[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]

Your organic click-through rate is ridiculously important. While it may not be a direct ranking signal that's even part of Google's core algorithm, I believe CTR is an indirect signal that definitely impacts rank. And if you improve your click-through rate, you should see your rankings and conversions improve.

Although having a high organic CTR is crucial, having positive website engagement metrics is even more critical. What value is there in getting hundreds or thousands of people to click on your brilliant headlines if those people don't stick around for more than a few seconds?

If Google values dwell time, is there a way to see it? YES! Today I'll share some data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings.

One important note before we get started: Please don't focus too much on the absolute bounce rate and time on site figures discussed in this article. We are only looking at figures for one particular vertical. The minimum expected engagement will vary by industry and query type.

Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?

Yes. We know Google measures dwell time, or how much time a visitor actually spends on a page before retuing to the SERPs.

In 2011, Google aounced a new option that allowed us to block domains from appearing in our search results. If you clicked on a result and then retued to the SERP from the website within a few seconds, Google's blocked sites feature would appear. Clicking it would let you block all results from that site.

Google told us they would study the data and considered using it as a ranking signal.

Although that feature is no longer with us, we know it was based on whether (and how quickly) you bounced back. So we know Google is definitely measuring dwell time.

The problem is, we don't have a way to measure dwell time. However, we can measure three engagement metrics that are proportional to and directionally equivalent to dwell time: bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate.

Does Bounce Rate Impact Organic Position?

OK, let's get the official Google line out of the way. Google's Gary Illyes tweeted the following in 2015: "we don't use analytics/bounce rate in search ranking." Matt Cutts said similar in the past. Pretty clear, right?

However, I'm not saying that bounce rate is used as a direct ranking factor. And Google definitely doesn't need Google Analytics to compute dwell time. What I believe is that, in some Rube Goldbergian way, bounce rate does in fact (indirectly) impact rankings.

Does the data back that up? We looked to see if the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we were ranking for had any relationship to their ranking. Check out this graph:

This is very peculiar. Notice the "kink" between positions 4 and 5? In mathematical terms, this is called a "discontinuous function." What's happening here?

Well, it seems like for this particular keyword niche, as long as you have a low bounce rate (below 76 percent) then you're more likely to show up in positions 1 through 4. However, if your bounce rate is higher (above 78 percent), then you're much less likely to show up in those coveted top 4 positions.

Am I saying bounce rate is part of the core search algorithm Google uses? No.

But I think there’s definitely a relationship between bounce rate and rankings. Looking at that graph, it leads me to believe that it's no accident — but in fact algorithmic in nature.

My guess is that algorithms use user engagement as a validation method. Think of it more like a "check" on click-through rates within the existing algorithm that hasn't been quantified.

Undoubtedly, click-through rates can be gamed. For example, I could promise you the digital equivalent of free beer and have a ridiculously high click-through rate.

Image via Fox.

But if there's no free beer to be had, most (if not all) of that traffic will bounce right back.

Image via Fox.

So I believe Google is measuring dwell time (which is proportional to bounce rate) to check whether websites getting high CTRs actually deserve it and if the clicks are indeed valid, or if it's just click bait.

One other question this discussion obviously raises is: do higher rankings cause higher engagement rates, as opposed to the other way around? Or could both of these be caused by some a completely unrelated factor?

Well, unless you work at Google (and even then!) you may never know all the secrets of Google's algorithm. There are things we know we don't know!

Regardless, improving user engagement metrics, like bounce rate, will still have its own benefits. A lower bounce rate is just an indicator of success, not a guarantee of it.

Does time on site impact organic position?

Now let's look at time on site, another metric we can measure that is proportional to dwell time. This graph also has a "kink" in the curve:

It's easy to see that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you're more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you're more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.

Interestingly, you get no additional points after you cross a minimum threshold of time on site. Even if people are spending 2 hours on your site, it doesn't matter. I think you've passed Google's test — passing it by even more doesn't result in any additional bonus points.

Image via Fox.

Larry's Theory: Google uses dwell time — which we can't measure, but is proportional to user engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates — to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for.

Conversion rates: The ultimate metric

So now let's talk about conversion rates. We know that higher click-through rates typically translate into higher conversion rates:

If you can get people really excited about clicking on something, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.

So what we need is an Engagement Rate Unico/Donkey Detector, to detect high and low engagement rates.

Before we go any further, we need to know: what is a good conversion rate?

On average across all industries, site-wide conversion rate for a website is around 2 percent (the donkeys), while conversion rates for the top 10 percent of websites (the unicos) get 11 percent and above. While absolute conversion rates vary wildly by industry, unicos always outperform donkeys by 3–5x regardless of industry.

Remember, conversion rates are a very important success metric because you get the most value (you actually captured leads, sold your product, got people to sign up for your newsletter, or visitors did whatever else it was you wanted them to do), which means the user found what they were looking for.

How do you tu conversion rate donkeys into unicos?

Image via Fox.

The way you don't get there is by making little changes. The difference between donkeys and unicos is so huge. If you want to increase your conversion rates by 3x to 5x, then small, incremental changes of 2 or 3 percent usually won't cut it.

What should you do?

1. Change your offer (in a BIG way)

Rather than A/B testing button color or image changes, you might be better off trashing your current offer and doing a new one.

Ask yourself: Why in the world are 98 percent of the people who see your offer not taking you up on it? Well, it's probably because your offer sucks.

Image via Fox.

What can you offer that will resonate enough that +10 percent of people would be excited about signing up for it or buying it on the spot?

Be open-minded. The answer is probably something adjacent to what you're currently doing.

For example, for my own company, five years ago our primary offer was to sign up for a trial of our software. It was somewhat complicated, people had to lea how to use the software, and not everyone made it through the process.

Then I had an epiphany: Why don't I just grade people's accounts without having them do a trial of our PPC management software, and just give them a report card? That increased my conversion and engagement rates by 10x, and the gains persisted over time. There is much more leverage in changing the offer versus, say, the image on an existing offer.

2. Use Facebook Ads

You can influence users even before they do searches. Brand awareness creates a bias in people's minds which has a ridiculously huge impact on user engagement signals. We can do this with Facebook Ads.

You want to promote inspirational, compelling, memorable content to your target market. Although they'll consume your content, they won't convert to leads and sales right away. Remember, love takes time.

Image via Fox.

Rather, your goal is to bias them so in the future they'll do a search for your product. If it's an unbranded search, having been exposed to your marketing materials in the past, they'll be more likely to click on and choose you now.

Facebook and many other vendors have conducted lift studies that prove that Facebook ads impact clicks and conversions you'll get from paid and organic search.

You won't get away with promoting junk. You have to promote your unicos.

For this, we'll use Facebook's:

• Interest-Based Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the things you're selling.
• Demographic Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the stuff you're selling, maybe within the next month.
• Behavioral Targeting to reach the people who buy stuff that is related to the stuff you're selling.

For example, let's say you're a florist or jeweler. You can target Facebook ads at people who will celebrate an aiversary within the next 30 days.

Why would you want to do this? Because you know these people will be searching for keywords relating to flowers and jewelry soon. That's how you can start biasing them to get them to have happy thoughts about your business, increasing the likelihood that they'll click on you, but more importantly, convert.

It's not just Facebook. You can also buy image display ads on Google's Display Network. You can use Custom Affinity Audiences to target people who have searched on keywords you're interested in, but didn't click through to your site (or you can specify certain categories related to your business).

3. Remarketing

Image via Fox.

People are busy and have short attention spans. If you aren't using remarketing, essentially you're investing a ton of time and money into your SEO and marketing efforts just to get people to visit one time. That's crazy.

You want to make sure the people who gave you a look to see what your site was about never forget you so that subsequent searches always go your way. You want them to stay engaged and convert.

Remarketing greatly impacts engagement metrics like dwell time, conversion rate, and time on site because people are more familiar with you, which means they're more likely to be engaged with you for longer.

There's a reason we spent nearly a million dollars on remarketing last year. Investing in remarketing:

• Boosted repeat visits by 50 percent.
• Increased conversions by 51 percent.
• Grew average time-on-site by 300 percent.

These are huge numbers for a minimal investment (display ads average around $10 for 1,000 views).

It's your job to convert or squeeze as much money as you can from people who are already in the market for what you sell. So use remarketing to increase brand familiarity and increase user engagement metrics, while simultaneously tuing the people who bounced off your site in the past into leads now.

4. Clean up your bad neighborhoods!

If you've tried all of the above (and other ways to improve engagement rates) and still have bad neighborhoods on your websites that have low CTR and/or user engagement rates — just delete them. Why?

I believe that terrible engagement metrics will lead to a death spiral where your site gets less clicks, less leads, less sales, and even lower rankings. And who wants that?

Now, I don't have any proof of this, but the software engineer in me suspects that it would be very difficult for Google to compute engagement rates for every keyword/page combination on the Inteet. They would need to lean on a "domain-level engagement score" to fall back on in the event that more granular data wasn't available. Google does something conceptually similar in AdWords by having both account-level and keyword-level Quality Scores. It's also similar to how many believe that Google considers links pointing to your domain and also individual pages on your site when computing organic rankings (a moment of silence for our beloved Google PageRank Toolbar). Dumping your very worst neighborhoods — only if all attempts to resuscitate have failed miserably — would, in theory, raise a domain-level score, if it existed.

Obviously better CTRs, higher engagement rates, and improved conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I also believe that improvement in these metrics will lead to better organic search rankings, creating a virtuous cycle of even more clicks and conversions.

Conclusion

It's becoming increasingly clear that organic CTR matters. But you might not realize that high CTRs with low engagement rates aren't that meaningful.

Image via Fox.

So no cheap tricks, guys! Don't invest in sites that specialize in gaming your click-through rates. Even though they might work now to an extent, they won't work well in the future. Google is good at fighting click fraud on ad networks, so you can expect them to apply those same leaings to fight organic search click fraud.

I would prioritize click-through rate and conversion rate (or engagement) optimization at the very top of the most impactful on-page-SEO efforts.

At the very least you'll get more conversions. But if I'm right, you'll not only get more conversions, but you'll get better rankings, which will lead to more conversions and even better rankings.

So use the tactics and strategies from this post to diagnose your engagement rates, and then start optimizing them!

There's no shortage of advice on the Inteet. This holds especially true in digital marketing; after all, we’re the folks who came up with “content is king,” right? If we weren't the inventors, we clearly co-opted it.

I’ve been wanting to write a piece that takes us back to the roots of digital marketing. A reminder of sorts; one that might serve to snap some marketers out of the mundane daze of their daily grunt work. I wanted to inspire a vacation from hanging out in the weeds, which unfortunately can be common for some digital marketing practitioners. Falling into tactics and routine processes without any deviation certainly feels like grunt work — something that marketing should never be.

In reality, there's still plenty of life left in classic digital marketing advice. Like music or meals, sometimes the basics still have plenty of flavor left. Maybe you simply have to challenge yourself to hold onto your roots.

So, I decided a great place to collect this general advice is the platform that still hangs onto 140 characters — Twitter. I wasn't looking for anything too specific or particular, just coerstone digital marketing advice. I posted a few repeated tweets requesting the following:

You have 140 characters to give your best digital marketing / SEO and client management advice. Go, go, go!!!
— Bill Sebald (@billsebald) March 1, 2016

Next, I’m going to share some of the fantastic responses and expand upon them. Thanks to everyone who helped me out with their responses.

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Marie Haynes

@billsebald Figure out how to be better, more useful, and immensely more helpful than all of your competitors.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 3, 2016

This is a great tweet to kick things off. My mind immediately goes to the concept of 10x content, of which Rand is a big proponent. Want to be the best option for searchers? Be the best solution. (Wow, that makes it sound awfully simple!)

But it’s true; this translates from the written word to business, and frankly, to life in general. Or what about The Immutable Laws Of Marketing, where not only being the best — but being perceived as the best — would help you fit into the The Law of Perception, among others classic concepts.

Here's a quote I've always believed: "Perception is reality." I find it really tough to argue. Even if you think you’re a stud, it doesn't mean a thing if your customers do not. Using your own company as an example, you could compete by putting together one hell of a PR game, or you could genuinely build a practice that does the talking for you. If you’re an agency or consultant getting repeat business and having success through referrals, you’re doing something right.

Han Solo said it best: “Don’t get cocky, kid. A strong perception will fade if you don’t maintain it with consistently high value." He may not have said the last part.

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John Doherty

@billsebald move discussions from tactics to strategy. Tactics change, strategies live on.
— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) March 2, 2016

In my opinion, the heyday of SEO was very much a tactical time. It was a land of scalability and, well, a lexicon of spammy tactics. We spoke and wrote about SEO strategies, but we were often only discussing tactics.

But Google made some significant changes to offset the value of many standalone tactics. Google didn't want to be manipulated by SEOs — they wanted to be influenced by valuable websites. I believe we're still very much in a rebirth of SEO, and I’m completely in agreement with John — true strategic partnerships are the most valuable SEO relationship you can have today.

Tactics are components of a strategy, built upon a hypothesis and goals, and including milestones. It's a bigger picture, but an accountable one as well. Being a strategic thinker is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it can be practiced. I would suspect (and I’ll bet John will agree) that the most success in 2016 will come from those consultants and agencies who master the multi-stepped, multi-faceted, data-driven strategy. And those who have the ability to help their clients execute and implement in parallel.

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Steve Hammer

@billsebald measure what matters to the business - don't get hung up on metrics that don't drive to that goal.
— Steve Hammer (@armondhammer) March 2, 2016

Damon Gochneaur

@billsebald tie yourself to revenue, not traffic, rankings etc, over communicate, & expect to get fired every time you talk to a client.
— Damon Gochneaur (@DamonGochneaur) March 3, 2016

Several interesting points here from Steve and Damon. First, measure what really matters to the client. If it’s not revenue, it’s certainly some form of ROI. Let’s be honest: as digital marketers, notably SEOs, this is a serious challenge.

Reporting on rankings and traffic is easy. We have software with report “export” options, but we're not hired to be button pushers. In actuality, we are hired to help our clients hit their KPIs, while muddling through a plane of limited visibility through search referrals and unpublished Google metrics. How did we get ourselves into this?

Being goal-oriented is everything. In my opinion, some of the most important questions you can ever ask yourself are:

• Why is this particular task (or strategy) worth doing?
• How do I measure it?
• What are the metrics I can use to show my client we had an impact?

More often than I'd prefer to admit, I hear from prospects who say, “I don’t know what my last SEO company really did.” That’s shocking to me. Why would a client keep an SEO company who failed to communicate up to the required level? But at the end of the day, even if it takes longer than it should, the client does ultimately end up leaving if they don't get what they want. Business 101.

Last, “expect to get fired every time you talk to a client” is truly an interesting one (and one I’ll be stealing). I love it. If you want your client for the long term, try to impress them every time. Have you ever rescued a sour client relationship? It's tough being behind the 8-ball. Treat every opportunity like it's your last. That should keep you honest.

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Nick LeRoy

@billsebald use data to support all your decisions
— Nick LeRoy (@NickLeRoy) March 1, 2016

One of the most beautiful things about digital marketing is the ability to capture loads of data. In the old days, someone sat next to a billboard and clicked a counter as cars drove by, with no sense of engagement or demographics. Now we are so data-rich that going into the campaign creation stage without due diligence is almost negligent. While Google does keep plenty of juicy metrics a secret, we still have client analytics, log files, and even fairly accurate competitor data (a la SEMrush).

At Greenlane, any time we create a campaign for a client, hours of data gathering and looking for stories precedes the actual strategy creation. Does this guarantee success? No. Does it improve the odds? Yes – a helluva lot. A “data-first” position is what the most seasoned marketers adopt, but it should simply be something everyone – no matter how experienced – should adopt. For some right-brained marketers, reading numbers like words it’s a skill you need to lea and practice.

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Jeff Gibbard

@billsebald stay in constant communication, no matter how good the work, the relationship keeps the contract going.
— Jeff Gibbard (@jgibbard) March 3, 2016

This is a great point. We're in the relationship business. This makes us an important line of defense/offense when needed, a challenging partner, and a safe pair of hands to rely upon. When your point-person sees you as a partner, you have an agent defending your honor when it’s time for inteal budget reviews. Who's the first to get fired? The consultant... unless that consultant does amazing work and is beloved.

