How I Use Talkwalker Alerts for Journalist / PR Outreach
It’s funny how much more quickly you can refine your client marketing processes by continuously learning from marketing your own agency.. On that note, I’ve found I rely on alerts services to tell me about new mentions of our brand name, new links and new opportunities for outreach so much that it’s obviously inspired how […]
The post How I Use Talkwalker Alerts for Journalist / PR Outreach appeared first on SEOgadget.
Facebook Custom Audiences: 7 Strategies Marketers Can Start Using Today
Facebook Custom Audiences provides a way to engage customers, leads, and website visitors across devices, based on dozens of parameters, including search history and their stage in the buying cycle. Here’s how to start reaching more customers.
LinkDex ThinkTank – iGaming & Search Strategy #thinktank
If you want to know about competitive markets – read our coverage of the LinkDex iGaming ThinkTank Event
Post from Jackie Hole on State of Digital
LinkDex ThinkTank – iGaming & Search Strategy #thinktank
Does Authorship Affect Rankings? A Rand Fishkin Study
So as the title suggests, does Authorship have an affect on rankings? Here’s the experiment… Take an unauthoritative blog (mine) and an authoritative blogger (Rand Fishkin) and see what happens. The Back Story In June 2012 I contacted Rand Fishkin of Moz and asked him if we could set up
The post Does Authorship Affect Rankings? A Rand Fishkin Study appeared first on SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.
Sharenting – Is It What Your Child Would Want?
Two thirds of UK babies have been posted on a social media network within one hour of their birth. In this post I’m going to have a look at sharenting.
Post from Laura Phillips on State of Digital
Sharenting – Is It What Your Child Would Want?
Google Sochi Olympics Logo For Olympic Charter & Gay Rights
Minutes ago, Google posted their first Google Doodle, aka Google Logo, for the The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics that kicks off tonight. The logo shows the colors of the Rainbow Flag, also known as the LGBT pride flag…
Google’s “Olympic Charter” Logo Stands Up To Russia’s Anti-Gay Legislation
If you had any doubts over how Google feels about Russia’s legislation against gay “propaganda,” just go the Google home page. The company has started what will be a string of special logos for the Olympics with one that includes a quote stressing that the official Olympic Charter…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Penalized A Germany Agency & Their Clients For Link Schemes, Says Matt Cutts
Soon after Google has warned Germany SEOs about paid links and link schemes, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted on Twitter that they took action on a German agency and their clients for link schemes. Matt Cutts wrote, “this week we took action on a German agency’s…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The Demise of Individual Keyword Ranking Reports: 10 Superior SEO Stats – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.
Death of Keyword Ranking Reports – Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video Transcription
The problem with keyword ranking reports
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.
Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We’ve been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I’m talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They’re actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.
So we’ve all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.
The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don’t know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you’re missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that’s sending you those numbers.
Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.
Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete’s recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you’re ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.
So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it’s still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I’m going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.
Keywords
1. Rank Indexes
The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I’ll link to his post in the transcription below. It’s the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.
That is you can create keyword groups. So let’s say these were my keywords here — iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I’m tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I’m moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.
Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I’m not tracking are likely going up and down too. It’s not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They’re not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I’m capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.
It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I’m just tracking 1 index. That’s the number I’m reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that’s something that the client is going to care about.
Reach
2. Organic Traffic
3. Referral Traffic
4. Social Traffic
5. Total Traffic
A better metric to report to clients — reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that’s traditionally been the SEO’s realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I’m going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it’s getting shares and mentions, that means it’s going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It’s important to the client. It’s important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.
The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you’re doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it’s going to be shared more, and it’s a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it’s definitely something you want to report, because, again, it’s something that’s important to the client, and it’s something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you’re going to be much more highly rewarded, and you’re going to have a better experience.
Endorsements
6. Classic Links
7. Mentions
8. Press
9. Social Endorsements
So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that’s not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they’re really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it’s sort of like you’re reporting on your good marketing skills.
You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It’s a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mention.net. We actually rank all the new links that we’ve seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
— Majestic, Ahrefs.
The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.
KPIs
10. Business Objectives
Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it’s your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We’re often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There’s an entire sales team, there’s an entire website, there’s a development team.
