SEO News

Google+ and search rankings

• A report by Searchmetrics shows a strong correlation between a site’s social signals and its ranking in Google SERPs.
• Websites that rank in the top positions for Google usually have a large number of social signals, with Google+ apparently having the biggest impact.
• The report is based on analysis of 10,000 search terms from Google UK, using the first three pages of results.

• It’s important to point out that this is a correlation rather than causation, so we can’t necessarily say that social signals definitely lead to higher search rankings. But it does seem to suggest that there’s some relationship between the two.

51% of agencies say Google+ has no impact on search campaigns

The use of G+ was explored in the new Econsultancy/NetBooster UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of client-side respondents stated that they don’t know if Google+ is having an impact on their search campaigns, compared to just 28% of agency respondents.

What impact is Google+ having on your/your clients’ search campaigns?

Retail search increasing, with DIY and Gardening growing fastest

The BRC Google Online Retail Monitor Q2 2013 report reveals that:

• Retail searches on tablets are up 132%.
• Growth of retail searches on smartphone devices is up 66%.
• Total search volumes from UK consumers searching overseas retailers increased by 51% in Q2 compared with the previous year.
• Total search volumes grew fastest for DIY & Gardening, up 32% year-on-year.
• DIY & Gardening also had the highest growth in search volumes on tablets and smartphones, up by 170% and 81% year-on-year, respectively.
• Growth in search volumes on tablets and smartphones were at their highest on the weekend before the Wimbledon Championships.

Businesses now spend 24% of total marketing budget on paid search

• Paid search now accounts for around a quarter (24%) of the average business’ total marketing budget, according to a new report from Econsultancy and NetBooster.
• The UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013 asked respondents about the division of marketing budgets into the search, social media and display categories.
• Paid search is apportioned the largest average budget by companies (24%), followed by SEO (18%). Social media and display had equal average share of budget (both 11%).
• This figure could potentially increase further by 2014, as more than half of respondents (55%) said they expect their PPC budgets to increase over the next 12 months.

Do you expect your budgets to increase or decrease in the next 12 months?

Mobile search spend up 132% year-on-year

• New data from Covario shows that the level of investment in mobile paid search is slowly catching up with consumer behaviour.
• On a global basis mobile search advertising accounted for 16% of total spend in Q2, of which 10% was spent on tablet and 6% on smartphone.
• This represents an increase of 39% compared to Q1 2013 and a massive 132% increase year-on-year.
• CPC prices varied significantly depending on the mobile platform. CPCs on smartphones remained at a 40% discount to desktop CPCs, but have increased nearly every quarter for the last five quarters – with the exception of Q4 2012.

Google and ‘domain clustering’

• According to a study by Stickyeyes, Google has been looking to show more diverse results in the wake of Penguin 2.0.
• There are now, on average, 34.7 unique domains per 100 results as opposed to 19.3 before the uodate, meaning a number of terms weren’t fully impacted.
• 1,323 sites lost all their results. Only nine of these started with 10 or more results and 121 with three or more, possibly a combined blow along with the Penguin 2.0 update.
• 451 sites lost more than 50% of their results.
• 52% of the current index is occupied by new domains with 8,892 domains that didn’t rank now displaying.

Percentage of traffic by Google search position

• According to a study by Chikita, the number one spot in Google’s organic results bags 33% of the clicks. 

Mobile flight searches

• Greenlight stats show that were 3.2m online searches for flights in May 2013 and more than 17% of these were made on mobiles. 
• Cheap flights’ was the most popular term searched for on Google UK, accounting for 17% of all flight searches, and 20% of all searches made on mobile. 

55% of mobile search conversions happen within an hour

• When consumers search for things on their mobiles more than half usually intend to buy it, according to new research from Google and Nielsen.
• Participants in the study were asked to log their mobile searches over a two week period in Q4 2012, which resulted in more than 6,000 mobile searches being recorded, and then follow-ups were conducted by Nielsen to see what actions resulted from these searches.
• Of the searches conducted by participants, three out of four triggered actions, which ranged from additional research (36%) to a website visit (25%) to a store visit (17%) to a purchase (17%) to a phone call (7%).
• And, on average each mobile search triggered at least two of the above actions, although product and shopping searches were more likely to have higher numbers of outcomes.
• Conversions also happened quickly after a search, with 55% occurring within just one hour of the original search.

