Page title optimization – the Holy Grail

Page titles are probably the most overlooked aspects of SEO. Crafting a good page title is a must-have skill for anyone aiming for high SERP conversions. Title tags are a major factor in helping search engines understand what your page is about, they also determine the first impression visitors have of your page.

It’s important to always optimize your page title as search engines mostly rely on it when ranking because it gives an insight into the content of a page. To excel at SEO & get business online, it is important to play by Google’s rules. In 2017, Google accounted for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 7.27%, Baidu at 6.55% and Yahoo at 5.06%, clearly ranking on Google is essential.

Whether you’re looking to improve the SEO of your website, or increase the impact of a content marketing strategy, optimizing page titles is an important step. In this article, we’ll talk about best writing practices for page title optimization.

Pay attention to length

Google will display 50-60 characters of a page title in the search results before cutting it off, so you should aim for page titles that are around 55 characters or less in length, including spaces.

The length of your page title can affect how it is presented in the SERP. If it’s too long, it’ll be truncated. If it’s too short, Google might decide not to show your page in the search results at all, or simply overwrite your title.

Source: Google.com

To be safe, make sure the most important or descriptive words in the keyword are towards the beginning so they’re less likely to get cut off. A good page title should be structured like this: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.

Note that longer titles may work better for social sharing in some cases, and some titles are just naturally long. While it’s good to be mindful of how your titles appear in search results, there are no penalties for using a long title. Use your judgment, and think like a search engine user.

Write unique titles for every page

Every page on your website is unique and it should be treated as such. It’s important to have specific, descriptive titles for each page on your site. The Page title should reflect the individuality of each page. Unique titles help search engines understand that your content is unique and valuable, and also drive higher click-through rates.

Customize the page title on each page of your website so that they accurately describe what’s on that specific page. With 57% of B2B marketers stating that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative, won’t it be smart to ensure your business pages are seen and understood?

On the scale of hundreds or thousands of pages, it may seem impossible to craft a unique title for every page, but modern CMS and code-based templates should allow you to at least create data-driven, unique titles for almost every important page of your site.

Use your target keyword

Every page on your website should answer a question or provide valuable information someone is searching for. Your website will be more useful to searchers if it ranks in search for the right term – just when they’re looking for the information you provide. This is extremely important. A well-crafted title should include your target keyword. So for each page, you should have a target keyword (or a few) in mind.

Since Google’s algorithm uses the page title as one of the main ways to determine what a page is about, A good title helps both search engines and users understand what the page is about, and having your keywords in the title is a step towards that direction. That makes it clear to Google that this page is relevant for anyone searching for that specific term.

It’s sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but it is overkill to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. While there is no penalty built into Google’s algorithm for long titles, you might face challenges if you start stuffing your title full of keywords in a way that creates a bad user experience, such as: Buy shoes, Best shoes, Cheap shoes, shoes for Sale.

This kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look like spam to Google and to users.

Create titles for users and not search engines

This is also very crucial. Your titles should be interesting enough to catch and hold the attention of searchers. While page titles are very important to SEO, remember that your first goal is to attract clicks from well-targeted visitors who are likely to find your content valuable.

It’s important to think about the entire user experience when you’re creating your titles, in addition to optimization and keyword usage. The page title is a new visitor’s first interaction with your brand when they find it in a search result — it should convey the most positive, important and accurate message possible.

Avoid vague descriptors like “Home” for your home page, or “Profile” for a specific person’s profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search result listings.

Outsource your SEO auditing

Consistent SEO plays a vital role in helping you achieve your goals. But you can’t just spend a week dedicated to SEO and be done with it for the next three months and expect success. You need to actively track your progress adjust as required. An SEO company will offer you guidance in a constantly evolving industry with optimal strategies changing. Their sole purpose is to help you improve your visibility online.

An SEO company will help place keywords in your page titles to help Google rank your page, add well written, keyword rich copy to underperforming landing pages. These SEO professionals also provide a range of services, including auditing your site, developing a tailored SEO strategy, and implementing the tactics that will help your business rank for keywords and gain organic traffic through search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Outsourcing to an SEO company will give your website the best possible chance of placing highly in search engine rankings and driving a higher volume of relevant traffic to your website. Within months of having your website SEO outsourced to the right people, you should find that your website’s traffic skyrockets.

Whether your aim is to optimize your page title or drive traffic to your website in order to increase your profits or your website’s popularity, ensuring your page titles are optimized put your site on the right lane!

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Google Local Service Ads Display Pricing Estimates for Specific Locations

Google has added a new feature to their local services as, the special local ads that appear for searchers that are looking for a specific business type in their local area, to give estimates for specific jobs in their area. Tom Waddington shared a screenshot on Twitter. This is a great feature for searchers because […]

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Google Testing “Relevant History” Section in Mobile Search Results

Google is testing a new feature in the mobile search results – a drop down section labelled as “Relevant History” that appears at the very top of the mobile search results.  It shows previously visited pages directly related to the search. Henny Roggy shared the screenshots on Twitter showing the feature. Here is how it […]

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Building Better Customer Experiences - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Are you mindful of your customer's experience after they become a lead? It's easy to fall in the same old rut of newsletters, invoices, and sales emails, but for a truly exceptional customer experience that improves their retention and love for your brand, you need to go above and beyond. In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, the ever-insightful Dana DiTomaso shares three big things you can start doing today that will immensely better your customer experience and make earning those leads worthwhile.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm the President and partner of Kick Point, and today I'm going to talk to you about building better customer experiences. I know that in marketing a lot of our jobs revolve around getting leads and more leads and why can't we have all of the leads.

