Get Your Seattle Exploration on at MozCon 2016!

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

MozCon is fast approaching us! On September 12-14—just two weeks away—1,400 online marketers will descend on Seattle, ready to learn about SEO, content, Google Tag Manager, conversion rate optimization, and so much more. We've got fewer than 60 tickets left, so grab yours now.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

If you haven't done so, check out all the learning! This post is geared toward the things you can do when MozCon sessions aren't happening.

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Places you'll want to go as recommended by Mozzers

While you're in Seattle, we want to make sure you have a fabulous time. Seattle in September is beautiful. It's still sunny outside, and it's the time of year people come to Seattle and then want to move here. So we've complied a list of great activities and restaurants:

Sights

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Gasworks Park

"Incredible views of the city, float planes landing overhead, Space Needle in the background, Ivar's Clam Chowder down the street, bikes all over the place."

— Brian Childs

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Volunteer Park

"This is my favorite place in all of Seattle! Stroll around the park and stop in the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the conservatory, then climb to the top of the water tower for an incredible view. You can also walk through the graveyard and see Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee's grave. After all that walking, hop over to the adorable and delicious Volunteer Park Cafe."

— Megan Singley

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Elliott Bay Trail

"Amazing views, has a mini gravel beach, and lots of park space. Great for running and cycling. I ride my bike along EBT nearly everyday to Moz, and I fall in love with city over and over again."

— James Daugherty

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Alki Beach

"Alki is a beautiful walk with a spectacular view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It's got some good restaurants, and even a little history as the site of the original settlement."

— Maura Hubbell

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Discovery Park

"If you've never been to the Pacific Northwest (or even if you have!), Discovery Park on a clear day is a great place to see the Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound, Mt. Rainier, and to get some quality forest walking done all in one fell swoop. Plus, it's 20 minutes from downtown! (Pro tip: For the easiest view access, park in the lot on W Emerson just before 43rd Ave W.)"

— Rachel Moore

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Green Lake

"People of every ilk converge to exercise, feed ducks, play with dogs, and covet the dogs of others."

— Felicia Crawford

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Activities, tours, and museums

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The Underground Tour

"What a great way to hear about and experience early-Seattle's history!"

— Emily Smollen

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Ferry to Bainbridge Island

"Seattle is surrounded by water and mountains. The ferry is the easiest way to experience that scenery. The view of the city is amazing too!"

— Alyson Murphy

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The Pinball Museum

"It is special to me because I've only been to Seattle once, as I work remotely in the UK. It was a joy the see how strong the love for pinball is in Seattle. The Pinball Museum houses the world's biggest pinball machine, and it is really something to behold; it's like hugging a dining room table."

— Jo Cameron

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Restaurants and bars

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Linda's

"Laid back, good music, cheap food, and nice people."

— Nicelle Herron

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Cyclops

"If you are a vegetarian (or love vegetarian food), the Happy Hippy Burger is a must. It is not only the best veggie burger in Seattle, but it's the best I have ever had. Cyclops also has great drinks and food for the omnivores, too."

— Chiaryn Miranda

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Pie Bar

"This hole in the wall has it all! Pie Bar serves up warm, freshly baked slices of heaven with a pint of bliss. Savory pies, sweet pies, pietinis, craft spirits, and beer...all nestled in an elegant, cozy venue where you won't have to shout over a crowd 3-hipsters-deep to order. And if you're done with your pie and ready for some pinball and arcade games, John John's Game Room is directly next door!"

— Jess Stipe

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Oddfellows Cafe

"This hip little eatery has some awesomely tasty foods, a sweet little private back patio, a laidback atmosphere, and awesome drinks. Plus, it's right in the heart of Capitol Hill, one of my favorite 'hoods in the city."

— Tawny Case

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Bonus! Lightning suggestions:

• The Fat Hen
• Smith
• Bottega Italiana
• Cafe Turko
• Shorty's
• Omega Ouzeri
• Sushi Kashiba
• Métier Seattle
• General Porpoise Doughnuts
• Sizzle Pie
• Holy Mountain Brewing
• Herb and Bitter
• Lionhead
• Optimism Brewery
• Meet the Moon
• Bar Melusine

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Brian Childs' recommendation corner

"I put this Google map together for friends visiting the city. Includes lots of breweries, bars, restaurants, and things to do: Get the info!"

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Official MozCon evening events

For all our evening events, make sure to bring your conference badge AND your US ID or your passport.

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Monday Night MozCrawl

From 7:00pm - 10:00pm, you can head to all the stops at your own pace and in any order. Visit all the stops, fill out your punch card, and return it to the swag store on Tuesday morning to enter to win a golden Roger!

• Barca hosted by Unbounce
• Capitol Cider hosted by Buffer
• Comet Tavern hosted by SimilarWeb
• Linda’s Tavern hosted by WordStream
• Still Liquor hosted by Whitespark
• Unicorn hosted by BuzzStream

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Tuesday MozCon Ignite

If you're looking for networking, this is event for you! Join us at from 7:00-10:00pm at McCaw Hall for a night of networking and five-minute, Ignite-style passion talks from your fellow attendees. This year, our talks will range from information and unique to heartwarming and life changing. You don't want to miss this MozCon night.

