SEO News

Posted by Lindsay

As Web Community Manager @ThinkGeek, Carrie Gouldin built the company’s social media presence from the ground up and now engages hundreds of thousands of followers through multiple social platforms.

We’re excited that she is bringing her valuable insights about social media to MozCon! In her talk, “Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement,� she’ll share practical advice about how to track links, read metrics, and keep your followers hungry for more.

Recently, we got the chance to talk to her about her dynamic job, social metrics, and how a well-coordinated social media response helped ThinkGeek turn around an internet meltdown.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

I’m going to talk about how the right content at the right time and the right metrics tracked with the right tools drives ThinkGeek’s social program. I’ll show examples of the kind of stuff that gets us thousands of retweets and a 25-50% Talking About This rate on Facebook, some of our behind-the-scenes data on traffic and revenue, and tips and tests you can try right away.

You’re currently the web community manager at ThinkGeek. Could you tell us a bit about how you got into that role?

I started at ThinkGeek almost five years ago. At that time, ThinkGeek had a very strong brand and passionate fans, but we weren’t really available to our customers out there on social networks. I came in at the right time — before Oprah joined Twitter, even — and was able to start building a community organically and trying new things without the burden of so-called “best practices.” It also wasn’t my only role (and still isn’t; I also head up our email program), so I was able to justify my existence beyond Faceyspaces and Twitlogs to those who were on the fence about the value of social networks for internet retailers.

What do you think are the top three qualities of an effective web community manager?

First and foremost, 100% dedication to the brand, values, and public persona of the company they represent. If they’re going to manufacture the Kool-Aid, they have to drink it first. This is why I feel social media should always be kept in-house.

Second, the ability to communicate clearly, interestingly, and like a real human being — which is to say with humor, compassion, and enthusiasm. That includes strong (and concise!) writing skills, some Photoshop mojo, experience with HTML and web publishing, and unflagging attention to detail.

And lastly, a thick skin and knowing when to take a break. Being at the beck and call of the internet is not easy.

Which social metric do you think is widely undervalued?

Engagement is undervalued, and the metric depends on the network. What good is a jillion followers if none of them clicks your links or retweets or shares your content?

On the other hand, revenue and traffic are valued but traditionally achieved through paid placements like boosted Facebook posts or sponsored tweets, while we treat our social streams like network television with great content surrounding our commercials, which does work for us. We haven’t seen boosted posts pay off for us on Facebook, but remarketing ads (not under the purview of our “community” team) can be successful.

Give us an example of one important test that any business on Facebook should do in the process of building social media engagement.

On Facebook, try the same content two ways at the same time of day, one day apart. It’s hard to do A/B tests given the nature of the tools we have–that is, in most cases, everyone sees the same thing at the same time–so you have to be creative.

I’d suggest an image + text post on Facebook on the same subject versus the same text without an image. Which does better on shares? Clicks? Comments? Reach? Revenue? Facebook targets different kind of content to different users based on their past engagement history, so you might see very different results.

A couple months ago, ThinkGeek was caught in the crossfire between FOX and sellers on Etsy, but ThinkGeek came out of it looking great. Can you share a bit about how social media helped manage ThinkGeek’s reputation in this incident, and any insights you gained from the experience?

For those playing along at home, the issue was over a licensed knit hat from Joss Whedon’s short-lived space western Firefly, owned by FOX. The show ranks up there with Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek in terms of the geek lexicon, and the hat in question became a symbol of both rebelling against the man (because of the character who wore it) and helping others out (with charitable donations from the purchase of hand-made knit hat replicas on sites like Etsy).

So when an unnamed source (a.k.a. the man) went after many unlicensed Etsy sellers (the rebels with hearts of gold) with cease and desist orders, the internet exploded.

Our licensed version of the hat (made by another company that is not us) is visible out there in the geekiverse so we got a lot of questions and accusations about our role in the matter via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, our blog, our Jayne hat product page comments, the phone — every possible method of contact.