Plus, the more frequent the communication, the better the intelligence gathering becomes. How many times have you talked with a client and the conversation took an unexpected tu?

Here's an example. An SEO finds themselves talking about an email campaign they knew nothing about. The SEO started to lea about all this content that the email team was creating based on A/B tests. The SEO leaed about stockpiles of great content that never appeared anywhere but in customers’ inboxes. This SEO found the motherlode, even though the call was originally about URL structures. (This is a true story. My name was removed to protect my identity).

These conversations are gold, and don’t happen often if you’re not speaking on a routine basis. Enjoy the communication.

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Mark Keedy

@billsebald Give the opinion/strategy that will work for the client's business (as if it was your own), not what the client "wants to hear".
— markkeedysem (@markkeedysem) March 2, 2016

Are you someone willing to mix it up with a client, or are you just trying to placate them? We’re not here to let our clients eat Big Macs, folks. We’re being hired to tell them there’s over 500 calories in that hamburger, and give them reasons why they should or shouldn’t eat it. Our job is to empower clients with what we’ve leaed in the steps we’ve taken before. I proudly tell new prospects that "we will fight for our ideas if we really believe them to be the best." I’ve never had anyone reject us for that statement that I know of. Even if they have, I’d argue that we probably dodged a bullet ourselves.

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Corey Eulas

@billsebald I don't need that much: K.I.S.S.
— Corey Eulas (@coreyeulas) February 29, 2016

The “Keep It Simple, Stupid” Principle. It’s a great principal in marketing, especially in design and usability. But I agree with Corey that the same holds true with digital marketing.

A fantastic way to balance your relationship with the client is to understand what level of complexity they want. Do they want massive amounts of data, or would some visualization help them get the point faster?

I love our attoeys (said nobody ever, and this is from a guy whose ex-wife is a divorce attoey). They're great at expediting a phone meeting, giving us just what we need, and executing on follow ups. I hate law and don't understand most of it. But when we have a need, they do a fantastic job of relaying it to me in my language. It's an incredibly important trait of any service provider. As I am with tax law, most of our clients are the same with SEO. Keep it simple.

Albert Einstein said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." It’s a balance which brings valuable results.

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Chad Lio

@billsebald Spend the time + research to find a niche within a niche. Once you've found it, create content that matches audience intent.
— Chad Lio (@WaiverWarrior1) February 29, 2016

I like this a lot. It’s the advice I give many clients who either have relatively young websites or aggressive competition. SEO is organic — start with a few sectional wins, and Google will start noticing your website as a whole. The niche (sometimes within the niche) is often areas of lower competition and higher opportunity. Hit those areas hard. Get a good footing there and create a roadmap for expansion.

Let’s say you’re an eCommerce site who sells nothing but buttons. Looking at Google's Keyword Plaer, "Mother of Pearl Buttons" (whatever they are) has a search volume of 880 monthly estimated searches. Not a huge number, but pretty high for a small niche campaign. Showing your customers and Google that you’re the master of Mother of Pearl Buttons is really not above the reach of even the smallest company. You will live in infamy, kind of.

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Dan Ke

@billsebald Clients must understand they're never "done" with their website (optimization, content, design, etc). If stop, eventually drop.
— Dan Ke (@kemedia) April 30, 2016

Here's an analogy I occasionally use when talking to prospects who are thinking of merely dabbling with SEO for a only a brief period.

"SEO is like a big game of King of the Mountain. On your mountain, you have many aggressive competitors all climbing towards the top. Someone will always get there. Then, without waing, Google might make a change and knock away all your progress, starting you at the bottom again. Not guaranteed, but this can happen to the other climbers as well. You have two choices: quit the game, or play to win in this routine scenario. SEO is a game that's not for the weak of heart. But keep in mind, when you do win, your rewards should offset all your losses."

That analogy either produces excitement or pause, and I think this is important. We should encourage our clients to understand the true rules of engagement with SEO.

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Phil Nottingham

@billsebald buy Bill Sebald a beer.
— Phil Nottingham (@philnottingham) April 30, 2016

Without a doubt, this is my favorite piece of advice in the entire article. I think it speaks for itself. I'll be at MozCon this year, so everyone can feel free to take Phil's advice.

How about you? Any nuggets of advice you'd want to add? Sound off in the Idea.

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

(header photo is the search result for "scene" in the Blind Photographers Flickr photo pool.)

In the first two posts in this series we covered site and page structure overlaps, and formatting and linking overlaps. In this final post we’ll cover accessibility and SEO overlaps when coding for media elements.

Images and non-text elements

As you can imagine, images online can be problematic for visually impaired visitors to decipher, but luckily we’re using technology here so you and I can help solve that issue with the proper coding on and around images and non-text elements.

Some examples of images and non-text elements are:

• Images, including graphs and charts, word art, decorative and background images, webcam images, photographs
• Infographics
• Image maps
• Animations
• Graphical buttons
• Captchas

Here are some of the things you can optimize around images and non-text elements for better accessibility.

Alt attributes

Image alt attributes in SEO are used to describe to search bots what the image is or what the image points to if the image is a link. If a link, the alt attribute acts like keyword anchor text, helping Google understand the context of the destination page.

Alt attributes on images are also read by screen readers. Here’s a quick example:

Alt attributes are a win-win optimization for accessibility and SEO, but there are some things to keep in mind, particularly these first two items below, when optimizing alt attributes for screen readers.

Alt attribute do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use alt attributes on decorative images: Decorative images of clouds on your health insurance website are not a hook for getting image search traffic and are not useful in providing context to screen readers. A decorative image can still look dreamy to sighted users but not get in the way of navigating through the page for visually impaired users by keeping the alt attribute as alt=”” (null), or by making it a background image.
• Don’t use alt when there’s also a text link: If the image is a link and there is link text next to the image, both pointing to the same destination, the screen reader will read both and it sounds repetitive and weird. Use alt=”” (null) for the image alt and keep the anchor text pointing to the destination page about the topic. This may be contested by SEOs who want to put the alt attributes on the image to help it rank in image search. What I’d recommend in a case like this one is to use the alt attributes on the images on the destination page, since that’s the page you’d want to appear in SERPS anyway (probably a great topic to debate more in the Idea).
• Do keep it short or use captions: There are some traces of recommendations around the web that the JAWS screen reader doesn’t do well with alt attributes over 125 characters. Whether that’s true or not, it’s more user-friendly to keep alt attributes short. If you’d like to understand why, add a screen reader extension to your browser (like ChromeVox for Chrome or Fangs for Firefox) and navigate around a page with images that have long alt attributes. If you have a lot to say about an image, put it in caption text or describe it in text on the page instead of in the alt.
• Don’t keyword stuff — write naturally. Let’s consider the health insurance website with decorative cloud images example again. An SEO may see five decorative cloud images on a landing page as five opportunities to stuff “health insurance, health insurance tools, health tools” etc. into the alt attributes. Don’t do it. It’s not only noise to screen readers, it can be confusing and aoying. Plus, realistically, no one is doing image searches for “health insurance” — and even if they were, the chances of them clicking on a picture of clouds in search results expecting to get what they’re looking for is pretty slim. Similarly, make sure your alt attributes are descriptive and make sense — write them for people, not just a bunch of keywords for bots.

Image captioning

Google can segment text near an image to attribute that text to the image and even create its own captions; therefore, text near an image can help provide context and could affect rankings. Image captioning also provides context for screen readers, often providing more context than an alt attribute might, or in place of an alt attribute if one is not known at the time of upload.

Image captioning do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use alt attribute if there is an image caption. Similar to the anchor text link, describing an image via alt attributes and a caption can be repetitive. This could also be a debatable practice, as SEOs would likely want to use both. In that case, consider how it will read by a screen reader that reads both a caption and an alt attribute, and try to make the best decision that will work for both
• Do describe what you’re captioning. For example, use “Figure 1:” so that this captioning tag is properly understood by people using assistive technologies that may not recognize the tag.
• Optional: Do use a <figcaption> tag: <figure> with <figcaption> tags can be applied to images or other page elements. Figcaption isn’t necessarily a known tag to optimize for SEO and they aren’t a must-do for screen readers, but it sounds like Google does try to index the text within a tag whether it recognizes the tag or not, and despite figcaption’s variable readability by screen readers, the text may be considered as a related element to an image for screen readers and hopefully helpful nonetheless.

Text-as-images

The reasons to avoid text as images are similar for SEO as accessibility: Simply avoid text within an image if you want the text to be able to be machine-read. Text as an image is also not always ideal for people needing to use magnifiers, since magnifying text in an image can be pixelated and hard to read.

Text-as-images do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use text as images for important information. If you must use text as an image, do use an alt attribute to describe the image text if it’s something that should be read by search bots and screen readers.
• Do consider styling actual text as an alteative. If you need your text to look a certain way, style it using HTML + CSS or use SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

Infographics

Infographics have historically been popular among SEOs for attracting links that boost rankings. SEOs may also want to provide on-page context of the infographic and its parts to search engines.

For accessibility, the idea is to be able to easily determine what the infographic portrays. Screen readers, unlike search engines, can’t determine the infographic page’s context by using the link text and page content of the hundreds of pages linking to your infographic. For screen readers it’s all up to the on-page code signals, and you can imagine that describing a complex infographic would be weighty for an alt attribute. Also consider the use of color for colorblind users or the problem we encounter with text as images (not “readable,” scales pixelated) that we covered in part 2.

There is not a simple <infographic> tag that lets you add a lengthy, thorough description of the infographic like a long alt attribute (although you can consider longdesc below). Rather, I’d recommend you test out these tactics below to see what works best for you and your particular situation:

Infographic do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t describe the whole thing in an alt attribute. It’s terribly user-unfriendly for screen readers (can’t navigate through the text, copy or paste it, etc). Use alts as they’re meant to be used, and choose another method for long descriptions.
• Do adhere to color contrast requirements. Plan ahead when thinking about color for your infographic, and use colors that meet the minimum color contrast requirements. Use this tool to help you out.
• Do consider ARIA-describedby. This ARIA (Accessible Rich Inteet Application) attribute is read in addition to alt text on an image, and allows for a long description. Here’s a video example. Note that because describedby is aounced in addition to image alt text, this can be repetitive.
• The longdesc attribute: This image attribute allows you to provide a machine-readable link to long descriptions for images (either within the page or on a separate page), but isn’t well-supported and to my knowledge also isn’t a working SEO technique.
• Do consider hidden text alteates: See the example in the previous post of an image infographic provided as an easily shareable piece within an iFrame with indexable text hidden in a CSS clip in the iFrame HTML.
• Do create your infographic using CSS: This is a great solution. Below are two pages with the same infographic and how each of them look cached in Google. One is an image file with the text and links on the page below it. The other is an infographic with indexable text and links created via HTML + CSS.

Left: Infographic as image (the page also provides the infographic text on the page).

Right: Infographic provided as HTML styled with CSS (source here).

You’ll notice they look incredibly similar.

Let’s look at the code. Here’s Google’s cache of the infographic text content of each page.

Top: Google cache (partial) of infographic text provided on the image infographic page.

Bottom: Google cache (partial) of infographic text in the infographic on the CSS infographic page.

Both provide indexable and screen readable solutions. The CSS version does it without having to also duplicate the information in text on the page for sighted visitors.

You may have noticed the CSS version also adds helpful invisible display:none section headers, which are seen by the screen readers but not visible in the infographic. See more on hidden text in the previous post.

Image & non-text element tools & resources

Video transcription, subtitling, and captioning

Video transcription

Video transcription is the text of the video provided alongside the video. Video transcription is helpful to hearing-impaired visitors who can’t hear the video, or to interpret words for people watching something in another language or strong accents. It’s also helpful to anyone watching a video with sound that’s tough to hear, when watching video in a loud room, or when you need to watch with no sound.

Similarly for search engines, video transcripts describe the content of a video via text.

Video subtitling and captioning

Subtitles and captioning provide time-synced text along with a video while it plays. Subtitles provide the dialogue, while captioning provides the dialogue and also describes other sounds like music, sound effects and speaker identification.

Options for providing text accompaniments for your video content include:

• Add the transcript as text on the page. You can simply add the transcription as text on the same page as the video, like this example of the coral reef video text below the video on the page. You can type up the transcript yourself or use tools or services to do this for you (see resources section).
• HTML5 <video> and <track>. The HTML5 <track> tag on a <video> or <audio> element allows you to add video to your page and specify a .vtt text file with your transcription text. From what I can tell, Google can index .vtt files, but I don’t see any clear examples of Google associating a .vtt text file with the page that sources it for the video.
• Add an interactive transcript. Use a service that creates an interactive transcript, where the transcript is time-synced and can be used as navigation through the video, like these timed transcript TED talks.
• YouTube transcripts, subtitles, and closed captions are automated by YouTube to various degrees of accuracy, but they’re incredibly convenient if you’re putting your video on YouTube. The automated transcription must be checked, though — it’s especially bad with accents, background noise, or this awesome example of YouTube’s automated transcript of a video of the ChromeVox screen reader that, in the video, reads “image. Spacer image. Image. Caption icon off image. Inteal link. Privacy slash security. Link. Sponsor image. Search index page description” but is transcribed as “en españa en caac o móviles en china se dirigen al cómico jim carrey algo”.

Video accessibility do’s and don’ts:

• Do provide video (and/or audio) transcripts. The time and effort it takes to provide text alteatives can help search engines and various viewers needing a text accompaniment to understand the content.
• Do upload or correct YouTube transcripts & captions: YouTube’s automated transcripts are convenient but usually weird and wrong, and therefore need to be edited for correctness. Having the correct text is helpful for your transcript-dependent viewers and, when search engines do index the transcript text, that text content can help surface the video page in search results.
• Do provide context. When it makes sense (especially in closed captioning), indicate speaker names, and other sound context like music, relevant sounds, laughing, cheering, shouting, crying, etc.
• Don’t spam. Don’t use transcripts for keyword stuffing. It’s a terrible user experience, and depending on your platform, a transcript may not be indexed by search engines anyway, so keep it real.

Video accessibility tools & resources

Recap & thank you’s

In case you missed the previous posts, here’s what we’ve covered:

And I want to extend a huge thank you to the folks below for taking the time for fact-checking, providing references, for some great discussions while creating this series, and for their commitment to making the web accessible. THANK YOU!

Ted Drake (website | twitter)

Ryan Burgess (website | twitter)

Vincent François (website | twitter)

Jeifer Sutton (website | twitter)

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Every SEO knows 301 redirects are necessary from time to time. But are they affecting your other optimization efforts by slowing down page load time? Or are they sending bots on a wild goose chase? How many 301s are out there that you don’t need anymore?

Before I jump into this list, let me take you back to where this started: I was in a development meeting for one of our clients. This meeting had nothing to do with SEO. But, as usual, the discussion quickly sparked a few SEO considerations.

This client, a manufacturer of home goods, is particularly sensitive about the load time of their site, and rightfully so. They’ve got a lot of hi-resolution imagery on their site; therefore, every possible measure to minimize load time must be taken.

One of the proposed initiatives to cut load time was removing all 301 redirects. That got my attention.

There was no way I was going to let that happen. I knew some of their redirects were necessary for — well, scratch that. I wasn’t sure how valuable they were or how many people were hitting them. I had no quantitative data to support my position.

I convinced them to leave all redirects in place until a viable solution was put in place. I obviously needed to collect some data to demonstrate how important 301 redirects can be. But how was I going to identify which ones needed to stay?

I wanted a solution that would provide the data in a format that we (as the marketers/analysts) could easily access without stepping on the toes of development or IT.

Google Analytics was the obvious choice. As I was hashing out the solution for the redirect removal conundrum (details on this in No. 3 below), I noticed several other items that were affecting the load time of this site: inteal links pointing to outdated URLs (which had then been 301’ed) and rel=canonicals with 301’ed URLs.

Basically, every redirect-related issue that could exist did.

After fixing these issues, we were able to effectively decrease the redirection time of the site.

The development team was stoked, the SEO team was excited that our (necessary] 301s got to stay, and the client was thrilled with load time.

