The natural evolution of digital for brands: becoming more human

It used to be that digital interactions portrayed in the Jetsons, on Star Trek and through KITT on Knight Rider were make-believe preserved for the television and big screen.

However, with the rise of digital personal assistants in recent years like Cortana and Siri, and intelligent bots, what was once science fiction is quickly becoming fact.

We are on the cusp of the next big shift in computing—a shift that is fueled by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and built around the one act that comes most natural to us—conversation.

We are optimistic about what technology can do, and this is rooted in a belief that every person and organization should be empowered to achieve more. It’s important though to set some context on how we’ve arrived at this new reality to help answer why you should care and what you should do as a marketer.

Every decade is marked with a shift driven by technological innovation. From the proliferation of PCs during the 80s to the emergence of the Web in the 90s to the rise of mobile and the cloud in the last decade – we have expanded our commerce, improved our communication and strengthened our connections.

But while these advances have helped the world become smaller, in many ways they’ve added layers of complexity, and more significantly, they’ve put the onus on us, the user, to adapt our behavior and expression so that we can be understood by the machines.

But what if we could just talk and interact with technology in exactly the same way we do with other people? Call upon it when we genuinely need support and not have to change the way we behave in order to reap the benefits?

We envision a world where digital experiences mirror the way people interact with one another today. A world where natural language will become the new user interface. A world where human conversation is the platform—the place to discover, access and interact with information and services, and get things done.

Computing is becoming more human

The mobile first, cloud-centric world of computing is driving this new platform of engagement. With the ability to understand tone of voice, interpret emotions and remember conversations, the nature of AI is no longer about man vs. machine, it’s about machines complementing and empowering people to do more of what really matters to them.

One of the major trends that has set the stage for an era of people communicating with their devices is the growth in people communicating through their devices.

With more than 3 billion people using messaging apps every day, consumers are spending five times longer on average using messaging apps than they do on all other mobile apps.

And, what’s more, we’ve reached a point where natural language is the new universal user interface with technology. Search intelligence is now embedded across platforms and services, harnessing intent understanding and using a vast base of semantic knowledge.

When coupled with machine learning that’s infused throughout all of our digital interactions, technology is becoming more human. People and machines are able to sustain conversations with personal digital assistants and intelligent bots in such a way that the meaning, intent and even emotion behind the words are as comprehensible as the words themselves. And we’re nearing a time when this will be scaleable to every individual and every business.

Conversations are the new platform

Imagine if brands had the opportunity to engage with consumers in ways that were not only relevant and personal but also in an environment where their added value is proactively sought out by the individual themselves. In the realm of conversations as a platform, this is the new reality.

Picture having a sudden craving for pizza. Just by telling the personal assistant on your phone “I would love a thick crusty four seasons pizza right now,” you’ve initiated a conversation to seek options or gone directly to your preferred pizzeria.

The bot you choose to talk to will place the order for you and arrange delivery and payment within seconds. In essense, you expressed a need, an emotion and took the initiative to engage with a particular company through their bot and you got what you wanted with more speed and ease than was previously possible.

This example illustrates how brands need to be ready for the engagement opportunities within this conversational exchange.

Marketers must think strategically about the best framework for building bots that cater to natural language and play into conversations across all platforms.

From there they must figure out how to connect these into their existing cloud, CRM and other elements of their digital marketing ecosystem. This is a business strategy that will require input across functions – starting with the CMO and throughout marketing, sales and IT – in order to offer a customer experience that is consistent with other more traditional digital engagements as well as being timely, relevant and serendipitous.

It’s a time of fundemental change in the digital technology experience. Conversations as a platform, A.I. and emerging search technologies are advancing this next frontier in ways that will simplify and enhance our lives and will be critical to every future marketer’s success.

To put a twist on these three timeless words from the Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s not just “markets are conversations,” but the future of “marketing is conversations.”

Ryan Gavin is General Manager, Search and Cortana Marketing at Microsoft.

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Optimizing for RankBrain... Should We Do It? (Is It Even Possible?) - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

If you've been stressing over how to optimize your SEO for RankBrain, there's good news: you can't. Not in the traditional sense of the word, at least. Unlike the classic algorithms we're used to, RankBrain is a query interpretation model. It's a horse of a different color, and as such, it requires a different way of thinking than we've had to use in the past. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles the question of what RankBrain actually is and whether SEOs should (or can) optimize for it.

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 RankBrain SEO and RankBrain in general. So Google released this algorithm or component of their algorithm a while ago, but there have been questions for a long time about: Can people actually do RankBrain SEO? Is that even a thing? Is it possible to optimize specifically for this RankBrain algorithm?

I'll talk today a little bit about how RankBrain works just so we have a broad overview and we're all on the same page about it. Google has continued to release more and more information through interviews and comments about what the system does. There are some things that potentially shift in our SEO strategies and tactics around it, but I'll show why optimizing for RankBrain is probably the wrong way to frame it.

What does RankBrain actually do?

So what is it that RankBrain actually does? A query comes in to Google. Historically, classically Google would use an algorithm, probably the same algorithm, at least they've said sort of the same algorithm across the board historically to figure out which pages and sites to show. There are a bunch of different ranking inputs, which we've talked about many times here on Whiteboard Friday.

But if you search for this query today, what Google is saying is with RankBrain, they're going to take any query that comes in and RankBrain is essentially going to be a query interpretation model. It's going to look at the words in that query. It's potentially going to look at things possibly like location or personalization or other things. We're not entirely sure whether RankBrain uses those, but it certainly could. It interprets these queries, and then it's going to try and determine the intent behind the query and make the ranking signals that are applied to the results appropriate to that actual query.

So here's what that means. If you search today — I did this search on my mobile device, I did it on my desktop device — for "best Netflix shows" or "best shows on Netflix" or "What are good Netflix shows," "good Netflix shows," "what to watch on Netflix," notice a pattern here? All five of these searches are essentially asking for the very same thing. We might quibble and say "what to watch on Netflix" could be more movie-centric than shows, which could be more TV or episodic series-centric. That's okay. But these five are essentially, " What should I watch on Netflix?"

Now, RankBrain is going to help Google understand that each of these queries, despite the fact that they use slightly different words and phrasing or completely different words, with the exception of Netflix, that they should all be answered by the same content or same kinds of content. That's the part where Google, where RankBrain is determining the searcher intent. Then, Google is going to use RankBrain to basically say, "Now, what signals are right for me, Google, to enhance or to push down for these particular queries?"

Signals

So we're going to be super simplistic, hyper-simplistic and imagine that Google has this realm of just a few signals, and for this particular query or set of queries, any of these, that...

• Keyword matching is not that important. So minus that, not super important here.
• Link diversity, neither here nor there.
• Anchor text, it doesn't matter too much, neither here nor there.
• Freshness, very, very important.

Why is freshness so important? Well, because Google has seen patterns before, and if you show shows from Netflix that were on the service a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, you are no longer relevant. It doesn't matter if you have lots of good links, lots of diversity, lots of anchor text, lots of great keyword matching. If you are not fresh, you are not showing searchers what they want, and therefore Google doesn't want to display you. In fact, the number one result for all of these was published, I think, six or seven days ago, as of the filming of this Whiteboard Friday. Not particularly surprising, right? Freshness is super important for this query.