The typical customer experience:

But in reality, the other half of our job should be making sure that those leads are taken care of when they become customers. This is especially important if you don't have, say, a customer care department. If you do have a customer care department, really you should be interlocking with what they do, because typically what happens, when you're working with a customer, is that after the sale, they usually get surveys.

- Surveys

"How did we do? Please rate us on a scale of 1 to 10," which is an enormous scale and kind of useless. You're a 4, or you're an 8, or you're a 6. Like what actually differentiates that, and how are people choosing that?

- Invoices

Then invoices, like obviously important because you have to bill people, particularly if you have a big, expensive product or you're a SaaS business. But those invoices are sometimes kind of impersonal, weird, and maybe not great.

- Newsletters

Maybe you have a newsletter. That's awesome. But is the newsletter focused on sales? One of the things that we see a lot is, for example, if somebody clicks a link in the newsletter to get to your website, maybe you've written a blog post, and then they see a great big popup to sign up for our product. Well, you're already a customer, so you shouldn't be seeing that popup anymore.

What we've seen on other sites, like Help Scout actually does a great job of this, is that they have a parameter of newsletter at the end of any URLs they put in their newsletter, and then the popups are suppressed because you're already in the newsletter so you shouldn't see a popup encouraging you to sign up or join the newsletter, which is kind of a crappy experience.

- Sales emails

Then the last thing are sales emails. This is my personal favorite, and this can really be avoided if you go into account-based marketing automation instead of personal-based marketing automation.

We had a situation where I was a customer of the hosting company. It was in my name that we've signed up for all of our clients, and then one of our developers created a new account because she needed to access something. Then immediately the sales emails started, not realizing we're at the same domain. We're already a customer. They probably shouldn't have been doing the hard sale on her. We've had this happen again and again.

So just really make sure that you're not sending your customers or people who work at the same company as your customers sales emails. That's a really cruddy customer experience. It makes it look like you don't know what's going on. It really can destroy trust.

Tips for an improved customer experience

So instead, here are some extra things that you can do. I mean fix some of these things if maybe they're not working well. But here are some other things you can do to really make sure your customers know that you love them and you would like them to keep paying you money forever.

1. Follow them on social media

So the first thing is following them on social. So what I really like to do is use a tool such as FullContact. You can take everyone's email addresses, run them through FullContact, and it will come back to you and say, "Here are the social accounts that this person has." Then you go on Twitter and you follow all of these people for example. Or if you don't want to follow them, you can make a list, a hidden list with all of their social accounts in there.

Then you can see what they share. A tool like Nuzzel, N-U-Z-Z for Americans, zed zed for Canadians, N-U-Z-Z-E-L is a great tool where you can say, "Tell me all the things that the people I follow on social or the things that this particular list of people on social what they share and what they're engaged in." Then you can see what your customers are really interested in, which can give you a good sense of what kinds things should we be talking about.

A company that does this really well is InVision, which is the app that allows you to share prototypes with clients, particularly design prototypes. So they have a blog, and a lot of that blog content is incredibly useful. They're clearly paying attention to their customers and the kinds of things they're sharing based on how they build their blog content. So then find out if you can help and really think about how I can help these customers through the things that they share, through the questions that they're asking.

Then make sure to watch unbranded mentions too. It's not particularly hard to monitor a specific list of people and see if they tweet things like, "I really hate my (insert what you are)right now," for example. Then you can head that off at the pass maybe because you know that this was this customer. "Oh, they just had a bad experience. Let's see what we can do to fix it,"without being like, "Hey, we were watching your every move on Twitter.Here's something we can do to fix it."

Maybe not quite that creepy, but the idea is trying to follow these people and watch for those unbranded mentions so you can head off a potential angry customer or a customer who is about to leave off at the pass. Way cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one.

2. Post-sale monitoring

So the next thing is post-sale monitoring. So what I would like you to do is create a fake customer. If you have lots of sales personas, create a fake customer that is each of those personas, and then that customer should get all the emails, invoices, everything else that a regular customer that fits that persona group should get.

Then take a look at those accounts. Are you awesome, or are you super annoying? Do you hear nothing for a year, except for invoices, and then, "Hey, do you want to renew?" How is that conversation going between you and that customer? So really try to pay attention to that. It depends on your organization if you want to tell people that this is what's happening, but you really want to make sure that that customer isn't receiving preferential treatment.

So you want to make sure that it's kind of not obvious to people that this is the fake customer so they're like, "Oh, well, we're going to be extra nice to the fake customer." They should be getting exactly the same stuff that any of your other customers get. This is extremely useful for you.

3. Better content

Then the third thing is better content. I think, in general, any organization should reward content differently than we do currently.

Right now, we have a huge focus on new content, new content, new content all the time, when in reality, some of your best-performing posts might be old content and maybe you should go back and update them. So what we like to tell people about is the Microsoft model of rewarding. They've used this to reward their employees, and part of it isn't just new stuff. It's old stuff too. So the way that it works is 33% is what they personally have produced.

So this would be new content, for example. Then 33% is what they've shared. So think about for example on Slack if somebody shares something really useful, that's great. They would be rewarded for that. But think about, for example, what you can share with your customers and how that can be rewarding, even if you didn't write it, or you can create a roundup, or you can put it in your newsletter.

