Sampling is a process used in statistics when it's unfeasible or impractical to analyse all the data that exists. Instead, a small, randomly selected subset is used to keep things manageable. Many analytics platforms use some sort of sampling to keep report loading times in check, and there seem to be three schools of thought when it comes to sampling in analytics. There are those who are terrified of it, insisting in unsampled versions of any report. Then there are those who are relaxed about it, trusting the statistical logic. And then, lastly, there are those who are oblivious.

All three are misguided.

Sampling isn't something to fear, but, in Google Analytics in particular, it can't always be trusted. Because of that, it's definitely worth your time to understand when it occurs, how it affects your work, and how it can be avoided.

When it happens

You can always tell when sampling is being used, because of this line at the top of every report:

If the percentage is less than 100%, then sampling is in progress. You'll notice above that I've produced a report based on more than half a billion sessions without any sampling — sampling isn't just about the sheer number of sessions involved in a report. It's about the complexity of what you're asking the platform to report on. Contrast the below (apologies for the small screenshots; I wanted to make sure the whole context was included, so have added captions explaining just what you're looking at):

No segment applied, report based on 100% of sessions

Segment applied, report based on 0.17% of sessions

The two are identical apart from the use of a segment in the second case. Google Analytics can always provide unsampled data for top-line totals like that first case, but segments in particular are very prone to prompting sampling.

The exact same level of sampling can also be induced through use of a secondary dimension:

Secondary dimension applied, report based on 0.17% of sessions

A few other specialised reports are also prone to this level of sampling, most notably:

• The Ecommerce Overview
• "Flow Reports"

Report based on 0.17% of sessions

Report based on <0.1% of sessions

To summarise so far, sampling can happen when we use:

• A segment
• More than one dimension
• Certain detailed reports (including Ecommerce Overview and AdWords Campaigns)
• "Flow" reports

The accuracy of sampling

Sampling, for the most part, is actually pretty reliable. Take the below two numbers for organic traffic over the same period, one taken from a tiny 0.17% sample, and one taken without sampling:

Report based on 0.17% of sessions, reports 303,384,785 sessions via organic

Report based on 100% of sessions, reports 296,387,352 sessions via organic

The difference is just 2.4%, from a sample of 0.17% of actual sessions. Interestingly, when I repeated this comparison over a shorter period (last quarter), the size of the sample went up to 71.3%, but the margin of error was fairly similar at 2.3%.

It's worth noting, of course, that the deeper you dig into your data, the smaller the effective sample becomes. If you're looking at a sample of 1% of data and you notice a landing page with 100 sessions in a report, that's based on 1 visit — simply because 1 is 1% of 100. For example, take the below:

Report based on 45 sessions

Eight percent of a whole year's traffic to Distilled is a lot, but 8% of organic traffic to my profile page is not, so we end up viewing a report (above) based on 45 visits. Whether or not this should conce you depends on the size of the changes you're looking to detect and your threshold for acceptable levels of uncertainty. These topics will be familiar to those with experience in CRO, but I recommend this tool to get your started, and I've written about some of the key concepts here.

In extreme cases like the one above, though, your intuition should suffice - that click-through from my /about/ page to /resources/...tup-guide/ claims to feature in 12 sessions, and is based on 8.11% of sessions. As 12 is roughly 8% of 100, we know that this is in fact based on 1 session. Not something you'd want to base a strategy on.

If any of the above conces you, then I've some solutions later in this post. Either way, there's one more thing you should know about. Check out the below screenshot:

Report based on 100% of sessions, but "All Users" only accounts for 38.81% "of Total"

There's no sampling here, but the number displayed for "All Users" in fact only contains 38.8% of sessions. This is because of the combination of there being more than 1,000,000 rows (as indicated by the yellow "high-cardinality" waing at the top of the report) and the use of a segment. This is because of the effect of those rows grouped into "(other)", which are hidden when a segment is active. Regardless of any sampling, the numbers in the rows below will be as accurate as they would be otherwise (apart from the fact that "(other)" is missing), but the segment totals at the top end up of limited use.

So, we've now gone over:

• Sampling is generally pretty accurate (+/- 2.5% in the examples above).
• When you're looking at small numbers in reports with a high level of sampling, you can work out how many reports they're based on.
  • For example, 1% sampling showing 100 sessions means 1 session was the basis of the number in the report.
• You should keep an eye out for that yellow high-cardinality waing when also using segments.

What you can do about it

Often it's possible to recreate the key data you want in alteative ways that do not trigger sampling. Mainly this means avoiding segments and secondary dimensions. For example, if we wanted to view the session counts for the top organic landing pages, we might ordinarily use the Landing Pages report and apply a segment:

Landing Pages report with Organic Traffic segment, based on 71.27% of sessions

In the above report, I've simply applied a segment to the landing pages report, resulting in sampling. However, I can get the same data unsampled — in the below case, I've instead gone to the "Chaels" report and clicked on "Organic Search" in the report:

Chaels > Organic Search report, with primary dimension "Landing Page", based on 100% of sessions

This takes me to a report where I'm only looking at organic search sessions, and I can pick a primary dimension of my choice — in this case, Landing Page. It's worth noting, however, that this trick does not function reliably — when I replicated the same method starting from the "Source / Medium" report, I still ended up with sampling.

A similar trick applies to custom segments — if I wanted to create a segment to show me only visits to certain landing pages, I could instead write a regex advanced filter to replicate the functionality with less chance of sampling:

Lastly, there are a few more extreme solutions. Firstly, you can create duplicate views, then apply view-level filters, to replicate segment functionality (permanently for that view):

Secondly, you can use the API and Google Sheets to break up a report into smaller date ranges, then aggregate them. My colleague Tian Wang wrote about that tool here.

Lastly, there's GA Premium, which for a not inconsiderable cost, gets you this button:

So lastly, here's how you can avoid sampling:

• You can construct reports differently to avoid segments or secondary dimensions and thus reduce the chance of sampling being triggered.
• You can create duplicate views to show you subsets of your data that you'd otherwise have to view sampled.
• You can use the GA API to request large numbers of smaller reports then aggregate them in Google Sheets.
• For larger businesses, there's always the option of GA Premium to receive unsampled reports.

Discussion

I hope you've found this post useful. I'd love to read your thoughts and suggestions in the Idea below.

There are lots of myths and misconceptions surrounding the subject of inteational SEO. I recently gave a Mozinar on this; I'd like to share the basis of that talk in written form here. Let’s first explore why inteational SEO is so confusing, then dive into some of the most common myths. By the end of this article, you should have a much clearer understanding of how inteational SEO works and how to apply the proper strategies and tactics to your website.

One common trend is the lack of clarity around the subject. Let's dig into that:

Why is inteational SEO so confusing?

There are several reasons:

• Not everyone reads Google Webmaster Guidelines and has a clear understanding of how they index and rank inteational content.
• Guidelines vary among search engines, such as Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and Google.
• Guidelines change over time, so it’s difficult to keep up with changes and adapt your strategy accordingly.
• It’s difficult to implement best practices on your own site. There are many technical and strategic considerations that can conflict with business needs and competing priorities. This makes it hard to test and find out what works best for your site(s).

A little history

Let's explore the reasons behind the lack of clarity on inteational SEO a bit further. Looking at its development over the years will help you better understand the reasons why it's confusing, laying some groundwork for the myth-busting that is about to come. (Also, I was a history major in college, so I can’t help but think in terms of timelines.)

Please note: This timeline is constructed almost entirely on Google Webmaster blog aouncements. There are a few notes in here about Bing and Yandex, but it's mostly focused on Google and isn't meant to be a comprehensive timeline. Mostly this is for illustrative purposes.

2006–2008

Our story begins in 2006. In 2006 and 2007, things are pretty quiet. Google makes a few aouncements, the biggest being that webmasters could use geo-targeting settings within Webmaster Tools. They also clarify some of the signals they use for detecting the relevance of a page for a particular market: ccTLDs, and the IP of a server.

2009

In 2009, Bing reveals its secret sauce, which includes ccTLDs, reverse IP lookup, language of body content, server location, and location of backlinks.

2010

In 2010, things start to get really exciting. Google reveals some of the other hints that they use to detect geo-targeting, presents the pros and cons of the main URL structures that you can use to set up your inteational sites, and gives loads of advice about what you should or shouldn’t do on your site. Note that just about the same time that Google says they ignore the meta language tag, Bing says that they do use that tag.

Then, in fall of 2010, hreflang tags are introduced to the world. Until this, there was no standard page-level tag to tell a search engine what country or language you were specifically targeting.

2011

Originally, hreflang tags were only meant to help Google sort out multi-regional pages (that is, pages in the same language that target different countries). Only, in 2011, Google expands hreflang tag support to work across languages as well. Also during this time, Google removes the requirement to use canonical tags in conjunction with hreflang tags, citing they want to simplify the process.

2012

Then in 2012, hreflang tags are supported in XML sitemaps (not just page tags). Also, the Google Inteational Help Center is created, with a bunch of useful information for webmasters.

2013

In 2013, the concept of the "x-default" hreflang tag is introduced, and we lea that Yandex is also supporting hreflang tags. This same year, Bing adds geo-targeting functionality to Bing Webmaster Tools, a full 5 years after Google did.

2014

Note that it isn’t until 2014 that Google begins including hreflang tag reporting within Google Webmaster Tools. Up until that point, webmasters would have had to read about hreflang tags somewhere else to know that they exist and should be used for geo-targeting and language-targeting purposes. Hreflang tags become much more prominent after this change.

2015

In 2015, we see improvements to locale-adaptive crawling, and some clarity on the importance of server location.

To sum up, this timeline shows several trends:

• Hreflang tags were super confusing at first
• There were several iterations to improve hreflang tag recommendations between 2011 and 2013
• Hreflang tag reporting was only added to Google Search Console in 2014
• Even today, only Google and Yandex support hreflang. Bing and the other major search engines still do not.

There are good reasons for why webmasters and SEO professionals have misconceptions and questions about how best to approach inteational SEO.

At least 25% of hreflang tags are incorrect

Let’s look at the adoption of hreflang tags specifically. According to NerdyData, 1.7 million sites have at least one hreflang tag.

I did a quick search to find out:

438,417 sites have hreflang=“uk”

7,829 sites have hreflang=“en-uk”

Both of these tags are incorrect. The correct ISO code for the United Kingdom is actually gb, not uk. Plus, you can't target by country alone — you have to target by language-country pairs or by language. Thus, just writing “uk” is incorrect as well.

That means at least 25% of hreflang tags are incorrect, and I only did a brief search to find a couple of the most commonly mistaken ones. You can imagine just how many sites out there are getting these hreflang values wrong.

All of this is to prove a point: the field is ripe for optimization when it comes to global SEO. Now, let’s debunk some myths!

Myth #1: I need to have multiple websites in order to rank around the world.

There's a lot of talk about needing ccTLDs or separate websites for your inteational content. (A ccTLD is a country-coded top-level domain, such as example.ca, which is country-coded for Canada).

However, it is possible for your website to rank in multiple locations around the world. You don't necessarily need multiple websites or sub-domains to rank inteationally; in many cases, you can work within the confines of your current domain.

In fact, if you take a look at your analytics on your website, even if it has no geo-targeting whatsoever, chances are you already have traffic coming in from various languages and countries.

Many global brands have only one site, using subfolders for their multilingual or multi-regional content. Don't feel that inteational SEO is beyond your reach because you believe it requires multiple websites. You may only need one!

The most important thing to remember when deciding whether you need separate websites is that new websites will start with zero authority. You will have to fight an uphill battle to build authority for establish and rank those new ccTLDs — and for some companies, organic traffic growth may be for many years after launching ccTLDs. Now, this is not to say that ccTLDs are not a good option. But you just need to keep this in mind that they are not the only option.

Myth #2: "The best site structure for inteational rankings is _________."

There's a lot of debate about what the best site structure is for inteational rankings. Is it subfolders? Subdomains? ccTLDs?

Some people swear by ccTLDs, saying that in some markets users prefer to buy from local sites, resulting in higher click-through rates. Others champion subdomains or sub-directories.

There is no one answer to the best inteational site structure. You can dominate using any of these options. I've seen websites of all site structures dominate in their verticals. However, there are certain advantages and disadvantages to each, so it's best to research your options and decide which is best for you.

Google has published their pros and cons breakdown of the URL structures you can use for inteational targeting. There are 4 options listed here:

• Country-specific, aka ccTLDs
• Subdomains
• Subdirectories with gTLDs (generic top-level domains, like .com or .org)
• URL parameters. These are not recommended.

Subdirectories with gTLDs have the added benefit of consolidating domain authority, while subdomains and ccTLDs have the disadvantage of making it harder to build up domain authority. In my opinion, subdomains are the least advantageous of the 3 options because they do not have the distinct advantage of geo-targeting that ccTLDs do, and they don’t have the advantage of a consolidated backlink profile that subdirectories do.

The most important thing to think about is what’s best for your business. Consider whether you want to target at a language level or a country level. Then decide how much effort you want (or can) put behind building up domain authority to your new domains.

Or, for those who are more visual leaers:

• ccTLDs are a good option if you’re Godzilla. If branding isn’t a problem for you, if you have your own PR, if building up domain authority and handling multiple domains is no big deal, then ccTLDs are a good way to go.
• Subdirectories are a good option if you’re MacGuyver. You’re able to get the job done using only what you’ve got.
• Subdomains are a good option if you’re Wallace and Gromit. Somehow, everything ends well despite the many bumps in the road.

I researched the accuracy of each type of site structure. First, I looked at Google Analytics data and SEMRush data to find out what percentage of the time the correct landing page URL was ranking in the correct version of Google. I did this for 8 brands and 30 sites in total, so my sample size was small, and there are many other factors that could skew the accuracy of this data. But it's interesting all the same. ccTLDs were the most accurate, followed by subdirectories, and then subdomains. ccTLDs can be very effective because they give very clear, unambiguous geo-targeting signals to search engines.

However, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. You need to take a cold, hard look at your business and consider things like:

• Marketing budget you have available for each locale
• Crawl bandwidth and crawl budget available for your site
• Market research: which locales should you target?
• Costs associated with localization and site maintenance
• Site performance conces
• Overall business objectives

As SEOs, we're responsible for forecasting how realistically our websites will be able to grow and improve in terms of domain authority. If you believe your website can gain fantastic link authority and your team can manage the work involved in handling multiple websites, then you can consider ccTLDs (but whichever site structure you choose will be effective). But if your team will struggle under the added burden of developing and maintaining multiple (localized!) content efforts to drive traffic to your varied sites, then you need to slow down and perhaps start with subdirectories.

Myth #3: I can duplicate my website on separate ccTLDs or geo-targeted sub-folders & each will rank in their respective Googles.

This myth refers to taking a site, duplicating it exactly, and then putting it on another domain, subdomain, or subfolder for the purposes of geo-targeting.

And when I say "in their respective Googles," I mean the country-specific versions of Google (such as google.co.uk, where searchers in the United Kingdom will typically begin a search).

You can duplicate your site, but it's kind of pointless. Duplication does not give you an added boost; it gives you added cruft. It reduces your crawl budget if you have all that content on one domain. It can be expensive and often ineffective to host your site duplicated across multiple domains. There will be caibalization.

Often I'll see a duplicate ccTLD get outranked by its .com sister in its local version of Google. For example, say a site like example.co.uk is a mirror of example.com, and the example.com outranks the example.co.uk site in google.co.uk. This is because geo-targeting is outweighed by the domain authority of the .com. We saw in an earlier chart that ccTLDs can be the most accurate for showing the right content in the right version of Google, but that's because those sites had a good spread of link authority among each of their ccTLDs, as well as localized content.

There's a big difference between the accuracy of ccTLDs when they're localized and when they are dupes. I did some research using the SEMRush API, looking at 3 brands using ccTLDs in 26 country versions of Google, where the .com outranked the ccTLD 42 times. You shouldn’t just host your site mirrored across multiple ccTLDs just for the heck of it; it's only effective if you can localize each one.

To sum it up: Avoid simply duplicating your site if you can. The more you can do to localize and differentiate your sites, the better.

Myth #4: Geo-targeting in Search Console will be enough for search engines to understand and rank my content correctly.

Geo-targeting your content is not enough. Like we covered in the last example, if you have two pages that are exactly the same and you geo-target them in Search Console, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those two pages will show up in the correct version of Google. Note that this doesn’t mean you should neglect geo-targeting in Google Search Console (or Bing or Yandex Webmaster Tools) — you should definitely use those options. However, search engines use a number of different clues to help them handle inteational content, and geo-targeting settings do not trump those other signals.

Search engines have revealed what some of the inteational ranking factors they use are. Here are some that have been confirmed:

• Translated content of the page
• Translated URLs
• Local links from ccTLDs
• NAP info — this could also include local currencies and links to Google My Business profiles
• Server location*

*Note that I included server location in this list, but with a caveat — we’ll talk more about that in a bit.

You need to take into account all of these factors, and not just some of them.

Myth #5: Why reinvent the wheel? There are multinational companies who have invested millions in R&D — just copy what they do.

The problem here is that large multinational companies don't always prioritize SEO. They make SEO mistakes all the time. It's a myth that you should look to Fortune 500 websites or top e-commerce websites to see how they structure their website— they don't always get it right. Imitation may be the best form of flattery, but it shouldn’t replace careful thought.

Besides, what the multinational companies do in terms of site structure and SEO differs widely. So if you were to copy a large brand’s site structure, which should you copy? Apple, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Ikea…?

Myth #6: Using URL parameters to indicate language is OK.

Google recommends against this, and from my experience, it's definitely best to avoid URL parameters to indicate language or region.

What this looks like in the wild is:

http://www.example.com?language=english

or

http://www.example.com/example/?lang=en

...where the target language or region of the page changes depending on the parameter. The problem is that parameters aren't dependable. Sometimes they'll be indexed, sometimes not. Search engines prefer unique URLs.

Myth #7: I can just proxy localized content into my existing URLs.

In this situation, a website will use the IP address or the Accept-Lang header of a user to detect their location or browser language preference, then change the content of the page based on that information. So the URL stays the same, but the content changes.

Google and Bing have clearly said they don't like parameters and recommend keeping one language on one URL. Proxied content, content served by a cookie, and side-by-side translations all make it very problematic for search engines to index a page in one language. Search engines will appear to crawl from all over the world, so they'll get conflicting messages about the content of a page.

Basically, you always want to have 1 URL = 1 version of a page.

Google has improved and will continue to improve its locale-aware crawling. As of early 2015, they aounced that Googlebot will crawl from a number of IP addresses around the world, not just the US, and will use the Accept-Lang header to see if your website is locale-adaptive and changing the content of the page depending on the user. But in the same breath, they made it very clear this technology is not perfect, this does not replace the recommendation for using hreflang, and they still recommend you NOT use locale-adaptive content.

Myth #8: Adding hreflang tags will help my multinational content rank better.

