SEO News

Posted by DaisyQ

As a digital content marketer, your job is to grow traffic that converts into leads and sales. Some of us in this field are lucky to work with companies that sell sexy products. It makes it a little easier. But that’s not always the case. This post is for the other marketers that work in the not-so-sexy fields. I can speak to this audience because up until the spring of this year, I was the Digital Content and Marketing Manager at a synthetic oil company. I won’t fault you if you don’t know what that is — we’ll get to it shortly.

Grow blog traffic, stat

In 2016, I joined a company that sold synthetic oil (the stuff in your engine that you change once every couple of months). One of my tasks was to grow website traffic, and the best channel I landed on was the company blog.

The corporate e-commerce website (yep, we sold engine oil online at a premium) was a political minefield, so I had very limited sway. The blog was not. A group of three contributors would meet weekly and throw spur-of-the-moment posts together. It had a sporadic publishing schedule. The topics were dry (it was a blog about motor oil, after all) and blog traffic was correspondingly sluggish. The blog at the time had averaged under 5,000 sessions a month. Within a year, we doubled it. Within two years, we scaled it up seven times. By the time I left, we had surpassed 100,000 sessions within a month threshold.

How we operationalized our blog for triple-digit growth

Within a few months of assuming leadership of the blog, we overhauled the entire publishing process, doubled the team of volunteer contributors, implemented a quarterly editorial calendar, and search-optimized the heck out of our blog posts.

These are the tactics I used to increase our sessions, search visibility, and subscribers in two years.

1. No man is an island — neither is your blog

Our company had a communications team of great writers. Correction: great-but-swamped writers. So we had to look elsewhere. I reached out to departments across the company in hopes of finding people that liked writing enough to publish something once or twice a month. The writer assigned to help manage the blog would proof and edit posts before they were published, so that these contributors wouldn’t have to worry about writing perfectly.

Our efforts paid off; we grew the team from three contributors to a group of eight.

2. Build a flexible calendar, yo

We cut back on the spur-of-the-moment publishing process and focused on getting content out three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were our days, initially.

I created a shared doc where contributors could add post topics. Each quarter, we went through the ideas and picked topics that we would publish. Then I ran each idea through keyword research (via Moz Keyword Explorer and Keyword Planner) and social research (Buzzsumo). This process gave us direction on which messaging resonated with different audiences and how we would distribute our content. Sometimes we wrote posts to answer search queries. Other times, we had a customer group in mind, or an event our marketing team was sponsoring.

One of the events we sponsored was the Sturgis Rally. In this case, the post we created was purely for our social media and events support. Luckily, the rally promoted it, which brought an influx of their fans to our blog. An audience we were targeting with our event sponsorship, because they were likely to know and care about which brand of oil they used on their bikes.

3. Ditch the corporate speak — write like you

We weren’t corporate mouthpieces. We were a team of individuals, each with our own personalities. One contributor was a handyman and liked to fix things; I encouraged him to write from that perspective. Another writer, Andy, was known for his colorful commentary (“Quaker, it takes more than one goose flying north to make a summer!”) so he infused his posts with some of it, as well. Our racing and events writer became a mom, and her son made an appearance in some of her posts. Our approach did not always align with our brand’s masculine tone. Not a best practice (shrug) but it made our posts a lot more genuine. Each piece we wrote had a distinct voice.

Did this have a direct correlation to traffic growth? Probably not. However, it did encourage people to write more often, because the writing was a more natural process. This helped us churn out new content several times a week, which did have an impact.

4. Not all posts shall be optimized equally — that’s ok

Despite our best efforts, the blog was a volunteer project slated among a slew of tasks we all had. Thus, not all posts were created equal. Some posts pulled more than their fair share of traffic. We focused on on-page optimization for those each summer with the help of our interns. On a given blog post, we might have:

• Tweaked the blog post title
• Added a table of contents (with anchor links and bonus points for voice search phrases)
• Changed the URL (with a redirect, of course)
• Implemented alt tags
• Added crawl/human/voice search-friendly sub-heads
• Added videos (where relevant)
• Lengthened the post with relevant additional content

By implementing these tactics, several of our posts were able to gain Position 0 or 1 and garnered pretty significant spikes in traffic.

An example of a post that benefitted from some extra love was our engine flush blog post. It became our hallmark for how we could optimize good writing on a relevant topic into a high-ranking and ultra-SERP-friendly post.

5. Invest in AMP (if you haven’t already)

Not judging. Sometimes it takes months for larger organizations to adapt to changes that are for their benefit. When we implemented Accelerated Mobile Pages, it blew our search traffic through the roof.