First, there was a collective “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” at ThinkGeek HQ, and we told customers we didn’t know what was going on (which was true) but we’d find out. After some triage behind the scenes, we learned it was FOX — generally unloved by fans because FOX is the reason the show was cancelled in the first place — and that in fact FOX had only issued one C&D, so presumably Etsy decided to shut down the other stores. As quickly as we could, we published a blog post explaining our side of things.

Neither we nor the licensors who make the hat had any role in it, but then the story changed to “Well, if you didn’t sell it, this wouldn’t happen.” That may or may not be true. FOX would have likely tried to protect their intellectual property regardless, but there we were still selling the hat. So, after much consternation about how to turn our problem into a solution befitting the charitable roots of the hat, we published another post the following day announcing our donation of the proceeds to Can’t Stop the Serenity, a Browncoat charity that supports Equality Now:

Then Nathan Fillion, who starred in Firefly, very kindly tweeted about the steps we’d taken:

Which was very much appreciated by us (because we’re fans so OMG <3 NATHAN)… but crashed our blog, and spawned the hashtag #Fillioned. All in all, a good ending to two long days.

What did we do that made this work out? We were honest, acted quickly, and responded in the manner that honored and respected the spirit of the hat and the fandom surrounding it. Pretty simple, but in practice it takes serious coordination to pull a response like that together.

What is your geekiest hobby?

MY JOB. Seriously. Curating a collection of 100+ fan-made cosplay outfits for a stuffed monkey who meets geek celebrities like Adam Savage, Wil Wheaton, and the voice of GLaDOS should count for something.

What is a quote that has stuck with you, and why?

“Brevity is the soul of wit” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Comes in handy for Twitter-zen.

If you had to be trapped in a TV show for a month, which would you choose?

I should say Game of Thrones to stay on message but that’s just about the very last universe I’d want to find myself trapped in. My top pick would be Downton Abbey so I could I hang with the Dowager Countess.

It was great to speak with you, Carrie! Get geeky updates by following @ThinkGeek on Twitter, and learn test-driven social media tips by checking out Carrie’s presentation at MozCon!

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What does the perfect digital strategy look like?

Rather than starting by looking at agency models, I always find it more useful to look at the bigger picture of what brands are doing and what they need. 

Try asking yourself “if budget and restrictions/internal bottlenecks were no object, what would the perfect digital marketing strategy look like?”. Presumably this is likely to include the integration of owned, earned and paid media:

And then you can work backwards:

• What are the main goals you are looking to achieve?
• What marketing channels can help you to achieve your goals?
• How can the channels work/integrate together?
• What type of people do you need to get involved?
• What can you manage internally vs. using external expertise?

Ultimately it’s taking a budget and spending it where it works best, with short, medium and long-term goals in mind. 

It’s not about SEO, PR or content marketing, it’s simply being able to share your brand’s story to your target audience and converting them into customers. 

Once you’ve figured this out, you can then define everything else afterwards. It’s important to know the budget you have to work with early on, so that you can set targets and control realistic expectations from the outset. 

Otherwise you’re unlikely to ever win if those expectations aren’t clearly aligned.

If you flip the question of “what should an agency offer in 2013?”, to ask “what does a client need in 2013?”, you can start to build the right approach to match those key requirements. Otherwise, you run the risk of offering services that aren’t as useful or valued.

Integrated or specialist agency?

To succeed in 2013, brands really need a multichannel approach. This means they have two choices:

1. Work with an integrated team (either in-house or externally – usually a mixture of both) who can bring everything together under one roof.
2. Work with a number of specialists in each area.

Of course, there are pros and cons to each. You might lack the in-depth quality a specialist can give you in a particular area. 

But, in that approach you may lose the bigger picture and miss out on many efficiencies of being able to work together more closely as an integrated team. There’s no right or wrong answer, but it’s important that you maximise the synergies between channels such as SEO, PPC and social media: 

We’re finding we’re more often talking to brands who are looking for digital marketing partners to work alongside their team, as opposed to managing individual channels with separate agencies. This means supporting them with: 

• Skills they don’t have internally – perhaps it’s content production, blogger outreach, social media marketing campaigns, SEO expertise, PPC management. 
• Training internal teams – for example, making sure the content team is aware of SEO/PR/social media marketing best practises.
• Strategic consulting – to reinforce ideas or get internal buy-in with advice from a neutral party.
• Assistance to build their own team – working alongside brands in interim management positions to identify where they need new skills/job roles and help them recruit key personnel to strengthen their teams.

