. This is I think what we’re going to start seeing as a content trend in SEO is that the best way to create content that is salient to a topic is to have an actual expert in that topic create that content.

Somebody with deep knowledge of a topic is naturally going to include co-occurring terms, because they know how to create something that’s about what it’s supposed to be about. I think what we’re going to start seeing is that people are going to have to start paying more for content marketing, frankly. Unfortunately, a lot of companies seem to think that content marketing is and should be cheap.

Content marketers, I feel you on that. It sucks, and it’s no longer the case. We need to start investing in content and investing in experts to create that content so that they can create that deep, rich, salient content that everybody really needs. 

How can you use this API to improve your own SEO? 

One of the things that I like to do with this kind of information is look at — and this is something that I’ve done for years, just not in this context — but a prime optimization target in general is pages that rank for a topic, but they rank on page 2.

What this often means is that Google understands that that keyword is a topic of the page, but it doesn’t necessarily understand that it is a good piece of content on that topic, that the page is actually solely about that content, that it’s a good resource. In other words, the signal is there, but it’s weak.

What you can do is take content that ranks but not well, run it through this natural language API or another natural language processing tool, and look at how the entities are extracted and how Google is determining that they’re related to each other. Sometimes it might be that you need to do some disambiguation. So in this example, you’ll notice that while chocolate cookies is called a work of art, and I agree, cookie here is actually called other.

This is because cookie means more than one thing. There’s cookies, the baked good, but then there’s also cookies, the packet of data. Both of those are legitimate uses of the word “cookie.” Words have multiple meanings. If you notice that Google, that this natural language processing API is having trouble correctly classifying your entities, that’s a good time to go in and do some disambiguation.

Make sure that the terms surrounding that term are clearly saying, “No, I mean the baked good, not the software piece of data.” That’s a really great way to kind of bump up your salience. Look at whether or not you have a strong salient score for your primary entity. You’d be amazed at how many pieces of content you can plug into this tool and the top, most salient entity is still only like a 0.01, a 0.14.

A lot of times the API is like “I think this is what it’s about,” but it’s not sure. This is a great time to go in and bump up that content, make it more robust, and look at ways that you can make those entities easier to both extract and to relate to each other. This brings me to my second point, which is my new favorite thing in the world.

Writing for humans and writing for machines, you can now do both at the same time. You no longer have to, and you really haven’t had to do this in a long time, but the idea that you might keyword stuff or otherwise create content for Google that your users might not see or care about is way, way, way over.

Now you can create content for Google that also is better for users, because the tenets of machine readability and human readability are moving closer and closer together. 

Tips for writing for human and machine readability:

What I’ve done here is I did some research not on natural language processing, but on writing for human readability, that is advice from writers, from writing experts on how to write better, clearer, easier to read, easier to understand content.Then I pulled out the pieces of advice that also work as pieces of advice for writing for natural language processing. So natural language processing, again, is the process by which Google or really anything that might be processing language tries to understand how entities are related to each other within a given body of content.

Short, simple sentences

Short, simple sentences. Write simply. Don’t use a lot of flowery language. Short sentences and try to keep it to one idea per sentence. 

One idea per sentence

If you’re running on, if you’ve got a lot of different clauses, if you’re using a lot of pronouns and it’s becoming confusing what you’re talking about, that’s not great for readers.

It also makes it harder for machines to parse your content. 

Connect questions to answers

Then closely connecting questions to answers. So don’t say, “What is the best temperature to bake cookies? Well, let me tell you a story about my grandmother and my childhood,” and 500 words later here’s the answer. Connect questions to answers. 

What all three of those readability tips have in common is they boil down to reducing the semantic distance between entities.

If you want natural language processing to understand that two entities in your content are closely related, move them closer together in the sentence. Move the words closer together. Reduce the clutter, reduce the fluff, reduce the number of semantic hops that a robot might have to take between one entity and another to understand the relationship, and you’ve now created content that is more readable because it’s shorter and easier to skim, but also easier for a robot to parse and understand.

Be specific first, then explain nuance

Going back to the example of “What is the best temperature to bake chocolate chip cookies at?” Now the real answer to what is the best temperature to bake chocolate cookies is it depends. Hello. Hi, I’m an SEO, and I just answered a question with it depends. It does depend.

That is true, and that is real, but it is not a good answer. It is also not the kind of thing that a robot could extract and reproduce in, for example, voice search or a featured snippet. If somebody says, “Okay, Google, what is a good temperature to bake cookies at?” and Google says, “It depends,” that helps nobody even though it’s true. So in order to write for both machine and human readability, be specific first and then you can explain nuance.

Then you can go into the details. So a better, just as correct answer to “What is the temperature to bake chocolate chip cookies?” is the best temperature to bake chocolate chip cookies is usually between 325 and 425 degrees, depending on your altitude and how crisp you like your cookie. That is just as true as it depends and, in fact, means the same thing as it depends, but it’s a lot more specific.

It’s a lot more precise. It uses real numbers. It provides a real answer. I’ve shortened the distance between the question and the answer. I didn’t say it depends first. I said it depends at the end. That’s the kind of thing that you can do to improve readability and understanding for both humans and machines.

Get to the point (don’t bury the lede)

Get to the point. Don’t bury the lead. All of you journalists who try to become content marketers, and then everybody in content marketing said, “Oh, you need to wait till the end to get to your point or they won’t read the whole thing,”and you were like, “Don’t bury the lead,” you are correct. For those of you who aren’t familiar with journalism speak, not burying the lead basically means get to the point upfront, at the top.

Include all the information that somebody would really need to get from that piece of content. If they don’t read anything else, they read that one paragraph and they’ve gotten the gist. Then people who want to go deep can go deep. That’s how people actually like to consume content, and surprisingly it doesn’t mean they won’t read the content. It just means they don’t have to read it if they don’t have time, if they need a quick answer.

The same is true with machines. Get to the point upfront. Make it clear right away what the primary entity, the primary topic, the primary focus of your content is and then get into the details. You’ll have a much better structured piece of content that’s easier to parse on all sides. 

Avoid jargon and “marketing speak”

Avoid jargon. Avoid marketing speak. Not only is it terrible and very hard to understand. You see this a lot. I’m going back again to the example of getting your clients to say what their products do. You work with a lot of B2B companies, you will you will often run into this. Yes, but what does it do? It provides solutions to streamline the workflow and blah, blah. Okay, what does it do? This is the kind of thing that can be really, really hard for companies to get out of their own heads about, but it’s so important for users, for machines.

Avoid jargon. Avoid marketing speak. Not to get too tautological, but the more esoteric a word is, the less commonly it’s used. That’s actually what esoteric means. What that means is the less commonly a word is used, the less likely it is that Google is going to understand its semantic relationships to other entities.

Keep it simple. Be specific. Say what you mean. Wipe out all of the jargon. By wiping out jargon and kind of marketing speak and kind of the fluff that can happen in your content, you’re also, once again, reducing the semantic distances between entities, making them easier to parse. 

Organize your information to match the user journey

Organize it and map it out to the user journey. Think about the information somebody might need and the order in which they might need it. 

Break out subtopics with headings

Then break it out with subheadings. This is like very, very basic writing advice, and yet you all aren’t doing it. So if you’re not going to do it for your users, do it for machines. 

Format lists with bullets or numbers

You can also really impact skimmability for users by breaking out lists with bullets or numbers.

The great thing about that is that breaking out a list with bullets or numbers also makes information easier for a robot to parse and extract. If a lot of these tips seem like they’re the same tips that you would use to get featured snippets, they are, because featured snippets are actually a pretty good indicator that you’re creating content that a robot can find, parse, understand, and extract, and that’s what you want.

So if you’re targeting featured snippets, you’re probably already doing a lot of these things, good job. 

Grammar and spelling count!

