Hi there!

Thanks for requesting the Unbounce #mozcon 2016​ notes. Unbounce typed furiously over the last three days so that you didn’t have to – and it was our pleasure to do so. :)

We captured every actionable takeaway and tweetable quote so that all you have to do

now is curl up with a nice cup of coffee and get right to optimizing for search (and for the user too).

Enjoy!

Notes brought to you by Unbouncers:

Cody Campbell, @cody_campbell

Chelsea Scholz, @chelseascholz 

Love,

Unbounce

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[Monday, September 12th]

Welcome to MozCon!

Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills

The Big One: Relaunching Your Website

The Hidden Talents of Email: Creating Customer-Centric Messages

How to Do Reputation Marketing

Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing

Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization

Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets

Content Chaos: Building Your Brand through Constant Experiments

Social Media: People First, "Rules" Second

[Tuesday, September 13th]

You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter

How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy

Server Log Files & Technical SEO Audits: What You Need to Know

Digital Marketing Skill Pivot: Recruiting New Talent

Boost SEO Rankings by Removing Internal Links

Improve Your UX & SEO through Navigation Optimization

Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career

Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism

Optimizing the Journey to Deliver Radically Relevant Experiences

Putting Trust into Domain Authority

[Wednesday, September 14th]

The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling

29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know

Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers

Persuasion, Data, & Collaboration: Building Links in 2016

Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing

Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology

Link Building's Tipping Point

[Monday, September 12th]

Welcome to MozCon!

Rand Fishkin, @randfish

Welcome to another Mozcon! Big changes in search: search and direct keep rising as traffic sources… social not so much.

1. Dark traffic is still a huge issue

• 38% of Rand’s social traffic is dark
  

2. Google’s move to machine learning

• You’re going to hear a lot about machine learning a MozCon and for many years to come
  

3. AdWords is redacting data like it’s the CIA

4. Ten blue links? Exists in only 3% of searches anymore (search features are dominating)

• but most SEOs still ignore SERP features
  

5. Quality is becoming a site-wide metric

6. SEO continues to dominate other forms of web marketing in search interest

• Paid is just nuts compared to content and social
• But job postings show the inverse
• SEO has become a skill/function but not so much a job
  

7. RankBrain + Hummingbird are changing how content can rank

• More content can rank for a variety of queries than ever before
• Fantastic for creators and SEOs
  

8. SEO is a highly in-demand practice

• This is the highest SEO has ever been!
• It remains more of a skill than a title though - not a huge surprise to Rand
  

9. PPC continues leveling off trend

• To keep up, google’s getting ever more subtle with paid ad formatting
• Barely a difference between an ad and a paid result
  

10. Thanks to Clickstream Data, We Finally Know More about how searchers engage with Google:

• There is a huge long tail still in search
• Average searcher is performing 3 queries per day on a desktop or laptop

• Of all those queries 1.19% of google.com US searches result in an ad click
• Google is making 90% of their money on 1% of the clicks that happen

• 49% of clicks go to Google properties (others go to organic)
• Lots of no-click searches in 2016 - 40% of searches result in no clicks at all
• 25% of desktop queries are coming through Chrome instant
• Top sites receiving Google search traffic:

• Facebook’s referral traffic is even more biased to the top
• The past year at Moz...some painful goodbyes

• Heartbreaking to have to let people go - go and find folks at a hiremoz website
• As a result of this, Sarah’s approach has been “more wood, behind fewer arrows”
• A refocus on SEO
• He also might finally shave his moustache
  

• Made great progress in Moz Local!

• Launched Local Insights and Moz Pros updated
• Keyword Explorer and dozens of pro campaign improvements
• Now tracking SERP features
• More accurate keyword volume ranges
• As of last week, volume data in pro as well
• Date ranges for rankings and traffic data
• More and more stable releases
  

• But still a ways to go:

Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills

Cara Harshman, @caraharshman

• 70% of marketers said conversion optimization is more of a priority for 2016
• 56% of teams will allocate more budget to conversion optimization in 2016
• Biggest optimization challenges:

• Knowledge
• Resources
• Knowing what to test

• Cara is going to go on an evolutionary journey of taking your A/B testing ideas, execution and team to a state of hypotheses, automation and advocates
• Optimal outcome of A/B testing evolution is

• Learn rate = 100%
• Business growth, higher revenue
• Delighted customers
• Stronger decisions and culture

• An example from Kyle Rush:        

• He’s currently working with Hillary Clinton on getting more donations through her website
• They decided to test something on reducing friction for online donations
• Kyle wanted to automate the process for people making a payment with their credit card details saved

• Hypothesis: If we make it as easy as possible to save your CC info, then more people will donate.
• With the changes they made, they saw a 239% increase in people who saved their details — the biggest lift Kyle Rush has ever seen

• First evolutionary process: Ideas → Hypotheses

• “If we do this, then this will happen because of this reason.”

• This is not a straight line process

• You need to find your analytics and the voice of the customer.
• Great a/b tests hypotheses are born out of reason not whiteboarding
• ANALYTICS

• You need quantitative and qualitative information about your tests
• Top analytics sources:

• 1. Funnel Report (Google Analytics)
• 2. Heat map on home and high intent pages
• 3. Form error submission reports (Google Analytics)
• 4. Exit/page bounce report (Google Analytics)
• 5. High traffic/low conversion landing pages
  

• VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER (on our journey to Hypotheses)

• Empathy based analysis, understand the needs of the end user as a human
• Voice of the customer listening channels:

• 1. Customer success team
• 2. Recorded user testing sessions
• 3. Coffee shops
• 4. On-page surveys (really likes Hotjar and Qualaroo)
• 5. Email surveys (email is still king)

• Voice of the “human” (psychological triggers, what makes us tick)

• 1. Lift model by WiderFunnel
• 2. Conversion equation from Oli Gardner (woop woop!)
• 3. Psychology
• 4. Design principles
• 5. Neuromarketing

• All very helpful to root your rationale
• Caraharshman.me has more info if you’re interested!
  

• Solid hypothesis example:

• MVMT Watches - wanted more revenue so they decided to test how they were going to promote the incorporation of these straps in their website

• “If we add the new product up-sell on the product detail page, then sales will increase because this placement mimics the in-store buying experience.”
• They tested the placement of the straps underneath the add to cart, way below and mid-way below the button.
• Conversion lift of 2.2% on desktop and 5.5% on mobile

• One way to embrace this at your company is to host a hackathon in your office!

• Hotwire (a big travel company) - they did a global hackathon to their HQ

• Want to do a hackathon?

• 1. Give people access to data
• 2. Invite cross functional teams
• 3. Give prizes
• 4. Follow up
• DOWNLOAD: optimizely.com/testing-toolkit/ (testing hackathan poster)
  

• So that was taking us from ideas to hypotheses, next we want to talk about going from execution to automation.

• To get there, we need to work with prioritization and standardization.
• Think about the long game here, not getting shit done
• PRIORITIZATION

• An emotion-free system to decide what to test
• Don’t bring your emotions to an a/b test
• Ease vs. impact

• Prioritization score card - a rule and point based system where every hypothesis gets a score

• More prioritization worksheets in the testing toolkit listed above

• STANDARDIZATION

• A broadly agreed-upon set of priorities, metrics, definitions
• 3 pieces to standardize:

• Main success metrics

• What are the actions you are trying to move? Can be defined by whittling down your company goals

• Standardize Stopping criteria

• How long will a test run before you stop it?

• Time and days

• Standardize your audiences

• Which unique traffic segments deserve more attention?

• Mobile? Returning? Referral?
• Think about what audiences you have to do some tests on and who you can personalize for
• Example from Brooks Running: “If we deliver unique content to shoppers buying similar size shoes, then they will be less likely to return because they decided on a size.”

• So moving from execution to automation requires standardization and prioritization

• Third part of the journey is moving from team to advocates.

• People who do work → people who promote your work
• To make this happen, we need diverse skills and abundant communication (to the people who want to hear it)

• Top 5 skill sets to have:

• 1. Project Manager
• 2. Developer
• 3. Designer
• 4. Analyst
• 5. Fearlessness (ask why and be that vocal upstart that’s asking the right questions)

• 2 Team Examples:

• Craig at Earnest and Josephine at Hotwire
• There’s not one way to manage a team

• Communication Channels

• 1. Opt-in email newsletter
• 2. Weekly meetings for core crew
• 3. Internal wiki/workflow tool
• 4. Lunch n’ learns
• 5. All hands meetings

• In the testing toolkit again, you can get results sharing templates and decks
  

• That was quite the evolution!

• Ideas → Hypotheses
• Execution → Automation
• Team → Advocates
  

• Optimal outcome of A/B testing evolution:

• 100% learn rate
• Business growth, higher revenue
• Delighted customers
• Stronger decisions & culture

• Caraharshman.me / @caraharshman

The Big One: Relaunching Your Website

Lauren Vaccarello

• What relaunching a website can look like (what we tackled):

• New site architecture
• Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
• All new copy
• All new design
• All new messaging
• 7 existing language sites
• 3 new language sites

11 Things you need to know/do for a website re-launch

1. Know why you’re doing it

2. Clearly define and share the goals that you’re trying to achieve

• This is what our goals look liked:

1. Increase pipeline and revenue contribution by 30% within 6 months
2. 10 percentage point reduction in bounce rate
3. Increase in engagement

3. Make sure everyone on the team is emotionally bought in

• If you want people to move fast and move mountains, help them understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and how their work contributes to the end goal

4. Get the entire company behind the project (make this happen before project starts)

• Communicate why you’re doing the project and what impact it will have
• Keep key stakeholders updated throughout the project

5. Do the pre-work:

• Define information architecture
• What does the sitemap look like
• Create wireframes
• Who are we targeting? Who are the buyer personas?
• What technical specifications do we need to consider?

