If you are hoping Google can do something on their back end to lift an algorithmic penalty, you are out of luck. Google does not have something that can remove an algorithmic penalty – such as from impacted by Panda, Penguin, or the many other algo signals – so a site will rank better in […]
The post Google: Manual Reviews Cannot Lift Algorithmic Search Penalty appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by BritneyMuller
Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Today, we are going over targeting featured snippets, Part 2 of our featured snippets series. Super excited to dive into this.
For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?
Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs actually has some of the capabilities to do that all for you. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.
So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.
All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.
From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.
So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?
What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.
One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.
So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."
I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.
All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.
So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.
The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.
I changed enter your competitor's domain URL — it felt a little duplicate — to enter your competitor's URL. Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."
So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.
So hopefully that example helps. I'm going to continue to sort of drudge through a bunch of these with you. I look forward to any of your comments, any of your efforts down below in the comments. Definitely looking forward to Part 3 and to chatting with you all soon.
Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. See you.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted by Trevor-Klein
With just over three months until MozCon 2018, we're getting a great picture of what this year's show will be like, and we can't wait to share some of the details with you today.
We've got 21 speakers lined up (and will be launching our Community Speaker process soon — stay tuned for more details on how to make your pitch!). You'll see some familiar faces, and some who'll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.
Topic details and the final agenda are still in the works, but we're excited enough about the conversations we've had with speakers that we wanted to give you a sneak peek. We hope to see you in Seattle this July 9–11!
If you still need your tickets, we've got you covered:
Pick up your ticket to MozCon!
Here's a look at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:
Mad Scientist, Yoast
Jono will explore how much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place.
As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.
We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning.
In his talk, he'll push for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.
Partner, Briggsby
Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless.
Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.
In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?
For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.
By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like “best,” we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.
With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.
VP of Product, Moz
Some practitioners of local SEO swear by manual curation, claiming that automation skips over the most important parts. Some swear the exact opposite. The real answer, especially when you're working at enterprise scale, is a sweet spot in the middle.
In this talk, Neil will show you where that spot is, why different verticals require different work, and some original research that reveals which of those verticals are most stable.
President and Partner, Kick Point
With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal.
We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.
Founder, SparkToro, Moz, & Inbound.org
A man who needs no introduction to MozCon, we're thrilled to announce that Rand will be back on stage this year after founding his new company, SparkToro. Topic development for his talk is in the works; check back for more information!
Co-Founder, Unbounce
Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists.
We need our M.O.M.s!
No, he isn't talking about your actual mother. He's talking about your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.
In this session you'll learn:
Senior Director, Digital Marketing, KoMarketing
Everyone thinks they need content but they don't think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value.
In this session, we'll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers today and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.
Mobile Product Marketer & App Strategist
At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The mobile-first index underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe they need developers for most of those improvements. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.
Principal Search Scientist, Moz
Russ is our principal search scientist here at Moz. After a decade as CTO of an agency, he joined Moz to focus on what he's most interested in: research and development, primarily related to keyword and link data. He's responsible for many of our most forward-looking techniques.
At MozCon this year, he's looking to focus on cutting through bad metrics with far better metrics, exploring the hidden assumptions and errors in things our industry regularly reports, showing us all how we can paint a more accurate picture of what's going on.
VP Marketing, Litmus
A veteran of the MozCon stage, Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named an Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.
At MozCon this year, she's looking to cover the importance of engagement with emails in today's world of marketing. With the upcoming arrival of GDPR and the ease with which you can unsubscribe and report spam, it's more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads.
Managing Director, iPullRank
Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Mike will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.
CEO & Founder, MobileMoxie
The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.
Marketing Scientist, Moz
Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA "Dr. Pete") is a Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science — which is more like a hallway and pretty wide — he's the architect behind MozCast, the keeper of the Algo History, and watcher of all things Google.
Senior SEO Scientist, Moz
Britney is Moz's senior SEO scientist. An explorer and investigator at heart, she won't stop digging until she gets to the bottom of some of the most interesting developments in the world of search. You can find her on Whiteboard Friday, and she's currently polishing a new (and dramatically improved!) version of our Beginner's Guide to SEO.
At MozCon this year, she'll show you what she found at the bottom of the rabbit hole to save you the journey.
CEO, Verve Search
Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people’s ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.
In this session she’ll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.
Director of Organic Search, VML
Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.
President, Nifty Marketing
You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.
Founder & Director of Digital Strategy, Seer Interactive
The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I'll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.