Like what can you do to bring value to those customers? Then the last 33% is what they shared that others produced. So is there a way that you can amplify other voices in your organization and make sure that that content is getting out there? Certainly in marketing, and especially if you're in a large organization, maybe you're really siloed, maybe you're an SEO and you don't even talk to the paid people, there's cool stuff happening across the entire organization.

A lot of what you can bring is taking that stuff that others have produced, maybe you need to turn it into something that is easy to share on social media, or you need to turn it into a blog post or a video, like Whiteboard Friday, whatever is going to work for you, and think about how you can amplify that and get it out to your customers, because it isn't just marketing messages that customers should be seeing.

They should be seeing all kinds of messages across your organization, because when a customer gives you money, it isn't just because your marketing message was great. It's because they believe in the thing that you are giving them. So by reinforcing that belief through the types of content that you create, that you share, that you find that other people share, that you shared out to your customers, a lot of sharing, you can certainly improve that relationship with your customers and really turn just your average, run-of-the-mill customer into an actual raving fan, because not only will they stay longer, it's so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one, but they'll refer people to you, which is also a lot easier than buying a lot of ads or spending a ton of money and effort on SEO.

Thanks!

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Google Converts PDFs, DOCs, XLS etc into HTML for Indexing

A discussion came up on twitter about different content types and how Google determines what type of files they are. The discussion then moved to PDFs in the Google search results and how Google handles them. John Mueller commented that Google automatically converts PDFs and similar document types into HTML format for indexing and ranking […]

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Why Google Shows Featured Snippets With Images from Another Site

For a few years now, Google has sometimes shown featured snippets where the text is from one site, but the image shown within the featured snippet itself is actually from a second site. Last year, Google confirmed that it would continue doing this, and it wouldn’t change how it sometimes selects a more optimal image […]

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The Long-Term Link Acquisition Value of Content Marketing

Posted by KristinTynski

Recently, new internal analysis of our work here at Fractl has yielded a fascinating finding:

Content marketing that generates mainstream press is likely 2X as effective as originally thought. Additionally, the long-term ROI is potentially many times higher than previously reported.

I’ll caveat that by saying this applies only to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients.

Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO.

To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:

1. Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain
2. Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content

While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl).

Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works:

So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?

To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from 2015 and 2016 through today. Having a few years of aggregation gave us an initial benchmark for how links accumulate over time for general interest content that is relatively evergreen.

We profiled four campaigns:

• Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders
• America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places
• Reverse-Photoshopping Video Game Characters
• Water Bottle Germs Revealed

The first view we looked at was direct links, or links pointing directly to the client blog posts hosting the content we’ve created on their behalf.

There is a good deal of variability between campaigns, but we see a few interesting general trends that show up in all of the examples in the rest of this article:

1. Both direct and secondary links will accumulate in a few predictable ways:
   1. A large initial spike with a smooth decline
   2. A buildup to a large spike with a smooth decline
   3. Multiple spikes of varying size
2. Roughly 50% of the total volume of links that will be built will accumulate in the first 30 days. The other 50% will accumulate over the following two years and beyond.
3. A small subset of direct links will generate their own large spikes of secondary links.

We'll now take a look at some specific results. Let’s start by looking at direct links (pickups that link directly back to our client’s site or landing page).

The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over time

This campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively smooth decline in link acquisition over the first month.

After the first month, long-term new direct link acquisition continued for more than two years (and is still going today!).

The less common result: Slow draw up to a major spike

In this example, you can see that sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks to see the initial pickup spike and subsequent primary syndication. In the case of this campaign, we saw a slow buildup to the pinnacle at about a week from the first pickup (exclusive), with a gradual decline over the following two weeks.

"These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications."

Zooming out to a month-over-month view, we can see resurgences in pickups happening at unpredictable intervals every few months or so. These spikes continued up until today with relative consistency. This happened as some of the stories written during the initial spike began to rank well in Google. These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications. For evergreen topics such as body image (as was the case in this campaign), you will also see writers and editors cycle in and out of writing about these topics as they trend in the public zeitgeist, leading to these unpredictable yet very welcomed resurgences in new links.

Least common result: Multiple spikes in the first few weeks

The third pattern we observed was seen on a campaign we executed examining hate speech on Twitter. In this case, we saw multiple spikes during this early period, corresponding to syndications on other mainstream publications that then sparked their own downstream syndications and individual virality.

Zooming out, we saw a similar result as the other examples, with multiple smaller spikes more within the first year and less frequently in the following two years. Each of these bumps is associated with the story resurfacing organically on new publications (usually a writer stumbling on coverage of the content during the initial phase of popularity).

Long-term resurgences

Finally, in our fourth example that looked at germs on water bottles, we saw a fascinating phenomenon happen beyond the first month where there was a very significant secondary spike.

This spike represents syndication across (all or most) of the iHeartRadio network. As this example demonstrates, it isn’t wholly unusual to see large-scale networks pick up content even a year or later that rival or even exceed the initial month’s result.

Aggregate trends

"50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years."

When we looked at direct links back to all four campaigns together, we saw the common progression of link acquisition over time. The chart below shows the distribution of new links acquired over two years. We saw a pretty classic long tail distribution here, where 50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years.

