An Exploration of Podcasting SEO in 2016

Posted by evolvingSEO

[Estimated read time: 24 minutes]

Marketers: Add podcast promotion to your skill set

Sure. This post is for podcasters.

Hi Podcasters. You may find the below interesting, perhaps educational — and I hope you leave your insights for the Moz Community in the comments below (I'll be reading and replying to all of them).

But even if you never plan on having your own podcast, this post is for you, too! I see the marketing of podcasts will being an important addition to any marketer's skill set in 2016 and beyond.

So below, we'll examine iTunes ranking factors, lay out promotional strategies I've used to grow listeners in my first 6 weeks of podcasting, and I'll transparently reveal all of my podcast's metrics.

Before I show you this, though, let's look at exactly how much podcasts are growing.

The "Serial" effect.

To grasp the magnitude, we zoom out and look at the trends.

Since Edison Research began tracking statistics in 2008, podcasting saw the largest YoY growth of monthly listeners in early 2016. Listeners jumped from 17% to 21%.

That's now 21% of the US population, compared to only 9% in 2008. Estimates expect that percentage to grow even more.

Yes, you are witnessing the Serial Effect: accelerated growth of a medium led by mass popularity of the best produced product in podcasting to date.

Ways to consume podcasts are growing, too

Not surprisingly, app developers have jumped on board — and the paths to discovery are growing.

As a podcaster or marketer, you should want to look at this from a search perspective. iTunes (partially a search engine) is likely the top discovery channels for podcasts. Many other players like Sticher, Player.fm, and even Google (just announced) have a core search functionality for discovery.

And Google just announced they'll show podcasts in search results in the Android Google App.

How long before this carries into all of Google search?

How's the data available to podcasters?

Meager at best.

Apple doesn't disclose search volume. There's conflating ideas of what a "download" actually means. There's no engagement metrics (i.e.: you can't tell how long people actually listen to an episode).

Because of that (and my lack of extreme nerd-ness, I only have moderate nerd-ness) this post has NO fancy charts or big-data graphs. But my hope is to relate my experience with podcasting SEO thus far, to bring value to the marketing community at large.

Keep in mind: this post is from the perspective of a two-person podcasting team, running it as a side project at Evolving SEO, with a combined total of only about 12 hours per week.

Buckle up.

Table of Contents

There's a LOT here. You can absolutely consume this post by jumping around!

• iTunes rankings
  • What are the "paths" to discovering podcasts?
  • What are possible ranking factors?
• My promotion strategy
  • Produce an exceptional product
  • Run targeted Facebook ads
  • Create an organic network effect
  • Be a guest on other podcasts
  • Interview guests who have audiences
• Goals & results
  • General show stats
  • iTunes rankings
  • Business results
• Lessons learned & takeaways
  • Patience
  • Make a popular show iTunes wants to rank
  • Competition is heating up
  • Chat with me

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I. iTunes rankings

What are the "paths" to discovering podcasts in iTunes?

It's first important to understand the different nuances and places of "ranking" within iTunes.

In other words — these are the places you can show up in iTunes.

Curated lists vs. searching

The biggest distinction I have learned — and you need to know — is lists versus search rankings. "Ranking" factors for each may be quite different.

• List Rankings are NOT attached to a search keyword, because no search happens. Found via clicks and navigating through the site.
• Search Rankings are impacted by keywords, because the user types a search into the search bar. Found via performing a search.

The podcast "home page" lists

This is the "holy grail" of what Podcasters talk about when trying to break into "new and noteworthy." Supposedly if you get listed here, your downloads skyrocket, you make tons of cash, and you sit on a beach in the Bahamas.

Category lists

This includes:

• New & Noteworthy for the Category
• What's Hot for the Category
• All Podcasts for the Category

Though not the "home page," it's still generally quite advantageous to rank here. Lists function by clicking into the category list — not by running a search:

Subcategory lists

The UX in iTunes (desktop) is weird here, because you can't drill down from a category into subcategories. You have to find a show in the subcategory, and use the breadcrumbs to back out of it into the subcategory page:

Now we're in the Business > Careers subcategory:

As you can see, it still has "New and Noteworthy" and "What's Hot." I should note, in the Podcast App, it's much easier to drill into subcategories.

Related podcasts

iTunes will show "related" podcasts in three ways:

• More by Channel
  • If you publish more than one show.
  • Publish multiple shows to show up here.
• Top Podcasts in Category
  • Basically this looks like the Top 200 category list.
  • So you need to break into the Top 200 list for your category to show up here.
• Listeners Also Subscribed to
  • This seems to be the only "related" functionality based upon user behavior (like Amazon's "people also bought").
  • You need to get more subscribers in iTunes to show up here.

Podcast search results

This is the true "search engine" area of iTunes. These seem to operate quite differently than lists.

Here is the "first page" result for "marketing":

The main point to takeaway here is that there are a variety of discovery paths within the iTunes store, and you should be aware and optimize for all of them.

What are possible iTunes podcast ranking factors?

Below, I'm going to list a large variety of possible ranking factors and some anecdotal, instinctual thoughts of my own — as well as references to other opinions.

Again, this is one view and set of hypotheses for how rankings might work within iTunes. I welcome opposing thoughts or discussion.

Number of new subscribers in last week

In the middle of writing this post I stumbled upon episode 421 of Podcast Answer Man. Admittedly, it threw me a HUGE curveball. Rob Walch claims to know the exact algorithm for iTunes List rankings. Yeah, I'm not kidding.

Rob says:

"The top 200 list is number of new subscribers in the last seven days with a weighted average of 24, 48, and 72 hours.

The actual algorithm is: (Day1x4 + D2x3 + D3x2 + D4 + D5 + D6 + D7) / 13"

You can go listen to the excerpt of that episode and Cliff's follow-up explanation for how this algo works.

Again, this is the top 200 for each category (Business, Arts, Education etc). I do NOT think this is for ranking in searches.

• List or Search Rankings: This likely affects list rankings, not search.
• Likely Factor: I think likely, but would just like to see some example data to back it up.
• Influenceable: Indirectly; there's a lot of things you can do to promote getting subscriptions.
• Data Available: Supposedly yes, in Feedburner, but I'm just not seeing anything in my account yet.
• My Advice: You should be trying to grow subscribers anyway, so of course this is an important area.

Keywords in show feed

This includes the following areas:

• Show Name
• Artist Name
• Episode Titles
• Episode Description

By the way, you can read a TON on podcast keyword placement suggestions on Pat Flynn's Podcasting Tutorial. It's pretty basic though. Put your keywords in those places, without being spammy.

• List or Search Rankings: This impacts search rankings (not list).
• Likely Factor: I say yes. It's quite obvious iTunes ranked my show based upon words I used.
• Influenceable: Yes. You can control, edit, and update any of this text at any time. It takes about 12–24 hours tops for iTunes to pick up the updates.
• Data Available: Yes, we can publicly see all text available in any Podcast feed. This makes it easier to study.
• My Advice: Similar to traditional SEO, definitely optimize your show with keywords. See Pat's tutorial for more specifics advice on that.

