SEO News

Personally, I think most commentators are missing the bigger picture. I am by no means right all the time (or even a small amount of the time, to be honest) but every now and then I send out a spark that ignites something that goes on to become a raging inferno. 

Over the last month my brain has been largely filled with thoughts around authorship and how Google could use it in the future.

My main argument is simply that authorship needs to be seen as a potentially fundamental change in the way that Google assigns value to content on the web.

Here are a couple of caveats before I get started:

• Firstly, I don’t work for Google.
• Secondly, I’m not forcing anyone to do anything or implying that this is happening yet. I’m describing a potential trajectory that digital marketers need to consider.

Authorship as a value metric for links and mentions

As SEO evolved over the last ten years, different metrics have been used to identify the value of an individual link. Originally we used PR (PageRank) as this was known to be a metric Google used to measure the ‘power’ of a site.

We then moved away from PR to a more authority-based approach, taking into account the perceived importance of a website within its niche and combining it with MozTrust and DA.

This means we have moved from ‘pure power’ to ‘authority’ already.

Now we are seeing Google pushing authorship as a way of getting content noticed (it allows you to have a picture next to your listings in SERPs), but as with most things Google, there is always some underlying motive beyond the direct benefits to authors visibility.

Firstly, authorship is yet another attempt to push content producers on to Google+. Google+ isn’t going away. That’s a fairly obvious motive for Google’s authorship push, but could there be more? 

Could authorship be used to further segment a website into pages of greater value and pages of lesser? 

At present we focus on the authority/trust of a domain in the knowledge that trust is applied at a domain level rather than a page level.  

This assumption of domain level trust is perfectly valid in that the seed sites for a trust algorithm are so well researched they are assumed to have no areas of lower trust.

But is applying trust at a domain level the best way to go? Well, not really! Recently, and not so recently, we have seen a lot (a real lot) of activity around newspapers and trusted publishers trying to make money online through selling links: 

• Many come from tried-and-tested advertorials.
• There is no doubt that money is changing hands in exchange for mentions and links directly from journalists, but this is very under the radar;
• Services such as HARO are now widely used by PR and SEO teams in an attempt to gain links.
• I recently overheard a group of students talking about how they were all doing travel internships with the aim of becoming travel writers because they can get lots of free holidays, etc. This activity of ‘I give you a holiday, you give me a link’ happens very often. 

If you were trying to prevent the above from having such an effect on the overall trust allocation across the web, what could you do? Well, it’s easy: you take some of the power away from websites and give it directly to the authors.

This is because: 

• Advertorials don’t come from authors, as such.
• High-value authors are less likely to take back-handers, or are at least so expensive that the activity is very limited.
• The best authors don’t use HARO – they do all of the work themselves. The middle and lower tiers use these services to supplement their workload.
• The best authors and publishing organisations send their own staff to places; they don’t rely on touting for freebies.

If Google was able to identify these ‘best’ authors somehow, it could use the data to apply an additional level of trust to the ranking algorithm. They could also use the data to police author-commercial relationships.

Hypothetical scenario number one

Bob is a well-known author and writes for his own personal blog and a well-known tech publisher. At present, the tech publisher would be the target for a link, as it has the higher DA.

Bob’s own blog, although awesome in terms of content, doesn’t have a very high DA.

If Google were to be able to flag Bob as a trusted author in the field of tech, suddenly anywhere that Bob writes about tech has a much greater value.

Hypothetical scenario two

Bob has an intern working with him as a writer for the well-known tech publisher. At present it wouldn’t matter if the intern or Bob wrote the content as long as it was on the site and had a link. Both would result in the same Domain level trust flow.

If Bob has been identified as a trusted author and the intern hasn’t, then the link suddenly has a lot more value if Bob wrote the content compared to the intern (I wish I had given him/her a name earlier). 