• Domain authority, that is somewhat important. Google doesn't want to get too spammed by low-quality domains even if they are publishing fresh content.
• Engagement, very, very important signal here. That indicates to Google whether searchers are being satisfied by these particular results.

This is a high-engagement query too. So on low-engagement queries, where people are looking for a very simple, quick answer, you expect engagement not to be that big. But for something in-depth, like "What should I watch on Netflix," you expect people are going to go, they're going to engage with that content significantly. Maybe they're going to watch a trailer or some videos. Maybe they're going to browse through a list of 50 things. High engagement, hopefully.

• Related topics, Google is definitely looking for the right words and phrases.

If you, for example, are talking about the best shows on Netflix and everyone is talking about how hot — I haven't actually seen it — "Stranger Things" is, which is a TV program on Netflix that is very much in the public eye right now, well, if you don't have that on your best show list, Google probably does not want to display you. So that's an important related topic or a concept or a word vector, whatever it is.

• Content depth, that's also important here. Google expects a long list, a fairly substantive page of content, not just a short, "Here are 10 items," and no details about them.

As a result of interpreting the query, using these signals in these proportions, these five were basically the top five or six for every single one of those queries. So Google is essentially saying, "Hey, it doesn't matter if you have perfect keyword targeting and tons of link diversity and anchor text. The signals that are more important here are these ones, and we can interpret that all of these queries essentially have the same intent behind them. Therefore, this is who we're going to rank."

So, in essence, RankBrain is helping Google determine what signals to use in the algorithm or how to weight those signals, because there's a ton of signals that they can choose from. RankBrain is helping them weight them, and they're helping them interpret the query and the searcher intent.

How should SEOs respond?

Does that actually change how we do SEO? A little bit. A little bit. What it doesn't do, though, is it does not say there is a specific way to do SEO for RankBrain itself. Because RankBrain is, yes, helping Google select signals and prioritize them, you can't actually optimize for RankBrain itself. You can optimize for these signals, and you might say, "Hey, I know that, in my world, these signals are much more important than these signals," or the reverse. For a lot of commercial, old-school queries, keyword matching and link diversity and anchor text are still very, very important. I'm not discounting those. What I'm saying is you can't do SEO for RankBrain specifically or not in the classic way that we've been trained to do SEO for a particular algorithm. This is kind of different.

That said, there are some ways SEOs should respond.

1. If you have not already killed the concept, the idea of one keyword, one page, you should kill it now. In fact, you should have killed it a long time ago, because Hummingbird really put this to bed way back in the day. But if you're still doing that, RankBrain does that even more. It's even more saying, "Hey, you know what? Condense all of these. For all of these queries you should not have one URL and another URL and another URL and another URL. You should have one page targeting all of them, targeting all the intents that are like this." When you do your keyword research and your big matrix of keyword-to-content mapping, that's how you should be optimizing there.
2. It's no longer the case, as it was probably five, six years ago, that one set of fixed inputs no longer governs every single query. Because of this weighting system, some queries are going to demand signals in different proportion to other ones. Sometimes you're going to need fresh content. Sometimes you need very in-depth content. Sometimes you need high engagement. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you will need tons of links with anchor text. Sometimes you will not. Sometimes you need high authority to rank for something. Sometimes you don't. So that's a different model.
   
3. The reputation that you get as a website, a domain earns a reputation around particular types of signals. That could be because you're publishing lots of fresh content or because you get lots of diverse links or because you have very high engagement or you have very low engagement in terms of you answer things very quickly, but you have a lot of diverse information and topics on that, like a Dictionary.com or an Answers.com, somebody like that where it's quick, drive-by visits, you answer the searcher's query and then they're gone. That's a fine model. But you need to match your SEO focus, your brand of the type of SEO and the type of signals that you hit to the queries that you care about most. You should be establishing that over time and building that out.

So RankBrain, yes, it might shift a little bit of our strategic focus, but no, it's not a classic algorithm that we do SEO against, like a Panda or a Penguin. How do I optimize to avoid Panda hitting me? How do I optimize to avoid Penguin hitting me? How do I optimize for Hummingbird so that my keywords match the query intent? Those are very different from RankBrain, which has this interpretation model.

So, with that, I look forward to hearing about your experiences with RankBrain. I look forward to hearing about what you might be changing since RankBrain came out a couple of years ago, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Understanding the impact of speech recognition software on search

In the movie Her, Joaquin Pheonix plays a lonely and heartbroken man who develops strong romantic feelings for his mobile operating system. “Samantha,” as he calls it, speaks to him, listens to him, and ultimately becomes a major part of his life.

As technology stands right now, we may not be at the point of making real “human” connections with our mobile devices, but we do talk to them. We talk to them a lot.

Mobile technology is progressing quickly, and soon, speech recognition software will become even more advanced and far more prevalent than it is now.

Ultimately, improved speech recognition software will have a significant impact on how the public uses search engines. As search engine queries evolve, the results will naturally follow suit.

Consequently, SEO practices will be affected and businesses will have to develop new techniques (or alter current methods) for optimizing their websites.

Speech recognition software: the road to success

Smartphone speech recognition software has been frustratingly slow, glitchy, and spotty at best. At its worst, the burgeoning technology has produced some embarrassing and problematic communication blunders.

Basically, talking to Siri has been somewhat like trying to converse with your older grandmother after she’s taken out her hearing aids for the night.

It’s a far cry from the convenient hands-free technology creators originally set out to build. A new experiment, though, has suggested that there is a solution on the horizon.

Putting new technology to the test

James Landay, a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-author of this recent study said:

“Speech recognition is something that’s been promised to us for decades, but it has never worked very well. But we were noticing that in the past two to three years, speech recognition was actually improving a lot, benefiting from big data and deep learning to train its neural networks to produce faster, more accurate results. So we decided to formally test it against humans.”

Landay and his research team, which included scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and Baidu Inc., took Baidu’s Deep Speech 2 software and challenged 32 texters to a competition of speed and accuracy.

To test Baidu’s reportedly advanced speech recognition software, the researchers recruited a group of 19- to 32-year-olds to type messages on the Apple iPhone’s built-in keyboard in a race against the machine.

“They grew up texting, so we’re putting speech recognition up against people who are really good at this task,” explained Landay.

The participants either typed or verbalized about 100 everyday phrases. Some subjects performed the task in English while the others did so in their native Mandarin. Regardless of the language, the results were clear – Baidu’s Deep Speech 2 software was significantly faster and more accurate.

In English, speech recognition was an astonishing three times faster than typing, and the error rate was 20.4% lower. In Mandarin, the speech recognition software performed with a staggering 63.4% lower error rate.

Stanford computer science PhD student and co-author Sherry Ruan said:

“We knew speech recognition is pretty good, so we expected it to be faster, but we were really actually quite surprised to find that it was almost three times faster than typing on a keyboard.”

The future of speech recognition software

Now that researchers have been able to quantify the success of speech recognition software, they hope it will inspire engineers to design better user interfaces that take advantage of this technology.

“We should put speech in more applications than just typing an email or text message,” expressed Landay. “You could imagine an interface where you use speech to start and then it switches to a graphical interface that you can touch and control with your finger.”

Though software company Baidu does not currently plan to make Deep Speech 2 available to the public, they are integrating it into their own apps in China.