40% of consumers may be unaware that Google Adwords are adverts

• Research carried out by Bunnyfoot suggests that many people are unaware of the difference between paid and organic search listings, with 40% of web users unaware they were adverts.
• While conducting a research project for an insurance sector client, Bunnyfoot discovered that 81% of users clicked on Google Adwords listings as opposed to natural search results.
• Further investigation of this surprising bias revealed that 41 out of the 100 individuals tested did not know that Adwords were paid-for adverts, believing them instead to be the most authoritative links.

Amazon dominates paid search on Google UK

• Amazon.co.uk is the site mostly likely to be seen in paid search ads on Google UK, as well as being the most visible online retail site in organic search results, according to research from Searchmetrics.
• The list is dominated by retail, price comparison and travel brands including johnlewis.com, supaprice.co.uk and laterooms.com, with amazon.co.uk taking the top position.

Smartphones achieve highest paid search CTR

• Mobile devices achieve higher click-through rates than desktops when it comes to UK paid search ads, according to a report from Marin Software.
• The data looks at how different devices performed during 2012, with smartphones achieving the highest CTR at 5.87%, compared to 3.93% on tablet and 2.29% on desktop.
• And though the same is true of the Eurozone, the difference is less pronounced – smartphones achieved a CTR of 4.78%, compared to 4.48% on tablet and 3.1% on desktop.

1. Expired domains

The black hat method: 

Website owners often lose interest in their sites and do not renew them when they expire. All the links which these website acquired usually remain, even though the site no longer exists.

One black hat technique which has been used for a number of years involves purchasing expired or dropped domains and 301 redirecting them to a money site. Google often does not reset expired domains and a 301 redirect can transfer most of the link equity to the URL of your choosing. 

There could be a number of legitimate reasons why you would 301 redirect a domain to another site. For example, you could have taken over a competitor or you may have rebranded an old site to a new one.

However, if you are trying to manipulate the flow of Page Rank by redirecting random sites, Google considers this to be against its terms of service. The more domains you redirect to your site, the more your risk increases of being penalised.

The white hat alternative: 

Instead of buying just any expired domain, look for ones which are relevant to your niche. If you are able to find an expiring domain that is similar to your website niche, think about buying it and building it out, providing a useful resource to people who would otherwise end up on a 404 page.

Where possible, you could use Archive.org to resurrect the old site, making slow, incremental changes. At some point in the future, when it is useful for visitors, you may be able to find an opportunity to link back to articles or sections of your money website, which should result in improved rankings.

Tip: If you are going to use this technique, I would suggest hosting the expired site on a separate C class domain and using privacy protection if possible.

2. Comment spamming

The black hat method:

Like a car thief looking for an open door, spammers play a numbers game, hoping that a webmaster will automatically approve comments or accidently let one through.

Once they find a site that allows their comments, they will come back and leave an endless stream of links back to their site.

The white hat alternative:

Instead of polluting the web with worthless comments, why not play a more intelligent game, leaving comments which are useful, informative and engaging on blogs within your niche.

Don’t even include a link initially. The idea is to build rapport and a relationship with the website owner.

Once you have complemented/suggested/assisted/and engaged the webmaster, they are going to be much more likely to reciprocate. This reciprocation could be in the form of linking back to some content you have created or allowing you to guest post on their blog.

3. Paid links

The black hat method: 

Google states that buying or selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, therefore buying links is black hat.

It is not hard to spot an overtly paid link, they tend to be anchor text heavy and surrounded by other links to low quality sites.

A quick analysis or a manual review from Google could result in these links being discounted at best or at worst, your site being penalised.

The white hat alternative: 

There is ambiguity over what the search engines consider a paid link.

Is a donation to a charity a paid link? Is sponsoring an event a paid link?

What about giving away one of your products that results in a link? You can set up a Google Alerts to send you potential opportunities that could result in legitmate ‘paid’ links.

For example:

• site: kickstarter.com “link on our website”  + “your  niche”
• “the following sponsors” + “your niche”
• “the following companies donated” + “your niche”

Tip: If you are going to donate to a charity or sponsor event, it’s best to try and find a relevant charity or event. For example, if you sell running shoes, why not donate to an obesity or other related charity.