The last thing, which I shouldn’t have to say, but I’m going to say is that grammar and spelling and punctuation and things like that absolutely do count. They count to users. They don’t count to all users, but they count to users. They also count to search engines.

Things like grammar, spelling, and punctuation are very, very easy signals for a machine to find and parse. Google has been specific in things, like the “Quality Rater Guidelines,”that a well-written, well-structured, well-spelled, grammatically correct document, that these are signs of authoritativeness. I’m not saying that having a greatly spelled document is going to mean that you immediately rocket to the top of the results.

I am saying that if you’re not on that stuff, it’s probably going to hurt you. So take the time to make sure everything is nice and tidy. You can use vernacular English. You don’t have to be perfect “AP Style Guide” all the time. But make sure that you are formatting things properly from a grammatical standpoint as well as a technical standpoint. What I love about all of this, this is just good writing.

This is good writing. It’s easy to understand. It’s easy to parse. It’s still so hard, especially in the marketing world, to get out of that world of jargon, to get to the point, to stop writing 2,000 words because we think we need 2,000 words, to really think about are we creating content that’s about what we think it’s about.

Use these tools to understand how readable, parsable, and understandable your content is

So my hope for the SEO world and for you is that you can use these tools not just to think about how to dial in the perfect keyword density or whatever to get an almost perfect score on the salience in the natural language processing API. What I’m hoping is that you will use these tools to help yourself understand how readable, how parsable, and how understandable your content is, how much your content is about what you say it’s about and what you think it’s about so you can create better stuff for users.

It makes the internet a better place, and it will probably make you some money as well. So these are my thoughts. I’d love to hear in the comments if you’re using the natural language processing API now, if you’ve built a tool with it, if you want to build a tool with it, what do you think about this, how do you use this, how has it gone. Tell me all about it. Holla atcha girl.

Have a great Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Find Ranking Keywords, Uncover Opportunities, Check Rankings, & More: 5 Workflows for Easier Keyword Research

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

Have you ever wished there were an easy way to see all the top keywords your site is ranking for? How about a competitor’s? What about those times when you’re stumped trying to come up with keywords related to your core topic, or want to know the questions people are asking around your keywords?

There’s plenty of keyword research workflow gold to be uncovered in Keyword Explorer. It’s a tool that can save you a ton of time when it comes to both general keyword research and the nitty-gritty details. And time and again, we hear from folks who are surprised that a tool they use all the time can do [insert cool and helpful thing here] — they had no idea! 

Well, let’s remedy that! Starting with today’s post, we’ll be publishing a series of quick videos put together by our own brilliant SEO scientist (and, according to Google, the smartest SEO in the world) Britney Muller. Each one will highlight one super useful workflow to solve a keyword research problem, and most are quick — just under a couple of minutes. Take a gander at the videos or skim the transcripts to find a workflow that catches your eye, and if you’re the type of person who likes to try it out in real time, head to the tool and give it a spin (if you have a Moz Community account like most Moz Blog readers, you already have free access):

Follow along in Keyword Explorer

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1. How to do general keyword research

5:37 video

Find relevant keywords

You can do this a couple of ways. One is just to enter in a head keyword term that you want to explore — so maybe that’s “SEO” — and you can click Search. From here, you can go to Keyword Suggestions, where you can find all sorts of other keywords relevant to the keyword “SEO.”

We have a couple filters available to help you narrow down that search a little bit better. Here, without doing any filtering, you can see all of these keywords, and they’re ranked by relevancy and then search volume. So you do tend to see the higher search volume keywords at the top.

Save keyword suggestions in a list

But you can go through here and click the keywords that you want to save for your list. You can also do some filtering. We could group keywords by low lexical similarity. What this means is it’s basically just going to take somewhat similar keywords and batch them together for you to make it a bit easier.

Here you can see there are 141 group keywords under “SEO.” Fifty keywords have fallen under “SEO services” and so on. This gives you a higher level, topical awareness of what the keywords look like. If you were to select these groups, you could add a list for these.

When I say add list, I mean you can just save them in a keyword list that you can refer back to time and time again. These lists are amazing, one of my favorite features. What you would basically do is create a new list. I’m just going to call it Test. That adds all of your selected keywords to a list. You can continue adding keywords by different filters.

Filter by which keywords are questions

One of my other favorite things to filter by is “Are questions.” This will give you keywords that are actual questions, and it’s really neat to be able to try to bake these into your content marketing or an FAQ page. Really helpful. You can select all up here. Then I can just add that to that SEO Test list that we already created. I hope this gives you an idea of how to use some of these general filters.

Filter based on closely or broadly related topics and synonyms

You can also filter based on closely related topics, broadly related topics and synonyms. Keywords with similar result pages is very interesting. You can really play around with both of these filters. 

Filter by volume

You can also filter by volume. If you are trying to go after those high volume keywords, maybe you set a filter for here. Maybe you’re looking for long tail keywords, and then you’re going to look a little bit on the smaller search volume end here. These can all help in playing around and discovering more keywords.

Find the keywords a domain currently ranks for

Another thing that you can do to expand your keyword research is by entering in a domain. You can see that this changed to root domain when I entered moz.com. If you click Search, you’re going to get all of the keywords that that domain currently ranks for, which is really powerful. You could see all of the ranking keywords, add that to a list, and monitor how your website is performing.

Find competitors’ keywords

If you want to get really strategic, you can plug in some of your competitor sites and see what their keywords are. These are all things that you can do to expand your keyword research set. From there, you’re going to hopefully have one or a couple keyword lists that house all of this data for you to better strategically route your SEO strategy.

If we know that related questions are occurring most often, you can create strategic content around that. The opportunities here with these filters and sorts for keyword opportunities are endless.

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2. How to discover ranking keywords for a particular domain or an exact page

1:37 video

See all the keywords a particular domain ranks for

This is super easy to do in Keyword Explorer. You just go to the main search bar. Let’s just throw in moz.com for example. I can see all the keywords that currently rank for moz.com.

We’re seeing over 114,000, and we get this really beautiful, high-level overview as to what that looks like. You can see the ranking distribution, and then you can even go into all of those ranking keywords in this tab here, which is really cool.

See all the keywords a specific page ranks for

You can do the same exact thing for a specific page. So let’s take the Beginner’s Guide. This will toggle to Exact Page, and you just click Search. Here we’re going to see that it ranks for 804 keywords. You get to know exactly what those are, what the difficulty is, the monthly search volume.

Keep track of those keywords in a list

You can add these things to a list to keep an eye on. It’s also great to do for competitive pages that appear to be doing very well or popular things occurring in your space. But this is just a quick and easy way to see what root domains or exact pages are currently ranking for.

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3. How to quickly find keyword opportunities for a URL or a specific page

1:21 video

Find lower-ranking keywords that could be improved upon

I’m just going to paste in the URL to the Beginner’s Guide to SEO in Keyword Explorer. I’m going to look at all of the ranking keywords for this URL, and what I want to do is I want to sort by rank.

I want to see what’s ranking between 4 to 50 and see where or what keywords aren’t doing so well that we could improve upon. Right away we’re seeing this huge monthly search volume keyword, “SEO best practices,” and we’re ranking number 4.

It can definitely be improved upon. You can also go ahead and take a look at keywords that you rank for outside of page 1, meaning you rank 11 or beyond for these keywords. These could definitely also be improved upon. You can save these keywords to a list.

You can export them and strategically create content to improve those results. 

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4. How to check rankings for a set of keywords

0:48 video

Use keyword lists to check rankings for a subset of keywords

This is pretty easy. So let’s say you have a keyword list for your target keywords. Here I’ve got an SEO Test keyword list. I want to see how Moz is ranking for these keywords.

This is where you would just add Check Rankings For and add your URL. I’m just going to put moz.com, check rankings, and I can immediately see how well we’re doing for these specific keywords.

I can filter highest to lowest and vice versa.