But driving AMP traffic is not enough. We learned through the process that the standard AMP implementation strips out most aspects of the blog interface. As a result, we lost links to sign up for our blog emails or shop our e-commerce website (egad!). Even though our mobile traffic was up considerably, traffic to the website suffered or lagged.

Unfortunately, we had a custom-built design. Changes would have to be manual, and we didn’t have a budget or the resources for that. So we focused on doing a better job of highlighting our website and products within our posts.

6. Use social media to gather ideas

Yes, we promoted our posts on social, but we also used social media to curate ideas. Some ideas were published. As a thank you, we embedded shout-outs in the post and on social media to the source. It was a way of making our posts feel personal to our audience.

7. Add more pep to your blog email newsletter

Consistency is cool, but we tried to throw an element of surprise and delight into our blog emails. This meant taking time to create a clear and compelling reason why the recipient should open the email — not just listing new posts. Since there isn’t a lot of change month-to-month in the industry, we got creative. Each week I played with subject lines that were timely, relevant, fun, or attention-grabbing. I backed those up with a standard pre-header/teaser for consistency. Some subject lines we used included:

• Spit into this tube, we’ll build a car for you.
• Remember this classic SNL skit?
• Cruisers, Firearms, and Cash
• Can your truck go 500,000 miles?

I also used the blog newsletter as a channel to curate and promote older, evergreen posts when relevant, which helped bring fresh eyes to existing material.

8. Do one thing at a time

We split our goals into our top priorities each year, and focused on that. Once we achieved the first goal, we shifted focus to the next priority.

Year one, our focus was growing traffic from search engine results pages and social. To drive traffic, we created search-optimized, evergreen posts and chose relevant topics with significant search volume. We also held team sessions on beginner SEO where we went over best practices and gave the team access to easy keywording tools (I used Spyfu). We propelled our organic search traffic after a year of consistently following this protocol.

In year two, our goal was driving sign-ups. We created premium content and leveraged social to capture some of our fans through lead ads tied to blog content. These tactics drove our blog subscriber list up by 44%.

The third year, we focused on increasing the blog’s contribution to sales. We put our efforts into highlighting products in the blog email, publishing product-centric posts, and including very clear and compelling calls-to-action to shop our e-commerce website.

We gamified our team’s participation by establishing a blogger leaderboard and highlighting up-and-coming creators, or those whose posts were doing well across different metrics.

Could we have done this all concurrently? Probably. But that would have required more time and resources than what we had.

“Sexy” is what you make of it

For us, creating blog posts was something a team of volunteers contributed to between a myriad of other tasks that were actually on our job descriptions. But we grew the channel into a source of considerable traffic for the company. We rallied around an unsexy topic — synthetic oil — and turned it into a creative outlet that moved product. The project also sparked a team of empowered creators, stakeholders, and in-house champions across departments who were fired up by the results of a motley crew of writers, DIY-ers, and tinkerers.

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!

Posted by MrLukeCarthy

From e-commerce to listings sites to real estate and myriad verticals beyond, the data you can harness using custom extraction via crawler tools is worth its weight in revenue. With a greater granularity of data at your fingertips, you can uncover CRO and user experience insights that can inform your optimizations and transform your customer experience.

In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, we’re delighted to welcome Luke Carthy to share actionable wisdom from his recent MozCon 2019 presentation, Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler.

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz. What’s up? Wow, can I just say it’s incredible I’m here in Seattle right now doing a Whiteboard Friday? I can’t wait to share this cool stuff with you. So thanks for joining me.

My name is Luke Carthy. As you can probably tell, I’m from the UK, and I want to talk to you about custom extraction, specifically in the world of e-commerce. However, what I will say is this works beautifully well in many of the verticals as well, so real estate, in job listings. In fact, any website that can pretty much spit out HTML in a web crawler, you can use custom extraction.

What is custom extraction?

Let’s get started. What is custom extraction? Well, as I kind of just alluded to, it allows you, when you’re crawling using like Screaming Frog, for example, or DeepCrawl or whatever it is you want to use, it allows you to grab and extract specific parts of the HTML and export it to a file, a CSV, in Excel, or whatever you prefer.



As a principle, okay, great, but I’m going to give you some really good examples of how you can really leverage that. So e-commerce, right here we’ve got a product page that I’ve beautifully drawn, and everything in red is something that you can potentially extract. Although, as I said, anything on the page you can. These are just some good examples.

Product information + page performance

Think about this for a moment. You’re an e-commerce website, you’re a listing site, and of course you have listing pages, you have product pages. Wouldn’t it be great if you could very quickly, at scale, understand all of your products’ pricing, whether you’ve got stock, whether it’s got an image, whether it’s got a description, how many reviews it has, and of the reviews, what’s the aggregate score, whether it’s four stars, five stars, whatever it is?

