Tuesday MozCon 2015 Notes

Surviving Google: SEO in 2020

Dr. Pete Meyers - @Dr_Pete

• Every Google search page has paid results. You’ll possibly see one organic result above the fold
• 64% of search results have a vertical, knowledge graph or both.
• A lot has happened with knowledge graph in the first year

• Knowledge cards. “How tall is the space needle?” Seemingly endless answers, but human-edited knowledge doesn’t scale.
• Featured snippets are built on your indexed data. It’s a work in progress and not everything is right.
• They need to figure out what’s a question
• They’re trying dual knowledge boxes
• “People also ask” box is in testing.

• Are answers being driven by mobile. Namely, voice search. “Voice search is dependent on precise answers.”
• Is your niche safe from distruption?
• Is it really my data? If this is built on my data, can I take advantage of that? Yes, you can update those answers, but it might take a long time to index.
• Process for getting into Knowledge Graph / Answer Box:

• First: Google has to recognize it as a question
• Second: Google decides what results should be on page one
• Third: Google pulls the best answer from the page one results.
• “This isn’t spamming, this is our metric. We should be able to answer this question.”
• “It could be easier to jump from number five to [the knowledge box] than it is to jump from number five to number one.”

• Act now, cash it in. These tactics might not exist forever, but you can benefit in the short term. E.g., Google Authorship.
• Google is becoming content creators: think videos, lyrics, sports scores, mortgage calculator, auto insurance quotes, etc.
• “Google is building content for a better experience and they’re disrupting your content.”
• What can you do?

• Build deep content. Don’t be the easy answer. It’s helpful, but Google can wipe you off the map. Make it hard to replace you with a little box.
• Add value and insight. Credit Karma is a great example of this.
• Bring your A-game.

•  Mobile-friendly Google update: Google got what they wanted.

• Over half of search usage is mobile. Desktop and laptop haven’t gone down, it’s just that mobile has increased.
• Most activity starts on mobile. 65% of search starts on a mobile device. 60% continued on a PC. 4% continued on a tablet.
• Google is putting mobile design first. The song search was designed for mobile and then rolled out to desktop.

• Run your numbers. “Are you creating a great mobile experiences for your users and do they need that?”
• Attack of the hybrids: E.g., paid hotel booking. “Google is a commercial ecosystem. They are more than search.”
• App packs can replace up to 6 organic spots. Google can combine these packs, and frankly, it’s a good experience. The paid ecosystem is going to get more competitive, you can’t afford to ignore these things.
• Can we survive the future?

• Disappearing SERPS?
• Will voice be the death of SERPS?
• What if keywords don’t matter?

• Today, it does. We need to be aware of the future but we need to keep playing this game.
• 75% of our traffic still comes from search. If you’re missing the paid stuff you’re missing 90% of your first page search opportunities.
• /keyopp/ 
• Short tactics, long strategy.

• “Not everything can be personalized, but we’re going to see more and more of it.”
• “You can only do so much with predictive search.”
• “Google’s world could change overnight.”

Becoming a Mobile SEO Superhero in a Post 4/21 World

Cindy Krum - @Suzzicks

• 4/21/2015 was the first time Google gave SEOs a heads’ up about an update.
• Surveying the mobile landscape

• What is the threat?

• Mobile traffic is still growing
• More types of mobile devices
• Our results are being de-emphasized (users just want answers to their issues, they don’t care about visiting a site).

• Google’s goal is to organize information so it’s easily accessible to users. “Google is becoming a presentation layer of the Internet.”
• Types of mobile sites.

• mDot
• Responsive design (Google’s favorite)
• Selective serving
• Single page app

• Desktop is the default canonical. This is how they evaluate content and keywords. As long as google understands the pages are related, your mobile site will get keywords and more from the desktop version.
• Honor the integrity of the canonical. You need extreme consistency across 301 redirects > server rules > internal links > self-referencing canonicals > XML sitemap
• “Mobile SEO is a lot more technical than desktop SEO. But it’s also a lot less about specific rankings and more about interaction of the user from the rankings to the website.”
• Settings that impact mobile search

• Logged in or out
• Chrome vs. Google Now
• Location and privacy
• Android vs. iOS

• Standard vs. basic mobile search results. When you’re on a slow data connection your results might be different than someone on a fast connection. You’ll have fewer images, videos, app packs, etc.

• Fundamental 4/21 changes

• Desktop crawl is for content and desktop rendering is canonical
• Mobile crawl focuses on UX and rendering rather than content (making CSS and JavaScript crawlable, which actually has nothing to do with UX)

• “The smartphone crawler doesn’t really understand more than just the rendering.”