4. Mass directory submissions

The black hat method: 

It’s not uncommon to see ads, offering to submit your site to 500 directories for $5. Google only provides broad guidelines around this tactic, stating that we shouldn’t “participate in link schemes designed to increase your site ranking or PageRank”.

As many of these directories have ‘SEO’ in their URLs, it’s a sure sign to anyone looking over your link profile that you are trying to game the system.

The white hat alternative: 

Target niche directories related to your website. Not only will these directories look more natural if anyone from the Google Spam team were to look over your link profile, but many will provide real traffic and targeted leads and have added SEO benefits.

In summary…

Like an investment in the stock market, your SEO tactics should factor in your goals, strategy and risk tolerance. Whichever techniques you decide to use, make sure you weigh up the risk and rewards of using it and how aggressive you are.  

Being too aggressive can lead to your site being manually reviewed which opens up your entire history and potential wrongdoings.

Posted by gfiorelli1

• Driverless cars, paired with companies like Uber, will soon transport us about the city, offering us the extra time to revise our notes before an important business meeting.
• Leap-motion interfaces are available.
• Marketing has become personalized and targeted.
• We have experienced a loss of privacy in the name of a supposed greater safety.

In many respects, we can say that the future is (almost) now.

Of all the things that were presented in Minority Report, the one that most concerns us as SEOs and inbound marketers is the personalization of experiences that our potential customers have when looking for a product and/or information, when they share things online, and when they interact with our brands on our websites.

Search marketing and personalization

Personalization in search marketing is not something new—it was (re)launched on Google in 2005. Still, it was only with the launch of “Search, plus Your World” (January 2012), the rollout of the Venice Update (February 2012), and the introduction of Google Now (July 2012), that the personalization factor has become predominant.

If we ask everyday Google users about personalized search, though, this is what they answer:

This data from the excellent infographic on seotraininglondon.org reveals something that we might have guessed in talking about rankings with our clients: the average user does not know that their Google SERPs are personalized.

To tell the truth, we SEOs also tend to forget that search is almost always personalized, and we examine concepts such as, for example, neutral search.

For example, we tend to act this way when we try to understand the rankings of our sites or when we do competitive analyses. It is certainly not incorrect—it is a necessary starting point—but in reality, it is not enough anymore.

Take the case where our site is national or global: In that case, the personalization of the search experience is such that we should not only check how our site ranks in the U.S. or the UK, but we should also in smaller geographic areas of our targeted country.

At the same time, we should see who our competitors are with a “micro-geographic” focus. In fact, while we might be on the first page in a totally neutral search with its geographical center being the political capital of the country we are analyzing, maybe we don’t rank so highly in the searches done in a city that we consider a target as important as the “nation” (i.e. Seattle or Manchester).

Why? Because the often shamefully forgotten Venice Update enhances the localization of the user performing a search in terms of how their SERPs are shaped. Hence, local businesses, which might not be relevant on a national/global scale, are indeed relevant locally. In those cases, they can be shown at the expense of “national” or “global” sites, which often do not possess sufficient relevance at a local level.

And that’s personalization (note: in the concept of personalization I personally include context, because without it, personalization would provide a poor search experience).

But that’s not the only way localization influences the personalization of search.

In fact, as both Tom Anthony and Will Critchlow explained well, localization (and other contextual information) is a key component of what they defined as “new queries,” which include both a explicit and implicit aspect.

An even stronger implementation of personalization is possible: implicit-only queries, as they are defined by Baris Gultekin in this video interview shot at Google I/O 2013.

These queries are those that users don’t even actually perform, but that Google predicts they are implicitly performing. The results are shown in Google Now cards:

In the first case (personalization due to geolocalization), we can try to acquire more relevance on a local level by creating events (online and/or offline), connections with local web sites, and partnerships with local influencers. Those influencers can be found with tools that geographically map social media followers/fans, such as Followerwonk (all the better if they are already connected with us):

Or, we can take advantage of the geographical segmentation of the people we have circled on Google Plus (and of the local communities’ pages, if they exist):

In the second case (“new queries” with implicit and explicit aspects), we can try to “enter” in the personalized SERPs of our users, creating content that is contextually relevant to a topic + location + device. For now, though, it is quite hard to determine how, from where, and for what a user is already searching on our own sites via Google search. This information can’t be easily understood with tools like Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools does not offer us the opportunity to dig deeper than the country level. Hence, the best way to get this information is by actively obtaining feedback directly from our targeted audience.