These changes were put into place between July and August of 2015. I think the results speak for themselves:

Here are the four ways redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts:

1. You have redirect chains
2. Your inteal linking steps through redirects
3. You have uecessary 301s
4. You have canonical tags that 301

1. You have redirect chains

Let’s start out with a simple definition: A redirect chain is a series of redirects that go from one URL after another, forcing people and search engines to wait until there are no more redirects to step through. Here’s an example: www.mysite.com/responsive redirects to www.mysite.com/responsive-web-design, which then redirects to www.mysite.com/rwd.

Of course, we all know the implication this has on passing authority. For every step in a redirect chain, about 10% of authority is lost. But it’s also important to acknowledge how this would drastically increase page load time and decrease the overall quality of your site. A standard single-step redirect is already having an impact on your load time, then add to that the fact that some redirects may be going through multiple iterations just to call one URL.

It's no surprise that 301s stack up over time and create these chains: You put in this redirect, your coworker adds another, and a few months later you stack another one on top. These things happen.

So how do you identify these chains? Luckily, our friends at Screaming Frog have built ridiculously simple feature into their tool that tracks down redirect chains and outputs them in a report. Here's how to use it:

• Run a full site crawl with Screaming Frog
• Go to > Reports > Redirect Chains

That’s it. Seriously.

Analyzing which ones you need to fix is slightly more involved than pulling the report. The only thing that makes this more difficult is the fact that ALL of the links on your site are factored in. This means that if you link out to another site and they’ve got a chain in place, it finds that as well (see red highlighting in the screenshot below). One of the common themes of URL types I’ve seen here is social sharing URLs; they change frequently, so they’ll need to be filtered out of the report. In column B, identify your own domain (see green highlighting) and remove all the other rows.

Once this is done, it’s pretty smooth sailing and you can update your 301 redirects to remove those uecessary steps. Don’t send them to your dev or IT team yet, though. Keep reading for more useful nuggets.

2. Your inteal linking steps through redirects

The second way redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts is via inteal links pointing to URLs that are redirected elsewhere.

To get a handle on what's going on with your site, follow these simple tips:

• Visit the Google Search Console and download the full list of your inteal links.
• Go to Search Traffic > Inteal Links and click the "Download this Table" button. Once you’ve done that, open the doc and use the concatenate function in Excel to append your domain to the begiing of those URL strings.

Once you have that column of your full URLs, copy the whole list. Here's how to use that clipboard info to populate a crawl in Screaming Frog:

• In the menu bar, go to "Mode" and change it to "List." Then, click "Upload List" and "Paste." This will run a crawl of only the URLs from the Inteal Link report.
• Once complete, check the status code column for any 301s. If you see any, select that URL and go to the Inlinks tab in the lower left of Screaming Frog. This will show you all the pages that contain a link to that redirecting URL.

Once you’ve identified all redirecting inteal links, get your list together for updates to send over to your development team.

3. You have uecessary 301 redirects

Websites tend to collect 301 redirects over the years, and no one really thinks to clean them up. When your .htaccess file starts to run deep with redirects, your load time suffers. Each time a URL is called by a browser, every single one of those redirects is checked to see if the requested URL needs to be sent elsewhere. The absolutely kills your load time.

But how do you identify which of those redirects are actually needed? UTM tags, that’s how.

By appending UTMs to the resolving URLs of redirects, you can easily identify which 301 redirects are actually used on a regular basis.

Here’s an example of the tagging methodology I use:

/old-page >>> /new-page?utm_medium=301&utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=/old-page

This will send data to Google Analytics every time someone hits one of your redirects and give it the attribution information you’ve included in your UTMs.

Download a Google Sheet with my tag generator. To save it locally, go to File > Download As > Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).

Twice a year, I’ll go into Google Analytics and view the Source/Medium Report and apply an in-line filter for 301s.

From here, simply pull a list of redirects that were triggered and compare that to the list of 301s in the .htaccess file. Any that weren’t hit should get removed.

Side note: If you run an e-commerce site, you can demonstrate the importance of 301 redirects by showing how much revenue was saved by having redirects in place.

4. You have canonical tags that 301

The logic behind this one requires little explanation, as it’s basically the same as having redirect chains. You don’t want to have canonical tags that point to redirected URLs. To identify these canonical tags, run your Screaming Frog crawl and go to the Directives tab. Scroll to the right to find the "Canonical Link Element 1" column and copy the list.

Re-crawl using List Mode and find any that have a Status of 301.

Bonus: Regaining links via 301s

If you have a large site, or your site has had a few URL structural changes over the years, chances are pretty good you’ve got some decent links pointing to a dead URL.

Run an Open Site Explorer report and grab the list of target URLs.

Drop that list into Screaming Frog using the same "Upload List" method described above. If you see any errors in the Status Code column, 301 redirect the URLs. (Make certain to check the stats and quality of those links first.)

Join in the conversation below if you have other redirect-related issues to add to this list, or other methods for identifying and troubleshooting these problems.

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Success isn't an oveight phenomenon when it comes to SEO, but with the right process and a dose of patience, it's always within reach — even if you're ruing your own blog. Optimizing your blog posts begins as early as the inception of your idea, and from then on you'll want to consider your keyword targeting, on-page factors, your intended audience, and more. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out a step-by-step process you can adopt to help increase search traffic to your blog over time.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about blog post SEO, specifically how to nail the on-page optimization process, the thought process, the strategy process, the content creation and optimization for a blog post. So if you are writing a blog, there are a bunch of things that you need to do to be great at SEO, and there are some steps that I think you can follow.

This is not one of those things where I'm going to say, "Oh, you absolutely have to follow this from end to end for every post that you write, and it's a big, formal, complex process." A lot of this can be done in your head before you start writing the post, before you start creating it. That's totally okay. This does not have to add a ton of layers of involvement. But if you use this process as you're creating each post, which I do many, many times for Whiteboard Friday, this blog post that you're reading and watching right now, and for all the posts that I write, it can be hugely helpful and eventually transformative in your ability to get search traffic to your blog.

Step 1: Determine the post's goals

So let's start. First off, as you should always do, you should determine what the goal of the post is. You should have that in your head or written down before you start creating the post. So that could be:

• Attract a new audience in this particular sphere.
• Convince and win over people to my perspective on a particular topic.
• I'm really trying to promote a product or service with this post.
• Share some important news about my organization or my company.
• Share something that's happening in my sphere.
• Contributing to a conversation that already exists out in the blogosphere or the social media world or the news world in your space.
• Answer a question or ea influencer amplification.

Whatever it is, make sure you know what it is before you go into the post. I hate to see folks starting with step three, like doing keyword research when they have no idea what the post goals are.

One thing before we skip to step two is once you know what you're trying to do here, determine the metric or metrics that matter the most to that goal. So for example, a metric could be visits, just raw traffic. It could be engagement on the post. It could be Idea. It could be links.

It could be social shares, because you're trying to reach a new audience that's on LinkedIn. You haven't done very well on LinkedIn in the past, but you think this post is perfectly targeted to that.

Or you're only really trying to get one or two people's attention, particular influencers, in which case your metric might be: Did they come and read it? Did they share it? If the answer to that is yes, you've accomplished the post's goals. But you need that metric recorded.

Step 2: Determine the audience you need to reach

Related, determine the audience you're trying to reach with the post. So that could be potential new readers. It could be existing loyal fans. "Yay," he's waving a flag. It could be influencers, folks who have the ability to broadcast your message, and maybe you're not even trying to attract them to broadcast this particular message, you just want their attention so in the future you can reach them.

Or it might be very specific audience targets, in this case my backpacker readers. Moz does that all the time. For example, I might do a Whiteboard Friday that is specifically for e-commerce websites or specifically for B2B folks. I'm focusing on a particular audience target with that content.

Step 3: Do your keyword research

Now we're going to do our keyword research, because we know what we're trying to accomplish and who we're trying to reach. So we're going to try and find three to five keyword phrases to target. Why three to five? Because generally, that's what you can reasonably expect to be able to reach with a single blog post. I'll talk a little bit more about on-page optimization in a sec.

I'm looking for, as we've talked about in our keyword research-focused Whiteboard Friday just a few weeks ago, which you should check out if you haven't already, we want relatively high volume, low difficulty, high click-through rate opportunity. Meaning, there is a good number of people who search for it, it's not that hard to potentially rank for, and there are not too many other features in the search result that are going to take away from my potential ability to rank with web content.

If there are, by the way, lots of people who have images or lots of people who have videos in this search result or lots of news content, then you want to think about, "How do I get my post to include those?" I might think about, "Hey, maybe this post should be very visually centric, or maybe this post should be a video." "Or maybe this post should try and get into Google News." "Can I get my blog into Google News?" If I can't, maybe I want to find someone whose platform I can publish on to get into Google News.

All the keywords that you target should have the same searcher intent. What do I mean by searcher intent? I mean that the people who search for those three to five terms and phrases are all trying to accomplish the same goal or very, very similar goals.

So an example might be, if someone is searching for "luxury kids clothes," that is likely very, very similar to someone searching for "designer children's fashion," or "haute couture kids brands." They all have the same intent. They are thinking about purchasing, or investigating at least what brands in the fashion space offer children's clothing, and they're all in the luxury, high-end, haute couture, high-priced space. Perfect. These are all matching that searcher intent.

Step 4: Conduct competitive research

I want to conduct my competitive research. This is where I'm going to go ask questions like:

• "Who else is ranking for this keyword?" I can just go to Google, take a look at that, or I could look at the SERPs analysis through something like Keyword Explorer.
• "Who has produced heavily shared content in this space?" So not necessary who's ranking, but who's had lots of shares and likes on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, all that kind of stuff. BuzzSumo is great for this. You can also use Moz Content's Search tool. Once you know the answers to these two, you need to determine...
• "What is it that's the unique value that I can bring to the table with my blog post?" Unique value meaning not just unique content. Obviously, what you write is going to be different than what other people have written or created. But how are you providing value that is different from what other people have provided?

Is that because your opinions are very unique? Is it because you are providing a better experience? Is it because you're providing that content in a different format? Is it because you have access to unique researcher data? Whatever those things are, you need to answer that question because we're trying to go above and beyond what else is out there.

Step 5: Create your post

I'm going to go ahead and create the post, and this is where a lot of that research comes into play. Because I know what my post goals are and who I'm targeting, and some of the keyword research and what people are looking for around this topic, as well as what's already out there, I can now make a post that is unique and uniquely valuable. This is huge, because it means that my post has much greater potential to reach its audience and to perform well, and to be perceived by both searchers and search engines, as well as sharers and influencers and folks on social media, as much more worthwhile.

I also want to think about, in here, the types of content that I want. So written content is pretty obvious for most blog posts. But I should also think about things like images and graphs or data, video. Do I want to embed content from other places, maybe SlideShare, or I want to embed some rich media file?

Or maybe I want to link to other places out there. Maybe some people have produced content on this and I would like to get their attention, and I would like to reference their work, and so I'm going to link over to them. Maybe I want to embed some quotes or get some quotes from some notable folks about the particular topic or get other opinions for the piece. All of that type of stuff I should think about as I create the post.

Step 6: On-page SEO/keyword targeting

This is the on-page SEO portion. So I'm going to take those three to five terms, and I'm going to think about one of those as the primary keyword phrase that I'm targeting. That's going to be the one that goes exactly matched in the title and the headline and the URL. I'm also going to think about two to four secondary keywords that I want to attempt to wrap into potentially the meta description and image alt tags and the content itself. I'm going to try and use these keywords intelligently in places like title, URL, meta description, headline, content, images, all those spots.

Then I want to consider any old URLs that I might redirect here. So let's say that perhaps I have done a blog post on this topic in the past six months ago or two years ago. Do I want to redirect that old post to this one? Or are there posts that I should go out there and find, or content anywhere on my site or on any site that I control or influence, where I want to link to this content, this new post that I'm writing now that I've created it? This can be helpful for discovery. It can also be helpful for inteal linking, helpful to your audience who's reading your old stuff, and helpful to search engines to find, index, and hopefully rank your new content.

Step 7: Craft an outreach + amplification plan

I need some way to do outreach and amplification, and I want to plan for that. So the questions I'm asking here are:

Who do I want to reach? Who do I think will help me amplify this?

How am I going to target them? How am I going to reach out to them? Is it going to be via email? Is it going to be via Twitter? Am I going to see them in person? Do I have a direct relationship? Do I need an introduction? Do I want to comment on something that they have done, whatever that might be?

When should I do that? Do I want to do it beforehand, because I'm trying to get them to look at the content or contribute something to it prior? Or do I want to do it after I've published it and promoted it, and why?

Meaning, why is this person going to help me? What does it do for them or for their audience? Does it make them look good? Is it something that in the past they have shared lots of things like this, but this one is uniquely valuable or better, or provides new information that they didn't have before? You need an answer to all of those questions when you create that plan.

Step 8: Experiment, lea, & iterate

I'm going to experiment, I'm going to lea, and I'm going to iterate on this. So look, in this process, some of these things, for a big, big post you might spend a lot of time on each of these steps very thoroughly. For a post that's sort of a toss-away, quick opinion, I'm trying to write it in an hour or less and get it published, maybe I'm just thinking about these things in my head and doing real fast keyword research and targeting, and the rest of it's sort of just a mental model that I have. But regardless of that, I'm going to expect that this process is going to be repeated dozens of times, 30, 40, 50, 70 times even, before I should expect my first success, especially if you're a new blog or new blogger, and that I'm going to have to do it hundreds of times before I'll have a relatively high hit or a high success rate, where lots of your posts are doing well and eaing you rankings and ongoing traffic and social shares.

This is not something where you follow this process and you have instant results with your first post. That's not the case. No one has that in blogging. That's just not how it works. You're going to launch, promote, analyze, apply the information that you lea, and launch again. This process is going to happen over and over, and the more you lea and apply, the better you're going to get at this system.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

Every year, we take great pleasure in accepting pitches and having community speakers grace our stage. Our community speakers represent a unique opportunity, and our MozCon audience has a lot of love for them.

This year, we'll have four speakers!

The basic details:

• To submit, just fill out the form below.
• Please only submit one talk! We want the one you're most excited about.
• Talks must be about online marketing and are only 15 minutes in length.
• Submissions close on Sunday, June 12th at 5pm PDT.
• Final decisions are final and will be made in late June.
• All presentations must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
• You must attend MozCon in person, September 12–14 in Seattle.

Everyone who submits a community speaker pitch will be informed either way.

Community speakers get the following:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation, plus 5 minutes of Q&A.
• A free ticket to MozCon. (If you already have one, we'll either refund or transfer the ticket to someone else.)
• Four nights of lodging covered by us at our partner hotel.
• A reimbursement for your travel (flight, train, car, etc.), up to $500 domestic and $750 inteational.
• A free ticket for you to give to anyone you would like and a code for $300 off another ticket.
• An invitation for you and your significant other to join us for the speakers' dier.

If you're curious about what the process look like, Zeph Snapp wrote about his experiences as a community speaker.

How do you pick speakers?

We have a small selection committee of Mozzers who review each and every pitch. We start off by reviewing only topics without biographical details, which ensures our first commitment to making sure topics match our audience. Then we look at everything for a holistic view of what you might bring to the stage.

Things to consider for your pitch:

• Read my post on how to prepare for speaking, from pitching to the actual gig.
• Review the topics already being presented on at MozCon to avoid overlap and get inspiration.
• Focus your pitch on online marketing. MozCon is all about actionable information.
• Your pitch is for MozCon organizations, so detail what you're talking about. We need to know the actual tactics you'll be sharing.
• Keep within the word limits of the forms. Tricky submissions — like linking to Google Docs for more words — will be disqualified.
• Do not ask speaker selection committee members to evaluate your pitch before submitting it.
• No amount of lobbying on social media will positively affect your chances at being selected.
• Bonus: make sure to link to a video of you presenting and past slide decks.

Feeling a bit nervous?

Every speaker at MozCon gets direction on topics and reviews of content and slide decks. We work hard to make sure our audience will love your talk. We encourage pitches from speakers of all backgrounds, knowledge levels, and speaking experiences. At MozCon, we believe in diversity of voices and helping grow speakers in their careers.