6. Decouple front end changes from back end changes

• Marketers think about what they can see (front end)
• On the back end you’ve got to consider hosting platforms, CMS systems. load balancing etc.

7. Collocate your team: design, copy, web and engineering

• Putting people in the same room with shared goals helps people work faster and more effectively
• Questions get answered quicker

8.  Test a few pages and iterate

• Don’t do a mass page build before working out the bugs on a small scale. Why? Because you’ll end up re-building every single page later because it won’t look good or work well.

9. Slow methodical rollout

• This is how we rolled out the site to a proportion of our visitors :

1% - Check for bugs

10% - Directional data and adjust fast

25% - More data and adapt

50% - Confirmation and launch

Using this method helps you adapt quickly and make changes before the entire world sees it.

10. Don’t underestimate the workload behind an international roll out

• QA takes an incredibly long time

11. The new website is live. This is Day 1

• Have a glass of bourbon
• Now decide what you can test to make your website better every single day

What tools do you use for user testing?

• Usertesting.com
• External user testing consultant - Always get an outside eye on your website!
• Love Optimizely

The Hidden Talents of Email: Creating Customer-Centric Messages

Justine Jordan, @meladorri

• litmus.com/lp/mozcon - everything Justine is talking about is in this link! Get it!
• Email’s got a lot of things going for it but not exactly for the right reasons
• There are a lot of emails that can make us really grumpy…
• Email also has a talent for exposing our technological and human weaknesses
• Every once in awhile you can get an email that actually is delightful and impactful
• Those are the kind that are:

• Preferred
• Measurable
• Direct
• Personal

• Sometimes we forget that emails go to real people, with real needs
• Ask yourself: how can my brand take advantage of human needs and deliver something awesome?

• Hierarchy of subscriber needs:

• Remarkable
• Valuable
• Functional
• Respectful

• To stop just making functional emails, get out of the blast mentality.

• You don’t say you’re going to blast your friends, right? Stop saying email or message. Walk a mile in your user’s shoes…

• Don’t act like a spammer - spammed is defined first and foremost by the user
• Spam is different in different parts of the world - the US is the only country that doesn’t require consent to email someone

• Really put some effort into your inbox part - from name, subject line, preview text.

• From name: Quora variates their from name to give a preview of the actual content in the email - so cool!

• Make sure the email attached to your from name is actual somewhere you can reply from

• Subject line optimization: no such thing as a secret formula for a subject line

• We tend to be really focused on the open rate but they’re kind of a vanity metric
• Instead, look at what open rates actually result in clicks and conversions - focus on the post-open
• Relevancy is very important

• Preview text optimization: use something actionable and trackable

• Guide to preview text → bit.ly/preview-text

• What about the body of the email?

• Context-aware email

• What do you know about your user to create a better experience for them?

• Experience
• Environment
• Task

• If you don’t have a plain text version of your email, people with an apple watch aren’t getting it!

• Know your audience

• At Litmus, only 30% are opening on mobile

• Pay attention to responsive design

• Use sharp images (save image at 2x the image display size)
• No images = no message

• Style your ALT text

• Stop saving images as buttons! Use a bulletproof button:

• Create a great CTA and test them!

• It’s not all about open rate, follow the funnel all the way down

• PLEASE STOP SAYING CLICK HERE! (or tap here) - use a more direct CTA
• And make everything bigger

• Enlarge all the things - use your actual thumb as a rule of thumb for testing CTA size and whitespace

• Video in email doesn’t work - create a thumbnail of your video that when clicked on opens into a landing page with the video embedded on it

• Speaking of thumbnails, people in the images outperform the brand every time.

• Use animated gifs!

• But keep in mind (especially for outlook users) there needs to be something in the first frame, or else people won’t see it.

• Contextual emails

• Location
• Cart abandonment
• Welcome email!

• To go from relevant to remarkable emails:

• CSS animation is a great tool
• Image personalization!
• Interactivity

• Litmus did a product demo right in the email

• Gamification

• You can combine the subscriber experience with the hierarchy of subscriber needs and really tailor your email to the needs of both of those things with your needs and the customer’s needs.
• Great emails deliver really really awesome experiences so you can make email better.
• #makeemailbetter

How to Do Reputation Marketing

Rhea Drysdale, @rhea

• Reputation Marketing is not managing company reviews

• Brand equity and reputation are what drive consumer’s willingness to pay $$

Reputation also drives financials:

Reputation is an expectation of future behaviour based on past experiences.

What makes a great reputation?

• Great reputations are grown through consistency, dedication to your mission
• The next important part is surprise. Impress people.

What if we actively cultivate and promote a positive reputation? You can do this in all areas of the organization:

69% of people say they frequently or regularly discuss how they feel about a product they bought.

“While Gen Z is inclined to participate in the brand experience, they’ll only do it when they respect the brand.”

Examples of Brands being extraordinary:

Better Life: You can actually eat this cleaning product!

Brands create impressions that make people think or feel something

Reputation makes you act based on an experience

Here are some examples of companies and how they stack up in terms of brand and reputation:

How can you measure reputation?

• Reputation is not new. Take a financial perspective:

• Reputation = market value - tangible assets

3 ways to get started measuring reputation your own way

Note: Use the data you have in your organization.

1. Develop your own reputation score. Here are a few ideas to consider incorporating:

Once you choose which metrics you’re going to use. Come up with a method of calculating a score for the relevant areas of your organization:

2.  Track your mentions by sentiment and type

• Make sure you communicate your reputation score, sentiment analysis and progress company wide.

• UX and Dev teams really appreciate this information. They don’t always get to see it like your marketers do

• Sharing positive news and feedback with the team tends to improve employee happiness and retention too.

3.  Audit your About Page (for your mission and values)

• Make sure your mission is clear and you know the marketing you’re serving.

Chart your reputation

• Know if you’re making a difference

When you meet and exceed expectations, you suddenly find that people will pay more money, stay around longer and promote your brand.

Optimize for reputation. Surprise people when you can.

How to start a Reputation Gap Analysis

• Start with the data you have access to

And don’t forget to track your progress over time…

So what do you do if you don’t have a visible brand?

Rally the team, train them, improve your workspace, get everyone emotionally bought in to building community and experiences to enhance your reputation.

Go from this...

To this…

We need to have reputation marketing and reputation strategy.

Check out our guide to get started on Reputation Marketing: outspokenmedia.com/

reputation-marketing/

Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing

Joe Hall, @joehall

• Over the last few years a lot of SEOs have been having a problem: They’ve got great SEO fundamentals, but they’re not getting great traffic and rankings

• The root of this problem is bad information architecture (IA)

What is information architecture?

The structural design of shared information environments. This is what we typically see when it comes to website structure:

The problem with this is that this structure has nothing to do with marketing. It’s problematic for marketers because it doesn’t help us promote the entire website together. Traffic and links get sent to an isolated part of a website (think the blog).

So how do you fix bad IA?

• Find a way to consolidate taxonomies/categories on your blog
• If your internal links aren’t passing link juice to pages you want to rank, that SEO value is basically wasted.

• The traditional fix for bad information architecture generally tends to be improved internal linking. That helps in some cases, but it’s kind of a band aid. Working on internal links manually is a hard process to keep up with.

How to Design Kick Ass Information Architectures

We need to focus on where we’re going (marketing) and less about (web development).

Start with main concepts

• Main concepts that define an organization
• Popular ideas

Develop supporting content

• Blog posts
• Evergreen content
• Targeted user intent

Develop conversion points

• Product pages
• Lead gen forms
• User sign ups

Main Taxonomies

• Can define main navigation
• Can influence URL structure
• Develops category hierarchy
• Can influence content development

Supporting Taxonomies

• Can be used as sub navigation or sidebar navigation

• These things define the relationship between content and separate site sections
• Grows internal linking organically
• Can act as a secondary navigation
• Can grow and change over time

Note: Use this to introduce supporting content that’s not related to the main idea or purpose of your site

Tools to use when building supporting taxonomies:

• Calais
• AlchemyAPI
• Lexalytics
• Cloud Natural Language API (Google) - open to the public. Runs on the same natural language processing language that Google uses.

Building the right information architecture should help you earn the trust and respect of your audience

Q&A

Q: Our company uses a lot of one off landing pages that have a short shelf life. What should we do with them when we’re done with them?

A: Try and find a way to integrate those landing pages into the main architecture of your site (if they’re not campaign specific).

If they’re in your internal linking structure, you have less chance of getting penalized by Google.

Q: Why is having your blog in a separate part of your site a bad thing?

A: All of the link equity that your blog posts generate won’t benefit the rest of your site. Remember that internal links are a band aid fix. We need to look at ways to blend this kind of content together with other parts of the site.

Q: What is local topic authority?

A: Topic authority is having all content on the same topic you want to rank for in the same section of your site (kind of like a silo). Organize topics in a way that’s easy to understand. Don’t spread out your content pieces on the same topic into different parts of your site.

Q: Any suggestions on how to best optimize a page? Any changes lately?

A: From an information architecture standpoint, you want to make sure it's tagged correctly and that it’s internally linked well. Breadcrumbs are an easy way to give Google a clear view of the site structure.