It always varies based on the client – larger brands often prefer to work with a number of agencies with different expertise and specialisms. Even then, each team still needs to be fully aware of other activity outside of their own campaigns that can make an impact and be used. 

I’ve always found holding agency days to be incredibly valuable too, as that helps you to understand other areas that are being worked upon in more detail, one I attended showed some great demographic profiling information from a CRM agency which I was previously unaware of, and then able to put to use within content and search campaigns.

Plus, getting to know everyone involved allows you to build a relationship outside of the client – which can be very useful if you need to get things done quicker by communicating directly with different agencies/suppliers, without the need for client to be involved in every step.

Surround yourself with talent 

Online marketing has become so integrated that clients will often need a digital partner to support and challenge their internal team and goals. That means as an agency you face a situation where you can a) look to bring in new talent, or b) you have to accept that there’s a range of services that you just can’t offer.

I’ve never been a fan of starting as a full-service agency, I’d rather be great at one thing than average at 10. But if you can find ways to build up and bring in key skills/people into your team which can complement your client campaigns, that has to be an option worth pursuing. 

Scaling with quality is always the biggest agency challenge, and in this game everything is about people – so good recruitment and team building is vital. 

I’m not the best person in my agency at everything we do (or arguably anything!), and neither do I want to do be. No one wants to be a big fish in a small pond, that way you’ll end up making it all up yourself and have little choice but to learn from your mistakes.

Alternatively, if you’re surrounded by great PPC specialists, bloggers, designers, SEOs, PRs etc you can all learn from each other and create a solid strategy where the whole is much greater than the sum of all parts.

We’ve done this recently, by acquiring a paid search agency to compliment and combine our service offering into an integrated approach. I expect to see more agencies doing the same before the end of the year – and of course, like any agency, we’re always looking for talented people to join us and add to the team.

Ditch the silos

Everyone has known for years that there are efficiencies in combining paid and organic search strategies into a single team. That is true – but it doesn’t really happen until you really start to break down the silos. It’s even more important now, with so many overlaps in search, content, social and PR.

Team building and improving efficiencies is one of the biggest learning curves I’ve faced, but it’s undoubtedly my proudest achievement too by being able to build great teams and individually see people grow and succeed. We’ve made a huge effort in our team to get everyone working together, this means internally the SEO strategists are working in combination with outreach, social media and paid search specialists and supporting each other. 

Sometimes, it’s as simple as getting them to sit next to each other – other times you need to bring them into internal/client meetings, brainstorming and projects.

By ensuring that we act as a team, share knowledge and have a set of individual skills it means clients benefit from this multichannel approach, but you’re all working towards executing a single strategy, just from different angles using a mix of tactics.

Having that single and clear strategy, operating across multiple channels using different tactics, means you’re less likely to hit bottlenecks further down the line – because you’re all on the same team and working together.

In my opinion culture can often be looked at the wrong way. But to me this is what culture is all about, it’s getting everyone enjoying their work, learning every day, contributing as part of a team with the support of others and working on clients they love/sectors they are passionate about and willing to put the extra work in when it’s required.

Then you can add in all the free fruit and coffee afterwards, but on it’s own that’s not the important bit.

Team integration also helps to get around the issue where quite often an agency is hired, only to end up dealing with one person at that company. 

That means it’s almost a freelance arrangement, and not quite the service that means you get access to a range of different specialists and have the security in a backup of people who know and understand your brand and what you’re trying to achieve – especially in the case that a key contact is unavailable, on holiday or leaves the company.

Make content central to your brand

In 2013, there’s no longer an argument on if content is important, everyone can now see the market growth is clearly there, although surprisingly that wasn’t the case even 12 months ago.  