We're happy to help, including:

• Calls to discuss and refine your topic.
• Assistance honing topic title and description.
• Reviews of outlines and drafts (as many as you want!).
• Best practices and guidance for slide decks, specifically for our stage.
• A comprehensive, step-by-step guide for show flow.
• Serving as an audience for practicing your talk.
• Reviewing your final deck.
• Sunday night pre-MozCon tour of the stage to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the screens, and test the clicker.
• A 15-person dedicated crew to make your A/V outstanding.
• Anything else we can do to make you successful!

Please let me know if you have any questions in the Idea.

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Your website's copy is far more important than you realize.

Besides design, copy forms the foundation of your brand. How you describe yourself and your products leaves a palpable impression on your customers. Whether customers think of your brand as bold, futuristic, quirky, or cute depends largely on your copy.

Web copy is also crucial for conveying product information. Your customers want to know how your product works and how it will change their lives.

Unfortunately, far too many e-commerce stores spend hours optimizing their website's design and layout but completely skip over the copy.

The result? Poor conversion rates.

The relationship between copy and conversion rates

If you're ruing an e-commerce store, a SaaS startup, or a marketing agency, the three of your biggest challenges are:

1. Informing visitors about the store’s products and their unique features and benefits
2. Evoking emotions that drive action and persuade the visitor
3. Fostering a long-lasting relationship by emphasizing the brand’s values (and how they align with their customers’ values)

You'll realize that you can meet all of these challenges through smart copywriting. In fact, it isn't unusual for improving a website's copy to increase its conversion rates by 2x, 3x, or even 4x.

For example:

There is a distinct, direct relationship between copy and conversion rates. Better copy, whether it’s on landing pages or product descriptions, leads to better conversion rates.

The obvious question is: how can you improve your e-commerce copy?

Here are four actionable tactics you can use right away to get better conversions.

1. Write for your target personas

Sketching out a target customer profile based on your brand's personas will help you craft laser-targeted, high-converting copy.

Nearly all your customers will belong to one or more of these four persona types:

• Logical persona: This persona type is logical, methodical, and detail-oriented. A customer with a logical persona will carefully scrutinize your offer before hitting the "Buy" button. He will also shop around for better deals. Roughly 40–45% of the audience falls into this category.
• Impulsive persona: An impulsive persona type is spontaneous, risk-oriented, and optimistic. This persona is more prone to making quick decisions and will focus on the benefits when buying. Roughly 30–35% of the audience would be characterized as an impulsive persona.
• Caring persona: A caring persona is conceed deeply about the well-being of others. This persona will consider your offer only when it helps others as well. Instead of looking at the product and its features, those having caring personas will also browse through your About Us page to see what kind of company you run. Roughly 15–20% of the population falls into this category.
• Aggressive persona: An aggressive persona is rational and focused on self-improvement. This persona holds herself to a high standard of integrity and will expect the same from you. Roughly 5–7% of the population has this persona.

How to write for each customer persona

What kind of copy you’ll use for each persona will depend largely on what category the persona falls into. A logical persona type will respond very differently to your copy than an impulsive persona type.

Try following some of these guidelines for your persona-types:

Logical persona

• Emphasize features
• Include extensive details, especially of the technology behind your products
• Avoid fluff and vague language

Example: Take a look at the product descriptions on Canada-Goose.com. This is a brand that sells expensive but high-quality outerwear for extreme cold weather conditions.

Canada Goose customers care about the quality and construction of the clothes. The copy reflects this, focusing on features and underlying technology.

Impulsive persona

• Focus on benefits
• Use rich imagery and power words
• Weave a story around your product

Example: Read the product descriptions on the J Peterman catalog. This brand sells the story behind each product.

The details are sparse and the copy uses rich imagery and metaphors to appeal to its target audience.

Caring persona

• Show how your products benefit others, both within product descriptions and on unique pages (About Us, mission statement, etc.).
• Emphasize the environmental or social benefits of your products.

Example: On Patagonia.com, each product page has a separate section detailing the product’s supply chain. This is in line with Patagonia’s mission statement that promotes sustainable living and environmentally-friendly policies.

Aggressive persona

• Focus on how the product will help the customer improve himself/herself
• Emphasize the underlying technology, especially how it relates to performance improvements
• Focus on your store or your brand’s heritage and history to establish credibility

Example: Most fitness brands fall under this category (see the copy for Keen, a brand of hiking footwear):

The copy lists out the technology used in the shoe and tells the reader how it improves performance.

Ideally, you want to use copy that targets all of these personas on every page. If that’s not possible, you should at least try to figure out the dominant customer persona for each product or category, and use the appropriate copy.

2. Use power words and action words

Staggering. Smashing. Stuing.

These are all examples of power words — words that evoke strong emotions in your readers.

Power words are rarely used in everyday speech (recall the last time you used “staggering” or “sensational” in a casual conversation). This makes them stand out all the more when used in e-commerce copy.

Using power words is the easiest way to elevate your copy beyond the ordinary. A sprinkle of these words can tu boring product descriptions into emotion-generating copy that tus browsers into customers, customers into fans.

See how Firebox uses power words in its product descriptions:

These simple words tu ordinary copy into something far more compelling.

So what are power words like?

Here’s a short list of power words that are particularly useful for e-commerce copywriting tasks.

Amazing	Audacious	Authentic	Backed	Best-Selling
Baed	Breathtaking	Crazy	Caution	Cheerful
Crush	Cheap	Certified	Censored	Controversial
Confession	Dumb	Defying	Delight	Dare
Discount	Exciting	Epic	Eye-opening	Explosive
Extra	Economical	Fortune	Free	Frenzy
Frugal	Forbidden	Faithful	Fearless	Flirt
Grateful	Greatest	Guaranteed	Hack	Happy
Hero	Hope	Hidden	Inexpensive	Incredible
Ironclad	Insider	Joy	Jaw-dropping	Jackpot
Jubilant	Looming	Legendary	Luxurious	Lifetime
Little-known	Magic	Mind-blowing	Miraculous	Massive
Marked-down	Money	Mystery	Naughty	No obligations
No questions asked	Official	Outlaw	Pluck	Provocative
Pummel	Passionate	Profit	Prize	Private
Proven	Protected	Priceless	Risk-free	Remarkable
Rich	Reduced	Researched	Refund	Reliable
Secret	Select	Secure	Savings	Skyrocket
Soaring	Surging	Smashing	Staggering	Stuing
Surprising	Tank	Targeted	Triumphant	Tantalizing
Thrilling	Tested	Unauthorized	Uplifting	Unconditional
Victory	Value	Verified	Whopping	Wonderful

Use action words

Power words evoke emotion, but they don’t drive readers to take action.

For that, you need to use action words in your copy.

These are simply words that describe an action: add, act, take, get, etc.

Let’s take another look at the Firebox product description page:

Action words make your copy sound more energetic and active. They also subtly tell the reader to take some action.

You don’t have to use them excessively. Just pepper them in whenever you want to hammer in a feature/benefit or get your readers to take some action.

Here's a list of some action words you can use in many different types of copywriting tasks:

Add	Act	Buy	Break	Bite
Begin	Collect	Catch	Call	Create
Choose	Drink	Drive	Draw	Eat
Exude	Feel	Find	Fly	Grow
Go	Give	Guard	Hold	Hurry
Jump	Know	Kick	Love	Listen
Locate	Make	Measure	Multiply	Mix
Print	Prepare	Play	Pull	Push
Read	Run	Ride	Ring	Shout
Sell	Shake	Study	See	Speak
Say	Take	Think	Text	Try
Taste	Tell	Test	Understand

3. Use the right formatting

Your website visitors don’t read your pages.

They scan.

According to eye-tracking studies conducted by Nielsen, people scan e-commerce pages in an F-shaped patte:

That is, they first look to the left column, then to the right, then drag their eyes down the page.

This means that users won’t read your copy — however remarkable it may be — unless it's formatted correctly.

Follow these guidelines for improved e-commerce copy formatting:

• Follow an information hierarchy. The most important content should go in the first couple of paragraphs. Less important information should be further down the page.

  Take a look at this product page on NewEgg.com. It lists the most important things about the product, including availability, seller name and key features, at the top of the page:

BestBuy's product pages follow a similar structure, but with even better content organization:

Keep these tips in mind when you write your copy. Otherwise, you just might end up creating impeccable content that no one reads.

4. Don’t forget unique pages

Your homepage, About Us page, mission statement, and the like comprise your site's unique pages.

Unlike product or category pages (which usually follow a template), each of these pages has distinct content, copy, and design.

Optimizing the copy on your unique pages can have a noticeable impact on conversion rates. For one, these pages help customers understand you and your brand. If you can describe your brand in a way that resonates with your target customers, you’ll be able to sell more products at better prices.

Tell a story through your unique pages

When writing copy for unique pages, the standard rules apply: Use power words and evocative imagery.

At the same time, you also want to make sure that your copy weaves a story about your brand.

ThinkGeek does the same by boldly stating its manifesto on its About page:

Emphasize your brand’s history and values

Another way to use copywriting to improve brand perception is to share your brand’s history and values on your unique pages.

For example, Patagonia.com has a separate page for its mission statement:

Tell your brand's story

Your brand is more than just a collection of products. There are real people with real stories behind the business who come together to create all your amazing products.

Highlighting these on a separate "Our Story" page is a great idea.

For example, take a look at how Saddleback Leather does it:

Whatever tactic you use to emphasize your brand’s history and its values, the copy on these pages should reflect your brand.

Key takeaways

Copywriting and conversion rate are inherently related. Good web copy is closely correlated with good conversion rates. Using power words, appropriate formatting, and persona-targeted copywriting can help you drastically improve the copy of your e-commerce website and, by proxy, its conversion rates.

Has your brand made a commitment to enhancing conversion rates with effective copywriting?

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Do you suffer from average ROI and low-to-moderate page optimization scores? Do you feel like your SEO has lost its spark? Have you sensed there’s something “missing” from your digital marketing strategy? If this sounds like you or someone you know, then have I got some good news for you:

Aouncing Moz’s new and improved workshops and training!

Whoa! Let's check it out!

If you’ve been looking for a way to improve your marketing strategy and get better results for you or your clients, then Moz’s new training and workshops could be the solution for you.

Great! Wait... what?

Chris Pratt

Great question, reader and Chris. Training and workshop sessions are comprehensive, in-depth, interactive classes designed to help you unleash your ier marketing super power. Every class comes coupled with activities like conducting a full website audit, competitive research exercises, keyword brainstorms, and more. Sound like fun? You bet it does. Almost as much fun as these guys are having:

Training AND workshops? What’s the difference?

Glad you asked. Here’s the run-down on what workshops and training are all about:

Workshops are small group classes lead by a member of the Moz Academy team. They’re open to both Moz subscribers and non-subscribers alike (though it helps to have a Moz subscription or trial), and cover best practices and real-world applications for topics like website audits, keyword research, content marketing, and more.

Not just a one-sided webinar, these sessions are meant to be interactive and participants have numerous opportunities to ask questions and dig deeper. What’s more: every student who attends a workshop will leave with a custom worksheet, audit, or other interactive tool.

Access to worksheets and other in-class activities are included in the price of each workshop.

Custom training is just that: fully customized one-on-one or small group training sessions for organizations who want specialized, focused attention from Moz trainers. Custom training curricula can be designed around whatever SEO and traffic generation topics YOU want to lea about, and individual training sessions are customized to your unique business and industry. Prefer to lea in person, in a real classroom setting? Ask if we can come to you!

The best part of both training AND workshops? You’ll leave each session with not only more know-how, but also an actionable plan for how you can improve your strategy moving forward.

Paid training?! From Moz?!

One of the other things that separates these workshops and trainings from other web-based content Moz has provided in the past: they’re paid. We feel these trainings offer a unique experience for attendees that’s worth the investment, but this is, admittedly, a different route for us. To that end, I wanted to provide some transparency as to why we’ve chosen to offer paid training.

The first (and biggest) reason why we decided to go the paid training route? Customers asked for it. Here are a few examples:

“Does Moz offer Professional Services?”

“We are seeking your support and consultancy on what needs to be done on our website in order to rank higher. If that will cost extra, we will pay. Please advise.”

“How much [would it cost] for me to ask you a lot of questions for an hour? I know you guys are the best...would like to do it on the phone...a conference call would be best.”

Despite requests like these, we’d always shied away from offering paid education because of the vast number of free resources we already offer. With educational materials like the Moz Blog, Whiteboard Fridays, our Begier's Guides, and beyond, we weren’t sure a paid option would be valuable or useful for users like you.

But as comprehensive as Moz’s free resources may be, they all share two things in common: 1.) They’re self-guided leaing tools and 2.) many are one-size-fits-all. Let’s dive into each one of those a bit deeper:

An alteative to self-guided leaing

While self-guided leaing is great for some, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for all leaing styles. Depending on how you lea best, self-serve resources to organize, peruse, and intealize at your own pace can either be the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest hurdle to actually leaing something new.

To ensure we have a great option for everyone who wants to lea how to get more traffic, we created comprehensive paid trainings that combine an engaging experience with a hands-on activity to help attendees apply the topic at hand to solve a real life pain-point for their organizations.

From a leaing modality perspective, this means we’re able to provide resources for all types of leaers — even those who lea best from actually doing an activity at hand.

When one-size-fits-all education isn’t enough

Best practices are just that — the best practice to employ for most organizations in most scenarios. But many organizations have their own nuances and specific business cases — and for those folks, one-size-fits-all education and strategy shop talk isn’t always going to address the underlying issue or provide the best solution.

And sometimes, you may feel like this user:

...I know I have, more times than I can count.

To provide a solution for those who feel like one-size-fits-all education isn’t enough for their organization, our custom training option allows us to tailor a unique education program to your specific needs, use cases, and business.

At the end of the day, we believe the live interaction with our trainers and hands-on activities in each session make workshops a whole new ballgame when it comes to education from Moz. We also believe that the depth of instruction and take-home collateral they provide is more than worth the investment — training packages are custom-priced, and workshops are $79-per-seat early-bird pricing and $99-per-seat regular pricing.

Who are Moz training and workshops for?

Come one, come all! Anyone looking to refine their marketing strategy — specifically as it relates to SEO and getting found online — will find a session with their name on it. While most of our current workshop content is focused towards users with advanced begier-to-intermediate skill levels, we’ll soon be diving deep and creating content for all levels of expertise. Since our training sessions are fully custom, they can be tailored to match you and your team’s skill level.

Some other folks who might get the most bang for their buck from Moz Academy:

• Marketers looking to refine their skills and dive deeper
• Agencies interested in providing more in-depth audits and insight to clients
• Organizations looking to expand their capabilities
• Companies who’ve brought on new employees who need training
• Inte-training program creators
• Marketers who have seen stagnant or lackluster results and want to supercharge their strategies

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means — and it isn’t meant to be. Why? Because these classes weren’t designed to fill a specific use case: rather, we created them with a specific persona in mind. That persona is someone who wants to constantly push themselves to dive deeper, lea more, and do better marketing.

Why Moz Academy?

All GIFs aside, we’re incredibly excited to share these courses with you because we think they’re going to help marketers from all walks of life supercharge their skills and take their strategies to the next level. Instead of only skimming the surface about big-picture best practices and theoretic applications, group workshop and custom training attendees have a chance to dig deep into the details of SEO and inbound marketing strategy and really get their hands dirty.

Here’s what a couple recent workshop attendees have had to say:

“...the Keyword Plaing Worksheet — holy moly that thing is awesome. I'll definitely be using that over and over again.”

“Presenter was very knowledgable and this could easily have filled many more hours. Great overview to get started with audits using Moz but also third party tools.”

“The technical insights into robots.txt were super helpful — really, the entire workshop was really well done!”

“The presenter did a phenomenal job — everything was super clear, engaging, and easy to apply.”

Lea more about what we cover in each of these sessions or see what’s coming up over at the Moz workshops and training home.

Current topics offered

We currently offer workshops covering four topics:

• Performing website audits
• Keyword research strategy
• Content marketing
• Gaining the competitive edge

Looking for something a little more tailored to your organization’s specific needs and interests? Our custom training curricula have covered topics like:

• Link building
• Video marketing
• Identifying your target audience
• Growing your keyword footprint
• Local search optimization

“That’s great, but what about a class on _____?”