• How to figure out if you have a mobile friendly site

• Search site:yourdomain.com.
• Google’s mobile friendly test. This will tell you exactly why it’s blocked.
• Webmaster console fetch and render.
• Text that’s not readable (hidden content) is devalued.
• Mobile UX signals aren’t yet used by Google to evaluate rankings. That’s probably next, followed by improving page speed with images.
• Cool tool: responsiveimages.org.

• Other recent changes to the SERP

• More featured information: answers aggregated results, interactive
• Easy to see: packs, cards, carousels
• Semantic: natural language, compound search, entity understanding, contextual information

• A deeper understanding of “intent”

• Google LOVES intent. Top navigation is sorted based on the search query. Device / mobile intent also matters. It’s a ranking factor. Google is now specifically reporting on the different rankings.
• What might indication mobile intent?

• What is the meaning of life vs. meaning of life.  

• Google is expanding the meta description to give a better answer. 160 characters to 300+
• Compound search queries
• Implied keywords.
• Schema.org on mobile
• Crumb trail URL formatting

• Making apps your ally

• What might have a bigger impact on search result is apps.
• There are all of these massive new competitors coming into the mobile search results.
• 5 types of app results

• App pack
• App single*
• App carousel
• Icon deep links
• Deep links*

• “If you have deep links, your site is more likely to show up in search results.”
• “There will be even more competitors in your search results, thinks you haven’t even thought of.”
• “Go ahead and create deep links even if your site doesn’t have a lot of parity.”

• Maintaining super hero status

• Now that you have it, how do you keep it?
• Marketing up email and contacts in schema.***
• PPC results are taking up more room on mobile. They look beautiful and it’s hard to tell that they’re sponsored.
• TV and media sponsored results
• Sponsored app results
• Shopping sponsored results.
• Travel sponsored results.
• Predictive search - Google Now

• Click to search is part of this. “It gives you what you need without having to search for it. There are no keywords on smartwatches right now.”

• When you have a mDot and a desktop site, that’s twice as much crawling and twice as much opportunity for errors. You have to make a business decision for what’s best for your users and go with that.
• “Devaluing text is a problem.” “Google doesn’t like the idea of hidden text, and it’s not just the interstitials.”
• “If the app is going to do exactly what the website does, don’t waste your time.”
• “Apple search is already including search results that don’t have web parity, so your search might never get to Google.”

Digital Analytic: People, Process, Platform

Adam Singer

• TheFutureBuzz.com
• Measurement is the key to improving what we do. If you want to do better at your job, you’re going to need to measure it.
• Talk will cover:

• People: you need the right team
• Process: make sure you’re using data in the right way
• Platform: Google analytics.

• People

• 90/10 rule with digital marketing spend on analytics software. “You should be spending 90% of your budget on your team members and 10% on the software.”
• Our goal: get the highest value from Web Analytics implementation.
• Fancy software isn’t going to solve all of your problems. If you think that way still, it’s time to reevaluate.
• You have to have business acumen and nerd skills. They need to have the vision.
• “The best analysts are comfortable working with imperfect data.” In many ways, having a stats background can be a handicap if you don’t feel comfortable working with the imperfect data of the internet.
• Get external help when you’re first building your team.

• Process

• Winning process vs. not. There needs to be a trend.
• Collect what matters

• Measure the things you care about
• Use transaction to send monetary data
• Custom data (e.g., achievements)

• Sketch out a plan: acquisition, engagement, outcome
• “If you do nothing else, have macro conversions and micro conversions.”
• It’s as absurd to ask someone to buy your product at the first meeting as it is to ask someone to marry you on the first date.
• We’ve gone tag crazy. The average Fortune 500 company website has 63 tags. It’s going to slow down your site and provide a worse user experience.
• Essential information when requesting data

• What data do you need?
• What format?
• When do you need it?
• Is this a one-time request or recurring request?
• Why not use a form for data requests? It can make your lives a whole lot easier.

• Digital insights are beneficial to the entire organization. You could reduce call center volume with website data.
• Create best practices and theory training docs.
• Create process for

• marketing
• tag management
• email
• marketers

• Ask for input and evangelize the process: http://krsta.me/testroadmap 
• Culture shift is an ongoing process

• It doesn’t happen overnight but it can start with one big win
• Keep the momentum
• Bring everyone along: marketers, sales, devs, engineers, etc.

• Share your results and teach others to do so.