Not many people would disagree now that brands are becoming publishers and that whether you’re involved in PR, social media or SEO – content is crucial towards marketing your brand. That’s why brands like Netflix, Red Bull and Virgin Mobile are now taking content marketing so seriously.

As a result of this growth, the job roles that agencies are now hiring are much more content-based. This means writers/bloggers/authors, social influencers, graphic designers, videographers and creative PRs are much more highly valued than they probably were this time last year. 

In order to succeed, brands are investing in content and building a brand to integrate with all of their marketing channels – this a much longer-term vision to grow their audience and sustainably increase market share.

No one understands your brand better than you

Our job as agencies is to understand the clients we are working with as much as we can, in order to execute a marketing strategy and get the best results possible.

That said, no one is going to understand your brand better than you. Which is why the move towards working as an integrated digital partner makes a lot more sense. That way you’re not just telling an agency to manage everything, instead they are there to support and work with you.

This is where the best results come from, the days are long gone where clients just sign 12-month contracts and you have free reign, with the client only asking to hear from you 11 months down the line to arrange a review meeting. And yes, I have seen that happen! 

Now the task is to support and work together with in-house teams, planning and executing a strategy to combine the skills and resource of both to hit targets.

Brands have huge power in data, knowledge, information & relationships

As agencies – we need to use the full strength of a brand. And for content marketing, for example, there’s a huge amount of value in the data, information and knowledge that brands have available to them.  Most of the time they don’t even realise this can be used for marketing purposes, so we need to work on digging this out and turning their data into content, stories, news, PR.

We all can be guilty of being too stubborn to admit we could benefit from a clients help, or their PR agency’s (and vice versa). 

But brands have a huge amount of power in the relationships they have – if you want to create a social media or outreach campaign to leverage influencers, it makes sense to start with those contacts you’ve build strong relationships with already – so leverage what you’ve got!

The time to be innovative & forward thinking is now

You can debate as long as you like about the impact of Google+, but some agencies (and brands for that matter) can be very reactive and sit back on what has been tried and tested to work for years.

That’s all very well if it works, but if it has diminishing results, it doesn’t matter how good it was in the past, it’s time to move on. Plus there’s lots of opportunities and slow-moving brands that you can take advantage of by moving quickly and being ahead of the curve. 

Sometimes it just needs a leap of faith on something that you believe is going to become increasing important – so that you are being innovative and investing in the future – without taking your eye off the ball today. 

This is one of the most forward thinking SEO articles I’ve read in a long time and if you can get a head-start on things like responsive design, schema and semantic optimisation then you’re likely to be in a very strong position versus your competitors – you can leave them chasing the algorithm while you build for long-term success.

Of course, you won’t always get it right, but if you’re going to be spending time on Google+ for example, don’t hang around waiting until the audience is there – the time to do it is now. Then when the audience is there, you can be one of the authorities and thought leaders within your industry.

Really your business strategy and marketing strategy should be as closely aligned as possible – which is why so many people are encouraging CEOs to become thought leaders to promote their companies via blogging, speaking etc.

They are the ones responsible for setting the company vision and are likely to have the strongest relationships and know more about the industry/market than anyone else, so they should be best placed to bring it all together when it comes to being innovative and predicting where their industry is going next.

Being agile and quick is vital

Which leads on to being agile. In 2013 there are so many newsworthy and topical trends that are great marketing opportunities. Here’s 26 just to name a few!

Econsultancy CEO, Ashley Friedlein wrote an excellent post recently on the importance of having a 70:20:10 approach. That 10% is hugely important – as by being agile and quick to move, you’re likely to be taking advantage of opportunities where perhaps your competitors are slower to move.

In this case, for once it’s not always about quality either, it’s about being quick! I really like the concept that you have something fast, quality or cheap, but you can’t have all three, pick two! In this case, fast is the vital ingredient and then you decide if you prefer quality, or if cheap will do the job.

The ability to be agile shouldn’t be underestimated, we’re in a situation now where we’re telling clients that we’re going to create them x pieces of content, but we have no idea what it’s going to be about. That’s a big shift in mind-set and even a year ago, people would have laughed at that! 