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5. How to track your keywords

2:08 video

Set up a Campaign

If you don’t already have a list of your keywords that you would like to track, I suggest watching the General Keyword Research video above to help discover some of those keywords. But if you already have the keywords you know that you want to track for a particular site, definitely set up an account with Moz Pro and set up a Campaign.

It walks you through all of the steps to set up a particular Campaign for a URL. If you already have your Campaign set up, for example this is my Moz Campaign and I want to add say a new list of keywords to track, what you can do is you can come into this dashboard view and then go to Rankings.

If you scroll down here, you can add keywords. So let’s say Moz is breaking into the conversion rate optimization space. I can paste in a list of my CRO keywords, and then I can add a label.

Use keyword labels to track progress on topics over time 

Now that’s going to append that tag so I can filter by just CRO keywords. Then I’m going to click Add Keywords. This is going to take a little while to start to kick into gear basically.

But once it starts tracking, once these keywords are added, you’ll get to see them historically over time and even you against your competitors. It’s a really great way to monitor how you’re doing with keywords, where you’re seeing big drops or gains, and how you can better pivot your strategy to target those things.

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Discover anything new or especially useful? Let us know on Twitter or here in the comments, and keep an eye out for more quick and fun keyword research workflow videos in the coming weeks — we’ve got some good stuff coming your way, from finding organic CTR for a keyword to discovering SERP feature opportunities and more.

Try out some new tricks in Keyword Explorer

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It’s Content and It’s Links – Are We Making SEO Too Complicated?

Posted by AndrewDennis33

Content and links — to successfully leverage search as a marketing channel you need useful content and relevant links.

Many experienced SEOs have run numerous tests and experiments to correlate backlinks with higher rankings, and Google has espoused the importance of “great content” for as long as I can remember.

In fact, a Google employee straight up told us that content and links are two of the three (the other being RankBrain) most important ranking factors in its search algorithm.

So why do we seem to overcomplicate SEO by chasing new trends and tactics, overreacting to fluctuations in rankings, and obsessing over the length of our title tags? SEO is simple — it’s content and it’s links.

Now, this is a simple concept, but it is much more nuanced and complex to execute well. However, I believe that by getting back to basics and focusing on these two pillars of SEO we can all spend more time doing the work that will be most impactful, creating a better, more connected web, and elevating SEO as a practice within the marketing realm.

To support this movement, I want to provide you with strategic, actionable takeaways that you can leverage in your own content marketing and link building campaigns. So, without further ado, let’s look at how you can be successful in search with content and links.

Building the right content

As the Wu-Tang Clan famously said, “Content rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M,” …well, it was something like that. The point is, everything in SEO begins and ends with content. Whether it’s a blog post, infographic, video, in-depth guide, interactive tool, or something else, content truly rules everything around us online.

Content attracts and engages visitors, building positive associations with your brand and inspiring them to take desired actions. Content also helps search engines better understand what your website is about and how they should rank your pages within their search results.

So where do you start with something as wide-reaching and important as a content strategy? Well, if everything in SEO begins and ends with content, then everything in content strategy begins and ends with keyword research.

Proper keyword research is the difference between a targeted content strategy that drives organic visibility and simply creating content for the sake of creating content. But don’t just take my word for it — check out this client project where keyword research was executed after a year of publishing content that wasn’t backed by keyword analysis:

(Note: Each line represents content published within a given year, not total organic sessions of the site.)

In 2018, we started creating content based on keyword opportunities. The performance of that content has quickly surpassed (in terms of organic sessions) the older pages that were created without strategic research.

Start with keyword research

The concept of keyword research is straightforward — find the key terms and phrases that your audience uses to find information related to your business online. However, the execution of keyword research can be a bit more nuanced, and simply starting is often the most difficult part.

The best place to start is with the keywords that are already bringing people to your site, which you can find within Google Search Console.

Beyond the keywords that already bring people to your website, a baseline list of seed keywords can help you expand your keyword reach.

Seed keywords are the foundational terms that are related to your business and brand.

As a running example, let’s use Quip, a brand that sells oral care products. Quip’s seed keywords would be:

• [toothbrush]
• [toothpaste]
• [toothbrush set]
• [electric toothbrush]
• [electric toothbrush set]
• [toothbrush subscription]

These are some of the most basic head terms related to Quip’s products and services. From here, the list could be expanded, using keyword tools such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer, to find granular long-tail keywords and other related terms.

Expanded keyword research and analysis

The first step in keyword research and expanding your organic reach is to identify current rankings that can and should be improved.

Here are some examples of terms Moz’s Keyword Explorer reports Quip has top 50 rankings for:

• [teeth whitening]
• [sensitive teeth]
• [whiten teeth]
• [automatic toothbrush]
• [tooth sensitivity]
• [how often should you change your toothbrush]

These keywords represent “near-miss” opportunities for Quip, where it ranks on page two or three. Optimization and updates to existing pages could help Quip earn page one rankings and substantially more traffic.

For example, here are the first page results for [how often should you change your toothbrush]:

As expected, the results here are hyper-focused on answering the question how often a toothbrush needs to be changed, and there is a rich snippet that answers the question directly.

Now, look at Quip’s page where we can see there is room for improvement in answering searcher intent:

The title of the page isn’t optimized for the main query, and a simple title change could help this page earn more visibility. Moz reports 1.7k–2.9k monthly search volume for [how often should you change your toothbrush]:

This is a stark contrast to the volume reported by Moz for [why is a fresh brush head so important] which is “no data” (which usually means very small):

Quip’s page is already ranking on page two for [how often should you change your toothbrush], so optimizing the title could help the page crack the top ten.

Furthermore, the content on the page is not optimized either:

Rather than answering the question of how often to change a toothbrush concisely (like the page that has earned the rich snippet), the content is closer to ad copy. Putting a direct, clear answer to this question at the beginning of the content could help this page rank better.

And that’s just one query and one page!

Keyword research should uncover these types of opportunities, and with Moz’s Keyword Explorer you can also find ideas for new content through “Keyword Suggestions.”

Using Quip as an example again, we can plug in their seed keyword [toothbrush] and get multiple suggestions (MSV = monthly search volume):

• [toothbrush holder] – MSV: 6.5k–9.3k
• [how to properly brush your teeth] – MSV: 851–1.7k
• [toothbrush cover] – MSV: 851–1.7k
• [toothbrush for braces] – MSV: 501–850
• [electric toothbrush holder] – MSV: 501–850
• [toothbrush timer] – MSV: 501–850
• [soft vs medium toothbrush] – MSV: 201–500
• [electric toothbrush for braces] – MSV: 201–500
• [electric toothbrush head holder] – MSV: 101–200
• [toothbrush delivery] – MSV: 101–200

Using this method, we can extrapolate one seed keyword into ten more granular and related long-tail keywords — each of which may require a new page.

This handful of terms generates a wealth of content ideas and different ways Quip could address pain points and reach its audience.

Another source for keyword opportunities and inspiration are your competitors. For Quip, one of its strongest competitors is Colgate, a household name brand. Moz demonstrates the difference in market position with its “Competitor Overlap” tool:

Although many of Colgate’s keywords aren’t relevant to Quip, there are still opportunities to be gleaned here for Quip. One such example is [sensitive teeth], where Colgate is ranking top five, but Quip is on page two:

While many of the other keywords show Quip is ranking outside of the top 50, this is an opportunity that Quip could potentially capitalize on.

To analyze this opportunity, let’s look at the actual search results first.

It’s immediately clear that the intent here is informational — something to note when we examine Quip’s page. Also, scrolling down we can see that Colgate has two pages ranking on page one:

One of these pages is from a separate domain for hygienists and other dental professionals, but it still carries the Colgate brand and further demonstrates Colgate’s investment into this query, signaling this is a quality opportunity.