Schema is helpful to give search engines additional topical signals as well.

Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization

Talia Wolf, @taliagw

• $275 BILLION LOST IN ONLINE REVENUES BECAUSE WE’RE NOT DOING OUR RESEARCH!
• Our go-to solution for mobile is out-of-the-box template design that’s responsive
• The problem is that visitors are arriving to the site and can’t find what they’re looking for so they leave.

• There’s a 270% gap between people who convert on desktop versus mobile

• When we’re on mobile phones we’re different people - we’re in a different state of mind.
• Mobile behaviour is also different.
• Want to convert more on mobile?

• Understand people better
• Understand behaviour better
• Provide them an experience they actually want and need

• A wealth of information also creates a poverty of attention.

• Analysis paralysis = when we have too many options our brain’s default is just not to choose
• It’s no wonder that 86% of us are willing to pay 25% more for better personalization! We want someone to give us the information we need!

• How are you helping the buyers find what they’re looking for? Because people are getting lost on mobile.
• We need to start thinking about information hierarchy and what our users need + what info we’re going to serve them

• Google has identified the 4 micro-moments of a mobile journey

I want to Know > I want to Go > I want to Do > I want to Buy

• KNOW:

• Someone who’s arriving for the first time and are not ready to convert – they want more information.
• No matter what you’re selling, what customers really care about isn’t the WHAT, it’s the WHY.

• They care about what’s in it for them. The actual value.
• You’re not the hero here, your customer is.

• When you’re on your mobile and you’re so distracted, and the company doesn’t make it clear within 3 seconds, you’re not going back.
• 60% of mobile web visitors expect sites to load in less than 3 seconds
• A 1 second delay causes a multitude of problems
  

• Nobody is going to wait for your images to load! Rethink your images on mobile
• If we identify that someone is on a product page or check out page and idle for more than six seconds, just ask them if they want to save their item for later.
• Also offer them the relevant information!
  

• GO:

• Help people navigate to you quickly
• Help people contact you easily

• Add a quick click to call button
• Simple and easy contact forms
• Or times to call within
  

• DO:

• Help people learn and explore
  

• BUY:

• Consider keyboards

• All you have to do is talk to dev and make sure when people select a certain field that the right keyboard comes up
• Major increase in conversions because of this

• Stop using desktop solutions for mobile

• Don’t use pop-ups on mobile when they block the content!

• Tell your users WHAT TO DO on mobile
• With mobile design it’s all about trust

• Being immediate
• One call to action
• Looking native

• Incentivize mobile purchases

• Coupons
• Free shipping

• Mobile visitors are NOT mini desktop visitors. We need to treat them as different people with different perspective.

• Build better experiences for mobile >> www.banana-splash.com

Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets

Rob Bucci, @STATrob

This is what a featured snippet looks like:

Snippets provide timely, relevant content provided to the searcher (usually) without the need to click through.

So why are snippets worth paying attention to?

• On page conversion rates are spiking when they come to your site from rich snippets.
• They build trust and a positive reputation for your brand

We did some research…

We’re seeing more snippets than ever. From January to July, the number of rich snippets grew from 9% to 15%.

Let’s talk about types of snippets…

1. Paragraph snippet (most common)

2. Table snippet

3. List snippet

Why has there been an increase in snippets showing in Google this year?

• SEOs are getting more savvy at how they format their content for engines to understand.
• Google is getting better at formating the content it sees on websites (tables, lists etc.) so it can display it to users

The format of the content you create determines the format of the snippet.

I.e. If you create a piece of content with a table, your snippet will be a table.

The use of images in snippets is declining. Why? Voice search and mobile search are becoming more and more common.

Wikipedia owns 15% of all snippets with images. Why? Google trusts Wikipedia.

Universal Results

Places, Videos, Images, News, Shopping

We never saw Places results in the same SERP as a snippet? This is because the user intent tends to be different. Snippets are shown on information queries.

People Also Ask (PAA Boxes)

PAA boxes are a great way to see what kind of content Google thinks are relevant to specific queries. Use these PAA boxes to inspire your content.

Use the PAA boxes to map out the query space (ie. What people are searching for around a specific idea)

Keywords Matter

Be careful about implied questions (build a roof vs How do I build a roof?). Google won’t always show snippets for both queries.

Pay attention to keyword variations. Snippets will often only show for some.

Some words are more likely to trigger certain snippets:

Other words are less likely to trigger snippets:

Pro Tip: Reviews and opinion based content can now snag snippets! Go get em’.

Snippet Formats vs Query Types

• The best insights are in the intersections of the data. We can make some assumptions about the format of content we can use for certain queries.
• When you’re talking about numbers, tables are a good idea
• If you find weak snippets in search results, it’s likely that Google can’t find the information it wants to show the user. Chances are if you created content that formatted the same information in a better way, you’d have a good chance at getting your content pulled as a snippet.

Example of a weak snippet that’s lacking useful data:

Key takeaway: You can steal featured snippets if you find a better way to format the content. Research the featured snippets in each query space & format your content to match.

What about the other snippet types?

There are “general question” words that generate two different types of snippets.

Key Takeaways

Featured snippets aren’t going anywhere. They’re a cornerstone of Google’s strategy for mobile and voice search.

Look for missing featured snippets in other markets. This is a huge opportunity.

1. You need a tool to track featured snippets
2. Local-intent queries never have featured snippets
3. Let “People Also Ask” boxes inspire your own featured snippet content
4. Pay attention to keyword variants. Snippets only show up for some.
5. Reviews and opinion based content can now get snippets. Go get em’

Get all the research from Rob’s talk here at https://getstat.com/moz/

Content Chaos: Building Your Brand through Constant Experiments

Ross Simmonds, @thecoolestcool

• Experiments have given us the ability to test all sorts of things in marketing
• For some reason as we grow up and get certain job titles, we stop experimenting
• In reality, we should always continue testing
• Experimentation works for all company sizes
• My experiment philosophy: Build, Ship, Learn, Decide

When you embrace experimentation, be OK with failure. Failure encourages you to learn how to do something better.

Tip: Slideshare is one of the most underrated opportunities out there. Experiment with it!

Experimentation isn’t just for button color, email, UX etc. Content experiments work too.

Think about testing content tone, format, delivery.

Embrace a bit of chaos with a little bit of structure. Be sure to develop processes around your experiments.

One of my first failures: Reddit

• I dove into reddit. I wanted to prove that you could market a B2B company well on reddit
• I uploaded a bunch of content to reddit and got banned. (Build & Ship)
• I could have quit right then, but I had to learn how I failed

• There was a disconnect between what marketers wanted and what the users on reddit wanted.

• I went back into relevant subreddits and learned what users really wanted based on upvotes and comments (Learn)

• The key is to understand and empathize with the audience you’re targeting

• I decided on what to do next: A case study

I repurposed this post in a way that appealed to reddit users - I used a Drake reference.

Result - I got a ton of traffic and even clients:

Quora

Build & Ship - My first experiment was to answer every marketing question I could find. My goal was to get traffic, but I didn’t get much...

Learn: I learned that Quora had a relationship with Forbes. And the media likes pop culture.

Decide: Let’s write content that partners and media outlets would be interested in.

Result - Forbes picked up my article, but I didn’t get any referral traffic.

Instagram

Build - I found out that a lot of people would take stock photos and put text overtop. I decided to double down on design and create visual content like infographics.

Result - Tons of our content was getting shared by platforms like reddit. Our Instagram was growing by the 1000’s every day.

Learn - Influencer marketing works.

Learn - there are risks. If you rely too much on a platform, you have to be careful. Any algorithm change could negatively impact your reach and engagement

Slideshare

Over the years I’ve spent over 20k on slideshare campaigns.

Slideshare never used to be used for storytelling. There were only slide decks up there.

Build & Ship:

If I double down on design and work on storytelling, will that work?

Within the first 5 slides you have to hook the reader or else they’ll stop reading

Learn: Creating unique CTAs on SlideShare decks works!

Result:

How to go about experimenting

When you’re thinking about starting an experiment, make sure to validate it in terms of cost, time, channel, approach and topic. Come up with some “qualifiers” that help you decide what’s low risk vs high risk.

Remember: Experiments give you the opportunity to drive real results.

Coca Cola Model in experimentation - 70:20:10

Q&A

Q: Are there any particular communities/industries where SlideShare works well in?

A: It works well with B2B marketing. LinkedIn bought SlideShare so it tends to give slideshares quite a bit of love.

One of the best ways to use SlideShare is to look at your best performing content and just repurpose it into a slide deck.

Q: During your experiments, is there anything that particularly surprised you?

A: Instagram performed way better than we thought. We’ve seen a huge amount of email signups from Instagram. You can reach business people in channels like this (outside of LinkedIn etc.)

Social Media: People First, "Rules" Second

Dana DiTomaso, @danaditomaso

Do we use social media well?

• We’re using it as a digital billboard
• Nobody gets excited in the morning to engage with their favourite brand on Facebook!
• Bad experiences happen every day
• Why are you approaching social media from a “me first” perspective?

Start with the market in mind

• Stop starting your ideation process with a billboard
• The metrics in social media steer us down the path of paying attention to the noise instead of the signal
• What happened to social media?

• Marketers have lost sight of what made social media so exciting in the first place → I can talk to you and you can talk to me.

• How do you get away from the billboard experience?

