SEO News

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about something that we don’t usually talk about in the inbound marketing world because inbound, of course, is such a hyper-measurable channel, at least most of the investments that we make are very measurable, but I love serendipitous marketing too. That’s investing in serendipity to earn out-sized returns that you might not be able to make. That’s a tough sell for a lot of management, for a lot of executives, for a lot of marketers because we’re so accustomed to this new world of hyper-measurability. But with a couple examples, I’ll illustrate what I mean.

So let’s say we start by maybe you go and you attend an off-topic conference, a conference that isn’t normally in your field, but it was recommended to you by a friend. So you go to that event, and while you are there, you meet a speaker. You happen to run into them, you’re having a great chat together, and that speaker later mentions your product, your company, your business on stage at the event. It turns out that that mention yields two audience members who become clients of yours later and, in fact, not just clients, but big advocates for your business that drive even more future customers.

This is pretty frustrating. From a measurability standpoint, first off, it’s an off-topic event. How do you even know that this interaction is the one that led to them being mentioned? Maybe that speaker would have mentioned your business anyway. Probably not, but maybe. What about these folks? Would those two customers have come to your business regardless? Were they searching for exactly what you offered anyway? Or were they influenced by this? They probably were. Very, very hard to measure. Definitely not the kind of investment that you would normally make in the course of your marketing campaigns, but potentially huge.

I’ll show you another one. Let’s say one day you’re creating a blog post, and you say, “Boy, you know, this topic is a really tough one to tackle with words alone. I’m going to invest in creating some visual assets.” You get to work on them, and you start scrapping them and rebuilding them and rebuilding them. Soon you’ve spent off hours for the better part of a week building just a couple of visual assets that illustrate a tough concept in your field. You go, “Man, that was a huge expenditure of energy. That was a big investment. I’m not sure that’s even going to have any payoff.”

Then a few weeks later those visuals get picked up by some major news outlets. It turns out, and you may not even be able to discover this, but it turns out that the reporters for those websites did a Google image search, and you happened to pop up and you clearly had the best image among the 30 or 40 that they scrolled to before they found it. So, not only are they including those images, they’re also linking back over to your website. Those links don’t just help your site directly, but the news stories themselves, because they’re on high-quality domains and because they’re so relevant, end up ranking for an important search keyword phrase that continues to drive traffic for years to come back to your site.

How would you even know, right? You couldn’t even see that this image had been called by those reporters because it’s in the Google image search cache. You may not even connect that up with the rankings and the traffic that’s sent over. Hopefully, you’ll be able to do that. It’s very hard to say, “Boy, if I were to over-invest and spend a ton more time on visual assets, would I ever get this again? Or is this a one-time type of event?”

The key to all of this serendipitous marketing is that these investments that you’re making up front are hard or impossible to predict or to attribute to the return on investment that you actually earn. A lot of the time it’s actually going to seem unwise. It’s going to seem foolish, even, to make these kinds of investments based on sort of a cost and time investment perspective. Compared to the potential ROI, you just go, “Man, I can’t see it.” Yet, sometimes we do it anyway, and sometimes it has a huge impact. It has those out-sized serendipitous returns.

Now, the way that I like to do this is I’ll give you some tactical stuff. I like to find what’s right here, the intersection of this Venn diagram. Things that I’m passionate about, that includes a topic as well as potentially the medium or the type of investment. So if I absolutely hate going to conferences and events, I wouldn’t do it, even if I think it might be right from other perspectives.

I do particularly love creating visual assets. So I like tinkering around, taking a long time to sort of get my pixels looking the way I want them to look, and even though I don’t create great graphics, as evidenced here, sometimes these can have a return. I like looking at things where I have some skill, at least enough skill to produce something of value. That could mean a presentation at a conference. It could mean a visual asset. It could mean using a social media channel. It could mean a particular type of advertisement. It could mean a crazy idea in the real world. Any of these things.

Then I really like applying empathy as the third point on top of this, looking for things that are something that my audience has the potential to like or enjoy or be interested in. So this conference my be off-topic, but knowing that it was recommended by my friend and that there might be some high-quality people there, I can connect up the empathy and say, “Well, if I’m putting myself in the shoes of these people, I might imagine that some of them will be interested in or need or use my product.”