Technical SEO Account Manager, Merkle
Alexis works as a Technical SEO Account Manager at Merkle, ensuring the accuracy, feasibility, and scalability of the agency’s technical recommendations across all verticals. You've likely seen her on the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, OnCrawl, The Raven Blog, and TechnicalSEO.com. She's got a knack for getting the entire industry excited about the more technical aspects of SEO, and if you haven't already, you've got to check out the technical SEO challenge she created at https://TechnicalSEO.expert.
Founder, Whitespark
At the forefront of local SEO, Darren is obsessed with knowing all there is to know about local search. He organizes and publishes research initiatives such as the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and the Local Search Ecosystem.
At MozCon this year, he'll unveil the newest findings from the Local Search Ranking Factors study, for which he's already noticing significant changes from the last release, letting SEOs of all stripes know how they need to adjust their approach.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted by efgreg
We all work hard building our businesses.
We put in the sweat equity and all the tears that can come with it to build something truly great. After another day hustling at the office or typing furiously on your keyboard, you might be wondering… what is the end game here?
What are you really going for? Is there a glowing neon sign with the word “Exit” marking the path to your ultimate goal?
For the majority of businesses, the end goal is to eventually sell that business to another entrepreneur who wants to take the reins and simply enjoy the profits from the sale. Alas, most of us don’t even know what our business is worth, much less how to go about selling it — or if it's even sellable to begin with.
That's where Empire Flippers comes in. We've been brokering deals for years in the online business space, serving a quiet but hungry group of investors who are looking to acquire digital assets. The demand for profitable digital assets has been growing so much that our brokerage was able to get on the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row, both times under the 500 mark.
We can say with confidence that, yes, there is indeed an exit for your business.
By the end of this article you're going to know more about how online businesses are valued, what buyers are looking for, and how you can get the absolute top dollar for your content website, software as a service (SaaS), or e-commerce store.
(You might have noticed I didn’t include the word “agency” in the last paragraph. Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible. Even though having clients is great, other digital assets are far easier to sell.)
If you’ve built a digital asset you’re looking to exit from, the first question you likely have is, “This sounds fantastic, but how do I go about putting an actual price tag on what I’ve created?”
We’ll dive into those answers below, but first let’s talk about why you're already in a great position just by being a reader of the Moz Blog.
SEO is by far the most attractive traffic source for people looking at purchasing online businesses.
The beauty of SEO is that once you’ve put in the work to achieve the rankings, they can maintain and bring in traffic for sometimes months without significant upkeep. That's in stark contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as Facebook ads, which require daily monitoring to make sure nothing strange is happening with your conversions or that you’re not overspending.
For someone who has no experience with traffic generation but wants to purchase a profitable online business, an SEO-fueled website just makes sense. They can earn while they learn. When they purchase the asset (typically a content website for people just starting out), they can play around with adding new high-quality pieces of content and learn about more complicated SEO techniques down the road.
Even someone who is a master at paid traffic loves SEO. They might buy an e-commerce store that has some real potential with Facebook ads that's currently driving the majority of its traffic through SEO, and treat the SEO as gravy on top of the paid traffic they plan to drive toward that e-commerce store.
Whether the buyer is a newbie or a veteran, SEO as a traffic method has one of the widest appeals of any other traffic strategy. While SEO itself does not increase the value of the business in most cases, it does attract more buyers than other forms of traffic.
Now, let’s get down to what your business is worth.
How businesses are valued is such a common question we get at our brokerage that we created an automated valuation tool that gives a free estimate of your business’s value, which our audience uses with all of their different projects.
At the heart of any valuation is a fairly basic formula:
You look at your rolling 12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible (something we’ll talk about later in this article).
You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.
When you see this formula, they’re using an annual multiple, whereas at Empire Flippers we use a monthly multiple. There's really not much of a difference between the two formulas; it mainly depends on your preference, but if you’re brand new to buying and selling online businesses, then it's helpful to know how different brokers price businesses.
We prefer the monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it's trending.
Just like you can influence Google SERPs with SEO knowledge, so can you manipulate this formula to give you a better valuation as long as you know what you’re looking at.
There are various things you can do to get a higher multiple. A lot of it comes down to just common sense and really putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.
A useful thing to ask: “Would I ever buy my business? Why? Why not?”
This exercise can lead you to change a lot of things about your business for the better.
The two areas that most affect the multiple come down to your actual average net profit and how long the business has been around making money.
The higher your average net profit, the higher your multiple will tend to be because it's a bigger cash-flowing asset. It makes sense then to look at various ways you can increase that net profit and decrease your total amount of expenses.
Every digital asset is a little different in where their expenses are coming from. For content sites, content creation costs are typically the lion’s share of expenses. As you approach the time of sale, you might want to scale back your content. In other cases, you may want to move to an agency solution where you can scale or minimize your content expenses at will rather than having in-house writers on the payroll.