Total number of plays/downloads

This is a very common factor many podcasters will cite as having influence on ranking.

To clarify, "downloads" can be misleading — it refers to any streaming play or actual download of an episode, as reported by podcast hosting services like Libsyn (the host I use).

Nielson's Hot Pod states:

"We’re about a year and a half into this podcast-renaissance racket, but even with all this talk, a download still doesn’t necessarily mean a download, and an impression still doesn’t necessarily mean an impression."

As far as I understand, I haven't seen download numbers affected at all by length of engagement. One could listen to the first 10 seconds of an episode and it still registers as a "download" (I've tested this myself).

• Likely Factor: No. Apple does not have access to my Libsyn stats of total downloads.
• Influenceable: Indirectly (unless you use Fiverr or something).
• Data Available: Only privately, or if podcasters willingly share their download numbers.
• My Advice: Of course you want to get listens or downloads. But consider these numbers proxy/relative metrics at best. And certainly don't try to boost thinking they impact rankings.

NOTE: Downloads are often the go-to numbers used when sponsorships are purchased. See Tim Ferris' post or EOFire's great guide on sponsorships.

Are you beginning to see how download numbers are pretty muddy too?

Review acquisition

This is one of the most hotly debated ranking factors for podcasts. The idea is that the more reviews you get and the faster, the more likely you are to hit "New and Noteworthy."

• Likely Factor: In my opinion, unfortunately, yes. Although some may strongly disagree. And I respect Daniel's opinion. I'm just not sold on reviews being off the table as a ranking factor. Perhaps they don't affect Top Lists, but do affect search rankings.
  • And maybe some people are gaming iTunes rankings for no actual reason, and I'm misreading this as a correlation. More on that below.
• Influenceable: Yes. Unfortunately. As you'll see below, fake reviews are plentiful.
• Data Available: Yes, you can see at any time how many reviews any episode has, when they were left and how many stars (out of five) were given. There could be sub-factors to just pure number of reviews, such as:
  • Quality of reviews
  • Velocity of reviews
  • Who leaves them (kind of like a Yelp Elite user review has more weight).
• My Advice: I'm in the camp of "earn your reviews organically." As of writing this I only have 10 reviews, while other shows that came out around the same time have 50+. I haven't asked a single person for a review, but that's my personal choice.

Cover art

Many podcasters have claimed that the quality of your cover art impacts rankings. They state that an iTunes editor will be more likely to place you into New and Noteworthy.

• Likely Factor: My opinion, no. I know many will disagree — but design quality is subjective, in a way. And I've seen many shows with what I would call "ugly" cover art ranking just fine. This may help you if iTunes wants to hand-choose you for the homepage. Also, this is not a scaleable ranking factor.
• Influenceable: Yes— hire a good designer :)
• Data Available: Subjectively.
• My Advice: You should aim to have great cover art no matter what (ok ok, I know mine is just OK, I made it myself, and we're working on a very lean/agile budget, remember?) :)

Launching with 2–3+ episodes at once

This seems to be commonly cited among podcasters — including Tim Ferris, in his exceptional article about building his podcast (it's great, you should read it). But I'm not sure I can agree.

• Likely Factor: I'm going to go against a lot of the podcasting community on this one and say — I'm highly skeptical. I think the idea is that you have a small window of time after launching to rank, and you'll "miss out" otherwise. I'm just not seeing evidence of this. My show didn't rank for much in week #1, but 7–10 days later after I had 3–4 episodes posted it did start to rank for things, yet I posted episodes one at a time.
• Influenceable: Yes. You can upload as many episodes as you want, whenever you want.
• Data Available: Sort of. We can look at newly launched podcasts, and try to parse those launching with only one episode from those that launch with three or more — and note ranking differences. So it's hard to say if this effect is correlation or causation. And I'm afraid many are seeing correlating evidence on this one. For example, perhaps more episodes will result in more reviews, which then results in higher rankings. In which case the directive should be "get more reviews!" Even with one episode.
• My Advice: You may want to consider launching with 3+ episodes, so when new people discover your show, they are more enticed to subscribe.

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II. My promotion strategy

HUGE DISCLAIMER: There was so much more I wish we could have done. With extra resources (time and/or budget) I'm confident we could break into the "New and Noteworthy" section.

Also, I have no intention of "gaming" rankings to break into "New and Noteworthy." I want the answer to "how would an average guy, with no fancy tricks, rank naturally in iTunes?"

1. Produce an exceptional product

This sounds like an empty platitude, but let me break it down for you. Here are a few core standards I wanted to adhere to from the beginning:

a.) Ask the guests unique questions

We're running a guest interview-format show. Therefore, the questions are everything.

How do you ensure you're asking unique questions? Two ways:

• Listen to or read at least 2–3 recent interviews your guest has given. Avoid repeating questions they've already been asked.
• Reference very recent tweets or articles the guest has written, especially on newer topics. Chances are no one else has had the chance to ask about them yet.

I can see our strategy working. Jen Slegg had this to say:

If we're not asking at least 2–3 questions our guest has never heard before, we're not doing our job — and we're not going to have a show that stands out.

b.) Read 1-star reviews of other podcasts to learn what NOT to do

I know that's a long heading... so let me show you an example.

The following are some 1-star reviews of other marketing podcasts:

I read through hundreds of bad reviews of other podcasts. I started to see common things to avoid, such as:

• Make the intros short and sweet, and get right into the meat of the show. Listeners are not very tolerant of longwinded intros (note: I've worked on improving this, especially episodes 11 and on!)
• Don't "banter" and small-talk, especially not at the beginning. People are VERY turned off by the typical "radio jock" DJ you may have heard on radio stations in the '80s and '90s.
• Make the sound quality as good as possible. People complain a lot about unbalanced volume levels, inaudible guests, and just generally bad sound. Don't hurt people's ears!
• Don't trick people. There's a big trend in podcasting to just pile in the names of "famous" entrepreneurs to try to rank for searches of their name. People hate this. It's disingenuous.

c.) Strive for professional audio quality

Poor audio quality in a podcast should be the same criminal offense as having illegible fonts on your blog. It creates cognitive friction that distracts from your content.

Fortunately, I have experience with audio production; if you don't, I highly recommend you get help in this area.

Here are a few of the trade secrets I've been using.

• Use Compression — Most basic music software will have a compression plugin (including Garageband). Essentially, it evens out the high/low volumes, eliminating spikes and brings up the softer sounds. (There was a tool called "Levelator" which you could use, but it's been discontinued).
• Use a Gate — A "gate" is a way to eliminate lower volume extraneous noises, like fans humming, an echo-y room (like my office), sniffling, etc. This has been my secret weapon to really clean up the show.

And I have to say, for not having the most fancy and expensive equipment and setup, our show sounds pretty good. It's something I'm super proud of.

There's LOTS more we're doing to strive for a best-in-class show, but those have been the top three focus areas.

