How Often Should I Blog?

The tweetable answer to the “How often should I blog?” question is this: Blog as often as possible, as long as you’re writing content that offers value to readers. But obviously there’s more nuance involved in answering this question, so let’s dive a little deeper into the benefits of regular blogging. My Usual Advice: Two Posts per Week When I began working with Dr. Cynthia Bailey way back in 2008/09, …Read More

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How Often Should I Blog?

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Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/how-often-blog/7269/

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Don't Buy Link Rich Advertorials (Unless You're Google)

I understand Google's desire to have a clean editorial signal & not wanting people to manipulate the web graph.

But Google once again isn't following the best practices they dish out for others.

Both of the following are not one-off articles, but are part of a "series" of advertorials for various Google products with direct followed links to AdWords, Google Analytics, Chromebook, & Hangouts.

Check the date on this next one: February 19th, the same day Interflora was penalized by Google. This is something that is an ongoing practice for Google, while they penalize others for doing the same thing.

Is using payment to influence search results unethical unless the check has Google on it?

None of those links in the content use nofollow, in spite of many of them having Google Analytics tracking URLs on them.

And I literally spent less than 10 minutes finding the above examples & writing this article. Surely Google insiders know more about Google's internal marketing campaigns than I do. Which leads one to ask the obvious (but uncomfortable) question: why doesn't Google police themselves when they are policing others? If their algorithmic ideals are true, shouldn't they apply to Google as well?

Clearly Google takes paid links that pass pagerank seriously, as acknowledged by their repeated use of them.

Categories: 

google

Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-advertorials

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The Path to SEO Success

Ever wonder how to succeed as an SEO? Dr Pete Meyers of User Effect wrote an excellent “love letter” to newbie SEOs that is worth re-sharing. You won’t find the usual basic technical SEO tips in his letter, nor would …

The Path to SEO Success was originally posted on the Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by Gary Cottam.

You can connect with Gary on Google+, on Twitter @garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about Doublespark SEO or Doublespark Web Design.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/phoenixrealm/UynW/~3/sw1fUhUk3r4/

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How Much Content Should I Have Ready to Go When I Launch a Blog?

I recently had the opportunity to sit with a small group of Pre-Bloggers – people about to start their first blogs. One of the questions I was about how much content should be written before launching a new blog. My answer came in two parts: The Ideal Scenario What I actually have done The reality [...]

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How Much Content Should I Have Ready to Go When I Launch a Blog?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/xFbsEXuKtvU/

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What Should Lead Your Online Marketing Strategy: SEO or Content Marketing?

There are quite a few studies showing that companies publishing more blog posts and more content in general equates to generating more business than those that don’t. I suppose if you’re starting from scratch, adding any kind of content has the potential to improve a company’s ability to attract people seeking to buy. �Since content [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/l9dewcIBpGo/

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Top 5 Social Media Questions Marketers Want Answered

What if you could tap into the minds of 3,000 marketers to find out where they stand when it comes to social media marketing? How valuable would it be to know how your peers are handing the time commitments, social media�platforms and measurement? Lucky you and lucky me, the answers to those questions are found [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/Av0X7px4-EU/

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SMX London 2013 ? Top Takeaways from the Paid Search and SMX Advanced Tracks

We’ve had a great couple of days at SMX London – here’s what we learnt from the Paid Search track from day 1 and the SMX Advanced track from day ...

© SEOptimise SMX London 2013 – Top Takeaways from the Paid Search and SMX Advanced Tracks

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seoptimise/~3/6cK5S4PbJVQ/smx-london-2013-top-takeaways-from-the-paid-search-and-smx-advanced-tracks.html

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12 Reasons Why Hitting Publish is Only the Beginning of Content Marketing by @marceladevivo

Most of us think our job is done after we hit the ?Publish? button on WordPress. �We take a deep breath, sit back in our chair, and congratulate ourselves on another article well done. Then we go back to pulling out what?s left of our hair, worrying about how to build more links. While we [...]