Hreflang tags are one of the most powerful tools in the inteational SEO toolbox. They're foundational to a successful inteational SEO strategy. However, they're not meant to be a ranking factor. Instead, they're intended to ensure the correct localized page is shown in the correct localized version of Google.

In order to get hreflang tags right, you have to follow the documentation exactly. With hreflang, there is no margin for error. Make sure to use the correct language (in ISO 639-1 format) and country codes (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) when selecting the values for your hreflang tags.

Hreflang requirements:

• Exact ISO codes for language, and for language-country if you target by country
• Retu tags
• Self-referential tags
• Point to correct URLs
• Include all URLs in an hreflang group
• Use page tags or XML sitemaps, preferably not both
• Use HTTP headers for PDFs, etc.

Be sure to check your Google Search Console data regularly to make sure no retu tag errors or other errors have been found. A retu tag error is when Page A has an hreflang tag that points to Page B, but Page B doesn't have an hreflang tag pointing back to Page A. That means the entire hreflang association for that group of pages won't work, and you'll see retu tag errors for those pages in Google Search Console.

Either the page tagging method or the XML hreflang sitemap method work well. For some sites, an XML sitemap can be advantageous because it eliminates the need for code bloat with page tags. Whichever implementation allows you to add hreflang tags programmatically is good. There are tools on the market to assist with page tagging, if you use one of the popular CMS platforms.

Here are some tools to help you with hreflang:

Myth #9: I can’t use a canonical tag on a page with hreflang tags.

When it comes to hreflang tags AND canonical tags, many eyes glaze over. This is where things get really confusing. I like to keep it super simple.

The simplest thing is to keep all your canonical tags self-referential. This is a standard SEO best practice anyways. Regardless of whether you have hreflang tags on a page, you should be implementing self-referential canonical tags.

Myth #10: I can use flag icons on my site to indicate the site’s language.

Flags are not languages — there's even a whole website dedicated to talking about this common myth: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com. It has many examples of sites that mistakenly use flag icons to indicate languages.

For example, the UK's Union Jack doesn't represent all speakers of English in the world. Thanks to the course of history, there are at least 101 countries in the world where English is a common tongue. A flag of a country to represent speakers of a language is very off-putting for any users who speak the language but aren't from that country.

Here's an example where flag icons are used to indicate language. A better (and more creative) approach is to replace the flag icons with localized greetings:

If you have a multi-lingual site(s), you should not use flags to represent language. Instead, use the name of the language, written in the local language. English should be “English,” Spanish should be “Español,” German should be “Deutsch,” etc. You’d be surprised how many websites forget to use localized language or country spellings.

Myth #11: I can get away with automated translations.

The technology for automated translations or machine translations has been improving in recent years, but it's still better to avoid automated translations, especially machine translation that involves no human editing.

Automatic translations can be inaccurate and off-putting. They can hurt a website trying to rank in a competitive landscape. A great way to get an edge on your competitors is to use professional, high-quality native translators to localize your content into your target languages. High-quality localization is one of the key factors in improving your rankings when it comes to inteational SEO.

If you have a very large amount of content that you caot afford to translate, choose some of the most important content for human translation, such as your main category and product pages.

Myth #12: Whichever site layout and user experience works best in our core markets should be rolled out across all our markets.

This is something I’ve seen happen on many, many sites, and it was part of the reason why eBay failed in China.

Porter Erisman tells the story in his book Alibaba’s World, which I highly recommend. He spoke of how, when eBay and Alibaba were duking it out in China, eBay made the decision to apply its Weste UX principles to its Chinese site.

In Alibaba’s World, Erisman writes about how eBay “eliminated localized features and functions that Chinese Inteet users enjoyed and forced them to use the same platform that had been popular in the US and Germany. Most likely, eBay executives figured that because the platform had thrived in more industrialized markets, its technology and functionality must be superior to a platform from a developing country.

"Chinese users preferred Alibaba’s Taobao platform over eBay, because it had an interface that Chinese users were used to – cute icons, flashing animations, and had a chat feature that coected customers with sellers. In the West, bidding starts low and ends high, but Chinese users preferred to haggle with sellers, who would start their bids high and end low."

From this story, you can tell how localization — in terms of site design, UX, and holistic business strategy — can be of tantamount importance.

Here is an example of Lush’s Japanese site, which has bright colors, a lot going on, and it’s almost completely localized into Japanese. Also notice the chat box in the bottom right:

Now compare that to the Lush USA site. There's a lot more white space here, fewer tiles, and the chat box is only a small button on the right sidebar. They’ve taken the effort to adjust layout according to how they want to express their brand to each market, rather than just replacing tiles in the same CMS layout with localized tiles. Yet, in both markets they have many elements that are similar, too. They're a good example of keeping a unified global brand while leaving plenty of room for local expression.

The key to success inteationally is localizing your online presence while at the same time having a unified global brand. From an SEO perspective, you should make sure there's a logical organization to your global URLs so that localized content can be geo-targeted by subdirectory, subdomain, or domain. You should focus on getting hreflang tags right, etc. But you should also work with a content strategy team to make sure that there will be room for trans-creation of content, as well as with a UX design team to make sure that localized content can be showcased appropriately.

Design, UX, site architecture — all of these things play increasingly important roles in SEO. By localizing your design, you're reducing duplicate content and you're potentially improving your site engagement metrics (and by corollary, your clickstream data).

Things that an SEO definitely wants to localize are:

• URLs
• Meta titles & descriptions
• Navigation labels
• Headings
• Image file names, inteal anchor text, & alt text
• Body content

Make sure to focus on keyword variations between countries, even within the same language. For example, there are differences in names and spellings for many things in the UK versus the US. A travel agency might describe their tours to a British audience as "tailor-made, bespoke holidays," while they would tell their American audience they sell "customized vacation packages." If you used the same keywords to target all countries that share a common tongue, you'd be losing out on the ability to choose the best keywords for each country. Take this into account when considering your keyword optimization.

Myth #13: We can just use IP sniffing and auto-redirect users to the right place. We don’t need hreflang tags or any type of geo-targeting.

A lot of sites use some form of automatic redirection, detecting the user’s IP address and redirecting them to another website or to a different page on their site that's localized for their region. Another common practice is to use the Accept-Language header to detect the user’s browser language preference, redirecting users to localized content that way.

However, Google recommends against automatic redirection. It can be inaccurate, can prevent users and search engines from indexing your whole site, and can be frustrating for users when they're redirected to a page they don't want. In fact, hreflang aotations, when correctly added to all your localized content and correctly cross-referenced, should eliminate or greatly reduce the need for any auto-redirection. You should avoid automatic redirection as much as possible.

Here are all the reasons (that I can think of) why you shouldn’t do automatic redirection:

• User agents like Googlebot may have a hard time reading all versions of your page if you keep redirecting them.
• IP detection can be inaccurate.
• Multiple countries can have multiple official languages.
• Multiple languages can be official in multiple countries.
• Server load time can be negatively affected by having to add in all these redirects.
• Shared computers between spouses, children, etc., could have different language preferences.
• Expats and travelers may try to access a website that assumes they're locals, making it frustrating for the users to switch languages.
• Inteet cafes, hotel computer centers, and school computer labs may have diverse users.
• The user prefers to browse in one language, but make transactions in another. For example, many citizens are fluent in English, and will search in English if they think they can get better results that way. But when it comes to the checkout process, especially when reading legalese, they will prefer to switch to their native language.
• A person sends a link to a friend, but that friend lives in a different place, and can't see the same thing as her friend sees.

Instead, a much better user experience is to provide a small, unobtrusive baer that appears when you detect a user may find another portion of your site more relevant. TripAdvisor and Amazon do a great job of this. Here's an image from Google Webmaster Blog that exemplifies how to do this well:

One exception to the never-use-auto-redirection rule is that, when a user selects a country and/or language preference on your site, you should store that preference in a cookie and redirect the user to their preferred locale whenever they visit your site in the future. Make sure that they can set a new preference any time, which will re-set the cookie preference.

On that note, also always make sure to have a country and/or language selector on your website that's located on every page and is easy for users to see and for search engine bots to crawl.

Myth #14: I need local servers to host my global content.

Many website owners believe they need local servers in order to rank well abroad. This is because Google and Bing clearly stated that local servers were an important inteational ranking factor in the past.

However, Google confirmed last year that local server signals are not as important as they once were. With the rise in popularity of CDNs, local servers are generally not necessary. You definitely need a local server for hosting sites in China, and it may be useful in some other markets like Japan. It’s always good to experiment. But as a general rule, what you need is a good CDN that will serve up content to your target markets quickly.

Myth #15: I can’t have multi-country targeted content that’s all in the same language, because then I'd incur a duplicate content penalty.

This myth is bo from an underlying fear of duplicate content. Something like 30% of the web contains some dupe content (according to a recent RavenTools study). Duplicate content is a fact of life on the web. You have to do something spammy with that duplicate content, such as create doorway pages or scrape content, in order to incur a penalty.

Geo-targeted, localized content is not spammy or manipulative. There are valid business reasons for wanting to have very similar content geared for different users around the world. Matt Cutts confirmed that you will not incur a penalty for having similar content across multiple ccTLDs.

The reality is, you CAN have multi-country targeted content in the same language. It’s just that you need to combine hreflang tags + localization in order to get it right. Here are some ways to avoid duplicate content problems:

• Use hreflang tags
• Localized keyword optimization
• Adding in local info such as telephone numbers, currencies, addresses in schema markup, and Google My Business profiles
• Localized HTML sitemaps
• Localized navigation and home page features that cater to specific audiences.
• Localized images that resonate with the audience. American football, for example, is not very popular outside the US. Also, be mindful of holidays around the world and of current events.
• Transcreated content (where you take an idea and tailor it for a specific locale), rather than translation (which is more word-for-word than concept-for-concept)
• Obtain links from local ccTLDs pointing to your localized content

As you can see, there are many common myths surrounding inteational SEO, but hopefully you've gained some clarity and feel better equipped to build a great global site strategy. I believe inteational SEO will continue to be of growing interest, as globalization is a continuing trend. Cross-border e-commerce is booming — Facebook and Google are looking at emerging markets in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, where more and more people are going online and getting comfortable buying online.

Inteational SEO is ripe for optimization — so you, as SEO experts, are in a very good position if you understand how to set your website up for inteational SEO success.

Any old picture might be worth a thousand words. But your target niche doesn’t need or want a thousand words. Your ideal audience needs the right words, paired with the right images, to tell a story that uniquely appeals to their deepest desires.

Studies show that people understand images faster than words, remember them longer, and if there’s a discrepancy between what we see and what we hear, our brains will choose to believe what they see. Our brains prioritize visual information over any other kind, which makes images the fast-track to coection all marketers are looking for.

So don’t just slap some text on a stock photo and call it good. You can do better. Much better. And I'll show you how.

Understand the symbolic underpiings

This homepage from Seer Interactive does a lot right. The copy below this central image is golden: "We’re Seer. We pride ourselves on outcaring the competition." Outcaring? That’s genius!

But, I would argue, pairing this image with these words, "It’s not just marketing, it’s personal," is less than genius. There’s nothing personal about this picture. Sure, there are people in it, but chatting with a group of coworkers doesn’t say "personal" to me. It says corporate.

What if they paired those words with this free image by Greg Rakozy from Unsplash?

There’s something about this image that isn’t just personal; it’s intimate. Two people coecting in the dark, surrounded by snowflakes that almost look like white noise. Could this be a metaphor for reaching out through the noise of the Inteet to make a personal coection? To get someone to fall in love (with your brand) even?

A truly powerful image speaks to us on a symbolic level, feeding us information by intuition and association. Humans are associative creatures. We naturally derive deep, multifaceted meanings from visual cues, an idea brought into prominence by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

The magic behind an effective symbol is its ability to deliver messages to both our conscious minds and subconscious awareness. When choosing the right image for marketing copy — whether an ad or the "hero" section of your website — consider not just what you want to tell people, but what you want them to feel.

And, of course, as you're looking through images, consider this:

What type of images and experiences will resonate with your target audience’s deepest desires?

This, of course, requires you to have built out a robust buyer persona that includes not just their demographic information with a catchy name but also their extracurricular passions: the driving forces that get them out of bed and into the office each day.

As with conversion copywriting, the key to success is identifying motivations and using them to create a visual representation of your niche’s most desired outcomes.

Set the stage for an experience, not just a product

In keeping with the theme of images that deliver the desired outcome, the most effective online ads do this in a way that invites the viewer to experience that outcome. Instead of featuring simply a product, for example, these ads set the stage for the experience that buying the product just might enable you to have.

ModCloth is a master of this. Doesn’t this image make you want to take a nap in a nice, cozy cabin? You can get that experience (or something like it) if you buy their $200 hammock.

Unless you live in the deep woods of the Appalachian mountains, your home will never look like this. But some of us wish ours did, and we're clearly the target audience. This picture speaks to our deepest need to get away from everyone and everything for some much-needed rest and recuperation.

When choosing images, it's just as important to consider symbolism as it is to consider the target viewers. What experience will resonate with them most? What images will sell their desired experiences?

ModCloth’s recent "road trip" slider doesn’t say anything about the clothes they’re trying to sell, for example. But it does speak to a sense of adventure and the power of female friendships, both of which are defining characteristics of their target niche of milleial women with a delightfully quirky fashion sense.

You don’t have to be a clothing company to capitalize on this idea or even a B2C company. Check out how these B2B companies use images to make their words not just read, but felt.

Don’t you feel like you’re Superman out for a midnight joyride? All the world at your fingertips? Yeah, that’s the point. What they’re selling, essentially, is omniscience via data. All the benefits of DC Comics-like superpowers, minus the kryptonite.

You might not catch it at first glance, but look at how cozy these people are. They’re wearing knit sweaters (not suits) while cradling warm cappuccinos in their hands — clearly, this sales meeting is going well. No pressure tactics here. Quite the opposite.

For this example from Blitz Marketing, you’ll have to visit their website, because this isn’t a static image — it’s a video montage designed to get you PUMPED! Energy practically radiates off the screen (which, we are left to infer, is the feeling you’d get all the time if you worked with this creative marketing agency).

Piston, another ad agency, takes a more subtle approach, which I love. Instead of having your standard stock photo of "man in a suit," they did a custom photo shoot and added quirky elements, like a pink candy ring. I find this image particularly powerful because it effectively sets up an expectation (man in a suit), then adds a completely unexpected element (candy ring), which is conveniently located behind the word CREATIVE. This illustrates just how creative this agency is while remaining utterly professional.

Numbers are compelling. Numbers with visual aids? Unstoppable.

Let’s say your buyer persona isn’t driven by emotion. Show this persona a grid of city lights from 2,000 feet up, and he or she won’t feel like Superman. They’ll be wondering what this has to do with the ROI they can expect.

Someone get this persona some numbers already.

When conversion depends heavily on gaining credibility, pictures can be very compelling. In fact, one study out of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand showed that simply having an image makes the text alongside that image more believable, even if the image had nothing at all to do with the text.

Essentially, any image is better than nothing. But the right image? It’s worth even more. In a similar study by the Psychology departments at both Colorado State University and the University of Califoia, researchers experimented with brain images.

However, what if we traded in this either/or philosophy (either picture or no picture, either picture or bar graph) for a philosophy that uses the best of all resources?

Having the right image, supported by the right words, and given credibility by real numbers (as statistics or in graphs/charts) is the most effective possible combination.

Statistics have also proven to be compelling. In Blinded with science: Trivial graphs and formulas increase ad persuasiveness and belief in product efficacy, the study out of Coell University reveals that just the appearance of being scientific increases an ad’s persuasiveness. What does that "appearance" require?

Graphs. Simple, unadoed graphs.

And, those graphs were even more effective at persuading people who had “a greater belief in science” (e.g., your logical buyer persona).

Put the right words together with the right image, then overlay with a supportive set of numbers, and you can convince even the most logical persona that you have the solutions they seek.

Graphs and charts don’t have to be fancy or complicated to be convincing. Check out these two graphs from the Kissmetrics article Most of Your A/B Test Results are Illusory and That’s Okay by Will Kurt.

Do you even need to read the rest of the article to get the point? (Though you will want to read the article to find out exactly what that scientist is doing so right.) This is highly effective data storytelling that shows you, at a glance, the central point the author is trying to make.

CubeYou, a social data mining company that tus raw numbers into actionable insights, does great data storytelling by combining stats and images. Not only do these visuals deliver demographic information, they put a face on the target at the same time, effectively appealing to both logical and more intuitive personas in one fell swoop.

And for even more powerful images, look at the data visualizations Big Mountain Data put together of the #WhyIStayed domestic violence hashtag. Talk about telling an impactful story.

Then there are infographics that include data visualization, images, and analysis. I love this one from CyberPRMusic.com.

It’s all about telling their story

Uninspired visuals are everywhere. Seriously, they’re easy to find. In researching this article, I could find 20 bad images for every one good one I’ve included here.

Herein lies an opportunity to stand out.

Maybe the intersection of words, images, and numbers isn’t well understood in online marketing. Maybe having free stock photos at our fingertips has made us lazy in their use. Maybe there aren’t enough English majors touting the benefits of effective symbolism.

Whatever the reason, you now have the chance to go beyond telling your target niche about your product or service’s features and benefits. You have the ability to set your brand apart by showing them just how great life can be. Free tools such as Visage make it possible.

But first, you have to care enough to make compelling images a priority.

What are your thoughts on using stuing visuals as needle-movers for your brand?

One decision that you'll have to live with for quite a long time is the domain name you choose for your site. You may have a list of options that you know are available, but what should you keep in mind when you sit down to make the decision? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers eight criteria for picking a wier.

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

Welcome to Rand's rules (for choosing an effective domain name)

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are going to chat about choosing domain names, and, in fact, I've got eight rules for you that will help guide your domain name choices.

Now, it could be you're starting a new brand. It could be that you have an existing brand and you're trying to take it online. It might be that you're working with clients who are taking their brand online. It could be that you're starting a new company entirely. I love entrepreneurship, congratulations. Any of these ways, you're going to need a website.

Before you do that, you should really think long and hard about the domain name that you choose and, in fact, the brand name that you choose and how that's represented through your domain name online. Domain names have a massive impact all over the web in terms of click-through rate, from search to social media results, to referring links, to type-in traffic, brandability, offline advertising. There's a huge wealth of places that your domain name impacts your brand and your online marketing, and we can't ignore this.

So first rule that Rand has for how to choose a domain name.

1) Make it brandable.

Brandable, meaning when you hear the domain name, when you hear yourself or someone else say it, does it sound like a brand, or does it sound like a generic? So that means that hyphens and numbers are a real problem because they don't make something sound like a brand. They make it sound generic, or they make it sound strange.

For example, if I try and say to you, "Look, let's imagine that our new company that we're starting together, you and I, is a website that has pasta recipes and potentially sells some pasta related e-commerce products on it." If I tell you that I have pasta-shop.com, well, that's hard to brand. It's hard to say. It's hard to remember.