2. Run targeted Facebook ads

I have a Facebook Ad consultant running ads for clients, so we set a campaign up for the podcast episode in which I interviewed Brian Dean. I figured leveraging a pretty known name in the industry would attract some clicks and interest on this particular episode.

This was our targeting:

• Locations: Australia, UK, Ireland, US
• Ages: 22–50
• Languages: English (UK or US)
• Interests: Amy Porterfield, KissMetrics, Neil Patel, Moz (marketing software), Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn or Derek Halpern
• Must match interests: Podcasts
• Budget: $200

We tested a number of text/image combinations, but these were the two "winners":

I think these won in CTR simply because the messaging is specific and intriguing.

Ad 1 Stats:

• Reach: 14,151
• Website Clicks: 746
• Cost: $0.17
• Spent: $123.14

Ad 2 Stats:

• Reach: 7,963
• Website Clicks: 263
• Cost: $0.21
• Spent: $55.63

We also tested other images of Brian, but that one performed the best by far.

It's tough to tell exactly how many plays we got from ad traffic, but it looks like about 30% of Facebook ad traffic resulted in a "download."

In other words, it cost about $1.00 per download.

3. Create an organic network effect

Besides spending $200 on Facebook, we had no budget allocated; just time and effort. This means doing every little thing you can to create a cumulative effect.

a.) Update your email signature

Tons of people see my emails every day. These impressions add up and matter over time:

Now you have my phone number :)

b.) Send personal emails to highly relevant people

This is truly the power of one in practice. Yes, I'll take the time to personally email a small handful of people who I think might enjoy the show. I don't ask them to review it or share it. These are people I already know pretty well, not cold emails.

For instance, Jake, who asked me about Podcasts almost a year ago.

We had a short conversation at that time, but I remembered the chain and followed up:

This is an excerpt of his reply:

I also remembered Borja Obeso had me as a guest on the Rebel Growth Podcast — and I had been emailing with him and let him know about it:

He then voluntarily shared it:

No. None of this is earth shattering. But repeat small actions like this dozen or hundred's of times and they add up.

Besides, I'm just building/continuing relationships in the process — which is even better.

c.) Share in seemingly irrelevant places

A podcast has a much wider appeal than my SEO services. This means I can share my podcast in places I'd never be talking about SEO services. Like Instagram.

I pretty much use it as a photographer:

But I figured, why not just share a photograph per usual and announce it in the copy of the post?

Luckily, this photo got the most likes I've ever received — and this the most visibility.

And it actually worked:

Yes, that's ONE person telling me they downloaded the Podcast. It's small. But it's one more person listening to the show. Remember, those add up. Cumulative effects.

d.) Swap small talk for "Hey, we started a podcast!"

How does your typical meeting begin?

"How are you?"
"How's the weather there?"
"What'd you do this weekend"?

Snooze.

Because I probably talk to and/or meet 100+ different people per month, I have used these opportunities in the last 6 weeks to switch up my default answer from "good" or "cold" or "here's some boring activity we did you don't care about" to:

"Great! One exciting thing, we just launched our marketing podcast and it seems to be going well."

Sometimes there's an awkward pause, because an actual conversation is so shocking to some people.

But 85% of the time I sense an interest. In which case, I drop them a link in a chat or an email.

Results?

That person ended up leaving a review, too.

This is just two examples, but it happened many many times — just by telling people as you go through your day.

Again, this sort of "word of mouth" promotion is possible by the very nature of a podcast — it has a wide reach and appeal.

4. Be a guest on other podcasts

When you think about it, the people you should be trying to get in front of are podcast listeners. Not all people interested in marketing will want to consume information in audio format. But if you can be a guest on a podcast in a related field, you're more likely to attract new listeners, because they're already in the podcasting ecosystem.

I only had limited opportunity to do this, as I was the guest on Talking Drupal last week, but will be hoping to do this more in the future.

Yes, I'm available to be on any podcast talking about SEO. Interested? Tweet me </plug>.

5. Interview guests who have audiences

I think this is a given and in fact it's a pretty known "trick of the trade" in podcasting. Look at the success of shows like Entrepreneur on Fire, School of Greatness and Mixery. These shows are practically built on the following of the guests (and the hosts to some degree).

Now... I will NEVER have a guest on I'm not excited about or who won't bring real value, just for the sake of siphoning their audience. But I'm well aware of the fact some guests may have a sizable influence.

Take the show I did with Everette Taylor. All I did was put out one tweet and his audience did the rest:

And Ross Simmonds' tweet with Everette's RT took it even further:

(Yeah, some Twitter bots jacked up those numbers a bit)

And again, I reiterate, there are plenty of people I could have on my show with "influence," but I'd opt to have someone that makes for a great interview any day over "influence" alone.

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III. Goals & results

First, before I show results, I have a few things in mind we're looking to achieve:

Goal KPIs

• To hit "New and Noteworthy" in our subcategory, and category (I doubt the home page is possible with our limited resources and the 2016 competition)
• To rank in iTunes search for some general keywords like "SEO," "marketing," "growth hacking," and some guest names like "Brian Dean," etc.

Goal show metrics

• Downloads — I'm shooting to hit 10,000–30,000+ downloads per episode within six weeks from the date they're posted. There's no consistent industry agreement on how many downloads you need to monetize (see here and here and here) but the 10,000–30,000 mark seems common. I'm NOT saying we'll definitely take sponsors, but I figure if we're "sponsor-worthy" we're "monetization-worthy" in one way or another.

Business goals

• Monetization — As noted, I am not set on how we monetize, but this would be a great result for the hours, effort, and energy we put into a free show.
• New service / Product opportunities — Again, nothing I'm dead set on, but open to what happens. We may be in the position to train other companies on how to produce audio content, or to have this be on offshoot media company producing a variety of audio content.

So how are we doing so far? It's been 36 days since we launched, so we're relatively young, but I'm seeing promising results thus far.

General show stats

(As of 4/28/2016)

• Episodes posted: 13
• Reviews received: 11
• Total "Downloads": 2,708

iTunes rankings

I didn't do this very "scientifically." I don't know how to track iTunes rankings automatically, so I just jumped in and took screenshots every few days.

Here's some rankings in chronological order:

Day 2

By day 2, we were "indexed" in iTunes and showing up for long-tail searches like "digital marketing experts":

I doubt anyone searches that, but I was basically just checking that it showed up at all.

Day 3

I was pleasantly surprised to see us ranking for "seo" — albeit position #51 — only 3 days in:

I also quickly realized I would need to improve the cover art, as the font was WAY too small.

I was even more happily surprised to see we ranked #6 for "growth hacking" by day 3.

Sadly, we didn't actually have any content about growth hacking yet. I suspect we ranked for it simply because it's in our show title.

By day 3 we also ranked for "Brian Dean":

Day 9

Yeah, I know... what happened to days 4–8? Well by Day 9, we ranked even better for "Brian Dean":

Day 12

In trying some other searches, I noticed we ranked pretty well for "slideshare":

This was due to episode four with Ross Simmonds, which was mostly about SlideShare, so it was in the show title.