"If direct links are the cake, secondary links are the icing, and both accumulate substantially over time."

Links generated directly to the blog posts/landing pages of the content we’ve created on our clients’ behalf are only really a part of the story. When a campaign garners mainstream press attention, the press stories can often go mildly viral, generating large numbers of syndications and links to these stories themselves. We track these secondary links and reach out to the writers of these stories to try and get link attributions to the primary source (our clients’ blog posts or landing pages where the story/study/content lives).

These types of links also follow a similar pattern over time to direct links. Below are the publishing dates of these secondary links as they were found over time. Their over-time distribution follows the same pattern, with 50% of results being realized within the first month and the following 50% of the value coming over the next two to three years.

The value in the long tail

By looking at multi-year direct and secondary links built to successful content marketing campaigns, it becomes apparent that the total number of links acquired during the first month is really only about half the story.

For campaigns that garner initial mainstream pickups, there is often a multi-year long tail of links that are built organically without any additional or future promotions work beyond the first month. While this long-term value is not something we report on or charge our clients for explicitly, it is extremely important to understand as a part of a larger calculus when trying to decide if doing content marketing with the goal of press acquisition is right for your needs.

Cost-per-link (a typical way to measure ROI of such campaigns) will halve if links built are measured over these longer periods — moving a project you perhaps considered a marginal success at one month to a major success at one year.

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A Quarter-Million Reasons to Use Moz's Link Intersect Tool

Posted by rjonesx.

Let me tell you a story.

It begins with me in a hotel room halfway across the country, trying to figure out how I'm going to land a contract from a fantastic new lead, worth annually $250,000. We weren't in over our heads by any measure, but the potential client was definitely looking at what most would call "enterprise" solutions and we weren't exactly "enterprise."

Could we meet their needs? Hell yes we could — better than our enterprise competitors — but there's a saying that "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM"; in other words, it's always safe to go with the big guys. We weren't an IBM, so I knew that by reputation alone we were in trouble. The RFP was dense, but like most SEO gigs, there wasn't much in the way of opportunity to really differentiate ourselves from our competitors. It would be another "anything they can do, we can do better" meeting where we grasp for reasons why we were better. In an industry where so many of our best clients require NDAs that prevent us from producing really good case studies, how could I prove we were up to the task?

In less than 12 hours we would be meeting with the potential client and I needed to prove to them that we could do something that our competitors couldn't. In the world of SEO, link building is street cred. Nothing gets the attention of a client faster than a great link. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to land a killer backlink, completely white-hat, with no new content strategy, no budget, and no time. I needed to walk in the door with more than just a proposal — I needed to walk in the door with proof.

I've been around the block a few times when it comes to link building, so I wasn't at a loss when it came to ideas or strategies we could pitch, but what strategy might actually land a link in the next few hours? I started running prospecting software left and right — all the tools of the trade I had at my disposal — but imagine my surprise when the perfect opportunity popped up right in little old Moz's Open Site Explorer Link Intersect tool. To be honest, I hadn't used the tool in ages. We had built our own prospecting software on APIs, but the perfect link just popped up after adding in a few of their competitors on the off chance that there might be an opportunity or two.

There it was:

1. 3,800 root linking domains to the page itself
2. The page was soliciting submissions
3. Took pull requests for submissions on GitHub!

I immediately submitted a request and began the refresh game, hoping the repo was being actively monitored. By the next morning, we had ourselves a link! Not just any link, but despite the client having over 50,000 root linking domains, this was now the 15th best link to their site. You can imagine me anxiously awaiting the part of the meeting where we discussed the various reasons why our services were superior to that of our competitors, and then proceeded to demonstrate that superiority with an amazing white-hat backlink acquired just hours before.

The quarter-million-dollar contract was ours.

Link Intersect: An undervalued link building technique

Backlink intersect is one of the oldest link building techniques in our industry. The methodology is simple. Take a list of your competitors and identify the backlinks pointing to their sites. Compare those lists to find pages that overlap. Pages which link to two or more of your competitors are potentially resource pages that would be interested in linking to your site as well. You then examine these sites and do outreach to determine which ones are worth contacting to try and get a backlink.

Let's walk through a simple example using Moz's Link Intersect tool.

Getting started

We start on the Link Intersect page of Moz's new Link Explorer. While we had Link Intersect in the old Open Site Explorer, you're going to to want to use our new Link Intersect, which is built from our giant index of 30 trillion links and is far more powerful.

For our example here, I've chosen a random gardening company in Durham, North Carolina called Garden Environments. The website has a Domain Authority of 17 with 38 root linking domains.

We can go ahead and copy-paste the domain into "Discover Link Opportunities for this URL" at the top of the Link Intersect page. If you notice, we have the choice of "Root Domain, Subdomain, or Exact Page":

I almost always choose "root domain" because I tend to be promoting a site as a whole and am not interested in acquiring links to pages on the site from other sites that already link somewhere else on the site. That is to say, by choosing "root domain," any site that links to any page on your site will be excluded from the prospecting list. Of course, this might not be right for your situation. If you have a hosted blog on a subdomain or a hosted page on a site, you will want to choose subdomain or exact page to make sure you rule out the right backlinks.

You also have the ability to choose whether we report back to you root linking domains or Backlinks. This is really important and I'll explain why.