Regardless, it seems that improved speech recognition software is on its way to smartphones and other mobile devices here in the United States. Before we can discuss how this technology will impact user behavior and affect the way we do business, we must first answer the question, ”Who is using speech recognition software and why?”

It may not come as a surprise, but the majority of people using mobile personal assistants like Siri fall into the generational category of ‘millennials‘. The breakdown looks like this:

• Ages 18-29: 71%
• Ages 30-43: 59%
• Ages 44-53: 39%
• Ages 54+: 38%

Now that we’ve established the “who,” it’s time to talk about the “why.” Why are we using speech recognition software? What’s the purpose?

According to a Northstar Mobile Voice study, teens and adults use their phones’ speech feature for different reasons.

The majority of teenagers (43%) use speech recognition to make a phone call, while 38% ask for directions and 31% use the search feature to get help with homework. On the other hand, 40% of adults use it to ask for directions, while 39% dictate texts and 31% use it to call someone.

Many people are starting to use speech recognition for search engine queries. It is this application in particular that will impact businesses, digital advertisers, and SEO specialists.

How will voice search affect SEO?

There are bound to be differences between how we type our search queries and how we verbalize them. As user behavior changes, so, too, will search engine results. The question is will you be ready to adapt to these changes in order to keep your website optimized?

Here are the two major ways voice search will affect SEO.

Query length and phrasing

When we type our search queries, we rarely input more than two words. We typically don’t write full sentences, knowing that Google will get the gist.

While right now, voice searches are still relatively short, with most capping at around three words, it is important to note that voice search is still in its infancy.

As mentioned previously, voice recognition software hasn’t historically been all that useful; only now are we starting to see more advanced programs that can actually comprehend and accurately communicate with us.

As the software improves and we become more comfortable using it, it is highly likely that voice search queries will start to resemble natural language.

Stronger intent

Natural language demonstrates intent more strongly. When we speak in full sentences, our meaning becomes clearer to our audience. It’s pretty simple, right?

Here’s an example:

The user types “air conditioner” into the search bar. Google doesn’t know if they want to buy one, repair one, learn their history, or see images of them. Now, if they were to use voice search and say “Where can I buy an air conditioner?” then Google can provide them with more appropriate results.

For online marketers and SEO specialists, knowing users’ intent can be extremely helpful. They can strive to rank on question phrases with a higher likelihood of action.

Modifying your SEO strategy

As Internet user behavior changes, your business will need to respond and adapt.

Here are a few ways you can take action to maintain your website’s search engine optimization.

• Add relevant question phrases to your keyword list (i.e. How much does it cost to travel to Los Angeles?)
• Identify your most valuable question phrases and avoid questions that don’t suggest action (i.e. What time is it in Los Angeles?)
• Include filler words in your keyword questions, like “the”, “to”, “I”, and “for.”

Mobile technology has been progressing not in fluid strides but rather in giant leaps. It’s exciting, it’s impressive, but it’s also exhausting. Businesses need to be on their toes, ready to react and adapt at a moment’s notice.

Speech recognition software may have been around for awhile now, but it has yet to play a significant role in the shaping of our modern society. The time has come. Is your business ready?

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How to Build Backlinks Using Your Competitors’ Broken Pages

Posted by TomCaulton

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.

We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors' broken pages that have been linked to by external sources.

Allow me to elaborate.

Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I've outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors' 404 pages.

Please note: In this post, I will be using Search Engine Land as an example to make my points.

Ready to dive in? Great, because I'm going to walk you through the entire link building process now.

First, you need to find your competitor(s). This is as easy as searching for the keyword you’re targeting on Google and selecting websites that are above you in the SERPs. Once you have a list of competitors, create a spreadsheet to put all of your competitors on, including their position in the rankings and the date you listed them.

Next, download Screaming Frog SEO Spider [a freemium tool]. This software will allow you to crawl all of your competitors website, revealing all their 404 pages. To do this, simply enter your competitors' URLs in the search bar one at a time, like this:

Once the crawl is complete, click "Response Codes."

Then, click on the dropdown arrow next to "filter" and select "Client Error 4xx."

Now you'll be able to see the brand's 404 pages.

Once you've completed the step above, simply press the "Export" button to export all of their 404 pages into a file. Next, import this file into to a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs. On this part of the spreadsheet, create tabs called "Trust Flow," "Citation Flow," "Referring Domains," and "External Backlinks."

Now that you’ve imported all of their 404 pages, you need to dissect the images and external links if there are any. A quick way to do this is to highlight the cell block by pressing on the specific cell at the top, then press "Filter" under the "Data" tab.Look for the drop-down arrow on the first cell of that block. Click the drop-down arrow, and underneath "Filter by values," you will see two links: "Select all" and "Clear."

Press "Clear," like this:

This will clear all preset options. Now, type in the URL of the competitor's website in the search box and click "Select all."

This will filter out all external links and just leave you with their 404 pages. Go through the whole list, highlighting the pages you think you can rewrite.

Now that you have all of your relevant 404 pages in place, run them through Majestic [a paid tool] or Moz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) [a freemium tool] to see if their 404 pages actually have any external links (which is what we're ultimately looking for). Add the details from Majestic or Moz to the spreadsheet. No matter which tool you use (I use OSE), hit "Request a CSV" for the backlink data. (Import the data into a new tab on your spreadsheet, or create a new spreadsheet altogether if you wish.)

Find relevant backlinks linking to (X’s) website. Once you've found all of the relevant websites, you can either highlight them or remove the ones that aren’t from your spreadsheet.

Please note: It's worth running each of the websites you're potentially going to be reaching out to through Majestic and Moz to find out their citation flow, trust flow, and domain authority (DA). You may only want to go for the highest DA; however, in my opinion, if it's relevant to your niche and will provide useful information, it's worth targeting.

With the 404s and link opportunities in hand, focus on creating content that’s relevant for the brands you hope to earn a link from. Find the contact information for someone at the brand you want the link from. This will usually be clear on their website; but if not, you can use tools such as VoilaNorbert and Email Hunter to get the information you need. Once you have this information, you need to send them an email similar to this one:

---

Hi [THEIR NAME],

My name is [YOUR NAME], and I carry out the [INSERT JOB ROLE – i.e., MARKETING] at [YOUR COMPANY'S NAME or WEBSITE].

I have just come across your blog post regarding [INSERT THEIR POST TITLE] and when I clicked on one of the links on that post, it happened to go to a 404 page. As you’re probably aware, this is bad for user experience, which is the reason I’m emailing you today.

We recently published an in-depth article regarding the same subject of the broken link you have on your website: [INSERT YOUR POST TITLE].

Here's the link to our article: [URL].

I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind linking to our article instead of the 404 page you’re currently linking to, as our article will provide your readers with a better user experience.

We will be updating this article so we can keep people provided with the very latest information as the industry evolves.

Thank you for reading this email and I look forward to hearing from you.

[YOUR NAME]

---

Disclaimer: The email example above is just an example and should be tailored to your own style of writing.

In closing, remember to keep detailed notes of the conversations you have with people during outreach, and always follow up with people you connect with.

I hope this tactic helps your SEO efforts in the future. It's certainly helped me find new places to earn links. Not only that, but it gives me new content ideas on a regular basis.

Do you use a similar process to build links? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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Penguin 4.0: what does it mean for SEO practitioners?