That’s really powerful because you can then start to understand how good pages perform based upon the information that they have, based upon traffic, conversion, customer feedback, and all sorts of great stuff, all using custom extraction and spitting it out on say a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet file.

Competitive insights

But where it gets super powerful and you get a lot of insight from is when you start to turn the lens to your competitors and you think about ways in which you can get those really good insights. You may have three competitors. You may have some aspirational competitors. You may have a site that you don’t necessarily compete with, but you use them on a day-to-day basis or you admire how easy their site was to use, and you can go away and do that.

You can fire up a crawl, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t extract that same information from other competitors and see what’s going on, to see what pricing your competitors are selling an item at, do they have that in stock or not, what are the reviews like, what FAQs do people have, can you then leverage that in your own content. 

Examples of how to glean insights from custom extraction in e-commerce

Example 1: Price increases for products competitors don’t stock

Let me give you a perfect example of how I’ve managed to use this.

I’ve managed to identify that a competitor doesn’t have a specific product in stock, and, as a result of that, I’ve been able to increase our prices because they didn’t sell it. We did at that specific time, and we could identify the price point, the fact that they didn’t have any stock, and it was awesome. Think about that. Really powerful insights at massive amounts of scale. 

Example 2: Improving facets and filters on category pages

Another example I wanted to talk to you about. Category pages, again incredibly gorgeous illustrations. So category pages, we have filters, we have a category page, and just to switch things up a little bit I’ve also got like a listings page as well, so whether it’s, as I said, real estate, jobs, or anything in that environment.

If you think about the competition again for a second, there is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to extract via custom extraction the best filters that people use, the top filters, the top facets that people like to select and understand. So you can then see whether you’re using the same kind of combinations of features and facets on your site and maybe improve that.

Equally, you can then start to understand what specific features correlate to sales and performance and impacts and really start to improve the performance of how your website performs and behaves for your customers. The same thing applies to both environments here. 

If you are a listing site and you list jobs or you list products or classified ads, is it location filters that they have at the top? Is it availability? Is it reviews? Is it scores? You can crawl a number of your competitors across a number of areas and identify whether there’s a pattern, see a theme, and then see whether you can leverage and better that and take advantage of that. That’s a great way in which you can use it. 

Example 3: Recommendations, suggestions, and optimization

But on top of that and the one that I am most fascinated with is by far recommendations.

In the MozCon talk I did earlier I had a statistic, and I think I can recall it. It was 35% of what people buy on Amazon comes from recommendations, and 75% of what people watch on Netflix comes from suggestions, from recommendations.

Think about how powerful that is. You can crawl your own site, understand your own recommendations at scale, identify the stock of those recommendations, the price, whether they have images, in what order they are, and you can start to build a really vivid picture as to what products people associate with your items. You can do that on a global scale. You can crawl the entire of your product portfolio or your listing portfolio and get that. 



But again, back to powerful intelligence, your competitors, especially when you have competitors that might have multivariable facets or multivariable recommendations. What I mean by that is we’ve all seen sites where you’ve got multiple carousels. So you’ve got Recommended for You.

You might have People Also Bought, alternative suggestions. The more different types of recommendations you have, the more data you have, the more intelligence you have, the more insight you have. Going back to say a real estate example, you might be looking at a property here. It’s at this price. What is your main aspirational real estate competitor recommending to you that you may not be aware of?

Then you can think about whether the focus is on location, whether it’s on price, whether it’s on number of bedrooms, etc., and you can start to understand and behave how that can work and get some really powerful insights from that. 

Custom extraction is all about granular data at scale

To summarize and bring it all to a close, custom extraction is all about great granular data at scale. The really powerful thing about it is you can do all of this yourself, so there’s no need to have to have meetings, send elaborate emails, get permission from somebody.

Fire up Screaming Frog, fire up DeepCrawl, fire up whatever kind of crawler you want to use, have a look at custom extraction, and see how you can make your business more efficient, find out how you can get some really cool competitive insights, and yeah, hopefully, fingers crossed that works for you guys. Thank you very much.

Bonus resources:

• The Complete Guide to Screaming Frog Custom Extraction with XPath & Regex
• Custom Extraction in Screaming Frog: XPath and CSSPath
• How to Use Regex for SEO & Website Data Extraction

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

This is a meaty topic, we know — if you enjoyed this Whiteboard Friday and find yourself eager to know more, you’re in luck! Luke’s full presentation at MozCon 2019 goes even more in-depth into what custom extraction can do for you. Catch his talk along with 26 other forward-thinking topics from our amazing speakers in the MozCon video bundle:

Access the sessions now!

We recommend sharing them with your team and spreading the learning love. Happy watching!

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!