But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn’t be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It’s not about claiming all the credit. It’s about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.
So keep measuring those keywords, but let’s say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That’s all everybody. Thank you very much.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
The Death of Keyword Ranking Reports? 10 Superior SEO Stats – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.
Death of Keyword Ranking Reports – Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video Transcription
The problem with keyword ranking reports
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.
Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We’ve been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I’m talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They’re actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.
So we’ve all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.
The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don’t know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you’re missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that’s sending you those numbers.
Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.
Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete’s recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you’re ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.
So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it’s still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I’m going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.
Keywords
1. Rank Indexes
The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I’ll link to his post in the transcription below. It’s the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.
That is you can create keyword groups. So let’s say these were my keywords here — iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I’m tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I’m moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.
Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I’m not tracking are likely going up and down too. It’s not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They’re not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I’m capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.
It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I’m just tracking 1 index. That’s the number I’m reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that’s something that the client is going to care about.
Reach
2. Organic Traffic
3. Referral Traffic
4. Social Traffic
5. Total Traffic
A better metric to report to clients — reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that’s traditionally been the SEO’s realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I’m going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it’s getting shares and mentions, that means it’s going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It’s important to the client. It’s important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.
The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you’re doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it’s going to be shared more, and it’s a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it’s definitely something you want to report, because, again, it’s something that’s important to the client, and it’s something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you’re going to be much more highly rewarded, and you’re going to have a better experience.
Endorsements
6. Classic Links
7. Mentions
8. Press
9. Social Endorsements
So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that’s not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they’re really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it’s sort of like you’re reporting on your good marketing skills.
You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It’s a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mentions.net. We actually rank all the new links that we’ve seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
— Majestic, Ahrefs.
The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.
KPIs
10. Business Objectives
Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it’s your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We’re often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There’s an entire sales team, there’s an entire website, there’s a development team.
But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn’t be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It’s not about claiming all the credit. It’s about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.
So keep measuring those keywords, but let’s say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That’s all everybody. Thank you very much.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 6, 2014
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Update: “When Do The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Now You CAN Ask Yahoo Yesterday, I wrote about my search experience in trying to find out when the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Doodle 4 Google 2014 Contest has Begun
The student who wins this year’s Doodle 4 Google contest will get his or her logo published on Google’s homepage for a day. The winner will also receive a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school.
Susan Wojcicki Replaces Salar Kamangar as Head of YouTube
Wojcicki pushed hard for Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006, when it seemed like a big risk. Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined Google in 2003 and became a senior vice president of advertising and commerce last year, will now run the ad business.
Google Starts Penalizing Sites for Rich Snippet Spam
Google is going after websites that misuse structured data markup. The new penalty affects websites that violate Google’s rich snippets guidelines, such as including authorship on home pages and reviews on pages where there are no reviews.
Update: “When Do The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Now You CAN Ask Yahoo
Yesterday I wrote about my search experience in trying to find out when the Olympics Opening Ceremonies will take place and when they’ll air in the U.S. That post was titled “When Do The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask Yahoo. An update is in order. Today, I…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Future of Search & Content Marketing: Expand Your Mindset
As niche search engines gain popularity, and as devices of choice like mobile and even Google Glass increase in usage, the ways we create and market content are expanding. More on this topic from Covario’s INFLECTIONPoint 2014 event.
Thinking Logically about Search, Social, Links and Engaging Your Audience
This post is an English translation of an interview I did with Анастасия Матвеева (Anastasia Matveeva), Editor of Searchengines.ru. The original Russian version is here. In both interviews we discuss future trends in search, linkbuilding vs. social, Google penalties, budget and resource limitations, and some advice to people considering a move to SEO or digital […]
Google taking action on Rich Snippet Spam
Barry at Search engine round table has reported how google is now sending out penalty notices to spammy rich snippets
read more
Bing to Showcase Winter Olympics Data in Search Results
The XXII Olympic Winter Games officially open on Friday and Bing is getting ready to celebrate in a big way. If you’re one of those who needs all the results and information on the athletes, Bing has all your Olympic information just a click away.
February 2014 Google Webmaster Report
Here is the monthly recap for all Google webmaster related topics for the past month. January was a pretty wild month with a pretty big update happening on January 8th and 9th, which Google did not confirm…