As you’re no doubt aware, Google finally rolled out its Google 4.0 algorithm update at the end of last week.

Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm, penalising websites that use various black-hat link schemes to manipulate search rankings.

Other important changes include:

• Penguin data is refreshed in real time, so any changes will be made as soon as the affected page has been recrawled and reindexed.
• Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking of the offending page, rather than affecting the whole site.

So how do these changes affect actual SEO practitioners? I asked a panel of experts and SEW contributors their views on Penguin 4.0, including:

• Gerald Murphy, Client Service Manager at EMEA at BrightEdge
• Kevin Gibbons, Managing Director at Blue Glass
• Nikolay Stoyanov, freelance SEO consultant at niksto.com

Do you think the new version of Penguin is fairer? Do you think it’s an adequate deterrent when it comes to spammy link-building?

Kevin Gibbons: Yes, being realtime helps to set expectations as you won’t have to wait weeks or months for the next algorithm refresh to assess your link removals.

Of course Google’s algorithm is always a moving target – but it is becoming harder to be manipulated at scale. In some verticals it can even be a game of whoever doesn’t have the worst backlinks might win. Perhaps having a new domain with no link reputation isn’t a bad starting point any more!

Gerald Murphy: I think the algorithm is fairer. Think about it, you will be awarded for great content, instantly. I also think that, with the rise of AI, Google will soon be able to understand links more. A flower shop on Valentines Day, for example, will get away with more spam-like links but this won’t be the case in September. As links will be linked with behaviours.

Nikolay Stoyanov: Yes, I think that the real-time version of the Penguin algorithm will be fairer and will play a very positive role for the whole SEO community.

Google Penguin is now a part of the core algorithm and every change (either a negative or positive one) will happen very quickly (maybe not instantly but on a daily or weekly basis). After more than 700 days of waiting we can finally rest assured that whatever SEO mistakes we make we will be able to quickly fix afterwards.

This works both ways though. If we use some gray or black hat techniques Google will be able to catch us very quickly and punish us for not following its rules. So this is a double-edged sword.

Another great change with Penguin 4.0 is the fact that it became more “granular”. This means that whatever penalties hit our sites from now on they will impact separate pages on the site and not the whole domain in general.

I believe that this will be a positive thing as it will give us a better chance to fix those penalized pages and to learn from our mistakes without losing a huge amount of our organic traffic (like before).

Ideally, the latest Penguin update will benefit white hat SEO experts like myself and will help us take our SEO to the next level. Same goes with end users who will get better results to answer their search intent properly.

Conversely, black hat techniques (especially PBNs) will slowly become obsolete and will eventually stop working which is the ultimate goal.

Have you experienced any affect from the Penguin update?

Kevin Gibbons: None of our clients have seen any negative shifts in organic traffic.

However, in the past we have noticed trends of referral traffic dropping as a knock-on effect from blogs/forums/publishers that have been penalised and as a result of them having less traffic, there are fewer outbound link clicks.

The data we have so far is too early to highlight a trend, but it’s certainly one to keep a close eye on…

Nikolay Stoyanov: No, I haven’t seen any change on my site or my clients’ sites since Penguin 4.0 was launched. I guess it’s because I’m playing by the rules but also because it’s not been entirely rolled out yet. It’s way too soon to jump to conclusions.

How can webmasters best avoid the risk of being affected by Penguin?

Kevin Gibbons: Focus on building a brand, not links.

If your activity is just for link building, it will leave an SEO footprint. No-one wants that.

Aim to tell your story via content, data-driven analysis and knowledge – and amplify to a targeted audience via multiple channels; social media, paid search, digital PR etc…

Also monitor the links you have and audit these on a frequent basis. If you’re in a competitive industry, you may have to actively disavow negative links that have been built to your site that someone else has built!

Gerald Murphy: Data analysis is even more important to SEO. This most effecient way to analyse this update is to breakdown links by category, sub category, and page level, and then compare this with data, such as, visits, average blended rank, and revenue, for example.

Nikolay Stoyanov: Forget about shortcuts in SEO! There aren’t any. The only way to stay on the safe side and secure your brand, visitors and sales is if you do white hat SEO.

Write well researched and useful content and build quality links to it. That’s it! Nothing’s changed. Hopefully with the real-time Penguin that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Maybe not at once but eventually.

With Hummingbird and RankBrain we’re already seeing lots of positive changes in the SERPs from content perspective. Now’s the time to see the same when it comes to link building.

How, if at all, will this update change the way you work?

Kevin Gibbons: The update doesn’t change our process, the only thing it might do is re-affirm the message we have been on the right track by focusing on quality. We’re just hoping it catches some of our clients competitors out!

Nikolay Stoyanov: I wouldn’t say that Penguin 4.0 will change my work routine in any way. But I am pretty sure that there will be a much higher demand for quality link building services in the upcoming years due to this huge change in the SEO world.

Hopefully, more and more webmasters will start playing by the rules as they should be same for everyone. That’s fair!

Gerald Murphy: It won’t.

What future algorithm changes do you wish to see? Is there anything Google is ignoring?

Kevin Gibbons: There’s always been a gap between what Google says it’s algorithm does and what it actually does. Over recent years they’ve done a much better job at closing these, and most of the tactics that do work are often very short-term, which is enough to keep most brands away from them.

I would expect them to be looking at things such as:

• Spammy link building at high velocity, which can still rewarded by Google.
• Ecommerce site cloning can be a pain point, where Google starts to rank the phishing/fake site organically with the clients own content.
• Redirected domains into sites/pages/new domains – some can be for legitimate reasons (re-brands/acquisitions) – but others are purely for short-term SEO boosts.
• Mass content production, with many companies pumping out X amount of articles a day/week trying to show ‘freshness’ of content but not putting enough effort/resource into the quality of content. Long-term you’d expect panda to go against them, but short term it can work better than expected.

Gerald Murphy: AI integration with links to get a deeper analysis of behaviour, such as, seasonality and maybe even social media signals. Remember mobile is going to kill links because of our behaviour. Name me a user, sitting in the front room on their tablet or smartphone, reading another great blog who creates a HTML link. This is not in our behaviour.

Nikolay Stoyanov: I want to see all the black hat and grey hat methods dead. Starting with PBNs. I still see multiple sites ranking in top 5 or higher with low quality or PBN links that I can smell from a mile away. It’s high time that Google Penguin starts penalizing these websites like they deserve.

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How a Single Piece of Content Increased Our DA by +7 Points [Case Study]

Posted by sergeystefoglo

Content marketing has been discussed and researched more in the last 5 years than ever before.

Source: Google Trends

There are various kinds of content marketing strategies out there. Blog promotion, infographics, video strategies, and creative content are some. Depending on your goals, some are more effective than others.

At Distilled, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on many creative content pieces with some incredible clients. This article is going to focus on a piece of content that my team and I created for a client. We’ll take a look at both the creation process and the tangible results of the piece we made.

Note: In general, you don’t want to rely on one piece of content for link acquisition. It’s recommended to focus on multiple pieces throughout the year to add link diversity and give your content pieces a good chance to succeed. The following is simply a case study of one piece of content that worked well for my client.

---

Client backstory: We need links!

Our client is Ginny’s (shoutout to Matt and Cailey). Ginny's is an ecommerce business based in the beautiful state of Wisconsin.