The next step for investigating this opportunity is to examine Colgate’s ranking page and check if it’s realistic for Quip to beat what they have. Here is Colgate’s page:

This page is essentially a blog post:

If this page is ranking, it’s reasonable to believe that Quip could craft something that would be at least as good of a result for the query, and there is room for improvement in terms of design and formatting.

One thing to note, that is likely helping this page rank is the clear definition of “tooth sensitivity” and signs and symptoms listed on the sidebar:

Now, let’s look at Quip’s page:

This appears to be a blog-esque page as well.

This page offers solid information on sensitive teeth, which matches the queries intent and is likely why the pages ranks on page two. However, the page appears to be targeted at [tooth sensitivity]:

This is another great keyword opportunity for Quip:

However, this should be a secondary opportunity to [sensitive teeth] and should be mixed in to the copy on the page, but not the focal point. Also, the page one results for [tooth sensitivity] are largely the same as those for [sensitive teeth], including Colgate’s page:

So, one optimization Quip could make to the page could be to change some of these headers to include “sensitive teeth” (also, these are all H3s, and the page has no H2s, which isn’t optimal). Quip could draw inspiration from the questions that Google lists in the “People also ask” section of the SERP:

Also, a quick takeaway I had was that Quip’s page does not lead off with a definition of sensitive teeth or tooth sensitivity. We learned from Colgate’s page that quickly defining the term (sensitive teeth) and the associated symptoms could help the page rank better.

These are just a few of the options available to Quip to optimize its page, and as mentioned before, an investment into a sleek, easy to digest design could separate its page from the pack.

If Quip were able to move its page onto the first page of search results for [sensitive teeth], the increase in organic traffic could be significant. And [sensitive teeth] is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg — there is a wealth of opportunity with associated keywords, that Quip would rank well for also:

Executing well on these content opportunities and repeating the process over and over for relevant keywords is how you scale keyword-focused content that will perform well in search and bring more organic visitors.

Google won’t rank your page highly for simply existing. If you want to rank in Google search, start by creating a page that provides the best result for searchers and deserves to rank.

At Page One Power, we’ve leveraged this strategy and seen great results for clients. Here is an example of a client that is primarily focused on content creation and their corresponding growth in organic sessions:

These pages (15) were all published in January, and you can see that roughly one month after publishing, these pages started taking off in terms of organic traffic. This is because these pages are backed by keyword research and optimized so well that even with few external backlinks, they can rank on or near page one for multiple queries.

However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore backlinks and link acquisition. While the above pages rank well without many links, the domain they’re on has a substantial backlink profile cultivated through strategic link building. Securing relevant, worthwhile links is still a major part of a successful SEO campaign.

Earning real links and credibility

The other half of this complicated “it’s content and it’s links” equation is… links, and while it seems straightforward, successful execution is rather difficult — particularly when it comes to link acquisition.

While there are tools and processes that can increase organization and efficiency, at the end of the day link building takes a lot of time and a lot of work — you must manually email real website owners to earn real links. As Matt Cutts famously said (we miss you, Matt!), “Link building is sweat, plus creativity.”

However, you can greatly improve your chances for success with link acquisition if you identify which pages (existing or need to be created) on your site are link-worthy and promote them for links.

Spoiler alert: these are not your “money pages.”

Converting pages certainly have a function on your website, but they typically have limited opportunities when it comes to link acquisition. Instead, you can support these pages — and other content on your site — through internal linking from more linkable pages.

So how do you identify linkable assets? Well, there are some general characteristics that directly correlate with link-worthiness:

• Usefulness — concept explanation, step-by-step guide, collection of resources and advice, etc.
• Uniqueness — a new or fresh perspective on an established topic, original research or data, prevailing coverage of a newsworthy event, etc.
• Entertaining — novel game or quiz, humorous take on a typically serious subject, interactive tool, etc.

Along with these characteristics, you also need to consider the size of your potential linking audience. The further you move down your marketing funnel, the smaller the linking audience size; converting pages are traditionally difficult to earn links to because they serve a small audience of people looking to buy.

Instead, focus on assets that exist at the top of your marketing funnel and serve large audiences looking for information. The keywords associated with these pages are typically head terms that may prove difficult to rank for, but if your content is strong you can still earn links through targeted, manual outreach to relevant sites.

Ironically, your most linkable pages aren’t always the pages that will rank well for you in search, since larger audiences also mean more competition. However, using linkable assets to secure worthwhile links will help grow the authority and credibility of your brand and domain, supporting rankings for your keyword-focused and converting pages.

Going back to our Quip example, we see a page on their site that has the potential to be a linkable asset:

Currently, this page is geared more towards conversions which hurts linkability. However, Quip could easily move conversion-focused elements to another page and internally link from this page to maintain a pathway to conversion while improving link-worthiness.

To truly make this page a linkable asset, Quip would need add depth on the topic of how to brush your teeth and hone in on a more specific audience. As the page currently stands, it is targeted at everybody who brushes, but to make the page more linkable Quip could focus on a specific age group (toddlers, young children, elderly, etc.) or perhaps a profession or group who works odd hours or travels frequently and doesn’t have the convenience of brushing at home. An increased focus on audience will help with linkability, making this page one that shares useful information in a way that is unique and entertaining.

It also happens that [how to properly brush your teeth] was one of the opportunities we identified earlier in our (light) keyword research, so this could be a great opportunity to earn keyword rankings and links!

Putting it all together and simplifying our message

Now before we put it all together and solve SEO once and for all, you might be thinking, “What about technical and on-page SEO?!?”

And to that, I say, well those are just makeu…just kidding!

Technical and on-page elements play a major role in successful SEO and getting these elements wrong can derail the success of any content you create and undermine the equity of the links you secure.

Let’s be clear: if Google can’t crawl your site, you’re not showing up in its search results.

However, I categorize these optimizations under the umbrella of “content” within our content and links formula. If you’re not considering how search engines consume your content, along with human readers, then your content likely won’t perform well in the results of said search engines.

Rather than dive into the deep and complex world of technical and on-page SEO in this post, I recommend reading some of the great resources here on Moz to ensure your content is set up for success from a technical standpoint.

But to review the strategy I’ve laid out here, to be successful in search you need to:

1. Research your keywords and niche – Having the right content for your audience is critical to earning search visibility and business. Before you start creating content or updating existing pages, make sure you take the time to research your keywords and niche to better understand your current rankings and position in the search marketplace.
2. Analyze and expand keyword opportunities – Beyond understanding your current rankings, you also need to identify and prioritize available keyword opportunities. Using tools like Moz you can uncover hidden opportunities with long-tail and related key terms, ensuring your content strategy is targeting your best opportunities.
3. Craft strategic content that serves your search goals – Using keyword analysis to inform content creation, you can build content that addresses underserved queries and helpful guides that attract links. An essential aspect of a successful content plan is balancing keyword-focused content with broader, more linkable content and ensuring you’re addressing both SEO goals.
4. Promote your pages for relevant links – Billions of new pages go live each day, and without proper promotion, even the best pages will be buried in the sea of content online. Strategic promotion of your pages will net you powerful backlinks and extra visibility from your audience.

Again, these concepts seem simple but are quite difficult to execute well. However, by drilling down to the two main factors for search visibility — content and links — you can avoid being overwhelmed or focusing on the wrong priorities and instead put all your efforts into the strategies that will provide the most SEO impact.

However, along with refocusing our own efforts, as SEOs we also need to simplify our message to the uninitiated (or as they’re also known, the other 99% of the population). I know from personal experience how quickly the eyes start to glaze over when I get into the nitty-gritty of SEO, so I typically pivot to focus on the most basic concepts: content and links.

People can wrap their minds around the simple process of creating good pages that answer a specific set of questions and then promoting those pages to acquire endorsements (backlinks). I suggest we embrace this same approach, on a broader scale, as an industry.