There are also expenses that you might be applying to the business but aren’t really “needed” in operating the business, known as add-backs.
Add-backs are where you add certain expenses BACK into the net profit. These are items that you might’ve charged on the business account but aren’t really relevant to running the business.
These could be drinks, meals, or vacations put on the business account, and sometimes even business conferences. For example, going to a conference about email marketing might not be considered a “required” expense to running a health content site, whereas going to a sourcing conference like the Canton Fair would be a harder add-back to justify when it comes to running an e-commerce store.
Other things, such as SEO tools you’re using on a monthly basis, can likely be added back to the business. Most people won’t need them constantly to run and grow their business. They might subscribe for a month, get all the keyword data they need for a while, cancel, and then come back when they’re ready to do more keyword research.
Most of your expenses won’t be add-backs, but it is good to keep these in mind as they can definitely increase the ultimate sales price of your business.
While there's usually a lot of fat you can cut from your business, you need to be reasonable about it. Cutting some things might improve your overall net profit, but vastly decrease the attractability of your business.
One common thing we see in the e-commerce space is solopreneurs starting to package and ship all of the items themselves to their customers. The thinking goes that they’re saving money by doing it themselves. While this may be true, it's not an attractive solution to a potential buyer.
It's far more attractive to spend money on a third-party solution that can store and ship the product for you as orders come in. After all, many buyers are busy traveling the world while having an online business. Forcing them to settle down just so they can ship products versus hanging out on the beaches of Bali for a few months during winter is a tough ask.
When selling a business, you don’t want to worry only about expenses, but also how easy it is to plug into and start running that business for a buyer.
Even if the systems you create to do that add extra expenses, like using a third party to handle fulfillment, they’re often more than worth keeping around because they make the business look more attractive to buyers.
The more history you can show, the more attractive your business will be, as long as it's holding at a steady profit level or showing an upward trend.
The more your business is trending upward, the higher multiple you're going to get.
While you can’t do much in terms of lengthening the business’s history, you can prepare yourself for the eventual sale by investing in needed items early on in your business. For example, if you know your website needs a big makeover and you’re 24 months out from selling, it's better to do that big website redesign now instead of during the 12-month average your business will be priced on.
Showing year-over-year growth is also beneficial in getting a better multiple, because it shows your business can weather growing pains. This ability to weather business challenges is especially true in a business whose primary traffic is Google-organic. It shows that the site has done quality SEO by surviving several big updates over the course of a few years.
On the flipside, a trending downward business is going to get a much worse multiple, likely in the 12–18x range. A business in decline can still be sold, though. There are specific buyers that only want distressed assets because they can get them at deep discounts and often have the skill sets needed to fix the site.
You just have to be willing to take a lower sales price due to the decline, and since a buyer pool on distressed assets is smaller, you’ll likely have a longer sales cycle before you find someone willing to acquire the asset.
While profit and length of history are the two main factors, there are a bunch of smaller factors that can add up to a significant increase in your multiple and ultimate valuation price.
You’ll have a fair amount of control with a lot of these, so they’re worth maximizing as much as possible in the 12–24 month window where you are preparing your online business for sale.
Critical points of failure are anything in your business that has the power to be a total deal breaker. It's not rare to sell a business that has one or two critical points, but even so you want to try to minimize this as much as possible.
An example of a critical point of failure could be where all of your website traffic is purely Google-organic. If the site gets penalized by a Google algorithm update, it could kill all of your traffic and revenue overnight.
Likewise, if you’re an Amazon affiliate and Amazon suddenly changes their Terms of Service, you could get banned for reasons you don’t understand or even have time to react to, ending up with a highly trafficked site that makes zero money.
In the e-commerce space, we see situations where the entrepreneur only has one supplier that can make their product. What happens if that supplier wants to jack up the prices or suddenly goes out of business completely?
It's worth your while to diversify your traffic sources, have multiple monetization strategies for a content site, or investigate having backup or even competing suppliers for your e-commerce products.
Every business has some kind of weakness; your job is to minimize those weaknesses as much as possible to get the most value out of your business from a potential buyer.
Higher traffic tends to correlate with higher revenue, which ultimately should increase your net profit. That all goes without saying; however, high traffic also can be an added bonus to your multiple on top of helping create a solid net profit.
Many buyers look for businesses they can optimize to the extreme at every point of the marketing funnel. When you have a high amount of traffic, you give them a lot of room to play with different conversion rate optimization factors like increasing email options, creating or crafting a better abandoned cart sequence, and changing the various calls to action on the site.