In the third case (totally implicit queries), we can go with the classic SEO’s first reaction of fright and ask to have our site integrated in the Google Now ecosystem, as Zillow, Booking, Urbanspoon and many others have already done.

Personalization and Knowledge Base

Last May, at Google I/O 2013, Amit Singhal said, “The search of future will need to answer, converse, and anticipate.”

With “answer,” he refers to the Knowledge Graph, with “converse” to Voice Search, and finally with “anticipate” to Google Now. Knowledge Graph and Google Now are based mostly on the so-called Google Knowledge Base, and in both cases—as well as in Voice Search—semantics and entity recognition play an essential role.

Semantics, entity recognition and the Knowledge Base, then, are the foundation on which Google can really achieve the goal of creating its dreamed-of Star Trek computer, capable of providing information to the user by predicting its needs for information.

As I wrote in a previous post here on Moz, the Knowledge Base helps Google by answering how and why the documents are connected and searched, as well as an understanding of what named entities those same documents cite and are related to.

The most evident examples of this are the Knowledge Graph boxes:

This snapshot, though, shows another example of personalization.

Google presented me Saint Peter the Apostle because in a neutral search I performed before, Google agnostically presented me all the entities the Knowledge Graph could relate to the query “Saint Peter”.

As you can see, neutral “objective” searches still play a huge role in Google… but is this really so? No, it isn’t.

Even in a neutral search, personalization of search is present. Here are a couple of examples:

Knowledge Graph disambiguation boxes in Google.it neutral search for “San Pietro”

Knowledge Graph disambiguation boxes in Google.com neutral search for “San Pietro”

Knowledge Graph disambiguation boxes in Google.fr neutral search for “Saint Pierre”

Knowledge Graph disambiguation boxes in Google.com neutral search for “Saint Pierre”

Localization of the users—both geographically and linguistically—plays an evident role in the personalization of search.

But that’s not all. In fact—as I said before—personalization is always acting, not just when users are logged in. When you’re not signed in, Google uses a cookie to personalize your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser.

The more someone uses Google for search, even logged out, the more Google understands and refines the search experience for that user. Knowing that there are about 5,134,000,000 searches performed every day, we can understand how the Google Knowledge Base is endlessly updating itself. That is not Big Data, that’s Gigantic Data, all used for one purpose: to offer more personalized search and ad results.

How does Google personalize search?

Search History is surely the most important factor, but as we saw, localization has assumed an increasing relevance, especially because of the rise of mobile search.

Google seriously knows a lot about us. Crazypants! as a friend of mine would say.

How does search history shape the personalized SERPs, and how can Google strengthen the personalization of SERPs in relation to a query when search history is not present or is not sufficient by itself?

Google does this thanks to search entities, a concept that is explained in depth by Bill Slawski in this post.

Search entities, as described by Bill, are:

• A query a searcher submits
• Documents responsive to the query
• The search session during which the searcher submits the query
• The time at which the query is submitted
• Advertisements presented in response to the query
• Anchor text in a link in a document
• The domain associated with a document

The relationships between these search entities can create a “Probability Score,” which may determine if a web document is shown in a determined SERP or not.

I warmly suggest you read Bill’s post to find out more about all the possible relationships that can exist between these search entities, but for this post, I’d like to focus on these ones:

1. The strength of relationships between these entities can be measured using a metric obtained from direct relationship strengths (derived from data indicating user behavior, such as user search history data) and indirect relationship strengths (derived from the direct relationship strengths).
2. A relationship between a first entity that has insufficient support (e.g., not enough search history data) to associate a given property with the first entity and a second entity that does have sufficient support to associate the given property with the second entity can be identified, and the given property can be associated with the first entity with higher confidence.

From an SEO point of view, these two cases are telling us that even though we aim for a neutral search environment, we should never forget that 99% percent of a user’s search experience is personalized. We could define this attitude as “growth hacking SEO.”

Moreover, we could take advantage of the personalization of search thanks not only to being included in the personal search history of the users, but also to connections created with entities that are already in those users’ search history. This connection can be a link, a citation, or a co-occurrence in a document, which is considered more relevant than the query alone or the search history of the users.

