SEO News

When is a link a natural link?

The Google blog post in question prompted some SEOs to bemoan the fact that marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to earn organic traffic.

Hasn’t Google made online PR a more tricky proposition than offline?

If a company sends a product to a blogger, it does not dictate what that blogger writes. Indeed, bloggers often explicitly state that being sent free products does not in any way guarantee blog coverage.

There is no money changing hands in these situations either.

If a blogger becomes aware of a great product (let’s say a new and unique product from an SME) through being sent something in the post, is this not a valid method of discovery?

There are already conventions in place that allow brands to promote themselves through influencers – think of designers dressing celebrities for the Oscars.

This particular convention relies on implicit commendation from the star in question – it’s the press, offline and online, that fill in the blanks or ask the celeb about their outfit.

Why should online PR not have its grey areas, too, or even its guerrilla tactics?

The answer of course is that Google doesn’t enforce hard or fast rules on bloggers – no algorithm is sophisticated enough to deduce subtle relationships between products, bloggers, article style, website content, linking etc.

Google merely recommends rules of thumb and is likely to agree that do-follow links are indeed appropriate in some instances.

Time for a crap analogy?

Those marketers who are mired in blogger relations, trying to make it work for their brands that are struggling for visiblity, would do well to remember there are other priorities.

Here’s a crap analogy.

Sending free products to bloggers, trying to increase traffic to your site (directly or via search gains), instead of looking to improve the customer experience of your site is like: 

• Pushing more paper into a jammed printer. 
• Serving bigger portions of foul-tasting food.
• Practising a rain dance instead of building an irrigation system.
• Tuning the engine of a car with flat tires. 

Google’s advice to bloggers is the same that should be heeded by brands. Provide a consistent, enjoyable and accessible experience via your website.

For bloggers, this means that output should recognisably be themed, of a consistent standard and without conflict of interest.

This content should reside on a mobile optimised website.

Brands ultimately need to face up the hierarchy of product over experience over marketing.

Yes, there are crap products that are marketed well (just think of any random smartwatch).

Yes, there are great products, for which we must endure a poor buying experience (think continually refreshing a website to buy gig tickets).

But, the holy grail is creating repeat custom and high conversion by selling a good product on a slick website.

Do that and the SEO will (more than ever) take care of itself.

It could be less hassle just to buy some social ads or old-fashioned creative

Okay, I don’t want to contradict myself here, but social advertising over the past few years, chiefly Facebook ads, has matured to a point where it offers reliable visibility at scale.

If you’re paying an agency to find bloggers, measure and report on their audiences, contact them to discuss partnership, send them nicely packaged freebies, measure the impact of any activity, and potentially, after all that, need to disavow some links, you’d be forgiven for being frustrated.

Though the most successful bloggers can offer good scale, if you don’t have the products to command serious consideration from these influencers, some straight-up advertising might be a better option.

Out-of-home advertising is still going strong, an area that many brands barely consider, though it can deliver high engagement and ROI.

Do a lack of skills necessitate blogger relations?

In a recent article about ecommerce product descriptions (are they always necessary?), I posited that there may be a focus on content by many brands because of a lack of skills in other areas.

Whilst content professionals abound and UX specialists and programmers are in high demand, it’s perhaps inevitable that this blogger debate should be so fervid.

However, until marketers have their owned content in order, they need to stop worrying about influencers. The ground on which freebie blogger links are built seems to be increasingly infirm.

When is a link a natural link?

The Google blog post in question prompted some SEOs to bemoan the fact that marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to earn organic traffic.

Hasn’t Google made online PR a more tricky proposition than offline?

If a company sends a product to a blogger, it does not dictate what that blogger writes. Indeed, bloggers often explicitly state that being sent free products does not in any way guarantee blog coverage.

There is no money changing hands in these situations either.

If a blogger becomes aware of a great product (let’s say a new and unique product from an SME) through being sent something in the post, is this not a valid method of discovery?

There are already conventions in place that allow brands to promote themselves through influencers – think of designers dressing celebrities for the Oscars.

This particular convention relies on implicit commendation from the star in question – it’s the press, offline and online, that fill in the blanks or ask the celeb about their outfit.

Why should online PR not have its grey areas, too, or even its guerrilla tactics?

The answer of course is that Google doesn’t enforce hard or fast rules on bloggers – no algorithm is sophisticated enough to deduce subtle relationships between products, bloggers, article style, website content, linking etc.

Google merely recommends rules of thumb and is likely to agree that do-follow links are indeed appropriate in some instances.