But now, because it’s so important to be topical, we have to be quick to react and provide the content that people are tweeting about and searching for in almost real-time – otherwise you’re too late.

You only need to see the results that Oreo got by being agile during the Superbowl to see that agile can yield huge results and brand visibility.

It’s important to have a consistent model, so balance is key. Allow yourself enough time to be agile, but have that clear plan and strategy that it can work alongside a planned digital roadmap to get the best results.

Otherwise, you’ll end up just chasing the latest fad, you should be using agile to compliment the parts that already work – not replace it.

End of Day Rates?

Pricing models in digital are hard to get right, it’s all about providing value at a fair market rate. 

In every situation, you have to make it win-win. If the client doesn’t get results they’re not going to be happy, and if the agency doesn’t make a profit, equally that’s unlikely to be a good relationship long-term.

Traditionally, the way to do this has been day rates. You know how much time you’ve spent, the margin you make after considering overheads and from an agency perspective you know where you are.

But it doesn’t reflect value. Just because an audit took 10 days to complete, it doesn’t mean it’s any good! 

If anything a day-rate often incentivises the task to take longer! Hopefully not, of course – but you always have to be aware of the dodgy car mechanic. This is especially true with tasks like blogger outreach – the expected results from time spent is vague at best – it’s results that matter.

I can’t speak for other agencies, but I would be interested to hear – personally, other than consultancy time or training, we haven’t charged anything as a standard day-rate for at least a year.

I would expect this is a common trend as more productised and performance-based agreements are much clearer to set expectations and charge clients/reward agencies much more fairly. 

It also means the pressure is on the agency to deliver as the client knows exactly what to expect in terms of key deliverables over the course of a project, with a much higher emphasis on client re-education towards quality over quantity. Focusing on the long-term gain, not the quick wins.

But, it also means that if you are a client with higher than realistic target/deliverable expectations at the outset, that you might get more agencies refusing to work with you now than has happened in the past too.

We want to build our clients into great case studies and success stories – but if a potential client doesn’t share that same drive and determination to get things done, it probably makes sense to pass early, rather that drag out what is likely to be a forgone conclusion.

Summary

In a lot of ways the agency task hasn’t changed at all, it’s about supporting clients goals in the best way possible to achieve results. 

It’s also about having a proven model that works and you can stick to, no-ones wants to constantly change, but at the same time you need to evolve in order to cater for what the market needs and learn what strategies and team environments yield the most success.

What has changed, is the fact that the lines are becoming so blurred between marketing channels, which means operating in silos is no longer effective.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t be a small specialised agency – but it does present a new challenge, for those agencies such as ourselves, who are looking to bridge the gap between small specialist consultancies and the big media agencies. 

I believe the way to go is almost to do both – build an integrated team of specialist skills in each key area, then you can bring them in and out as you see fit to support the growing needs of clients across multi-channels.

It’s simply the process of supporting them in that task and taking a marketing budget and spending it where it works best!

I’d be very interested in hearing from other agency owners on their challenges and how they’ve adapted strategies and their positioning based upon the changing market – let us know in the comments.

Although it’s perhaps a subtle change, it’s a logical one, as it makes frequently used features easier to access and organizes them into related groups that match “the stages of search” – to quote Google.

Here’s a screen shot from my own blog’s Webmaster Tools (GWT) account, so you can see the new navigation (on the left):

As you can see, new navigation headings have become: “Search Appearance”, “Search Traffic”, “Google Index” and “Crawl”. This new design is much tidier, allowing quick access to the key areas or issues that webmasters will want to monitor and assess.

I am inclined to agree, these are the key areas of the stages of search: Google crawls a site then indexes the content accordingly.

As digital marketers, we should be monitoring GWT closely, because if Google cannot crawl and index your site, neither can a user access your content costing you valuable visits. So if there are issues here, we need to correct these first.

But if crawling and indexing are ticking over nicely, we then try to improve the appearance and coverage in search so that we’ll receive optimum levels of search traffic to our site. This is something that we tend to monitor more frequently than crawl issues, as we always have our eyes on the prize of more traffic.