Our brains are changing from analog to digital

• Example: vertical video sucks

• Why do you hate it? Because the implementation sucks
• Vertical video on youtube is an analog signal - built by people who group up in analog
• Vertical is the most comfortable way to shoot video on mobile - times are changed.
• We’re all turning digital.

• It’s time to change your medium before your competition does.
  
• The concept of SMUX - social media user experience.

• About how the individual market engages with the post
• About knowing when and how the market pays attentiont o you and giving them what they want at that time.

• Let’s go beyond personas and audience research
• Focus on attention research

• Dana uses Rival IQ
• You can put social media into it
• She built a landscape of all the mozcon speakers (Twitter)

• Goes further than just figuring out when the market is active

• [Slide of psot times]

• These things when you pull them together form the foundation for attention research

• This research is the foundation of SMUX
  

• What makes good SMUX?

• Psychographics
• Analytics
• Platform
• Message
• Intent
• Play

• Start your creative process from a SMUX-first perspective
  
• PSYCHOGRAPHICS

• Lumping people into an age range does nothing - they aren’t the same
• Pick up the phone and call your customers

• Ask unusual questions

• What makes you share a post on Facebook
• What do you like about your neighbourhood?
• What phone do you use?

• Do this, and you’ll really get under the hood for why your customers do what you do

• If you’re not using the FullContact API, check it out
• P.S. Take LinkedIn with a grain of salt (many people on there don’t use their work emails to log in)
  

• ANALYTICS

• Separate strategic metrics from tactical metrics (Dana did a talk on this two years ago at Mozcon - go dig it up!)

• Strategic metrics
• Tactical metrics

• Digital marketers are bad at reporting on these but not on strategic

• If you focus too much on tactical you end up on a hamster wheel of engagement and you’re not going to be able to take the time to think about if the posts you’re posting are really appealing to any kind of audience

• How much of your site traffic is via social media?
• Analytic tools are part of the problem - attribution is a massive problem in social media.
• Social media is getting harder to measure - DARK SOCIAL

• Dark social can account for 20-60% of any client’s social media
  

• PLATFORM

• Channel 4 News Example:

• They grew their video views on Facebook from 5 million to 200 million through:

• Making their videos square
• Captioning everything

• Ask yourself, am I even on the right platforms? Do my Facebook pages suck?
  

• MESSAGE

• Use your brand voice (Dana talked about this at mozcon last year)

• Create a brand voice and USE IT

• Use your keyword research

• Consider the voice of the market
• Look at your top posts, consider those posts again and compare them with your keyword research
• How can your posts make your market feel comfortable?

• Are you using the right words?

• Are you inclusive?

• They’re more likely to comment if you use their language
  

• INTENT

• Your goal on social media shouldn’t be to hit your posting targets
• Ask yourself why before you post

• Take that time to ask yourself what the goal and intent is

• Consider all your interactions - the engagement and customer service kind
• Is your intent even possible?

• Nothing is crappier than tweeting out “enter our contest” and ending up on a mobile site that’s not responsive

• PLAY

• Play is why Snapchat has more users than Twitter
• The average user plays with a snapchat lens for 20 seconds - the first five seconds on youtube is spent waiting for the skip button!

• EVERYBODY WANTS TO PLAY

• At the heart of marketing is emotion, and play is part of emotions.
• Play gives you the permission to relax and goof off
• People want to be on social media and have a good time
• Play is more than creepy taco faces on snapchat

• Approach SMUX from a building blocks perspective

• Think about the three elements you can get to the easiest, and when you’ve got those three then pick up another one...and then another one, until you’ve got all 6.

• When your SMUX comes together, it’s more about empathy. You understand your people.
• When your site has a 1% conversion rate it means you’ve failed 99% of the people who came there. Make change. Do SMUX.
• Keep it in your brand voice, do your research, be SMUXy - forget about these ridiculous social media rules
• Let’s break some rules.

[Tuesday, September 13th]

You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter

Pete Meyers, @dr_pete

Searches are Evolving

• In May 2013 Google launched voice search on desktop. This was the start of Google’s evolution of how it adapts to how people are searching.
• In the same year, Hummingbird came out. This was a core re-write of the Google algorithm. It was and is responsible for building the infrastructure and speed Google would need to handle voice search and long tail searches.
• Google releases Rank Brain in April 2015.

How searches are evolving

Notice how Google gives different answers based on the change in the query. It understands that they’re all looking for the similar answer.

What is Google doing here? Google is looking at keywords based on how they tie to a concept.

And even though we need to target concepts, people still use keywords to query.

The Old Way Is Dying

We all used to keyword stuff and we knew that Google could equate a word like scarfs to scarves.

It can equate Warner Brothers to Warner Bros. even if the word brothers isn’t in the content.

It can equate discount airfare to cheap flights, discount flights etc.

What’s changing?

Now, Google is matching answers to questions instead of just matching keywords.

And the way we used to use keyword variations isn’t working in the same way as it used to. Why? Because sometimes keyword variations indicate different search intent.

Check out this example about some keyword variations for “blender”

“Blenders” returns shopping results.

“Blender” returns a company profile.

“Blended” returns a result about a movie title.

The algorithm is now different

It uses machine learning. Something called Deep Learning. This model tries to model how the brain works.

• The way a neural network works is that you want to put something in the machine and you want to get something out (input and output). The thing is we need something in between that generates the output (hidden layer).
• To start the machining learning process we have to train the machine by starting with the output and working back to the input.
• Deep learning is like this neural network idea times 1,000,000. It’s super powerful and we haven’t been able to exploit this in the past.

Google using Deep Learning

If someone types in “udacity deep learning,” “machine learning” comes up as being relevant.

There was a major shift two years at Google where the old lead of machine learning left and a new person came in to take the algorithm in a new direction.

Word2Vec

Deep learning begins to understand relationships. The machine learns that the words below have a relationship:

So now we have a machine that can understand relationships without supervision.

Google used to do query translation when you type in something wrong. That is not what rank brain does.

Google has a new way to factor in relevance:

It can return a proper result for “NJ DMV” even though those acronyms aren’t in the content. In fact it returns an accurate result for the “motor vehicle commision” of New Jersey.

We have to adapt

So how can we do keyword research moving into the future?

If we’re trying to target a topic like the Space Needle. We have three options for keyword targeting

1. Create 1000s of pages of content for all the keywords we want to rank for - bad idea.
2. Keyword stuff all of our keywords into a few pieces of content - terrible idea.
3. Organize keywords into groups - best option.

Once keywords are organized into groups, pick an ideal phrase that represents each keyword group.

Then use those representative phrases in your copy.

The process is simple

1. Gather your keywords
2. Group your keywords
3. Generate ideal phrases

What this does is allow you to target 100’s of keywords within a relatively small amount of content. You’re optimizing for a conceptual answer instead of targeting keyword by keyword.

So if we’re optimizing for these “ideal phrases” do we track these in our keyword tracker? No. These are the phrases or concepts that you build your content around.

How is search changing?

Search will continue to become more and more long tail. Less people will be searching short 2-3 word queries. Younger generations will continue searching in more natural ways - by asking questions.

Q&A

Q: Is Google Trends and related questions a good way to see what content is worth creating?

A: Yeah, it’s a good start to see what Google thinks is relevant to that particular question as well as future questions one might ask.

Q: What % of queries does RankBrain cover?

A: Everything, but it doesn’t always have an impact. It’s a new relevance engine. It will affect long tail queries more than the shorter queries.

How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy

Joanna Wiebe, @copyhackers

• Joanna is a conversion copywriter! We love Joanna at Unbounce :)
• We’re always looking for signs of relevance in copy

• Something that says “I should pay attention to this!”

• 1986: 2000 ad messages a day
• 2016: 5000 ad messages a day.

• We recognize 50

• We remember 4…

• Blank spaces to put your message on are rare, but we keep looking for them

• The reality is that they don’t really exist
• We are in this world of 5000 competing messages every single day

• The reality then is that we get pretty tired

• So what do we do when we write messages?

• Are we really thinking about how tired our brains are? How overwhelmed our brains are?

• You’re competing with 4 other messages out there (everything else doesn’t matter)
• There is huge opportunity is just competing with the 4 because none of the other noise is getting through
• “Save time and money” makes up the 4000 boring messages that aren’t getting through  a lot of the time

• It’s easier for the reader to just ignore you

• We’re so busy thinking of what we should say safely, say succinctly, that it actually ends up sounding really boring out in the market

• We have to stand out against our competitors’ safe messages

• We’re distracted by our competitors - what are they saying/doing??
• But as many as 60% of sales are lost to no decision

• So the real threat is inertia

• Keep doing what I’m doing because that’s fine and safe and I’ll keep doin’ what I’m doin’ - THIS IS THE PROBLEM

1. How do we win their attention?
2. How do we keep it?
3. How do we monetize it?

• One of the biggest ways to do this, is being specific
• They did an 8-email series with Wistia that brought in 3.5x the paying customers
• Three ways you can get specific based on the case study with Wistia:

1. Make sure that what you’re saying is obviously about the person you’re writing to

Old:

New:

Takeaways:

2. Connect the dots for your reader

Old:

New:

Takeaways:

3. Words are supposed to create pictures to engage our imaginations

Old:

New:

Takeaways:

• Generalized, summarized and vague messages don’t work

• Those 4 specific messages are the ones that will

• It takes organizational change to write high-converting (and specific) copy.