While many sellers might be fantastic at driving traffic, they might not exactly be the biggest pro at copywriting or CRO in general; this is where a big opportunity lies for the right buyer who might be able to increase conversions with their own copywriting or CRO skill.
It's almost a cliche in the Internet marketing space to say “the money is in the list.” Email has often been one of the biggest drivers of revenue for companies, but there's a weird paradigm we’ve discovered after selling hundreds of online businesses.
Telling someone they should use an email list is pretty similar to telling someone to go to the gym: they agree it’s useful and they should do it, but often they do nothing about it. Then there are those who do build an email list because they understand its power, but then never do anything useful with it.
This results in email lists being a hit-or-miss on whether they actually add any value to your business’s final valuation.
If you can prove the email list is adding value to your business, then your email list CAN improve your overall multiple. If you use good email automation sequences to up-sell your traffic and routinely email the list with new offers and pieces of high-quality content, then your email list has real value associated with it, which will reflect on your final valuation.
Social media has become more and more important as time goes on, but it can also be an incredibly fickle beast.
It's best to think of your social media following as a “soft” email list. The reach of your social media following compared to your email list will tend to be lower, especially as social organic reach keeps declining on bigger social platforms like Facebook. In addition, you don’t own the platform that following is built off of, meaning it can be taken away from you anytime for reasons outside of your control.
Plus, it's just too easy to fake followers and likes.
However, if you can wade through all that and prove that your social following and social media promotion are driving real traffic and sales to your business, it will definitely help in increasing your multiple.
Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.
What happens if that product goes out of style? Or gets discontinued?
Whether you’re running an e-commerce store or a content site monetizing through affiliate links, you want to have several different product offerings.
When you have several products earning good money through your website, then a buyer will find the business ultimately more attractive and value it more because you won’t be hurt in a big way if one of the “flavors of the month” disappears on you.
Remember, the majority of buyers are not looking at acquiring a job. They want a leveraged cash-flowing investment they can ideally scale up.
While there's nothing wrong with working 40–50+ hours per week on a business that is really special, it will narrow your overall buyer pool and make the business less attractive. The truth is, most of the digital assets we’re creating don’t really require this amount of work from the owner.
What we typically see is that there are a lot of areas for improvement that the seller can use to minimize their weekly hour allotment to the business. We recommend that everyone looking to sell their business first consider how they can minimize their actual involvement.
The three most effective ways to cut down on your time spent are:
You should always be in a position where you’re working ON your business and not IN.
At Empire Flippers, we’re always asking people if they built a deep enough moat around their business. A deep moat means your business is harder to copy. A copycat can’t just go buy a domain and some hosting and copy your business in an afternoon.
A drop-shipping store that can be copied in a single day is not going to be nearly as attractive as one that has built up a real following and a community around their brand, even if they sell the same products.
This fact becomes more and more important as your business valuation goes into the multiple six-figure and seven-figure valuation ranges because buyers are looking to buy a real brand at this point, not just a niche site.
Here are a few actions you can take to deepen this moat:
The harder it is to copy what you’ve built, the higher the multiple you’ll get.
You’re now well-equipped with knowledge on how to increase your business’s ultimate value, but why would you actually sell it?
The reasons are vast and numerous — too many to list in this post. However, there are a few common reasons you might resonate with.
Here are a few business reasons why people sell their businesses:
Just as there are a ton of business reasons to sell, there are also a ton of personal reasons why people sell their business:
When you can collect 20–50 months of your net profit upfront, you can do a lot of things that just weren’t options before.
When you have a multiple six-figure or even seven-figure war chest, you can often outspend the competition, invest in infrastructure and teams you couldn’t before, and in general jumpstart your next project or business idea far faster without ever having to worry about if a Google update is going tank your earnings or some other unforeseen market change.
That begs the question...
Honestly, it depends.
The answer to this question is more of an art than a science.
As a rule of thumb, you should ask yourself if you’re excited by the kind of money you’ll get from the successful sale of your online business.
You can use our valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate or do some back-of-the-napkin math of what you’re likely to receive for the business using the basic multiple formula I outlined. I prefer to always be on the conservative side with my estimations, so your napkin math might be taking your 12-month average net profit with a multiple of 25x.
Does that number raise your eyebrows? Is it even interesting?
If it is, then you might want to start asking yourself if you really are ready to part with your business to focus on other things. Remember, you should always set a MINIMUM sales price that you’d be willing to walk away from the business with, something that would still make you happy if you went through with it.
Most of us Internet marketers are always working on multiple projects at once. Sadly, some projects just don’t get the love they deserve or used to get from us.
Instead of letting those projects just die off in the background, consider selling your online business instead to a very hungry market of investors starting to flood our digital realm.