So, what’s under each heading?

Site appearance

Under this heading, you’ll still find structured data. Google’s data highlighter tool allows the less technical savvy among us to markup content with rich snippets. These additional snippets of HTML allow Google to include more information in its search results.

The “sitelinks” feature allows you to check which links are appearing within your individual organic results. Here’s an image of a listing using rich snippets in the search results:

New search appearance pop-up window

Google has added a new feature to this tab, too. Just click the question mark bubble. A window will pop up showing how your site appears in the search results.

You’ll then be able to make changes to individual listings so they’re more appealing. Here’s what it looks like:

Search traffic

The ’Search traffic’ tab allows you to gain an insight into the terms people are using to land on your site (click on “search queries” for this). There’s a tab listing “links to your site”, which is a great way of finding out which sites are already linking to you.

And there’s a run-down of your “internal link” structure. So, you should look here to check that your site is clearly structured.

Google index

Here you’ll see how many pages of your site are in Google’s index. GWT tells you the overall number of pages it has indexed. If you’re seeing more pages indexed than you have published, this may be a sign that your site has a ‘duplicate content’ problem. In other words, Google is finding more than one version of each of your pages; which will harm your site’s rankings.

You can also see which keywords Google has found on your pages.

You’re also able to request the “removal of URLs” from Google’s Index if not already blocked in the robots.txt file. Use this feature if you have pages that you don’t want Google to find.

Crawl

This tab allows you to understand Google’s crawlers a little better, especially their behaviour on your own website. It’s important that Google is able to crawl your site easily: you want Google to find and index your content after all!

You can find out “crawl stats”, any possible “crawl errors”, the “URLs that are blocked” from Google’s crawlers, “sitemaps” associated with a website and find out whether Google is having any trouble with the coverage of your site with the “URL Parameters” tab.

All of these are important factors in making sure your site is indexed properly by Google.

Account-level admin tasks now accessible from the settings menu

There’s also been a shake up on which items users can see. If you’re the admin for the GWT account, you’ll find a full list of tasks like “Webmaster Tools Preferences”, “Site Settings”, “Change of Address”, “Google Analytics Property”, “Users & Site Owners”, “Verification Details” and “Associates” under the gear icon in the top right hand corner.

If you have limited access, you’ll see fewer options. The idea is that you can give access to a wider variety of users.

If you’ve received any messages in Webmaster’s Tools there could be a chance that Google isn’t able to properly access and index your site which can have a detrimental effect on rankings and visits. 

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

You know the numbers — Google uses over 200 ranking signals, updates its algorithm over 500 times a year, and employs thousands of engineers. We often get so caught up in the minutiae of the algorithm that we forget all this effort serves a single purpose:

Satisfy the user.

This isn’t a touchy-feely post that says “Make great content and visitors will come” or “Delight your customers and magic will happen.”

It’s not magic. Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor.

Unlike other ranking factors, this one is hard to measure because it’s based almost entirely on search engines’ own internal data — something they don’t share. We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google’s most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results.

It’s easy to tweak a keyword. It’s much harder to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don’t find what they were looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that’s why search engines place so much emphasis on it.

How Google measures and predicts satisfaction

User behavior in search results

Stephen Levy’s excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data (bold added):

“… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the “long click” – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling were the “short clicksâ€� where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. “If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy,” says Patel. “If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy.”

Often called pogosticking, this refers to the behavior of users that click on a result, then “pogostick” back and forth between the search results and different websites, searching for satisfaction.

Search quality raters

In 2012, Google released an abbreviated copy of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public. A version of this document is used by Google’s small army of Search Quality Raters to evaluate search results.

One of the highest scores a quality rater can assign to a page is “useful” (bold added):

“Useful pages should be high quality and a good “fitâ€� for the query. In addition, they often have some or all of the following characteristics: highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic). Useful pages are usually well organized and pages you trust. They are from information sources that seem reliable. Useful information pages are not “spammy.”