• Platforms (Google Analytics)

• Collect data from multiple sources. “What we want to be able to do is ultimately understand our users.”
• Our data sources are rapidly increasing.
• “If you get connected to the Internet, you can measure it in Google analytics.”

• One company measured coffee intake with employee productivity.

• Data import: bring anything you want into Google analytics (minus PII). E.g., segment based on weather.
• 90% us multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time. 98% move between devices that same day.
• “You can have a logged in experience that’s consistently great across devices.”
• We check our devices 150X per day on average. Mobile far eclipses all other devices. Desktops and laptops will never go away because that’s where people create things.
• There will be over 3 billion Internet users in 2015, and many of those will be mobile-only, especially in developing nations.
• Mobile is spurring new types of conversions. Make sure you track those.
• Take your GA data to go via API. “It’s so easy my mother can do it. Yes, I had my mother sit down and do this.”
• You can turn your GA data into infographics and visual apps.

How to Better Sell SEO to the C-Suite

Purna Virji - @purnavirji

• You are the CEO of SEO at your company, and there are things that SEOs can do that no other marketers can do. (CSEOEO?)
• “There is a way to win the C-suite over. It’s with clear strategy and clear direction.”
• SEO success is more than just ranking improvements. It’s important - and our jobs - to better set expectations.
• “The CEO’s language is profit and loss. To win their support, we need to show them that we can think like them.”
• Why you need a strategy document:

• Gain alignment on strategies
• Set expectations for the C-suite
• Set up make-or-break goals
• Earn trust and buy-in

• The SEO Strategic Planning Process is ideally done at the start of a new project.

• Goals
• Strategies
• 6-month growh
• growth attribution
• potential risks
• resources needed
• annual forecasts

• Step one: outline the goal

• Time-specific and revenue-based goals are imperative.
• If you can’t get dollar values, orders x AOV is a good rough estimate

• What key strategies will be used?

• What we’ll do and why we’ll do it. Examples:

• Focus on high-demand products to maximize sales
• Increased qualified leads and earned links
• Hone-in high converting markets
• Reduce barriers to ranking

• Benefits are clear and the why behind the what has been answered.
• Now the CEO feels more involved and has confidence in what you’re going to do.

• What’s potential monthly growth?

• SWAG: Scientific Wild-Ass Guess
• Speak in terms of probability. 80% and 60% probability, with 60% being your optimistic goal.

• Where will the growth come from?

• Order growth attribution

• What are potential risks?

• Issues that could slow growth

• delays in execution of content
• Google updates
• Issues with site updates
• How quickly technical aspects can be resolved

• Now the C-suite is involved in things that are usually not under your control. You don’t look defensive since you’re spelling potential issues out in advance.

• What resources are needed?

• What do you need? A community manager, PR team, and agency? Spell it out now so the powers that be will understand the level of investment up front so they can align their teams to give you what you need.
• Cost benefit analysis of hiring a new person

• Explain the need, who will manage, what value they’ll bring
• Explain what happens if we don’t have that person, and the potential cost of not having that person.

• P&L Graphs

• Shows CEOs that you can think like them.

• Now what?

• Prepare answers for tough questions

• Why are we focusing on X first?
• How do you know Y will work?
• Can’t you do Z in half the time?

• Prepare relevant examples (case studies and research)

• We know X can work because…
• Mox recently shared a study on Y…
• In the past, when we did Z, it performed…

• Create tactical execution plans (start with 3-month) complete with mini-milestones.
• Set communication cadence
• Reminder: this is not set in stone. It is a living document. “If you find a better detour, you’re going to want to take it.”
• “The companies that win at SEO will be the ones that have full company support.”

Drive More Conversions with Lifecycle Email Campaigns

Tamara Gielen - @tamaragielen

• As consumers, we have a lot of choices.
• “As a consumer, we like to be in control. We like to own our experience. And I want companies to make it easy for me.”
• “The average attention span on the Internet is about eight seconds.”
• “Based on the sender, you’ll either open or delete those emails regardless of the subject line.”
• “You need to think about what people will want to buy from you before they even think about it.”
• If email marketing is done well, it’s not marketing, it’s a service.
• “Automated, triggered emails are very, very powerful.”
• For a client in the travel sector, triggered emails are 5% of volume but 45% of profit.
• Three steps to email marketing success:

• 1. Who is your ideal customer?

• Who are these people? What are their objectives, challenges, and potential objectives?

• 2. What is their journey?

• Where do they find you? Where do they drop off? Where you can assist them at different touchpoints?

• 3. How can you assist them?