Selling a business, even if it's a side project that you’re winding down, is always going to be an intimate process. When you're ready to pull the trigger, we’ll be there to help you every step of the way.
Have you thought about selling your online business, or gone through a sale in the past? Let us know your advice, questions, or anecdotes in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
An interesting question came up in the most recent Google Webmaster Office Hours with John Mueller, specifically surrounding PageRank. Google doesn’t talk that much about PageRank anymore, which makes his comments a bit interesting for SEOs. First off, Mueller doesn’t reveal any secret sauce for exactly how much PageRank might flow though a link. If […]
The post Google: Calculating Amount of PageRank in a Link appeared first on The SEM Post.
There’s been much talk recently about Google implementing a broad core algorithm update.
A couple of weeks ago, webmasters started to notice changes to their search rankings which many suspected were due to an update to Google’s core algorithm. Google subsequently confirmed this via a tweet to its Search Liaison account, manned by former Search Engine Land editor and Search Engine Watch founder Danny Sullivan.
Each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our results. Some are focused around specific improvements. Some are broad changes. Last week, we released a broad core algorithm update. We do these routinely several times per year….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018
Google has suggested that this update has nothing to do with the quality of content, and instead focuses on improving the quality of the SERPs. At SMX West, Nathan Johns, a search quality analyst at Google, stated in an AMA session that the core update was designed to “reward under-rewarded sites” rather than award penalties.
At Pi Datametrics, our data on organic search rankings would tend to confirm this, as the only real losses we’ve seen – while dramatic – were generally short-lived, and occurred in the run-up to the update itself.
However, if Google wasn’t testing quality, what exactly were they testing?
I turned to the SERPs to have a look, going back in time to the period just before, during and after the recent update. I asked Google a relatively simple question, then analyzed the results to detect any rumblings or suspicious flux.
Google Query: What’s the best toothpaste?
I’ve focused primarily on content that was visible on page 1 or 2 at the start of this year.
We can clearly see that all these pages dropped out of the top 100 then reappeared on the same day. This occurred multiple times over a five week period.
Seven websites all performed pretty well (visible on page 1 and 2), with a further two sites appearing mid-way through the shake-up, that had no previous visibility (Expertreviews [dark pink] and Clevelandclinic [dark blue]).
The obvious shake-up started on 24 January, roughly five weeks before the algorithm was said to have fully rolled out (Sunday 4th March).
What we have here is a pattern we’ve seen many times before, something that is only visible with access to daily data on the entire SERPs landscape. It looks like a period of testing pre-full rollout, which is only to be expected.
Here’s the same chart, zoomed in from 01 February:
In the chart above we can see the flux continuing from February 5 onwards. Every site involved experienced almost the exact same pattern of visibility loss.
Things finally settled down on March 8. At first glance, it looks like all sites regained their original positions.
However, on closer inspection we can see that all came out slightly worse off, by an average of just over two positions; the smallest drop being one position (which can be painful on page one) and the largest being six.
If this chart says one thing, it is DON’T PANIC if you drop out of the top 100 for a term you care about!
Just keep monitoring the SERPs every day. If you’ve ruled out content cannibalization, it could well be a period of algorithm testing – as with the broad core update.
If you’ve put the searcher first and created the kind of rich content that will satisfy them, then the chances are you will recover from these testing times.
Or maybe, like the Expertreviews site above (following the injection of a long-form, socially popular and recently updated piece of content into their ecosystem), you could even move from nowhere to position three, nudging all others down a peg.
The only two websites entirely unaffected by all of this were Reviews.com and Which.co.uk, proving that the combination of first mover advantage, relevance and fantastic authority ensures high visibility and algorithmic stability:
So, the immediate questions are – who has benefited from this shake-up? What happened in the gaps between the spikes? Who’s lost out and why? Are we now seeing a SERP more aligned with the intent of the searcher?
It wasn’t Expertreviews or Clevelandclinic. They benefited later.
Let’s introduce some of the the momentary winners who gained visibility during the downtime of all either sites:
So the question is – if I were searching for “What’s the best toothpaste?” which of these new pages would I prefer?
All pages are mobile friendly, but if I really wanted to know what the best toothpaste was, I’d definitely prefer to read the Businessinsider.com page – coincidentally the only page that moved up to page one following the shake-up and stayed there.
In other words, the only one to satisfy my intent was in fact the only page that remained visible post shake-up. This page, to me answers my question perfectly.
Based on our testing, we can deduce that this algorithm is concerned with optimizing search results to support user intent, rather than to audit quality.
Why?
In this respect, Google’s core update was concerned with the nature rather than the quality of content.