The problem with quality raters is they can only look at a few thousand websites at any given time. There are millions of sites on the web, so Google invented a new system:

Panda

Instead of evaluating results after the fact, Panda gives Google the ability to predict user satisfaction — modeled on actual human surveys — and apply it to every site in its index.

Less satisfying pages are ranked lower in search results, and every few weeks the index is updated with new data.

The chart below shows Panda hitting a site again and again.

Site visits with Panda updates via Panguin Tool and Google Algorithm Change History

What can we do?

If search engines measure user satisfaction and employ it as a ranking factor, our goals as search marketers are to:

1. Create highly satisfying experiences so that users don’t return to search results to pick another URL.
2. Build sites that meet Panda’s expectation of high quality.
3. Surprise and delight our visitors so that they seek us out again and again.

5 Tips to improve visitor satisfaction:

1. Google’s free website satisfaction surveys

As if to put an exclamation point on the whole satisfaction experience, Google recently released free, embeddable customer satisfaction surveys for website owners.

After installing a line of JavaScript on your site, your visitors are presented with the following questions:

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?
2. What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?
3. What is your main reason for visiting this website today?
4. Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?

If you’d like to customize the questions, Google allows you to do this for $0.01 per response.

It feels like Google wants to give site owners the same type of feedback Google acquires directly from behavior data. Using these forms won’t tell you exactly what to do, but any webmaster using them is sure to get a ton of valuable feedback about visitor satisfaction.

2. Removing barriers

We’ve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors affect rankings.

Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We’re seeing these more and more all over the web.

What if Moz required registration?

The idea is simple: folks click on a search result, see the form and return to the search results to try another URL. After a few hundred times (or less), search engines start to figure out this result doesn’t satisfy users.

At Moz, we’ve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, there’s anecdotal evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers.

3. Speed it up

We know that faster websites are good, but page speed has two mechanisms by which to influence rankings:

1. Directly: Google reps have stated that page speed has a direct impact on rankings for a certain percentage of queries (only 1% in 2010).
2. Secondary: As page speed affects usage, it can have a secondary effect on user satisfaction. A frustrated user waiting too long for a page to load can often return to search results.

Google obsesses over speed, and scientists at Microsoft have shown that users will visit a site less often if it’s only 250 milliseconds slower than the competition.

Source: NYTimes

If you ever need to convince your client or boss to improve page speed, try the comparison tool at Webpagetest.com which allows you to export a slow motion video.

4. Empathy

Empathy as a ranking factor? “Cyrus,” I can hear you saying, “you’ve been hanging out with Rand too much!”

Consider this comment on a recent Whiteboard Friday. I’ve edited the comment below to highlight the important parts:

When you practice empathy, you put yourself in the shoes of your visitor to try to build a satisfying experience. You accomplish this by

• Answering their questions
• Employing intuitive layouts
• Giving them relevant links and resources to click
• Surprising them with extras

While it’s difficult to prove a relationship between improved user experiences and rankings (because we can’t measure user behavior like Google can) there’s strong anecdotal evidence that search engines aggregate these factors into their algorithms.

5. Linking out

One of the best SEO articles I’ve read all year is AJ Kohn’s Time to Long Click, a great article you shouldn’t miss. AJ explains how linking out (and also creating content hubs) can be used to increase user satisfaction (bold added):

What I’m recommending is that you link to other valuable sources of information when appropriate so that you fully satisfy that user’s query. In doing so you’ll generate more long clicks and earn more links over time, both of which can have profound and positive impact on your rankings.

Stop thinking about optimizing your page and think about optimizing the search experience instead.

-AJ Kohn

Think of it this way: It’s far better for users to click away to another URL from your site than for those same users to return to Google to try again. In the first instance, you are the authority hub, in the latter, Google is the authority.

Be the authority.

How do YOU improve satisfaction?

There are two types of SEOs: those that try to satisfy robots, and those that satisfy users.

The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. If the users aren’t happy, neither are the bots.

The user-focused SEOs works with the same keywords and title tag, but then they go one step further and ask their users to try the site. After that, they do whatever it takes to make their users happy.

Have you seen improvement in rankings after improving user satisfaction? Share your story with us in the comments below.

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