When we talk to potential and existing clients, colleagues, executives, etc., let’s keep things simple. If we focus on the two concepts that are the easiest to explain we will get better understanding and more buy-in for the work we do (it also happens that these two factors are the biggest drivers of success).

So go out, shout it from the rooftops — CONTENT AND LINKS — and let’s continue to do the work that will drive positive results for our websites and help secure SEOs rightful seat at the marketing table.

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!

9 Reports Every SEO Needs: Introducing Custom Report Templates in Moz Pro

Posted by rachelgooodmanmoore

Reporting is central to our jobs as SEOs and helps us to communicate the value of our work to stakeholders and clients alike. Without good reporting, it can be a challenge to illustrate our success in search. We know how important it is — but it can also be painful and clunky.

Am I the only one who moderately dreads what we might call “reporting season?” The timing of that season might vary — based on who you work for, what a reporting cycle looks like, and other factors — but ultimately it’s the time of year when we have to get our ducks in a row and report to our stakeholders: not only on the SEO progress that we’ve made, but what that progress equates to in terms of real-world implications.

For me, one of the biggest time-black-holes when building reports is the fact that I’m reaching to collect data from disparate sources to paint a full picture of my SEO work. I find myself grabbing screenshots from various tools, pulling them into a template that I’ve built, and wishing I had a streamlined process for it all … then, repeating the exact same data-wild-goose-chase-and-template-building-acrobatics for each site I track. Ugh.

A solution (which I admit I’m a totally biased fan of) has launched in Moz Pro this week. Within a Campaign’s custom reports, we’ve introduced nine custom report templates to help you report on what matters to your stakeholders. Just select a template and dive into the insights.

These templates are rooted in workflows that are popular within the Moz Pro app. Our team also conducted tons of customer interviews to identify what kinds of templates we needed to build. While you can edit templates to suit your individual needs, they come pre-loaded with descriptive insights and data that stands on its own to tell a story. If you have a Medium-level plan or higher, you’ve already got instant access to these templates.

Get started with your templates

Use one of Moz’s new report templates to pull together the data you need—depending on exactly what your reader needs to know. Choose from one of our nine most popular templates to tell your SEO story. Here’s what we’ve got:

1. Competitive Analysis Overview Report

The Competitive Analysis Overview Report provides a brief overview of how your site compares to your competitors. It highlights competitive metrics like search visibility and compares your site’s featured snippets, link profiles, and tracked keywords to your competitors. As an overview report, it will help quickly show stakeholders how your site compares to your competitors.

2. Full Competitive Analysis Report

The Full Competitive Analysis Report gives a complete and thorough view of how your site stacks up against the competition. More in-depth and detailed than the aforementioned overview report, this one is perfect for stakeholders who want to know all the details about your SEO competition. It highlights competitive metrics, as well as in-depth comparisons across links, keyword performance, Domain Authority, and more.

3. Campaign Overview Report

The Campaign Overview Report is perfect to provide to any team members or clients who want exactly that—an overview of your site’s Campaign. The report includes a view of your Campaign dashboard, Search Visibility, and a look at site health, link data, and traffic.

4. Link Analysis Report

The Link Analysis Report is ideal to pass along to any stakeholder who is particularly interested in link data. It provides an in-depth look at your own site’s links, as well as how your site stacks up against its competitors when it comes to link profiles. This report includes many important link metrics, including discovered & lost links, linking domains, anchor text, Domain Authority, and more.

5. Rankings Analysis Report

The Rankings Analysis Report will be great for anyone who is curious about your site’s ranking performance, especially when it comes to top keywords. The report highlights a high-level overview of keyword performance, and then digs in to best- and worst-performing keywords, Search Visibility, traffic, and keyword opportunities.

6. Ranking Opportunities Report

The Ranking Opportunities Report is ideal for the stakeholder in your life who wants to know what the next steps might be for your keyword strategy. This report identifies some of the top keyword opportunities pulled in from Keyword Explorer and your Campaign, based on your site’s current performance. By highlighting keywords your site is already ranking for that you aren’t tracking, and opportunities to rank for new keywords, this is an easy report to pass along for consideration around future keyword strategy.

7. Full Site Audit Report

The Full Site Audit Report provides a very thorough, in-depth look at your site’s health. This report is ideal for any stakeholder or client who wants to know precisely how the site is doing and what outstanding work still needs to be done. Based on your site crawl in Moz Pro, this highlights actionable insights such as new and critical issues, crawler warnings, redirect issues, and metadata/content issues.

8. Quick Site Audit Report

The Quick Site Audit Report is a briefer version of the aforementioned Full Site Audit Report. This report is easily digestible for any stakeholders who just want a high-level view of your site’s health and link profile. It highlights top-level crawl metrics, new site crawl issues, and quick link metrics.

9. Search Visibility Report



The Search Visibility Report is ideal for a client or boss who just wants to know the answer to the age-old question: “How visible is my site?” This report provides a quick overview of your Moz Campaign before diving into trending search visibility and a comparison against competitors. Provide a clear answer to the question of how visible your site is with this concise report.

Try custom report templates now!

Feeling ready to jump into year-end reporting? We’re looking forward to your feedback. How do the new templates fit into your reporting workflows? Got other ideas on how we can continue to improve your reporting? Please feel free to share in the comments!

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!

The Content Distribution Playbook – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by rosssimmonds

If you’re one of the many marketers that shares your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked before calling it good and moving on, this Whiteboard Friday is for you. In a super actionable follow-up to his MozCon 2019 presentation, Ross Simmonds reveals how to go beyond the mediocre when it comes to your content distribution plan, reaching new audiences in just the right place at the right time.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What’s going on, Whiteboard Friday fans? My name is Ross Simmonds from Foundation Marketing, and today we’re going to be talking about how to develop a content distribution playbook that will drive meaningful and measurable results for your business. 

What is content distribution and why does it matter?

First and foremost, content distribution is the thing that you need to be thinking about if you want to combat the fact that it is becoming harder and harder than ever before to stand out as a content marketer, as a storyteller, and as a content creator in today’s landscape. It’s getting more and more difficult to rank for content. It’s getting more and more difficult to get organic reach through our social media channels, and that is why content distribution is so important.

You are facing a time when organic reach on social continues to drop more and more, where the ability to rank is becoming even more difficult because you’re competing against more ad space. You’re competing against more featured snippets. You’re competing against more companies. Because content marketers have screamed at the top of their lungs that content is king and the world has listened, it is becoming more and more difficult to stand out amongst the noise.

Most marketers have embraced this idea because for years we screamed, “Content is king, create more content,”and that is what the world has done. Most marketers start by just creating content, hoping that traffic will come, hoping that reach will come, and hoping that as a result of them creating content that profits will follow. In reality, the profits never come because they miss a significant piece of the puzzle, which is content distribution.

In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about how you can distribute your content more effectively across a few different channels, a few different strategies, and how you can take your content to the next level. 

There are two things that you can spend when it comes to content distribution: 

1. You can spend time, 
2. or you can spend money. 

In today’s video, we’re going to talk about exactly how you can distribute your content so when you write that blog post, you write that landing page, when you create that e-book, you create that infographic, whatever resource you’ve developed, you can ensure that that content is reaching the right people on the right channel at the right time.

◷: Owned channels

So how can you do it? We all have heard of owned channels. Owned channels are things that you own as a business, as a brand, as an organization. These are things that you can do without question probably today. 

Email marketing

For example, email marketing, it’s very likely that you have an email list of some sort. You can distribute your content to those people. 

In-app notifications

Let’s say you have a website that offers people a solution or a service directly inside of the site. Say it’s software as a service or something of that nature. If people are logging in on a regular basis to access your product, you can use in-app notifications to let those people know that you’ve launched a blog post. Or better yet, if you have a mobile app of any sort, you can do the same thing. You can use your app to let people know that you just launched a new piece of content.