What better way to test the match of nature with intent than by shaking up the SERPs for a couple of weeks to determine user reaction?
If your content visibility drops, it’s always necessary to carry out checks to ensure you have done everything within your power to mitigate the issue.
In the face of an algorithm update (like the recent broad core update), however, the best advice is to do nothing but monitor the SERPs closely.
If it is algorithmic testing, you most certainly won’t be the only one involved. Other sites will follow the exact same pattern down to the day. That’s a big clue that it’s algorithmic rather than isolated. Talking to others within the SEO and webmaster communities can help you to affirm that yours isn’t an isolated incident, and that you aren’t on the receiving end of a penalty from Google.
Google has confirmed that sites that experienced ranking drops as a result of the broad core update aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong. As I stated at the beginning of this article, the losses that we did observe were short-lived and not drastic.
If you want to make sure that your content is insulated against future updates of this kind, focus on creating content that puts the searcher first and will satisfy user intent. But above all: don’t panic.
A version of this article was originally published to the Pi Datametrics blog.
The SEO landscape is changing.
RankBrain, Latent Semantic Indexing and voice search have placed a heavy hand of friendly persuasion on the SEO industry, resulting in a shift towards solution-led (rather than keyword-led) content.
For years, short-tail and transactional keywords were the primary focus of SEO campaigns and, to an extent, they still tend to dominate the communication channels between agencies and clients. However, there is a clear acknowledgement on both sides of the fence with regards to the power of long-tail keywords.
Evangelism by the likes of Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel, along with the popularity of ‘content marketing’, has no doubt helped fuel this adoption.
The complexity of Google’s search algorithm means that they/it (/he/she?!) has a stronger grasp of the intent behind a search, rather than simply looking at the keyword strings that make up said search term. This has had a direct effect on how we plan our content and attract our target audience.
Does that mean that keyword research is dead? Not at all. In the ever increasingly competitive and complex world of search, it means that research is more important than ever.
But how do we adapt keyword research in relation to this focus on identifying great long-tail keywords?
This should underpin all of your activities – research, creation and distribution. What is the searcher really trying to achieve and how is your content helping them reach this goal?
Ultimately, the tools listed below are there to help you speed up this process and to provide ideas, but you can’t fully rely on them to produce an outstanding long-tail keyword strategy.
Take the time to understand your target market, the length of the sales cycle or what factors influence their purchasing/conversion decisions. Subsequently, you will be able to understand the type of search terms that can be targeted to provide the most value for your users. Better yet, you can understand the intent behind relevant searches and provide solutions.
Often the first port of call for many when it comes to keyword research, albeit somewhat restricted by the necessity of a minimum AdWords spend to access more accurate data.
The Keyword Planner may have less specific data in comparison to the former ‘Keyword Tool’, but it does have some useful additions to help you with identifying valuable long-tail keywords.
The ‘Keyword ideas’ and ‘Ad group ideas’ function provides related search terms, helping you save time thinking of all the different variations. Sift through the tabs (there were 700 keyword ideas in this example) to gain data on potential long-tail keyword ideas.
Even if you don’t find the perfect match for your strategy you should be able to acquire new idea ‘streams’ which should lead to more fruitful long-tail keywords.
Do not underestimate how useful Google’s own suggestions within the SERPs are. They are unlikely to be the central pillar in your strategy but they can certainly contribute.
When we are searching for those high value long-tail keywords, Google rather helpfully suggests related search terms according to what you are inputting into the search bar:
Once you have entered your search, Google also displays related searches to help you find the right information:
As SEOs in 2018, we are spoilt by the amount of tools available to help us draw insights into what the most effective strategy will be. Keyword research is no different. We have progressed from simply looking at average monthly search volume to being able to utilize BuzzSumo to understand what the most shared type of content is in relation to your topic.
We can use Answer the Public to be instantly displayed within a plethora of long-tail search terms in a visual ‘who, what, why, when, how’ type format.
Or use Keywordtool.io to have greater access to Google Suggest and Autocomplete, therefore accessing 750+ keywords at a time rather than the more granular method mentioned previously.
I am absolutely not doing justice to the value just these three platforms represent, but there are reasons as to why I have not dived into using the tools:
Uurrggghhh. Value. Please Mr. Value, come and join the throng of other overused buzzwords.
Whatever terminology you use, this is the most important point that will be made in this article.
The tools listed above will only get you so far in creating the highest performing content strategy possible. Like with any keyword research, the suggestions and data are great starting points.
However, there are other variables at play which will dictate which search terms you target and the content you produce. Some examples of which may be:
In my opinion, it is madness not to check the SERPs before signing off on a keyword and subsequent content strategy. Not only do the SERPs give you great insights into what Google perceives as the user intent behind any one search, but they also show you how competitive each search term is.