• 7:00-8:00pm Networking
• 8:00-8:05pm Introduction with Geraldine DeRuiter
• 8:05-8:10pm Help! I Can't Stop Sweating - Hyperhidrosis with Adam Melson at Seer Interactive
• 8:10-8:15pm A Plane Hacker's Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel with Ed Fry at Hull.io
• 8:15-8:20pm Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent with Adrian Vender at Internet Marketing Inc
• 8:20-8:25pm How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home with Nadya Khoja at Venngage Inc.
• 8:25-8:30pm Embracing Fear, Potential Failure, and Plain Ol' Discomfort with Daisy Quaker at AMSOIL INC.
• 8:30-8:35pm How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives with Anneke Kurt Godlewski at Charles E. Boyk Law Offices, LLC
• 8:35-8:40pm Is Your Family Time for Sale? with Michael Cottam at Visual Itineraries
• 8:40-9:20pm Networking with desserts and refreshments
• 9:20-9:25pm Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies with Caitlin Boroden at DragonSearch
• 9:25-9:30pm Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5' 10" 6th Grader with Hannah Cooley at Seer Interactive
• 9:35-9:40pm Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories with Lisa Hunt at Moz
• 9:40-9:45pm Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn with Lindsay Dayton LaShell at Diamond + Branch Marketing Group
• 9:45-9:50pm How a Cartoon Saved My Life with Steve Hammer at RankHammer
• 9:50-9:55pm Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL with Sarah Lively at Nebo Agency
• 9:55-10:00pm Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan with Kevin Smythe at Moz

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Wednesday Night Bash!

From 7:00-12:00 midnight: Bowling, pool, Jenga, a slow-motion booth, a photo booth, karaoke, cupcakes, food, drinks, and more! You don't want to miss our annual bash.

Rent some bowling shoes and go for a turkey. Sing your heart out just like you recently joined Journey. Snap photos with your friends while wearing silly hats. Show off how much of a ringer you are at pool. Get into a chicken strip-eating contest. Hang out with your new MozCon friends one last time, and celebrate all the learning!

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Birds of a Feather lunch tables

If you want to spend your lunchtime getting great advice from your fellow attendees about online marketing or meet people in your specialty, check out our birds of a feather lunch tables:

Monday, September 12

• Women in Digital hosted by Heather Physioc at Tentacle Inbound, LLC
• Search Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations hosted by Sheena Schleicher at Schleicher Marketing
• Content MArketing for E-Commerce hosted by Kane Jamison at Content Harmony
• Local SEO hosted by Kristina Kledzik at Rover
• Topical Analysis hosted by Michael Cottam at Visual Itineraries
• In-house SEO hosted by Andy Odom at Santander Consumer USA
• Making CRO Work for Your SEO hosted by Patrick Delehanty at Marcel Digital

Tuesday, September 13

• Local Search hosted by George Freitag at Moz
• Growth Hacking hosted by Brittanie MacLean at Realty Austin
• Continuing Marketing Education hosted by Rachel Goodman Moore at Moz
• Marketing Automation hosted by Ed Fry at Hull.io
• How to Smartly Mix Search and Content to Aid Overall Business Strategy by Ronell Smith at Ronell Smith Consulting
• E-Commerce SEO hosted by Everett Sizemore at Inflow
• SERP Features hosted by Jon White at Moz
• Technical SEO hosted by Bill Sebald at Greenlane Search Marketing

Wednesday, September 14

• Google Penalties hosted by Michael Cottam at Visual Itineraries
• Advanced SEO hosted by Britney Muller at Moz
• Marketing for USA Manufacturing Companies hosted by Crystal Hunt at Grassroots Fabric Pots
• Work-Life Balance hosted by Keri Morgret at Inbound.org
• Local Search hosted by George Freitag at Moz
• Marketing Automation hosted by Ed Fry at Hull.io
• Content Marketing hosted by Trevor Klein at Moz

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Join the Fitbit Group

Track your steps while networking and cheer on your fellow attendees!

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Play Roger Patrol!

Ready for some friendly competition between your fellow attendees? We’ve built a special MozCon game just for you. You'll play as starship, part of Roger Patrol! Try and beat the top score on Roger Patrol video game by zapping asteroids, destroying evil spaceships, and protecting Roger Mozbot's universe. We’ll provide a download link for attendees, and you’ll also find three arcade-style boxes of the game throughout the MozCon venue.

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Visit our Partner Hub, get your photo taken with Roger, and more arcade-style fun

As you head up to registration, entering MozCon, you won't want to miss all the activities around you and happening when the conference isn't in active session.

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Say hello to our Partners

Every sulk through an exhibitor hall with your head down like you're in middle school again? Us too. Which is why at MozCon, we wanted to do something different. Our invite-only partners are not only respectful, but we've vetted their activities and their products to make sure they are useful to you. So say hello, and we promise you might instead get a postcard to send home, a t-shirt, or a special MozCon coin.

Our great partners:

• Buffer
• BuzzStream
• SimilarWeb
• Slope
• STAT
• Tagboard
• Unbounce
• Whitespark
• Wistia
• Wordstream

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Stop each day at the Swag Store!

After the first day, Registration will be transformed into a swag store. You don't want to miss out on these goodies. On Tuesday, you'll be able to pick up your official MozCon 2016 t-shirt. On Wednesday, you'll get your own Lego Roger.

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Meet Mozzers to give feedback or Ask an SEO

Make sure to stop by the Moz Hub. We'll be there to answer your questions about Moz Pro and Moz Local. Learn about our latest offerings and updates. Get insights into how best to use the tools.

And by popular demand, we've added Ask an SEO. Mozzers and Associates with expertise in SEO will be there to answer your burning search questions and kickstart you with new ideas for your search campaigns.