Speaking of, is this brand memorable? So generic keyword strings are a big no-no. Generic keyword strings really tough to remember, really tough to stand out in the brain. You want something unique, which means try and avoid those exact and partial keyword match domain names. They tend not to do so well, in fact. If you look at the numbers that we see in MozCast, for example, or in correlation studies, you can see that, over the past 10 years, they have done nothing but trend down over time in terms of their correlation with rankings and their ability to show in the search results. Dangerous there.

I would probably stay away from something like a PastaRecipesOnline.com. I think BestPasta.com, maybe that's getting a little bit better. PastaAficionado, well, it sounds brandable. For sure, it's a little bit challenging to say. But it's definitely unique.

I really like PastaLabs.com. Very brandable, unique, memorable, stands out. I'm going to remember it. It has kind of a scientific cootation to it. Fascinating. I might think about the domain name space that way.

2) Make it pronounceable.

You might say to yourself, "Rand, why is it so important that it's pronounceable? Most people are going to be typing this in or they're going to be clicking on a link, so why does it matter?"

In fact, it matters because of a concept called "processing fluency." It's a cognitive bias that human beings have where, essentially, we remember and have more positive associations with things that we can easily say and easily think about, and that includes pronounceability in our own minds. This is going to be different depending on the language that you're targeting and which countries you're targeting. But certainly, if you can't easily say the name and others are not easily able to guess how to say that name, you're going to lose that processing fluency, you're going to lose that memorability and all the benefits of the brandability that you've created.

So I might stay away from things like FlourEggsH20.com. It's clever. Don't get me wrong. It's unique. It's clever. It might even be brandable, but it's very difficult to pronounce and to recall. When you see it, you don't know if that zero is an O. There are questions about like what does it necessarily mean or not.

Raviolibertine.com. Even I'm having trouble saying it. Raviolibertine? I would stay away from a little bit of the getting too clever for yourself, and many, many domain names do try to do that.

I might say, "You know what? Something like LandOfNoodles.com, while it doesn't fulfill every requirement that we've got here, it is eminently pronounceable, easy to remember." These are easy words that many people are very familiar with, at least in English. LandOfNoodles, whoops, I like LandOfNoodles. I'm giving it a check mark. Well, now I've messed up the Whiteboard. Hopefully, Elijah took a picture before I did that. Oh, he's giving me the thumbs up. Good.

3) Make it as short as you possibly can, but no shorter.

This means obey these other rules before you just go for raw length. But length matters. Length matters because of the processing fluency stuff we talked about before. But the fewer characters a domain name has, the easier it is to type, the easier it is to say, to share, the less it gets shortened on social media sharing platforms and in search results. So when you've seen those long domain names, they get compressed, or they might not show fully, or the URL might get cut off, or you might see just the t.co, all those kinds of things.

Therefore, short as possible. Shorter is definitely better. I might go for something short like MyPasta.com, but I'd be careful about going too short. For example, PastaScience.com is a pretty good domain name. PastaSci, I've lost that pronounceability and a little bit of that memorability. It's a little bit tougher. It's clearly a brand, but it's a little awkward. I would probably stay away from that one and I'd stick with PastaScience.

4) Bias to .com.

I know, it's 2016. Why are we still talking about .com? The inteet's been around 20-plus years. Why does .com matter so much when there are so many TLD extension options? The answer is, again, this is the most recognized, most easily accessible brand outside of the tech world.

If you're talking about, "Look, all I'm doing is addressing developers and my pasta website only wants to talk to very, very tech savvy individuals, people who already work in the web world," well okay, maybe it's all right to go with a .pasta domain name. Perhaps you can actually buy that TLD extension now that ICANN has approved all these new domain names.

But cognitive fluency, processing fluency says, dictates that we should go with something that's easy, that people have an association with already, and .com is still the primary thing that non-tech savvy folks have an association with. If you want to build up a very brandable domain that can do well, you want that .com. Probably, eventually, if you are very successful, you're going to have to try and go capture it anyway, and so I would bias you to get it if you can.

If it's unavailable, my suggestion would be to go with the .net, .co, or a known ccTLD. Those are your best bets. A known ccTLD might be something like .ca in Canada or .it in Italy, those kinds of things. That's your next best bet. I'd still bias you to .com. But the PeeIsMightier.com, I'm particularly proud of this one. I think it's a terrible pun, but a man's got to do.

MacaroniMan.net, would I potentially think about that if I couldn't get the .com? Yeah, possibly if I thought I was targeting a little bit more of a savvy audience and if I was pretty sure that MacaroniMan.com was owned by a squatter who just wouldn't give it up, or it was owned by a small restaurant somewhere that I never had to really worry about competition with and they wouldn't sell to me, yeah, okay, I might do it.

What about Impastable.co? Avoiding the fact that this is another terrible pun of mine, I might consider that if I absolutely couldn't get Impastable.com and that was already my domain name and I felt like I had the branding ability to make the .co something people would associate with. I could consider that too.

5) Avoid names that infringe on another company or another organization's existing trademark or could be confused with that trademark.

You have to be very careful here because it's not whether you think it could be confused. It's whether you think any judge in the jurisdiction in which they might take legal action against you would consider those two things to be potentially misrepresented or potentially confusable. So it's not your judgment. It's not even your audience's judgment. It's what you think a judge in the jurisdiction might have the judgment about.

So this is dangerous waters. I would urge you to talk to your attoey or a legal professional about this if you have real conces. But there is the danger and this does happen regularly throughout the web's history where a trademark owner will come and sue a domain owner, someone who's owning the domain legitimately and using it for business purposes or just someone who's purchased it and is sitting on it, and that sucks.

This can also create brand confusion, which is hard for your brandability. So you might be familiar with some pasta brands that have done particularly well here in the U.S., like Barilla and Ronzoni and Rustichella d'Abruzzo. Well, I probably would not go get Barzilla.com even if you have a hilarious, Godzilla themed pun that you want to make about the pasta. Just because your name might be Ron and you are covering pasta, I still would not go with RonsZoni. Oops, I'm going to X those both out. Likewise, Rustichella -- apologies for my poor Italian pronunciation -- but Rustichella owns Rustichella.it. They don't seem to own Rustichella.com. I think that's owned by a domain name owner. But I would not go start up a website there. Rustichella certainly could, with their U.S. presence, go and claim trademark ownership of that domain and potentially get it from you. I would think that was risky.

6) Make the domain name instantly intuitive.

If you believe that a member of your target audience, the audience that you're trying to reach now and in the future, could immediately associate the domain name with a good guess of what they think you do, that is a big positive. Being able to look at that domain name and say, "Oh, I'm guessing they probably do this. This is probably what that company is up to."

So something clever and subtle, like SavoryThreads.com, okay, yeah, once I get to your site, I might realize, "Oh, I see it's sort of a playful word game there and 'savory,' I get that it's about food." But it's too clever, in my opinion, and it doesn't instantly suggest to a majority of your audience what it is that you do.

Likewise, AelloniToZiti.com, well, yeah, maybe I could guess that these are probably pasta names and it probably means that the website has something to do with that. But they're not traditionally very well-known pastas. At least here in the United States, those shapes are not particularly well-known, and so I might cross that one out too, versus something where it is clearly, clearly about recipes for and potentially sales of goods, PastaPerfected.com. That's obviously, intuitively about what it is going to be, and anyone from your audience could figure that out.

7) Use broad keywords when sensible, but don't stress keyword inclusion.

Keyword use in domain names, you might think, is an important thing and that would be something that I would mention here from an SEO perspective. It can help. Don't get me wrong, it can help. It can help mostly for this instant intuition portion and the cognitive fluency and processing fluency biases that we've talked about, but also a little bit from an SEO perspective because of the anchor text that you generally will accrue when people link over to your domain. But what we've been seeing, as I mentioned earlier, is that Google's been biasing away from these exact match and partial match keywords.

I would say that if you can get a keyword mention in your domain name that helps make it obvious what you're about, go for it. But if you're trying to target what would be called keyword rich or keyword targeted domains, I would generally stay away from those actually in 2016. They just don't carry the weight that they used to, and there are a lot of associations, negative associations that users and search engines have about them that would make me stay away.

So I would not do something like a RecipesForPasta.com. I wouldn't do something like BuyPastaOnline.com. I would be tempted to, in fact, go for something very, very broad like Gusto.com. Think about a brand like an Amazon.com, which clearly has no association with what it is, or Google itself, Google.com, or a domain here in Seattle area that serves lawyers that's called Avvo.com. These are very, very well-branded and associated with their niches, but they don't necessarily need to have a keyword richness to them.

Another great example, the find a dog sitter or find pet care website, Rover.com. Well, "rover" has an association with dogs, but it's not really keyword rich. It's more of a creative association just like "gusto" means "taste" in Italian. So I might be tempted to go in that direction instead. Same thing with something like Handcut.com. People have that, especially foodies are going to have that association between handcut and pasta.

8) If your name isn't available, it's okay to append or modify it.

If your domain name is not available, last one, it is okay to go out there and add a suffix or a prefix. It is okay to use an alteate TLD extension, like we talked about previously, and it's okay to be a little bit creative with your online brand.

For example, let's say my brand name is Pastaterra. Maybe I've already got a shop somewhere maybe in the Seattle area and I have been selling pasta at my shop and now I'm going online with it. Well, it is okay for me to do something like ThePastaterra.com, or PastaterraShop.com, or even Pastaterra.net. If I wanted to be very targeting a much more tech savvy set and was aware of the branding difficulties, I could conceivably go with something like Terra.pasta, because that pasta TLD extension is now available. But I could get a little bit broader. In fact, I might prefer this and go with something like RandOfTheTerra or RandsTerra.com or EatAtTerra. If I were a restaurant, I might do something like EatAtTerra.com.

So with these rules in mind, I would love to hear from all of you about your domain choices and your domain name biases and what you think is working in 2016 and potentially not working, and hopefully we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com;;

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Structured data has never been more important than it is today. We’ll talk about why briefly below, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about giving you a new tool to add to your semantic SEO tool belt. My goal is to empower you implement semantic markup and structured data with greater ease and enable you to architect a more robust and complete web of linked data on your website (and beyond).

Structured data is more important than ever

I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. When Schema.org launched in June of 2011, search marketers gained access to an incredibly powerful tool: an extensive vocabulary, agreed upon by the world’s leading search engines, with which we could give our data meaningful structure.

However, there were two things holding us back from realizing the dream of a truly semantic web.

1. The difficulty of actually implementing said markup on our sites.
2. The markup’s limited utility in actually achieving some kind of tangible SEO retu on our investment.

I believe JSON-LD’s big day at Google was a watershed moment in making implementation less daunting and, hopefully in the coming years, ubiquitous across the web (well, at least more so). Now that we have rapidly growing JSON-LD support from Google and powerful semantic attributes like Itemref and Itemid, the ability to give structure to the unstructured is within everyone’s reach.

The tangible SEO retu has also never been greater! Beyond tried and true rich snippets for star ratings, pricing, availability, and breadcrumbs in search, we’re seeing richer and richer results, previews, and cards show up in Google. These are powered by, you guessed it, structured data and, more often than not, the recommended format is in JSON-LD. In light of Google’s recent launch of Rich Cards (starting with Recipes and Movies, but sure to be expanding to other Schema types soon), Top Stories with AMP, and Knowledge Panel Critic Reviews (which is currently by request and with Google approval only), we need flexible models for structuring bigger and bigger data sets.

Through using itemref and itemid, you’ll be able to mark up your data that much easier to keep up with the rapid evolution of semantic SEO. You’ll also be positioned to fully capitalize on new search features, regardless of whether or not they require JSON-LD or in-line microdata (remember that while Google is now all about JSON-LD, they’re not the only game in town).

That’s enough of an intro; let’s talk itemref and itemid.

What are itemref & itemid?

At their core, itemref and itemid are just HTML attributes. They’re actually very similar to other attributes that you’re already familiar with if you’ve worked with semantic markup before.

The 3 most common attributes in semantic SEO

Let’s quickly recap what itemscope, itemtype, and itemprop do. Feel free to skip to the next section, though it never hurts to brush up.

Itemscope: an attribute without a value that defines the scope of an semantic entity within your data. Everything within that itemscope is considered a part of that entity and everything outside of it is separate.

<div itemscope></div>

Itemtype: an attribute that goes hand-in-hand with itemscope and that does have a value. The value of the itemtype attribute is going to specify the type of entity you’re marking up and is most commonly a link to a URL on schema.org.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person/" ></div>

Itemprop: an attribute used to declare specific attributes of your entity (e.g. itemprop= "name", itemprop="description", etc.)

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person/" >
    <h1 itemprop="name">Mike Aesen</h1>
</div>

The 2 hidden attributes in semantic SEO

It’s fairly easy to guess what itemref and itemid are just by looking at their names, but it’s a little harder to figure out how to use them (don’t worry, we’ll get to that part later).

Itemref: an attribute that allows you to reference other data points outside of the itemscope.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person/" itemref="phone" ></div>

Itemid: an attribute that allows you to give an entity a unique identifier. This entity can then be used to flesh out another entity as an embedded entity.

<div itemid="http://www.upbuild.io/#upbuildOrg" 
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" ></div>

But why do we even need these?

The challenge with inline markup

The challenge we face with inline microdata is that it’s brittle and breaks easily. It’s also very rigid in terms of implementation. Itemref and itemid help us overcome that!

Consider the page below:

The primary entity that you want to mark up on this page is a Product, but you’ll likely want to mark up the BreadcrumbList as well. Assuming that each highlighted area lives in its own <div> tag, you have some potential issues.

1. If you declare your itemtype="product" on the overarching <div> that contains all three areas, you forfeit the opportunity to mark up breadcrumbs. Why? Because a BreadcrumbList isn’t a valid a property of a Product.

1. If you declare your itemtype="product" on the blue <div>, you can still mark up the breadcrumbs on the red <div>, but you won’t be able coect the data in the green <div> to your main Product and your structured data won’t validate since offers (AKA, the price) is required.

Traditionally, you’d have a make a non-ideal compromise or have a developer change how the whole page was structured. There’s no way around it; that sucks!

How itemref and itemid empower you

With itemid and itemref, you can write semantic markup that reaches across disparate <div> tags and pulls in the data points you need without requiring any restructuring.

So what’s the difference between these two tags and when do you use one over the other?

• Use itemref when you need to populate itemprops in your primary entity. For example, if the commentCount of a blog post was written in a <div> outside of the main post’s body.

• Use itemid when you need to populate itemprops where the expected type (more on expected types from Schema.org) is another entity (not just a simple data point). For example, if you wanted to declare the publisher of a blog post, you’d want to point to a complete Organization entity (complete with a name, logo, URL, and perhaps even founder, address, contact points, etc.)

How to use itemref

An easy way to conceptualize the use of itemref is to imagine coecting a data blob to the semantic entity you’re working on. I first heard the term “data blob” from Jao van Driel, someone who I’d consider my Itemref and Itemid Sensei, and I think it’s a fitting description.

Data blob

noun | ˈdā-tə- bläb

a blob of data that just hangs around doing nothing special, until it’s called into service by another entity. More formally, a discoverable resource within a document.

To keep this brief, let’s assume you’ve already marked up your Primary Entity to the best of your ability and, for the purposes of demonstration, let’s say we’re marking up a blog post (AKA, BlogPosting). Furthermore, let’s say that the one itemprop data point we can’t get at using traditional means is the commentCount for the blog post; it’s in a <div> that’s completely outside the scope of the blog post’s body.

In order to solve this, we’ll want to mark up the commentCount as a data blob that contains an unlinked and unused commentCount property. There are three main steps:

Step 1: In the <div>, <span>, or other HTML element that contains the commentCount, add an itemscope attribute. That’s it. In a deviation from the norm, you don’t want to follow that by specifying an itemtype. That’s why it’s called a data blob; it’s independent data without a type. In fact, when you eventually test this in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, you’ll see it pick up on an “Unspecified Type.” That’s fine; just ignore it.

The finished tag should look like this:

<div itemscope>...</div>

Step 2: Wrap a new <span> tag around the comment count itself and specify what itemprop this is going to be. At this point, it’s a property of nothing and that’s okay.

Now the finished tag should look like this:

<div itemscope>
    <span itemprop="commentCount">108</span>
</div>

Step 3: Lastly, you’ll want to create a unique identifier for this data blob (so you can reference it later). To do that, just add a basic id to the tag.

The updated tag will look like this:

<div itemscope>
    <span itemprop="commentCount" id="Idea">108</span>
</div>

Sidenote: Can Itemref Be Used with Meta Tags? Yes! Just go through Step 2 and Step 3 on meta tags in your <head> and you can reference them from an entity in your <body> tag using itemref! However, with meta tags there’s no need to add an itemscope; skip Step 1.

Now we come to my favorite part: hooking the data blob into the main entity. It’s incredibly simple.

Step 4: Find and edit the itemscope/itemtype declaration for your Primary Entity. In this case, it’ll look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">

Step 5: Within that tag, add the itemref attribute and reference the unique id that you created in Step 3 above.

The finished tag will look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" itemref="Idea">

Bonus: You can reference more than one data blob in the same itemref attribute! Just add them one after the other, separated by spaces.

E.g., itemref="Idea wordcount citation alteativeHeadline"

Boom! Now you’re cooking with itemref! Where before you had a pantry full of data that didn’t really go together, now you have an entity that is completely baked and you’re ready to roll.

How to use itemid

Using itemid is actually very similar and may even involve less new code than itemref. Since you use itemid when you want to reference another complete entity, this might be an entity that’s already on the page. If that’s the case, you just add a quick bit of markup and you’re good to go.

In the visual below, what we want to do is use the Secondary Entity to populate an itemprop of the Primary Entity.

Using our blog post example, let’s say we want to reference an Organization entity to populate the publisher itemprop of the BlogPosting entity.

Here’s how we do that:

Step 1: Mark up the Secondary Entity just as you normally would. If you already have that entity on your page and it’s fully marked up, that’s less work for you!

Step 2: In the opening itemscope/itemtype declaration of that entity, add an itemid attribute and give this secondary entity a unique fragment identifier.

It should look like this:

<div itemid="#mozOrg" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/organization" >...</div>

And now we make the magic happen!

Step 3: Within your Primary Entity, add a <link> tag wherever you want to call in the Secondary Entity and specify the itemprop you want your Secondary Entity to populate. Use a simple href attribute to point to the fragment identifier from Step 2.

It should look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/blogPosting"> 
    <link itemprop="publisher" href="#mozOrg"/>
</div>

Bonus: You can reference this secondary entity from multiple other entities and populate multiple itemprops, too! If this post were a company aouncement on moz.com and Moz were both the publisher and the author, both of those properties could reference #mozOrg.

That’s it! Now, regardless of where these two entities live in the DOM (i.e., in your page’s source code), they’ll be linked together and can create something awesome.

“By your powers combined, I am a great blog post!”