Somehow this is not something new. In fact, when Richard Baxter talks about doing really targeted outreach, we know it is good from the point of view of being discovered by the audience. Creating content for other sites that are used by the people influencing our target market will often result in new users of our own site.

But now, this patent about search entities is evidence that typically inbound tactics can have a direct reflection on a purely search-related level.

Semantic web

When we talk about entities, we usually think about people, places, and things (i.e., a brand). But web documents are also entities.

And, in light of what is described in the patent cited above, the “probability score” of a web document, which can determine its presence in a SERP or its visibility in results for a determined query based on all the classic on-page “ranking factors,” can be improved by the use of structured data.

Structured data, from schema.org, Microdata and Open Graph, are important not just because they can gift our site’s search results with a rich snippet. That snippet is the facade of something more important: helping the search engines better understand what a document is all about.

For instance, the breadcrumb schema is surely important because it can help add mini-sitelinks to our snippets, but it is even more important because it clearly tells search engines how the documents in our site are hierarchically related between them.

Or, using an even better example, the article schema is the only way (or at least so it is described by Google) to obtain visibility in the In-Depth Articles search blend.

Therefore, the use of structured data has become essential, not only because rich snippets offer us a greater visibility in the SERPs, but also because not many people are using it (36.9% of URLs use Open Graph, and 9.9% use Schema.org, as reported by Matthew Brown at MozCon). In addition, structured data can help increase the relevance of a document for a determined query simply because it “helps our systems to better understand your website’s content, and improves the chances of it appearing in this new set of search results.”

The social layer

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Posted by Benjamin Estes

Being a consultant can be an intense experience. Every client (and every day!) presents a new challenge. In my experience that isn’t a product of the ever-changing state of affairs in SEO or inbound marketing. In fact, I don’t lose sleep over every algorithm change—there are plenty of smarter people from whom I can draw that sort of information.

What keeps me awake at night is how I can shape my projects to make them successful. A lot of people work together with me every day: my clients, my teammates, and teams in other offices. Everyone needs to collaborate to even have a shot at success. How will we pull that off? How will they communicate? What do they need to do this week? Next month? Next quarter?

In short, I focus on planning, and I focus on it in three specific scopes:

1. Pitching (how do we estimate project size in advance?)
2. Strategy (how do we know what we are going to do, and when?)
3. Execution (how do we ensure that these things actually get done?)

Three different tasks with three different plans, each with its own unique purpose. A list of tasks to execute is not a sales pitch any more than it is a high-level summary of the course of a project that helps you decide what to do today. Each of these plans must be treated differently, and with appropriate respect. The most important thing I’ve discovered as a consultant is this:

You can disagree about what’s in a plan, but you must agree about what the plan is intended to accomplish.

Let me walk you through these three types of plans, what the purpose of each is, and what warning signs may crop up if something isn’t going smoothly in each stage. I firmly believe that a little conscious effort can improve how we handle each of them, and tune our instincts to spot when something is going wrong. On the other hand, I won’t go into techniques for how to create these plans—at that point I’d be writing a book instead of a blog post.

I’ve definitely not mastered all of this yet, so if you have any lessons of your own to share in the comments I’d love to hear them! All of these planning phases interact with each other, and I can only talk about them from my point of view. In your experience the lines may be fuzzier or more defined. You may treat them very differently. Do share!

Pitching

Why do we have a plan at this stage?

To understand the scope of a project, that we are the right choice for the client, and that the client is the right choice for us.

What should this plan do?

• Address the client’s needs (as far as they are understood)
• Reflect the limitations of what we can offer and what the client can execute
• Get the right order of magnitude for project size

What should we watch out for?

• Anyone talking about scheduling deadlines for deliverables—”We need the keyword deliverable week one, the technical audit week two…”

What I’ve noticed:

The first time we have to deal with a plan for a new client is when we’re trying to convince them to work with us. Obviously we are asking someone to trust us to help them get a good return on their investment, and part of building that trust is to let them know what sort of work we are going to be doing. A good plan during the “pitch” phase helps us do that.

An example plan for a pitch from Distilled. Activities are scheduled chronologically left to right.