Likewise, if I’m making this visual asset, I can say, “Well, I know that since this is a tough subject to understand, just explaining it with words alone might not be enough for a lot of people. I bet if I make something visual, that will help it be much better understood. It may not spread far and wide, but at least it’ll help the small audience who does read it.”

That intersection is where I like to make serendipitous investments and where I would recommend that you do too.

There are a few things that we do here at Moz around this model and that I’ve seen other companies who invest wisely in serendipity make, and that is we basically say 1 out of 5, 20% of our time and our budget goes to serendipitous marketing. It’s not a hard and fast rule, like, “Oh boy, I spent $80 on this. I’d better go find $20 to go spend on something serendipitous that’ll be hard to measure.” But it’s a general rule, and it gives people the leeway to say, “Gosh, I’m thinking about this project. I’m thinking about this investment. I don’t know how I’d measure it, but I’m going to do it anyway because I haven’t invested my 20% yet.”

I really like to brainstorm together, so bring people together from the marketing team or from engineering and product and other sections of the company, operations, but I really like having a single owner. The reason for that single owner doing the execution is because I find that with a lot of these kind of more serendipitous, more artistic style investments, and I don’t mean artistic just in terms of visuals, but I find that having that single architect, that one person kind of driving it makes it a much more cohesive and cogent vision and a much better execution at the end of the day, rather than kind of the design by committee. So I like the brainstorm, but I like the single owner model.

I think it’s critically important, if you’re going to do some serendipitous investments, that you have no penalty whatsoever for failure. Essentially, you’re saying, “Hey, we know we’re going to make this investment. We know that it’s the one out of five kind of thing, but if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay. We’re going to keep trying again and again.”

The only really critical thing that we do is that we gain intuition and experiential knowledge from every investment that we make. That intuition means that next time you do this, you’re going to be even smarter about it. Then the next time you do it, you’re going to gain more empathy and more understanding of what your audience really needs and wants and how that can spread. You’re going to gain more passion, a little more skill around it. Those kinds of things really predict success.

Then I think the last recommendation that I have is when you make serendipitous investments, don’t make them randomly. Have a true business or marketing problem that you’re trying to solve. So if that’s PR, we don’t get enough press, or gosh, sales leads, we’re not getting sales leads in this particular field, or boy, traffic overall, like we’d like to broaden our traffic sources, or gosh, we really need links because our kind of domain authority is holding us back from an SEO perspective, great. Make those serendipitous investments in the areas where you hope or think that the ROI might push on one of those particularly big business model, marketing model problems.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.

BuiltWith also knows about your competitors’ websites. They’ve cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Want to know how many sites use your competitor’s analytics software? Or who accepts Bitcoin? Or how many sites run WordPress?

Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google’s search results.

We thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to combine the two data sets?”

That’s exactly what our data science team, led by Dr. Matt Peters, did. We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.

How we conducted the study

BuiltWith supplied Moz with tech info on 180,000 domains that were previously analyzed for the Search Engine Ranking Factors study. Dr. Peters then calculated the correlations for over 50 website technologies.

The ranking data for the domains was gathered last summer—you can read more about it here—and the BuiltWith data is updated once per quarter. We made the assumption that basic web technology, like hosting platforms and web servers, don’t change often.

It’s very important to note that the website technologies we studied are not believed to be actual ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. There are huge causation/correlation issues at hand. Google likely doesn’t care too much what framework or content management system you use, but because SEOs often believe one technology superior to the other, we thought it best to take a look..

Web hosting platforms performance

One of the cool things about BuiltWith is not only can you see what technology a website uses, but you can view trends across the entire Internet.

One of the most important questions a webmaster has to answer is who to use as a hosting provider. Here’s BuiltWith’s breakdown of the hosting providers for the top 1,000,000 websites:

Holy GoDaddy! That’s a testament to the power of marketing.

Webmasters often credit good hosting as a key to their success. We wanted to find out if certain web hosts were correlated with higher Google rankings.

Interestingly, the data showed very little correlation between web hosting providers and higher rankings. The results, in fact, were close enough to zero to be considered null.

Statistically, Dr. Peters assures me, these correlations are so small they don’t carry much weight.