We knew that regardless of how much optimization was done on the site, their lack of incoming links would be a huge barrier to success. This quickly became a topic of discussion for us.

The general rule of thumb: the more linking root domains (LRDs) your site has, the stronger the domain authority should be. And the stronger the linking root domains are, the better it is for your DA. In other words, it’s better to get 1 strong link (DA 80+) than 10 weak links (DA 20-). Kudos if the links are topically relevant to your website/brand.

So, my team and I sat down and started thinking of different ways we could accomplish the task of increasing LRDs and (hopefully) DA for my client.

---

The process of creating a link-worthy story

Here are the steps my team and I went through for this particular client.

Note: For an extensive look at creating creative content, please see the following articles:

• How to Make Award-Winning Creative Content - Part 1
• How to Make Award-Winning Creative Content - Part 2

Ideation

The first step in the creative process is ideation, because without great ideas you can’t a have a great piece of content. It’s important to give yourself enough time for ideation. Don’t rush it, and be sure to include various team members with different backgrounds to get as many ideas as possible. Note: stock up on coffee/Red Bull and snacks for this.

Validation

Typically after an ideation session you'll have many potential ideas. It’s important to go through and validate them. When I say "validate," I mean making sure others haven’t already done something similar, or that creating the piece is actually possible (you have access to the right data, etc.)

Note: For more information on researching and validating your creative ideas, read this post titled “Researching Creative Ideas: 10 Dos and Don'ts.”

Pitching

At this point you'll have a handful of ideas that are not only on-brand and interesting, but have great potential in being picked up by various sources. Put together a nice deck and pitch your ideas to the client. The goal is to get your client to pick one (or a few, depending on the budget).

Note: Here’s an awesome write-up on a framework for pitching creative ideas to your clients.

Gathering the data

Once your client signs off on a piece, it’s time to dive into the data! Depending on the piece you're creating, this might look like scraping websites and doing a ton of research to get the right data you need. Take your time on this, as you want to make sure your data is accurate and relevant.

Design

During this part of the process, it’s a great idea to start mocking up some potential designs. If your piece is smaller, this might be a quick and simple task. If you have a data visualization, this will be longer. Typically, it’s a good idea to create 2–3 mockups and give your client some options.

Development

Once your client signs off on a particular design, it’s time to dive into development.

Copy

The actual copy for the piece doesn’t have to happen after the development, but it’s usually a good idea to allow the copywriter to see how much space they have to work with. What you don’t want is for your copywriter to write 500 words when the designer has made space for 100. Communication is key in this process.

Testing

Once the piece is built, it’s important to test it out on various browsers and devices. Ask people to give it a run and try to fix as many errors/bugs as possible.

Promotion

Depending on your timeline, you might want to start promotion sooner than this. The important thing to note is to consider pre-pitching and reaching out to contacts to gauge their interest in the piece as soon as possible. Keep your contacts updated and be sure to give them everything they need for their stories.

Note: For further reference on pitching journalists, please see this post titled, “Beyond the Media List: Pro-Active Prospecting for Pitching Creative Content.”

Launch

It’s time to launch!

Push

On the day the piece launches, be sure that you are reminding journalists, reaching out to contacts, sharing the piece on social media, and making your social campaigns live.

Celebrate

There are a lot of steps to building a creative piece, so don’t underestimate the work that goes into it! After you launch the piece be sure to have a beer, give yourself a pat on the back, or do whatever it is you need to do to celebrate.

---

Post-ideation: What we came up with

After the process outlined above, our team came up with 50 States of Bacon.

The idea was simple: Everyone likes bacon, but who likes it the most? Ginny’s caters to a lot of people who love deep frying, so this was on-brand. We decided to use Instagram’s (now difficult to access) API to extract 33,742 photos that were tagged with #bacon and located within the USA. To normalize for population distribution and Instagram usage, we also collected 64,640 photos with the tags #food, #breakfast, #lunch, and #dinner.

To make this data more visual, we made it interactive and included some fun facts for each state.

---

What happened after we launched the piece?

So, what happened after we launched the piece? Let’s dive in.

Here are some of the larger websites 50 States of Bacon got picked up on.

Website	Domain Authority	Other
US News	94	Tweeted from account (115K+)
Mashable	96	Tweeted from account (6.95M+)
AOL Lifestyle	98	Referred 1,200+ visitors
Eater	85	N/A
Daily Dot	85	Tweeted from account (274K+)

Here is what the LRDs and DA looked like before we launched the piece, and then after 4 months of it being live:

	Before Launch	4 Months Later
Linking Root Domains	450	600
Domain Authority	29	36

Let’s break this down by metric. Here's a graph of the LRDs over time (we launched the piece at about the start of the uplift).

The domain authority didn’t budge until about 4 months after we launched the piece. We weren’t actively pursuing any other link-based campaigns during this time, so it’s safe to say the creative piece had a lot to do with this boost in DA.

Note: Since DA is refreshed with new pools of data, this observation wouldn’t have been as valid if the DA only moved one or two positions. But, since it moved 7 positions so close to the launch of this piece, I feel like it’s safe to assume the piece contributed greatly.

Does this mean if you do a similar piece that your DA will also increase? No. Does it give us a good example on what can happen? Absolutely.

---

A note on LRDs, DA, and setting expectations

Setting expectations with clients is hard. That's even more true when you both know that links may be even more important than user engagement with your campaign. To make sure expectations are reasonable, you may want to encourage them to see this campaign as one of many over a long period of time. Then there's less pressure on any individual piece.

So, it’s important to set expectations upfront. I would never tell a client that we can guarantee a certain number of links, or that we guarantee an increase in domain authority.

Instead, we can guarantee a piece of content that is well-built, well-researched, and interesting to their target audience. You can go one step further and guarantee reaching out to X amount of contacts, and you can estimate how many of those contacts will respond with a "yes" or "no."

In fact, you should set goals. How much traffic would you like the piece to bring? What about social shares? What seems like a reasonable amount of LRD’s you could gain from a piece like this? Benchmark where you currently are, and make some reasonable goals.

The point I’m trying to make is that you shouldn’t promise your client a certain amount of links because, frankly, you'd be lying to them. Be upfront about what this looks like and show examples of work you’ve done before, but make sure to set their expectations correctly up front to avoid any conflicts down the road.

---

Conclusion

There's a lot to be learned from the results of creative campaigns. The goal of this article is to share one piece that I’ve worked on with a client while highlighting some things that I learned/observed along the way. If you'd like to see more campaigns we’ve worked on at Distilled, take a look at our creative roundup for last year.

To wrap things up, here are the key takeaways:

• Creative pieces take a lot of thought, work, and time. Don’t underestimate the task at hand.
• Don’t frame the project as only focused on gaining links. Instead, aim for creating a compelling piece of content that is on-brand and has the potential to gain traction.
• Oftentimes it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket. Plan multiple pieces throughout the year.
• If your research is right and you pitch the piece to the correct people, this is a strategy that can gain your domain some very strong LRDs. In this particular case, 110 linking root domains (and counting).
• …But those links won’t come easy. You need to pre-pitch, remind, and re-pitch your contacts. There are many great pieces of content being published daily; you need to be proactive about ensuring your spots online.
• There are other benefits to doing pieces like this aside from links. Social shares, brand awareness, and referral traffic are some other metrics to look at.
• It is possible to increase your DA by doing a piece like this, but it takes time. Be patient, and continue doing great work in the meantime.