You can see from the illustration I’ve included that for a lot of projects this plan can be quite broad. Basically it amounts to a straightforward summary of what needs to happen and in what order. It’s where everything begins, before the engagement has even started.

The other piece of data that is presented concurrently with the plan shown is a budget, which is essentially the size of the project or the proposed bandwidth that Distilled will dedicate to it. To know that a budget should be X dollars per month or that a contract should last for some amount of time seems quite amazing if you think about it—so many variables are involved! But while every project is different, there are a lot of things we can estimate with a good degree of accuracy. The things we have a handle on might be different from yours—there might be areas where your estimation is a lot better than ours, or vice versa. Consider:

• Weekly meetings
• Project management (time spent scheduling)
• Monthly reports
• Some common research reports (this may vary wildly, but it helps to have an average we can point to)

These are all elements which can be used to anchor an estimate. There may also be some other administrative tasks or fixed price elements (tools, copy writing) that can be leveraged as well.

But it is ambiguous. The pitches you deal with might be more or less ambiguous than ours, but there is no possible way that a proposal created in the sales process can accurately reflect what will actually happen. No one can predict the future, and the sales process is too far removed from actual work to be treated as definitive when it comes to planning.

And that’s what I watch out for. It’s not uncommon for leads to demand that we offer them strict calendars for delivery of reports. It’s one thing to build in regular meetings and status updates—those are great, at appropriate intervals—but if we are talking about rigorously scheduling deliverables like technical audits, or are devising a content strategy, there are too many variables present to know exactly when all that is going to happen. Demands in the sales process for the abstract to be made concrete should be handled very carefully in the sales process. The needs of the client must be addressed, but acquiescing to unreasonable scheduling is likely going to hurt your relationship with a client rather than help it. In other words:

A prospective client can disagree with what is included in the proposed project, but they can’t insist on a level of detail that is inappropriate.

In my own experience, there have been a couple of clients in particular who needed help with website redesigns or complete domain migrations. One insisted on an extremely delineated schedule provided in the pitch, with arbitrary deadlines for various deliverables and a project duration which would coincide with the launch of a new site. The justifications for this (on the client’s end) were both to get a better understanding of the work being done and to make sure that we would be around to monitor the site’s launch. Needless to say, the site didn’t launch on time—few websites ever do. And because of the strict language of our arrangement, we had no flexibility to adapt our strategy or extend the duration to accommodate. I didn’t feel good about that outcome.

If I were put in the same position again, working with our sales team on the pitch for this project, would I take a hard line against this style of planning? It’s hard to say. But I would be very aware of the potential risks, and at the very least make sure that there were contingencies in place if the scheduling of work turned out to be inappropriate.

Fortunately, we only have to deal with this sort of ambiguity once or twice in each project—once the engagement has begun, things become more tangible. Once the project has kicked off, we don’t talk at such a general level. It’s time to take charge, get more information, and figure out how to make things happen. It’s time for proper strategy.

Strategy

Why do we have a plan at this stage?

To figure out what work should be done and when it should be done.

What should this plan do?

• Prioritize work
• Defer work that can’t be done within time constraints

What should we watch out for?

• Big chunks of time that don’t have any tasks assigned to them
• Too many tasks to accomplish in the time available

What I’ve noticed:

Once a client has retained our services we need to figure out what we’re going to do. Consider: there are a tremendous number of constraints on the work we commit to doing every day. We have a finite number of working hours in a day, week, or month. We may be dependent upon other projects finishing in a timely manner—will the client’s website launch in time? Will the team working on the content finish?

In the face of that uncertainty we still manage to accomplish something. We just have to limit the scope of what we do. Estimate the amount of time various elements of the projects will take, decide what will fit into this month, and commit to executing them. It’s that commitment and specificity that distinguishes this phase from the sales pitch phase. And that’s why we can’t start thinking at this level before we’ve engaged a client—we need more information from them, we need their commitment to a project, and we need to know as much as possible about our own bandwidth in a given month.

A screenshot of Distilled’s internal scheduling system. The “size” of tasks is defined by how many hours they are anticipated to take. These tasks are kept fairly broad: project management, weekly meetings, etc.

This plan is the response to those needs. We know we need to do keyword research, a technical audit, and Analytics implementation—how long will each take, approximately? Which will we do this month? Which have to wait for information from the client? We answer these to the best of our ability and that becomes our roadmap.