A class on what, you say? Let us know in Idea section of this post what sessions you’d like to see! While we currently offer our four flagship workshops, we’re ultimately building the program to encompass a course on everything that goes into a comprehensive traffic generation strategy from start to finish.

If you’re looking for instruction about a particular topic sooner rather than later, drop us a line and let us know a little bit more about what you’re looking for, by when, and for whom — we’d be happy to help provide some custom training if it makes sense for you.

What’s happening to the free videos currently available on Moz Academy?

Nothing, for now. We plan on keeping the free video trainings available for a few more months, but will begin phasing them out later this year. We’ll make sure to provide plenty of advance waing before we do so, though.

Where are we going from here?

Ultimately, we’ll be offering several “tracks” of content that will serve as home to lessons a wide variety of SEO topics (some mentioned above) and at all skill levels. We’d also like to expand just how interactive our courses are (Codeacademy and Treehouse are great inspirations), as well as make it easier for current and future session attendees to coect with each other. We have quite a few other tricks up our sleeves, but you’ll just have to keep an eye on the program to see what we’re up to next!

Interested in leaing more about Moz workshops or custom training packages? There’s no time like the present! Get started:

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

(header photo "Kenzie" by H.L.W. from the Blind Photographers Flickr Group.)

Search engine optimization (SEO) evolved by search engines creating algorithms to automate the classification and ranking of websites, with SEOs manipulating the loopholes in those algos.

Accessibility, on the other hand, is bo out of a desire to be inclusive; to coect humans to information through assistive technology (AT).

When we strip down both industries to where a machine is reading a web page, there are a few overlaps. That’s what we’re looking at in this series. If you’re optimizing for search engines, you’re also affecting how people using screen readers and assistive technologies are experiencing your site.

In today’s post on accessibility + SEO, we’re digging into on-page aspects that include formatting text, colors, links, and content that we can’t see see but machines can. The previous post covered structure overlaps, and we’ll cover images, video, and non-text elements in the last post following this one.

Hidden text

There are times when something that can be seen on the page provides information or context that isn’t able to be read by bots or screen readers, like in an infographic image. The text, graphs, and overall context are all in the image, so in this case, you’d want to provide text that screen readers and bots can use for information and context — either visibly or hidden.

There may also be other reasons you want to actively hide text from all visible display, but not from bots or screen readers. An example might be a paragraph that expands to show more text only when clicking on a caret. In this case, the text is hidden by default from the visual experience, but you want to make sure that screen readers and bots can get it.

This table below shows how each of these different methods of hiding content is perceived by sighted users, screen readers and search engines. I’m not an accessibility expert, so if you know of anything different or additional, please do share.

*I’d highly recommend not using these hidden text techniques solely for spam, as Google may index hidden text, but doesn’t give hidden text the same weight or ranking effect as non-hidden text, and if it’s abused and has to be manually reviewed, you could find yourself in some trouble.

On that note, let’s dig into two actual common examples: one where the primary content is in an image, so we need to make hidden content available to screen readers and bots, and a second where the primary content is hidden from users by default, and we need to make sure screen readers and bots find it.

Providing text for an infographic

Here’s an example SEOs will love of an infographic where we want to provide the infographic information and context to the screen reader and search engines. The simple way would be to add the text to the page below the infographic, like in this example.

But Ted Drake is an accessibility genius (who has been invaluable with his help in this post series and my interest in a11y in general — thank you Ted), and has also shown us an option to provide the information for screen readers and bots that is invisible to sighted users. The infographic is pulled into a page (or easily shared) via an iFrame and, in addition to the infographic image, that iFrame HTML has all of the descriptive text in clipped content, invisible to the sighted user reading the same content via the infographic, but fully legible and interactive for screen readers and bots that can’t read the infographic.

Check it out for yourself. This page appears in Google search results for the infographic text "The days are longer, but you’re still not able to find time to plan those much-needed getaways." That text does not actually appear visually on the page.

Side note: Notice that the one with the text on the page, the example I provided above, is ranking higher than the visible text one for me.

In this hidden text example, the infographic itself is an image provided on a separate HTML page with the text information in a 1px CSS clip, pulled into that page in the search results via an iFrame.

At first glance the separate HTML page looks like it only has an image on it, but you’ll see in the code that there is also text hidden in a “visually-hidden” CSS class that clips the content, and this text has semantic markup allowing screen reader users to navigate through it, copy text, etc., making it a highly usable, interactive alteative to having the text right on the page.

See it in action with the VoiceOver screen reader here:

Since I know this is going to cause a lot of excitement among the more spam-bent SEOs reading this, I’ll also mention that those who control the spam-tweaking at Google are also aware of this method, and even this specific example. While they’re confident their processes for specifically combating hidden text spam are strong, I can only show this example in good conscience by also saying don’t spam. Google is watching. Do consider this method for accessibility and especially for sharing infographics along with the text content.

Hiding ancillary text

There are times when you want to show the sighted user some text, but have them click something like a caret to expand for more text content if they choose (or skim by it and move on to whatever else is on the page).

I’ve done site audits where the functionality was there (for sighted users), but the content wasn’t indexed because of the way it was coded. You can use display:none for the default content that’s hidden, which will hide the extra content from screen readers and sighted users skimming through the page, but allow access to that content if the caret or link is clicked by either user.

Here’s an example where the Netflix Help pages hide content from the sighted visitor and screen reader unless the visitor chooses to expand and access the content. It’s using display:none in the CSS. It’s accessible to screen readers and sighted visitors and the caret content is indexed by search engines. Win-win-win.

Hidden text do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use hidden text for spam. Stuffing hidden keywords into a page is not recommended if you want to keep your nose clean for SEO, and can be a terrible experience for screen reader visitors.
• Do consider sighted and non-sighted audiences: If you need to hide text, consider which method is best to use depending on whether you want a screen reader to see it and a sighted user not to, or if you want all visitors not to.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a mostly old-school SEO practice that still lingers. It is/was very popular on pages where the site is very image-heavy, on old Flash pages, or even on pages with normal content but where the developer wants more text-based keywords on the page. This is done just for search engines, so why do we care if visitors other than screen readers come across it?

Luckily it's harder to find good keyword stuffing examples these days, so @Joeartdotcom sent me a perfect archived example of a 2007 Patagonia home page with a big image, minimal content, and a bunch of “Search Index Page Description” text. Listen to it via a screen reader (like ChromeVox for Chrome or Fangs for Firefox). Sighted readers can see the text on this Wayback Machine page if you’d like to read along, or just listen to this video.

Keyword stuffing hopefully isn’t as big of an issue as it was back in 2007, but it’s nonetheless still an option, and it’s very likely to aoy your screen reader users.

Keyword stuffing do’s and don’ts

• Do think ahead when building: Avoid having to keyword-stuff to attract search engines to begin with, and build accessible pages with relevant, indexable text information.
• Do write naturally. It’s best for everyone, and this can be done using keywords but not abusing keywords.

Size and color contrast of text

People will often use small fonts and low contrast text simply for page aesthetics. SEOs will sometimes use low-contrast small font text to add more keywords to a page without distracting from the rest of the content.

It’s not something I’ll get into detail here, but search engines can consider font size and color. They know what we’re all up to.

Here’s where this can be problematic beyond SEO. Colorblind or color vision-deficient readers may be unable to distinguish certain colors or only see things in black and white or gray shades, and these deficiencies can be mild or severe.

This video shows some color contrast examples that are tough even for readers without color deficiencies.

Additionally, low-vision readers may be elderly readers or may suffer from conditions that affect their vision like glaucoma or macular degeneration, and have difficulty perceiving content that is too small, that doesn’t scale, or is low contrast. Here are some great low-vision examples.

To get a good sense of how assistive technologies can help in these cases, check out this demo of the very cool ZoomText screen magnifier, which can also change color contrast, create cross-hairs or a giant circle on your mouse pointer, and highlight cursor focus or active area focus.

Some people, like legally blind student Kim Russell, are using ZoomText at 12–14x magnification to navigate your site. That’s huge.

There are a lot of font and color do’s and don’ts to keep in mind when you’re designing your pages and/or when you’re considering that extra small, low-contrast text. Check the resources section for a lot more interesting tools and details beyond the do’s and don’ts listed here.

Text size and color do’s and don’ts

• Don’t use text as an image. When possible use actual text rather than text graphics to avoid pixelation when these text images are enlarged.
• Don’t rely solely on color to portray information. Users should be able to understand the content if all colors were removed. If link text is indicated only by the fact that it’s red, red-sensitive colorblind users may not see the links. Underlines on links are more visible, regardless of link color.
• Do maximize the contrast of text. This includes logo text and text in images when possible. Use color contrast tools to find good foreground-to-background contrast of at least 4.5:1 for small text and 3:1 for large text. For example, #757575 is the lightest grey that is accessible on a white background.
• Do use relative font sizes vs absolute. Sizing fonts by relative percent or em sizes can allow for better resizing than absolute sizing via pixels or points.
• Do use readable fonts: Try to stay away from cursive, fantasy (decorative), and monospace fonts (ex: Courier), and stick closer to native serif and sans-serif family fonts, utilizing as few different font faces as possible for continuity.

Links and anchor text

Screen reader users often tab through a page to skim the page by its links. The link anchor text is aounced at each instance, also aouncing “link” along with the anchor text, and the user can hit enter to follow any link in focus.

Descriptive and informative links

Links with descriptive anchor text are a win for search engines and screen readers. When the link describes what it is pointing to, it provides context to both, telling screen reader users tabbing through links what the link points to and, for SEO, providing context as to what the destination page is about and potentially helping that destination rank for that phrase or topic.

Providing context with links can be helpful for screen readers as well. Check out the video below of navigating this example of a webpage created to show bad accessibility. The first logo link is pretty amusing, but also notice the [image description] links, the MORE>> links that don’t provide any context and aren’t coected to the articles that they’re visually coected to on the page, and the infamous “click here” and “read more” links, a familiar downer for SEOs.

Now compare that to this video of a properly created version of the same webpage, navigating much more smoothly through it via headers and links:

And just because you have to see this one to believe it, here’s an example of navigating through the links on my favorite accessibility horror story website:

Avoid pseudo links and buttons

While this isn’t necessarily an SEO overlap, it’s a vast problem for accessibility that is worth calling out in this article. Using the correct markup to create links and buttons is important to make sure those links and buttons are clickable using assistive technologies. The simple rule is to use links to navigate to other places and buttons to initiate an action, and do not use <span> or <div> for these cases as they are not the proper markup and may not work.

Karl Groves has a great writeup on the differences, with some examples and why they’re problematic.

Breadcrumb links

SEOs like our breadcrumb links because, well, they’re links. And they’re keyword-rich. But to screen readers, the absence of context around breadcrumb links can be confusing.

Consider the hidden text methods we looked at earlier to provide a little extra context to screen readers like the text "you are here":

Listen for the hidden “you are here” in the video below, tabbing through the WebAIM invisible content page.

Link anchor text do’s and don’ts

• Don’t keyword stuff your links. Let’s say you have a Seattle-focused website with an article aouncing the opening of a new coffee shop. You spam the article every chance possible with linked phrases like “coffee shop” and “Seattle coffee shop” and “coffee shop in Seattle” that all link to the coffee shop website. This article is no fun to read for anyone, sighted or not. Don’t do it.
• Do create descriptive links. When you’re using a screen reader you can tab just through the links on the page. If all of the links say “here,” it’s not very useful for someone using a screen reader who is trying to find a link on the page to something specific.
• Do use proper link and button markup. Divs and spans are not links or buttons, and empty <a> anchors without an href attribute or with an empty hashtag destination <a href=”#”> are all potentially problematic.
• Do consider explaining breadcrumb links. Consider hiding a bit of explanatory text offscreen, like “you are here,” before your breadcrumb links for screen readers.

Resources and tools:

If you know of other good tips or resources, please share with us in the Idea.

Text formatting

Hidden text

Links and anchor text

For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:

This naturally begs the question — how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we’ve got 9 more characters to work with?

Not so fast, my friend…

This is where things get messy. It’d be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We’ve got three complications to consider:

(1) Character widths vary

Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case ‘l’ is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case ‘W’. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you’re trying to say.

In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:

This title has 14 i's and lowercase l's, 10 lowercase t's, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.

(2) Titles break at whole words

Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here's a word that's just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:

(3) Google is appending brands

In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 words pre-cut:

The brand text "- The Homestead" was appended by Google and is not part of the sites <TITLE> tag. The next word in the title was "Accommodations", so the combination of the brand add-on and long word made for a very truncated title.

Data from 10,000 searches

Examples can be misleading, so we wanted to take a deeper dive. We pulled all of the page-1 display titles from the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set, which ends up being just shy of 90,000 titles. Uncut titles don't tell us much, since they can be very short in some cases. So, let's focus on the titles that got cut. Here are the character lengths (not counting " ...") of the cut titles:

We've got a fairly normal distribution (skewed a little to the right) with both a mean and median right around 63. So, is 63 our magic number? Not quite. Roughly half the cut titles in our data set had less than 63 characters, so that's still a fairly risky length.

The trick is to pick a number where we feel fairly confident that the title won't be cut off, on average (a guaranteed safe zone for all titles would be far too restrictive). Here are a few select percentages of truncated titles that were above a certain character length:

• 55% of cut titles >= 63 (+2) characters
• 91% of cut titles >= 57 (+2) characters
• 95% of cut titles >= 55 (+2) characters
• 99% of cut titles >= 48 (+2) characters

In research, we might stick to a 95% or 99% confidence level (note: this isn't technically a confidence interval, but the rationale is similar), but I think 90% confidence is a decent practical level. If we factor in the " ...", that gives us about +2 characters. So, my recommendation is to keep your titles under 60 characters (57+2 = 59).

Keep in mind, of course, that cut-offs aren't always bad. A well placed "..." might actually increase click-through rates on some titles. A fortuitous cut-off could create suspense, if you trust your fortunes to Google:

Now that titles are cut at whole words, we also don't have to worry about text getting cut off at confusing or unfortunate spots. Take, for example, the dangerous predicament of The Inteational Association of Assemblages of Assassin Assets:

Prior to the redesign, their titles were a minefield. Yes, that contributed nothing to this post, but once I had started down that road, it was already too late.

So, that's it then, right?

Well, no. As Google evolves and adapts to a wider range of devices, we can expect them to continue to adjust and test display titles. In fact, they're currently test a new, card-style format for desktop SERPs where each result is boxed and looks like this:

We're not even entirely sure that the current change is permanent. The narrower format is still appearing for some people under some conditions. If this design sticks, then I'm comfortable saying that keeping your title length under 60 characters will prevent the majority of cut-offs.

Note: People have been asking when we'll update our title tag tool. We're waiting to make sure that this design change is permanent, but will try to provide an update ASAP. Updates and a link to that tool will appear in this post when we make a final decision.

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Inteet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s.

Your website is an API to your business

If we look to pre/early Inteet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your "API" — the way people interacted with your business.

As the Inteet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new "API" for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn't necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn't have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).

Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.

The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant

Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M — as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware — are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.

New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.

In the last couple of years we've discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.

Trend 1: More complex searches

The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine leaing, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.

Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Implicit Signals
• Natural Language
• Conversational Search
• Hummingbird & RankBrain

Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.

Trend 2: More complex results

Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we've seen a search interface that doesn't even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would tu up a card right there in the app.

Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Entities / Direct Answers
• Faceted search
• Data driven answers

You may like Distilled's Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.

Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs

More recently, with the increased interest in bots (especially since Facebook's F8 aouncement), we can see a rise in the number of companies investing in various forms of conversational UI (see this article and this one).

Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.

Note that a conversational UI isn't limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an "on demand" UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Conversational UI
• Bots
• On-demand UIs within the IPA interface

Trend 4: 3rd-party integration

Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.

However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.

Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite — but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.

This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.

What's the impact of all this?

More searches as friction reduces

Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they're trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.

The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of "always listening" search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously "too much work" means we'll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn't have happened previously. So rather than caibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.

Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top

As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we'll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. "where can I buy The Martian?," "flights to Berlin," or "order a pepperoni pizza").

This is a massive opportunity — it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in "classical SEO" if you've integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.

The classic fuel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs

This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it'll have on users and businesses. People have modeled "the fuel" in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:

The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn't been a big part.