Day 20

I know, I know, we've skipped 8 more days. Anyway, I'm still not ranking for the terms I think will bring the most value, like "marketing":

I should not, at this point, as search result like this only has 100 slots. If you're not in the top 100, you're not there at all. That would be me (not there).

We ARE, however, moving up the spots for "SEO," now at position #27:

Day 28

Finally. We made it into "New and Noteworthy" for the sub-category of Marketing and Management:

Could we have done this sooner and ranked higher with the application of additional "tactics"? Sure. I could have directly asked people for reviews and subscriptions. But I really wanted to see what the natural progressions of rankings would be without this influence.

Day 30

We then finally made it into "New and Noteworthy" in the main category of Business. Well, sort of. Ranking in the 15th row is there, but that's basically like the 10th page of Google:

Beyond day 30

We tend to hover around the position 30 range for "New and Noteworthy" in Marketing & Management:

Also, currently rankings are:

• 29 for "seo"
• Not in top 100 for "marketing"
• 3 for "everette taylor"
• 4 for "growth hacking"
• 18 for "content marketing"
• 67 for "digital marketing"
• 81 for "analytics"

iTunes ranking hacks

Throughout the course of doing this, I noticed a series of loopholes — if one had the desire to pursue them.

Rank #1 by post-dating your episodes

Now, I'm not sure if this is being done on purpose, but here's how you show up #1 in your category:

If you look at his episodes, they are post-dated. So apparently this section is ranked chronologically:

Rank for almost any keyword by being popular

There's not much keyword targeting going on here:

This show has nothing to do with marketing, but ranked #2 (at the time of my search) for "marketing." Perhaps it had a marketing episode at one point.

There's no apparent filtering or de-ranking for fake reviews

Do these reviews by user names "dghdb76" or "ghn dgd56" look real to you?

Yeah, me neither.

However, this show (I didn't want to call it out) has dozens (maybe hundreds at this point) of fake reviews. It ranks exceptionally well. iTunes does nothing to filter them out.

I'm not 100% sure the reviews are causing the rankings, but if the reviews are gamed, wouldn't you assume the subscriptions are as well?

"REALLY THIS PODCAST IS AN EXCELENT." <--- seriously?

Podcast show metrics — our results

Just like normal SEO, rankings mean nothing if they don't translate to marketing and business outcomes. Which is why we can look at my iTunes rankings all we want, but I'm more interested in downloads.

First, here are my total "downloads" as of 4/20/2016:

Remember. My GOAL is 10,000+ downloads per episode within 6 weeks of when they post. So for example, #3 with Brian Dean would have more like 9,000+ downloads by now.

So yeah, we're just getting started.

Here's the growth of downloads day by day. As you can see, it's been a nice steady trend upwards so far:

Each spike is generally a day when a new episode posts, or when it gets some extra sharing on social media.

What's cool is Libsyn also provides some nice data around user agents — here are the agents most used to play my show thus far:

Though not a "goal" metric, it is nice to see a nice variety of agents and diversity of places people listen to the show.

Business results

This is where it gets interesting. Sure, metrics are great, but I'm paying extra attention to those "serendipitous" things most people might miss.

I mentioned the long term goals of monetization and additional business opportunities. Of course 44 days in is pretty fast for that, but I can specifically point to other business results due to the podcast.

Having a podcast makes writers more receptive to you

I occasionally reply to HARO inquiries. I noticed that when I started putting that I was a podcast host, it helped warm up writers to me a bit more. I think it's less intimidating than "agency owner."

This is an example of one of a few placements that came as the result:

People perceive you differently

I can hear it in their voices. When I'm on a call and I tell a client "we launched a podcast," you hear that like "ohhhhhh," as if they're impressed. I think podcasting can have this effect right now, because they still have a perception of "status," like authoring a book.

If you want to stand out, podcasting is a great route, but not the only one. It's the idea of doing something "real companies do."

Instead of just being any other SEO agency or consultant, suddenly we have an extra badge of credibility. This can lead to a client having more confidence/trust in our ability to make decisions and set strategies for them — leading to more success.

Relationship building leads to business outcomes

I can cite two very concrete examples of business outcomes since interviewing about 20 people (we record the episodes a few weeks ahead of time):

• A new client — Someone I interviewed referred a small project to us a week later.
• A placement in a high-profile publication — Someone else I interviewed invited me to contribute content to a high-profile site in the tech/marketing industry. Since I have not done much of this, it opens the door to an opportunity of more exposure and doing so again in the future. (Note: this content has not been posted as of yet). Writing for higher profile sites beyond just the SEO industry has been a passive goal for a while.

Running an interview-format podcast has opened the doors to a TON of relationship building and networking that I normally wouldn't be doing from Worcester, MA. :)

Podcasting impacts your website rankings & traffic

I spent most of this post focusing on ranking in iTunes for the sake of getting more podcast downloads. But your podcast can feed back into your website performance.

Remember, podcast episodes are posted to your website, so all of that content lives on your domain too. This means I could eventually rank for some target terms like:

People will search for podcasts in Google by category, so this is another source of traffic and discovery.

You also get a link from Apple. Despite being nofollowed, I think this still must convey something to Google.

Combine niches to create a new niche & stand out

There are tons of SEOs. And there are LOTS of podcasters.

But there are NOT many podcasting SEOs.

This sounds like a cheap gimmick, but honestly, I only realized it in hindsight. Here's a concrete example.

How many non-SEO podcasters would have noticed the dilemma in Google Play's email here?

Or how many SEOs would have received that email without having a podcast themselves?

However, now being in "both worlds," it's an opportunity to spot something happening in one industry relevant to another — and be the source of interesting news or information.

As an SEO or marketer, "niche" down into something and you'll spot TONS of information you can share between the two worlds, providing value to both, and helping you to stand out.

The future of "standing out" is combining disciplines in new ways.

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IV. Lessons learned & takeaways

Patience

I'm only 44 days into podcasting. I realize I could be employing "tactics" (tricks?) to break into New and Noteworthy. I am aware of other podcasts that have received MORE downloads, reviews, listens, and praise than mine in the same amount of time.

But, I refuse to employ such tricks, so I'm willing to be more patient to let those results come more naturally.

Make a popular show iTunes wants to rank

Just like Google, iTunes want to rank popular/quality podcasts — not make your podcast popular.

Back in about 2006–2012, you could just put a decent show up in iTunes, rank in New and Noteworthy, and be set. But now, you can't depend on iTunes alone to make your show a success. You have to put in the work, especially if you're not going to use tricks.

Should you optimize for iTunes rankings? Of course. But you'll have to market your podcast outside of iTunes as well.

Competition is heating up

We come full circle.

There are real media companies — with budgets and brand equity — pouring into the podcasting space every day. I'm not saying it's too late to have a widely popular podcast. I'm still planning on it.