• Find the drop-off points. Where can you give them a little push to move them through that journey?
• Case study: 3 triggered emails saw a 44% increase in revenue.

•  7 Ways to Assist Customers On Their Journey

• Welcome / Activation / Onboarding programs

• Thank customers for being customers

• Recovery Program

• Abandoned shopping cart. This can take a long time to implement.

• Up-sell / Cross-sell Program
• Follow-up Program
• Renewal / Replenishment Program
• Surprise and Delight
• Reactivation

• Keys to Success

• Get management buy-in
• Bring the data together
• Set up the right rules and triggers
• Test your set-up extensively
• Optimize for conversion
• Start Small
• Ask yourself questions based on the business opportunity that they offer

• Aim for progress, not perfection in email marketing

Reaching Critical Mass: 150 Active Members with

Rich Millington - @RichMillington

• Of 957 organizations that created an online community, only 5 had 100 or more active members.
• Successful online communities have:

• A lot of angry customers
• A massive budget
• An incredibly unique product

• There is hope: hobbyists are great at building communities

• Stop with massive launches and immaculate hobbyists
• Find your founding members.
• Invite friends, not those on the mailing list or a Twitter list

• 1. In the beginning, you need a credible founder. To get credibility, follow the CHIP method:

• Create content
• Host events
• Interview experts
• Participate in existing groups

• Create a list of 250 potential members, try to get 50 people to interact
• 2. How to make sure your community posts life

• Don’t make your community about yourself
• Don’t make it about what you want people to do, or what you think they want to do
• Types of communities that work well

• Problem: Solve a problem they know exists
• Opportunity: Seize an opportunity they’re aware of
• Passion: Explore a passion they’re curious about
• Status: Increase their status among their friends

• 3. How to create the perfect platform for your community

• We’re terrible at building platforms for our communities. But maybe looking good isn’t the key to having a successful community. Think Reddit and Craigslist.
• Stop using Facebook. Pay to serve ads to get those people onto your email list.
• The first thing you want people to see is how active your community is.

• 4. How to get people to participate.

• Mistake #1: Introduce yourself!
• Mistake #2: Complete your profile
• Mistake #3: Just dumping people into a community
• You have a 15-minute window to persuade a member to share an experience, opinion, or problem.

• Use your confirmation email in a better way.
• What are your members thinking?
• What are your members doing?
• What have you recently learned?
• What do your members need help with?

• If you can’t convert 50% of your new members, stop with promotion and focus on engagement.

• 5. How to keep members active

• Between 40-90% of members in a community who make their first contribution will never participate again.
• If you respond to something within 15 minutes you have an 87% chance of seeing them again.
• 1. Show them a visible increase in skill

• Copy fitness communities. Benchmark yourself at the beginning and update that benchmark as you go. It’s a very powerful reason to keep participating.

• 2. Autonomy

• Find an answer to one post
• Interview experts
• Designated expert
• Run column / group / category

• Social relatedness

• “The more we make friends in a community, the more we participate in that community.”

• Design community

• Immediate ego hit
• intros to similar people
• skill increase task
• responsibility for topic / idea (ask for expertise”
• content about them
• relationship building

Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run!

Marshall Simmonds - @mdsimmonds

• What is dark traffic: a URL that you can’t track.

• Dark search
• Dark mobile
• Dark social

• Here’s what we see, here’s what we think

• Our approach is observations, not necessarily solutions.

• The goal is to create awareness. You’re building traffic that you’re not getting credit for.
• Dark Search

• (not provided)
• Misinformation is the number one thing we need to start with. There is no bigger misinformer than Google.
• SEO is not dead, though Buzzfeed says it is. Buzzfeed still gets a lot of traffic from search.
• HTTPs vs. HTTP - Google started using in ranking (or so they said). There actually wasn’t a search ranking benefit.

• When you go secure, you lose all of your shares. Look at this to maintain social shares: bit.ly/mikekingsocial

• META Referrer tag: https://moz.com/blog/meta-referrer-tag 
• Browsers

• On March 30, something very interesting happened. IE and Firefox traffic spiked. There were updates made to those browsers around that time.

• Image search: walled garden. It’s no longer a viable option from a marketing standpoint.
• 34% of site traffic is direct traffic
• Formula

• Pull direct traffic
• Remove home page and section fronts
• What’s left is dark social
• Verify links against social campaign
• Filter for new users
• What’s left is dark search

• Dark Social

• Social works! It works hand-in-hand with search

• The day Facebook cleaned up their newsfeed, they became a publisher.
• Chartbeat: leading tool for Facebook analytics on mobile. They claim they can detect 20% more of that dark traffic.