Depending on your link building campaign, you'll want to vary your choice here. Let's say you're looking for resource pages that you can list your website on. If that's the case, you will want to choose "pages." The Link Intersect tool will then prioritize pages that have links to multiple competitors on them, which are likely to be resource pages you can target for your campaign. Now, let's say you would rather find publishers that talk about your competitors and are less concerned about them linking from the same page. You want to find sites that have linked to multiple competitors, not pages. In that case, you would choose "domains." The system will then return the domains that have links to multiple competitors and give you example pages, but you wont be limited only to pages with multiple competitors on them.

In this example, I'm looking for resource pages, so I chose "pages" rather than domains.

Choosing your competitor sites

A common mistake made at this point is to choose exact competitors. Link builders will often copy and paste a list of their biggest competitors and cross their fingers for decent results. What you really want are the best link pages and domains in your industry — not necessarily your competitors.

In this example I chose the gardening page on a local university, a few North Carolina gardening and wildflower associations, and a popular page that lists nurseries. Notice that you can choose subdomain, domain, or exact page as well for each of these competitor URLs. I recommend choosing the broadest category (domain being broadest, exact page being narrowest) that is relevant to your industry. If the whole site is relevant, go ahead and choose "domain."

Analyzing your results

The results returned will prioritize pages that link to multiple competitors and have a high Domain Authority. Unlike some of our competitors' tools, if you put in a competitor that doesn't have many backlinks, it won't cause the whole report to fail. We list all the intersections of links, starting with the most and narrowing down to the fewest. Even though the nurseries website doesn't provide any intersections, we still get back great results!

Now we have some really great opportunities, but at this point you have two choices. If you really prefer, you can just export the opportunities to CSV like any other tool on the market, but I prefer to go ahead and move everything over into a Link Tracking List.

By moving everything into a link list, we're going to be able to track link acquisition over time (once we begin reaching out to these sites for backlinks) and we can also sort by other metrics, leave notes, and easily remove opportunities that don't look fruitful.

What did we find?

Remember, we started off with a site that has barely any links, but we turned up dozens of easy opportunities for link acquisition. We turned up a simple resources page on forest resources, a potential backlink which could easily be earned via a piece of content on forest stewardship.

We turned up a great resource page on how to maintain healthy soil and yards on a town government website. A simple guide covering the same topics here could easily earn a link from this resource page on an important website.

These were just two examples of easy link targets. From community gardening pages, websites dedicated to local creek, pond, and stream restoration, and general enthusiast sites, the Link Intersect tool turned up simple backlink gold. What is most interesting to me, though, was that these resource pages never included the words "resources" or "links" in the URLs. Common prospecting techniques would have just missed these opportunities altogether.

While it wasn't the focus of this particular campaign, I did choose the alternate of "show domains" rather than "pages" that link to the competitors. We found similarly useful results using this methodology.

For example, we found CarolinaCountry.com had linked to multiple of the competitor sites and, as it turns out, would be a perfect publication to pitch for a story as part of of a PR campaign for promoting the gardening site.

Takeaways

The new Link Intersect tool in Moz's Link Explorer combines the power of our new incredible link index with the complete features of a link prospecting tool. Competitor link intersect remains one of the most straightforward methods for finding link opportunities and landing great backlinks, and Moz's new tool coupled with Link Lists makes it easier than ever. Go ahead and give it a run yourself — you might just find the exact link you need right when you need it.

Find link opportunities now!

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How to Download Links Report in New Google Search Console

Google has released a brand-new link report within the new version of Google search console. The important thing to know about this linking report is that it contains different data than what was included in the old link report. To export your links, you need to go to your linking reports within the new Google […]

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Google: Avoid Including Redirected URLs in Sitemaps

Google is reminding site owners that they shouldn’t add URLs that are being redirected in the sitemap they submit to Google.  The question came up on Twitter about whether it should be avoided or if there was no detrimental effect to having them in a sitemap. John Mueller answered on Twitter and said that sitemaps […]

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Google’s Featured Snippet Videos Now Overlay in Search Results

Google has made a major change with how featured snippets with a video are done in the search results.  Instead of clicking through to the YouTube video landing page, Google is overlaying the video directly into the search results instead.  The overlay does not feature any of the YouTube features and is instead a very […]

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Expect Googlebot Crawl Increase With Changes to CDNs

Whenever you make major changes to something about the website, it is natural you see significant changes in the amount of crawling the Google but does on the site. This is completely normal and expected. The same is also true when you switch over your site to CDN. But if you remove the CDN or […]

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How to create an optimized career page for your website

With recruitment as competitive a market as it has ever been, it’s essential to ensure every careers page or job vacancy on your website is fully optimized in order to place it in front of the perfect candidate online.

They are some of the largest and most powerful websites around, but typically online job boards lack page authority, so while you cannot compete with them on a domain level, you can still outrank these huge companies with good SEO.

The next step is selling your vacancy to the candidate, which can sometimes be a tough process, but one that your job pages can definitely help you out with.

How should you go about doing this?

Conduct thorough keyword research

Your first port of call to ensure your careers pages are fully optimized is to conduct some thorough keyword research in order to identify relevant keywords to target on your job pages.

Location-specific job searches invariably have a favorable ratio between search volume and keyword difficulty (competitiveness), so it’s crucial to ensure you are targeting properly before you begin to optimize.

Ahrefs is my tool of choice for this due to the ease of use and array of filters available to use.