If you are investing time and money into content creation and targeting longer tail search terms, you want to make sure that you are targeting the ones with highest ROI. That doesn’t mean the highest search volume – it means the ones that will deliver the greatest results in relation to the amount of work required.
High search volume keywords are great and if you can target them then fantastic, go ahead. Be aware, though, that there are quicker wins.
Using your keyword research, you should be able to sift through the SERPs to understand which ones have results which could be improved. Perhaps you do not feel like the searcher’s intent has been completely satisfied, or that new information has come out which makes the other results dated.
Whatever the reason, spotting these opportunities and using the SERPs to influence your content strategy is critical in a truly efficient campaign.
Google has announced they have officially begin to roll out the mobile first index beyond the initial testing phase. The mobile first index, which has been testing with some sites in their search index, sees Google crawl, index and rank a page based on the mobile version of the page instead of the desktop version. […]
The post Google Announces Mobile First Index Rolling Out appeared first on The SEM Post.
Posted by meghanpahinui
Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! Our last episodes covered how to transform low-value content and how to track the right keywords for your local business. Today, Meghan is here to share all the juicy details to include in a truly persuasive SEO report for your clients and how you can create your own with Moz Pro. Read on and level up!
When it comes to creating useful SEO reports for clients and members of your team, it can be tough to balance the best, most relevant information to include with what they actually want to see. Essentially, you should show your clients that what you’re doing is working and getting results that positively impact their business. That being said, though, you’ll need to ask yourself what they consider progress:
Regardless of their specific business goal, you’ll need to create reports which are concise, straightforward, and easy to digest to remind your clients why they're investing in SEO and your services. If a report is too long, your client may lose interest. If a report is too short or doesn’t include the data they find most relevant, they may wonder what the heck they're paying for!
I like to think about creating SEO reports as if I’m writing up an experiment: I have an objective or problem that I’m trying to solve, a hypothesis about what will get me to that goal and solve my problem, and a procedure to follow, all of which leads to observations that will help me benchmark my progress and set up a new goal.
In this installation of Next Level, we’ll talk about what information you should include in your SEO reports and show you what modules you can add to your Custom Report in Moz Pro to illustrate that data.
The first step in any endeavor is determining what you’re setting out to achieve. You’ll want to make sure to outline your current SEO goals clearly for your client. For example, your goal may be to increase rankings for select keywords, to increase overall Search Visibility, or to generate more inbound links. Perhaps even more importantly, you’ll want to explain how these SEO goals will impact your client’s business overall.
Include tangible business objectives, such as “increase monthly revenue” or “drive more traffic to your online shop,” but don’t forget to explain why you’ve chosen these as your objectives. Simply telling a client that you’re planning to work on increasing their keyword rankings won’t help them to understand why that’s important. By outlining what you’re working towards and why, you'll not only give direction to your report but also set your client’s expectations.
How you plan to accomplish your client’s business goals through SEO is something that you’ll definitely want to think about when putting your SEO report together. What do you think needs to happen in order to make sure your client’s expectations and business goals are met? For example, if your client wants to increase the overall organic search traffic that comes to their site, you'll want to focus on improving their keyword rankings.
“Okay, but how are you going to do that?” asks your client. Here’s where you can outline your plan of attack and what you think will have the most impact, like making sure that all pages have meta descriptions that are the right length, or that all pages have title tags.
Asking yourself these types of “how” questions in advance will set you up for success when you go to create your report. A clear idea of your procedure — your way forward — will make sure the most relevant information is included and doesn’t get lost among a bunch of data irrelevant to your current goal. Taking the time early on to outline your next steps will help you stay on track and create concise, easy-to-digest reports.
SEO can be confusing, which is probably why your client hired you! Make sure you explain what you’re planning to do, how you plan to do it, and why. This will keep your client from feeling out of the loop and asking themselves questions like “What am I looking at? Is this really helping me?”
A transparent, informative explanation can be as simple as this:
“I’m working on making sure all your pages have relevant meta descriptions so searchers are better able to determine if your site is what they’re looking for in SERPs. This will help improve your overall click-through rate, which should help increase traffic to your site.”
If you can weave your goals directly into the explanation of what you're doing and how, all the better!
Time to show off what you’ve completed so far! Here, you'll include SEO goals you’ve already achieved, like fixed missing descriptions, resolved issues with 404 pages on the site, pages which have been optimized for target keywords, etc. People like to see evidence that their investments are paying off, so take care to remind your client what they're paying you to do, and create a detailed report to show just how effective you’ve been already.