However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the fuel being compressed:

In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?

Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself — the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.

Summary

Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.

People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.

IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you've been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.

What do you think? I'd love to have a discussion in the Idea about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.

Moving your customers down the fuel from awareness to conversion can make for a winding and treacherous road. Until you fully research and understand the buying process inside and out, it's far too easy to make a misstep. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand steps back to take a higher-level look at the path to customer purchase, recommending workflows and tools to help you forge your own way.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the path to customer purchase and how to research that path. The reason this is so critical is because we have to understand a few things like our content and conversion strategy around where do we need to be, what content we need to create, how to position ourselves, our product, our brand, and how to convert people. We can't know this stuff until we truly understand the buying process.

We've done a lot of Whiteboard Fridays that involve very, very tactically specific items in one of the steps in these, like: how to understand the awareness fuel and how to build your social media audience; or how to get into the consideration process and understand how you compare against your competition; or how to convert people at the very end of the buying cycle on a landing page.

But I want to take a step back because, as I've talked to a lot of you out there and heard Idea from you, I think that this bigger picture of, "How do I understand this research process," is something we need to address.

Buyers: Who are they?

So let's start with: How do we understand who our buyers actually are, and what's the research process we can use for that? My general sense is that we need to start with interviews with a few people, with salespeople if you're working with a team that has sales, with customer service, especially if you're working with a team that has customer service folks who talk to lots of their audience, and potentially with your target demographic and psychographic audience. Demographic audience would be like: Where are they, what gender are they, and what age group are they? Psychographics would be things around their interest levels in certain things and what they consume and how they behave, all of that type of stuff.

For example, let's say we're going to go target Scotch whisky drinkers. Now, I am personally among that set of Scotch whisky drinkers. I'm big fan of a number of scotches, as are many Mozzers. In fact, I have a bottle of Ardbeg — I think it's the Uigeadail — in my office here at Moz.

So I might go, "Well, let's see. Let's talk to the people who sell whisky at stores. Let's talk to the people who sell it online. Let's talk to the customer service folks. Let's do interviews with people who are likely Scotch buyers, which are both male and female, perhaps slightly more demographically skewed male, tend to be in a slightly wealthier, maybe middle income and up income bracket, tend to be people who live in cities more than people who live in urban and rural areas, tend to also have interests around things like fashion and maybe automobiles and maybe beer and other forms of alcohol." So we can figure out all that stuff and then we can do those interviews.

What we're trying to get to is a customer profile or several customer profiles.

A lot of folks call this a "customer persona," and they'll name the persona. I think that's a fine approach, but you can have a more abstract customer profile as well.

Then once you have that, you can use a tool like Facebook, through their advertising audience system, to research the quantity of people who have the particular attributes or affiliations that you're seeking out. From there, you can expand again by using Facebook and Twitter. You could use Followerwonk, for example in Twitter specifically, to figure out: What are these people following? Who are their influencers? What are the brands they pay attention to? What are the media outlets? What are the individuals? What are the blogs or content creators that they follow?

You can also do this with a few other tools. For example, if you're searching out just content in general, you might use Google Search. You could do this on Instagram or Pinterest or LinkedIn for additional networks.

There's a very cool tool called FullContact, which has an API that essentially let's you plug in let's say you have a set of email addresses from your interview process. You can plug that into FullContact and you can see the profiles that all of those email addresses have across all these social networks.

Now I can start to do this type of work, and I can go plug things into Followerwonk. I can go plug them into Facebook, and I can actually see specifically who those groups follow. Now I can start to build a true idea of who these people are and who they follow.

What needs do they have?

Now that I've researched that, I need to know what needs those folks actually have. I understand my audience at least a little bit, but now I need to understand what they want. Again, I go back to that interview process. It's very, very powerful. It is time-intensive. It will not be a time-saving activity. Interviews take a long time and a lot of effort and require a tremendous amount of resources, but you also get deep, deep empathy and understanding from an interview process.

Surveys are another good way to go, but you get much less deep information from them. You can however get good broad information, and I've really enjoyed those. If you don't already have an audience, you can start with something like SurveyMonkey Audience or Google Surveys, which let you target a broad group, and both of those are reasonable if you're targeting the right sorts of broad enough demographics or psychographics.

The other thing I want to do here is some awareness stage keyword research. I want to understand that this awareness phase. As people are just understanding they have a problem, what do they search for? Keyword research on this can start from the highest level.

So if I'm targeting Scotch, I might search for just Scotch by itself. If I plug that into a tool like Keyword Explorer or Keyword Plaer or KeywordTool.io, I can see suggestions like, "What's the best Scotch under $50?" When I see that, I start to gain an understanding of, "Oh, wait a minute. People are looking for quality. They also care about price." Then I might see other things like, "Gosh, a lot of people search for 'Islay versus Speyside.' Oh, that's interesting. They want to know which regions are different." Or they search for "Japanese whisky versus Scotch whisky." Aha, another interesting point at the awareness stage.

From there, I can determine the search terms that are getting used at awareness stage. I can go to consideration. I can go to comparison. I can go to conversion points. That really helps me understand the jouey that searchers are taking down this path.

It's not just search, though. Any time I have a search term or phase, I want to go plug that into places like Facebook. I want to plug it into something like Twitter search. I want to understand the influencers on the networks that I know my audience is in. That could be Instagram. It could be Pinterest. It could be LinkedIn. It could be any variety of networks. It could be Google News, maybe, if I'm seeing that they pay attention to a lot of media.

Then once I have these search terms and awareness through the fuel, now I've got to understand: How do they get to that conversation point?

Once I get there, what I'm really seeking out is: What are the reasons people bought? What are the things they considered? What are the objections that kept some of them from buying?

Creating a content & conversion strategy.

If I have this, what I essentially have now is the who and the what they're seeking out at each phase of this jouey. That's an incredibly powerful thing that I can then go apply to...

Where do I need to be?

"Where do I need to be" means things like: What keywords do I need to target? What social platforms do I need to be on? Where do I need to be in media? Who do I need to influence who's influencing my audience?

It tells me what content I need to create.

I know what articles or videos or visuals or podcasts or data my audience is interested in and what helps compel them further and further down that fuel.

It tells me a little bit about how to position myself in terms of things like style and UI/UX.

It also tells me about benefits versus features and some of the prototypical users. Who are the prototypical users? Who should I showcase? What kinds of testimonials are going to be valuable because people say, "Ah, this person, who is like me, liked this product and uses it. Therefore it must be a good product for me."

Lastly, it tells me about how we can convert our target audience.

Then it also tells us lastly, finally, through those objections and the reasons people bought, the landing page content, the testimonials to feature and what should be in those. It tells me about the conversion path and how I should expect people to flow through that: whether they have to come back many times or they make the purchase right away. Who they're going to compare me against in terms of competitors. And finally the purchase dynamics: How do I want to sell? Do I need a refund policy? Do I need to have things like free shipping? Should this be on a subscription basis? Should I have a high upfront payment or a low upfront payment with ballooning costs over time, and all that type of stuff?

This research process is not super simple. I certainly haven't dived deep on every one of these aspects. But you can use this as a fundamental architecture to shape how you answer these questions in all of the web marketing chaels you might pursue. Before you go pursue any one given chael, you might want to try and identify some of the holes you have in this.

If you have questions about how to do this, go through and do this research first. You'll have far better results at the end.

All right, everyone. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Like the talking mice to Cinderella, we're already working hard on MozCon and crafting Roger one heck of a ball gown. (And letting our metaphors get out of control in the meantime.) Which means I'm here to share with all of you the current MozCon 2016 Agenda and a ton of other preview goodies.

If you're suddenly like "Oh snap, I haven't bought my ticket(s)!", I'll pause while you:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

New emcees: we're mixing it up!

As some of you know, Cyrus won't be emceeing MozCon this year. (We still adore him, and I'm sure his face will make it into a few slide decks.) So we decided to take this opportunity to shake it up.

Emceeing MozCon is a hard job. We want each and every speaker to feel supported by our stage and have the emcee warm up the audience for their talk. Instead of having one emcee for three days, we're having three different emcees, one each day.

Please congratulate them!

Jen Sable Lopez

Sr. Director of Community and Audience Development at Moz
@jeita

Leading our community and audience development efforts here at Moz, Jen Sable Lopez's the biggest fan of you: our community. She's deeply invested in being TAGFEE and bringing educational content and community love to you. Jen also does a great Grumpy Cat impression, serves as Moz gif maker, and loves traveling and her family.

Ronell Smith

Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith

Ronell Smith is a business strategist with a passion for helping brands create a user experience their customers will recognize, appreciate, and reward them for with their business.

Zeph Snapp

CEO at Altura Interactive
@zephsnapp

A bilingual, bicultural marketer, Zeph Snapp helps inteational companies reach Spanish speakers in the US and Latin America. If you want him to go on a rant, ask him about machine leaing as it relates to translation and content.

The sneak peek MozCon 2016 Agenda

Because we're releasing this earlier than ever, there's still a few TBD spots and topics. I can't thank our speakers enough for being so gracious and super hard-working to settle on their topics.

You'll also notice that community speakers are still forthcoming. That's right — they're coming soon (keep an eye out for the submission post!), and we wanted to give you a head start to noodle on your potential topic.

Monday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2016! with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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09:25–10:10am
Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills with Cara Harshman

Content Marketing Manager at Optimizely
@caraharshman

A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise.

Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year aiversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings.

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10:10–10:30am
AM Break

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10:35–11:05am
TBD with Lauren Vaccarello

VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv

Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box.

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11:05–11:35am
TBD

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11:35am–12:05pm
TBD

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:10pm
Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing with Joe Hall

SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC
@joehall

Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets.

Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits.

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02:10–02:40pm
Breaking Pattes: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization with Talia Wolf

CMO at Banana Splash
@Taliagw

Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to tu more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior.

As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan.

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02:40–03:10pm
TBD

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03:10–03:30pm
PM Break

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03:35–04:05pm
TBD with Ross Simmonds

Co-Founder at Crate
@TheCoolestCool

Ross Simmonds is a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He's worked with both startups and Fortune 500 companies and is the co-founder of two startups: Crate and Hustle & Grind.

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04:05–4:50pm
TBD with Dana DiTomaso

Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso

Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients' businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget).

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Tuesday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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09:05–09:50am
You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter with Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist at Moz
@dr_pete

Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are begiing to understand concepts?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project.

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09:50–10:20am
How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy with Joaa Wiebe

Creator and Copywriter at Wiebe Marketing Ltd
@copyhackers

Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joaa shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act.

The original conversion copywriter, Joaa Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She's optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software... and now MozCon.

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10:20–10:40am
AM Break

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10:45am–12:05pm
Community Speakers

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:25pm
Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career with Mike Ramsey

President at Nifty Marketing
@mikeramsey

Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between.

Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about ruing agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot.

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02:25–02:55pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft

Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty

As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia's partner community, building coections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard.

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02:55–03:15pm
PM Break

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03:25–03:55pm
TBD with Rebekah Cancino

Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino

Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO.

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03:55–04:40pm
TBD with Wil Reynolds

CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds

Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site's traffic has on the company's bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

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Wednesday

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09:00–10:00am
Breakfast

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10:05–10:35am
The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling with Kindra Hall

Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall
@kindramhall

Whoever tells the best story, wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight.

Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories.

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10:35–11:20am
29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know with Mike Aesen

Founder and CEO at UpBuild
@mike_aesen

Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you're likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that'll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more.

Mike Aesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO.

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11:20–11:40am
AM Break

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11:45am–12:15pm
Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers with Tara Reed

CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com
@TaraReed_

Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code.

Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code.

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12:15–12:45pm
TBD

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12:45–02:15pm
Lunch

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02:20–03:05pm
Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing with Cindy Krum

CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks

In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and inteational digital marketing events.

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03:05–03:35pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise

UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah

Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to coect with customers and build experiences that matter.

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03:35–03:55pm
PM Break

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04:00–04:45pm
Eaing, Nudging, and (Indirectly) Buying the Links You Still Need to Rank with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we "create great content," links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016.

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Don't worry, we've got your MozCon evenings covered!

After a day of leaing and possibly discovering a brand-new city, I know I sometimes struggle with what to do after the conference closes for the day. At MozCon, we work to bring you three evening events where you can chill, network, make new friends, and grab some food and drinks. (We will also have a post in late August or early September with a ton of great recommendations for things to do and food to eat in Seattle!)

Monday's MozCrawl from 7–10pm

The best part of our MozCrawl is being able to explore a neighborhood in Seattle. Bring your walking shoes (or load your favorite rideshare app), and get to know a little about the flavor of Seattle. While the locations are still TBD, Moz and our MozCon partners will each host a bar with light appetizers and drinks.

To ensure you see as much of Seattle as possible, each bar will have a scavenger hunt element. Our sweet, bar-hosting partners:

(We also have two other partners, STAT and Wistia, who will be keeping a low profile that night.)

Tuesday's MozCon Ignite from 7–10pm

In my completely biased opinion, this is my favorite MozCon evening event. For those who've never been to an Ignite-style talk, they are 5 minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Because we're leaing all day at MozCon about online marketing, our Ignite talks are 100% not about marketing or business. They are passion projects, hobbies, and interests.

Last year, our 16 talks ranged from a touching tale about helping a terminally ill child musician record an album, to how to love opera, to how to make frosting. You can sit back, relax, laugh, and cry. Plus, beforehand, there are networking opportunities to chat with your fellow attendees.

If this sounds like something you'd want to speak at, we'll be opening up pitches in early July. Our venue is currently TBD.

Wednesday's MozCon Bash at the Garage from 7pm–12am

Make sure to book your flight home the day after MozCon so you can join us at our aual MozCon Bash to celebrate another great year of leaing. Put on your bowling shoes and see if you can out-turkey your new friends! Or play a round of pool, or sing your heart out with some karaoke. Food and drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are on us. You'll take home even more memories and some photobooth mementos to look back on.

Grab your ticket today — we've sold out for the last 5 years.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

If you have any questions about MozCon programming, please don't hesitate to ask in the Idea.

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Creating content for local link building can be intimidating.

Sure, you know your business. You know your area, but do you know what locals want to read about?

You can always guess, and you might strike gold. My guess is you don’t have the time, resources, or budget for guesswork.

I don’t either, which is why I like to go in educated.

Enter Moz Content.

Even if you don’t have a Moz account, Moz Content allows you to audit any website and find its most popular content. You can figure out which pages and posts have the most shares, the most links, and the sort of reach each page might have.

You can go much more in-depth with the paid version of the tool, and it’s absolutely worth the money.

But this post is about using the free version to remove the intimidation factor from local-based content, so we might as well start slowly.

By the end, you should have a good idea how to create local content that resonates with your audience and attracts links.

Local links

To my mind, the best links come from relevant websites, but there are (at least) two types of relevance:

• Industry-based
• Local

So, for this article, let’s say you own an auto repair shop in New Haven, Co., and you want to build links.

You’re just starting, so maybe you don’t have the time or the budget to build a fantastic piece of content about auto repair, the kind that draws links from gearhead hobbyists, dealership blogs, and parts manufacturers.

Local links should be your priority. Local links can be easier to be build and there’s not as much of a barrier to entry.

But you still must create a useful, engaging piece of content that people want to read.

You don’t have to guess, though. You can use the free version of the tool to come up with great ideas for local content, and you’ll have numbers to back it up.

For this hypothetical auto shop in New Haven, I didn’t analyze a single hypothetical competitor. Instead, I analyzed sites focused on New Haven.

I wanted to analyze three things:

• An official city website or a reputable tourism website to see what the big dogs are doing right;
• A popular local site or blog to see how small websites are appealing to locals;
• Content from a big, national brand that writes area-specific content about multiple cities to see how national brands are trying to get links and shares from regional-based content.

Here are the three sites I analyzed and the content ideas they gave me:

Site #1: VisitNewHaven.com

The first site I analyzed was VisitNewHaven.com. It’s full of tourist information, meaning it probably has a good handle on why people enjoy New Haven, and it knows what they like about it.

Heck, many New Haven residents probably use it, too. It’s full of information about local events, businesses, and websites. I thought it was a good start.

So, I put the URL into Moz Content:

When I scrolled down to view "popular pages," I saw that, other than the home page, the aual events page had the most links. The dining and nightlife pages did OK, too, so we’ll file that away for later use.