Author information

Marcela De Vivo

CEO at Gryffin Media

Marcela De Vivo has been an SEO since 1999, promoting thousands of sites including large corporate sites and small mom and pop businesses. She loves to connect, so don?t hesitate to reach out through her Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest or LinkedIn profiles.

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The post 12 Reasons Why Hitting Publish is Only the Beginning of Content Marketing by @marceladevivo appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Measuring Social Media

Measuring PPC and SEO is relatively straightforward. But how do we go about credibly measuring social media campaigns, and wider public relations and audience awareness campaigns?

As the hype level of social media starts to fall, then more questions are asked about return on investment. During the early days of anything, the hype of the new is enough to sustain an endeavor. People don't want to miss out. If their competitors are doing it, that's often seen as good enough reason to do it, too.

You may be familiar with this graph. It's called the hype cycle and is typically used to demonstrate the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies:

Where would social media marketing be on this graph?

I think a reasonable guess, if we're seeing more and more discussion about ROI, is somewhere on the "slope of enlightenment". In this article, we?ll look at ways to measure social media performance by grounding it in the only criteria that truly matter - business fundamentals.

Public Relations

We?ve talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto and how the world changed when corporations could no longer control the message. If the message can no longer be controlled, then measuring the effectiveness of public relations becomes even more problematic.

PR used to be about crafting a message and placing it, and nurturing the relationships that allowed that to happen. With the advent of social media, that?s still true, but the scope has expanded exponentially - everyone can now repeat, run with, distort, reconfigure and reinvent the messages. Controlling the message was always difficult, but now it?s impossible.

On the plus side, it?s now much easier to measure and quantify the effectiveness of public relations activity due to the wealth of web data and tools to track what people are saying, to whom, and when.

The Same, Only Different

As much as things change, the more they stay the same. PR and social media is still about relationships. And getting relationships right pays off:

Today, I want to write about something I?d like to call the ?Tim Ferriss Effect.? It?s not exclusive to Tim Ferriss, but he is I believe the marquee example of a major shift that has happened in the last 5 years within the world of book promotion. Here?s the basic idea: When trying to promote a book, the main place you want coverage is on a popular single-author blog or site related to your topic.....The post opened with Tim briefly explaining how he knew me, endorsing me as a person, and describing the book (with a link to my book.) It then went directly into my guest post? there was not even an explicit call to action to buy my book or even any positive statements about my book. An hour later, (I was #45 on Amazon?s best seller list

Public relations is more than about selling, of course. It?s also about managing reputation. It?s about getting audiences to maintain a certain point of view. Social media provides the opportunity to talk to customers and the public directly by using technology to dis-intermediate the traditional gatekeepers.

Can We Really Measure PR & Social Media Performance?

How do you measure the value of a relationship?

Difficult.

How can you really tell if people feel good enough about your product or service to buy it, and that ?feeling good? was the direct result of editorial placement by a well-connected public relations professional?

Debatable, certainly.

Can you imagine another marketing discipline that used dozens of methods for measuring results? Take search engine marketing for example. The standards are pretty cut and dry: visitors, page views, time on site, cost per click, etc. For email marketing, we have delivery, open rates, click thru, unsubscribes, opt-ins, etc?

In previous articles, we?ve looked at how data-driven marketing can save time and be more effective. The same is true of social media, but given it?s not an exact science, it?s a question of finding an appropriate framework.

There are a lot of people asking questions about social media's worth.

No Industry Standard

Does sending out weekly press releases result in more income? How about tweeting 20 times a day? How much are 5,000 followers on Facebook worth? Without a framework to measure performance, there?s no way of knowing.

Furthermore, there?s no agreed industry standard.

In direct marketing channels, such as SEO and PPC, measurement is fairly straightforward. We count cost per click, number of visitors, conversion rate, time on site, and so on. But how do we measure public relations? How do we measure influence and awareness?