Extending the power of itemid to JSON-LD

I can hear some readers asking, “The days of microdata are over! Now that Google’s going to support JSON-LD for everything, who cares?”

First, Google isn’t the only game in town and they don’t yet support JSON-LD for all Schema.org types (but, honestly, I think they will soon). That said, I still think it’s good practice to continue implementing structured data that less evolved crawlers can use.

Second, even though itemref can’t be used within the JSON-LD data model, itemid most definitely can, although in JSON-LD the property is called @id! And boy, does it come in handy.

Let’s talk about why you would use this and then we’ll get into how.

Why @id is great with JSON-LD

The why is pretty straightforward — just like when you’re using microdata, you are likely to have multiple JSON-LD entities on your site and, quite frequently, these will be housed in different scripts in the source code (or in different tags delivered via a tag management tool). Using @id, you can maintain your JSON-LD for each semantic entity separately and just make references between each entity as needed.

For example, consider the blog post you’re currently reading which has structured data for a BlogPosting delivered in JSON-LD. You could avoid having to include all the data for your publisher (the Organization known as Moz) in your JSON-LD script and instead reference a dedicated JSON-LD script for it.

You could host two independent JSON-LD scripts in your page <head> and link them using @id.

In this example, using @id is more cool than useful; it doesn’t save that much time or effort. In fact, it’ll add a bit more code to the page if you’re including two separate JSON-LD scripts (for a BlogPost and an Organization) on every page rather than doing it all in one tag.

Dealing with repetition

But what about when a single entity can be used to populate multiple properties in your JSON-LD? That’s where @id could save you a ton of time and hassle.

Imagine you have an Article page where you want to include structured data about the article’s publisher (#publisher), a video pertaining to the article (published by #publisher), and the article’s author (who worksFor #publisher). Suddenly, having the ability to leverage a single definition of the Publisher entity is very valuable!

Going deeper

If you’re not already sold on @id yet, here’s where it gets crazy. When you use @id with JSON-LD, you can extend its utility massively.

You can use @id in a JSON-LD script to reference
entities on other pages and even other websites!

Let that sink in.

What this means is that you can deliver JSON-LD on every blog post that references an Organization JSON-LD tag on the homepage. You don’t need to repeat that data on each page or update every instance if a datapoint ever changes.

Here are just a few use cases in which you’d want to host JSON-LD for specific entities in centralized locations and reference them throughout your whole site.

• Hosting your Organization JSON-LD on your company homepage and then using it as:
  • The publisher property on BlogPostings
  • The worksFor property on Person (on your team profiles)

• Hosting Person JSON-LD for key persoel on your About page and then using those entities as:
  • The author properties on BlogPostings
  • The performer properties on Events
• (If you’re a local business) Hosting Place JSON-LD about your city on a dedicated landing page and using it as:
  • The areaServed property on LocalBusiness
  • The eligibleRegion property on Offer
  • The foundingLocation property on Organization
  • The jobLocation on property JobPosting

With all of these scenarios, you can use @id to reference entities on other pages to create a literal web of linked data on your website!

How to use @id in JSON-LD

Here’s how to use @id in your JSON-LD.

Step 1: Edit your JSON-LD and give the entity a fragment identifier (e.g., #eru). This uses essentially the same format as the @type property, so you pretty much just copy that. Repeat this process for every JSON-LD script that defines an entity that you want to be able to reference.

The modification to your JSON-LD should look something like this.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "#mozOrg",
    "name": "Moz",
  …
}
</script>

Step 2: In order to reference one of those entities from JSON-LD on another page, provide an @id in the place of a value for the property in question. For example, instead of just providing a text string of “Moz” for the “publisher” on this BlogPosting, we’d refer to the uniquely identified entity by using its @id.

The modification to your JSON-LD would look a bit like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type": "BlogPosting",
    "publisher": {
    "@id": "#mozOrg"
    }
    …
}
</script>

Now, if the entity you’re pointing to lives on a different page, just use the absolute path rather than the relative one. “#mozOrg” becomes “https://moz.com/#mozOrg”

But wait. There’s more!

This is the part that really blew my mind. Remember that you can reference entities not just on your own website, but on OTHER websites as well. Doing so is really simple, though you do need to have the ability to slightly modify the JSON-LD on both sites.

The possibilities here are insane! Just picture the semantic associations we're forming on this post alone!

The good news

The process is exactly the same as what’s described above (using @id on your own website), but you definitely need to use the absolute path.

The bad news

This is super hard to validate without building your own web crawler. By their nature, the structured data validation tools that are available to us (like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, the Structured Data Linter, or Yandex’s Structured Data Validator) only fetch the one URL that they’re fed. They’re not going to go out and crawl the URLs where the other linked data lives and show you the full picture that their crawlers may be able to get.

In the future, I’m hoping to share concrete proof that Google recognizes linked structured data across domains. Until then, the more cross-site structured data we create, the better our chances are of showing that this works!

Itemref & itemid in action

This wouldn’t be a very good tutorial if it didn’t leave you with something to fiddle with. The code example below will show you how to use itemref in microdata, itemid in microdata, @id to reference entities on the same page, @id to reference entities on other pages (hint: there may be a really cool entity over at https://moz.com/rand/about/#rand if you want to check it out), and @id to reference entities on other websites.

See the Pen The Search Marketer's Guide to Itemref & Itemid by UpBuild (@upbuild) on CodePen.

You can even run this example’s URL through the Structured Data Testing Tool to see how Google interprets all the associations. Click here to see!

Until we meet again

I hope that this post has either given you some new tools that will help solve your structured data problems or has stoked your curiosity to see what’s possible with advanced JSON-LD. Good luck out there and happy optimizing!

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The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Image courtesy of Mike Behnken on Flickr.

The civics of local: Caring about your community

From Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to Central Park in New York City, with all of the town greens, plazas, fountains, schools, and libraries in between, America’s lasting community resources stand as a testament to our civic-minded past. Town fathers, city boards, and citizens of former times dedicated themselves to enriching local life by creating public access to features that fostered identity, civic pride, and a higher standard of living.

Mode cynics might look at today’s cityscapes and conclude that city plaers have forgotten the need for accessible human resources. Sprawling housing developments without parks, whole districts without adequate shopping, good schools, libraries, or community centers would be evidence of this. And yet, 2016 points at a better future because, if nothing else, the ongoing election cycle has proven that the rising workforce — the milleial generation — cares tremendously about civics.

In the phenomenal youth movement currently sweeping the nation, I see an inspiring, fresh commitment to improving life for all people and all communities. If you're one of those citizens rallying for a living wage, greater educational opportunities, and the revitalization of both ier city and rural life, then this article will explain why a career in local search marketing could spell out satisfying work that directly impacts life quality in communities across the country. In other words, your best ideals will go hand-in-hand with what you do for a living. Sound good? Let’s take a look!

What is local search marketing, in a nutshell?

Anything you do to promote the online visibility of local businesses, organizations, and resources = local search marketing. Local search engine optimization (SEO) basically seeks to create a mirror image of real-world communities on the web, making it easy for anyone to find the best available resources for everything nearest them. You can promote the visibility of local businesses, schools, parks, organizations, churches, or anything else that exists for the use of people in any given city or town.

Local SEO seeks to reflect real-world communities. Image courtesy of DonaldMcTim on Flickr.

The basic components of local

Right now, the basic components of local search marketing include:

• Designing locally optimized websites
• Developing locall -relevant text, image, and video content
• Building local business listings on a variety of search engines and directories
• Helping clients ea and manage online reviews
• Helping clients engage with their neighbors via social media
• Ensuring that all client holdings are mobile-friendly
• Seeking local publicity opportunities, whether via news, advertising, sponsorships, or other vehicles
• Discovering iovative methods of helping your clients stand out from the competition

Here’s a broad overview of local SEO to jump-start your education. Ready for a deep dive? You can get a detailed picture of the major components of local search marketing from this Local SEO Checklist, and can take a gander at what industry experts cite as the most influential Local Search Ranking Factors you’ll be implementing for clients.

Manual + automated solutions

Local search marketing has been a viable career option for a little over a decade — ever since search engines like Google set out to replace the print Yellow Pages as the way people access local resources. In the early days, a majority of the work we did in local was manual — manual website development, manual local business listing creation, etc. Now, many tasks have been made easier via tools.

Google: Making print phone books obsolete for over a decade. Image courtesy of Mike Goehler on Flickr.

For example, you don’t have to build a website from scratch. You can lea to develop excellent Wordpress-based websites, choosing from mobile-friendly/responsive themes and using plugins that make it easy to incorporate basic local optimization components.

You don’t have to build local business listings (a.k.a. "citations") one at a time anymore, either. You can use automated tools or sign up for manual submission services, freeing you up for more creative work.

Intelligent tools now make it possible to analyze your social media opportunities and manage your review strategy.

You’ll be entering the field at a time when tools have taken quite a bit of the grunt work out of this area of marketing, meaning your best asset may be your creativity, rather than your capacity to grind through things.

Go solo or work for an agency

Before you take a job or start serving clients, you’ll want to educate yourself as much as possible about this form of marketing. Your education will prevent you from going to work for an agency that doesn’t adhere to above-board practices, and it will also lessen your chances of making a costly mistake for your clients.

Working from home can be quite cozy. Image courtesy of Tina Lawson on Flickr.

You can set up your local SEO business in your living room, if need be, with nothing more than a laptop and a good Inteet coection. Some people have no problem flying solo, begiing the work of making a name for themselves by their contributions to their own community and the local search marketing industry. The main benefit of this is autonomy; the main drawbacks are money worries until you get established.

Others may prefer to seek employment at an agency with an existing local SEO department. Some companies will only hire you if you’ve got proven experience, but if an agency is open to intes, this can provide a great opportunity to lea on the job and understand what it means to be part of a team. The main benefits of this are experience and a regular paycheck; the main drawback is less direct control over the work you’d like to explore.

Emotional requirements of the job

Here’s a simple checklist that should help you determine whether you’ve got the right temperament for the job. You’ll need to:

• Be a self-disciplined worker (especially if you’re going solo) but also be open to the benefits of a more flexible schedule. Some of the best Inteet marketing agencies aren’t rigid about 9–5 work days and allow for some work being done outside the office. Some mode businesses are experimenting with concepts like the 6-hour work day and other new ideas. On your own, you may find yourself working 5 hours a day — or 15! Flexibility is an asset in this field.

• Have good communication skills. You’ll be strategizing with team members and distilling complex topics down into easily understood terms for clients. You’ll be well-served by the ability to speak well and clearly with anyone you meet in a day’s work.

• Feel empathy. Local SEOs should be able to identify with their clients’ struggles, whether they are mom-and-pop shops in neglected communities or large brands floundering over their identity. You become a part of every business you serve and will have a share in both failures and triumphs.

• Practice awareness of your own experience with commerce. Approach every one of your own transactions from the viewpoint of both merchant and consumer and analyze faults and successes. No part of commerce is too small to be analyzed, and your findings will give you something to think about, write about, and put into practice for clients.

• Love a mystery. When a business is failing to rank, when an incoming client might be spamming search engines, when Google tweaks its algorithm, or outreach is falling on deaf ears, you will be the detective who gets to the root of the problems and defines the solutions.

• Like to travel + network. While it’s not necessary for local SEOs to serve clients in person, chances are good that you’ll want to travel to industry events, and hopefully one day contribute to them for the educational advancement and prestige of your business or agency. Word-of-mouth is regularly cited as one of the most effective vehicles for client acquisition, so the more people with whom you network in local, the better the health of your company.

• Be honest when it counts most. You can’t fear civil confrontation in this field. It's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have to deliver bad news to confused clients and lay down the law to spammy ones. You’ll be required to be totally honest when what a client has been doing is harming their own business. That’s your job, and it’s only when you’ve called out and halted bad practices that you can begin to implement better ones. You’ll also need to honest with agency team members about your work, progress, and conces.

• Commit to continuing education. There may be no other form of Inteet marketing that has experienced more changes in the past decade than local. Guidelines and tactics change on a continual basis and, as a local SEO, it will be your job to keep up with all such developments. Your education must be viewed as ongoing as long as you’re in business.

What does a job in local SEO pay?

No promises on the emeralds and pearls! Image courtesy of Leigh49137 on Flickr.

According to the 2015 BrightLocal industry survey, the average aual income for SEOs (pre-taxes) was $70,000 and the median income was between $50,000–$60,000. How these figures strike you will largely depend on the cost of living in your geography. These eaings may not be adequate if you live in San Francisco or NYC, but may be just fine if you make your home in Albuquerque or Atlanta.

Note, too, that these are averages, and that there's room in this industry for iovators to work their way towards greater eaings. Remember, it was your generation that produced Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebook when he was 20.

In the local SEO industry, there have been success stories like David Mihm’s $3 million sale of his local business listing product, GetListed, which became the foundation of Moz Local. While not every worker in this discipline will "make it big," no limit can be placed on your potential to succeed if you have the ability to disce opportunities that haven’t yet been explored to their limits. If you’ve been gifted with a great brain, it could be your company that invents the next app, software, or platform that lights up the local landscape.

Recommended skill acquisitions

Even as I’m writing this, local is out there changing and developing, so the best I can provide newcomers is a snapshot in time of the skills I’d recommend they acquire right now to be current + competitive:

Master the guidelines for representing your business on Google

As a local SEO, these are your rules for survival and contain the essential mindset you'll bring to almost every interaction you'll ever have with any client or team member. The guidelines are regularly revised, so check back periodically for edits that may totally change the game.

Lea PPC

Google, the biggest force in local, is steadily but surely moving towards more highly-monetized local search engine results. The local SEO of today and tomorrow will need to be able to advise clients about pay-per-click and other forms of advertising. Here’s a begier’s guide to Google Adwords. We have a Pay-Per-Click category here on the Moz blog and you’ll enjoy this Phil Rozek article written about his 8 years of doing PPC for local businesses.

Engineering/dev skills could set you apart

You can stick to being a consultant if you prefer, but it can be a major asset if you know how to get in amongst the nuts and bolts of websites, applications, and widgets. In fact, your abilities as a developer could be a key to you moving from basic income to lucrative iovation.

Lea offline local marketing

Local SEO doesn’t exist in an online vacuum. It represent the real commercial and civic landscape we all inhabit. Understanding traditional forms of offline marketing (think print marketing, newspapers, billboards, radio, TV, etc.) will make you a much stronger force in the field. Most businesses will need to employ a combination of both on- and offline publicity, and you’ll need to be in-the-know about all of it.

Lea a second language

Having trouble breaking into the industry? Being bilingual could help. In the U.S., leaing Spanish will help you serve the skyrocketing Hispanic business community. In Canada, leaing French could be a real help to your agency. In Europe, pick the language of any neighboring country that has the infrastructure to benefit from local SEO and double your client base. In Australia, you might tackle Mandarin to serve business owners both at home and abroad. Despite working in something called "local," ours is a global economy!

Follow the leaders

Finally, I’d recommend that you make a commitment to follow industry leaders’ blogs and social profiles, as an essential part of your education and daily work. Local is an exceptionally generous area of marketing, with experts willingly sharing tons of useful information on a daily basis. We strive to offer some of the most comprehensive coverage and tutorials in the local SEO column here on the Moz Blog, and I would further recommend these high-quality resources:

That’s a short list, and you’ll likely find many more smart people to lea from and network with. The main thing is to set yourself a regular schedule of checking resources like these for the latest local developments.

What a meaningful worklife feels like

The average American works 1,700 hours a year. If you start working when you’re 16 and retire when you're 75, you’ll be spending over 100,000 hours of your life on the job. 100,000 hours.

If you had a choice, chances are, you wouldn’t sign up to spend that much time doing anything that felt meaningless to you. If you had a choice, chances are you’d much rather get to put some of your personal hopes, ethics, and best self into those future hours ahead of you.

In your spare time, you’ll be socializing with friends, maybe caring for a spouse and raising a family, maybe volunteering on the local school board, or in community projects, social, environmental, or political causes. What if time away from the things you love best could actually go towards improving the usefulness and accessibility of the cities you and others live in?

Image courtesy of Tobias Berchtold on Flickr.

And that’s why I’d recommend local SEO as a work option for young people. It truly can be meaningful when you help a senior center get found by your friend’s grandmother who never knew before that she could take a free class in sociology. Or when you help a family-owned restaurant make the front page of the local newspaper with their blue-ribbon organic tacos. Or when you help main street compete against the big-box stores, keeping your community unique.

That’s what local search marketing can be, and it can make the difference between a job you couldn’t care less about, and one that is integrated with the interesting, meaningful life you want to build for yourself. When you're equipped with the skills to get businesses, organizations, and local stories heard, when you have the necessary education and have a say in picking the voices you want to amplify, you will never lack for opportunity to lend a powerful helping hand to the civic improvements you feel matter most.

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Feel like you're already over the term "storytelling" without ever really having understood how you can successfully apply it to your writing? You aren't alone. Like so much jargon, this amazingly powerful and useful word is in serious danger of being consigned to LinkedIn profiles and marketing parody.

Even storytelling guru Aette Simmons is over the way we're teaching storytelling as a content cure-all.

"We need to stop 'telling stories' that oxytocin or the magic of a 'narrative arc' explain storytelling. It’s much bigger than science can explain. Storytelling is an art – subjective, emotional, and as variable as humanity is diverse." - Aette Simmons

We can do better. Instead of yet another "stories=good" post, today we're going to apply the logic of storytelling to site content. After you've read the last word, you should have the tools you need to draw a concrete map of how to tell your brand "story" with site content.

Note: I'm not knocking storytelling here. I'm a novelist. That's illegal. I am knocking throwing the latest buzzword at our marketing and pretending like using the word makes us better at our jobs.

Why storytelling

I promised not to flog you with the "stories are engaging so be engaging by telling stories" line, but if we dig just a little deeper we can understand one of the concrete arguments for storytelling: persuasion.

In her compelling book, The Story Factor, Aette Simmons reminds us that we can throw facts and figures at people all day long, but stories hold the real power to change someone's mind.

"Your story needs to take [potential customers] on a tour of the aspects that step by step convinced you to believe so they can step by step come to believe the same things" - Aette Simmons

Take a moment to check this against your own experience. When was the last time someone truly shifted your perspective? If they did so using anything other than a story, it's okay to stop reading here and find a tactic that you think will work better. But my guess is that some sort of story was involved.

The six types of story

Simmons outlines six types of stories we can use as humans and marketers to overcome objections:

"Who I am" stories and "why I am here" stories establish the groundwork you need to build trust with your audience. They naturally assume you're in it for yourself and these stories allow you to share your motivations. If you get human enough, your audience might find common ground on which to coect with you.

Vision stories tell how things could be. This type of story shows your audience what's in it for them. If you're holding an all-hands meeting, your vision story might include a tale about how the company has triumphed over obstacles in the past. If you're marketing a product, your vision story might speak to a future state where a problem (that your product solves) no longer has to exist.