The lesson here is that web hosting, at least for the major providers, does not appear to be correlated with higher rankings or lower rankings one way or another. To put this another way, simply hosting your site on GoDaddy should neither help or hurt you in the large, SEO scheme of things.

That said, there are a lot of bad hosts out there as well. Uptime, cost, customer service and other factors are all important considerations.

CMS battle – WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal

Looking at the most popular content management systems for the top million websites, it’s easy to spot the absolute dominance of WordPress.

Nearly a quarter of the top million sites run WordPress.

You may be surprised to see that Tumblr only ranks 6,400 sites in the top million. If you expand the data to look at all known sites in BuiltWith’s index, the number grows to over 900,000. That’s still a fraction of the 158 million blogs Tumblr claims, compared to the only 73 million claimed by WordPress.

This seems to be a matter of quality over quantity. Tumblr has many more blogs, but it appears fewer of them gain significant traffic or visibility.

Does any of this correlate to Google rankings? We sampled five of the most popular CMS’s and again found very little correlation.

Again, these numbers are statistically insignificant. It would appear that the content management system you use is not nearly important as how you use it.

While configuring these systems for SEO varies in difficulty, plugins and best practices can be applied to all.

Popular social widgets – Twitter vs. Facebook

To be honest, the following chart surprised me. I’m a huge advocate of Google+, but never did I think more websites would display the Google Plus One button over Twitter’s Tweet button.

That’s not to say people actually hit the Google+ button as much. With folks tweeting over 58 million tweets per day, it’s fair to guess that far more people are hitting relatively few Twitter buttons, although Google+ may be catching up.

Sadly, our correlation data on social widgets is highly suspect. That’s because the BuiltWith data is aggregated at the domain level, and social widgets are a page-level feature.

Even though we found a very slight positive correlation between social share widgets and higher rankings, we can’t conclusively say there is a relationship.

More important is to realize the significant correlations that exist between Google rankings and actual social shares. While we don’t know how or even if Google uses social metrics in its algorithm (Matt Cutts specifically says they don’t use +1s) we do know that social shares are significantly associated with higher rankings.

Again, causation is not correlation, but it makes sense that adding social share widgets to your best content can encourage sharing, which in turn helps with increased visibility, mentions, and links, all of which can lead to higher search engine rankings.

Ecommerce technology – show us the platform

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest ecommerce platform of them all?

Magento wins this one, but the distribution is more even than other technologies we’ve looked at.

When we looked at the correlation data, again we found very little relationship between the ecommerce platform a website used and how it performed in Google search results.

Here’s how each ecommerce platform performed in our study.

Although huge differences exist in different ecommerce platforms, and some are easier to configure for SEO than others, it would appear that the platform you choose is not a huge factor in your eventual search performance.

Content delivery networks – fast, fast, faster

One of the major pushes marketers have made in the past 12 months has been to improve page speed and loading times. The benefits touted include improved customer satisfaction, conversions and possible SEO benefits.

The race to improve page speed has led to huge adoption of content delivery networks.

In our Ranking Factors Survey, the response time of a web page showed a -0.10 correlation with rankings. While this can’t be considered a significant correlation, it offered a hint that faster pages may perform better in search results—a result we’ve heard anecdotally, at least on the outliers of webpage speed performance.

We might expect websites using CDNs to gain the upper hand in ranking, but the evidence doesn’t yet support this theory. Again, these values are basically null.

While using a CDN is an important step in speeding up your site, it is only one of many optimizations you should make when improving webpage performance.

SSL certificates, web servers, and framework: Do they stack up?

We ran rankings correlations on several more data points that BuiltWith supplied us. We wanted to find out if things like your website framework (PHP, ASP.NET), your web server (Apache, IIS) or whether or not your website used an SSL certificate was correlated with higher or lower rankings.

While we found a few outliers around Varnish software and Symanted VeriSign SSL certificates, overall the data suggests no strong relationships between these technologies and Google rankings.

What we can learn

We had high hopes for finding “silver bullets” among website technologies that could launch us all to higher rankings.

The reality turns out to be much more complex.

While technologies like great hosting, CDNs, and social widgets can help set up an environment for improving SEO, they don’t do the work for us. Even our own Moz Analytics, with all its SEO-specific software, can’t help improve your website visibility unless you actually put the work in.

Are there any website technologies you’d like us to study next time around? Let us know in the comments below!