PR firms have often developed their own in-house terms of measurement. The problem is that without industry standards, success criteria can become arbitrary and often used simply to show the agency in a good light and thus validate their fees.

Some agencies use publicity results, such as the number of mentions in the press, or the type of mention i.e. prestigious placement. Some use advertising value equivalent i.e. is what editorial coverage would cost if it were buying advertising space. Some use public opinion measures, such as polls, focus groups and surveys, whilst others compare mentions and placement vs competitors i.e. who has more or better mentions, wins. Most use a combination, depending on the nature of the campaign.

Most business people would agree that measurement is a good thing. If we?re spending money, we need to know what we?re getting for that money. If we provide social media services to clients, we need to demonstrate what we?re doing works, so they?ll devote more budget to it in future. If the competition is using this channel, then we need to know if we?re using it better, or worse, than we are.

Perhaps the most significant reason why we measure is to know if we?ve met a desired outcome. To do that we must ignore gut feelings and focus on whether an outcome was achieved.

Why wouldn?t we measure?

Some people don?t like the accountability. Some feel more comfortable with an intuitive approach. It can be difficult for some to accept that their pet theories have little substance when put to the test. It seems like more work. It seems like more expense. It?s just too hard. When it comes to social media, some question whether it can be done much at all

For proof, look no further than The Atlantic, which shook the social media realm recently with its expose of ?dark social? ? the idea that the channels we fret over measuring like Facebook and Twitter represent only a small fraction of the social activity that?s really going on. The article shares evidence that reveals that the vast majority of sharing is still done through channels like email and IM that are nearly impossible to measure (and thus, dark).

And it's not like a lot of organizations are falling over themselves to get measurement done:

According to a Hypatia Research report, "Benchmarking Social Community Platform Investments & ROI," only 40% of companies measure social media performance on a quarterly or annual basis, while almost 13% or the organizations surveyed do not measure ROI from social media at all, and another 18% said they do so only on an ad hoc basis. (Hypatia didn't specify what response the other 29% gave.)

If we agree that measurement is a good thing and can lead to greater efficiency and better decision making, then the fact your competition may not be measuring well, or at all, then this presents great opportunity. We should strive to measure social media ROI, as providers or consumers, or it becomes difficult to justify spend. The argument that we can't measure because we don?t know all the effects of our actions isn?t a reason not to measure what we can.

Marketing has never been an exact science.

What Should We Measure?

Measurement should be linked back to business objectives.

In ?Measure What Matters?, Katie Delahaye Paine outlines seven steps to social media measurement. I liked these seven steps, because they aren?t exclusive to social media. They?re the basis for measuring any business strategy and similar measures have been used in marketing for a long time.

It?s all about proving something works, and then using the results to enhance future performance. The book is a great source for those interested in reading further on this topic, which I?ll outline here.

1. What Are Your Objectives?

Any marketing objective should serve a business objective. For example, ?increase sales by X by October 31st?.

Having specific, business driven objectives gets rid of conjecture and focuses campaigns. Someone could claim that spending 30 days tweeting a new message a day is a great thing to do, but if, at the end of it, a business objective wasn?t met, then what was the point?

Let?s say an objective is ?increase sales of shoes compared to last December?s figures?. What might the social strategy look like? It might consist of time-limited offers, as opposed to more general awareness messages. What if the objective was to ?get 5,000 New Yorkers to mention the brand before Christmas?? This would lend itself to viral campaigns, targeted locally. Linking the campaign to specific business objectives will likely change the approach.

If you have multiple objectives, you can always split them up into different campaigns so you can measure the effectiveness of each separately. Objectives typically fall into sales, positioning, or education categories.

2. Who Is The Audience?

Who are you talking to? And how will you know if you?ve reached them? Once you have reached them, what is it you want them to do? How will this help your business?

Your target audience is likely varied. Different audiences could be industry people, customers, supplier organizations, media outlets, and so on. Whilst the message may be seen by all audiences, you should be clear about which messages are intended for who, and what you want them to do next. The messages will be different for each group as each group likely picks up on different things.