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Play the Roger claw machine

We're bringing back the plushie claw machine! If you missed out getting one of our plushie Roger Mozbots, or you just need another as a small child or pet decided Roger was their best friend, now's your chance. In order to play, you must visit one of our Partners or the Moz Hub for a special shiny coin. Then take that coin to the claw machine!

Don't worry, we've put a TAGFEE spell on this machine, so you may find it a little easier than the ones in the malls of your childhood. ;)

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Take a photo with Roger Mozbot

A MozCon tradition you won't want to miss. Get your annual photo (or maybe it's your first!) taken with the cuddliest robot in the galaxy, Roger Mozbot.

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Donate to charity, on us!

Open up your Monday swag kit and inside you'll find $5 Roger bucks. You get to donate this to one of three charities (charities selected by Mozzers):

• PAWS - people helping animals
• International Justice Mission - a global organization that protects the poor from violence in the developing world
• Seattle Children’s Hospital - to prevent, treat, and eliminate pediatric disease

Roger Mozbot will then count the bucks and write a check to each charity.

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Push pin world map

Ever play pin the tail on the donkey? Well, this is like that, but pin the spot where you are from, minus the blindfold.

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In Seattle on Thursday post-MozCon? We have MozPlex tours.

Every wonder where Roger Mozbot lives? Or heard of the stories of cereal bars and rooms named after starships and robots? Is is true that Mozzers have sit/stand desks? Don't miss out on our Office Tours on Thursday 9/15. Sign up for your time slot.

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Even more fun in Seattle

Don't miss our posts from years past, which are full of restaurant, activity, and more recommendations: 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

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Activities happening around Seattle from Saturday, September 10 - Sunday, September 18

• September 9-11, San Gennaro Festival in Georgetown
• September 10, Thai Festival Seattle
• September 11, Live Aloha Hawaiian Cultural Festival
• September 11, Second Saturday Art Walks
  
  • Ballard Art Walk
  • Central District Art Walk
  • Madrona Art Walk
  • Georgetown Art Walk
  • Wallingford Art Walk
• September 11, Historic Tour of the Moore Theater
• September 15, Columbia City Art Walk
• September 15, Seattle Center's “Best Damn Happy Hour”
• September 16, University District Art Walk
• September 17-18, Fiestas Patrias – Latin American Independence Festival
• September 17-18, Seattle Mini Maker Faire
• September 17, Ballard Civic Orchestra's “Celebrating Hispanic Cultural Heritage”
• September 17, White Center Art Walk
• September 17, Historic Tour of the Neptune Theater

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If you're looking to connect with fellow attendees, please join our MozCon Facebook Group.

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Seven simple rules for effective email communication and outreach

Communication is key to success in life. No matter your industry, field, career, day-to-day responsibilities, or duties, communication is integral to your success. 

This is particularly true in SEO and link building, where communication is vital to educating clients, gaining buy-in, executing campaigns, securing links, and presenting results.

Email is the primary mode of communication in today’s digital world. If you can’t communicate well through email, you’ll struggle.

Benefits of effective communication

1. Establishes trust, sets project scope, and defines expectations.
2. Conveys and emphasizes the correct information.
3. Enables both parties to be understood.
4. Identifies team obstacles and facilitates problem solving.
5. Ensures client, team, and personal satisfaction.

Your ability to present yourself well, communicate ideas, and pitch is fundamental to success.

Let me be clear:

Knowledge, skill, and integrity are vital to any business. But being able to communicate well is crucial in all aspects of work.

Good communication increases value, instills trust, builds confidence, resolves issues, reveals obstacles, and facilitates virtually every piece of an SEO campaign and relationship with clients, supervisors, and team members.

Communication is doubly valuable in link building, which requires one-to-one communication with other site owners in order to secure links. You need to effectively communicate WHY it’s in their (or their audiences’) best interest to link.

Here are my rules for effective email communication (and outreach):

1. Use templates for format.
2. Know your audience.
3. Lead with value.
4. Be clear and concise.
5. Active language wins.
6. Send complete emails.
7. Follow up.

What is the goal of your email? Every single element of your email (subject line, structure, word choice) should support that.

1) Templates: how to format emails

Everyone has received terrible mass-produced emails with a template containing zero customization.

If I receive one more “Dear Webmaster” email…

Despite this, I fervently believe in the value of templates. Templates lead to systems and processes, which lead to well-formatted emails that are easy to read and understand (not to mention produce).

My rule of thumb for whether or not I use a template is:

1. Am I sending multiple emails to a similar audience?
2. Will I send a similar email in the future?
3. Is there an optimal way to structure the information to convey my message?

The secret to a good template is list segmentation. Your template should be customized to your audience, leaving enough room for variance as needed.

Unless I’m replying to a thread or sending a unique email, it’s highly likely I’m using some form of template.

Even hand written emails follow a general format (AKA template). Think about the various emails you have to send every day. I bet there are a handful of general templates you follow, even if you’re composing each email individually.

Here’s an example of a template I use often:

This is what I use when I include a positive mention of someone or their company in a post. This helps me build a connection, alerts them to the fact they’ve been mentioned and why, and maybe even nets me a couple social shares.

Creating processes is key to effectiveness. This idea of optimizing shouldn’t be new to the SEO crowd

2) Know your audience

The most important rule of communication is to base the entire conversation around your audience.

Think about it:

How do you converse with a colleague? A supervisor? A client? A good friend? Your parent?

Style, tone, word choice, and mode of communication varies with each audience. It’s communication 101 – you need to structure the conversation that makes sense and is effective for that audience.