Server Log Files & Technical SEO Audits: What You Need to Know 

Samuel Scott, @samueljscott

• Log data is information of how machines are performing

• The data you see in server logs is different than what you see in Google Analytics (GA)

• There is a difference because Google Analytics is on the client side. It’s placed on the front side of your site. Server logs are on the back end (the source of truth). If there’s a blockage in the data, Google Analytics will be wrong.

• When doing a server log audit, ask for a week's worth of server log data bucketed by day. Compare that data to GA.

The ELK Stack

Use it to monitor server logs in a nice visual way. It’s open source software.

Why do Log Analysis?

Your product depends on your systems working 24/7. All errors, security breaches etc. are found first in your log data. Server logs can also be used for technical SEO.

What to Audit in your server logs

Bot Crawl Volume:

• If there is a big dip in the number of requests Googlebot is making to your site, you’ll want to check your robots.txt file, Google search console to see if there are blocking issues.

Response Code Errors:

• Find out all of the crawl errors that are occurring and where they are occurring.
• Often you’ll want to to change 302 redirects to 301’s to pass link juice

Crawl Priorities:

• You can see which sections of your website are getting crawled the most by a search engine. Does the amount of requests by Googlebot match what you want? If you’re updating a section of the site more frequently, it should be getting more requests. Update your sitemap with crawl priority to make any fixes.

Last Crawl Date:

• If Google isn’t crawling your pages often enough, you can re-submit them through Google search console

Crawl budget waste:

• The most common waste of crawl resources are URL parameters. To fix this, you can block specific parameters through robots.txt or via the URL parameters section in Google search console.

See last slide in the deck for a list of resources for technical SEO

Digital Marketing Skill Pivot: Recruiting New Talent

Emma Still, @mmstll

• Last year Emma talked to someone at Mozcon who was so excited to go home with all their actionable marketing tactics but they were deflated after they didn’t have the manpower to actually put them into practice
• Marketing managers are in high demand, tough to fill

• Takes an average of 43 days in the US to fill this job
• You might have to have a high cost as well
• Can lead to frustration or turnover
• It really impacts your ability to get shit done

• We’re all sitting here with the skills we need to do something about this
• People who do link building can be recruiters…

• Link building is similar to recruiting
  

• But what’s in this for me?

• You can earn money

• Lots of companies have referral bonuses

• You can cherry-pick your coworkers
• You get time back

• Even if you don’t do link building, this isn’t lost on you….

• Marketing and HR are very similar too
  

• If you start to bridge the gaps between marketing and recruitment, you can acquire talent much more easily
• Only 18% of recruiters consider themselves experts when it comes to social recruiting…

• 4 common search criteria we look for when recruiting candidates:

1. Hard skills

1. Websites to query: industry publications, forums, niche sites

2. Trustworthy

1. Klear - “Talked With” report (social)
2. What if I’m not active:

1. Use a former colleague
2. Your company
3. Your competitors
4. Someone too qualified
5. Someone not interested

3. Klear - “Top Content” report (social)

3. Soft Skills

1. What is your value? Your brand?
2. Find a piece of content that aligns with your values at your company and do a content analysis

4. Location

1. Followerwonk or Twitonomy

1. Find people near you from your twitter profile (or someone else’s twitter profile) and reach out to them

2. Check out the people that Twitter suggests as similar users to an “ideal candidate”

• Start thinking about small things you can do to hire great candidates

Boost SEO Rankings by Removing Internal Links

Alex Stein

• Having internal links point to all kinds of pages on your site dilutes the authority flowing through the site
• Authority flows through a site via internal links.
• Authority is divided by the number of links on the page and ~15% disappears
• If you reduce the amount of links flowing out of an important page, you can increase the authority of the page.

How to decide what internal links to remove?

• Consider these three things

• Search volume
• Click data
• Page level revenue

What we did

We cut ~150 links

Result:

• Fewer internal searches
• More people found…

• the important pages
• the product faster

• We had a conversion boost
• 5-10% increase in organic traffic

Best places to tackle for cutting internal links:

• Main nav
• Footer
• Side bar

Product grid pages are a big culprit too

We made a change on our product pages which increased the number of links. After we did that, traffic dropped.

To fix the problem, we removed all the additional links we created and consolidated our product feature into one link.

Making a Business Case

Need to convince your boss or a developer to reduce links in your navigation? Use this formula to determine the revenue you’ll gain per link removed.

Check out this link value calculator to help.

Improve Your UX & SEO through Navigation Optimization

Robyn Winner, @robyn_winner

What defines a bad navigation - the usual suspects

Your navigation tells the story of your website to search engines and your website.

Usual suspects of UX/SEO destruction:

1. Hidden navs
2. One page sites
3. Sites that push too far on design and aesthetics
4. Dynamically displaying content
5. Narcissistic navigation - uses buzzwords that no one understands except for your internal team

Be careful: People might be struggling to find your navigation menu. Notice the difference in the change between hidden navs (hamburger menu) vs a combo menu

Content discoverability also decreases based on the navigation type

What’s the goal of a website anyway?

1. Make new users AWARE we exist and that we can solve their problems
2. Help users CONSIDER us and educate themselves about our key differentiators
3. Easily guide users to CONVERT; whatever form that takes (whether it’s an online purchase, or a lead to customer)
4. RETAIN our users through new and targeted content to keep current customers engaged

Diagnosing and fix bad navigation

1. Utilize your marketing personas

2. Go through your website and identify which pages are driving conversions

3. Keyword rank analysis

• Is this the right page that should be ranking for this keyword
• Categorize your content based on the place it fits into your sales funnel

What a clean nav looks like:

If you change your main nav and remove old pages, make sure you 301 redirect those pages.

The impact of a navigation redesign

Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career

Mike Ramsey, @mikeramsey

Let’s talk about personal brand!

• Example: Lebron James - has a tattoo of a lion
• Example: Shark Tank - “willing to take a bite out of you”
• Example: The Rock - rocks are alive apparently
  

People have been using living organisms to represent their personal branding for thousands of years

• Jesus = the lamb of god
• Lucifer = serpent

• This symbology has been around representing people and the things they do for thousands of years
• What is your personal brand? What living organism represents you?

• It’s taken Mike a long time to figure out what his is - The Bristlecone Pine
• Why?

• It’s not the tallest tree, or the best looking but there are some characteristics that really are exemplary

• It grows on rugged terrain - survives when nothing else can
• Thick bark - impenetrable
• It’s the oldest living tree on earth - the oldest one is 5000 years old!
• It never stops growing

• Nifty did a lot of research into rankings of local scholarship programs

• The scholarships’ impact on rankings for businesses was almost always a significant increase in rank
• Organic traffic also went up
• From this project, everyone in Nifty had to come up with a project they were passionate about that would improve their work
• Ryan was an employee who looked into local content research

• Tried combining three small pages into one 2033-word page
• Quite a few of the keywords saved the same, but on a couple different terms they had some massive increases

• Looked at the 10X content that Rand Fishkin compiled and evaluated some law firms in the city

• Not a single company had 10X content

• Then he looked at ranking terms in association with that website
• See the whole study at bit.ly/2x10x

• Chelsea looked at landing page design across the legal industry in America and discovered what it took to create the best landing page

• The average amount of links was 2033 - a lot of spam in the legal space
• The data was really interesting as they were starting to look at websites
• bit.ly/local-landing

• Jo’s Internship link tests - he wanted to see if universities would be interested in linking to internship programs

• Reached out to universities over 3 hours and had 7 links from DA 67 sites
• Several hours of work, 5% confirmed approval rate and 30+ applications
• Ended up with 0 links after all that work though…

• Lots of universities were putting these links in internal databases but still a fun study! And they learned a lot

• Devin was another employee who built at a competitive link building worksheet

• He built an excel sheet with competitors and then added links

• Pro tip: used a remove duplicates google chrome plug in to clean it up

• 2 hours = 30 shared link ops, 10 outreached, and 4 awesome links
• bit.ly/competitor-links
• bit.ly/LocalLinkBuilding (caps matter!) ← tons of local link ideas

• Cameron’s Spanish SEO Study

• He went and looked at the top 100 US markets in legal and tried to determine what was working for spanish websites in the US for law firms
• Found that subfolders of a site was best - there was more of them and ranked higher than any other style of linking
• Beyond this, those sites that marked up in schema in spanish outperformed everything else, but it was very uncommon to find that. For every 16 english sites, only 1 was marked up in spanish
  

• Johnathan did a schema study across reviews

• These are review snippets showing up on organic listings and it was showing either an aggregate of stars for multiple or single reviews.
• 2.7% had rich snippets
• It was always on a subpage that these would show up

• It wouldn’t work on a home page

• Google guidelines around this basically say we don’t want to have overall reviews. In local and for local service biz, what might their individual product be? So different reviews would show up but not on the home home page for the overall company
• Average domain authority = 29
• bit.ly/review-schema (google updated right as this study was being published)

• People have to have a true representation of reviews on your site - you can’t block out negative reviews. You also can’t mark up third party reviews, and then mark it up and hope you would have the rich schema stars showing up

• Jami’s Review Data

• She interviewed some clients and did some tests
• 83% of nifty clients were too busy to effectively gather reviews and want help
• They wanted their reviews on google, industry specific sites, yelp, facebook (in order of preference)
• 78% of clients only wanted reviews if they were 5 stars
• 92% of people want to read reviews before choosing a company
• Having a lower than 3 star rating is a deal breaker
• 169 requests sent, 11 left testimonial, 14 left star rating, 0 left online review…

• Not an abnormality if you’re just blinding going out and asking your big customer base

• But some clients have done really well with reviews

• You know why? They PERSONALLY reach out to everyone and ask them.
  