Use internal links

Internal links are your chance to tell Google which pages on your site are the most important. You can manage your internal links as you wish, but one recommended strategy is for any page you are trying to rank, you should point internal links at it from the more powerful pages on your website.

A good way of finding these authoritative pages is by using the ‘Top Pages’ category in ahrefs (other tools are available) which will filter your pages by URL rating (authority) in a descending order. You are left with a list of your most powerful pages ready to be linked from.

When trying to boost vacancy pages, adding natural looking anchor text along the lines of ‘Like what you are reading? See our latest job openings’ and linking to the live positions can work well.

Internal linking is an oft-underutilized strategy in SEO and Andy Drinkwater is one of the more prominent voices on the topic often sharing useful, actionable information with the SEO community.

Maximize your content

Ensure the copy featured on each of your careers pages is optimized to rank well. Your content should be specific to your company and the individual role, with a minimum word count of 250 words.

Make it enticing! And if your company has a personality, ensure you show it.

The copy itself should be relevant and informative to the user, answering any specific queries they may have. The more information you can give the prospect the better.

Avoid duplicate content at all costs and try to be creative – you can assume the job seeker is looking at a number of job posts so you really need to try and stand out here.

Go behind the scenes

Provide potential employees with a look behind the scenes at your offices before they apply for a role. This is likely to benefit both you and the prospective employee as they can see if the environment appeals to them.

An office walkthrough is the ideal way to show what life is like at your company, plus the tour footage can form part of your Google Business listing (if recorded by an accredited Google Business). Appearing alongside your company address and telephone number, it’s an effective way to boost your site’s local SEO.

If you really want to stand out from your competitors, however, why not invest in a 360 degree tour of your office? This can also be VR-based. Interactive and realistic, it’s the next best thing to being in your office in person and will help a prospective employee to really visualize working for you.

Once you’ve taken these factors into consideration, you also need to think about Google Jobs.

What is Google Jobs?

Having launched in the US in 2017 and the UK in July this year, Google’s new job search tool Google Jobs looks set to radically alter the way job seekers search for roles, also impacting recruitment agencies and their processes.

Google caused a disturbance in the flight industry with the launch of Google Flights, which saw an immediate uptake in bookings from customers who were frustrated by the tendency of airlines to withhold information about additional costs such as baggage fees whilst booking, in order to make their flights appear cheaper.  

Inc.com attributed the success of Google Flights to increased transparency to customers, who are able to see all the relevant costs prior to booking a flight, plus any predicted delays. The impact of the launch of Google Flights was immediate, with Business Insider stating the platform was “…an embarrassment to the airline industry”.

The search engine’s success in identifying and capitalizing upon weaknesses in the travel and tourism industry is expected to be replicated in the recruitment industry with the launch of Google Jobs.

Simply recognizing users’ frustration at a lack of information, collating results at once and then proceeding to provide this information immediately results in a more valuable service for users.

What does the launch of Google Jobs mean for job vacancies online?

Google Jobs has been designed to simplify and speed up the process of job-hunting for the job-seeker. At the US launch of Google Jobs last year, Google CEO Pichai Sundar announced that the purpose of the tool was to “better connect employers and job seekers”.

Users are able to filter roles by key criteria such as necessary qualifications and experience, working hours, salary and commute. Recruiters and employment platforms currently working with Google Jobs include LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor and Payscale (but interestingly, not Indeed).

The impact on recruitments companies will be severe. Even if you were ranking #1, you will now have the Google Jobs ‘import’ sitting above you plus the usual PPC ads.

While it’s safe to assume that Google will weight Google Jobs above all other recruitment platforms, it is worth bearing in mind that the company recently received a $5 billion fine from the EU for abusing their Android dominance, so they may – initially at least – proceed with more caution than usual.

What does this mean for my job vacancy?

Google Jobs pulls through vacancies from many recruitment company sites and jobs boards. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there isn’t the ability to get your (a SMEs) specific role featured in the platform without posting it on one of these jobs sites/boards.

For businesses who have steered clear of these in the past, now may be the time to start to signing up.

We can assume Google Jobs’ popularity is only going to increase so if you want to maximize the chance of your vacancy being seen, don’t get left behind.

 

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SEO Negotiation: How to Ace the Business Side of SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

SEO isn't all meta tags and content. A huge part of the success you'll see is tied up in the inevitable business negotiations. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, our resident expert Britney Muller walks us through a bevy of smart tips and considerations that will strengthen your SEO negotiation skills, whether you're a seasoned pro or a newbie to the practice.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. So today we are going over all things SEO negotiation, so starting to get into some of the business side of SEO. As most of you know, negotiation is all about leverage.

It's what you have to offer and what the other side is looking to gain and leveraging that throughout the process. So something that you can go in and confidently talk about as SEOs is the fact that SEO has around 20% more opportunity than both mobile and desktop PPC combined.

This is a really, really big deal. It's something that you can showcase. These are the stats to back it up. We will also link to the research to this down below. Good to kind of have that in your back pocket. Aside from this, you will obviously have your audit. So potential client, you're looking to get this deal.

Get the most out of the SEO audit

☑ Highlight the opportunities, not the screw-ups

You're going to do an audit, and something that I have always suggested is that instead of highlighting the things that the potential client is doing wrong, or screwed up, is to really highlight those opportunities. Start to get them excited about what it is that their site is capable of and that you could help them with. I think that sheds a really positive light and moves you in the right direction.