But check it out: this is New and Noteworthy, April 24th, 2016. Look. At. All. The. BRANDS.

Out of the top 27 podcasts in iTunes, there are these 12 brands:

• Entertainment Weekly
• Earwolf (a Podcasting Network)
• Apple
• Dean & DeLuca
• FOX Sports
• ABC News
• Digg
• New York Daily News
• Women's Health
• New Hampshire Public Radio
• Sports Illustrated
• ESPN

Yes, folks, being successful at podcasting has evolved into real marketing.

But with monthly listeners growing fast as well, there's still opportunity.

The true variable of success is the quality of the product.

---

Chat with me.

Comments? Questions? Disagreements?

I will reply to ALL below.

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Announcing Keyword Explorer: Moz's New Keyword Research Tool

Posted by randfish

A year ago, in April of 2015, I pitched a project internally at Moz to design and launch a keyword research tool, one of the few areas of SEO we've never comprehensively tried to serve. The pitch took effort and cajoling (the actual, internal pitch deck is available here), but eventually received approval, with one big challenge... We had to do it with a team already dedicated to the maintenance and development of our rankings collections and research tools. This project wouldn't get additional staffing — we had to find a way to build it with only the spare bandwidth of this crew.

Sure, we didn't have the biggest team, or the ability to work on the project free from our other obligations, but we had grit. We had passion. We wanted to prove ourselves to our fellow Mozzers and to our customers. We had pride. And we desperately wanted to build something that wasn't just "good enough," but was truly great. Today, I think we've done that.

Meet our new keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer:

If you want to skip hearing about it and just try it out, head on over. You can run 2 free searches/day without even logging in, another 5 with a free community account, and if you're a Pro subscriber, you've already got access. For those who want to learn more, read on!

The 5 big, unique features of Keyword Explorer

Keyword Explorer (which we've taken to calling "KWE" for short) has lots of unique features, metrics, and functionality, but the biggest ones are pretty obvious and, we believe, highly useful:

1. KWE takes you all the way through the keyword research process — from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list, filtering the keywords on it, and prioritizing which ones to target based on the numbers that matter.
2. KWE features metrics essential to the SEO process — two you're familiar with — Volume and Difficulty — and three that are less familiar: Opportunity, Importance, and Potential. Opportunity estimates the relative CTR of the organic web results on a SERP. Importance is a metric you can modify to indicate a keyword that's more or less critical to your campaign/project. And Potential is a combination of all the metrics built to help you prioritize a keyword list.
3. Our volume score is the first volume estimation metric we know of that goes beyond what AdWords reports. We do that using Russ Jones' volume bucket methodology and adding in anonymized clickstream data from ~1 million real searchers in the US. From there, Russ has built a model that predicts the search volume range a keyword is likely to have with ~95% accuracy.
4. Keyword suggestions inside KWE come from almost all the sources we saw SEOs accessing manually in their research processes — Keyword Planner data, Google Suggest, Related Searches, other keywords that the ranking pages also ranked for, topic-modeling ideas, and keywords found from our clickstream data. All of these are available in KWE's suggestions.
5. Import and export functionality are strongly supported. If you've already got a list of keywords and just want KWE's metrics, you can easily upload that to us and we'll fetch them for you. If you like the KWE process and metrics, but have more you want to do in Excel, we support easy, powerful, fast exports. KWE is built with power users in mind, so go ahead and take advantage of the tool's functionality however works best with your processes.

These five are only some of the time-saving, value-adding features in the tool, but they are, I think, enough to make it worthwhile to give Keyword Explorer a serious look.

A visual walkthrough

As an experiment, I've created a visual, slide-by-slide walkthrough of the tool. If you'd rather *see* vs. read the details, this format might be for you:

The Power of Moz's Keyword Explorer from Rand Fishkin

And, for those of you who prefer video, we made a short, 2 minute demo of the tool in that format, too:

Of course, there's a ton of nuance and complexity in a product like this, and given Moz's dedication to transparency, you can find all of that detail in the more thorough explanation below.

Keyword Explorer's metrics

KWE's metrics are among the biggest data-driven advances we've made here at Moz, and a ton of credit for that goes to Dr. Pete Meyers and Mr. Russ Jones. Together, these two have crafted something extraordinary — unique metrics that we've always needed for SEO-based keyword research, but never had before. Those include:

Keyword volume ranges

Nearly every keyword research tool available uses a single source for volume data: Google AdWords' Keyword Planner. We all know from studying it that the number AdWords provides is considerably off from reality, and last year, Moz's Russ Jones was able to quantify those discrepancies in his blog post: Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets.

Since we know that Google's numbers don't actually have precision, but do indicate a bucket, we realized we could create ranges for volume and be significantly more accurate, more of the time. But, that's not all... We also have access to anonymized clickstream data here at Moz, purchased through a third-party (we do NOT collect or use any of our own user data via, for example, the MozBar), that we were able to employ in our new volume ranges.

Using sampling, trend data, and the number of searchers and searches for a given keyword from the clickstream, combined with AdWords' volume data, we produced a volume range that, in our research, showed ~95% accuracy with the true impression counts Google AdWords would report for a keyword whose ad showed during a full month.

We're pretty excited about this model and the data it produces, but we know it's not perfect yet. As our clickstream data grows, and our algorithm for volume improves, you should see more and more accurate ranges in the tool for a growing number of keywords. Today, we have volume data on ~500mm (half a billion) English-language search queries. But, you'll still see plenty of "no data" volume scores in the tool as we can access considerably more terms and phrases for keyword suggestions (more on suggestion sources below).

NOTE: KWE uses volume data modeled on the quantity of searches in the US for a given term/phrase (global English is usually 1.5-3X those numbers). Thus, while the tool can search any Google domain in any country, the volume numbers will always be for US-volume. In the future, we hope to add volume data for other geos as well.

An upgraded, more accurate Keyword Difficulty score

The old Keyword Difficulty tool was one of Moz's most popular (it's still around for another month or so, but will be retired soon in favor of Keyword Explorer). But, we knew it had a lot of flaws in its scoring system. For Keyword Explorer, we invested a lot of energy in upgrading the model. Dr. Pete, Dr. Matt Peters, myself, and Russ had 50+ reply email threads back and forth analyzing graphs, suggesting tweaks, and tuning the new score. Eventually, we came up with a Keyword Difficulty metric that:

• Has far more variation than the old model — you'll see way more scores in the 20s and 30s as well as the 80s and 90s than the prior model, which put almost every keyword between 50–80.
• Accounts for pages that haven't yet been assigned a PA score by using the DA of the domain.
• Employs a smarter, CTR-curve model to show when weaker pages are ranking higher and a page/site may not need as much link equity to rank.
• Adjusts for a few domains (like Blogspot and Wordpress) where DA is extremely high, but PA is often low and the inherited domain authority shouldn't pass on as much weight to difficulty.
• Concentrates on however many results appear on page 1, rather than the top 20 results.