• Roman’s Blogger Outreach Data

• Focuses on link building
• He wanted to know if a spray and pray approach would work or do we do really targeted blogger outreach and test that
• 1.5% response rate with spray and pray with outreach

• Only 5% of that 1.5% actually linked

• 42% response rate with selective outreach to bloggers

• 18% link rate from responses with selective outreach to bloggers

• Was selective really the way to go? Yes. Clearly.
  

• Brady’s reporting study

• Do clients read our reports? 90% do
• How much do they read? Only 69% read all of it
• How often do you have a phone call with a nifty project manager? 58% monthly
• What was the most useful info in the report? The overall summary…

• They were shocked. They thought it was the leads section.

• It comes back to the bristlecone thing. All these projects were hustle projects that took grit but they learned so much
• Mike has a challenge for everyone to go out and do their own bristlecone project. Some studies might not be relevant but learning is always relevant.Tackle something that’s perplexing and figure out how you can do it better.

• Let them know how you do! #bristlecone

Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism

Kristen Craft, @thecrafty

• Real relationship building is something we see so infrequently these days
• We try to do it on a massive scale with marketing automation for personalization, but it’s not exactly the same thing
• We want lifelong customers but people churn

• Why?

• Kristen argues it’s because we’re using short term tactics and short term tactics leads to short term relationships
  
• Three primary ways to differentiate ourselves:

• Price

• Kristen thinks this is the worst.
• You have no control. It’s a race to the bottom and the vast majority (86%) of people are willing to pay more for an excellent experience.

• Product

• Again, real easy for someone to replicate the exact same thing you’re doing.
• The time it takes to make a decision increases exponentially with the number of options. As decision time goes up, experience goes down.

• Experience

• These leaves us with experience as the ULTIMATE DIFFERENTIATOR.
• No one can steal your wonderful customer support experience from you.
  

• Yes, you need a good price, you need a good product but experience is the best differentiator.
• How? 3 things: Familiarity, Don’t be all things to all people, Prioritize the personal over the professional

• The Familiarity Principle:

• We prefer things we see more often.
• How can we leverage this human tendency?
• BambooHR does this really well. Made video voicemails and she then sold 2x what she was previously selling.
• Familiarity breeds love - video is one of the best ways of doing that in the digital world

• Put real people on camera - stock images aren’t authentic
• If you are going to put real people on camera, hide shadows with light. You can make people their most empathetic and passionate if you flood their faces with light!
• Script your video

• Won’t it sound scripted if I do that? Trust wistia. It’ll sound better scripted than all those ‘umms’ and ‘uhhs’ that’ll inevitable show up unscripted.

• More attractiveness → more messages

• Being highly polarizing will in fact, get you about 70% more messages than those who are universally average
• Bottom line: embrace uniqueness
  

• Don’t try to be all things to all people

• Use precise language
• Don’t hide your idiosyncrasies
  

• Prioritize the personal over the professional

• Show personal appreciation
• Heighten emotion with music
• Leave room for humor

• Evangelism: the holy grail of customer retention
• Make your customer the hero

• How can we implement this ourselves?

• Use “you” language
• Show different perspectives
• Piggyback on emotional moment

• If we’re able to recognize and leverage experience as our ultimate differentiator, we’ll be delivering the most authentic personal experience possible.

Optimizing the Journey to Deliver Radically Relevant Experiences

Rebekah Cancino, @rebekahcancino

• Consider the customer journey
• Your marketing funnel is not your user’s journey - it’s just their experience and we have to find where it’s most relevant for us to fit in that experience
• Understanding the journey is crucial
• 53% of customers would pay more if they had the kind of user experience design they want most

• The entire interconnected experience - content, design, SEO

• Three Kinds of Insight:

• Strategic Direction - bird’s eye view; what problem are we solving
• User Experience - what content, features and functions to users need at each point of the journey
• Design Decisions - what kind of emotions should we be designing for at which point in the journey

• Context isn’t tied to devices - context is tied to people (a trap marketer’s fall into a lot)

• Empathy map! ^
• From the thinking, feeling and doing, we can start to unpack that and keep going
• One way to do this is to map the journey

• This is scalable
• A customer journey mapping is an exercise in empathy
• Start by thinking out the user steps (and needs) from every phase

• Then we can move on about what each person is thinking, feeling and doing at each point in those phases
• Then after that, we can start to think about what features, functionality and context make the most sense

• Key point here is that it’s not all about brand here
• Once you have a high level picture of the journey, then you can find out if you’re solving the right problem or not
  

• Once you figure out the problem, formulate a problem together

• Like a mad lib

• Meta map, tie search data in

• Two kinds of intent:

• Active intent - explicitly described
• Passive intent - implicitly described
  

• How we uncover intent?

• Categorize into semantically related topics

• Look at what themes are emerging
• This is how we can start satisfying passive intent in content

• The real magic comes when we analyze search intent against the natural phases in our customer journey
  

• Design decisions:

• How can we design for emotions in different points in the journey

• Be careful when it comes to evoking certain emotions - you don’t want to evoke negative ones accidentally

• Ie, the facebook memories feature

• Start mapping things that matter
• Three tools for understanding the journey: journey mapping (big picture), moment mapping (what problem are we solving),  meta mapping (long tail, keyword research, etc.)
• Gain and retain customers by providing them with experiences they actually want and need

Putting Trust into Domain Authority

Wil Reynolds, @wilreynolds

• As marketers we often forget we’re marketing to people. People with feelings.
• We need to understand how people are feeling before marketing to them

• Understand their problems and worries
• You can’t find out how people feel by doing keyword research

• How can you start to learn how your audience is feeling?

• Chat logs at scale
• Individual interviews
• Sit on sales calls
• Having people “Google” a solution
• Video what they think vs ours

• Decisions are made based off how people feel.
• Spending your time targeting high volume keywords is a lost cause. You’re competing with everyone else.

• Try and understand all the questions someone would ask before searching that broad high volume term.

Building Brand and Trust

Find a way to add value to your audience. Do it selflessly.

• I.e. Help someone on reddit without linking back to your site
• We love it when a company makes our problem their problem

• Think Google misspellings

• Solve a problem your competitor won’t

With each website interaction your brand is either

building reinforcing or destroying reputation

Build trust and jump the SERP

Think how you can help someone before they make a query

This app (Honey) helps you find coupons for checkout pages with a click of a button.

I trust Amazon because:

• Secure
• 1-2 day delivery
• Returns are easy
• Works on mobile
• Fast transactions

What’s the result? A lot of people don’t search products on Google. They search them on Amazon.

Want to understand how people search for specific things, try http://answerthepublic.com/.

Turn solving problems and building trust into $$$

• Use your own keyword data to pitch revenue
• Throw it in SEM Rush to check rankings

STEP 1 - Prove that you have content that ranks well

STEP 2 - Give your visits a value (you’d be OK with paying for paid traffic, so why not value organic visits?)

STEP 3 -  Consider the value of assisted conversions

STEP 4 - Calculate the value of potential conversions

This is what you’ll get if you do the project well:

But things don’t always go well so make sure you outline a worse case scenario when pitching a client.

Once you outline the current value your content generates, pitch your client and say “this is what you’ll get if we bump up traffic by 10%”

Re-run the #’s the same way we just did and you’ll get the revenue increase.

How to check if a brand is growing

Here are the tools I use:

• Google Trends
• MOAT
• ispot.tv

[Wednesday, September 14th]

The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling

Kindra Hall, @kindramhall

• Telling great stories is hard to do.
• Kindra has been telling stories for her entire life
• There is a strategic power of storytelling
• If you know that you’re supposed to be telling a story, my guess is that you’re coming up one page short
• How do we do strategic storytelling? 3 things we gotta break down

• Why does storytelling work so well?
• What is a story?
• Foolproof storytelling strategies

• Why does storytelling work so well?

• Story changes brain chemistry

• Cortisol (responsible for increased focus and attention)
• Oxytocin (responsible for increased empathy and emotion - the trust hormone)
• It’s not just in the heart, it’s in the head

• Once you create an emotional connection, you can move into action
• Stories work so well because they’re memorable

• Stories are what we can tell going forward

• Why aren’t we telling them?
  

• What is a story?

• Goal: to redefine story, what it is and what it is not.
  
• A story is NOT:  

• a tagline/slogan/mission statement
• It’s not a list of features or benefits
• It’s not simply catchy copy or cool infographics
• A story is not vague, high-level principles or through

• A story IS:

• Happens in a particular moment
• There is a beginning, middle and end,
• There is emotion not just information
• There are characters to care about and something at stake
  

• You can produce great video and still not have it be a story
• Too often, we allude to the story but we don’t actually tell the story.
• It’s not the magnitude or the tragedy of the story but telling it well
  

• Foolproof storytelling strategies

• Text 33444 with the message “Storytelling” to get these slides and more info!
• Finding the Story:

• Make a list of differentiators - in action

• What makes you or your company different

• Make a list of clients - their transformations
• Make a list of objections

• Why do people say no thank you and go with the other guy?