Social channels

You have social media channels. Let’s say you have Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Share that content to your heart’s desire on those channels as well. 

On-site banner

If you have a website, you can update an on-site banner, at the top or in the bottom right, that is letting people know who visit your site that you have a new piece of content. Let them know. They want to know that you’re creating new content. So why not advise them that you have done such?

Sales outreach

If you have a sales team of any sort, let’s say you’re in B2B and you have a sales team, one of the most effective ways is to empower your sales team, to communicate to your sales team that you have developed a new piece of content so they can follow up with leads, they can nurture those existing relationships and even existing customers to let them know that a new piece of content has gone live. That one-to-one connection can be huge. 

◷: Social media / other channels

So when you’ve done all of that, what else can you do? You can go into social media. You can go into other channels. Again, you can spend time distributing your content into these places where your audience is spending time as well. 

Social channels and groups

So if you have a Twitter account, you can send out tweets. If you have a Facebook page, of course you can put up status updates.

If you have a LinkedIn page, you can put up a status update as well. These three things are typically what most organizations do in that Phase 2, but that’s not where it ends. You can go deeper. You can do more. You can go into Facebook groups, whether as a page or as a human, and share your content into these communities as well. You can let them know that you’ve published a new piece of research and you would love for them to check it out.

Or you’re in these groups and you’re looking and waiting and looking for somebody to ask a question that your blog post, your research has answered, and then you respond to that question with the content that you’ve developed. Or you do the same exact thing in a LinkedIn group. LinkedIn groups are an awesome opportunity for you to go in and start seeding your content as well.

Medium

Or you go to Medium.com. You repurpose the content that you’ve developed. You launch it on Medium.com as well. There’s an import function on Medium where you can import your content, get a canonical link directly to your site, and you can share that on Medium as well. Medium.com is a great distribution channel, because you can seed that content to publications as well.

When your content is going to these publications, they already have existing subscribers, and those subscribers get notified that there’s a new piece being submitted by you. When they see it, that’s a new audience that you wouldn’t have reached before using any of those owned channels, because these are people who you wouldn’t have had access to before. So you want to take advantage of that as well.

Keep in mind you don’t always have to upload even the full article. You can upload a snippet and then have a CTA at the bottom, a call to action driving people to the article on your website. 

LinkedIn video

You can use LinkedIn video to do the same thing. Very similar concept. Imagine you have a LinkedIn video. You look into the camera and you say to your connections, “Hey, everyone, we just launched a new research piece that is breaking down X, Y, and Z, ABC. I would love for you to check it out. Check the link below.”

If you created that video and you shared it on your LinkedIn, your connections are going to see this video, and it’s going to break their pattern of what they typically see on LinkedIn. So when they see it, they’re going to engage, they’re going to watch that video, they’re going to click the link, and you’re going to get more reach for the content that you developed in the past. 

Slack communities

Slack communities are another great place to distribute your content. Slack isn’t just a great channel to build internal culture and communicate as an internal team.

There are actual communities, people who are passionate about photography, people who are passionate about e-commerce, people who are passionate about SEO. There are Slack communities today where these people are gathering to talk about their passions and their interests, and you can do the same thing that you would do in Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups in these various Slack communities. 

Instagram / Facebook stories

Instagram stories and Facebook stories, awesome, great channel for you to also distribute your content. You can add a link to these stories that you’re uploading, and you can simply say, “Swipe up if you want to get access to our latest research.” Or you can design a graphic that will say, “Swipe up to get our latest post.” People who are following you on these channels will swipe up. They’ll land on your article, they’ll land on your research, and they’ll consume that content as well. 

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse, you have the opportunity now to upload an article directly to LinkedIn, press Publish, and again let it soar. You can use the same strategies that I talked about around Medium.com on LinkedIn, and you can drive results. 

Quora

Quora, it’s like a question-and-answer site, like Yahoo Answers back in the day, except with a way better design. You can go into Quora, and you can share just a native link and tag it with relevant content, relevant topics, and things of that nature. Or you can find a few questions that are related to the topic that you’ve covered in your post, in your research, whatever asset you developed, and you can add value to that person who asked that question, and within that value you make a reference to the link and the article that you developed in the past as well.

SlideShare

SlideShare, one of OGs of B2B marketing. You can go to SlideShare, upload a presentation version of the content that you’ve already developed. Let’s say you’ve written a long blog post. Why not take the assets within that blog post, turn them into a PDF, a SlideShare presentation, upload them there, and then distribute it through that network as well? Once you have those SlideShare presentations put together, what’s great about it is you can take those graphics and you can share them on Twitter, you can share them on Facebook, LinkedIn, you can put them into Medium.com, and distribute them further there as well.

Forums

You can go into forums. Let’s think about it. If your audience is spending time in a forum communicating about something, why not go into these communities and into these forums and connect with them on a one-to-one basis as well? There’s a huge opportunity in forums and communities that exist online, where you can build trust and you can seed your content into these communities where your audience is spending time.

A lot of people think forums are dead. They could never be more alive. If you type in your audience, your industry forums, I promise you you’ll probably come across something that will surprise you as an opportunity to seed your content. 

Reddit communities

Reddit communities, a lot of marketers get the heebie-jeebies when I talk about Reddit. They’re all like, “Marketers on Reddit? That doesn’t work. Reddit hates marketing.” I get it.

I understand what you’re thinking. But what they actually hate is the fact that marketers don’t get Reddit. Marketers don’t get the fact that Redditors just want value. If you can deliver value to people using Reddit, whether it’s through a post or in the comments, they will meet you with happiness and joy. They will be grateful of the fact that you’ve added value to their communities, to their subreddits, and they will reward you with upvotes, with traffic and clicks, and maybe even a few leads or a customer or two in the process.

Do not ignore Reddit as being the site that you can’t embrace. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, Redditors can like your content. Redditors will like your content if you go in with value first. 

Imgur

Sites like Imgur, another great distribution channel. Take some of those slides that you developed in the past, upload them to Imgur, and let them sing there as well.

There are way more distribution channels and distribution techniques that you can use that go beyond even what I’ve described here. But these just a few examples that show you that the power of distribution doesn’t exist just in a couple posts. It exists in actually spending the time, taking the time to distribute your stories and distribute your content across a wide variety of different channels.

$: Paid marketing

That’s spending time. You can also spend money through paid marketing. Paid marketing is also an opportunity for any brand to distribute their stories. 

Remarketing

First and foremost, you can use remarketing. Let’s talk about that email list that you’ve already developed. If you take that email list and you run remarketing ads to those people on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, you can reach those people and get them engaged with new content that you’ve developed.

Let’s say somebody is already visiting your page. People are visiting your website. They’re visiting your content. Why not run remarketing ads to those people who already demonstrate some type of interest to get them back on your site, back engaged with your content, and tell your story to them as well? Another great opportunity is if you’ve leveraged video in any way, you can do remarketing ads on Facebook to people who have watched 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever it may be to your content as well.

Quora ads

Then one of the opportunities that is definitely underrated is the fact that Quora now offers advertising as well. You can run ads on Quora to people who are asking or looking at questions related to your industry, related to the content that you’ve developed, and get your content in front of them as well. 

Influencer marketing

Then influencers, you can do sponsored content. You can reach out to these influencers and have them talk about your stories, talk about your content, and have them share it as well on behalf of the fact that you’ve developed something new and something that is interesting.

Think differently & rise above mediocrity

When I talk about influencer marketing, I talk about Reddit, I talk about SlideShare, I talk about LinkedIn video, I talk about Slack communities, a lot of marketers will quickly say, “I don’t think this is for me. I think this is too much. I think that this is too much manual work. I think this is too many niche communities. I think this is a little bit too much for my brand.“

I get that. I understand your mindset, but this is what you need to recognize. Most marketers are going through this process. If you think that by distributing your content into the communities that your audience is spending time is just a little bit off brand or it doesn’t really suit you, that’s what most marketers already think. Most marketers already think that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is all they need to do to share their stories, get their content out there, and call it a day.