---

Other thoughts

• There are some arguments to be made that a piece of content like this only has spikes and doesn’t do any good for a brand. I don’t believe this to be true. The way I see it, if a piece is too evergreen, it might not gain as many strong links. At the same time, if a piece is completely left-field and doesn’t fit with the brand, the links might not be as impactful. I think there's a fine line here; it should be up to your best judgment on the pieces you should create.

• This piece could potentially be updated every year to gain more links or traction (although it would be a lot more difficult with Instagram drastically limiting their API).

• It’s possible that this piece didn’t have a direct impact on DA, but because there were no other link acquisition strategies during the 4 months, we can safely assume the two are correlated.

• There's an argument to be made that jumping from the 20s to the 30s is much easier than from 40s to 50s when you’re speaking of DA. We know that it gets more difficult to increase DA as it gets higher, so do keep that in mind.

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More online product searches start on Amazon than Google

Search traffic is of course vital for online retailers, but a new survey finds that more people use Amazon as the first port of call when looking for products.

The second annual State of Amazon study by BloomReach found that 55% of consumers start their online product searches on Amazon, compared to 28% who opt for a search engine.

The survey of 2,000 US consumers found that Amazon’s share of the action was up 11% year on year, and the figures down for search engines and other retailers.

The retailer’s reputation for price-competitiveness, (as well as the fact that it sells just about everything) means it’s the go-to destination for comparison shopping.

• 90% of consumers will check Amazon even if they’ve found their product elsewhere. 78% of these shoppers do this ‘often’ or ‘always’.
• It works both ways though, with 70% checking products they’ve found on Amazon on other ecommerce sites.  

Mobile shopping habits

The study also looked at shopping habits on mobile devices. Amazon still dominates here, but less so than overall.

• 50% of mobile shoppers try Amazon first, compared to search engines on 34% and other retailers on 16%.
• 76% of consumers shop on their smartphone, with 90% saying that they’ve made a purchase on a smartphone.
• Almost 50% shop on a smartphone weekly. 
• 92% say smartphone shopping can influence a purchase decision, while 52% say smartphone shopping often or always supports a purchase.
• 88% will use a smartphone to assist shopping in stores.
• 78% have a retailer mobile app, and 82% of those have a retailer app that isn’t Amazon’s.

These figures will of course be a major concern for competitors, as the risk is that many product searches begin and end on Amazon before they even have a chance to appeal to shoppers.

Jason Seeba, BloomReach head of marketing, says search still has a major part to play:

“While online retailers increasingly feel the pinch, search engines still play an integral part of commerce strategy. This study highlights that just because consumers start on Amazon, that doesn’t mean they ultimately buy from Amazon. Instead, they’re often comparing and researching products on search engines and other retailers.”

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Google Testing “Near City” in Local 3-Pack

Google is testing a new style of their local 3-pack, this one to show businesses that are near a certain location. Here is how it appears: And another screenshot: Sergey Alakov shared the images on Twitter. It will be interesting to see if others are spotting this test too, and if it narrows it down […]

The post Google Testing “Near City” in Local 3-Pack appeared first on The SEM Post.

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3 Surprising Lessons From Building 26,000 Links

Posted by KelseyLibert

The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared.

While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found.

Most high-authority links don’t receive a lot of social shares.

Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a Whiteboard Friday from last year, Rand talks about this trend. BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links – not just articles – this number rose to around 90 percent.

We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldn’t be the case with high-quality links we’ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) didn’t get any social shares:

• 52 percent of links with a DA over 89 received zero shares.
• 50 percent of links with a DA over 79 received zero shares.
• 54 percent of links with a DA over 59 received zero shares.

On average, our campaigns get 110 placements and 11,000 social shares, yet a single link accounts for about 63 percent of total shares. This means that if you exclude the top-performing link from every campaign, our average project would only get 4,100 social shares.

Since most links don’t yield social shares, marketers with goals of both link building and social engagement should consider a strategy for gaining social traction in addition to a strategy for building a diverse link portfolio.

The social strategy can be as simple as targeting a few key websites that routinely yield high social shares. It’s also helpful to look at target sites’ social media accounts. When they post their own articles, what kind of engagement do they get?

Of all the sites that covered our campaigns, the following five sites had the highest average social shares for our content. We know we could depend on these sites in the future for high social engagement.

Exceptions to the rule

Some content can definitely accomplish both high engagement and social shares. The BuzzSumo and Moz study found that the best types of content for attracting links and social shares are research-backed content or opinion pieces. Long-form content (more than 1,000 words) also tends to attract more links and shares than shorter content. At Fractl, we’ve found the same factors – an emotional hook, a ranking or comparison, and a pop culture reference – tend to encourage both social sharing and linking.

Few sites will always link to you the same way.

To ensure you’re building a natural link portfolio, it’s important to keep track of how sites link to your content. You’ll learn if you’re earning a mix of dofollow links, nofollow links, cocitation links, and brand mentions for each campaign. We pay close attention to which types of links our campaigns earn. Looking back at these data, we noticed that publishers don’t consistently link the same way.

The chart below shows a sample of how 15 high-authority news sites have linked to our campaigns. As you can see, few sites have given dofollow links 100 percent of the time. Based on this, we can assume that a lot of top sites don’t have a set editorial standard for link types (although plenty of sites will only give nofollow links).

While getting a site to cover your content is something to be celebrated, not every placement will result in a dofollow link. And just because you get a dofollow link from a site once doesn’t mean you should always expect that type of link from that publisher.

Creating a lot of visual assets is a waste of time in certain verticals.

There’s an ongoing debate within Fractl’s walls over whether or not creating a lot of visual assets positively impacts a campaign’s reach enough to justify the additional production time. To settle this debate, we looked at our 1,300 top placements to better understand how publishers covered our campaigns’ visual assets (including both static image and video). This sample was limited to articles on websites with a DA of 70 or higher that covered our work at least four times.

We found that publishers in different verticals had divergent tendencies regarding visual asset coverage. The most image-heavy vertical was entertainment, and the least was education.

Some of the variation in asset counts is based on how many assets were included in the campaign. Although this does skew our data, we do receive useful information from this analysis. The fact that top entertainment publishers used an average of nine assets when they cover our campaigns indicates a high tolerance for visual content from outside sources. Verticals with lower asset averages may be wary of external content or simply prefer to use a few key visuals to flesh out an article.

Keeping these publisher vertical preferences in mind when developing content can help your team better allocate resources. Rather than spending a lot of effort designing a large set of visual assets for a campaign you want to be placed on a finance site, your time may be better spent creating one or two awesome visualizations. Similarly, it’s worthwhile to invest in creating a variety of visual assets if you’re pitching entertainment and health sites.

Analyzing our entire link portfolio taught us a few new things that challenged our previous assumptions:

• High DA sites don’t necessarily attract a lot of social engagement. Just because a site that linked to you has a huge audience doesn’t mean that audience will share your content.
• Most sites don’t consistently use the same types of links. Got a dofollow link from a site one time? Don’t expect it to be the norm.
• Certain publisher verticals are more likely to feature a lot of visual assets. Depending on which verticals you’re targeting, you might be wasting time on designing lots of visuals.