The facts and the constraints that become apparent also become the boundaries of what we can sensibly plan. It’s in this boundary that I’ve noticed most problems crop up. Some clients will present a barrage of questions that threatens to undermine the rest of the scheduled work you’re trying to do. In the worst cases, results might be demanded when what you’re trying to prioritize is which work should be done. So let’s adjust the axiom above for the “strategy” phase:

A client can adjust the priorities of elements within this strategy, but they can’t insist that you do more work than there are hours available.

Unless they give you a bunch of money. Just kidding. Sort of.

Consider the alternative to using this sort of strategic scheduling: Every month that a client has you on retainer, you just do whatever they ask until you use up the budget in week two and just stop for the rest of the month. Or you keep working and effectively cut your hourly rate in half. Neither of these solutions sound great, do they?

It took a while for me to get the hang of this “strategy” stuff. Early on in my tenure at Distilled, this manifested in projects that were extremely productive early on. There were tons of technical things to fix—so much low hanging fruit that we at Distilled seemed like miracle workers. No strategy needed, pure action—for a couple of months. But once that stuff dried up, the relationships sputtered out. I was so enthusiastic about those quick wins that I didn’t establish a rapport with the client. I didn’t figure out how to work together with them to make their business better. I just told them what to do.

Talking about strategy gave me a language I could speak with my clients that helped improve our relationship and has been much more effective in the long run.

Eventually, you’ll work out a sequence of work that fits your schedule and addresses the needs of the client. Once you get to that point, you need to figure out how to execute the work.

Execution

Why do we have a plan at this stage?

To figure out how we’re going to do the work that needs to get done.

What should this plan do?

• Lay out exactly what actions need to be taken
• Let everyone know who is accountable

What should we watch out for?

• Tasks that aren’t well-defined
• Tasks that are defined by outcomes (e.g “get 10 links”)

What I’ve noticed:

At this point we’re finally we’re dealing with something that actually looks like a proper schedule—a real to-do list. Tasks need to be chunked into pieces that are clearly delineated and actionable. The image below actually reflects a list of tasks for one of my clients.

An activity schedule in Google spreadsheet form from one of my projects.

The biggest problem that I’ve observed in working with clients in “execution” mode —one that consultants often bring upon themselves—is the tendency to create tasks that aren’t well-defined. For instance, if I have “keyword research report” as a line item in my to-do list, I know I’m doing it wrong. Get more specific: Pull data from Searchmetrics, the Google Keyword tool, and Analytics; do analysis in Excel; and so forth.

On the other hand, the issue that has arisen through my interaction with clients is not recognizing when something is being put in this “to-do” list that is outside the scope of what we laid out in the strategy. Once you know what you are doing in a given month, and you have broken that down into individual tasks, you have to be careful about committing to other things. It’s very common to field random questions from a point of contact or their teammates, and it is usually best for the relationship for you to answer them. In order to do that, it is smart to schedule extra time for this kind of ad hoc support question—and if you starting going over that time you should be seriously concerned. To wit:

A client can negotiate the tasks in this schedule to complete the work you’re setting out to do, but they can’t add unrelated elements (i.e. change the strategy).

There are as many methods of keeping track of to-do lists as there are people doing to dos. How you actually accomplish these tasks is up to you—I prefer OmniFocus, while I know some at Moz have a bit of an Asana obsession. The important thing as that at some point, in order to go from a “strategy” phase to actually accomplishing something, you have to come up with a list of actions.

I know I’ve talked a lot about high-level planning in the “pitch” and “strategy” phases, but I should note that at the end of the day, getting better at scheduling the actual work is the most important element of the process. You can meditate all day on the structure of a perfect project, but unless you actually do something there is no chance for success. I consider it the Minimum Viable Plan, so to speak.

Review

Planning isn’t easy, but it gets better with practice. And that will, in turn, have a positive effect on all the projects you work on. Let me say it once again:

You can disagree about what’s in a plan, but you must agree about what the plan is intended to accomplish.

This rule is something I intuitively use more and more when planning a project and when issues arise over the course of a project. Once you start thinking about these things in increasingly conscious ways, their value becomes exponentially more obvious in ways you can’t anticipate.

Do you think about projects in these three phases? If so, what are the warning signs that you’ve spotted in your experiences?

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