Here’s what you should know about your contact before drafting an email:

1. Name
2. Title/position
3. Personality
4. Authority/influence
5. Their communication style
6. How often they’re pitched
7. Your professional relationship.

If you send similar emails, regardless of audience, you’re communicating ineffectively.

3) Value-first Communication

There’s always a reason WHY you’re sending an email.

To communicate effectively, it should be clear why you’ve sent an email, and why it matters to the person you’re emailing.

It’s the last bit – why your email matters to your contact – that’s most important. Leading with this is how you establish value, and gain consideration.

You don’t need to write a long introduction about who you are, or why what you’re doing matters to the world. Lead with the value to your audience.

Why should they care?

The earlier you can answer this question in an email, the better.

When editing a template, my first step is always to move the “why this matters to you” statement to the top (or as near the top as possible).

Here’s an email pitch I receive often:

Here’s how I would make this email value-first.

Hello Cory,

Are you working to improve your sales and marketing bandwidth?

(custom line that speaks directly to the person’s position or the company).

At [redacted] we provide you with a bespoke B2B list for your prospective accounts, lead generation, and data management services, so you own the client while we do all the research.

We specialize in:

• White Paper lead generation.
• CRM Data Maintenance and accuracy.
• Market intelligence research.
• Market mapping and market assessment.

Let’s discuss how [redacted] can help you meet your goals.

Is it perfect? No – this isn’t my business so I can’t rework the message or positioning. Also, I’m not looking to purchase or outsource list building, so I’m the wrong audience.

However, this reformatted version leads with value. It doesn’t waste any time. If it’s not the right fit, they can move on right away. If it is, they’re more likely to actually read it and reply.

There should always be a reason WHY you’re sending the email.

Don’t bury your lede.

4) Clear and concise

The secret to good writing is liberal editing.

Write your email, then cut as much of it as you can. Then cut a little bit more.

I love to cut:

• Junk words: that, lot, thing, like, feels,
• Euphemisms: get the sense, to hear, to help, taking the time, let me know, look forward, the likes of, staying the course, etc.
• Adverbs: totally, specifically, fully, especially, etc.
• Improper pronouns: any unnecessary switching. Keep it first person as much as possible.
• Everything: if I can cut it, I will.

Don’t obsessively reread emails before you send them. Instead, cut everything until you KNOW there’s no junk left. Everyone will be happier for it.

5) Active voice is for humans

Active voice communicates the correct perspective and chain of events in email.

Email reports are especially reliant on active voice, as passive voice might misrepresent the work.

Passive language robs communication of cause and effect, making it unclear which action led to which result, and deemphasizes value in your email communication.

If you struggle with active versus passive voice, look for awkward phrasing and think about who did what. Make sure you’re not obfuscating the information, for any reason.

A few examples of passive versus active:

“The page was optimized by the SEO.” vs “The SEO optimized the page.”

“Eight links were built by the team across the month.” vs “The team built eight links this month.”

“Rankings have improved and search traffic has been increased by our combined SEO efforts.” vs “Our SEO efforts improved rankings and increased search traffic.”

Passive voice will undermine your tone, confuse your meaning, and weaken your position.

6) Include your pitch

Don’t pitch a request to pitch. Don’t do it.

It happens often:

The best case scenario is a “yes, send along a pitch.” That same response might have been your ACTUAL goal – a link, a publication, coverage, meeting, etc.

Don’t make life more difficult than it needs to be. Everyone is busy and everyone receives too many emails. Pseudo politeness isn’t going to increase the odds your pitch will be successful, especially if you follow rule #2 and only send emails when you have value to add.

The best emails answer any question in the initial email. Consider your audience and make sure you cover everything within reason.

7) Follow up – It’s polite

If you’re building links or sending promotional emails, you’re not doing your job if you don’t follow up.

It’s not rude to send follow up emails – it’s polite.

The follow up email is a good litmus test for the value of your email.

If you believe you have something of value to offer, then you shouldn’t be shy to send a reminder to ensure the person had a chance to review your email.

You’re actually doing them a favor by making sure they didn’t miss a reasonable opportunity. If you don’t feel this way, you haven’t refined your approach enough. You need to believe in the value of your message, the brevity of the outreach, the goals of your contact.

The upper limit I’ll send is four. The original, with three threaded messages.

This isn’t for contacts I have a clearly defined relationship with – only when I think someone truly is missing my emails and I have a valuable reason to be contacting them.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my third (or even fourth) email get a positive response. People are BUSY.

If you’re not following up with your initial email at all, you’re missing huge opportunity.

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Google’s Pilot for Real Time Indexing of Breaking News Now Available

Want to push breaking news live directly to Google’s search results?  Google is now accepting publishers for their pilot of the Search Live Coverage Carousel feature, which allows publishers to push breaking news to the search results in real time.  Yes, you can push your breaking news content updates, whether content or video, directly to […]

The post Google’s Pilot for Real Time Indexing of Breaking News Now Available appeared first on The SEM Post.

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Three technologies you absolutely must have for better SEO

Your website has to stay on trend to survive.

Fast page loads. User-friendliness. Instant access to favorite news sources and blogs. Security… These are the needs of the internet browsing population.

It happens every day. You’re walking the dog and reading the news on your phone at the same time or scrolling Facebook in the grocery checkout line or simply checking out some nerd blogs while the kids play at the park, and there it is – a slow, clunky website.

What do you do? You utter a few adjectives and move on to a website that isn’t afflicted with the same ailments. It might be less informative or entertaining, but hey, you can actually view it.