While I hope you’ve learned something from Fractl’s internal study, I want you to see the broader lesson: the value of measuring and analyzing your own content campaign data as a means to improve your process. If you’ve done a similar analysis of links earned from content marketing, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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5 Interesting Uses of Customer Data for Ecommerce Marketing Each time a retailer interacts with a customer there is an opportunity to learn a little more about that customer and how to better serve ... http://ift.tt/eA8V8J

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Guide to Google ranking signals – Part 4: content freshness

Last week we published the third instalment of our complete guide to Google ranking signals.

It concentrated on the rather nebulous term ‘quality content’ and the practical signals you can provide Google to prove the text on your webpage is worthwhile.

This week we continue diving into on-page content factors, with content freshness.

Freshness

How recently your webpage was published is a ranking signal. However different searches have different freshness needs. (Source: Google Inside search post)

Google checks content for freshness by monitoring the following types of searches…

• Recent events or hot topics: Anything that begins trending on the web, that searchers want to find the latest information on immediately.
• Regularly recurring events: These are events that take place on a regular basis, such as annual conferences or presidential elections. Without a specific qualifier, you probably expect to see information on the most recent event, and not one from years ago.
• Frequent updates: These are searches for information that changes often, but isn’t a recent or regularly occurring event. These tend to be searches for frequently updated tech products or car brands.

Google will then check for spikes around search volume, whether news publishers and blogs have begun writing about the subject as well as social media mentions.

So if your content manages to ride the crest of the above, you may see a rankings boost for being first on the scene, or by regularly updating your content to remain fresh.

Moz recently looked at whether content freshness is a factor and went into further detail on all the possible ways Google determines content freshness. The following insights come from Moz’s research by Cyrus Shepard, so click on the link for more information.

1) Freshness by inception date

A web page can be given an immediate freshness score based on its publication date, which decays over time as the content becomes older.

2) Regular updates to content

Google scores ‘fresh content’ that’s updated regularly in a different way to a news article that doesn’t change.

3) Changes to a webpage’s core content matters more than other areas

Changes made in the main body of the article are far more important than other areas, such as Javascript, comments, navigation, etc.

4) How often the content changes

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years.

5) New page creation

Websites or blogs that publish new webpages more frequently will earn a higher freshness score than those who only publish once in a while.

6) Rate of new link growth may signal freshness

If a webpage sees has an increase in the number of external sites linking to it, this could be seen as a sign of relevance to Google.

7) Links from sites rated ‘fresh’ will pass freshness on to you

Links from sites determined to have a high freshness score can raise your own freshness level.

8) Traffic and engagement metrics may signal freshness

Standard engagement behaviours on SERP results, such as click-throughs and time on page, can be an indicator of freshness and relevance.

9) Changes in anchor text pointing towards your site may devalue older links

If your website or webpage suddenly or gradually changes focus over time (say from a carpentry guide to a best practice SEO guide – sounds unlikely, but you never know), then anchor text pointing to you will likely change in line with the different topic.

Google may then decide that your page has changed so much that the old anchor text is no longer fresh and devalue those older links.

10) Older is often better

The newest result isn’t always the best. For older, less news-worthy topics, an in-depth, authoritative result that’s been around a long while may rank highest.

Google News

11) Of course you can ensure that Google recognises that your content is fresh, and may immediately place you on the first SERP in its News section (or Top Stories on mobile), if you have successfully submitted your site to Google News.

You can check the guidelines for Google News submission here.

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Use Google Disavow Like Before, No Changes With Real Time Penguin

The new launch of Google Penguin on Friday does not change how site owners should be using the Google disavow tool. Some were questioning whether the changes with Penguin meant site owners would no longer need to disavow to recover from Penguin, or that they would need to use it at all going forward.  John […]

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No Changes to Link Related Manual Actions with Penguin Real Time Launch

Google will continue to send manual actions related to spammy links.  This has not changed now that the new real-time Penguin has been released. Gary Illyes from Google confirmed it on Twitter that manual actions have not changed with the Penguin launch. @SEO @JohnMu clarification: for MANUAL ACTIONS there will be notifications, nothing changed there, […]

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Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth The Wait?

Posted by Dr-Pete

For almost two years (707 days, to be precise), one question has dominated the SEO conversation: “When will Google update Penguin?” Today, we finally have the answer. Google announced that a Penguin update is rolling out and that Penguin is now operating in real-time.

September has been a very volatile month for the SERPs (more on that later in the post), but here’s what we’re seeing in MozCast for the past two weeks, including last night:

In a normal month, a temperature of 82°F would be slightly interesting, but it's hardly what many people were expecting, and September 2016 has been anything but a normal month. It takes time to refresh the entire index, though, so it's likely Penguin volatility will continue for a few days. I'll update this graph over the next few days if anything more interesting happens.

What happened in September?

September has been the most volatile month for SERPs since I started tracking temperatures in April of 2012 (just a couple of weeks before Penguin 1.0). To the best of my knowledge at this time, the volatility during the rest of September was not due to the Penguin 4.0 roll-out.

There are no official statements (currently) about other updates, but we’re aware of two things. First, many local SEOs saw major shifts around September 1st, when MozCast tracked a high of 108°F. This has been dubbed the Possum Update, and reports are that local pack URLs also moved substantially (MozCast does not track this data). We did see an overall drop in local pack presence in our data set on that day (about 7.3% day-over-day).

Second, between September 13th and 14th there was a massive drop in SERPs with image (vertical) results on page 1 in our data set. This caused substantial volatility, as image results occupy an organic position and so those SERPs got an extra organic result on page 1. The temperature that day was 111°F. Here’s the two-week graph of SERPs with image results on page 1:

SERPs with images in our data set dropped 49% overnight and have not recovered. I've hand-checked dozens of these results and have verified the drop. In some cases, images moved to deeper pages. It's unclear if other vertical/universal results were affected.

Were you affected by Penguin 4.0?

I've often said that measuring algorithm flux is like tracking the unemployment rate. It's interesting to the economy at large if the rate is 5% or 6%, but ultimately you either have a job or you don't. If you were hit by an algorithm update, it's little comfort that the MozCast temperature was low on that day.

Hopefully, if you were impacted by Penguin in the past and have made changes, those changes have been rewarded (or soon will be). The good news is that, now that Penguin is real-time, we should haven't to wait another two years for a major refresh.

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Google Launches Real-Time Penguin 4.0: All The Changes & Details

Google has officially launched Penguin 4.0  This new version of Penguin is the long awaited real-time Penguin that eliminates the long wait for site owners to recover if they have been negatively impacted by Penguin. Gary Illyes, part of the Google Search Ranking Team, as well as a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced the […]

The post Google Launches Real-Time Penguin 4.0: All The Changes & Details appeared first on The SEM Post.

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12 tips for content marketing from an SEO perspective

How can you create content marketing which works for search, right from the start?

Many of us probably think of SEO as something which is done after the fact: you create your copy, then you think about how to optimise it. But at the Content Marketing Association’s Digital Breakfast last week, Kevin Gibbons from BlueGlass proposed a radically different approach.

To make your content work for SEO, Gibbons’ advice is to “start with the end in mind”. You need to be thinking about promotion from the word go, he said; so that when it comes to publishing your content, you already have a distribution and promotion strategy in mind, and have crafted your content towards that goal.