Time for a crap analogy?

Those marketers who are mired in blogger relations, trying to make it work for their brands that are struggling for visiblity, would do well to remember there are other priorities.

Here’s a crap analogy.

Sending free products to bloggers, trying to increase traffic to your site (directly or via search gains), instead of looking to improve the customer experience of your site is like: 

• Pushing more paper into a jammed printer. 
• Serving bigger portions of foul-tasting food.
• Practising a rain dance instead of building an irrigation system.
• Tuning the engine of a car with flat tires. 

Google’s advice to bloggers is the same that should be heeded by brands. Provide a consistent, enjoyable and accessible experience via your website.

For bloggers, this means that output should recognisably be themed, of a consistent standard and without conflict of interest.

This content should reside on a mobile optimised website.

Brands ultimately need to face up the hierarchy of product over experience over marketing.

Yes, there are crap products that are marketed well (just think of any random smartwatch).

Yes, there are great products, for which we must endure a poor buying experience (think continually refreshing a website to buy gig tickets).

But, the holy grail is creating repeat custom and high conversion by selling a good product on a slick website.

Do that and the SEO will (more than ever) take care of itself.

It could be less hassle just to buy some social ads or old-fashioned creative

Okay, I don’t want to contradict myself here, but social advertising over the past few years, chiefly Facebook ads, has matured to a point where it offers reliable visibility at scale.

If you’re paying an agency to find bloggers, measure and report on their audiences, contact them to discuss partnership, send them nicely packaged freebies, measure the impact of any activity, and potentially, after all that, need to disavow some links, you’d be forgiven for being frustrated.

Though the most successful bloggers can offer good scale, if you don’t have the products to command serious consideration from these influencers, some straight-up advertising might be a better option.

Out-of-home advertising is still going strong, an area that many brands barely consider, though it can deliver high engagement and ROI.

Do a lack of skills necessitate blogger relations?

In a recent article about ecommerce product descriptions (are they always necessary?), I posited that there may be a focus on content by many brands because of a lack of skills in other areas.

Whilst content professionals abound and UX specialists and programmers are in high demand, it’s perhaps inevitable that this blogger debate should be so fervid.

However, until marketers have their owned content in order, they need to stop worrying about influencers. The ground on which freebie blogger links are built seems to be increasingly infirm.

Posted by jennita

Over the past 9 years, I’ve probably attended hundreds of marketing conferences. In the early days, I was an attendee there to learn all the things. Then after I started at Moz, I attended them as “press” and I would write about the conference on the Moz blog and live-tweet and such. At some point along the way I began to speak at different events: first about SEO, then social media, now community, and all the marketing in between.

Mat Siltala and I answering questions in our session at SearchFest. Thanks Arnie Kuenn for the pic!

At every conference I attend, no matter what my role is, I try to walk away with one tactic, one idea, one thing I can take back to my team and test, or implement, or even just understand better. After so many events, though, it can be difficult. Certainly not because I know all the things, and not because the speakers aren’t giving out excellent advice — but because after so many events, it all starts to sound the same. It’s not the same, of course (except for those few times I’ve attended the same conference two years in a row and saw the exact same presentation from a couple folks. Yikes!).

As I mature as a marketer, I’m finding myself walking away from excellent events, not with one specific tactic or idea, but with an entire theme. And that the theme, the group of ideas and discussions, are what I really get out of the event.

For example, at MozCon 2015, the theme for me was “disruption.” Now, this wasn’t the actual theme of the conference, but the part that stuck out to me from many of the talks was the idea that you can disrupt your industry and, sometimes more importantly, yourself. Since then, the idea of disruption has constantly been top-of-mind. Asking things like how will this shake things up, how will this make a difference, why would we do this? Ronell Smith recently wrote about how brands can find their disruptive opportunity.

The theme of SearchFest for me

Today, a few days out of SearchFest 2016, I find myself excited about the theme of “continuous improvement” or “kaizen.” In fact, one of the sessions specifically called kaizen out, which was when it hit me like a ton of bricks. After the session, I had a discussion with Sha Menz, one of the speakers on the topic, and I realized then that this was my theme.

(I had to use the Google search for this because of the next section. It’ll make sense in a second, I swear.)

While kaizen began as a Japanese business philosophy of making continuous improvement, it’s now used often in production systems as a way of making positive changes on a regular basis, as to improve productivity.

It’s the idea that in order to get better, you need everyone working on a project to help make suggestions and improve the process all the time. Imagine doing this with your marketing and your team.