This should never happen to your website. Ever.

Search engine optimization is an ever-changing, fluid landscape. In the old days, there were only desktops, and everything was geared to suit them.

Then mobile phones came along. There was sharing via email and instant messaging. Then social media happened. There was an emphasis on link quantity (i.e. the more links you had pointing to your website, the better your ranking).

Then, spammers took advantage of it and link quality became more important. There were 10-pack business listings. Then, they dropped to 7-packs and ultimately to 3-packs.

Competition for internet real estate has gotten stiffer and the hoops a bit higher. Google, the leader in search engines, keeps improving their search technology and rolling out algorithm (formula applied to search results) changes.

For website owners, it’s imperative to stay on top of Google’s algorithm changes. Right now, there are three main website technologies that you absolutely must have.

Mobile-responsiveness

Let’s start with cell phones and other mobile devices. In 2014, mobile users performed more internet searches than desktop users. Google knew it had to do something. Enter Mobilegeddon, the algorithm change that Google rolled out on April 22, 2015. It was considered the apocalypse of the internet.

Mobilegeddon promoted listings of mobile-friendly websites in the search results. Non-mobile-friendly sites were left out in the cold, which meant their rankings dropped.

So what does it mean to be friendly on mobile?

Google defines it this way. A website is mobile-friendly if:

• It avoids Flash software and similar types of software that don’t play well with mobile devices.
• It sizes the screen to fit the device (and nixes horizontal scrolling).
• It has readable text that doesn’t need to be zoomed.
• It’s thumb-friendly (i.e. links, buttons, and fill-in fields are easily clickable with thumbs and fingers).

Google applies these criteria to individual pages vs. websites, which is a benefit since optimized pages from your site can still rank even if the rest of your site doesn’t.

Being mobile-friendly is a minimum requirement and Google has a tool to determine if your website meets the requirements.

However, if you really want to make your website attractive to visitors, you should go a step further and make your site mobile-responsive.

Mobile-friendliness means that a site may have been designed for the desktop, but has been optimized to work on mobile devices. Mobile-responsiveness means that a site automatically responds to the device.

For example: a mobile-friendly site would show a desktop site on a smaller scale while a mobile-responsive site would show it in a different format, often in one column. A mobile-friendly site may not be mobile-responsive, but a mobile-responsive site will definitely be mobile-friendly.

HTTPS

Imagine a world where hackers could never hack your website. That world might be possible now with HTTPS, a security protocol that used to be used mainly for financial sites, payment portals, email, and sensitive transactions.

But the rest of the cyber world looked on and wanted secure encryption too. This is where regular sites began to adopt HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). The secure sockets layer (SSL) encrypts data on its way into your site and on its way out. Data is sent to and from a secure web server.

This protocol protects site visitors and owners from online eavesdropping, which is how hackers get credit card numbers and other sensitive information, or forging, which is what hackers do with the data they get.

Google AMP & Facebook Instant Articles

And now, imagine a world where web pages loaded instantly. Google and a bunch of other technology companies and publishers imagined it. They put their heads together and created the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, which is an open-source HTML project dedicated to fast and furious page loads.

What does this mean for you?

It means that you can put AMP code on your web page or post and deliver instant page results. So when your site visitor is at the grocery store and they’re trying to look at your blog about the clean 15, it won’t take five minutes for your site to load. That list of chemical-free fruits and vegetables will be at the user’s fingertips, instantly. You’ve just made a happy customer.

Facebook has its own version of fast content delivery, called Instant Articles. When content is uploaded to this Facebook publishing tool, the content is housed on Facebook and loaded instantly for viewers. Like Google’s AMP technology, Facebook Instant Articles are geared to mobile users.

To reach the goal of speedy page loads, AMP provides a plethora of web tools that create a common ground between websites that use it.

The AMP project leaders chose to make the software open-source so all platforms, developers, and publishers could collaborate to make the mobile web a faster and more pleasant experience.

AMP code works with photos, videos, and GIFs, in addition to written content. And AMP-optimized web articles will soon begin to appear throughout the organic mobile SERPs.

AMP technology also offers the option of caching. Third party platforms can access AMP content and cache it for their users. Google even provides its own Google AMP Cache, a free collection of AMP content that’s been published to the web.

WordPress developers already produced a WordPress AMP plugin. And many of the most prominent publishers and platforms, such as The New York Times, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Mashable, are participating.

Of course, all of these features translate to faster page loads and longer engagement

Mobile web technology is the technology of the future. It’s imperative that website owners implement tools that are capable of delivering the kind of service that mobile users are looking for—fast, secure, and easy to navigate.

As Richard Gingras of Google states about the AMP project, “We wanna make the web great again.”

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Combining Email and Facebook for a Dynamite Ecommerce Marketing Campaign

Posted by andrewchoco

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Most people view email marketing and social advertising as two separate entities, and I’ll be honest, I used to think that as well. However, I’ve discovered that combining multiple different avenues for a coherent marketing campaign yields some pretty impressive results.

We’ve tried this tactic before at Directive Consulting, combining SEO and PPC; but in this blog post, I’m going to break down a few ways to combine email and social advertising for multi-channel success.