• When the idea was born

• Origin/birth stories are extremely powerful

• Tips to finding stories:

• Be persistent on your pursuit

• Crafting the Story:

• Normal /  Explosion / New Normal (not beginning, middle and end)

• What was, what happened, what is now

• Amplify your stories        

• Focus on one  moment and one person
• Set the scene - be vivid & strategic
• Include emotions: the struggle, the hope
• Offer a directive

• Telling the Story:

• Places to tell:        

• Videos, videos, videos
• Website - about us and testimonials
• Social Media // Blogs // Email Campaigns
• Presentations & In-Person Meetings

• Use stories to tell the value of what you do and all the rest of it will make sense

29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know

Mike Arnesen, @mike_arnesen

Get additional resources and documentation on this talk at upbuild.io/gtm

1. Crawl your site to see if GTM containers exist. Using Screaming Frog, we can use Custom Search Filters to check that GTM’s base code is present on every page.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#1
   
2. Inject Jquery if you don’t have it. Use a tag that checks for jquery on every page. If it hasn’t been loaded, it can load it.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#2

3. Harvest Clickstream Data: Track all the click data you want. Find out where people are clicking on your site We use two tags to do this.

1. 1st tag applies click handlers to every thing we want to track (i.e. for the main nav
2. 2nd tag - Universal Analytics - receives the data and pushes it to Google Analytics

upbuild.io/gtm/#3 

4. Test & Release - You can build out your entire GTM container locally and Q/A it before making it live. You can enter preview mode and debug everything.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#4

5. Leverage Environments - If you have a multi-tiered dev environment use GTM to push code live on various environments (i.e. staging and production). The workspaces function in GTM helps you do this.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#5
   
6. Make Semi-Permanent Changes.
   
   When A/B testing with Optimizely, you can copy and paste your code from there and paste into GTM to load the code for free.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#6
   
7. Track file downloads - Turn on the build in variable called “click url”. You can selectively choose which URLs are tracked when clicked with a specific file extension.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#7
   
8. Track (off-site) downloads - you can setup a pseudo intermediary page  which has a tag that sends data to Google Analytics. Once that occurs you can use GTM to then redirect the user to their final destination
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#8
   
9. Track Outbound Clicks - Track and segment clicks in a meaningful way for better intelligence. It’d be nice to know what sites people went to from your site. To do this you can configure an Auto Event Variable to Grab Hostname of Clicked LInk.
   
   upbuild.io/gtm/#9
   
10. Configure Cross-Domain & Subdomain Tracking.
    

1. Subdomain tracking: You can do a quick setting change in GTM to make sure the cookies are tracking properly from subdomain to root domain, so you don’t end up with tracking issues.
   
2. Cross Domain Tracking: Have multiple sites that are part of the same user journey? Use cross domain tracking.

upbuild.io/gtm/#10

11. See Full Hostnames in Google Analytics reports - i.e. view page paths with subdomains or other top level domains.
    
    upbuild.io/gtm/#11
    
12. Strip out Personally Identifiable Information (PII): Create a javascript variable that looks for PII and intercepts it before it gets sent to Google Analytics.

upbuild.io/gtm/#12

13. Use Nested Variables
    

Use variables to create other variables. Here’s an example:

Another great example is using a URL protocol, hostname etc. to generate your canonical tags dynamically.

upbuild.io/gtm/#13

14. Merge Google Analytics and CRM Data
    

• Use a unique key to push data to your CRM
• Merge that data into GA with the key

upbuild.io/gtm/#14

15. Leverage a Data Layer - Bridge the gap between application and experience.

For the majority of websites there is an Experience Layer that consists of everything our users can see and interact with.

The Application Layer is made up of our functionality, our database, etc., and it’s what makes the Experience work.

The Data Layer (or dataLayer, as it’s written in GTM) provides us with an opportunity to surface information from our Application Layer that doesn’t necessarily ever need to become a part of the Experience.

Read more on the use cases here: upbuild.io/gtm/#15

16. Measure Scroll Depth - capture scroll data at predefined points. There’s a scroll depth plugin you can add via GTM

upbuild.io/gtm/#16

17. Observe dwell time - understand which visits are sticky and which visits aren’t.

In Google Analytics, time on site isn’t calculated accurately when someone only visits one page. Time on page is measured by page hits so if someone bounces (and doesn’t visit a 2nd page), the time on page count is considered as 0 seconds.

You can use the below formula to set an approximate dwell time that’s suitable for specific pages.

upbuild.io/gtm/#17

18. Monitor Pogo sticking - let’s you monitor how many people are going from SERPs to your site and then back to the SERP.

This tactic is experimental. Make sure it works on your site configuration.

upbuild.io/gtm/#18

19. Include Outsiders Only - make sure your traffic isn’t getting polluted by your employees. On top of Google Analytics IP filtering, you can define a parameter that identifies your team.  If your team opens that URL on every device, their visits will be excluded from your analytics data.

upbuild.io/gtm/#19

20.  Update Metadata for SEO purposes - Change or apply metadata without touching your code. Great for when you’re an agency and can’t get access to your clients site quick enough.

Inject code via GTM and overwrite the metadata that already exists.

upbuild.io/gtm/#20

21. Implement Structured Data - Inject dynamic JSON-LD for rich cards/snippets & more.

upbuild.io/gtm/#21

22. Hack Site Search Tracking - Don’t have it properly set up on your site via query strings? You can hack it together with GTM.

upbuild.io/gtm#22

23. Configure Analytics for Web Apps - Use advanced listening or ask nicely for a data layer.

upbuild.io/gtm#23

24. Measuring Video Engagement - Leverage YouTube's’ API to fire events during the play.

upbuild.io/gtm#24

25. Monitor Form Abandonment - Collect and send data to Google Analytics about how far users get into forms before leaving.

upbuild.io/gtm#25

26. Measure AdBlocking Traffic -  Get an approximation of how many people are visiting your site with adblockers. How? Populate a Custom Dimension based on whether or not a fake ad gets blocked.

upbuild.io/gtm#26

27. Get Sign Ups/Sales with Personalization - Set a cookie whenever someone enters the funnel and remove the cookie when someone converts. If user doesn't convert, you can show them different content based off that GTM cookie.

upbuild.io/gtm#27

28. Create Flexible Lookup Tables - Allows you to scale lookup tables very easily.

Basically it works with Google Sheets and allows you to pass a variable into a spreadsheet and output a corresponding data point based on that input.

i.e. You could have a huge lookup table to map domains to their respective UA-IDs.

upbuild.io/gtm#28

29. Export& Import GTM containers - Recycle previous work you’ve done in GTM by exporting containers you’ve already worked on and import them into a new account.

upbuild.io/gtm#29

Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers

Tara Reed, @tarareed_

• Engineering as marketing is when you build interactive tools to acquire, convert and engage leads

• We build pretty static stuff that don’t allow our users to have much interactivity at all
• We decide that as marketers we don’t have the skill set to do that so we don’t explore it
• Engineers and marketers are siloed and we don’t interact and we don’t do the stuff the other does

• Your plan for engineering as marketing

• 1. You can build tools to convert millions of users
• 2. You can use engineering as marketing to acquire millions of page views
• 3. You can use engineering as marketing to boost engagement rates

• Toolkit: 25 best software tools for your engineering as marketing
• Why?

• It’s the marketer's responsibility to acquire, convert and engage leads on your site
• Implementing a marketing as engineering strategy means you can get to stop begging your engineering team to help with every single campaign
• It gives you a little autonomy back
• You also get to differentiate from the same boring tactics your competitors are using

• You can build tools to convert users who come to your page

• Moz has a list of free tools for recommendations for optimization

• Moz knows that this gives you

• Hubspot has a “How strong is your website” calculator
• Crew uses quizzes based on FAQ to create something really engaging and helpful for the customer
• IKEA built an augmented reality app so you can see what furniture would look like in your house before you buy - so cool
• Art Collecting School - answers questions and puts practical art appraisal skills into an interactive learning experience

• Software tools to allow you to do this work:

• Leadquizzes - create customized quizzes but it will also funnel them through to the purchase of a product
• Typeform - choose your own adventure framework
• Motion.AI - chatbot to build your own artificial intelligence
• Stencyl - you can build your own video games for gamification
• Bubble - build your own mobile web apps (including your own database hosted on amazon web services)

• Example: notrealtwitter.com

• Just like twitter but built totally with Bubble and without writing a single line of code

• You can use engineering as marketing to acquire millions of page views

• There are overlaps between engineering as marketing and growth hacking

• Software tools to allow you to create awesome experiences for users before they even get to your site:

• Edgar - repurpose content and schedule posts
• Socedo - find leads who are desperate for your service on social media and interacts with them
• Growthpup - grow your instagram followers

• Make the experience coming to your site be interactive by itself

• You can use engineering as marketing to boost your engagement rates

• Intercom - you can use it for messaging customers within an app as well as for other unique things like your blog…
• Zapier - allows you to piece different software tools together through zaps

• So the tools listed above help us to start thinking like builders
• Toolkit: 25 best software tools for your engineering as marketing plan:

• Text MOZCON to 44222

Persuasion, Data, & Collaboration: Building Links in 2016

Kirsty Hulse, @kirsty_hulse

• There are common hurdles to building links:

• Clients say no to your ideas
• We can’t get good data
• Experts won’t collaborate
• Our emails don’t get replies
• We get coverage but no links

How to get clients to say yes to your link building campaign ideas

• Quit using jargon - use incredibly simple language. Avoid acronyms. Be as clear as possible
• Pitch something insane

• Next time you have an idea or campaign you want people to get on board with, pitch something crazy and wild first. It’ll make the idea you really want to do more enticing.

• Pitch ideas using questions

• Ask your audience a series of questions to get them involved in the idea before you even pitch it. Try and make them relate to the situation/problem you are trying to solve with your pitch

• Good affordable data

• When you have data it’s easy to get people interested in linking to your content
• Use Pollfish to poll an audience and get your own data in an affordable way. Be sure the send surveys to people who will actually care.