We’re after links, and the aual events page has the most links, so it’s a good place to start.

I clicked on the analysis for that page:

Reach isn’t great, and it doesn’t have many links, but it beats anything else on the site, so I decided it was worth a look. People like this page enough to link to a tourism website, so they’re doing something right.

Here’s what the aual events page on VisitNewHaven.com looks like:

There’s little text here, but it does the job, providing relevant, up-to-date info about aual events with appropriate links.

Since there’s little here, you could make something better. If it’s good enough, you could probably even get your first link from VisitNewHaven.com, especially if you credit them for inspiring you.

Content Idea: Build a guide to local events from your point of view. You could build one for a complete year or make several and target them to winter, spring, summer, and fall tourists.

To one-up this piece of content, you’d have to write a paragraph about each event, and give local insight.

You’d already have an outreach list, too. You could email the organizers of each event you mentioned and see if they want to link to your guide.

You know people are interested in aual events, and by one-upping this page, you could generate at least five relevant, local links.

When you’re just starting, five links are an excellent bounty.

Site #2: CoecticutLifestyles.com

Next, I did an audit for CoecticutLifestyles.com. It has good content, and it does well in Google search results.

It’s not backed by a city govement or tourism board, but it’s about as good as you'll find for a local website that’s not a business blog.

I plugged in the URL:

Next, I scrolled down to look at popular pages:

I found that recipes dominated their other blog posts. They had the most shares and links, even when there weren’t many shares or links.

Clearly, Coecticut audiences are interested in authentic food.

Content Idea: Offer some recipes.

Even if you own an auto shop, you still eat food. You probably have family recipes, or you can get them from friends, family, and employees.

Content that focuses on local recipes can work for almost any local business. The recipes must come from you or your employees.

So, you could publish a few recipes, or you can make a guide to spicy Coecticut food or Coecticut desserts and link to recipes from other authentic Coecticut sites.

You could even try to replicate the food from your favorite restaurants. You might even get them in on the action.

As long as you focus on authentic recipes, coming from authentic Coecticut residents, you have a good shot at building links. People care about recipes. We have the proof. They outperform all other content on CoecticutLifestyles.com.

Site #3: Movoto

Next, I analyzed Movoto’s New Haven section. Movoto is a real estate website, but they also pump out local-based content that strokes the egos of local residents and eas plenty of links and shares.

You’ve probably seen your friends share some of their content on Facebook. Movoto puts a lot of money into eaing shares and links from locals, so I thought they were a good site to analyze.

I plunked the URL into Moz Content:

Immediately, I looked at this section of Movoto’s most popular pages:

And we’re not seeing many links. That’s a bummer.

But we are seeing plenty of shares on one post.

You might have guessed it, based on the previous two websites. An article about restaurants is in the lead.

Here’s what it looks like:

These Movoto articles might not be getting the links they do in other cities, but knowing that a list of 15 restaurants blows everything else away might give you some ideas.

Content Idea: This piece of content features a quality photo for each restaurant. They could be stock photos, but they look authentic. It also gives each restaurant’s Yelp score, with a paragraph about the food.

And that’s it.

Chances are, you eat food every day. You might not be a food critic, but you’re qualified to talk about why you like your favorite restaurants. All you’d have to do is take photos, write something more in-depth, and keep it authentic.

Hear me out.

Restaurants write about their own food all the time, and it often comes off as salesy.

As a non-food-related, local business, you’re writing about the food you like. You’re not trying to sell it. That puts you at an advantage, because you’re inherently trustworthy.

Plus, you could likely get a link from most restaurants you write about.

This wouldn’t have to be a huge piece of content. It would just have to be better than an article that’s 15 paragraphs and 15 photos.

That’s doable.

Putting it all together

So, what’s the real reason I analyzed three websites for content ideas?

I wanted to see if I could combine three ideas into something unique.

You could find success with a single idea from any of these websites I audited, but I wanted to dig a little deeper.

So, in the VisitNewHaven audit, dining and nightlife were popular, although not as popular as aual events. With CoecticutLifestyle and Movoto, recipes and restaurants blew away all the competition.

You could combine them all into:

• A piece that shows New Haven’s favorite foods based on CoecticutLifestyle’s recipes;
• The best restaurants to find those foods in New Haven;
• The best aual events for foodies in New Haven.

Basically, you’d make a post that highlights aual food-based events. Within the post, you’d highlight the participating restaurants and food vendors and then talk about the New Haven favorites they serve.

Heck, you could even link to recipes for those foods.

That post seems like a win in my book.

You’d have a big list of restaurants, food vendors, event sites, tourism sites, and lifestyle blogs to contact for links as well.

Creating content for local link building need not be overwhelming or scary. With just an hour or two of extra research, you can find out what people in your area are reading about.

Then, no matter your industry, you can come up with an idea for local content that kills the competition.

I always advocate starting small. I recently wrote a post about building links at the neighborhood level and working your way up. You can use Moz Content for local link building at any level.

If you start small, armed with the knowledge of what a local audience wants, you’ll be creating bigger and better content in no time.

You have the tools. They’re free and at your disposal. You simply have to get started.

What about you? Have you tried Moz Content yet? Do you have other tools/workflows you'd recommend?

As marketers, we can’t tu a coer without hearing about how to generate leads with existing content. But CRO [Conversion Rate Optimization] is about so much more than just leveraging content in different ways; optimization is really the process of finding out and testing how to convert people on your site pages, landing pages, blog posts, and marketing efforts.

Don’t know where to start? Listen to these five actionable talks from a few of today’s top conversion experts. Hear directly from the landing page, copywriting, mobile, and conversion design experts on how to optimize your marketing for lead conversion. (And save your spot in a live Google Hangout with these experts and HubSpot on June 1st!)

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1. Peep Laja – How to Tu Data into Insights & Customers

Bio via ConversionXL:

As ConversionXL founder, Peep is an entrepreneur and conversion optimization expert with 10+ years of global experience. He has extensive experience across verticals: in the past he’s run a software company in Europe, an SEO agency in Panama, a real estate portal in Dubai, and worked for an inteational non-profit.

In this talk from TractionConf, Peep covers:

• 6 steps to thinking of conversion optimization as a process and not tactics
• Why “best practices” aren’t necessarily the best ways to optimize your own blog posts and landing pages
• Digging into the formula for conversion success (hint: it starts with the number of tests run, the percentage of wiing tests, and impact per successful experiment)
• Getting better data, not more
• Gathering qualitative and quantitative data to find out if your ideas are actually good
• Identifying problems and holes for conversion on your site

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2. Oli Gardner – 4 Coers of Conversion

Bio via Inbound.org:

Unbounce’s legendary Oli Gardner has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet. His disdain for marketers who send campaign traffic to their homepage is legendary. He is a prolific webinar guest and writer, and speaks inteationally about conversion-centered design where he is consistently ranked as the top speaker.

In this presentation from INBOUND15, you’ll lea:

• Bull sh*t marketing and how to spot it on your own landing pages
• Conversion-centered design and utilizing psychology for conversion
• How to apply the 4 coers of conversion — copy, design, interaction, and psychology — in all forms of your marketing, not just landing pages
• Utilizing information hierarchy and ensuring your copy comes before design

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3. Joaa Wiebe – 3 Undeniably Real Test-Proof Truths That Will Shake What You Know About Copywriting

Bio via Inbound.org:

As copywriter and creator of Copy Hackers, Joaa helps startups use their words so people fall in love with them, flood them in cash, tell all their friends about them, and name their firstbo after them. ("Buffer Anastasia McGillicuddy. That's got a nice ring to it.")

In this particular talk from CallToAction Conference 2014, she covers:

• How to approach “clever” copy and leaing to write for conversion
• How to lead a headline: what we’ve leaed from the advertising world of David Ogilvy and modeizing those ideas
• What color your buttons should actually be
• How to break pattes in language and copy when you’re stuck
• Ideas for new tests to run on your pages

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4. Tim Ash – Mobile Conversion Strategies

Bio via SiteTuners:

Tim Ash is the author of the bestselling book, Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.

At INBOUND15, Tim covered:

• Top 10 things to stop doing on your mobile pages
• How to manage navigation on mobile and prioritize content
• Setting expectations for your mobile users and acknowledging their attention spans

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5. Angie Schottmuller – 7 Secrets to Drive Epic Conversion with Hero Shot Images

Bio via LinkedIn:

Angie is an inbound marketing thought leader skilled at wielding magnetic content optimized for search, social, conversion, and mobile. With over seventeen years in multichael B2B and B2C experience in both agency and corporation settings leading successful marketing technology projects for brands like Nestle USA, Gerber, Red Wing Shoes, Andersen Windows, The Home Depot, and more, she’s adept at haessing online and emerging technologies to drive tangible results for improving business — social engagement, lead generation, sales conversion, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy.

At Conversionista Conference, Angie talks about:

• 7 hero shot persuasion factors to lea and test from
• How to say more in a visual than header text
• Coecting hero images in your marketing
• How to persuade through credible imagery and encourage prospects
• Staying away from “fancy” brand images and gearing hero shots for conversion

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Want to see some of these experts in action? Lea all about how to increase your lead conversion in a live Google Hangout on June 1st!

Save me a seat!

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Right now, a customer is trying to find your local business. How quickly are you delivering the NAP, directions and other details he needs, on the go?

Volumes of excellent free advice have been written for small businesses about creating quality, optimized local landing pages, but today, I’d like to talk about a topic that has received much less attention: helping customers discover locations when you’ve got a ton of them. This article is for the medium-to-large business with 50, 1,000, even 10,000 physical locations and a pressing goal to have each one be found by the customers local to it. Let’s talk about store locators!

Shopping wisely for store locators

A business with 5 or even 10 locations can easily work them into a menu tab labeled ‘Locations’ and trust that customers hitting the site will be able to click to their landing page of choice to access NAP, hours of operation, photos, reviews, etc. But when your company has grown beyond this, it simply isn’t practical to list dozens of locales in your top level navigation, whether on desktop or mobile devices. The solution, then, is a store locator widget that enables customers to enter a city and/or zip code, or click on an interactive map, to be guided to the right resource.

There are six main things you are looking for when assessing the quality of a store locator widget:

1. Does it let me build and/or link directly to a customizable, permanent landing page for each of my locations? If so, this is a good sign. If not, your SEO opportunities will be severely limited.
2. Does it allow me to search by city as well as zip code? If not, then you’ll have a problem with all travelers who may be trying to find your business in a strange city and have no idea what the local zip codes are.
3. Does it work properly on all devices? This is must these days, given that as many as 50% of mobile queries may have a local intent.
4. It’s a must that the widget will work with your existing website, whether that’s ruing on Wordpress, Magento, Demandware, or what have you. You don’t want to have to redevelop your website, just to get your widget to function.
5. A bonus to look for would be automatic geolocation detection — the ability of the widget to detect where a customer is searching from. This provides convenience.
6. And, finally, there may be extra features you’d like to have to ensure the best possible experience for both users and your business. This might include search text autocompletion, the ability to sync with a database to upload location data, or search filters that allow users to refine results based on personal criteria.

Keep all of these necessary and optional features in mind when evaluating Store Locator widget choices. Capterra has recently done a good job of profiling a number of popular options which should help you hone in on the right solution for your company.

Pricing varies widely, from free to upwards of a $1,000 initial investment with reduced rates for subsequent years of service. Wordpress offers a number of free and premium store locator plugins with varying degrees of popularity. For any paid product, I recommend choosing only those which offer a free trial period of at least 1–2 weeks so that you can be sure the solution works for you.

Weak landing pages? Weirdly, not a big worry!

I’m now going to write something kind of shocking you thought never thought you’d read on the Moz Blog: you can evidently get away with thin and duplicate content on location landing pages — if your brand is established enough.

I’m writing this because, having looked at a considerable number of live store locators while researching this article, I found landing pages like this one with next to zero content on them, landing pages like this one with a very meager attempt at content that is observably duplicative, and landing pages like this one with some duplicate content, but also, some added value for local users. Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but, with the exception of the last example, the sheer volume of locations operated by these companies has likely caused their marketers to settle on the most minimal effort possible to differentiate between landing pages. The last of these (REI) has actually done a good job of adding interest to their pages by including a regional event schedule. I like what they’ve done, but is it necessary?

The answer may surprise you

In a word: no. Google is correctly finding for me each of these businesses in the right cities, both organically and locally, when I search for them. While I would never advise a small business to take a least-effort approach with their store landing pages, it’s my conclusion from my research that established brands can get away with a great deal, simply because they are established. It seems you can get the right data in front of the customer with a very minor effort, and that the minimum requirements for data on those pages would be that they have correct company NAP on them and are indexable.

Am I handing out a lazy pass for all?

Are lax standards a good reason to go with the minimum effort and call it a day? In another word: maybe. The investment you make in landing page development for your brand is going to be dictated by:

• Funding
• Scalability
• Creativity
• Competition

If funding is modest, you may need to spend elsewhere in your marketing for now. If you have hundreds of locations, the cost of going the extra mile on your store landing pages may not show any easily-disceible ROI. If your marketing department throws its hands up in the air regarding differentiating store #157 from store #158, there may be a lack of available creative solutions to the scenario. But this last bullet point — competition — this is where things get interesting.

Besting your toughest competitors

Let’s say you’re operating one of three sporting goods stores in town. Competitor A has zero content beyond NAP and hours on his landing pages. Competitor B has thin, duplicate content on her landing pages. But, you, you smartie, have not only got a unique paragraph of text on your pages, but also store-specific reviews, and a maintained schedule of guided hikes in the region. All three of you link to your respective landing pages from your Google My Business listings. If you were Google, would A, B, or C look like a more authoritative resource to you?

And let’s look at this from the perspective of me on my cell phone on a winter’s day, looking for a high end snowboard and being given raw NAP by one competitor, a generic message by the second, but a promise of a free cup of hot cocoa (according to your reviewers) and a welcome message from you that states that every employee at your shop is a fanatical outdoors enthusiast, ready to show a novice like me the ropes of investing in sporting goods.

In a competitive scenario, if your store is the only one maximizing the potential for consumer engagement on your store landing pages, you are working towards impressing not just search engines, but customers, too. You could end up eaing more than your fair share of those 50% of local-intent mobile queries, in city after city.

Supercharge your landing pages

Here’s a quick brainstorming list of both typical and optional content you could include on store landing pages to make them extra useful and extra persuasive:

• NAP
• Hours of Operation
• Driving Directions
• Unique welcome message
• Proofs of local community involvement
• Store-specific reviews or testimonials
• Links to major review profiles for the store
• Social media links
• Live chat apps
• Store-specific specials, including coupons
• Location-specific schedule of in-store or topically related regional events
• A summary list of brands, goods and/or services offered at that location
• Indoor/outdoor imagery of the specific store
• Video content relative to the store or region
• A statement of guarantees offered at the store
• An interactive map
• Calls-to-action for how to communicate with the brand after hours
• Education about the availability of beacons or other in-store apps

Looking for more inspiration? Try this Moz Academy video to spark extra landing page content ideas.

You may necessarily end up with a minor amount of duplicate content, but by brainstorming a list like the above, you will be making a maximum effort to inspire bots to consider your pages authoritative and to inspire searchers to become customers.

Discovery and indexing: Making landing pages pay off

Now that you’ve made the effort to create all of these individual landing pages for your locations, your top priority is to be sure they can be discovered by customers and indexed by search engines.

Simple enough

The first is really easy: be certain your Locations or Stores link is in your top level navigation, at the top of every page of your website. Don’t count on users finding it if you’ve stuck it in a box somewhere within your homepage layout. Many users will not be entering your website via the homepage and you want to deliver the link to find the store nearest them immediately. Don’t make them search for it.

Take care here

Ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your local landing pages requires a bit more thought, given that different store locator widgets are developed with different types of code. Google can crawl CSS, and they can typically crawl Javascript and AJAX. Hopefully, the widget you choose will facilitate your landing pages being properly indexed with no additional effort. But, to make this foolproof, here are additional things you can do:

1. Be sure you are linking from the Google My Business listing for each location to its respective landing page on the website.
2. Be sure your other citations also consistently link to the landing pages instead of to the homepage.
3. Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
4. Create a permanent sitemap on your website, that includes links to all of the landing pages.
5. On the main Locations page of the website, include an alphabetical directory of all locations with crawlable links. You can see an example of this at REI.com.
6. Eaing inbound links to these pages from third parties and, also, linking inteally to landing pages from other pages of the website or blog posts, where appropriate, are other forms of insurance that they will be discovered, crawled and indexed.