More specifically, you’ll learn:

• How to create custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook from an email list
• Best practices for launching email and social campaigns simultaneously
• How we used this tactic to increase overall sessions and revenue
• Some additional strategies to take your ecommerce campaigns to the next level

Using email lists to create Custom Audiences on Facebook

Most (if not all) ecommerce stores require an email address when completing a purchase, and many times you can see what item the person bought. Keeping an organized and segmented email list is the first step to social advertising success. If you’re an online clothing store that specializes in creative t-shirts for men and women, create individual lists segmenting categories (e.g., sports, funny, and cute) and gender. If you’re using a CRM such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, or Salesforce, you can export these contact lists as .CSV files and then upload those to Facebook under the “Audiences” section using Ads Manager.

When logging onto your Ads Manager or Business Manager account, go to your ad account and select the drop-down hamburger menu in the top left-hand corner.

If "Audiences" doesn’t appear in the “Frequently Used” section, hit "All tools" and you’ll find it under the “Assets” section.

After clicking on “create custom audience,” you’ll need to select the “customer file” section and then “choose a file or copy” and you’ll be prompted to upload your .CSV file into Facebook.

Facebook will then match up the emails with actual Facebook users (you can expect anywhere from a 20% - 70% match rate), but with ecommerce those numbers tend to be on the higher side.

Using email lists to create Facebook Audiences

Another great feature of Facebook ads is the ability to create lookalike audiences from previously uploaded email lists. Facebook will match up the corresponding profiles of your email lists with a broader group of people who have similar profiles based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. As long as your email list consists of more than 100 people, Facebook will be able to create a lookalike audience. Obviously, though, the more people you have in the original email list, the more similar the lookalike audience will be (because Facebook will have more data to pull from.)

When you create your lookalike audience, you select a country and choose anywhere from 1% - 10% of a country’s population.

But you don’t have to stop there. Once you have a lookalike audience (we usually use the 10% option so we capture the most people), you can layer additional targeting on top of the lookalike. For the clothing store example, you could take the audience of 20 million and add additional behavior targeting of men’s fashion buyers and online buyers. Now that’s a specific audience!

Launching simultaneous campaigns for maximum reach

Now how can you tie together email marketing and social advertising for optimal reach?

Anytime an ecommerce shop launches a promotion or sale, they send out an email blast.

I usually check my email in the morning, see the promotion, and then promptly forget about it five minutes later. It’s common knowledge that every opportunity needs multiple touches before they end up converting to a sale, but sending three emails a day promoting a sale is a good way to lose a lot of subscribers.

The solution? Launch a social promotion targeted at your specific email list. Then ramp up the budget to ensure that every person sees your ad at least once during the campaign. A good way to do this is by looking at the estimated reach when creating an ad campaign and making sure your budget is high enough that the estimated reach per day matches up with the amount of people on your email list.

We used this tactic with a client of ours who sells collectable banknotes from countries all around the world.

Their most popular is the Zimbabwean $100 trillion dollar banknote, so they ran a promotion for 10% off. We didn’t segment the audiences like I mentioned earlier, because they were only promoting one country’s banknote, but we did create two different ad images as well as a carousel ad so we could target everyone in the list with multiple products for the same price.

While you may think this is an obnoxious ad and the red circle and arrow is overkill, this ad actually performed the best out of all of them, generating over 180 clicks in three days with a CTR of 8.7%. Little touches like this really draw in your audience’s attention and can lead to much higher engagement.

Carousel ads are great for ecommerce shops because they can show off multiple products without increasing the price of your campaigns. We recently switched over to carousel ads for a client of ours who builds custom fences and had 3,000% more sessions on the site from the carousel ads.

We launched these ads for a three-day period while the sale was running and combed it with an email blast that went out at the beginning of the sale. These are the results we saw when comparing the week of the promotion to the previous week:

We saw our sessions go up, as well as the pages per session and average session duration. We didn’t have a single transaction from Facebook the previous week, but had four during the sale, generating enough revenue to easily cover the cost of that campaign.

Another interesting thing we saw was that the email didn’t directly lead to any sales. I’m not saying it had no effect on the sales that week, but only launching an email campaign wouldn’t have had the same impact as combining these two platforms and working together to create additional touches throughout the sale period.

Additional strategies

1. Use lookalike audiences

For the above example, we only targeted our custom audience of email subscribers (the sale was a special promo just for those customers). But taking it even further, creating a broader audience from the lookalike audience would have been a great audience to target, as well.

What better way to introduce your brand and product to a potential customer than immediately offering a sale? You can also further target these audiences to get extremely specific. For our banknote client, our targeted lookalike audience looks something like this:

2. Create a new segmented list for sale buyers

If you’re launching a promotion for a sale using this tactic, segment each new email address you receive into its own list titled “sale buyers.” There’s a chance these people have been wanting to buy your product all along and finally waited until a sale came along to do it, but more likely, these people are impulse shoppers who made a purchase because of the exclusivity of the deal you’re promoting. This now gives you a list of customers that you know make purchases during sales, and you can test out other promotional deals later on. If you don’t offer free shipping regularly, have a two-day period when you do, and target these specific people.

3. Use Twitter as another platform to target your audience

Twitter is another social platform that gives you the ability to upload a .CSV of email addresses, and matches up twitter profiles with those corresponding emails.

In the Twitter Ads platform, go to "Tools" and then "Audience manager."

Head over to “Create new audience” and upload your own .CSV, just like you did for Facebook. (A word of warning: You do need 500 or more matches for Twitter to allow you to use the audience for promotions.)

For ecommerce, most people will use their personal email for Twitter as well as buying a product, so this shouldn’t be an issue with a big enough email list.

Now it’s your turn

Now you’re prepared to launch a robust and successful email and social advertising campaign.