• Expert endorsement increases replies (especially when getting links to a very commercial page)
• Pay Journalists

• For content feedback, strategy advice and press release amends

• Amazon New Releases is a goldmine

• Loads of experts who have something to promote
• They’re more likely to partner with your brand because its free PR for them
• Put your search into Amazon New Releases, find an author of a book/content piece and reach out to that author to partner.

• Don’t do shitty outreach

1. Don’t lead with a lie. Don’t be apologetic. Tell me what the opportunity is.

2. This one is just too vague. They didn’t include the data. It’s just not that interesting.

3. This reach out email is from a PR agency. It’s OK and you can see the difference as to how a PR person speaks with confidence and is not apologetic at all.

Q&A

Q: Do you send out press releases for all your content?

A: No. There are two types of content. One that creates demand and one that’s for building links. Send out press releases for the latter.

Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing

Cindy Krum, @suzzicks

• Understanding this is critical to understand the future of the internet
• Historically, crawlers have been locked out of some mobile content

• To index content, that content must be crawled

• Eventually crawlers started crawling javascript and started getting better at understanding that content
• Then they started crawling and indexing Android apps. Apple apps then followed.
• Crawling and mapping apps is similar to websites. It’s even easier and faster to do than websites.
• Now Google can index apps, but the crawling is still a bit primitive (especially for iOS)
• You can index the app itself and even the content within the app

• There are 2 types of Apps

• Web Apps and Native Apps

• Web Apps live on the internet
• Native Apps have to be downloaded - they work offline

• Progressive Web apps rely on javascript and AJAX

• AJAX = asynchronous javascript and XML

• This means only the needed content loads
• Once the user needs more, it will load asynchronously

• The problem with this is that it provides a great UX but slows everything down on the backend. Load times are high.

The problem we have is that Javascript and other elements increase the filesize of web pages. Since we’re trying to use heavier code on smaller and smaller devices, load times are becoming incredibly slow on mobile.

Google cares about load times. It’s even been testing a “slow” tag in mobile search results:

Google now explicitly allows javascript redirects as long as your have a rel=”alternate” tag to handle mobile traffic to get them to the right page.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) - Basically a native app that’s online

These apps are fast. Why? They put a middle layer in between the server and the website. It pre-renders and pre-caches all the heavy stuff to make it seem like everything on the website loads instantly. We call it a “service worker.”

PWA service worker are similar to AMP Javascript Runtime.

To have a service worker, you have to be on HTTPs.

The next thing you need is a web app manifest. This file holds the vital information about the app:

• All you do is write that manifest and link it from your website.
• Create your service worker

In the manifest you can do fun things:

• Have the app load with or without an address bar, full screen etc.
• Send push notifications

If you have a PWA you can send push notifications. Even on a website. These have to be on HTTPS.

Getting your App on people’s mobile home screen

Once someone visits your app a few times, you can use an add banner to encourage a user to download your web app with an “add to homescreen” banner. That Icon will take them to your web app, not a native app.

That means a user can visit the app offline and view all the content that has been cached.

To get a Progressive Web App indexed, you must work harder.

Indexing Web Apps

• You need HTML snapshots
• XML sitemaps
• HTML5 Pushstate
• Fetch and render in Google Search Console (ensure pages are getting indexed

Resources to make your site a PWA:

• App Manifest Wizard
• App Manifest Validator
• Service Worker Toolbox
• Service Worker Instructions

Native Apps

Pros and Cons of Native Apps vs Web Apps

• The problem is that mobile apps have a low reach.

• Mobile web reach is 2.5x app reach

86% of the time spent on apps in the US is spent on Facebook, Facebook Messenger and YouTube

Why should you care about app indexing in search engines? Because very few people are looking for apps in the app store now. They already have the apps they want.

How to index Apps

An app scheme is kind of like a URL for content within an app

This is what you need to index apps:

• The app schemes should be created to mirror the URLs you use on your website.
• Then you need a mapping association file that tells search engines which scheme corresponds to which URL
• The association in the mapping document must be to the canonical URL on the web

• If you update your website or 301 URLs and don’t update your mapping document, you can break all your deep links.

App indexing has it’s benefits. The result can be a direct install button in the search results or an appearance in Google’s autocomplete suggestions.

Google Firebase App Indexing - Google’s New App Building Platform

• This tool is supposed to make teamwork easier on apps
• It gives search engines entry points and endpoints in apps
• Firebase cloud hosting makes it easier for Google to access the content
• Firebase Generates Dynamic Links that will work regardless of the device

What does this mean for the future? (this is speculation)

• I think Google will give an SEO boost for apps using Firebase Integration

• Firebase dynamic linking expands the potential reach of any one app.

• I think once Firebase helps generate Android and IOS apps, they’ll all be able to be indexed as instant apps in the SERPs.

• This means there would be no need for app stores.

Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology

Sarah Weise, @weisesarah

• Let’s talk persuasion!
• 95% of decisions are unconscious
  

• The survival brain is downright selfish

• Basic instincts make us determine: can I eat it? Will it hurt me? Can I have sex with it? (how primal…)

• The emotional brain is helping you to empathize and connect with others

• This is the primary decision maker

• The rational brain justifies the decision you just made
• The most persuasive websites or campaigns tap into all three decision-making parts of our brain

7 elements to boost the persuasiveness of your sites:

1. Social proof

• Likes, star ratings, review numbers all push us to buy

• The most persuasive asks involve our friends, people we know, or people we think will be like us
  

^even Moz has social proof!

2. Scarcity also pushes us to buy

• Airline flights use “only two seats left” all the time
  

• Timers and countdown timers, deal of the day
• People are 16x less likely to uncheck boxes than check them when they’re blank

3. Loss Aversion

4. Comparison

• People are willing to spend the time when they’re interested, but the setup is important
• Amount saved, or discount crossed out
• This example combines comparison with emotional elements:

5. Association

• Story + visual
  

• Stock photos will hurt your credibility
  

6. Reasons

• If you provide a reason, your rational brain doesn’t have to think quite so much
• The word because sets off a specific trigger in the brain that signifies “oh, a reason is coming!” Use ‘because’.
• 64% more buy after watching a video - use a video for reasons

• So let’s look at a site that uses all the 7 elements:

• RiiDE
• Check out their very interactive site and all the elements that they’re using: http://www.riide.com/
  

• Go ahead. Play mind games. Because more persuasive experiences await.

Link Building's Tipping Point

Rand Fishkin, @randfish

I spent some time re-examining link building and have wiped my mind of everything I’ve thought about link building up until now.

Let’s look at what we’ve done right and wrong.

This is how Google has judged links in the past

This is not where they’re going next.

Google is now the all seeing eye. Google sees all.

Google’s goal is clear:

Google’s core search team is always asking the same question: are searchers satisfied with the results page they see?

They want to see click patterns like this:

If they find that they’re clicking on other things, they might swap the rankings up

Machine and Deep Learning Models

Try to identify traits highly predictive of good links vs bad links

Google is likely building a model of authority based on domain reputation and other attributes of a page instead of only the domain authority.

Google is transforming itself into a company based on learning models — a machine learning first company. To build a sustainable link strategy in the future, you’ll need…

• Link goals
• Strategic approach
• Tactical initiatives
• KPIs/metrics

Example: lineapasta.com

We also need…

• Buy-in on experimentation.
• Room to fail
• The right expectations to get to positive ROI

5 long term link strategies that work

1. The community and user-generated content path

Examples: YELP, TripAdvisor, Etsy, Medium, Dribble, Memorandum, Product Hunt

2. Press and media path

Example: Tesla, Uber, Dollar Shave Club,

3. Embed path

Examples: SlideShare, Vimeo, Typeform, RottenTomatoes, Walkscore, TradingView

*This option has the most spam risk

4. Partnership/Alliance path

Example: ReturnPath, FullContact, Trulia, Box, SendGrid, Otis Elevators

5. Content Marketing path

Example: Eater, Master of Malt (product content), Wordstream, Collectors Weekly, Politifact, GrooveHQ, Polygon, KPCB

Why isn’t manual link acquisition a strategy on this list?

The problem is that this strategy does not scale with decreasing friction.

Great link builders focus on their FlyWheel

Example: Moz’s Flywheel

Almost every Flywheel finds a point of friction. But if you know where that friction lies, that’s where I see the smartest link builders applying short term tactics.

10 of my favourite link building hacks (short term).

1. Republishing - Medium is great to use for this

2. Guest Contributions

3. Geography - Local Links

Example:

4. Small Site/Content Acquisitions

Buy a small content site and add it to a section of your site.

5. Be Someone Else’s Press

If you write about other people in your space (especially new ones), they will link back to you.

6. Bio Links

7. Resource lists (& Directories)

8a. Giving testimonials to others and get a link back in that testimonial

8b. Case Studies

Be in a case study for a vendor you use and they’ll be sure to link back.

9. Brand, Image & Content Reclamation

Reverse Google image search is an easy way to find pages that have mentioned your content but haven’t linked.

10. Orthogonal Alignments

Take your website and business and find all kinds of connections that aren’t about what you do, but are related

• Artistic Intersections
• Social causes
• sponsorship/support

Always ask yourself:

1. Do my links mimic how people might find you without search?

2. Do my links point to places that searches find valuable?

3. Is that link profile going to pass Google’s machine-learning smell test?