Obviously the important stuff comes from blending the two scenarios together. Could we get to a stage where, in terms of value:

• Bob writing on the tech site > Bob writing elsewhere > Intern writing on the tech site > General link from tech site.
• Bob has the power (you won’t hear that said often).

Would this be open to being gamed?

The SEO community will have a damn good go at gaming anything it can, but when you really think about it the only way to game authorship is to basically buy trusted authors.

This happens, of course, but the sums needed to do it successfully are putting it out of the reach of most people’s marketing budgets.

You don’t just become an author by writing a 500-word article on a random blog and getting 500 paid Google+’s out of it, you have to work bloody hard at it, and also maintain your status over time.

There is no obvious way to automate becoming an author other than maybe hacking into trusted authors’ Google+ accounts. 

If this were true, how would it impact the way SEO works? 

If you are doing things properly (subjective, I know), it wouldn’t. You should be generating good-quality content that talks to your consumers and then seeding it out to influencers.

These influencers should naturally include trusted authors. If anything, it would make success easier to report. At present, ‘Bob wrote about it on his personal blog’ is a much harder sell than ‘Bob wrote about it on TechCrunch’.

Authorship as a counter to guest blog posting

‘Directory link building is dead!’, ‘reciprocal link exchanges don’t work!’,  ‘paid link building is high risk!’, ‘infographics are (insert expletive here)!’…  As SEOs, we have a tendency to find something that works (in this case, something gets links), and burn it out through mass usage.

Having just returned from Brighton SEO, the in topic at the moment seems to be guest blog posting, or content provision. 

Now I’m not against guest blog posting, though I had some thoughts about its future, taking into account the likelihood that at some point Google will look to devalue or make poorly-implemented guest blog posting toxic.

The general concept of guest blog posting

SEO, link building, outreach and off-page: it all comes down to getting a link from a domain. I have done what is needed to get a link from site A to my client, move on to site B.The way we get the link is largely irrelevant.

We give them some content, we commission them to write some content, we give them a product, we provide them with an infographic, and so on. 

This approach, if carried out so casually, leaves a footprint that’s very easy to spot: brand X is mentioned in one post on Y number of sites over Z period of time. Often, none of the posts have any social metrics associated with them, no comments, the writing doesn’t follow the style of the rest of the site, etc. 

Still, this isn’t a post about guest blog posting, so I’ll take this opportunity to move on.

Enter authorship

Authorship is all about being a contributor of merit. Let’s say that Google sees this as someone who has made a genuine effort to contribute to the site in question beyond simply writing 200 words with a link in it.

The author has a profile. The author has a history of posts for the particular site. The author has value in the particular niche. The author engages and promotes their work.

If we compare this to a 200-word post stuck on a site by a guest author as part of a guest blog posting campaign, we can see a distinct difference in activity and the associated footprint.

Posts from genuine authors and contributors have value. Low-value guest blog posting campaigns don’t.

Suddenly, you have to be genuine, you have to build a relationship, a history and much more. Everything gets harder which, at the end of the day, favours Google and the people willing to put the effort in.

We contribute either through producing something worthy of mention or by becoming a genuine contributor to a site – no more ‘providing 200 words’.

Would this be open to being gamed? 

Hell yeah, but it would be a darn site harder to game than the way guest blog posting is going now. Getting an author to write for you is nothing new, but with authorship they are going to have to take more control of how they are seen online.

We are likely to see ‘toxic authors’ who are known to be operating outside of Google’s ideal of a valued author. The cream will likely rise to the top.

If this was the future, how would this affect the way we work? 

‘Guest blog posting is dead – long live expert author creation and contribution campaigns’.

If authorship was used as mentioned, the equity passed from site A to site B would be based on the contribution of the author overall.

As an example, Kevin Gibbons has made a solid contribution to Econsultancy, posting over a period of years on various subjects all relating to online marketing.

If Kevin links to you from an article he wrote on Econsultancy it is likely to get shared and commented on and thus is likely to have more worth. 