Remember, it’s important to ensure your budget aligns with the amount of people you’re trying to reach, and to use eye-popping images to catch your audience’s attention. Let me know in the comments if these tactics worked for you, or if you have any additional strategies for email and social success!

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3 Online Marketing Tools that Have Grown into Something Awesome This Year

I love tools and I love watching them evolve and grow. I think that building a cool tool is only half of the deal: It’s keeping innovating it based on ever changing trends that makes a tool successful. In this fast-paced digital world, you need to be building and re-building your platforms again and again […]

The post 3 Online Marketing Tools that Have Grown into Something Awesome This Year appeared first on The SEM Post.

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Bing Testing Site Name Only With No URL in Search Results

Bing is testing out something interesting – instead of showing the URL of the site, which is pretty standard across search engines, they are showing the company/brand name only. Here it is in action: I couldn’t replicate it in the English results.  It isn’t clear if it was only for Microsoft URLs. This test is […]

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The Two-Part SEO Ranking Model: Let's Make SEO Simple

Posted by EricEnge

There sure is a lot of interest in SEO ranking factors:

There have been major studies done on this, notably by both Moz and Searchmetrics. These are groundbreaking pieces of research, and if you're serious about SEO, you need to understand what these studies say.

That said, these are too complex for most organizations to deal with. They need a simpler way of looking at things. At Stone Temple Consulting (STC) we deal with many different types of organizations, including some of the world's largest companies, and some of the highest-traffic websites in the world. For most of these companies, understanding that there are 200+ ranking factors does more harm than good.

Why, you ask? So many people I talk to are looking for a silver bullet. They want to hear that they should only change their heading tags on the second Tuesday of every month, except during leap years, when they should do it on the first Tuesday, except in February when they should change it on the third Monday. These distractions end up taking away from the focus on the two things that matter most: building great content (and a great content experience) and promoting it well.

Today's post is going to lay out a basic approach that most companies can use to simplify their thinking about SEO, and keep their focus on the highest priorities.

What Google recently said

Here's what Google Dublin's Andrey Lippatsev said in a Hangout that I participated in on March 23, 2016. Also participating in the Hangout was Ammon Johns, who asked Andrey what the two most important ranking factors are:

Andrey Lippatsev: Yes. Absolutely. I can tell you what they are. It is content and links going into your site.

There we go, that's a start. According to Google, it's links and content that are the two biggest. Hopefully, the idea that content is a big factor is obvious, but below I'll break out more what great content really entails. In addition, you can see some backup for the power of links in the study I recently published on links as a ranking factor.

Should we think of the world as consisting only of these two factors? It's quite simplistic, and possibly too much so, but let's try to simplify this even more. How many organizations would dramatically improve their SEO if they focused on creating great content and promoting it effectively? I can tell you that from my experience these are two things that many organizations simply don't do.

Does that mean that we can take our two factors and put them into a (purely) hypothetical ranking score equation that looks like this?

I actually think that this equation is pretty effective, though it has some limitations and omissions that I'll describe in more detail below. You also need to think about the concept of "great content," that will get a high Content Score, in the correct manner.

What is "great content?"

If we step back and think about what makes up great content, it seems to me that there are three major components that matter:

1. Relevancy
2. Quality
3. The overall content experience

The first part of this is simple. If the content is not relevant to a query, it shouldn't rank for that query, ever. That makes sense, right?

The second part is also pretty simple, and that's the notion of quality. Does it provide information that people are looking for? Is that information relatively unique to your site? Clearly, it makes sense for the quality of the content to matter a lot.

We can combine the notions of quality and relative uniqueness into the notion of material differentiation. Rand covers this brilliantly in his Whiteboard Friday about creating 10X content.

Creating the 220,001st article on how to make French toast is just not going to cut it:

You need to create something new and compelling that also offers a lot of value. That may not be easy, but being the best at something never is.

If you're in a competitive market, it's reasonable to guess that your top competitors are making great, relevant content on topics that matter to their target audience. For the most important queries, it's probable that the top 5 (and maybe more) pieces of content in that space are really, really good (i.e. more comprehensive than other articles on the topic, or brings in new information that others don't have).

The third part encompasses many pieces.

• Is your content well-organized and easy to read?
• Does it effectively communicate its key points? How do people engage with it? If they land on a page on your site that has the answer to their question, can they quickly and easily find that information?

Once again, you'll find that the major competitors that rank in the top of the SERPs all handle this pretty well too.

Let's now take a look at what the role of the content score in ranking might look like:

Note that the Y-axis is "Chances of Ranking," as opposed to "Ranking." Nonetheless, this curve suggests that the Content Score is a big one, and that makes sense. Only the best of the best stuff should rank. It's simple.

Digging a bit deeper on what goes into content quality

But what about title tags? Heading tags, use of synonyms? Page layout and design? Stop and think about it for a moment. Aren't those all either part of creating higher-quality content, or making that content easier to consume?

You bet.

For example, imagine that I wrote this piece of content:

It could be the greatest information in the world, but it's going to be really hard for users to read, and it will probably have terrible user engagement signals. On the other hand, imagine that my content looks like this:

Would you say the quality of one of these pieces of content is higher? I would. The second one is much easier to read, and therefore will deliver more value to users. It will get better engagement, and yes, it will probably get linked to more often.

Why do links get separate treatment?