This new scoring model matches better with my own intuition, and I think you'll find it vastly more useful than the old model.

As you can see from one of my lists above (for Haiku Deck, whose board I joined this year), the difficulty ranges are considerably higher than in the past, and more representative of how relatively hard it would be to rank in the organic results for each of the queries.

A true Click-Through Rate Opportunity score

When you look at Google's results, it's pretty clear that some keywords are worthy of pursuit in the organic web results, and some are not. To date, no keyword research tool we know of has attempted to accurately quantify that, but it's a huge part of determining the right terms and phrases to target.

Once we had access to clickstream data, we realized we could accurately estimate the percent of clicks on a given search result based on the SERP features that appeared. For example, a classic, "ten-blue-links" style search result had 100% of click traffic going to organic results. Put a block of 4 AdWords ads above it, though, and that dropped by ~15%. Add a knowledge graph to the right-hand side and another ~10% of clicks are drawn away.

It would be crazy to treat the prioritization of keywords with loads of SERP features and little CTR on the organic results the same as a keyword with few SERP features and tons of organic CTR, so we created a metric that accurately estimates Click-Through-Rate (CTR), called "Opportunity."

The search above for "Keanu" has an instant answer, knowledge graph, news results, and images (further down). Hence, its Opportunity Score is a measly 37/100, which means our model estimates ~37% of clicks go to the organic results.

But, this search, for "best free powerpoint software" is one of those rare times Google is showing nothing but the classic 10 blue links. Hence, its Opportunity Score is 100/100.

If you're prioritizing keywords to target, you need this data. Choosing keywords without it is like throwing darts with a blindfold on — someone's gonna get hurt.

Importance scores you can modify

We asked a lot of SEOs about their keyword research process early in the design phases of Keyword Explorer and discovered pretty fast that almost everyone does the same thing. We put keyword suggestions from various sources into Excel, get metrics for all of them, and then assign some type of numeric representation to each keyword based on our intuition about how important it is to this particular campaign, or how well it will convert, or how much we know our client/boss/team desperately wants to rank for it.

That self-created score was then used to help weight the final decision for prioritizing which terms and phrases to target first. It makes sense. You have knowledge about keywords both subjective and objective that should influence the process. But it needs to do so in a consistent, numeric fashion that flows with the weighting of prioritization.

Hence, we've created a toggle-able "Importance" score in Keyword Explorer:

After you add keywords to a list, you'll see the Importance score is, by default, set to 3/10. We chose this number to make it easy to increase a keyword's importance by 3X and easy to bring it down to 1/3rd. As you modify the importance value, overall Keyword Potential (below) will change, and you can re-sort your list based on the inputs you've given.

For example, in my list above, I set "free slideshow software" to 2/10, because I know it won't convert particularly well (the word "free" often does not). But, I also know that churches and religious organizations love Haiku Deck and find it hugely valuable, so I've bumped up the importance of "worship presentation software" to 9/10.

Keyword Potential

In order to prioritize keywords, you need a metric that combines all the others — volume, difficulty, opportunity, and importance — with a consistent, sensible algorithm that lets the best keywords rise to the top. In Keyword Explorer, that metric is "Potential."

Sorting by Potential shows me keywords that have lots of search volume, relatively low difficulty, relatively high CTR opportunity, and uses my custom importance score to push the best keywords to the top. When you build a list in Keyword Explorer, this metric is invaluable for sorting the wheat from the chaff and identifying the terms and phrases with the most promise.

Keyword research & the list building process

Keyword Explorer is built around the idea that, starting from a single keyword search, you can identify suggestions that match your campaign's goals and include them in your list until you've got a robust, comprehensive set of queries to target.

List building is easy — just select the keywords you like from the suggestions page and use the list selector in the top right corner (it scrolls down as you do) to add your chosen keywords to a list, or create a new list:

Once you've added keywords to a list, you can go to the lists page to see and compare your sets of keywords:

Each individual list will show you the distribution of metrics and data about the keywords in it via these helpful graphs:

The graphs show distributions of each metric, as well as a chart of SERP features to help illustrate which types of results are most common in the SERPs for the keywords on your list:

For example, you can see in my Rock & Grunge band keywords, there's a lot of news results, videos, tweets, and a few star reviews, but no maps/local results, shopping ads, or sitelinks, which makes sense. Keyword Explorer is using country-level, non-personalized, non-geo-biased results, and so some SERPs won't match perfectly to what you see in your local/logged-in results. In the future, we hope to enable even more granular location-based searches in the tool.

The lists themselves have a huge amount of flexibility. You can sort by any column, add, move, or delete in bulk, filter based on any metric, and export to CSV.

If your list gets stale, and you need to update the metrics and SERP features, it's just a single click to re-gather all the data for every keyword on your list. I was particularly impressed with that feature; to me it's one of the biggest time-savers in the application.

Keyword Explorer's unique database of search terms & phrases

No keyword research tool would be complete without a massive database of search terms and phrases, and Keyword Explorer has just that. We started with a raw index of over 2 billion English keywords, then whittled that down to the ~500 million highest-quality ones (we collapsed lots of odd suggestions we found via iterative crawls of AdWords, autosuggest, related searches, Wikipedia titles, topic modeling extractions, SERPscape — via our acquisition last year — and more) into those we felt relatively confident had real volume).

Keyword Explorer's suggestions corpus features six unique filters to get back ideas. We wanted to include all the types of keyword sources that SEOs normally have to visit many different tools to get, all in one place, to save time and frustration. You can see those filters at the top of the suggestions page:

The six filters are:

1. Include a Mix of Sources
   • This is the default filter and will mix together results from all the others, as well as ideas crawled from Google Suggest (autocomplete) and Google’s Related Searches.
2. Only Include Keywords With All of the Keyword Terms
   • This filter will show only suggestions that include all of the terms you’ve entered in the query. For example, if you entered “mustache wax” this filter would only show suggestions that contain both the word “mustache” and the word “wax.”
3. Exclude Your Query Terms to Get Broader Ideas
   • This filter will show only suggestions that do not include your query terms. For example, if you entered “mustache wax,” suggestions might include “facial grooming products” or “beard oil” but nothing with either “mustache” or “wax.”
4. Based on Closely Related Topics
   • This filter uses Moz’s topic modeling algorithm to extract terms and phrases we found on many web pages that also contained the query terms. For example, keywords like “hair gel” and “pomade” were found on many of the pages that had the words “mustache wax” and thus will appear in these suggestions.
5. Based on Broadly Related Topics and Synonyms
   • This filter expands upon the topic modeling system above to include synonyms and more broadly related keywords for a more iterative extraction process and a wider set of keyword suggestions. If “Closely Related Topics” suggestions are too far afield for what you’re seeking, this filter often provides better results.
6. Related to Keywords with Similar Results Pages
   • This filter looks at the pages that ranked highly for the query entered and then finds other search terms/phrases that also contained those pages. For example, many pages that ranked well for “mustache wax” also ranked well for searches like “beard care products” and “beard conditioner” and thus, those keywords would appear in this filter. We're big fans of SEMRush here at Moz, and this filter type shows suggestions very similar to what you'd find using their competitive dataset.