The Moz Pro Custom Report tool comes in handy for this type of reporting, as well as the “Observations” portion we’ll talk about in just a bit. You can use the handy visuals in Custom Reports modules to illustrate what you’ve been working on and outline what you plan to attack next.
The “Observations” portion of your report is your place to show real, tangible data to your client. You’ve outlined what you’re doing to help them achieve their current SEO goal, and now it’s time to show them the results of your labor.
The idea here is pretty straightforward: show your client which of their keywords have improved in the rankings, and how their Search Visibility has changed since the last report. For transparency, you may also want to include some info about the keywords that didn’t do as well — now would be a good time to tell your client how you plan to tackle those low-performing keywords!
You may also want to display how your client is ranking compared to their main competitors and call out specific instances of improvement.
Here's an example:
“Although the rank dropped for 5 of your target keywords, your overall Search Visibility is up by 7%, and you’re ranking higher than your competitors for all 5 of those keywords.”
It's important to keep your client’s expectations grounded by reminding them that fluctuation in keyword rankings from week to week is pretty normal, and comparing rankings over a longer period of time is often more representative of true performance.
A great way to add in more detail about keyword rankings to your Custom Report is with Page Optimization modules. The Page Optimization tool allows you to pair a specific page on the site you’re tracking with a target keyword to see a report of how well-optimized that page is for that keyword. This is especially useful if your client has a specific set of keywords they need to be ranking for. The Page Optimization tool makes suggestions as to what you can do to improve your chances of ranking, and will show you what you’re already doing that’s helping your client rank where they are now! When you add Page Optimization modules to your report, they can illustrate not only improvements you’ve made to certain pages and how rankings have changed for those keyword/URL pairs, but they can also highlight pages you’re not already working on that may be good opportunities for optimization.
Showing your client that more people are heading to their site is a straightforward way to show off the progress you’ve made. If you can, be sure to point out where you think the increase in traffic is coming from, whether it’s from higher keyword rankings, new backlink generation, or other factors related to the work you've done.
If one of your goals is to generate more backlinks for your client, you’ll want to show them what you’ve accomplished. Be honest about the types of links you’re looking to acquire. For example, if you’re interested in quality over quantity and are focusing your efforts on acquiring links from sites with high MozRank and MozTrust, make sure you let your client know that, and explain what effect it could have on their backlink profile. Will your strategy earn them more links overall, or higher quality links — and which is better for their business? Explain why your goal is the best plan of attack for achieving their overall business goals.
Adding in Site Crawl modules to your Custom Report can effectively illustrate what you’ve been working on with regards to your client’s site specifically. For example, if you’ve focused on redirecting 404 pages to live, active pages, you could show them a graph illustrating the decrease over time in pages returning this type of error. Perhaps you have been working on cleaning up redirect chains, reviewing meta noindex tags, or editing pages with thin content. All of these things can be outlined so you can demonstrate your progress in your Custom Report using Site Crawl modules. You can also use these modules to show your client how their site has improved — e.g., by showing them a steady number of pages crawled each week alongside declining rates of on-site issues like 404 pages and thin content — and highlight areas of their site you think may still need some work.
Once you’ve laid out what you’re working on, why, and how it’s impacting your client’s business so far, you’ll want to outline what they can expect to see next. Let them know what your next course of action is and what you think is working (or not working) so they can be prepared for your next report. If you’re planning to work on optimizing pages for keywords that aren’t ranking currently, or if you’re planning to go after some link-building opportunities, make sure they're aware!
Finally, before sending your brand-new report out to your client, make sure to review it one last time to confirm that it’s telling the right story.
Not everyone is an SEO wiz, so it’s important to make sure the report you’re presenting is easily comprehended. For example, if you’ve illustrated that their overall search visibility has gone up, will they understand that jargon and what it means? If not, have you made sure to explain what it is and why it’s important? Try to view the report from your client’s point of view and see if you’re able to find the true value in the data you’re presenting. Taking this extra step can really help solidify your report and make sure it’s the best representation of your work.
Within the Custom Reports section of Moz Pro, you can set up your shiny new report to be emailed weekly or monthly to help keep your clients up-to-date on how things are going. You can also choose to email the report directly to anyone who might have a stake in seeing the results of your SEO efforts, such as colleagues or stakeholders.
The most important thing is to make sure your clients know what they are paying for! They want to see tangible results that are applicable to their business specifically. A well-crafted, intentional SEO report will both make your job easier and help your client rest easy knowing their investment is paying off.
If you’re ready to dive in and start creating your own shiny new Custom Report, be sure to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Moz Pro:
If you find you need more help getting started with your own report, be sure to check out our page all about Custom Reports on the Help Hub.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