So how can you carry this out in practice? Here are twelve tips from Kevin Gibbons’ presentation that will ensure your content works for search from beginning to end.

Break down ‘silos’ when creating your team

I’m not the biggest fan of the word ‘silos’; in fact, in seven months of writing about digital marketing and search, I’ve become heartily sick of it. But essentially what it means in this context is bringing people together across different departments – SEO, content strategy, creativity, PR and social media – to work on content.

Content marketing is a team effort, and your team should combine a variety of talents; in Gibbons’ words, “Get the right people on the bus!”

He warned against doing too many different things, and trying to spread yourself too thin. Ideally, you want to put together a team of people who specialise in their different areas, rather than trying to have one or two people be good at everything.

Know your goals

Once you’ve got your awesome team assembled, it’s time to set some goals. First off, understand your brand: what is your purpose and the story you want to tell? What are your core values, and how can you communicate them?

As an example of this, Gibbons cited Apple’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ slogan and the adverts that Apple put together to communicate this message:

Second, know your audience and understand who you are targeting. As John Romero, video game entrepreneur, once said: “Market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last.”

Thirdly, what’s the aim of your content marketing, and how can you measure and prove it? Success looks different depending on what you’re trying to achieve, and different metrics can be important to measuring different kinds of success.

Are you tracking conversions, traffic, social engagement, equivalent media spend? Are you looking for an improvement in customer support or sales?

Finally, Gibbons recommends creating clear content guidelines to work out what you should and shouldn’t be publishing. “Don’t be afraid to say no – being selective is good to keep focused on what’s really important.”

Image: BlueGlass

Do a content audit

Before you strike out and create new content, take stock of what you already have with an audit. Can you improve on it? What worked, and what didn’t go over so well? What has generated the most traffic, or social engagement and links?

Knowing what content you have is also hugely useful in developing a good internal linking strategy, which is key for SEO. And if customers are going to be finding your brand through this content, even just occasionally, it’s important to make sure it’s up to date and relevant!

Don’t create content for content’s sake

They say that every minute on the internet, there are 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube, 3.3 million Facebook posts, over 400,000 Tweets, and over 1,200 WordPress blog posts published. So how can you differentiate your content amongst so much noise?

Make your content is quality, necessary and worthwhile – don’t just create content for the sake of publishing content. Google’s algorithms prioritise quality content, so publishing less and publishing well, rather than churning out generic content, will help the content that you do have rank better. In the words of copyblogger:

“SEO can’t, by itself, make a popular blog. First, you need remarkable content, and then you optimize it for search engines. Skip the remarkable part, and all the optimization in the world won’t help you.”

Create data-driven content – and make it newsworthy

When putting together your quality, well-crafted content, one thing that Gibbons recommends doing is incorporating data. Find out what data your client has, and look at how you can use that in your content. More data increases your credibility, and data can also be a great hook when pitching to journalists, especially if you can find a good news angle.

Get exclusives for your content (but make sure you’re the source)

This is a tactic that works well if you have data-driven content and/or content with a good news angle. Agreeing an exclusive with a publisher in advance can help to get their buy-in on covering it, plus it helps with additional outreach to other publishers afterwards.

The coverage helps both to amplify your brand and to boost your SEO with backlinks; just make sure that you’re credited as the source!

Create content that answers questions

Creating content which answers your audience’s questions is a sound principle on multiple levels, both in terms of content value and in terms of SEO. First of all, by researching your audience and understanding their pain points, you better understand the people who your content is targeted at.

Secondly (if done well), it allows you to create evergreen, quality content that your audience can come back to repeatedly as a valuable resource.

How-to guides and ‘tutorial’ style content are always a good bet for both audience value and SEO, as people often search with a specific question in mind.

This is particularly true for voice search, where people tend to phrase their searches in the form of a whole question – so Q&A style content is especially well-suited to ranking for voice searches.

A useful tip that Gibbons gave is to start by answering people’s questions on sites like Quora and community forums, which will give you an insight into what they want to know. Then turn your most popular answers into more in-depth content!

Understand what triggers Quick Answers, and play to it

Also known as ‘rich answers’ and ‘featured snippets’, Quick Answers are those informative boxouts at the top of Google search results which quickly supply the information you’re searching for.

Rather than being drawn from the top ranking result on the SERP, they’re drawn from the content that Google thinks best answers the query.

So if you gear your content towards these boxes, they can be a fantastic way to ‘leapfrog’ to the top of search results and get your branding – and content – up there at the top.

Happily, ‘how to’ style content, which we mentioned in the last point, is ideal for this, along with Q&A style content and bullet point lists.

For more on how to hack Google’s Quick Answers, read Jim Yu’s guide to the ABC of Google Quick Answers.

Make the customer the hero

Involve your audience! If you think your content is about you, says Gibbons, you’re missing the point – when people share content, they share it about themselves, not you. And by involving your audience, you have an in-built reason for people to share and talk about your content.

Another speaker at CMA’s Digital Breakfast, Scott Davies, CEO of social TV and advertising company never.no, gave some great ideas as to how this can be used to jazz up a marketing campaign.

For example, when tasked with promoting a fairly boring household item – a mop – never.no asked people to submit their own videos on Vine and Instagram of doing different things with the mop. The result was a plethora of hilarious short videos that made for a great ad.

Another piece of advice that Gibbons gave was to play on people’s egos. Your audience loves to talk about themselves and where they’re from. Play on rivalries between cities, between countries, between areas.

Buzzfeed is a pro at this kind of content, because it’s so shareable – just look at 45 Reasons The North Of England Is Better Than The South, or 31 Reasons To Avoid South London.

Remember that you’re building an audience – not just traffic or links

People like to consume content in different ways, so think about how you can recycle the same content into multiple formats. You could turn an in-depth study into a series of short-form articles, or build up a long article into a downloadable guide or whitepaper. You could create interactive content, infographics or data visualisations, email newsletters, video.

You can use these additional pieces to create “content upgrades” – offering a resource that’s unique to each blog post, or other piece of content, that readers need to submit an email address or share on social media in order to receive.

The result is more value for your audience, more mileage for your content, and a huge boost to your email subscribers or social backlinks. Backlinko has a more detailed guide on how to make and use content upgrades.

Explore relevant syndication partners

Think about where you can cross-post your content both to amplify its signal and to create backlinks. Outlets like LinkedIn and Medium can be great for attracting an audience that your site might not get otherwise.

Just remember two things: one, don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to cover every platform – work out where your audience is, and concentrate on those outlets.

And two, remember that you’re still publishing to someone else’s platform, with their brand and their rules. And even though the traffic is going to your content, it’s still going to their site.

Walled gardens make up so much of the internet that it’s all but impossible to avoid them, but you can be savvy about publishing to them.

For example, post the first half of a blog post on LinkedIn, and then once you’ve got your reader hooked, invite them to read the rest of the content on your site.

Hopefully they’ll take the bait and follow the link to where you want them. (This tip comes courtesy of my colleague Ben Rabinovich, editor of PaymentEye – thanks, Ben!)

Just do it!

Don’t second-guess yourself with questions like, “What if everyone knows this already?” or “Why would I share all of this information if people can just copy it?” What people don’t get, says Gibbons, is the biggest risk is not doing it at all. Take a gamble on that adventurous content idea, and it might just pay off – but it won’t if you don’t!

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