Teaching stories give your audience an opportunity to lea from a mistake without ever having to make it. They also help you shape that audience's understanding of the potential solutions available to them. For example, if I were to tell you that a site audit can help you understand all the content resources you have available to you and use Moz Content as my auditing tool, I'd be pointing you in the direction of a solution for you and also making it easy for you to choose our solution.

Values-in-action stories are similar to vision stories and teaching stories, but they focus on the core values you want to reinforce and provide examples. Simmons suggests focusing on positive value stories rather than "war stories." One way to do this would be if a wedding dress company that prided itself on proper etiquette wrote a blog post about a bridal consultant who hand-wrote a thank-you card to every bride who purchased a dress from her.

The final type of story, the "I know what you are thinking" story, allows you to neutralize conce without that conce ever being raised. It's relatively easy to anticipate an objection from your audience and to use this kind of story to get ahead of it.

Applying storytelling to site content

This is where I wish I had a gorgeous illustration of the marketing fuel and that I could neatly fit these six story types in and presto change-o, poof! Your site content is perfectly optimized for storytelling and conversion.

Alas, life is a little harder than that. But we can get a good sense of which types of content are best for telling which types of stories. I'll use Moz as an example because that's close to my heart.

Who we are and why we're here

Moz is about three things: helping people be better marketers, building a strong community, and being TAGFEE. Free educational content has been a huge part of who we are since the very begiing when Rand was blogging about everything from the Google Link Command to Sandbox. That strong community is here because all of you make it happen, and because we work to make TAGFEE happen every day.

You can see our desire to help people be better marketers and to coect with the community right up at the top of our site. Click on "Lea & Coect" to bring down a bucket of resources like our begier's guides to SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media, as well as our webinars, blog, and Q&A.

We also share who we are on our about, TAGFEE, and team pages.

You'll note that all of this content is front and center because it helps our audience get to know us. Our audience becomes acquainted with our slightly quirky personality through our voice and the style of our imagery. We put our values out in the open for all to see so we can hold ourselves accountable and so our audience can know what to expect. And you can tell a lot about Moz by the fact that everyone who wants to be is listed on our team page (not just a selection of the top execs) and that each individual Mozzer's page has their own voice.

Help your potential customers get to know you by sharing "who you are" and "why you're here" stories in the content and form of your home, about, and team pages.

Our vision

The homepage is a perfect place to introduce an audience to your vision story:

But to really shape their expectations about what life could be like if only they'd use your products, you'll want to flesh out that vision story in content such as product descriptions and white papers.

Notice that all the vision stories, no matter where they are on the site, elaborate on and reinforce the same vision. Some pieces will speak to a greater ecosystem and others will pinpoint how your products bring that vision to life. Which role they play depends largely on where that piece of content sits in your fuel.

Teaching

You're reading teaching story content right now. I'm not trying to sell you anything at all, but I am trying to give you a new way of thinking about the work you do — to help you make better marketing. I'm also, on a meta level, teaching you about how Moz thinks about marketing, including how we see value in going beyond superficial monikers like "storytelling" and "keywords" to provide actual applied insight.

Although I mentioned our begier's guides as "who we are"-type stories, they are also teaching stories. You may have noticed that we don't have a begier's guide to pay-per-click advertising. That's not because PPC isn't important, but it is because our story is about the difference you can make with SEO, content marketing, and influencer marketing.

Big content can also be part of your teaching story. We use our Search Ranking Factors and Local Search Ranking Factors surveys to explore and share the changing nature of search, which helps focus our potential customers on asking the right questions about ranking better (instead of "where can I buy links?").

Mozcast plays a similar role by pointing people's attention to potential signs of shifts in Google's search algorithm. It is a useful tool, yes, for monitoring and predicting the search climate. It's also a story that teaches how much the algorithm changes and that SEO is not a one-and-done project.

Depending on who you are, your teaching stories might help your audience see fashion from the lens of accessories, understand that the value of your products is in sending matching items to the developing world, or see how essential coection speed is to saving money. Shape that conversation on your blog and in your big content.

Values in action

Our blog also tells values in action stories. We do this both through the teaching that is so core to who we are but also through the tone of content on the blog. This goes back to TAGFEE. Rarely (if ever) will you see a brand or competitor called to the carpet on our site. And our product and company updates are just as likely to tell you the ugly side of why we made the improvement as they are to celebrate the update, like this aouncement of Keyword Explorer:

You'll also find values in action stories in our help documentation as we try to provide straightforward but fun information to help you be the best marketer you can be.

Demonstrate your values in action by telling the story of efficient project management with a datasheet that doubles as a purchasing checklist to help your buyer overcome inteal objections. Or teach your customers how to use the spices you sell by tuing help documentation into recipes.

We know what you are thinking

Wow, that's a lot of talk about us. Most of our audience would be wondering right now if we can really live up to that hype. That makes this the perfect moment to share a "we know what you are thinking" story. Some of the best site content forms for putting the proof in your pudding are social proof (in the form of testimonials) and case studies.

Your tu

Ready to put storytelling into your site content? The framework is universal, but the application of it will be very individual to your experience. I'd love to hear how you've incorporated these six types of stories into your site, along with what's working for you and what isn't.

- - , .
.

Last year, we hosted the first MozCon Ignite, and it was a blast. We had so much fun listening to 5-minute stories on everything, from how to cook a hot dog to ruing a coffee charity from your kitchen, that we're bringing the event back for a second year. We can't wait to hear your story. MozCon Ignite takes place Tuesday, September 13, during MozCon as one of our evening networking events. In order to attend, you gotta:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Wait, what is an Ignite-style talk?

Ignite-style talks are five minutes in length, with auto-advancing slides. They tell short stories to spark ideas and conversations. If you're still scratching your head, check out Ignite Seattle's Scott Berkun giving an Ignite-style talk explaining Ignite talks:

How does Ignite work at MozCon?

Each evening at MozCon, we provide fun, networking, and relaxing after a day of leaing. MozCon Ignite specifically focuses on networking and kicking back to be entertained with stories from your fellow attendees.

We want you to share your stories, passions, and experiences. There are 16 — yes, 16 — speaking slots.

Our one topic rule: these stories caot be about online marketing or career advice. We've heard all about that during the day. To get your ideas flowing, these were the topics from last year:

• Regales of an Accidental Nightcrawler Stunt Double with Jay Neill
• Sled Dogs, Northe Lights, and Mushing Tails! with Aa Anderson
• Performing a Canine C-Section with Marie Haynes
• Bulltown Strutters: The Band That Married Its City with Mark Traphagen
• Okay, I Have a Confession: I Was Homeschooled with Garrett Mehrguth
• Conquering the 100 Best Books of All Time with Kristen Craft
• Tales of Coffee from a Kitchen Window with Scott Callender
• Go Frost Yourself: 7 Basic Frostings & Their Uses with Aette Promes
• A Creative Endeavor Inspires & Lengthens a Life with Ralph Legnini
• Finding and Embracing Healthy Eating Habits with Carrie Hill
• I Was Told There Would Be Hoverboards. with Dan Petrovic
• The Day I Disremembered with Chris Hanson
• What Did You Expect in an Opera, a Happy Ending? with Chrissi Reimer
• The Best Practices in Cooking Hot Dogs with Josh Couper
• Raising My Parents with Jen Lopez
• Stoned Nerd versus the Four-Legged Home Invaders with Ian Lurie

The ever-fabulous Geraldine DeRuiter, aka the Everywhereist, will be back as emcee.

Aette talks about yummy ganaches at MozCon Ignite 2015.

The basic details to pitch

• To submit, just fill out the form below.
• Please only submit one talk! We want the one you're most excited about.
• Talks caot be about online marketing or career-focused.
• They are only 5 minutes in length, so plan accordingly.
• If you are already speaking on the MozCon stage, you caot pitch for this event. You also caot pitch if you spoke at MozCon Ignite previously.
• Submissions close on Thursday, July 21 at 5pm PDT.
• Selection decisions are final and will be made in late July/early August.
• All presentations must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
• You must attend MozCon, September 12–14, and the Tuesday night event in person, in Seattle.

If selected, you will get the following:

• 5 minutes on the Tuesday night stage to share with our audience. The event lasts from 7–10pm and will be at McCaw Hall (where the Seattle Opera is).
• $300 off a regular priced ticket to MozCon. (If you already purchased yours, we'll issue a $300 refund for a regular-priced ticket or $100 for an early-bird ticket. Discount not available for super early-bird special.)
• We will work with you to hone your talk!
• Stage tour of event space between 5–7pm Tuesday night so you can get familiar with the venue and being on stage before the crowd shows up.

Unfortunately, we caot provide travel coverage for MozCon Ignite speaking slots.

What makes a great pitch?

• Focus on the five minute length.
• Be passionate about what you're speaking about. Tell us what's great about it.
• For extra credit, include links to videos of you doing public speaking.
• Follow the guidelines. Yes, the word counts are limited on purpose. Do not submit links to Google Docs, etc. for more information. Tricky and multiple submissions will be disqualified.

We caot wait to see what you want to share with us! Like other MozCon speaker selections, we'll have a small committee of Mozzers reviewing your pitches. If you're interested to see more Ignite talks and get inspired, check out the videos from Ignite Seattle 30 — you may see yours truly in one of them. ;-)

As always, best of luck pitching! And we'll let you know either way with regards to our decision. May the odds ever be in your favor.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket and don't miss MozCon Ignite!

We don't live in a world where we have the luxury of thinking about just user experience or just SEO. The two share many of the same spaces online, working in tandem and sometimes even clashing. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details the considerations and compromises that must be made for UX & SEO to coexist in harmony.

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 chatting about managing tension between user experience and SEO. This is a topic we've touched on a little bit in the past, but we've seen it come up quite a bit as many more folks are thinking about user experience and working with user experience designers and product and project managers and SEO. They're trying to reconcile some of these differences.

So it is the case that a lot of the things that positively impact user experience also positively impact SEO. In fact, we have a whole Whiteboard Friday about those kinds of things. But UX touches on lots of things that impact rankings in the search engines.

Affecting SEO with UX changes

Certainly spam, to a certain indirect degree, Google can be looking at pages and sites and may say, "This fits in our template of what spam looks like."

It affects links, especially because user experience helps to predict whether someone might link to you. If you have 1,000 people coming to your site, by improving the user experience you may go from 1 link per 1,000 people coming to your site to 2 or 3, which could dramatically increase the links that come to you, affecting your search engine rankings.

Obviously, content is being impacted here. User experience affects how search engines judge content just as it affects how users judge that same content.

User and usage data. Naturally, of course, technical issues certainly in some respects, especially with things like page load speed, mobile friendliness, these are big UX elements that impact.

Probably less so with things like query interpretation and user context. Those are generally less impacted signals that search engines might use.

But regardless of this, nearly everything you do that's on a site or a page that's going to positively impact user experience or negatively impact user experience will have a corresponding impact on SEO, with a small handful of exceptions. The small handful of exceptions is where we see a lot of these tensions and challenges coming into play, and that's what we're going to discuss today, specifically four kinds of tension that can exist.

So what I'm going to do is ask you to imagine two worlds, one world in which there is no SEO. It's before search engines. We're just worried about the user experience. People only come to your site through the site itself, and they only navigate through the website. They don't navigate from engines directly to your pages. They're not performing searches. We're UX-only world.

1. In UX-only world, one of the big exceptions here is page consolidation versus segmentation.

So page consolidation would be, I'm going to put a bunch of different user intents all together on a single page because we can serve users best from that single page, single experience. That is true in UX-only world.

But what has happened is that you've forgotten about UX+SEO world. I'll give you an example here. Let's say I'm trying to make a website all about transportation in the Seattle area. I want to provide people with how to get to and from places, and the best times to go, and are you thinking about traffic, and are you thinking about comparing public versus private transport options, and driving versus Lyft versus Uber versus renting a car, all these different kinds of things. I'm covering the whole world of Seattle transit.

So I have in my UX-only world a single experience that describes getting to and from any neighborhood or any particular location to any other one. That page is sort of a singular experience. It provides everything all those users might need.

But in UX+SEO world, we have to remember that somewhere between a third and half, sometimes even more of our traffic is actually going to be searching on Google for what we provide. They're not going to be going directly to our website and then experiencing the site only through that. They're also going to be searching on Google, and that means they're going to be searching with all different kinds of queries.

Those different kinds of queries have different intents behind them, and we need to serve those with separate pages, which is why page segmentation is so important. So I might have a general landing page in UX+SEO world. I might have an individual neighborhood landing page. I might have a location to location landing page.

If I'm only thinking about UX and not SEO, I am not serving these folks well. In fact, I'm hurting the user experience of anyone who searches for me or who might come to me through a search engine. Because landing on this page, if I've already expressed to Google that I'm looking to go from Ballard to the Space Needle and I want my options, that's a lousy experience. I have to go enter that information again. I already told Google what I wanted. Your website should be delivering that.

So this is one of those areas where we have to make the sacrifice and live in UX+SEO world, recognize this exists, create landing pages that specifically serve the needs of searchers and provide that great experience for them. Those pages have to be linked to. They have to be indexable. They have to be keyword-targeted. They need the right kinds of content on them. It's different than pure UX world.

2. Exception number two, this also happens in inteal linking and site navigation.

So in UX-only world, I can have a much more limited set of onsite navigation because I don't have to point to nearly as many pages and because, in general, I can rely on the intuition of my users to be able to figure out that oh, this particular page probably lives in this particular section. If I want to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, I can look at the neighborhoods landing area. Or if I'm particularly interested in comparing costs of different kinds of vehicle rentals versus getting around the city with Lyft and Uber versus that kind of thing, I can go to the transportation options section.

But in UX+SEO world, again because we have different types of landing pages, we generally speaking have to link to much more, and so that might mean instead of a single section we actually need drop-downs. We need to have more navigation. Maybe we need to even put in a footer or have some more sidebar navigation. We may need to make a little bit of a sacrifice for the purity of user experience for someone who's not coming from search in order to link to more things and in order to provide better inteal anchor text. These links are going to need good inteal, descriptive anchor text.

That is not actually just helpful for search engines. This is actually quite helpful for folks who may not have the same intuition that you're assuming many of your visitors might have and for folks who are looking to quickly navigate directly, potentially on a mobile device or on a screen reader for those folks who have more trouble with accessibility issues. This is positive from all those perspectives. That inteal anchor text, as we've discussed previously on Whiteboard Friday, can have quite a positive impact on your search rankings.

3. Exception number three, keyword use on pages in titles and in anchor text

So in UX-only world, I might have a page that's "Ballard to Space Needle." Great, that's all I need to say. But in UX+SEO world, I need to show the search engines and, indeed, the searchers themselves that I'm very relevant to their query, that I'm answering exactly what they are looking for before they get to this page, because, remember, all they're going to see in the search results is just the title and the description maybe, whatever is in that little snippet. They're not going to know, "Oh you know what, they probably provide a great experience, but it's very visual and interactive and so I just can't see it. I'll click them anyway." That is not how people search. They look at that snippet. They decide whether they're going to click and engage.

So we need to present a better, more optimized version of the page for search engines specifically. In this case, what is also true is that there's probably a bunch of words and phrases — what we've called here at Moz related topics — related keywords, related topics that I should have on this page.

If I'm talking about going from Ballard to the Space Needle, I probably want to include words like bus, streetcar, farmers market, the farmers market in Ballard, or Seattle Center (which is at the base of the Space Needle surrounding it), monorail, which there is a monorail. It won't get you from Ballard, but it will get you from downtown to the Space Needle. Uber and Lyft. These are all words and phrases that Google would expect someone who's interested in transportation between these neighborhoods to want to find on this page. Therefore, we need to do a good job of serving those searcher intents and those related topics that Google cares about.

4. Fourth and finally, we need crawler-readable text content on pages.

In UX-only world, that's not always the case. In fact, if you think about UX-only world, an app might be the very best type of experience. That could be a web app, or it could be a mobile app, or interchangeably both. It could provide a great experience by letting me just click around the city and know where I'm going and select things from inside the app. The URL would actually never change.

But you know what? This sort of visual interactive experience is not going to work in UX+SEO world.

We need descriptive content. We need to be able to navigate between pages. We need separate URLs for each of these. Those URLs need to have good anchor text that's pointing between them back and forth. We need to have keyword targeting in all of the facets of that navigation. We need to figure out what all those keyword targets are, which requires keyword research. So there are just a lot of different changes that need to happen.

My advice is this. If you're an SEO and you're working with user experience folks, please remind them that the user experience doesn't just apply to the people who are already on the site or navigating inteally in the site. Search engines send a huge amount of traffic, and we need to think about the user experience of coming from a search engine to the website. It's not just about rankings and traffic. It's about the user experience that those people have as well.

If you're a user experience professional and you're working with SEOs, with the exception of these few things, generally speaking everything that you do to improve user experience — the UI itself and the visuals, the design, the branding, the load speed, the efficiency that people get between pages on a site — all of those experiential elements also improve SEO. So as a user experience professional, your pitch to SEOs should be, generally speaking, very easy because you can help them rank better so long as you keep these things in mind.

All right, everyone, look forward to your Idea, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Darren Shaw of Whitespark speaking at Mozcon Local

The gentleman sitting across the table from me at a crowded lunch spot has what he sees as a workable business idea for a local business, a sound plan to get it off the ground, enough funds to weather the ups and downs of the current business climate in his area, and the determination to stick around long enough to be successful.

However, what he doesn't have are the answers to three questions pertaining to content marketing for his small business:

• "What should I write about?"
• "How do I [rank higher in local SERPs?]"
• "Do I need to use social media? Will it help my brand?"

My heart breaks a little as he looks down to pick at his salad. Not because I don't like questions, or because the questions are difficult to answer. They aren't.

In fact, the answer I gave comes from a slogan i leaed of in college and have used repeatedly when attempting to get small brands to see the shortest path to success: "Think globally, act locally."

The SERPs won't save you

Every brand wants to be No. 1 in the SERPs, or so they think.

What they really want, however, is to be the No. 1 most-chosen brand.

What ultimately matters in the earliest stages of your relationship with prospects is that they see you in the SERPs, recognize your brand for its quality of service and/or excellent products(s), and reward you with a click.

Far too often, however, local brands think too broadly (often as a result of poor keyword selection) and attempt to rank for terms and/or categories they'll never be able to consistently rank for. All the while, they ignore low-hanging fruit, such as ensuring their Google My Places is up-to-date, their citations are accurate, and prioritizing reviews on third-party sites.

Worse still, even brands that do commit to these efforts too often ignore creating local-specific pages, which can be a tremendous asset for capturing traffic, leads, and driving conversions for local brands.

Individually, not capitalizing on these areas is bad for brand health; collectively, they amount to leaving the door open to the competition.

Image source

And if you're a small or midsize business (SMB) owner, your focus must be on closing doors to the competition. To do that you'll need to use your size and the knowledge of your local service area to your advantage.

As I'm wont to say, it's simple, but it won't be easy.