☑ Explain their competitive advantage

I think this is really interesting in many spaces where you can sort of say, "Okay, your competitors are here, and you're currently here and this is why,"and to show them proof. That makes them feel as though you have a strong understanding of the landscape and can sort of help them get there.

☑ Emphasize quick wins

I almost didn't put this in here because I think quick wins is sort of a sketchy term. Essentially, you really do want to showcase what it is you can do quickly, but you want to...

☑ Under-promise, over-deliver

You don't want to lose trust or credibility with a potential client by overpromising something that you can't deliver. Get off to the right start. Under-promise, over-deliver.

Smart negotiation tactics

☑ Do your research

Know everything you can about this clientPerhaps what deals they've done in the past, what agencies they've worked with. You can get all sorts of knowledge about that before going into negotiation that will really help you.

☑ Prioritize your terms

So all too often, people go into a negotiation thinking me, me, me, me, when really you also need to be thinking about, "Well, what am I willing to lose?What can I give up to reach a point that we can both agree on?" Really important to think about as you go in.

☑ Flinch!

This is a very old, funny negotiation tactic where when the other side counters, you flinch. You do this like flinch, and you go, "Oh, is that the best you can do?" It's super silly. It might be used against you, in which case you can just say, "Nice flinch." But it does tend to help you get better deals.

So take that with a grain of salt. But I look forward to your feedback down below. It's so funny.

☑ Use the words "fair" and "comfortable"

The words "fair" and "comfortable" do really well in negotiations. These words are inarguable. You can't argue with fair. "I want to do what is comfortable for us both. I want us both to reach terms that are fair."

You want to use these terms to put the other side at ease and to also help bridge that gap where you can come out with a win-win situation.

☑ Never be the key decision maker

I see this all too often when people go off on their own, and instantly on their business cards and in their head and email they're the CEO.

They are this. You don't have to be that, and you sort of lose leverage when you are. When I owned my agency for six years, I enjoyed not being CEO. I liked having a board of directors that I could reach out to during a negotiation and not being the sole decision maker. Even if you feel that you are the sole decision maker, I know that there are people that care about you and that are looking out for your business that you could contact as sort of a business mentor, and you could use that in negotiation. You can use that to help you. Something to think about.

Tips for negotiation newbies

So for the newbies, a lot of you are probably like, "I can never go on my own. I can never do these things." I'm from northern Minnesota. I have been super awkward about discussing money my whole life for any sort of business deal. If I could do it, I promise any one of you watching this can do it.

☑ Power pose!

I'm not kidding, promise. Some tips that I learned, when I had my agency, was to power pose before negotiations. So there's a great TED talk on this that we can link to down below. I do this before most of my big speaking gigs, thanks to my gramsy who told me to do this at SMX Advanced like three years ago.

Go ahead and power pose. Feel good. Feel confident. Amp yourself up.

☑ Walk the walk

You've got to when it comes to some of these things and to just feel comfortable in that space.

☑ Good > perfect

Know that good is better than perfect. A lot of us are perfectionists, and we just have to execute good. Trying to be perfect will kill us all.

☑ Screw imposter syndrome

Many of the speakers that I go on different conference circuits with all struggle with this. It's totally normal, but it's good to acknowledge that it's so silly. So to try to take that silly voice out of your head and start to feel good about the things that you are able to offer.

Take inspiration where you can find it

I highly suggest you check out Brian Tracy's old-school negotiation podcasts. He has some old videos. They're so good. But he talks about leverage all the time and has two really great examples that I love so much. One being jade merchants. So these jade merchants that would take out pieces of jade and they would watch people's reactions piece by piece that they brought out.

So they knew what piece interested this person the most, and that would be the higher price. It was brilliant. Then the time constraints is he has an example of people doing business deals in China. When they landed, the Chinese would greet them and say, "Oh, can I see your return flight ticket? I just want to know when you're leaving."

They would not make a deal until that last second. The more you know about some of these leverage tactics, the more you can be aware of them if they were to be used against you or if you were to leverage something like that. Super interesting stuff.

Take the time to get to know their business

☑ Tie in ROI

Lastly, just really take the time to get to know someone's business. It just shows that you care, and you're able to prioritize what it is that you can deliver based on where they make the most money off of the products or services that they offer. That helps you tie in the ROI of the things that you can accomplish.

☑ Know the order of products/services that make them the most money

One real quick example was my previous company. We worked with plastic surgeons, and we really worked hard to understand that funnel of how people decide to get any sort of elective procedure. It came down to two things.

It was before and after photos and price. So we knew that we could optimize for those two things and do very well in their space. So showing that you care, going the extra mile, sort of tying all of these things together, I really hope this helps. I look forward to the feedback down below. I know this was a little bit different Whiteboard Friday, but I thought it would be a fun topic to cover.

So thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will see you all soon. Bye.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Google Search Console Links & Disavow Files

If you are doing a disavowal for a site, Google is recommending that you start looking at the URLs that Google is showing in the links section of Google Search Console. While we do know that the list of links showing Google Search Console isn’t a full list of links, it often can show links […]

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How to plan content marketing for an ecommerce business

It’s 2018 and running an ecommerce business is a lot more than just selling your products and services online. It requires you to handle everything; inventory management, promotion, shipping, replacements, refunds, order management – pretty much a lot on the plate.

Amidst all these job obligations, we hope that you have not managed to ignore the importance of the content marketing strategy for your ecommerce business.