If a random author (Malcolm Slade, for example!) was to link to you, people would probably think ‘who on Earth is this guy'” Rightfully so, as I am not a valued contributor on Econsultancy. It’s how humans work, and that’s what Google is always looking to replicate. 

There is a simple lesson to learn here. Don’t build links: contribute. Find the sites your client should be involved in (dictated by their strategy and by customer insight) and get involved for the long haul.

Think like a PR would. Build real relationships with real authors and help them to help you. 

Please feel free to discuss, comment, share, argue or rant. I appreciate I miss-use quotation marks and this could have been two separate posts but if I have got you thinking, I’ve done what I set out to do.

Posted by dohertyjf

Do you have an idea of the path a user typically takes to convert on your website? Or, are you simply building traffic from one channel (probably organic) and wondering why it’s not converting better? As I’ve grown up as a marketer, I’ve begun to really appreciate the insights that data can provide us on how users interact with our sites, and more importantly, on how they convert and where the experience can be improved to increase our conversion rates, and thereby our top-line revenue from online channels.

I’ve recently been very interested in building a full marketing funnel based on Google Analytics data. While it’s one thing to be able to identify where conversion discrepancies exist, such as low-converting types of visitors, it’s quite another to build a full and informed funnel from your site’s data. In order to do this and have an accurate view of where your conversions are actually coming from, you need to first have the following in place:

• Email URL tracking: Check out Annie Cushing’s thoughts here in slides 11-14. (Actually, look at the whole deck.)
• Social network tracking (tagging parameters and using a shortener to see clickthroughs by link)
• Display tagging
• Referral links tagged (or at least be aware of HTTPS sites linking to you, like Medium)
• Paid search campaigns tagged
• Tagging on affiliates (if applicable)

You can build your campaigns here using Google’s tool.

What’s a funnel?

Before we get too far into the meat of this post, I want to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. I’m not referring to one of these. Rather, I’m referring to one of these:

The funnel is typically broken into three sections:

• Top of funnel (TOFU)
• Middle of funnel (MOFU)
• Bottom of funnel (BOFU)

The goal of this post is going to walk you through how to identify the channels that are performing best for you in each of these areas. Once you know those, you know where to invest depending on your company’s needs or priorities. Also, knowing the different areas to which you can contribute will help endear you to the people running those channels, which will help you avoid being siloed as “the SEO.” Instead, you will start to be seen as part of the marketing team, which is what you are.

Another note: I’m not teaching you how to integrate into other marketing channels in this post. Stephanie Chang did a great job of it back in July when she wrote An Introduction to Integrated Marketing and SEO: How It Works and Why It Matters. Have a read there after you’re finished here.

Understanding attribution

You may already know this, but Google Analytics offers multi-channel attribution tools within the “Conversions” section:

In the “Assisted Conversions” section, you will see a number of columns. The ones to pay attention to are:

• Assisted Conversions
• Last Click/Direct Conversions

It’s important to understand the difference between assisted conversions and last click/direct conversions. According to Google’s own Answer Bin, a channel gets credit for an assisted conversion for any touch that they bring to the site where the interaction was not the one that led directly to a conversion. Google says:

This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel assisted. If a channel appears anywhere—except as the final interaction—on a conversion path, it is considered an assist for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the channel.

On the other side, a last click or direct conversion is a touch on the site that led directly to a sale. These are your closer, aka bottom-of-funnel channels. Google says:

This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel closed or completed. The final click or direct visit before a conversion gets Last Interaction credit for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the channel’s role in driving completion of sales and conversions.

Make sense? Great. Let’s build a funnel.

Identifying channels based on funnel level

As I said above, we’re going to use Google Analytics to identify the channels in the different levels of your funnel. If you use a different Analytics platform, like Omniture or Piwik, write a guide using that and I’ll be happy to share it out.

Top of funnel

The top of your marketing funnel is where the first interactions with your brand take place. This is typically attributed to search or organic, but is that really the case for your website?