• What happened to YouTube? Google+ is outpacing YouTube traffic to sites. Nearly 33% of outbound traffic goes to YouTube, .001% comes back.

• Dark Mobile

• When will mobile traffic surpass search? It hasn't happened yet, but it will.
• Mobilegeddeon has been happening all along
• Anytime a new iOS is pushed out, organic traffic plummets because Google forgets to change attribution.
• 6 weeks after iOS9 comes out, take a look at your mobile traffic to see if Google has turned on attribution.
• Twitter metrics are accurate.
• Google News indexes Twitter in mobile search, accurately.
• Android Search App passes referrer data as Direct.
• It’s time to replace Google+ with WhatsApp
• http://www.gotschemes.com/deeplinks/ 
• Emily Grossman wrote the best article ever about app search / store optimization: http://bit.ly/MozConASO 

•   Takeaways

• Be aware: every change affects traffic
• Beware misinformation
• HTTPs is not an SEO strategy
• Check metrics with New Browser Releases
• Image Search Traffic is dead
• Quantify Direct Traffic - is it search or social
• YouTube traffic is dead
• Facebook is fixing things but is still obscuring data
• Twitter strategy - are you connecting with influencers
• New iOS / Android release - check referrers
• Time to switch G+ and repelace with AppShare
• ASO is the new SEO

• Google referrer data trends accurately, but is far from exact. It’s one brush in your toolbox.

Back to the Future with Local Search

Mary Bowling - @MaryBowling

• Local search is based on proximity, relevance, prominence
• “The searcher became the centroid” in the last Google update. It was previously the city center.
• Start by trying to dominate the area around your business. If you can’t hold your own in your local search results, you don’t have a chance with users who are farther away.
• Virtual offices = fake locations. No longer acceptable.
• One thing Google hasn’t considered are coworking spaces. However, there are plenty of legitimate businesses that don’t have physical locations. Unfortunately, it’s very easy for spammer to take advantage of this, so these might never rank well.
• The best way to establish trusted location information is through citations. Focus on quality over quantity.

• You need to have the same information in your Google listing.

• Just last week Google added a bunch of new guidelines for authorized representatives.
• Google wants you to be more specific with your categories. Add sub-categories as well.

• “I like to structure a website around categories and sub-categories.”
• Case studies can help you rank for a lot of longtail terms

• Keep a good link profile
• Go hyper-local on a community or neighborhood level
• Build good local karma
• “Keep in mind that news varies by location. Something that never gets published in big media might be just right for a hyper local website.”
• “Google is doing a better job than it ever has at modeling the real world.”
• If you’re in a home-based business and don’t want to list your address, focus on organic. “If you can get your organic rankings high enough … then that’s your best chance.”

#mozcon // hmny.co/mozcon15

The Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short

Wil Reynolds - @WilReynolds

• “I see disruptions everywhere. I stay paranoid about what’s going to disrupt me.”
• “The best ads, ask no one to buy, but they are based on the knowledge of human nature, writers know how people are led to buy.”
• “Traffic are people. Clicks are people looking for things. The question is whether or not we’re going to help them find what they’re looking for.”
• “Understanding how people make decisions is an undisruptable skill.”
• “Learn what people want, and then apply your skills to that.”
• Competitors: lie in wait
• “The speed by which you can become a carcass on the Internet is phenomenal.”
• “Smart companies disrupt themselves.” Avoid rented platforms. The time to be most paranoid is when you’re sitting at the top because you have one place to go.
• The problem with marketing is that it amplifies, and if what you’re marketing is crap, no amount of marketing can help that.
• “A lot of us are asked to fix people's’ bad businesses.”
• “Marketing that doesn’t focus on people is getting old.”
• “Pinterest to me is a database of interests and aspirations.”
• Who needs a product vs. who searches for a product. Who needs a product AND searches for a product.
• “What if we were the people who helped people find things?”
• “Deflect disruptions by focusing on our customers’ needs and aspirations.”
• Focus on feeling rather than words
• Once algo’s get what we love, what happens for top rankings?
• Airbnb is searched for more than “vacation rentals.”
• “Average content can lower brand perception, trust, and loyalty.”
• 20% of budget is not tracked to specific ROI
• Stay paranoid
• Pinterest is a database of your aspirations: http://bit.ly/seerpinterestguide 
• Lesson: the best marketing is rarely created by only one discipline.

#mozcon // hmny.co/mozcon15