Well, the right content marketing strategy will get your business the recognition it needs. Aimed at creating the content that fits the audience’s perception well, this strategy will also help you boost your sales and retain existing customers because it lets the content speak for your eCommerce endeavor.

So, what is the right plan when it comes to crafting the best content marketing strategy for your eCommerce business? Let’s explore.

Portray a bigger story

 

Storytelling is a unique art that has braced digital trends and customers nowadays tend to be more interested in stories rather than factual descriptions. This applies to the content marketing strategy of your ecommerce business as well.

Let your content speak for itself about how your products have managed to avoid consumerism woes of many. This might sound stupid but this definitely has worked for many brands, an emotional background to these stories will help your content and audience connect better.

Spice up this story-laced content with pictures and videos to keep your audience looped. You can either run a separate page for this storytelling section on your eCommerce website or you could simply replace the traditional blog.

Serve a humanitarian purpose

From the business point of view, this move exists to seek a considerable amount of attention. Based on the scale that your ecommerce business is currently running on, you can opt for Charity Collab.

For example, Michael Kors collab with Watch Hunger Stop to eliminate world hunger that supports 16 million children over 70 countries. Through these collabs, your business is able to support a social cause and talk about it with their customers in a pursuit to raise awareness and build social credibility. Your eCommerce business can run a story/blog for this purpose and engage the customers in it. This will send out a super positive impression of your business as to how socially committed it is.

Build partnerships

Online business is definitely cooler than traditional business ways because it has inspired a trend of embracing competition and even working with them. Your ecommerce business can build great content around this strategy by partnering with the firms in competition and others as well.

Building partnerships with other members of the digital sphere can help you tap a new section of the audience as well as expose your line of products to customers who are loyal to other brands.

Influencers are everywhere

Influencer marketing has become the soul of online marketing and promotion of several brands and businesses.  Your business can get in touch with key industry individuals who will drive your brand’s message to the prospective customers who follow these influencers on social media.

The online customers heavily rely on the opinion of these social media influencers, who use popular social media pages to market your content and products.

Provide some free value to customers

In an effort to market the content for your ecommerce business, you cannot always expect to make money churning moves and not move a brick for free. A great content marketing strategy for an ecommerce business will always entail the use of offline as well as online resources to garner the attention of the customers.

Offering an offline value resource such as physical coupons, newsletters, a trial of new products, FAQs sheet etc. can spark a sense of physical hoarding in the customers. Make it a point to send these for free because not a lot of people would be interested in paid stuff. Freebies are a great way to get your content marketed and make sure that new people try them out.

Involve your audience in your content

When your eCommerce website is planning its content, it is a great idea to involve your audience in it. You can simply ask for their suggestions for the next blog post or the suggestion regarding what features they might want to see next on your online website. Doing so will make the audience feel important which is an indirect way of promoting your business now that your customers trust it.

Be persistent with a content theme

Not yet followed by many new ecommerce websites, a content theme is definitely a great way of staying uniform in your ecommerce site’s content.

Let’s talk about the product listing on your site as an example. Your website could follow a generic page layout for each of these products in the catalog. However, the layout must be uniform and consistent across the listing. By that, we mean that the content length of the description, the use of target keywords, and the overall aesthetic appeal must remain the same.

You can eventually change the theme to keep things fresh and kill the boredom. Also, if you have been looking for some inspiration to keep things at your ecommerce website tempting, ecommercebooth.com is a highly valuable resource.

A guide for customers to keep everything covered

The best way to keep your audience hooked to the website of your ecommerce business is to provide them everything related to the product you are dealing in. By everything, we mean to mention the product guide, the installation guide, the customer point of contact, product description and images, customer reviews, FAQs related to the products etc.

An educational guide in the form of a listicle, a blog post, or a video will drive new leads to your ecommerce website simply for the fact that how useful your brand is capable of becoming in order to product-educate its customers.

Case studies for your phenomenal products

Your ecommerce website will always have some products that are comparatively more popular than the others. If your business is offering solution-based products, you can tap into its significance by creating content around it. To accomplish that, case studies are great.

Roundup posts FTW!

Roundup posts that go like “Top 10 electronics gadgets to buy this summer” are doing great in 2018. Why not integrate them into your ecommerce content marketing plan as well?

You can be creative and can compile a roundup blog post for the most popular products from your site. This will become a great resource for promoting more than a single product through a single post without them sounding sale-focused. If you have a budget, you can buy sponsored space on famous blog sites and ask them to publish these roundup posts for you.

Usher the customer into your personal/professional journey

If suitable to the line of business for your ecommerce endeavor, you can choose to unveil the personal/professional story behind your business idea through text-based or video-powered content on your website. This is, again, a semantic advantage for your site’s content strategy.

Hire expert bloggers

Last but not the least, the best thing that you can do for your site’s content is to hire expert content creators or writers who understand the right brand tone and know how to create content that converts. They might cost you a considerable amount on your content strategy budget, but they will be worth it.

 

Content marketing is all about targeting the right set of audience and making an attempt to convert them into loyal customers through targeted content that attracts them. By having a clear understanding of what your ecommerce content marketing strategy is expected to deliver, your work will become easy. For the rest of the part, the above-mentioned tips will help you plan a great Content Marketing strategy to improve your eCommerce business.

However, research is the key to making sure that you are adding new trends to the list. So, stay tuned to this space for more information.

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