Some of my favorite, unique suggestions come from the "closely related topics" filter, which uses that topic modeling algorithm and process. Until now, extracting topically related keywords required using something like Alchemy API or Stanford's topic modeling software combined with a large content corpus, aka a royal pain in the butt. The KWE team, mostly thanks to Erin, built a suitably powerful English-language corpus, and you can see how well it works:

NOTE: Different filters will work better and worse on different types of keywords. For newly trending searches, topic modeling results are unlikely to be very good, and on longer tail searches, they're not great either. But for head-of-demand-curve and single word concepts, topic modeling often shows really creative lexical relationships you wouldn't find elsewhere.

SERPs Analysis

The final feature of Keyword Explorer I'll cover here (there are lots of cool nooks and crannies I've left for you to find on your own) is the SERPs Analysis. We've broadened the ability of our SERP data to include all the features that often show up in Google's results, so you'll see a page much more representative of what's actually in the keyword SERP:

Holy smack! There's only 3 — yes, THREE — organic results on page one for the query "Disneyland." The rest is sitelinks, tweets, a knowledge graph, news listings, images — it's madness. But, it's also well-represented in our SERPs Analysis. And, as you can see, the Opportunity score of "7" effectively represents just how little room there is for organic CTR.

Over time, we'll be adding and supporting even more features on this page, and trying to grab more of the metrics that matter, too (for example, after Twitter pulled their tweet counts, we had to remove those from the product and are working on a way to get them back).

Yes, you can buy KWE separately (or get it as part of Moz Pro)

Keyword Explorer is the first product in Moz Pro to be available sold separately. It's part of the efforts we've been making with tools like Moz Local, Followerwonk, and Moz Content to offer our software independently rather than forcing you to bundle if you're only using one piece.

If you're already a Moz Pro subscriber, you have access to Keyword Explorer right now! If you're not a subscriber and want to try it out, you can run a few free queries per day (without list building functionality though). And, if you want to use Keyword Explorer on its own, you can buy it for $600/year or $1,800/year depending on your use.

The best part of Keyword Explorer — we're going to build what you want

There's lots to like in the new Keyword Explorer, but we also know it's not complete. This is the first version, and it will certainly need upgrades and additions to reach its full potential. That's why, in my opinion, the best part of Keyword Explorer is that, for the next 3–6 months, the team that built this product is keeping a big part of their bandwidth open to do nothing but make feature additions and upgrades that YOU need.

It was pretty amazing to have the team's schedule for Q2 and Q3 of 2016 make the top priority "Keyword Explorer Upgrades & Iterations." And, in order to take advantage of that bandwidth, we'd love to hear from you. We have dozens (maybe hundreds) of ideas internally of what we want to add next, but your feedback will be a huge part of that. Let us know through the comments below, by tweeting at me, or by sending an email to Rand at Moz.com.

A final note: I want to say a massive thanks to the Keyword Explorer team, who volunteered to take on much more than they bargained for when they agreed to work with me :-) Our fearless, overtime-investing, never-complaining engineers — Evan, Kenny, David, Erin, Tony, Jason, and Jim. One of the best designers I've ever worked with — Christine. Our amazingly on-top-of-everything product manager — Kiki. Our superhero-of-an-engineering-manager — Shawn. Our bug-catching SDETs — Uma and Gary. Our product marketing liaison — Brittani. And Russ & Dr. Pete, who helped with so many aspects of the product, metrics, and flow. You folks all took time away from your other projects and responsibilities to make this product a reality. Thank you.

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More than 4.3 Million Manual Action Messages Sent by Google in 2015

Google has released a new “How we fought webspam” report for 2015, and it has some interesting insights similar to the ones shared by Juan Felipe Rincón at SMX West earlier this year.

Hacked Sites

They say hacked sites continue to be a major issue…. a 180% increase in the number of sites being hacked over the previous year.  On their research blog earlier this year, Google said they identified over 800,000 hacked sites.

Other Manual Actions

Google sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters about manual actions taken on their sites.  And Rincón revealed at SMX West that they send more manual actions for hacked sites than anything else.  But that is still a significant number of manual actions that aren’t hacked site related.

They saw an increase of thin, low quality content, which presumably resulted in manual actions.

Spam Reports

Rincón mentioned this at SMX West, although with slightly lower overall numbers for spam reports.  In the blog post Google says they receive 400,000 spam reports that are prioritized.  Google then acts on 65% of them, of which 80% are spam.

Webmaster Outreach

Google did more than 200 office hour hangouts and live events over the last year, in 17 different languages.

The help forums had tens of thousands of questions answered, and 35,000 of those came from Top Contributors.

You can read the full report here.

The post More than 4.3 Million Manual Action Messages Sent by Google in 2015 appeared first on The SEM Post.

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2 Ways Google Suggest Can Expand Your Keywords Beyond Simply Completing Them

Google Suggest (Autocomplete) has always been providing lots of useful insights onto how Google understands and interprets the language and the user intent. It’s interesting to witness such experiments as entity disambiguation right in auto-suggest drop-down.

Google Suggest reflects some of Google’s experiments they are currently focusing on, like guessing the brand behind the query, personalizing (localizing) the suggestion, including search history, guessing the right spelling (based on the search volume), etc.

I find it actually exciting that you can get inspired by simply typing words in a search box.

Primarily what Google Suggest would do is to complete your query as you type trying to guess what you are going to search for based on how many people searched that before you. This already gives you lots of insight into user behavior and helps with keyword research.

But, beyond that obvious auto-completion, Google Suggest can also be used for more sophisticated content research. Here are the two ways Google Suggest can help you with keyword research and content brainstorming:

1. Come up with keyword-based questions

This is by far the most useful idea for your content research. Answering popular questions in your content is a great way to achieve higher rankings, better loyalty and nowadays also additional SERPs exposure thanks to quick-answer featured snippets.

Google Autosuggest is almost an unlimited resources of niche question research: Just include question words when you type.

A better and a more productive way to do that is to use a third-party tool that is based on Google Autocomplete suggestions and filters questions for you.

SERPstat does exactly that and you’ll be amazed at how many various questions including your keyword people type into the search box:

To achieve these results:

• Type your core term into the search box, select the local Google version and search
• Click “Search suggestions” in the left-hand sidebar
• Click “Only questions” to activate the filter

This exercise resulted in 967 (!) questions for me: It’s a one-year editorial calendar out there (or more!)

Furthermore, I am not even logged in to the tool: This feature comes absolutely free.

You can filter those questions to only see those containing a location. It’s a nice option to have, especially if you are writing about a particular location:

2. Discover related phrases

More often than not, there are several ways to express one and the same idea. Or, there are related concepts and entities which could help you in content research.

A few weeks ago I discovered that Google Autocomplete would try to guess those related concepts and entities if it looks like you are lost.