Local SEO to the rescue

A few months, I had the distinct pleasure of getting to work with Local SEO expert Mary Bowling as she prepared for Mozcon Local. During a phone conversation, I shared with her my frustration at seeing local brands get pwned by big brands, in large part because the former has all but given up on the quest to be competitive, even when they have wood to throw on the fire.

She agreed that there some holes SMBs are refusing to expose.

"Big brands do have the resources to dominate in local search, but to a large degree they often won't spent the money needed to be successful, specifically as it regards local-specific content," says Bowling, owner of Ignitor Digital, which provides online marketing and Local Search marketing solutions to SMBs. "Often small brands don't create good content because they don't think they have the time. But it's not as complicated as they believe. Also, being that they are the local experts, local-specific content is easier to create than they think and can provide the [perfect vehicle to ward off bigger brands]."

That conversation was the wellspring for discussions I'd later have at Mozcon Local with speakers Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. I also had the privilege of interviewing each of them, in addition to Local SEO whiz Phil Rozek of Local Visibility Systems, after the event.

What follows is a post based on the entirety of those conversations, with the goal of answering one question: How can local SMBs better compete with big brands in their respective areas?

Local content is David's slingshot to Goliath's plate of armor

One of the toughest parts of working with SMB owners is getting them to realize the vast world around them is actually much smaller than they assume, in at least two key ways:

• Big brands with local or regional offices/locations are always a threat for stealing local customers.
• Their reach is as limited as their resources, in that while their service area is small, so too is their ability to rank in the SERPs.

That is, unless SMBs use the biggest and best weapon available to them: Local-focused content that makes a priority of using people, personalization and events to help them stave off the typically much stronger competition.

Full disclosure: Nothing related to business pisses me off more than seeing big brands dominate local search queries, when I know smaller brands that provide better service are all around.

Equally frustrating is seeing these small brands try to compete outside their league by relying too heavily on paid search and ignore how effective content marketing can be for their business's long-term success.

If this sounds like your brand, I implore you to own your local turf by following the three steps outlined below.

#1 — Think quality > quantity

As a business strategist, two questions comes up over and over from SMB owners:

1. "What should I write about?"
2. "How often should I post blogs?"

A better question is, "What topics are my prospects most interested in, and how can I write about those topics with the quality necessary to gain and retain their attention?"

The process begins with you thinking less about how often you write and more about how well you write on the topics your prospects and customers care most about.

"If you want to get local content, and get ranking but also customers, think quality over quantity," says Phil Rozek. "Get your sea legs. Can you create a page that gets rankings but also customers?"

The last point, which I discussed extensively with Rozek via phone, is a very important one.

The key to success for any brand's content goes well beyond the SERPs, and that applies doubly so for local SMBs, where butts in the door or phone calls are the lifeblood of the business.

The focus, he says, must be on producing content of sufficient quality and relevancy to move the needle, not simply attain eyeballs.

"The goal is to get the phone to ring," adds Rozek. "You want it to rank and continue to get the phone to ring. But you also want it to be good enough that you get customers who become brand advocates. If you can't do that, you need to go back to the drawing board."

Ramsey says well-performing local content should hit at least one of the following points perfectly:

• "It's unifying. Think of sporting events — it's one thing in a local place that brings everyone together across different walks of life and puts everyone on the same page. Good local content that gets shared and loved does the same."
• "It's educational. Local is confusing. Whether explaining history, directions, or tips, people crave good information about places."
• "It's insider. There is nothing worse than someone talking about a place that they don't understand. It's why content 'only' locals perform so well."

As an example, Ramsey uses Movoto, a service provides tools and information for the real estate, as a great example. You can see from the example below that localized pages they create go way beyond what we typically see for city-specific pages, as the content is compelling visually and topically, creating a rich experience visitors are likely to read, share, and link to.

Adds Ramsey, "SMBs should ask every customer where they spend their time online. When they know that, they can start to create content that will appeal to them. The problem that most SMBs have is they get 'sold' on products that will update feeds with garbage or create content that doesn't really relate to their audience.

"Then they give up. I think they have to step back and realize that you can't outsource strategy. They need to be a part of it. They know their customer and need to be involved in determining how best to reach them."

• What this tells us: Content quality goes beyond good grammar and solid images. Creating a content experience is the optimal goal.
• How to make it for your brand: Focus on creating content that is uniquely better than anything you've seen or that could be easily created by the competition, no matter how large. Think of the elements that make your area unique and interesting, then work to create content that provides a sensory experience worthy of being talked about and shared.
• Recommended reading/viewing: How to Create 10x Content - Whiteboard Friday

#2 — Relish the role of local expert

Mary Bowling speaking at Mozcon Local

Each time I do a search for a local service provider and see a large national or regional brand show up, a little of the strategist in me dies insides. Yes, I get that larger brands have the deep pockets to spend on Google Adwords and the domain authority to wreak havoc in the organic search. But come on... A lot of small brands aren't even trying to compete, and that's a shame.

"Too often, with small brands, they think they'll have to hire someone else to create it," says Bowling. "They don't realize they are the local authorities, and simply writing what they know can go a long way. Most sales are taken at the location level, but small brands often don't do enough location-specific content to help their business. Often, with a simple phone call and a fifteen minute interview, we can create a post that's able to move the needle for their brand."

Bowling further added: "The goal for the content these small brands create is localized excellence."

Rob Robillard, aka A Concord Carpenter, provides an excellent example of how local brands can use the expert mantle to own their space. A general contractor, carpenter, and woodworker, Robillard has parlayed his expert and local knowledge into a correspondence gig for the Boston Globe.

Image courtesy of A Concord Carpenter

Says Rozek, "Robillard doesn’t write 'local' content as much as he’s a local business owner whose business has benefitted from his having become a noted local authority. Not only does he write for the Boston Globe, he also has a cable show" and a popular video series.

Also, stresses Rozek, different types of businesses will have different goals for their content.

A plumber, for example, is likely less conceed with having a piece of content that draws and engagement and get links; she needs the phone to ring. So having strong city-specific pages that have the ability to rank and get the phone to ring would likely be a more desirable option.

However, if a small brand can do both, they're better positioned to enjoy success.

"If you have a small site that has good authority and some good links, they're in the bully pulpit because any page they create is a little more likely to rank," says Rozek. "The name of the game, then, is to use the other pages of the site to help the city pages rank, since even if they are done well doesn't guarantee that they rank by themselves. But if you build links to other related pages on the site, those city pages are [likely to see a lift as well in organic reach], which is significant for building authority and engagement, even if the pages the links are pointing to don't get the phone to ring."

What this tells us: Don't focus solely on creating content that gets the phone to ring. Devote some resources to attaining links on other parts of the site.

How to make it for your brand: Spend time building your reputation as an expert of note in your area, then create and share content on your site and other sites you're able to partner with. Also, while city pages get people in the door, effective outreach can help you build links to other parts of the site that, in tu, provide a boost to the other pages on the site, including the city-specific pages.

Recommended reading: Top-3 Local SEO "Content” Wins for People Who Hate to Write

#3 — Get personal

One of the toughest sells to SMBs is getting them to see the value of making the content they share personal in nature. Makes zero sense when you consider that unique-to-only-you content is the one thing the competition caot effectively copy.

"Small companies can create more unifying, educational, and insider content, but to do so they have to find the time and money to do it," says Ramsey, adding, if they do, "Small businesses can blow away competition."

Mike Ramsey speaking at Mozcon Local

An impressive example of a small brand outpacing all comers is Danburry Barbershop in Provo, Utah. The site has a welcoming, old-school feel and contains images of customers before, during, and after they receive service.

Danburry is getting right to the heart of personalized content by making local folks celebrities of sorts for, well, simply sitting in a chair and getting a trim or a wash. Let's be honest: Who doesn't want to show off their new 'do? You know the customers are sharing the experience with friends and family members while providing the barber shop with ready-made personalized content.

Also, the brand posts images to social media, including Facebook and Twitter, creating a web of personalized content even large brands must envy.

"The Danburry Barbershop is killing it with a subdomain on a .blogspot site simply because he uses his site to showcase his customers," says Ramsey. "His Facebook feed is also filled with his customer stories and what they do. He is creating a loyal community of unified, educated, and insider Provo people."

My question to small business owners is, "What's stopping you from doing the same?" And for those who work with SMBs, either as strategists, SEOs, or content people, we mustn't shy away from making recommendations of this sort, especially when a brand has the bandwidth and the clientele to make it work.

What this tells us: Look for ways to get personal with your clientele, particularly as it regards the sharing of information involving them.

How to make it for your brand: Think of the people who've talked or written about how much they enjoy your product or service. Why not reach out to them for a quick interview, which could take the form of a short video that could posted to Instagram or YouTube or hosted directly on your site?

All you'd need is a few questions to ask them — don't make it about your brand. Make it about the audience: getting to know them, who they are, etc.

Recommended reading: The Power of the Personal: Personal Brands for Company Brands

It was my first day at my new gig as a federal govement IT consultant in Washington, D.C. I was slogging through the typical onboarding paperwork when a senior partner dropped by, introduced himself, and handed me a paperback book.

“Read and implement this,” he said. The cover read The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, a book with a sole focus on “the ability to ea the trust and confidence of clients.”

“Client management must be important,” I thought.

This encounter occurred more than 10 years ago, in my previous profession. Before doing search marketing or SEO, I was a govement IT consultant. I navigated bloated systems and untangled red tape. In the time I spent consulting at the FBI, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection), I leaed quite a few lessons that apply directly to the SEO industry.

The most important lessons I leaed, perhaps, were about the art and science of effective client management. Many of those lessons leaed have become standard operating procedure at Go Fish Digital. What follows is the codification of our client management approach. It isn’t a sexy new link building strategy or a mind-blowing algorithm update, but it's just as critical to the success of a project.

Overarching client management principles

To start, the following overarching principles help set team expectations. The three core areas that guide our client engagements are:

1. Transparency: The majority of our tasks and communication take place in a project management tool (Basecamp) that the client has access to. We want them to see and participate in our discussions, questions, and decisions. By not having this process behind closed doors, we can always go back to when and why a decision was made within Basecamp.
2. Continuous communication: We communicate at the pace the client prefers, but we err toward over-communicating. To a client, radio silence means no work is being done, even if that isn’t truly the case.
3. Alignment: What are your client’s key performance indicators (KPIs)? What problems keep them up at night? We make sure to align our work and reporting with what is important to the client, rather than only pushing what we think is most important.

The following nine principles are built out of these three core areas, highlighting how you put these principles to work in day-to-day interactions with clients.

It should be noted that these aren’t hard and fast rules, but rather a philosophy to guide our team (and hopefully other agencies) on how to become trusted partners with your clients. It is hard to be perfect all the time (I sure as hell am not), but the more often these nine items are standard operating procedure, the better. So let's dive in, Star Wars-style.

1. Take the time to lea the industry

I got the call from a team member to let me know a new referral had come our way. He was excited because it was a strong referral and very likely to become a client soon. I asked him about the project and what industry they were in. “Plastics machine manufacturing” was his response. Interesting... I knew next to nothing about that industry. Yet, we were very likely to have them as a client to help them market their products online. The first thing we needed to do was understand the industry, and we did this by diving in head first to lea everything we could about the plastics manufacturing lifecycle.

To make sure we have a solid foundation for a client’s niche, the team conducts a lot of discovery in the first month, such as:

1. Reviewing the client’s website
2. Identifying industry publications and blogs and reading them consistently
3. Scheduling an in-person visit (if possible) to see how they work and meet the team
4. Requesting any documentation they have about their products or services
5. Watching online videos highlighting the industry, their products, and their team
6. Building a lexicon document that includes jargon and definitions of words commonly used in their industry
7. Purchasing and using the product or service ourselves (if reasonable and feasible)

As an SEO and marketing consultant, you will not be an expert in every client’s industry. But, it is important that you lea their space. This builds their confidence in you, helps you lea their language, and establishes trust.

2. Crush it on the kickoff call

We were kicking off an online reputation management (ORM) project with a celebrity’s publicist and assistant. Prior to the call, we gathered everyone in the company that was a fan of this celeb and did a quick research session so we were all up to speed with his movies, causes, friends, and issues. For the kick-off call, we built a detailed agenda which contained specific topics and questions. The call left the client team feeling at ease that we understood the issue and how to fix it. As a team, we were pleased that all of our early legwork (and TMZ watching) paid off.

After the sales process, the project gets handed over to a client manager like myself. The first thing I do is get a kick-off call scheduled quickly with the client and anyone from their side who will be on the project. Since this is one of your earliest communications with the client, it sets the tone for the entire engagement, so you want to be organized and responsive in getting this meeting set up.

We include on the call anyone from our team who might touch the project. This way, they hear everything from the client at the start, and the client feels good because so many people are working hard on their project.

We always build an agenda for the kick-off call, and I make sure that there is at least one item that each person on our team can speak to. This allows each employee to demonstrate their expertise in the begiing and build a relationship with the client. If it's a phone call, the client may forget just how many people we have working on the account if only one or two people speak during the meeting.

3. Have open, visible tasks and team discussions

We’ve been working with Amy for several years now, and she continually expresses her gratefulness for our transparency. Amy is a senior employee at a data security firm and is often traveling and working on other projects. By keeping track of every task on Basecamp and looping her into our work, she is able to quickly skim through completed tasks and see exactly where we stand on every project. She sees not only what we’ve accomplished in her absence, but also what’s on the horizon. Additionally, she can be directly emailed with any pertinent messages and chime in with a response to keep everything moving forward.

The goal here is to show everything except how the sausage is made. Why would you want to hide all of the time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes menial tasks you’re doing? Showing the client everything we are doing for them helps drive home the value of our service and keeps them from getting antsy about the occasional slow result.

The only place where we hold back a little is on drafts of deliverable reports. We keep those in our team Dropbox and simply reference the folder path when discussing them on Basecamp. We’ve found it keeps clients from getting hung up on things that we haven’t quite finished.

4. Respond within 24 hours

I was just breaking into online marketing when I heard something on the radio that caught my attention. My favorite show, The Sports Junkies in Washington, D.C., were looking to build a website for a new venture. They talked about how aoying it was to work with web designers because things always get difficult. In a moment of inspiration, I sent them a short pitch email that ended with, “Messages don’t sit around in my inbox. I respond immediately.” The next moing, someone from the show emailed me back, saying “I’m not sure why exactly, but I think I can work with you." I’ve worked closely with them ever since, and that relationship has helped springboard the Go Fish Digital brand in D.C.

From that original encounter on, I’ve always placed a high value on responsiveness. You know that person in your life who feels like you're late if you're on time? That’s how we are with this 24-hour response time rule. If you truly take 24 hours to acknowledge a client’s request, it may be within the time frame, but it isn’t honoring the spirit of the rule itself (37 pieces of flair, anyone?). It doesn’t take much to send a note saying, “We are on it”.

This is another area in which we err on the side of overdoing things. Even if the client sends an email that might not normally warrant a response, we still ping them back to let them know it was received.

One of the chief complaints about service-based companies is a lack of responsiveness. Counteract that by being committed to quick responses.

5. Be organized

The director of marketing at a large financial organization likes to meet with our team weekly. We review the previous week’s progress and talk through our tasks for the next few days. This client is especially chatty, so without a formal agenda in place, there was the potential for the calls to devolve into a free-for-all, which would be inefficient for everyone. Because of situations like this, we always send a formal agenda ahead of time, which keeps us all on track and demonstrates to the client that we understand their goals and respect their time. Of course, we always allow our clients to ask questions or bring new things up. For the most part, though, we try to stick to the agenda.

Disorganization is frustrating. Sometimes you just have to deal with it. A spouse or child who misplaces everything, a friend who can’t remember an appointment, or a co-worker that never replies to important emails. While in these instances there is nothing you can do, a client who’s fed up with her vendor’s disorganization can simply get a new vendor. So we stress the importance of being ultra-organized on the project.

Have well thought-out agendas. Follow those up with meeting notes and action items if appropriate. Keep Basecamp organized with to-dos and messages. Communicate clearly. Always use calendar appointments. It’s the little things that show you are professional.

6. Be flexible and adaptable

We work with a large car sales website that aggregates all car listings from across the web. When you're dealing with a site that has over 3 million pages, it's important to focus on optimization opportunities that scale. We identified site speed as one of these optimization opportunities. The site had been particularly laggy, and I was doing my best to get to the bottom of the issues with their CDN. Alas, I was stuck.

Fortunately, one of our other team members is Akamai certified and has configured CDNs for multiple large govement websites. I looped him in; he started throwing around big words like “nodes” and “end points.” Some magic happened, I assume, and everything was fixed. The site was now blazing-fast and the client happy that his SEO team resolved an issue he didn’t even know they could help with.

No project is ever the same, which is great. How boring would it be if you applied the exact same strategy and principles to different projects, over and over?

We're always looking for ways to show additional value to the client. Whether it's by helping them with something out-of-scope or helping with deliverables that they have to pass on to senior management, there are always ways for us to contribute value. Although there's nothing wrong with up-selling, we don’t often like to say “that is out of scope” for a task that wouldn’t take us too long or be too difficult.

Additionally, we're very flexible in terms of how we work with a client. Is the client a phone person or email person? Are they hands-off, or intimately involved in the details? We try to get a good feel for this, and then adjust how we work with them based on their preferences.

7. Be in front of the technological curve, not behind it

Our new yacht charter client had just finished their first month with us and we were reviewing everything that had been done thus far. It was all very positive, and during the call, the CEO casually said, “I love the inteal communication tool (Slack) so much that I’ve started using it at my other company.” Clients want to feel like you are doing things efficiently, effectively, and with the latest technology.

In our field, change is the norm. Every time Google launches an algorithm update, it can mean that a tactic that's worked for us for months or even years is suddenly obsolete. We’ve found that one of the best ways to avoid any surprises here is to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to strategies and tools.

I’ve mentioned our project management tool, Basecamp, a few times now. It may not have all the bells and whistles of others, but it’s dead simple to lea and our clients pick it up without any help from us.

We also use Slack both inteally and with clients for brainstorming sessions. Slack provides quick access to the entire team, which is helpful for most of our day-to-day communication.

In addition to tools, we’ve found that everyone on the team needs to be comfortable with a core set of tech-savvy tasks:

1. Reviewing and editing HTML and CSS
2. Testing, installing, and configuring WordPress plugins
3. Editing a WordPress theme
4. Ruing ScreamingFrog against a site and reviewing the results
5. Performing more advanced Excel functions like vLookups and pivot tables
6. Examining a website’s DNS and understanding each element

Being tech-savvy in all areas of our business reinforces their trust that they are with the best team. Clients expect us to be tech-savvy, so we don’t want to let them down by looking like noobs.

8. Have an escalation path to tu to

While project work was underway for one of our financial sector clients, a reputation crisis popped up that went beyond our defined scope of work. We had worked with Google in the past to get certain defamatory web pages removed, but this particular case required some legal expertise. Luckily, we had a highly specialized ORM attoey in our network who was equipped to handle situations exactly like this. The client was grateful that we had a trusted expert on call and felt like their issue was being handled by an elite team that could deftly handle any issue that arose.