If you want to be like most marketers, you’re going to get what most marketers receive as a result, which is mediocre results. So I push you to think differently. I push you to push yourself to not be like most marketers, not to go down the path of mediocrity, and instead start looking for ways that you can either invest time or money into channels, into opportunities, and into communities where you can spread your content with value first and ultimately generate results for your business at the end of all of it.

So I hope that you can use this to uncover for yourself a content distribution playbook that works for your brand. Whether you’re in B2C or you’re in B2B, it doesn’t matter. You have to understand where your audience is spending time, understand how you can seed your content into these different spaces and unlock the power of content distribution. My name is Ross Simmonds.

I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter, at TheCoolestCool, or hit me up any other way. I’m on every other channel. Of course I am. I love social. I love digital. I’m everywhere that you could find me, so feel free to reach out.

I hope you enjoyed this video and you can use it to give your content more reach and ultimately drive meaningful and measurable results for your business. Thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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If Ross’s Whiteboard Friday left you feeling energized and inspired to try new things with your content marketing, you’ll love his full MozCon 2019 talk — Keywords Aren’t Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing — available in our recently released video bundle. Learn how to use many of these same distribution channels as idea factories for your content, plus access 26 additional future-focused SEO topics from our top-notch speakers:

Grab the sessions now!

And don’t be shy — share the learnings with your whole team, preferably with snacks. It’s what video was made for!

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Building a Local Marketing Strategy for Franchises [Guide Sneak Peek]

Posted by MiriamEllis

A roller is a good tool for painting a house in big, broad strokes. But creating a masterpiece of art requires finer brushes.

Franchises face a unique challenge here: they know how to market at the national level, but often lack the detailed tools for reaching their local customers at a granular level. Google has stated that localization of search results is the greatest form of personalization they currently engage in. For franchises, where local sensitivity is lacking in the marketing plan, opportunity is being lost.

Don’t settle for this. Know that less-motivated competitors are losing this opportunity, too. This creates a large, blank canvas for a franchise you’re marketing to paint a new picture which takes state, regional and community nuances into account.

One famous example of localized marketing is McDonald’s offering SPAM in Hawaii and green chile cheeseburgers in New Mexico. For your franchise, it could revolve around customizing content for regional language differences (sub sandwich vs. po’ boy), or knowing when to promote seasonal merchandise at which locations (California vs. North Dakota weather).

What you need is marketing plan capable of scaling from national priorities to hyperlocal customers. Want the complete strategy now?

Get The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing

From paint roller to sumi-e brush: A franchise marketing plan

Today, we’ll explore the basics of getting to know your local customers, so that your national franchise can customize how you serve them. Build a strategy around the following:

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Your step-by-step guide to how to create a local marketing strategy

Finding your target audience

First, you need to understand who your customers are. If you have an existing franchise, you can do this fairly easily by simply observing or asking them. You might run an online survey, or you might do some quick spot interviews right in your place of business. What you want to work out is:

• Demographics: What are the common ages, genders, income levels, and other relevant characteristics of your customers.
  
• Psychographics: How do your customers think? What are their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs as they relate to your franchise?
  
• Pain points: What problems do your customers have that you could potentially solve? Maybe they want to eat healthy but have no time. Maybe they want a gym that will help them become better athletes.
  
• Consumption habits: How do your customers decide where to buy? Are they online? Do they have smartphones? Do they prioritize reviews/recommendations? Do they like video, or podcasts? Which social platforms do they frequent? What events do they attend?

Understanding the customer’s journey

Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about what we call the “customer journey.” This is just another way of saying we want to understand what happens between us and customers before they know our brand exist, after they discover it, up until they buy, and then beyond.

The best way to do this is to divide that experience into steps, understanding that some people will drop out of the process at every stage. Most corporate franchisers will recognize this as the “sales funnel.”

Here’s a simplified version of a sales funnel. Take the time to determine what happens at each stage in your own customers’ experience, and you’ll be a long way toward understanding how you can influence and help customers from one step to the next. 

Mapping a sales funnel



1. Awareness
   This is where a customer first discovers you exist and starts to form an opinion about you based on what they see. Often, this is managed by the activities being conducted by corporate franchisors (like a national TV ad campaign). But, it can also happen through franchisee-generated references and referrals (like a searcher discovering you via a Google Maps search on their phone).
   
2. Discovery
   This is where a customer has already absorbed information about you and your product and begins to actively try to learn more about it. This stage often encompasses online research. It local word-of-mouth queries between potential customers and their friends and family.
   
3. Evaluation
   This is where a customer has decided to probably purchase something similar to what you offer, but is trying to decide where to buy. They might stop by your business in this stage, or they may give you a call. They might visit your online website or listings to look at your hours, or menu or price list. This stage is influenced by both franchisor and franchisee activity.
   
4. Intent
   Now the customer has decided to buy from you — which means they are your customer to lose. Franchisors can lose them at this stage through misinformation in the brand’s local business listings — like incorrect hours or bad directions that lead customers to the wrong place and cause them to give up. Franchisees could lose the business through poor on-premises experiences — like uncleanliness, long wait times, low inventory, pricing, or poor customer service.
   
5. Purchase
   This is where the transaction takes place, and is generally entirely within the control of the franchisee.
6. Loyalty
   This stage determines whether the customer will return to buy again, and whether or not they will become an advocate for your business, give you good reviews, or rate you poorly. Again, this is typically within the control of the franchisee unless the issue is a decision made at the franchisor level, such as product/menu, pricing or policy.

Sometimes this whole funnel can take place in the time it takes to spot a sign for ice cream and purchase a double scoop sundae. Sometimes it may take weeks, as your customers labor over the right financial advisor to choose.

Understanding how your customer is thinking and what goes into making the decision to use you is important and will guide decision-making and sales activity at both the franchisor and franchisee levels.

Scoping out the competition

Most brands have already worked out their positioning with regard to other national brands, so this one is mainly for franchisees. Take some time to figure out who your direct competitors are in your local market. They might be other big brands, but there will also probably be local SMBs that are not on the corporate franchisor’s radar.

Understand:

• Where they are stronger or weaker, compared to you
• Who they attract, compared to you
• How they are marketing their business

Having this information should help you to position yourself to win a bigger piece of the local pie. Is your competitor a gym that has better weight training and machines than you? Are they marketing mainly to younger men and athletes? Are they advertising on local radio? Perhaps you should double down on your cardio and yoga classes and try to attract more women or older clientele. Maybe adding some nutrition classes will encourage people trying to lose weight. And so on.

Building your authority

Once you’ve figured out who your customers are, how they buy, and how you plan to position your franchise in the local market, it’s time to put that plan into action by creating some content to support it.

For franchisors at corporate this means putting in the time to create an informative, interesting brand website with dynamic, engaging content. Your content should aim to educate, inform and/or entertain, rather than only sell. The more points of engagement your website offers to customers, the more reason they have to read, share, and link to your content, building authority. Your most valuable content will, of course, be the elements or pages that directly convert visitors into customers.

The content you put out over social media should follow this same precept, and lead back to your site as often as possible. Experts suggest that “60% of your posts you create should be engaging, timely content, 30% should be shared content, and only 10% should be promoting your products & services.” (Medium)

Invest some time in link building, in order to show Google’s algorithm how influential your site is and boost your authority and ranking.

Here are a few tips:

• Use Moz’s “Find Opportunities” feature to locate sites which are linking to your competitors and not you (yet).
• Look for people who are already referencing your site and ask them to hyperlink to you.
• Do a little PR or news-making and ask articles to link to your site. (This is something local franchisees can excel at.)
• Ask for links from local trade organizations, community organizations or commerce groups.
• Sponsor events and ask for a link.
• Start a scholarship and post it on local .edu sites.