First, let’s identify the most common channels that people use to discover your site. To do this, go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. Set your secondary dimension to “Medium.” You’ll see something like this:

Now, export this data to Excel (I’ve provided a spreadsheet at the end that you can plug this data into) and pivot it to see which mediums are driving your best traffic. If you want to get super fancy, break it down by type of page as well.

Here’s how that pivot table is set up:

For the site shown in these screenshots it is indeed PPC and organic search. But just knowing the channel isn’t enough, so let’s take it a step further to see where the different channels are driving traffic. You’ll either need to manually classify your pages (if you have relatively few like in my example) or write an Excel script to do this automagically.

I now know that referral is the primary driver of traffic and that the majority goes to the homepage. One specific referral, which I tagged with a Medium of “Link,” sends the best traffic directly to conversion pages (which might not necessarily be the best place for people to land for their first interaction):

Middle of funnel

The middle of your funnel is the area where people are moving from a first brand interaction to an initial sale, or if they have already made a purchase, towards another sale. What we’re looking for in the data here is channels that are not necessarily our primary first- or last-touch drivers. Rather, these are the channels where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-time visitors come from in order to interact with your content again.

We can figure out the most popular and most effective middle-of-funnel channels a couple of different ways. The first, and by far the easiest, is by comparing different types of attribution to discover which channels get more credit based on first click, linear (where each channel gets equal credit), and last-click. To learn what each of the different attribution models really means, check out the Google support page.

By sorting the Model Comparison Tool in Analytics by Linear (high to low), you can find the channels that perform best when given equal credit independent of where they are in the funnel.

But this doesn’t give us great insight into which channels perform best in the middle. Rather, it’s telling us which channels account for the most revenue overall (which is still important to know), and the place doesn’t matter. In the above example, for Distilled that’s Direct, then email, organic search, and referral, in that order.

To find which channels are the most popular for your users to come back, we need to do some manipulation in Excel (my favorite tool) to clean out the first- and last-touch interactions in the Top Conversion Paths report.

What you want to do now is expand the number of rows in Analytics to account for as many of your paths as possible. For most sites the 5,000-row limit in Analytics will suffice.

Download all of your conversion paths into Excel. You’ll have one column with the complete paths, followed by the following columns:

• Conversions
• Conversion Value

To wrangle the data into the format we need, I also added the following columns:

• Top
  • Direct
  • Organic Search
  • Social
• Middle
  • Organic to Organic
  • Direct to Email
  • Direct to Organic
• Bottom
  • Email
  • Organic
  • Direct

Now we can build out a marketing plan depending on our needs.

Excel sheet

I promised you an Excel sheet that I have put together for you. Note that it does not automatically clean out your very long conversion paths, but use the parameters given above to narrow down your data to make it actionable if that makes sense for your business.

That said, you can download the spreadsheet here.

Bonus Excel sheet to find profitability by # of touches

I mentioned above about finding the number of touches that perform best for you. Here is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that allows you to do just this. Basically, the sheet looks at the number of touches and averages the conversion amount for each bucket. You can see the results on the far right.

To use this sheet for yourself, download your Multi Channel Funnel groupings in Analytics (you need to have ecommerce enabled) and enter your data into the sheet.

Download this bonus spreadsheet here.

Example and conclusion

If we are trying to convert more people to DistilledU, through that goal I know that Organic converts best for us on the last touch. This means that we need to invest in content that drives people towards a conversion through organic, so either blog content with a call to action or larger content teaching people SEO. We know that email converts 4th best for DU, but it works well higher in the funnel to convert people eventually. Therefore, we need to get more people onto our DistilledU email list.

Direct traffic converts well, of course; people are coming to the site because they know about it. Therefore we need to get top-of-mind and convert them into email and RSS subscribers so that they become familiar with our content and eventually buy through email or search.

We’ve built our funnel. You should go and build yours. I’d love to hear what insights you have.

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!