If things aren’t working, clients like when you have options to tu to. Bring in an expert from your team or even an outside consultant, but be sure to sell it as a unique offering or coection that you have. Being able to escalate situations to special people and processes when the initial solution doesn’t work keeps the project moving forward and prevents clients from seeking solutions from other agencies.

9. Show you care on a personal level

Our client was having his first child, a baby girl. That is certainly a time to celebrate, so we made a nice card and sent it to his family along with an edible arrangement when his bundle of joy arrived. It went over great, both with the client and his wife.

I hesitate to call this a tactic, since caring should never be manipulative. Let's just call this a reminder to care. Small talk at the top of calls, for example, can go a long way in establishing a more personal coection than the robotic client/agency relationship. It's hard for introverts like me, but I force myself to do it because it gives the relationship more depth and meaning. At the end of the day, your reputation as a person is more important than building brands or making money.

Final thoughts

We do our best to instill these values in our organization and make it clear up front what our expectations are of every employee. Over time, these nine principles have evolved and will continue to do so as we work to continue building a good agency with a strong reputation.

Maintaining a positive relationship with the client is everything. Delivering on the results you sell and adhering to these nine principles will help both you and your client achieve success.

Do you disagree with any of these principles? Or are there others that are important to you, either as a provider or as a client? Let us know in the Idea!

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

That's right! Please join us in congratulating the four community speakers for MozCon 2016 — September 12–14 in Seattle.

This year, we received 140 submissions. And while the overall number of submissions were down, the quality of submissions has gone up. Typically, we've been able to eliminate ~100 submissions for not meeting the minimum bar, but this year, it was more like ~20. Which only means competition for these four slots was harder than ever before.

For those wondering more about what makes a great MozCon pitch, I've included the pitches, plus a comment from a committee member. (With a bit of the information redacted, because surprises on stage are good.)

Please congratulate...

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Alex Stein

SEO Manager at Wayfair
@sonofadiplomat

Alex Stein is currently SEO Manager at Wayfair.com, an online home goods store. Follow him on Twitter @sonofadiplomat for all things SEO, and he is, in fact, the son of a diplomat.

Alex's pitch:

Boost Rankings by Removing Inteal Links

A majority of SEO advice covers gaining high volumes of exteal links, but many site owners fail to pursue the low-hanging fruit by reducing the number of inteal links to drive organic rankings. Listeners will lea easy ways to massively optimize inteal authority flow to boost rankings, with case studies to demonstrate these wins in action.

Business cases that will be covered:

1. Slimming down your header navigation: Using [X] data and [X] to remove links from header navigation, while increasing conversion.
2. Slimming down your footer navigation: I’ll cover how we used A/B testing to prove footer links weren’t driving qualified visits, just "tourist visits."
3. For smaller sites, I’ll cover common mistakes with [X] that increase the total number of links on every single page.
4. Reducing links on your most valuable pages: I’ll cover two concrete examples of how Wayfair reduced the number of links on product browse pages and drove additional visits.
5. I’ll share a "Link Value Calculator"
6. Lastly, I’ll also cover our formula for evaluating the dollar value of an inteal link.

Felicia's notes: Sounds very actionable. I like the straightforward, traditional simplicity of the topic, and am intrigued by the "link value calculator"/"evaluating the dollar value of an inteal link" ideas. If not a finalist, this would make a great blog post.

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Emma Still

Marketing Lead at Seer Interactive
@mmstll

Emma Still leads all marketing efforts for Seer Interactive. Prior to that, she led a team of SEO professionals at Seer, where she leveraged her digital marketing skills to recruit team members to build stronger, more successful digital teams.

Emma's pitch:

What if digital marketers thought about recruiting in the exact same way they thought about [smart] link building?

The highest commodity in our industry is human capital: the people on the teams, doing the work, getting. shit. done. Yet so many companies are desperate to find and recruit the talent they need.

The ironic thing is that the answer to their recruiting woes has been under their noses the whole time.

Using tools like [X] to find people who share content that aligns with your company’s mission or philosophy? Boom — list of candidate prospects.

All of those advanced search queries you’ve refined for identifying link prospects? You can easily use those for prospecting potential candidates. For example, [X query string]

Know someone who would be an ideal candidate but isn’t ready to make the leap to a new role? Use [X's] feature to find people they’re closely coected to and you’ve got a whole new set of prospects.

Digital marketers have all the tools and resources they need to find and recruit other talented digital marketers; all it requires is a change in perspective.

Christy's notes: Really interesting topic that tackles a pervasive problem in the marketing industry. Pitch is solid.

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Robyn Wier

SEO Manager at Hoblower Cruises and Events
@robyn_wier

Robyn Wier is a passionate SEOer with a deep love for data analytics, user experience optimization, content strategy development, and her two adorable cats who fill her life with joy and fur...on everything.

Robyn's pitch:

I'd love to present on Navigation Optimization. It's a pretty meaty topic, and I could honestly talk for two hours on it, but in the 15 minutes I'd like to cover the key components that go into improving a site's navigation structure. These components include: Understanding the buying fuel for both B2B and B2C, utilizing [X] to provide a guideline to the navigation structure, stepping away from narcissistic menuing (i.e. [X]), incorporating calls to action, the basic elements all b2b and b2c navigations should have, and ensuring each page is its own unique URL! No more of this one-page website with anchor text.

I've worked with a lot of clients just on this, and each time we've seen massive success because what we inevitably do is improve UX by bringing relevant pages higher in the fuel. We then see improved ranks for those pages because they're naturally accessed more via the nav. Most importantly, we're able to identify gaps in content once we whiteboard the new navigation structure based on [X, X, and X] (which inevitably leads to more ranks!).

Ronell's notes: Highly relevant to EVERYONE.

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Samuel Scott

Director of Marketing and Communications at Logz.io
@samueljscott

Samuel Scott is a global marketing speaker and Director of Marketing and Communications for log analysis platform Logz.io, as well as a contributor to TechCrunch and Moz.

Samuel's pitch:

The 8 Things You Need to Check in Server Log Files in Technical SEO Audits

Server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how search engines crawl your website. Here's what to check and how to fix any related problems.

Crawl budget and volume. If the number of times that a search engine is visiting your site suddenly drops, check your [X], [X], and [X].

Response code errors. Every single server log entry contains a response code. Group URLs by response code to look into those problems easily and in bulk.

Temporary redirects. Every log entry with a 302 response code is a temporary redirect. Those should be changed to 301 (permanent) redirects.

Crawl priority. Which parts of your website get the most attention from search engines? Does that match [X]?

Last crawl date. If an update page is not appearing in the SERPs, check when Google last visited the page. Try submitting that URL directly in Google Search Console.

Crawl budget waste. [X]

Matt's notes: I like it. It's a source of data that I think intimidates a lot of folks, and I'd love to see it made accessible. If he can make it short and simple, I think it'd be good.

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Thanks to everyone who tossed in their hat this year! It's a brave thing to even try.

Finally, I'd like to thank this year's community speaker selection committee – Chiaryn Miranda, Christy Correll, Felicia Crawford, James Daugherty, Matt Roney, Ronell Smith, and Sam Weber.

Cheer on community speakers and buy your MozCon ticket today!

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

It's been almost two years (August 2014) since Google aounced that HTTPS was a ranking signal. Speculation ran rampant, as usual, with some suggesting there was little or no benefit to switching (and possibly significant risk) while others rushed to sell customers on making the HTTPS switch. Two years later, I believe the data speaks for itself — Google is fighting, and wiing, a long war.

What's happened since?

If you only consider the impact of Google's original HTTPS update, I understand your skepticism. Prior to the update, our 10,000-keyword tracking system (think of it as a laboratory for studying Google searches) showed that roughly 7% of page-1 Google results used the "https:" protocol. A week after the update aouncement, that number had increased only slightly, to just over 8%:

The blue/purple show the before/after based on the aouncement date. As you can see, the update probably rolled out over the course of a few days. Even over a 2-week period, though, the impact appears to be fairly small. This led many of us to downplay Google's statements and ignore HTTPS for a while. The next graph is our wake-up call:

As of late June, our tracking data shows that 32.5% (almost one-third) of page-1 Google results now use the "https:" protocol. The tiny bump on the far left (above "A-14" = August 2014) is the original HTTPS algorithm update. The much larger bump in the middle is when Wikipedia switched to HTTPS. This goes to show the impact that one powerhouse can have on SERPs, but that's a story for another time.

What does it mean?

Has Google rolled out multiple updates, rewarding HTTPS (or punishing the lack of it)? Probably not. If this two-year trend was purely a result of algorithm updates, we would expect to see a series of jumps and new plateaus. Other than the Wikipedia change and two smaller bumps, the graph clearly shows a gradual progression.

It's possible that people are simply switching to HTTPS for their own reasons, but I strongly believe that this data suggests Google's PR campaign is working. They've successfully led search marketers and site owners to believe that HTTPS will be rewarded, and this has drastically sped up the shift. An algorithm update is risky and can cause collateral damage. Convincing us that change is for our own good is risk-free for Google. Again, Google is fighting the long war.

Is our data accurate?

Of course, our tracking set is just one sample of search data. The trendline is interesting, but it's possible that our keywords are overstating the prevalence of HTTPS results. I presented a number of roughly 30% at SMX Advanced in mid-June. Later that same day, Google's Gary Illyes called me out and confirmed that number:

Gary did not give an exact figure, but essentially gave a nod to the number, suggesting that we're in the general ballpark. A follow-up tweet confirms this interpretation:

This is as close to confirmation as we can reasonably expect, so let's assume we showed up to the right ballgame and our tickets aren't counterfeit.

Why does 30% matter?

Ok, so about one-third of results use HTTPS. Simple arithmetic says that two-thirds don't. Projecting the trend forward, we've got about a year and a half (16–17 months) before HTTPS hits 50%. So, is it time to panic? No, probably not, but here's the piece of the puzzle you may be missing.

Google has to strike a balance. If they reward sites with HTTPS (or dock sites without it) when very few sites are using it, then they risk a lot of collateral damage to good sites that just haven't made the switch. If, on the other hand, they wait until most sites have switched, a reward is moot. If 100% of sites are on HTTPS and they reward those sites (or dock the 0% without it), nothing happens. They also have to be careful not to set the reward too high, or sites might switch simply to game the system, but not too low, or no one will care. However I feel about Google on any given day, I acknowledge that their job isn't easy.

If rewarding HTTPS too heavily when adoption is low is risky and rewarding it when adoption is too high is pointless, then, naturally, the perfect time to strike is somewhere in the middle. At 30% adoption, we're starting to edge into that middle territory. When adoption hits something like 50–60%, I suspect it will make sense for Google to tu up the algorithmic volume on HTTPS.

At the same time, Google has to make sure that most of the major, trusted sites have switched. As of this writing, 4 of the top 5 sites in our tracking data are ruing on HTTPS (Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube) with the only straggler being #5, Yelp. The top 5 sites in our tracking account for just over 12% of page-1 results, which is a big bit of real estate for only 5 sites.

Of the top 20 sites in our tracking data, only 7 have gone full HTTPS. That's 35%, which is pretty close to our overall numbers across all sites. If Google can convince most of those sites to switch, they'll have covered quite a bit of ground. Focusing on big players and convincing them to switch puts pressure on smaller sites.

In many ways, Google has already been successful. Even without a major, algorithmic HTTPS boost, sites continue to make the switch. As the number climbs, though, the odds of a larger boost increase. I suspect the war is going to be over sooner than the trendline suggests.

What are the risks?

Am I telling you to make the switch? No. While I think there are good reasons to move to HTTPS for some sites and I think most of Google's motives are sincere on this subject, I also believe Google has been irresponsible about downplaying the risks.

Any major change to sitewide URLs is risky, especially for large sites. If you weigh the time, money, and risk of the switch against what is still a small algorithmic boost, I think it's a tough sell in many cases. These risks are not theoretical — back in May, Wired.com wrote up the many problems they've encountered during their HTTPS switch, a switch that they've since paused to reconsider.

Like any major, sitewide change, you have to consider the broader business case, costs, and benefits. I suspect that pressure from Google will increase, especially as adoption increases, and that we're within a year of a tipping point where half of page-1 results will be ruing on HTTPS. Be aware of how the adoption rate is moving in your own industry and be alert, because I suspect we could see another HTTPS algorithm update in the next 6–12 months.

[Estimated read time: 17 minutes]

On-page content is certainly not one of the sexier topics in digital marketing.

Lost in the flashing lights of "cool digital marketing trends" and things to be seen talking about, it's become the poor relative of many a hyped "game-changer."

I’m here to argue that, in being distracted by the topics that may be more "cutting-edge," we're leaving our most valuable assets unloved and at the mercy of underperformance.

This post is designed not only to make it clear what good on-page content looks like, but also how you should go about prioritizing which pages to tackle first based on commercial opportunity, creating truly customer-focused on-page experiences.

What is "static" or "functional" content?

So how am I defining static/functional content, and why is it so important to nurture in 2016? The answer lies in the recent refocus on audience-centric marketing and Google’s development of the Knowledge Graph.

Whether you call your on-page content "functional," "static," or simply "on-page" content, they're all flavors of the same thing: content that sits on key landing pages. These may be category pages or other key conversion pages. The text is designed to help Google understand the relevance of the page and/or help customers with their buying decisions.

Functional content has other uses as well, but today we're focusing on its use as a customer-focused conversion enhancement and discovery tactic.

And while several years ago it would have been produced simply to aid a relatively immature Google to "find" and "understand," the focus is now squarely back on creating valuable user experiences for your targeted audience.

Google’s ability to better understand and measure what "quality content" really looks like — alongside an overall increase in web usage and ease-of-use expectation among audiences — has made key page investment as critical to success on many levels.

We should now be looking to craft on-page content to improve conversion, search visibility, user experience, and relevance — and yes, even as a technique to steal Knowledge Graph real estate.

The question, however, is "how do I even begin to tackle that mountain?"

Auditing what you have

For those with large sites, the task of even begiing to understand where to start with your static content improvement program can be daunting. Even if you have a small site of a couple of hundred pages, the thought of writing content for all of them can be enough to put you off even starting.

As with any project, the key is gathering the data to inform your decision-making before simply "starting." That’s where my latest process can help.

Introducing COAT: The Content Optimization and Auditing Tool

To help the process along, we’ve been using a tool inteally for months — for the first time today, there's now a version that anyone can use.

This link will take you to the new Content Optimisation and Auditing Tool (COAT), and below I’ll walk through exactly how we use it to understand the current site and prioritize areas for content improvement. I'll also walk you through the manual step-by-step process, should you wish to take the scenic route.

The manual process

If you enjoy taking the long road — maybe you feel an extra sense of achievement in doing so — then let's take a look at how to pull the data together to make data-informed decisions around your functional content.

As with any solid piece of analysis, we begin with an empty Excel doc and, in this case, a list of keywords you feel are relevant to and important for your business and site.

In this example, we'll take a couple of keywords and our own site:

Keywords:

Content Marketing Agency
Digital PR

Site:

www.zazzlemedia.co.uk

Ruing this process manually is labor-intensive (hence the need to automate it!) and to add dozens more keywords creates a lot of work for little extra knowledge gain, but by focusing on a couple you can see how to build the fuller picture.

Stage one

We start by adding our keywords to our spreadsheet alongside a capture of the search volume for those terms and the actual URL ranking, as shown below (NOTE: all data is for google.co.uk).

Next we add in ranking position...

We then look to the page itself and give each of the key on-page elements a score based on our understanding of best practice. If you want to be really smart, you can score the most important factors out of 20 and those lesser points out of 10.

In building our COAT tool to enable this to be carried out at scale across sites with thousands of pages, we made a list of many of the key on-page factors we know to affect rank and indeed conversion. They include:

• URL optimization
• Title tag optimization and clickability
• Meta description optimization and clickability
• H1, H2, and H3 optimization and clickability (as individual scores)
• Occurences of keyword phrases within body copy
• Word count
• Keyword density
• Readability (as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability score)

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it's a great place to start your analysis. The example below shows an element of this scored:

Once you have calculated score for every key factor, your job is to then to tu this into an average, weighted score out of 100. In this case, you can see I've done this across the listed factors and have a final score for each keyword and URL:

Stage two

Once you have score for a larger number of pages and keywords, it's then possible to begin organizing your data in a way that helps prioritise action.

You can do this simply enough by using filters and organising the table by any number of combinations.

You may want to sort by highest search volume and then by those pages ranking between, say, 5th and 10th position.

Doing this enables you to focus on the pages that may yield the most potential traffic increase from Google, if that is indeed your aim.

Working this way makes it much easier to work in a way that delivers the largest positive net impact fastest.

Doing it at scale

Of course, if you have a large site with tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of pages, the manual option is almost impossible — which is why we scratched our heads and looked for a more effective option. The result was the creation of our Content Auditing and Optimisation Tool. Here's how you can make use of it to paint a fuller picture of your entire site.

Here's how it works

When it comes to using COAT, you follow a basic process:

• Head over to the tool.
• Enter your domain, or a sub-directory of the site if you'd like to focus on a particular section
• Add the keywords you want to analyze in a comma-separated list
• Click "Get Report," making sure you've chosen the right country

Next comes the smart bit: by adding target keywords to the system before it crawls, it enables the algorithm to cross-reference all pages against those phrases and then score each combination against a list of critical attributes you'd expect the "perfect page" to have.

Let’s take an example:

You run a site that sells laptops. You enter a URL for a specific model, such as /apple-15in-macbook/, and a bunch of related keywords, such as "Apple 15-inch MacBook" and "Apple MacBook Pro."

The system works out the best page for those terms and measures the existing content against a large number of known ranking signals and measures, covering everything from title tags and H1s to readability tests such as the Flesch-Kincaid system.

This outputs a spreadsheet that scores each URL or even categories of URLs (to allow you to see how well-optimized the site is generally for a specific area of business, such as Apple laptops), enabling you to sort the data, discover the pages most in need of improvement, and identify where content gaps may exist.

In a nutshell, it'll provide:

• What the most relevant target page for each keyword is
• How well-optimized individual pages are for their target keywords
• Where content gaps exist within the site’s functional content

It also presents the top-level data in an actionable way. An example of the report landing page can be seen below (raw CSV downloads are also available — more on that in a moment).

You can see the overall page score and simple ways to improve it. This is for our "Digital PR" keyword:

The output

As we've already covered in the manual process example, in addition to pulling the "content quality scores" for each URL, you can also take the data to the next level by adding in other data sources to the mix.

The standard CSV download includes data such as keyword, URL, and scores for the key elements (such as H1, meta, canonical use and static content quality).

This level of detail makes it possible to create a priority order for fixes based on lowest-scoring pages easily enough, but there are ways you can supercharge this process even more.