For example, searching for [saratoga springs missing cats] would trigger related suggestions that may contain none of the query words, like [craiglist glens falls pets], [times union lost and found], [pet connection facebook].

While in this case, Google Autocomplete is not doing what it’s supposed to so (i.e. “complete” the initial query), it definitely shows you how Google understands your search terms. All of the suggestions are somehow related to your query:

1. Mentioning nearby location (“troy”, “schenectady”, “glens fall”) which definitely makes sense because your missing cat may be found in the nearby town
2. Including synonyms (“pets” and “pet” instead of “cats” and “lost” instead for “missing”)
3. Including related entities, e.g. services and organizations that may solve your problem (“pet connection facebook”)
4. Including related, but not exactly synonymous terms (“found” instead of “missing”)

All of that offers you an indepth insight into what to include into your content and how to make it more helpful for the searcher.

To achieve these results:

• Come up with a pretty long query (for Google to have more freedom suggesting you more variations of the query)
• Type it into the search box and click “search”
• Once you see the results, show Google that you are somehow lost by clicking somewhere inside your query

Are there any more cool Google Suggest tricks you are aware of? Please share them in the comments!

The post 2 Ways Google Suggest Can Expand Your Keywords Beyond Simply Completing Them appeared first on The SEM Post.

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AdBlock Plus Releasing New Micropayment for Content Product Flattr Plus

It looks like AdBlock Plus has figured out a better way to monetize off all those people who use their ad blocking technology to block ads.  They are teaming up with Flattr to offer a program for micropayments for content, as a way for publishers to monetize off those who are blocking ads, and their ad revenue.

Together, the two companies have created a new product called Flattr Plus. Like Flattr itself, it allows users to allocate a monthly budget that they want to pay publishers. Unlike Flattr, users don’t have to click a button to “Flattr” a website — instead, it will automatically track their browsing activity and distribute the money based on their engagement.

It sounds somewhat similar to the way a company like Spotify distributes subscription fees to musicians — except it’s not just for artists on a single website or app.

The product is in testing now.  The beta will be later this summer and Flattr Plus expects it to go global by the end of the year.  The beta will give Flattr Plus time to figure out how best to measure engagement in order to distribute payments to publishers.  This is more in line with how Google Contributor works.  So it isn’t a way for publishers to put content behind paywalls and allow visitors to pay small amounts to read a specific piece of content individually.

Interesting, it sounds as though Flattr Plus will hold revenue earned by publishers who don’t sign up, but will release it when they do sign up.  But this could mean that Flattr Plus could earn a significant amount of revenue off those publishers who never sign up, versus splitting the revenue amongst the ones who are signed up.

Flattr Plus expects to generate half a billion dollars in revenue over the next year for publishers.  However, that would depend on AdBlock users actually paying Flattr Plus, and it remains to be seen just how many AdBlock Plus users actually will.

Publishers can sign up for the beta here.

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Why are SEOs slow to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages?

It’s been just over two months since Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), its super-fast brand of mobile webpages running on an amped-up version of HTML.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are designed to speed up the experience of browsing the mobile web, providing page load times which are anywhere from 15 to 85% faster than regular mobile pages. We know that site speed has been a signal in Google’s search ranking algorithms since 2010, and that Google has repeatedly given ranking preference to sites which are optimised for mobile.

Given these two facts, together with the fact that AMP is Google’s own initiative, and it isn’t much of a stretch to conclude that AMP websites are likely rank much better in search than sites with ordinary mobile webpages.

Yet the first survey conducted since the advent of AMP has found that uptake of AMP among professional SEOs is still relatively low. The survey, carried out by SEO PowerSuite, looked at awareness and uptake of AMP among a pool of 385 SEO professionals in North America and Europe.

Of the respondents surveyed, less than a quarter (23%) had taken concrete steps to implement AMP on their mobile sites since the feature’s launch.

Overall awareness of Accelerated Mobile Pages among respondents was high: 75% of the SEO professionals surveyed were aware of AMP. But of these, 21% said they were only aware of the existence of AMP “in passing”, meaning that altogether, nearly half of SEOs (46%) were either unaware of AMP or had only a passing awareness of the feature.

Of those SEOs who hadn’t yet begun to implement AMP on their mobile sites, a high proportion (42%) intended to do more research before making definitive plans. 29% said they had plans to implement AMP in the next six months, and only 5% of respondents said they had no intention of supporting AMP on their mobile sites whatsoever.

The evidence suggests that AMP is fertile ground for getting ahead in search, and a full 80% of survey respondents believed that AMP would have a significant (49%) or moderate (31%) effect on search rankings. So why have SEOs mostly held back from implementing AMP on their mobile sites so far?

Creating an AMP version of your mobile site sounds like a concrete and straightforward way to get ahead in search results, but in practical terms it’s easier said than done. As Damon Kiesow, Head of Product at publishing company McClatchy, told Neiman Lab:

“Everything we know about building a webpage we have to relearn. But we’re relearning it from the premise of converting a current product over, not creating a product from scratch. It’s a fairly complex process!”

Because AMP strips out a lot of the dynamic elements that slow down page loading time, embracing AMP might also mean that SEOs and search marketers have to do away with features that they depend on for business, such as comment systems, lead capture forms and other types of pop-up.

There’s also the very obvious fact that Google’s roll-out of AMP isn’t all that widespread yet. Accelerated Mobile Pages still don’t show up in search results outside of Google.com, meaning that many of the non-US respondents to SEO Powersuite’s survey may be deliberately holding fire until AMP will make a difference to search results in their country.

Accelerated Mobile Pages still have yet to make an appearance in search results outside of Google.com

And of course, there is the occasionally-forgotten fact that the world of search consists of more than just Google. In a situation where implementing AMP would take a lot of time and resources, SEOs may be hesitant to go all-in on a feature that will only affect the standing of their mobile site on Google, especially if they market to a country which favours another major search engine, such as China or Russia.

Ultimately, SEOs have to weigh up the potential benefits of getting in on AMP ahead of their competitors and possibly securing a better spot on the Google SERP versus the drawbacks and costs of implementing the new protocol. SEO Powersuite noted in their published results of the survey that, “the delay in quick adoption [of AMP] offers an opportunity for agile marketers to get ahead of their competition in mobile search by implementing AMP immediately.”

They pointed out that getting in early with AMP has the potential to be beneficial for a long time thereafter, because “As any SEO professional working to overtake competitors knows, Google’s institutional memory is long. It can be difficult to get the search behemoth to “forget” (i.e. to stop ranking) brands it has mentally defined as industry leaders and therefore deserving of higher ranking because of AMP support.”

Therefore, investing resources in AMP at this stage could allow SEOs and search marketers to reap the rewards further down the line. It’s still early days, and with relatively few SEOs apparently having staked their claim with AMP so far, the field is wide open for others to make a move if they judge it to be worthwhile.

For lots more valuable insight on the changing face of digital marketing, attend our two-day Shift London event in May.

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