Find out more about link building and unstructured citation and how to increase them in The Guide to Building Linked Unstructured Citations for Local SEO. 

Managing channels and budgets efficiently

Armed with good, authoritative content and an effective website, you’ll want to focus on how you manage all the channels available to you. This also includes managing your budget effectively. Most franchisor budgets are focused on the brand, and many franchisees don’t have a lot left over for local marketing, but here are some things to think about.

• Listings first: Your listings aren’t expensive to manage, but they give your marketing it’s biggest overall value — in some cases literally guiding people to your registers. Make great local business listings your top priority.
  
• Claim everything: Franchisors, be sure you are the one in control of your directory listings and social profiles. Complete your Google My Business profile and establish a presence on key social media and review platforms like Facebook and Yelp.
  
• Budget wisely: Do the strategy work to understand who your customers are and how best to reach them before you allocate your franchisor or franchisee marketing dollars.

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Pointillism for franchises

Adept franchise marketing requires the eye of Seurat: the ability to see life in hundreds of tiny points, making up a masterpiece. For you, franchise pointillism includes:

• Points representing each customer
• Points for the customer’s community, as a whole
• Points representing your locations on the map
• Points across the web where engagement happens
• Points offline where engagement happens
• Points of resource at all levels of the franchise, from franchisor to franchisee

Ready for expert help from Moz in seeing the finer points? Download your copy:

The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing

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The Marketing Tactics People Love (And Love to Hate) [Exclusive Survey]

Posted by amandamilligan

I’ve always considered the most challenging part about digital marketing to be prioritizing.

There are hundreds of tactics available to you, and it can be overwhelming to determine which of them are most appropriate for your marketing goals and your target audience. (And we all know what happens when you try to do too much — you do it all poorly.)

It’s critical to analyze the attitudes and behaviors of your current and potential clients/customers in order to best communicate with them in the methods they prefer.

But every now and then, it’s also helpful to zoom out and see how different marketing tactics are faring in general.

That’s why we surveyed 500+ Americans, asking them their thoughts on a variety of inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

Our objective was to better understand which tactics might be most effective on a broad scale and how people might feel about the various tactics they encounter.

Here are the biggest insights.

1. Very few channels “die”

Here’s the thing: The marketing industry experiences a constant ebb and flow. A tactic like email marketing becomes popular, everyone does it, the space becomes diluted, and then other tactics start to gain traction as people seek out “quieter” channels.

That doesn’t mean those tactics no longer work. It just means it becomes harder for your message to be seen because the volume of content out there for people to read is expansive. You have to work harder for it, have an intimate understanding of the information your audience wants, and test relentlessly.

Fractl surveyed 500+ people and asked them, “What is the most effective way for a company to attract your business?” The top result at 54.33% was “Appearing in search results when I’m looking for something I need or want.” The bottom result at 20.71% was “Being promoted or endorsed by an influencer on social media or elsewhere.”

The prime example of this revealed in this survey is that when asked what people think is the best way to attract their business, they picked snail mail (53.31%) over email (38.37%).

A couple of years ago, I’d never have thought to consider direct mail over email. It’s costly and people tend to find mail cumbersome, sending a lot of it straight to the trash.

But over time, some have started to feel that way about email. It’s hard to filter out all of the spam, discern between good pitches and bad ones, and just sort through what feels like an endless stream of messages. Direct mail has started to feel more like a novelty. In fact, 28% of our respondents said they’ve never clicked on the “Promotions” Gmail tab.

The takeaway: Don’t let anyone tell you a channel is dead (except for maybe MySpace and other sites that are abandoned.) Take advantage of “quiet” channels but only if it makes sense for your audience. Focus on them, and the appropriate channel for you will become more obvious.

For example, some brands are seeing success endeavoring into the print magazine realm, a “quieter” channel that appeals to their specific audiences. (And how many times have we heard that print is dead?)

2. Don’t seem intrusive

Privacy has certainly been a hot topic these days, but we shouldn’t be focusing solely on GDPR and other regulations (that’s where don’t be intrusive comes in). It’s not just about what’s legal — it’s also about what’s off-putting. Unsurprisingly, people don’t like to feel like they’re being oddly approached or “followed” online (or anywhere).

That probably explains why our survey found that of the 78% of people who said they notice retargeted ads, 56% have negative feelings toward them. That’s a pretty large amount of negativity for a tactic. In a separate question, 53% said they have ad blockers, choosing to bypass ads altogether.

Outbound marketing is about reaching out to people cold, but there’s an art to this.

Fractl surveyed 500+ people and asked them if they felt positively, negatively, or neutrally about different marketing tactics. Website and blog articles had the best sentiment. Website ads had the worst sentiment.

Traditional advertising achieves No. 2 on the sentiment scale, and my interpretation of this is that people are so used to seeing advertisements on television and hearing them on the radio that it no longer has an intrusive vibe.

Email, sponsored social media posts, and ads still can carry that feeling, though.

Does that mean you shouldn’t utilize these tactics? Of course not. It does mean you have to be very strategy in applying them, though, or you’ll turn off your audience almost immediately.

The takeaway: When utilizing outbound strategies, make sure the recipients understand why they’re receiving the information and ensure what you’re providing speaks to a want or need of theirs. Make the value you’re providing immediately clear.

For example, I made a reservation at an Italian restaurant called Osteria Morini about a year ago. I received an email from them with the subject line “Fall Pasta Classes are Here!” Even though I didn’t remember signing up for their updates, I opened the email because I knew exactly what they were trying to tell me and I was interested. I also just went back and checked; they’ve only emailed me once since the reservation. That’s an extreme — I don’t advocate you sending one email a year — but only send emails with real value.

3. Prioritize search

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that search engine optimization won out as one of the strongest strategies out there.

Notice in the first graph in the article that appearing in search results was listed as the best way to earn respondents’ business, and in the second graph, you’ll see that reading the type of content you’d find on those results carries the best sentiment.

Not only is it effective, but it’s also a common practice.

Fractl surveyed 500+ people and asked them, “In the last week, have you done any of the following?” The top result at 89% was “Used online search to find information about a company or product.” The bottom result at 30.4% was “Read a company or brand blog post.”

Using search engines to find answers is essentially an inherent online experience; nearly everyone does it, and if you’re not showing up in the SERPs, you can be missing out on massive opportunities to increase your brand awareness, connect with potential clients/customers, and build authority in your space.

I’d say authority is a huge piece of why search is so important to people. When you rank highly, it’s almost like the online equivalent of being published — “people” (other sites and Google) — vouch for you.



Fractl surveyed 500+ people and asked them, “How do you learn about a company or product?” The top result at 86.4% was “Do an online search.” The bottom result at 15.8% was “Download content from their site.”

The authority piece is greater represented in the graph above. Reading customer reviews comes in right behind performing searches for how people learn more about a company or product, because people are constantly looking for authority and quality indicators in order to make the best decisions possible. (This is why E-A-T has been such a hot topic lately.)

The takeaway: SEO should always be a primary objective of your marketing team. If you’re in a competitive space and finding it difficult to rank for your target keywords, focus on the long-tail for queries that are directly relevant to your business. That way, you’re building authority with people who are already close to becoming customers/clients.

For example, when searching for daily planners, I noticed there are a few related keywords regarding daily planners that start as early as 5 a.m. The Better Dayplanner has an article that ranks for these types of keywords, meaning that people looking for something very specific will see them first. Sure, the search volume is low, but the traffic is as relevant as you can get.

Conclusion

After reading through this article (and reviewing the full inbound and outbound marketing survey), you can get a sense of which of your tactics may need modifying and which opportunities may be present. There’s no universally right or wrong answer; it’s highly dependent on the specifics of your brand and your target audience. But knowing general trends and preferences can help you shape your strategy so it’s as effective as possible.

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