You say “local landing pages,” I say, “customer service!”

Comscore/Neustar Localeze have estimated that more than ½ of desktop local searches and more the ¾ of mobile local searches result in an offline purchase. The same study asserts that almost half of the searches surrounding services, restaurants and travel are performed by users looking for companies with whom they’ve never had any previous transactions.

In this lively scenario, the smart business will be that one which gets name, address, phone number and driving directions in front of the customer fast. The wiing business in a competitive environment may be the one which not only extends the courtesy of basic data to the customer, but which offers extra inducements (in the form of additional useful information) to be that customer’s choice.

Store locator widgets and local landing pages have become an established component of customer service. Properly implemented and developed, they may be the very first sign you give to a major percentage of your incoming customers that you are there to serve their needs. Serve them well!

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Note: this post is based on a recent presentation I gave at LeaInbound Dublin. You can find the slides here.

Mobile search as a topic has changed a lot over the past few years. When I first started looking at this, back in 2012, there was already a lot of discussion happening around the topic of mobile. And back then, the big question everyone was asking was, “what should my mobile strategy be?”

Even then, things were shifting. At one of my early conference presentations on the topic, I made the point that we should stop thinking about a “mobile strategy” as different from our web strategy, because mobile technology was becoming simply another way to access the Inteet. This isn’t surprising; after all, global purchases of smartphones are increasing at an exponential rate:

Source

And because of this, the questions we’re asking have changed.

• We used to ask whether we needed a separate mobile site (and it was around this time that Google really began to encourage the use of responsive design), whereas now “mobile-friendliness” often seems to be used interchangeably with “responsive.” (This is, of course, a whole other topic!)
• We used to worry about treating mobile users differently because we thought they were always “on the go,” whereas now we realize that most people use mobile devices all the time, and in fact most of the time these devices are used even when other options are available, such as at home or at work. And most recently, Google have started speaking in terms of “micro-moments,” the various use cases of search: Do-Go-Know-Buy, which apply equally to mobile users as to desktop.
• And we used to talk a lot about apps, and about whether to use an HTML web app vs a native app, how hard it was for the average app to stand out from all the noise in the app store, and about app store optimization (ASO) harking back to the old days of SEO, with its emphasis on keywords for ranking. Now, we talk about the other ways in which people can use and discover our apps — such as app indexation and app streaming.

This shift is hardly surprising, when you consider that, in 2015, 52% of UK inteet users have stated that mobile is their “preferred way to access the web” — up from only 24% in 2013. This means the number of people who view mobile as their primary web device has doubled in just 2 years, and we have every reason to believe that this trend with continue.

It just makes sense, because (as Benedict Evans recently wrote), “it’s actually the PC that has the limited, basic, cut-down version of the Inteet...it only has the web.”

Whereas our mobile devices have so much more information to draw on (photos, geolocation, friends, physical movement) and greater interactivity: with the exteal world (through technology like beacons), with you when you’re not using it (through notifications), and with your personal identity (because a phone is always signed-in and it is almost always an individual device rather than a shared one).

So what are the key ways in which we're seeing this shift in user behavior change our approach to SEO?

To answer that question, I’d like to focus on four key areas in which Google seems to be shifting its approach to mobile search, and some things we can do about it:

• Mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor
• Site speed and page load times
• Mobile-first design of SERPs
• App integration with web search

Mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor

In 2015, when Google first rolled out the Mobile-Friendliness Update (or “Mobilegeddon” as it was nicknamed), the impact was felt in two ways. More directly, by those sites which were impacted by the rollout — some sites lost up to 35% of their mobile rankings within the 1st month after the rollout — and indirectly, by the move towards mobile-friendliness in the lead up to the update. Google aounced that they saw a 4.7% increase in the number of mobile-friendly sites in the two months between aouncing that the update was coming and when it actually rolled out.

A new version of the update has recently rolled out, so we can expect to see further impact from this in the next few months.

What should we do about it?

The key action here is to ensure that your site passes the mobile-friendly test, and to check Google Search Console reports for mobile-specific errors.

Site speed and page load times

Hand in hand with the focus on mobile-friendliness, there is also a push towards improving site speed and page load times. This is particularly noticeable on editorial sites, where an ad-revenue business model leads to lots of different elements required to load a page, despite the actual content being fairly lightweight.

Google are not the only ones addressing this issue: Facebook Instant Articles and Apple Newsstand both use in-app versions of content pages to speed up the loading process, and some publishers have also created their own native apps to help solve this.

Google’s solution to this is their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), which allows publishers and creators of editorial content to build versions of their pages with stripped-back, skeleton HTML, following a set of rules which guarantee speed and force distribution (an important thing to be aware of if you choose to utilize this approach).

This set of rules allows the page to:

1. load quickly (speed), and
2. be cached by Google and served directly in the SERP (distribution).

Example (L–R): primary URL, AMP version on primary website, and AMP version cached by Google.

What should we do about it?

The first step is to decide whether AMP is relevant for you.

You should use AMP if:

• Google News is an important traffic source for you;
• You make a lot of content, particularly editorial content;
• You want wider distribution of your content;
• You have a high proportion of mobile traffic.

If this is a good approach for you, you can lea more about how to implement it here.

Mobile-first design of SERPs

This third key area is around Google making desktop search look and feel more like mobile search.

There are two major ways that this has happened:

1. The card-style layout, which makes the distribution of content easier on a variety of different screen sizes and types:

2. And the move to get rid of the sidebar ads on desktop search in favor of more ads at the top of the page (on “highly commercial” searches):

“Old” Google desktop SERP

“New” Google desktop SERP without sidebar ads

What should we do about it?

There’s not a huge amount that can be done to address this trend head-on. However, it’s important to ensure that, for these “highly commercial” SERPs, you are taking account of the changing SERP layout in your tracking and reporting.

In addition, you may want to shift some of your focus towards building out your top-of-fuel search strategy, to target less commercial keywords where you will have fewer paid ads to compete with.

App integration with web search

Google needs to find a way to integrate app content with the rest of the web, or they risk becoming irrelevant. The “walled garden” effect from having apps on your phone’s home screen, coupled with recent stats which show that around 85% of users’ time on their mobile devices is spent on apps rather than on the mobile web, means that apps present a very real threat to Google continuing to act as an intermediary between users and content discovery.

The solution for Google is to start indexing and serving app content in the web search results, and this is what they are trying to do with their work around app indexation and app streaming.

App indexation involves setting up your app so that the same http:// web link can be used to link to a page on your desktop site, its mobile version (responsive design or dynamic serving), and the equivalent content inside your app (deep linking). This allows Google to serve the most relevant version based on the context which they have around that particular user and how they prefer to use the web.

Image credit: http://searchengineland.com/app-indexing-matters-f...

In the longer-term, they seem to be moving towards the option of “app streaming,” which would allow a user to access app content without having the app installed on their device. The content would instead be served via Google search interface, again firmly positioning Google in the middle between the user and the content provider:

Example of app streaming in SERP

What should we do about it?

If you don’t already have an app, this may not be relevant to you. However, it is worth considering whether you should create one. To determine whether or not you should have an app, you can ask the following questions:

Would my app…

• Add convenience?
• Offer unique value?
• Provide social value?
• Offer incentives?
• Entertain?

If the answer is no to all of these, you probably don’t need an app.

If you do have an app, though, make sure that it supports http:// web links, and then head over to my post on app indexation for a walkthrough on how to set this up.

Where’s this all heading?

I believe that all of these trends are supporting a wider push by Google towards their goal of building the ultimate, intelligent personal assistant.

Sergey Brin stated in 2013: “My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually, you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all.”

This may seem impossible, but when you consider the implicit signals which Google is now able to access through the enhanced features on a mobile device, it seems less farfetched. Already, they are able to access data around:

• Search history
• Language
• Social coections
• Time of day
• Browser
• Device
• Location

And already, users are realizing that they can provide fewer contextual signals within their keyword search and the search engine will still know what they’re asking. In addition, the technologies are becoming more finely tuned and gathering more data all the time:

• wearables that can monitor physical activity and health signals (like heart rate),
• beacons which can pinpoint a location down to which side of the street you’re standing on, and
• phones which can tell whether you’re walking, ruing, cycling or riding in a car.

These are all signals which in the future could be used to determine the most relevant results to serve - potentially before you even ask.

When you combine all of these signals with the integration of the public index (what we currently think of as the Google search index), the private index (your emails, photos, calendar, etc) and app content, Google could have the ability to know as much about your day to day activities as any human PA. This means a single interface for all types of searches, and eventually, an intelligent personal assistant which can anticipate your next question before you ask it.

So maybe, instead of focusing just on keywords, or even topics, the next question we should start asking is: “How can I be the most useful source from a personal assistant app’s perspective?”

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If you’re interested in leaing more about these trends which are shaping the future of search, like implicit signals, the changing Google interface, intelligent personal assistants, beacons, wearables, and other new devices, and more, we’ve been writing and discussing our predictions over on the Distilled blog for our new #Searchscape project.

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How have you seen the mobile search landscape shift over time? Do you agree that it’s heading towards the development of intelligent personal assistants? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Idea!

You know you're supposed to write scaable copy. But do you know why?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
– Jakob Nielsen

Nope, it's not just that. Although the tiny fraction of attention readers have for your content is always important to keep in mind. But instead of another "write for the F-patte reader" article, let's dig into the psychological underpiings of how readers process information. You'll lea ways to make your content more memorable and how not to disenfranchise any audience members who struggle with legibility, however unintentional.

Don't worry; you don't have to immerse yourself in academic theories for the next three weeks. I've waded through those dusty tomes for you, and I'm here to report back on how readability actually works. I'll also suggest some implications for your content. This'll get a little wonky at times, but I hope you'll lea something from my research. I know I did.

These are the concepts I'll cover and where they fall on the legibility, readability, and comprehension spectrum:

1. Chunking (readability)
2. Word recognition (comprehension)
3. Universal design (legibility)

1. Chunking (readability)

In the field of user-experience design, ‘chunking’ usually refers to breaking up content into small, distinct units of information (or ‘chunks’), as opposed to presenting an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items.
– Kate Meyer

Chunking was first identified by George A. Miller in "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." While the article focuses on how many items we can hold in our memory, Miller goes on to suggest that we can remember more items if that information is properly separated out for us. For example, this string of numbers (even though it only contains eight digits):

is harder to understand or remember than this unforgettable number:

Those slashes help us parse the numbers into shorter (and more recognizable) units, which makes it easier to understand and remember the information.

The span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence of chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.
– George A. Miller

So when you're dividing up your web content with headers, images, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs, consider how those chunks of information are working for you. A listicle of the 100 greatest things about summer might be a lot more memorable if you subdivide that list with headers every 5–9 items. Likewise, if you write single-line-paragraph after single-line paragraph, your reader might get lost on the screen and miss something important. Instead, improve the readability of your content by varying the length of those paragraphs every so often.

2. Word recognition (comprehension)

That wasn't too painful, was it? This next concept, an area of research into psycholinguistics called the "cohort model," is a little harder to wade through, but since it speaks to our ability to comprehend information, I'm going to do my best to model that.

First, though, you might be thinking "psycho....what?" That's exactly the point. We're going to look at some incomprehensible content and then delve into how that affects readers. Then we'll consider how we can convey whatever information we need to and still keep people reading.

Faced with a paragraph like this:

The cohort model relies on a number of concepts in the theory of lexical retrieval. The lexicon is the store of words in a person's mind; it contains a person's vocabulary and is similar to a mental dictionary. A lexical entry is all the information about a word and the lexical storage is the way the items are stored for peak retrieval. Lexical access is the way that an individual accesses the information in the mental lexicon. A word's cohort is composed of all the lexical items that share an initial sequence of phonemes, and is the set of words activated by the initial phonemes of the word.
– Wikipedia

All but the most dedicated linguistics nerd would be lost inside that mouthful of incomprehensible information. I know I was. Not only were the concepts foreign, but I hadn't seen a lot of those words since college. So let me try to capture the gist:

The cohort model looks at the way we coect a spoken (or in the case of web content, written) word with meaning. The potential meanings for a word start out broad, based on the initial sound/letter. As we see or hear more of the word, the potential meanings narrow down until we can choose which word we are seeing or hearing.

We read so quickly that it's difficult to even recognize how our own reading happens. It's easier to think about a word we don't encounter every day like "psycholinguistics." The cohort model suggests our brains first pull out a list of words that start with "psy" and begin to narrow down what word we might be looking at:

As we read further into the word so that our brains have processed "psycho," the options narrow:

Note that although "psycho" could have been one of the words we initially thought of, by this point in our attempt to comprehend this word, we've likely also taken in the fact that the word is well over five letters.

As we process letters and sounds in reading "psycholinguistics," most of us will find that this is an unfamiliar word — that it does not match up to any word already in our lexicon — and so our brains look for alteate ways to comprehend its meaning. In this case, we'd likely break it down into the most familiar component parts: "psycho" and "linguistics." We might still not fully comprehend the word, but we have two possible meanings: 1. something related to both psychology and linguistics, or 2. the linguistics of a psychopath. One of these is more likely than the other...

So why do you care?

Stop words

In this case, it's easy to see how using unfamiliar terminology (or overly jargon-y terms like "terminology" when I mean "words") slows the reader down. Using these kinds of stop words might even stop a reader entirely and lead them to close your tab and move on to the next site.

Ambiguity

Ambiguous words, or those with more than one meaning, might be expected to cause difficulties in lexical processing.
– Treiman et al.

That's just another way of saying that you can slow a reader down by using words that have more than one meaning.

Even very short words can be ambiguous.

Context clues do help with comprehension, but if your goal is to convert a reader to a customer, there's no reason to make them think harder than they have to about your copy. So unless you have the linguistic command of a poet and are slowing readers down on purpose, think carefully about possible misunderstandings when you use ambiguous words.

Multiple meanings

Processing a polysemous word in one of its senses can make it harder to subsequently comprehend the word in another of its senses.
– Treiman et al.

"Polysemous" simply means "having multiple meanings" and it can contribute to the ambiguity we just discussed. But the point here is that if you first use a polysemous word like "bank" in one context, you should carefully consider whether and how to use that word again.

Because we all want to be able to bank on our bank, but sometimes customers would rather throw it over a bank.

Have trouble moving from one meaning to the next in that last sentence? Me too, and I wrote it.

3. Universal design (legibility)

Legibility can feel like the one aspect of intelligibility that we writers have the least control over (at least on the web). It's rare for us to get asked what font to use or how the color of our text should contrast with the background.

But legibility is important to accessibility. To borrow the universal design principle from architecture, if we design our sites (and our content) to be legible by all, we're removing potential blockers for all readers. Felicia, the tireless editor of the Moz Blog, is in talks with our UX crew about making our blog more accessible overall. Having worked at an organization that loved the look of light blue links against grey (and tiny) text, it's something I wish more sites thought about.

I'm only picking on AIA Seattle because I was party to some of the website redesign discussions there where members mentioned this very issue. Not only is there very little contrast in color between the links and text, but the links in the left nav are gray while those on the rest of the page are blue. I'd show you their redesigned page, but now you have to hover over text to even see if it's a link. Instead, take a quick look at the page for the national AIA:

Writers can help! As Laura Lippay wrote last week for the Moz Blog, by creating and implementing effective title tags, we can improve navigation for people with vision, memory, and mobility impairments. Properly structured headings, something we're using for readability anyway, also help with navigation.

Having recently had a baby, I'm finally starting to empathize with readers who are sleep-deprived, having trouble seeing, reading in a second (or third) language, or in a screaming rush. Not to mention people who are dyslexic, grew up in crappy school districts, or are naturally much more gifted in some other area of life than reading.

I hope these investigations into readability, comprehension, and legibility can help you create better copy. Your audience is counting on you. And by creating easily intelligible content, you just might keep them around long enough to convert.