You could argue that links are just another measurement of content quality, and there is some truth to that, but we give them separate treatment in this discussion for two reasons:

1. They're still the best measurement of authority.

Yes, I know I'm ruffling some feathers now, but this is what my experience after more than 15 years in SEO (and seeing hundreds of SEO campaigns) has taught me. To get and sustain a link, someone has to have a website, has to be willing to modify that website, and they have to be willing to have their site's visitors click on the link to leave their site and go to yours.

That's a pretty material commitment on the linking site's part, and the only incentive they have to do that is if they believe that your content is of value to their site's visitors.

Why not social signals? While I've long argued that they have no impact except for aiding in content discovery, let's for sake of argument say that I'm wrong, and there is some impact here, and explain why social signals can never be a critical part of the Google algo. It's simple: social signals are under the control of third-party companies that can make them invisible to Google on a moment's notice (and remember that Google and Facebook are NOT friends). Imagine Google giving Facebook (or any other 3rd party) the power to break their algorithm whenever they want. Not happening!

2. The power of links should cause different actions on your part.

What is that action? It's called marketing, and within that discipline is the concept of content marketing. Done the right way, these are things you should do to raise the reputation and visibility of your brand.

In fact, this may consume a material amount of your entire company budget. With or without search engines in the world, you've always wanted to do two things:

(1) Make really good stuff, and

(2) market it effectively.

In 2016, and beyond, this will not change.

No doubt, part of attracting great links is to produce great content, but there are other overt actions involved to tell the world about that great content, such as active outreach programs.

Expanding on user engagement

Many have speculated that Google is using user engagement signals as a ranking factor, and that it will increase its investment in these areas over time. For example, what about click-through rate (CTR)? I discuss CTR as a ranking factor here, but to net it out simply, it's just too easy a signal to game, and Google tells us that it uses CTR measurements as a quality control check on other ranking signals, rather than as a direct signal.

You can doubt Google's statements about this, but if you own or publish a website, you probably get many emails a week offering to sell you links via one scheme or another. However, you never get emails offering you CTR ranking schemes. Why is that, you think? It's because even the scammers and spammers don't think it works.

Important note: Rand has done many live CTR tests and a number of these have shown some short-term rankings movement, so CTR could be used in some manner to discover hot trends/news, but still not be a core ranking factor.

What about other user engagement signals? I'd bet that Google is, in fact, doing some things with user engagement signals, though it's hard to be sure what they are. It's not likely to be as simple as bounce rate, or its cousin, pogosticking.

Pogosticking sure seems like a good signal until you realize there are many scenarios where they don't work at all. For example, when users are comparison shopping, they'll naturally hop from site to site.

Finding good user engagement factors that make for really reliable signals is quite hard. Many have speculated that artificial intelligence/machine learning will be used to derive these types of factors. Here are three pieces of content that cover that topic in some detail:

1. The Machine Learning Revolution: How it Works and its Impact on SEO, an article here on Moz by yours truly
2. SEO in a Two-Algorithm World, a Powerpoint by Rand Fishkin
3. The Past, Present, and Future of SEO, an article by Mike Grehan

Information architecture

Having a solid information architecture (IA) that Google can crawl and easily find your content is also a major requirement. In Andrey Lippatsev's response, he undoubtedly presumed that this was in good shape, but it would be wrong to leave this out of this discussion.

At Stone Temple Consulting, we've helped tons of sites improve their organic traffic simply by working on their IA, eliminating excessive page counts, improving their use of SEO tags like rel=canonical, and things of this nature. This is clearly a big factor as well. Usability also feeds into IA, because people need to be able to find what they're looking for on your site.

What I've left out with the two-factor model

First of all, there are other types of results, such as images, videos, and maps results, that are opportunities to get on the first page, but the above discussion is focused on how to rank in regular web search results.

To be fair, even in the regular web results, I've left some things out. Here are some examples of those:

1. Local links. I'm not referring to "local pack" listings here. If I search on "digital cameras" right now, in the regular web search results, I'll see some listings for stores near me. Clearly, proximity is a very large factor in ranking those pages.
2. Query deserves diversity. An example of this is the query "Jaguar." Chances are that my two-factor algorithm would rank only car sites in the top 10, but Google knows that many people that type that query want information on the animal. So even if the two-factor algo would slant things one way, you'll see some animal-related sites in the top 10.
3. In-depth articles. This is a feature that's hard to spot in the search results, but sometimes Google includes in the bottom of the top 10 results some pieces of content that are particularly comprehensive. These are for queries where Google recognizes there's a decent chance that the user is engaging in extensive research on a topic. Here's an example for the query "constitution":

We conducted a small sample review of 200 SERPs and found that about 6% of the results appeared to be from factors such as these. The two-factor model also doesn't account for personalization, but this post is looking at ranking factors for regular search results other than personalization, which, of course, also has a large impact.

Looking for ranking hacks?

OK, I'm going to give you one. Make your content, and the experience of consuming that content, unbelievably good. That's step one. Stick to your knitting, folks, and don't cop out on the effort to make your content stand out. You have no choice if you want to get sustainably positive results from SEO.

Don't forget the overall site and page usability, as that's a big part of what makes your content consumable. This is a critical part of making great content. So is measuring user engagement. This provides a critical feedback loop into what you're doing, and whether or not it's working for your target audience.

Then, and only then, your focus should turn to marketing that will help drive your reputation and visibility, and help attract links to your content. Here it is in a nutshell:

If your content isn't competitive in relevance and quality, links won't help. If it is, links will make the difference.

Your content has to be elite to have a chance to score highly on any given competitive search result. After that, your superior marketing efforts will help you climb to the top of the heap.

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