The first thing to do is run a simple rankings check using your favorite rank tracker for those keywords and add them into a new column in your CSV. It'll look a little like this (I've added some basic styling for clarity):

I also try to group keywords by adding a third column using a handful of grouped terms. In this example, you can see I'm grouping car model keywords with brand terms manually.

Below, you'll see how we can then group these terms together in an averaged cluster table to give us a better understanding of where the keyword volume might be from a car brand perspective. I've blurred the keyword grouping column here to protect existing client strategy data.

As you can see from the snapshot above, we now have a spreadsheet with keyword, keyword group, search volume, URL, rank, and the overall content score pulled in from the base Excel sheet we have worked through. From this, we can do some clever chart visualization to help us understand the data.

Visualizing the numbers

To really understand where the opportunity lies and to take this process past a simple I’ll-work-on-the-worst-pages-first approach, we need to bring it to life.

This means tuing our table into a chart. We'll utilize the chart functionality within Excel itself.

Here's an example of the corresponding chart for the table shown above, showing performance by category and ranking correlation. We're using dummy data here, but you can look at the overall optimization score for each car brand section alongside how well they rank (the purple line is average rank for that category):

If we focus on the chart above, we can begin to see a patte between those categories that are better optimized and generally have better rankings. Correlation does not always equal causation, as we know, but it's useful information.

Take the very first column, or the Subaru category. We can see that it's one of the better-optimized categories (at 49%) and average rank is at 34.1. Now, these are hardly record-breaking positions, but it does point towards the value of well-worked static pages.

Making the categories as granular as possible can be very valuable here, as you can quickly build up a focused picture of where to put your effort to move the needle quickly. The process for doing so is an entirely subjective one, often based on your knowledge of your industry or your site information architecture.

Add keyword volume data into the mix and you know exactly where to build your static content creation to-do list.

Adding in context

Like any data set, however, it requires a level of benchmarking and context to give you the fullest picture possible before you commit time and effort to the content improvement process.

It’s for this reason that I always look to run the same process on key competitors, too. An example of the resulting comparison charts can be seen below.

The process is relatively straightforward: take an average of all the individual URL content scores, which will give you a "whole domain" score. Add competitors by repeating the process for their domain.

You can take a more granular view manually by following the same process for the grouped keywords and tabulating the result. Below, we can see how our domain sizes up against those same two competitors for all nine of our example keyword groups, such as the car brands example we looked at earlier.

With that benchmark data in place, you can move on to the proactive improvement part of the process.

The perfect page structure

Having identified your priority pages, the next step is to ensure you edit (or create them) in the right way to maximize impact.

Whereas a few years ago it was all about creating a few paragraphs almost solely for the sake of helping Google understand the page, now we MUST be focused on usability and improving the experience for the right visitor.

This means adding value to the page. To do that, you need to stand back and really focus in on the visitor: how they get to the page and what they expect from it.

This will almost always involve what I call "making the visitor smarter": creating content that ensures they make better and more informed buying decisions.

To do that requires a structured approach to delivering key information succinctly and in a way that enhances — rather than hinders — the user jouey.

The best way of working through what that should look like is to share a few examples of those doing it well:

1. Tredz Top 5 Reviews

Tredz is a UK cycling ecommerce business. They do a great job of understanding what their audience is looking for and ensuring they're set up to make them smarter. The "Top 5" pages are certainly not classic landing pages, but they're brilliant examples of how you can sell and add value at the same time.

Below is the page for the "Top 5 hybrids for under £500." You can clearly see how the URL (http://www.tredz.co.uk/top-5-hybrids-under-500), meta, H tags, and body copy all support this focus and are consistently aligned:

2. Read it for me

This is a really cool business concept and they also do great landing pages. You get three clear reasons to try them out — presented clearly and utilizing several different content types — all in one package.

3. On Stride Financial

Finance may not be where you'd expect to see amazing landing pages, but this is a great example. Not only is it an easy-to-use experience, it answers all the user's key questions succinctly, starting with "What is an installment loan?" It's also structured in a way to capture Knowledge Graph opportunity — something we'll come to shortly.

Outside of examples like these and supporting content, you should be aiming to

create impactful headlines, testimonials (where appropriate), directional cues (so it's clear where to "go next"), and high-quality images to reflect the quality of your product or services.

Claiming Knowledge Graph

There is, of course, one final reason to work hard on your static pages. That reason? To claim a massively important piece of digital real estate: Google Featured Snippets.

Snippets form part of the wider Knowledge Graph, the tangible visualization of Google’s semantic search knowledge base that's designed to better understand the associations and entities behind words, phrases, and descriptions of things.

The Knowledge Graph comes in a multitude of formats, but one of the most valuable (and attainable from a commercial perspective) is the Featured Snippet, which sits at the top of the organic SERP. An example can be seen below from a search for "How do I register to vote" in google.co.uk:

In recent months, Zazzle Media has done a lot of work on landing page design to capture featured snippets with some interesting findings, most notably the level of extra traffic such a position can achieve.

Having now measured dozens of these snippets, we see an average of 15–20% extra traffic from them versus a traditional position 1. That’s a definite bonus, and makes the task of claiming them extremely worthwhile.

You don’t have to be first

The best news? You don’t even have to be in first position to be considered for a snippet. Our own research shows us that almost 75% of the examples we track have been claimed by pages ranked between 2^nd and 10^th position. It's far from being robust enough yet for us to formalize a full report on it, but early indication across more than 900 claimed snippets (heavily weighted to the finance sector at present) support these early findings.

Similar research by search data specialists STAT has also supported this theory, revealing that objective words are more likely to appear. General question and definition words (like "does," "cause," and "definition") as well as financial words (like "salary," "average," and "cost") are likely to trigger a featured snippet. Conversely, the word "best" triggered zero featured snippets in over 20,000 instances.

This suggests that writing in a factual way is more likely to help you claim featured results.

Measuring what you already have

Before you run into this two-footed, you must first audit what you may (or may not) already have. If you run a larger site, you may already have claimed a few snippets by chance, and with any major project it's important to benchmark before you begin.

Luckily, there are a handful of tools out there to help you discover what you already rank for. My favorite is SEMrush.

The paid-for tool makes it easy to find out if you rank for any featured snippets already. I'd suggest using it to benchmark and then measure the effect of any optimization and content reworking you do as a result of the auditing process.

Claiming Featured Snippets

Claiming your own Featured Snippet then requires a focus on content structure and on answering key questions in a logical order. This also means paying close attention to on-page HTML structure to ensure that Google can easily and cleanly pick out specific answers.

Let’s look at a few examples showing that Google can pick up different types of content for different types of questions.

1. The list

One of the most prevalent examples of Featured Snippets is the list.

As you can see, Media Temple has claimed this incredibly visual piece of real estate simply by creating an article with a well-structured, step-by-step guide to answer the question:

"How do I set up an email account on my iPhone?"

If we look at how the page is formatted, we can see that the URL matches the search almost exactly, while the H1 tag serves to reinforce the relevance still further.

As we scroll down we find a user-friendly approach to the content, with short sentences and paragraphs broken up succinctly into sections.

This allows Google to quickly understand relevance and extract the most useful information to present in search; in this case, the step-by-step how-to process to complete the task.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the article, highlighting key structural elements. Below this is the list itself that's captured in the above Featured Snippet:

2. The table

Google LOVES to present tables; clearly there's something about the logical nature of how the data is presented that resonates with its team of left-brained engineers!

In the example below, we see a site listing countries by size. Historically, this page may well not have ranked so highly (it isn’t usually the page in position one that claims the snippet result). Because of the ways it has structured the information so well, however, Geohive will be enjoying a sizable spike in traffic to the page.

The page itself looks like this — clear, concise and well-structured:

3. The definition

The final example is the description, or definition snippet; it's possibly the hardest to claim consistently.

It's difficult for two key reasons:

• There will be lots of competition for the space and answering the search query in prose format.
• It requires a focus on HTML structure and brilliantly crafted content to win.

In the example below, we can see a very good example of how you should be structuring content pages.

We start with a perfect URL (/what-is-a-mortgage-broker/) and this follows through to the H1 (What is a Mortgage Broker). The author then cleverly uses subheadings to extend the rest of the post into a thorough piece on the subject area. Subheadings include the key How, What, Where, and When areas of focus that any good joualism tutor will lecture you on using in any good article or story. Examples might include

• So how does this whole mortgage broker thing work?
• Mortgage brokers can shop the rate for you
• Mortgage brokers are your loan guide
• Mortgage broker FAQ

The result is a piece that leaves no stone untued. Because of this, it's been shared plenty of times — a sure fire signal that the article is positively viewed by readers.

Featured Snippet Cheatsheet

Not being one to leave you alone to figure this out though, I have created this simple Featured Snippet Cheatsheet, designed to take the guesswork out of creating pages worthy of being selected for the Knowledge Graph.

Do it today!

Thanks for making it this far. My one hope is for you to go off and put this plan into action for your own site. Doing so will quickly transform your approach to both landing pages and to your ongoing content creation plan (but that’s a post for another day!).

And if you do have a go, remember to use the free COAT tool and guides associated with this article to make the process as simple as possible.

[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]

This is going to be an exciting year for MozBar. I’m happy to aounce that we’ve got something new that will help you save a ton of time tuning your on-page SEO.

(New to MozBar? Lea more about our free SEO toolbar extension available in the Chrome store.)

We've added Page Optimization to MozBar Premium!

If you want to dive right in, download MozBar for Chrome. To access the Page Optimization feature, you'll need to be logged in to your Moz Pro account. If you don’t have a Moz Pro account, you can take a free 30-Day trial to check out all the new goodies.

Currently in Moz Pro, you can run a Page Optimization report for any of your tracked keywords and campaigns to get detailed information on how to optimize your page for a keyword, and where you're getting things right.

We’ve taken this functionality and put it in the MozBar — except now you can check on-page optimization for ANY keyword on ANY page, not just ones you're tracking. It’s like having Moz Pro on-the-go. As always, the keywords and pages you research via MozBar are limitless — that’s right, they won’t affect any of your limits in Moz Pro.

You now have the flexibility to check any keyword on any page. This opens the door to tons of new ideas for page optimization, paving the way for you to rank higher in the SERPs. Quickly check any page on your site for keywords you're tracking and see how optimized (or not) your page is for target keywords, in real time. You’ll also get detailed suggestions on how to optimize your page. This can help you decide whether or not a keyword is worth optimizing for, or maybe you’ll find you’re already doing a great job and can move on to the next one.

Optimizing your page using MozBar

I’m always on the lookout for an article with good parenting tips, especially when it comes to traveling with children. I like the Honestly blog by the Honest Company, so let’s use this post about flying with kids as an example of how to optimize your page using MozBar.

Let’s say I’m targeting the keyword “flying with kids” and want to see how well this page is optimized. I chose this keyword because it feels like a query that can be answered by the content well, and after researching it in Keyword Explorer, I found that it has good search volume and a good Potential score.

1. First, we’ll open MozBar on the page. We’ll click on the new Page Optimization icon next to the Highlight tool.

2. Then, we’ll type in “flying with kids” in the text field. Click on “Get Score.”

3. Looking good! This page has a Page Optimization Score of 94 out of 100, which is great. There are three suggestions for improving this score even more, such as adjusting keyword placement in the page title and using targeted keywords in the H1 headers periodically on the page.

Overall, a pretty well-optimized page!

Here are some other ways to use Page Optimization in MozBar:

• Review competitors’ pages: Another benefit of being able to check any keyword + page URL combo is that you can see how well your competitors are optimizing for certain keywords, too. This insight could help you lea which keywords your competitors optimize for and how.

• Improve client proposals: Prospecting for potential clients has gotten easier, too. Now you can audit a prospect’s pages and find opportunities for on-page optimization improvement — a valuable resource for any SEO putting together a site report for a potential client.

How it works

For each keyword + page URL combo you check, you’ll get a Page Optimization Score, just like in the campaign-based version of Page Optimization in Moz Pro. The Page Optimization Score is a metric we use to gauge how optimized a page is for the keyword you’ve paired it with.

• We take twenty-seven contributing factors to a well-optimized page and score your page for that particular keyword.
• We’ve broken down your score by Suggestions (items you may want to tweak or optimize) and Solved (a list of factors that are positively influencing your score).
• You’ll get the full list of both Suggestions and Solved factors that contribute to your score under the All Factors tab.
• We also highlight the highest-priority items under Most Important Fixes. If you need more insight, expand the suggestion and you’ll get real advice from one of our SEO experts.

What’s coming next?

And we’ve got another cool feature on the horizon. We’ll be adding Related Topics to MozBar very soon. In addition to all the data you get from Page Optimization, Related Topics will surface a list of popular topics that your audience may be in interested in based on other topics that appear in the SERP. You’ll also see the pages that talk about those topics. Pretty sweet!

Check it out!

You can start using Page Optimization in MozBar Premium today with your Moz Pro subscription, or try it free for 30 days. Also, starting today, you’ll need to be logged in with either your Community account or your Moz Pro account to access link metrics. Read more about it here in my Q&A post.

Enough talk — I want to download MozBar!

Give Page Optimization for MozBar Premium a spin today, and as always, we’d love to hear what you think of it!

SEOs and executives speak different languages. It's a simple fact, but it's one that often acts as a blocker for getting your ideas and investments approved. A simple change in how you communicate your marketing goals, triumphs, and challenges could be what's standing between you and getting the C-suite buy-in that's integral to your success. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you translate your marketing jargon into financial metrics and data that the folks in charge will actually care about.

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 tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you've got are, investors, board members, to the metrics and data that they care about.

This is a problem that I've talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially at some conferences and events where folks say, "Hey, we've got our metrics dialed in. We know what we're doing. But when we present it to the Board, or when we present it to our CMO, or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it's like we're not speaking the same language, and therefore we're not able to have a conversation productively about where investment should and shouldn't be made, and they're not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one, or whether they think there's a good retu on investment there." This can be tough.

Start with the metrics that marketers care about

So what happens is you're a marketer, you're presenting here to your Board of Directors or to your executive team, and you say, "Hey look, we've got traffic growing in every category. SEO is up. Social is up. We've grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search, all these great things." Fantastic, but the Board is sort of sitting there like, "Well, I don't really know how to contribute, and how does that tie in to higher lifetime value of customers, because that's the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I'm not sure this marketer person is really investing in the right kind of ways for the organization."

That sucks. As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your message, and that means you're not going to get, you're unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the investments you need.

The thing is, marketers are very focused on the fuel.

We care about metrics that show top-of-fuel growth. We care about which chaels send that top-of-fuel traffic. We care about how people are moving through the fuel. We want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.

This is our world and we live in it. It does translate okay, decently to the Board level.

Translate marketing metrics to the financial ones that investors care about

But if you think about what folks care about at the highest levels of a company's strategic imperatives — that could be a Board of Directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks — they're really focused on things like market size, meaning: How big is our addressable market? Who could we potentially reach? What if we run out of those people — can we keep growing? Are more of them coming into the fold, or are people exiting this market and going somewhere else?

They care about cost of customer acquisition. How much does it cost us to get one new customer?

They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers that we're bringing in, whether that's going up, and overall growth rate. Are we getting more customers over time? Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?

They care about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers should tie back to that, especially when we're having conversations with these kinds of people. Essentially it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from us, they spend any type of dollars with us — a product, a service, a subscription, whatever it is — how much do we get over their customer lifetime? Meaning if it's an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360, and 40% of that is gross margin for us. Essentially, the rest is cost of goods. Okay, that's customer lifetime value.

Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe to our tools, we'll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month. I think on average our customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span, which is somewhere around 11 months all in. So it's that number multiplied out. So $1200 or $1300, somewhere around there, that's customer lifetime value.

That doesn't actually count recidivism, people who quit and then come back again. We're trying to get to that metric, and we need it, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value. This is sort of the underpiing of all the rest of this.

But other things these folks are going to care about, comparison of cohorts. So it's not the case that all customers are exactly the same. You know this as a marketer, because you know that it costs you a different amount of money to acquire folks through one chael, and they perform differently than folks who are acquired through a different chael. You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people let's say who work in an agency versus who work in-house, maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model. Or you know that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce shop, that type of stuff. That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.

Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison. How big are we, how big are they? How fast are they growing, how fast are we growing? What's their customer lifetime value, what's ours? What's their retention and recidivism rate, what's ours? Those things, massively interesting to this group as well.

Then there's a bunch of other stuff that they care about, like cost of goods and teams and market dynamics, etc. Marketers generally don't touch that stuff and don't usually need to worry about it.

But the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.

So let's go back to our initial story.

Instead of saying, "Here's traffic growth from all these different chaels, and here's how we're investing in search, versus social, versus paid ads, versus trade shows," all this kind of stuff, what we want to say is something like, "Hey, here's the traffic from SEO, and here's the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new customer has been falling, because those chaels are organic, and that means we don't pay each time we get a new customer from them. We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity, creativity, engineering needs, web engineering needs, and whatever we're doing. But then it keeps paying dividends, and because of that you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen."

Now you have the attention of these folks. Now you've engaged them in a way that they care about, because they say, "Aha, more organic search, lower cost to acquire a customer," — which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio, the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something that every investor, every Board of Directors member, every CXO cares deeply about. It's the underpiings of the company. That's what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow. When you speak their language, you get this type of response.

So what I'm going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any story you're trying to tell around retu on investment, around a project you have, and tu it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you're talking to, especially if that's strategic-level. You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues. It could be problems. It may not be just positive things. It could be negative things too, in the areas your CXO or Board or investor cares about.

So let's imagine — and this is a conversation that many, many folks have — they say to me, "Rand, we want to hire an SEO consultant, or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time, but we've been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our Board."

Well, let's change the conversation. Instead of, "We need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we're not competing in well right now," to, "CAC is high. CAC is too high. Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers that we buy via paid search. So we're spending a lot of money on paid ads right now, and the customers we get via that have this high customer acquisition cost, because we have to spend money to get them, and the CLTV isn't as high because customers who come through paid, on average, usually tend to underperform compared to those who come through organic. It's just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results. But, if we ranked organically for more of these keywords, and we could get more SEO traffic compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop (a) losing those searches to our competitors, who are outranking us now, and (b) we would bump up the CLTV and we'd be lowering cost of customer acquisition."

Boom. You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and you've made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.

Same thing here. Let's say you say, "Hey, we're going to do something crazy. We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically in-person. It's expensive. We don't reach as many people as we do over web chaels or over traditional ad chaels, but we've been getting good customers via events."

That's a real tough sell unless you do this. "Dear Board, here's a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing chaels. Here's SEO, here's PPC, here's our Facebook ads, here's organic social, and this is events. You can see cost to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and you can see the numbers of folks that we've gotten via each of those chaels and the revenue they bring in."

Awesome. Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment we can make over the next couple of quarters. We want to bring this up by two or threefold, and if we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have the last few months, we're going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment versus any of these other chaels.

Awesome. Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand. Speak their language, and you get the buy-in you want.

All right, everyone, look forward to your Idea and thoughts, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com