#1 is simply not enough

Our own Dr. Pete was the morning keynote at SearchFest this year. He dug into Google SERPs and helped us understand the importance and opportunities of index-generated answers. Pete made it very clear to everyone that if you want to jump the organic queue, you have to rank #0. Yea, that’s right. Being #1 simply isn’t good enough anymore.

But how do you even do that? Pete gave some specific tactics on how to find out which pages to optimize and what things to care about. Here are three ways Pete talked about getting incrementally better at ranking the ultimate #0:

1. Check to see if you have a featured snippet for a “who is,” “what is,” “how is” type of terms, then make sure it’s optimized the way you want it to show up. Below is my snippet, and although my Moz profile and personal blog rank #1 and #2, you can see that my Huffington Post author profile is pulling in #0. And it’s wrong! Yikes. I need to get in there and fix it. Then my next incremental step will be to get my Moz profile to rank #0 instead. :D
   
2. Once you’ve cleaned up the content that’s already showing up in the snippets, find phrases that you’d like to bump yourself up to #0 for. For example, in this scenario, I searched for “what is mozcon” and our Eventbrite page gets the #0 spot, while we’re in the low, low spot of #1. Obviously this one is “okay,” but definitely not ideal. We want folks to get the full MozCon experience by coming to our site. We’ll start working on making incremental changes to the actual MozCon page in order to take over that top spot.
   

This one goes along with #2 above, but Pete gives you another easy way to determine which page on your site Google thinks is the best fit for a snippet. Use “site: + question.” For example:

(Hahaha, this result is obviously horrible, and we should fix that.)

To get the most out of Dr. Pete’s talk, be sure to check out his full presentation:

SEO for Answers: Ranking #0 from Peter Meyers

The Internet of things

Cindy Krum, one of my favorite mobile experts, piqued my interest when she started talking about “the Internet of things” and how that really was the same thing as “The SEO of things.” She was talking about how on mobile devices, you don’t just optimize for Google search, then boom you’re done. No, you have to think about Mobile SEO, Google Now, Google Local, App stores, iTunes, Google Play… and the list went on and on.

She hit this point home by not stressing about DOING ALL THE THINGS, but that by focusing on continuous incremental changes, it would lead to exponential growth (usually when you least expect it).

During the same session, Justin Briggs talked about some specific tactics you could do to enhance your mobile rankings and experience for visitors. Here are a few that he covered:

1. Figure out the traffic you’ve lost because of poor UX for mobile. Knowing which pages are losing the most traffic because of a mobile experience can help you figure out what to work on first.
   
2. I also really liked the idea of calculating the differences between mobile landing pages:
   
3. Thumbnails are super important when it comes to keeping engagement high on mobile. He offered these tips:
   • Increase saturation in thumbnails 20–30% to attract clicks
   • Slightly over-sharpen thumbnails to improve visual experience on small thumbnails
   • Repeat text elements from image/video title
   • Use faces and emotion to connect to visitors & entice clicks

Want more of Justin’s tips? Check out his full deck:

Mobile SEO: Closing the Mobile Search Strategy Gap from Justin Briggs

Kaizen-style marketing

Although Sha Menz and Jon Cooper specifically talked about kaizen-style link building, it really hit me at this point in the day that this is what we should all be striving for. I loved the idea of making continuous, incremental improvements to how you do marketing, including everyone on your team, and perhaps even the entire company.

Take a peek at Sha’s presentation, and take special notice at how she talks about striving to do better in everything we do, every time we do it.

Kaizen Link Building – Embracing Your Pursuit Of The Unattainable from Sha Menz

Imagine a world where your SEO, Social, Content, Branding, PPC, and PR teams worked together like a well-oiled machine. Because each and every person on the team was working toward the making continuous improvements of the greater goals, and not just their own small individual goals. And I know this exactly what I hope for within the Moz marketing team.

Bringing it all together

As I mentioned on Twitter during the conference last week, the biggest issue I have with multi-track events is that I have to miss some of the talks. I’m sure I missed a lot of really great information from some excellent speakers.

At the very end of the event, it was announced that SearchFest would be changing their name. Since the conference has expanded to be beyond just search, the new name, beginning in 2017, will be Engage.

I seriously had one of those “aha!” experiences when this was announced. It wasn’t because the word “engage” meant a lot to me — it was the idea of improving. It seemed to perfectly tie together my personal takeaway theme from SearchFest. And it has inspired me to be a better leader and marketer by working to continuously improve.

PS – If all else fails, do the chicken dance.
PPS – If you’re interested in seeing my deck from SearchFest, you can find it here.

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