Attach a value to each group. Is a media organization picking up on a message more valuable than a non-customer doing so? Again, this should be anchored to a business requirement. ?We need media outlets following us so they may run more of our stories in future. Our research shows more stories has led to increased sales volume in the past?. Then a measure might be to count the number of media industry followers, and to monitor the number of stories they produce.

3. Know Your Costs

What does it cost you to run social media campaigns? How much time will it take? How does this compare to other types of campaigns? What is your opportunity cost? How much does it cost to measure the campaign?

As Delahaye Paine puts it, it?s the ?I? in ROI.

4. Benchmark

Testing is comparative, so have something to compare against.

You can compare yourself against competitors, and/or your own past performance. You can compare social media campaigns against other marketing campaigns. What do those campaigns usually achieve? Do social media campaigns work better, or worse, in terms of achieving business goals?

In terms of ROI, what?s a social media ?page view? worth? You could compare this against the cost of a click in PPC.

5. Define KPIs

Once you?ve determined objectives, defined the audience, and established benchmarks, you should establish criteria for success.

For example, the objective might be to increase media industry followers. The audience is the media industry and the benchmark is the current number of media industry followers. The KPI would be the number of new media industry followers signed up, as measured by classifying followers into subgroups and conducting a headcount.

Measuring the KPI will differ depending on objective, of course. If you?re measuring the number of mentions in the press vs your competitor, that?s pretty easy to quantify.

?Raising awareness? is somewhat more difficult, however once you have a measurement system in place, you can start to break down the concept of ?awareness? into measurable components. Awareness of what? By whom? What constitutes awareness? How to people signal they?re aware of you? And so on.

6. Data Collection Tools

How will you collect measurement data?

• Content analysis of social or traditional media
• Primary research via online, mail or phone survey
• Web analytics

There are an overwhelming number of tools available, and outside the scope of this article. No tool can measure ?reputation? or ?awareness? or ?credibility? by itself, but can produce usable data if we break those areas down into suitable metrics. For example, ?awareness? could be quantified by ?page views + a survey of a statistically valid sample?.

Half the battle is asking the right questions.

7. Take Action

A measurement process is about iteration. You do something, get the results back, act on them and make changes, and arrive at a new status quo. You then do something starting from that new point, and so on. It?s an ongoing process of optimization.

Were objectives met? What conclusions can you draw?

Those seven steps will be familiar to anyone who has measured marketing campaigns and business performance. They?re grounded in the fundamentals. Without relating social media metrics back to the underlying fundamentals, we can never be sure if what we?re doing is making or a difference, or worthwhile. Is 5,000 Twitter followers a good thing?

It depends.

What business problem does it address?

Did You Make A Return?

You invested time and money. Did you get a return?

If you?ve linked your social media campaigns back to business objectives you should have a much clearer idea. Your return will depend on the nature of your business, of course, but it could be quantified in terms of sales, cost savings, avoiding costs or building an audience.

In terms of SEO, we?ve long advocated building brand. Having people conduct brand searches is a form of insurance against Google demoting your site. If you have brand search volume, and Google don?t return you for brand searches, then Google looks deficient.

So, one goal of social media that gels with SEO is to increase brand awareness. You establish a benchmark of branded searches based on current activity. You run your social media campaigns, and then see if branded searches increase.

Granted, this is a fuzzy measure, especially if you have other awareness campaigns running, as you can?t be certain cause and effect. However, it?s a good start. You could give it a bit more depth by integrating a short poll for visitors i.e. ?did you hear about us on Twitter/Facebook/Other??.

Mechanics Of Measurement

Measuring social media isn?t that difficult. In fact, we could just as easily use search metrics in many cases. What is the cost per view? What is the cost per click? Did the click from a social media campaign convert to desired action? What was your business objective for the social media campaign? To get more leads? If so, then count the leads. How much did each lead cost to acquire? How does that cost compare to other channels, like PPC? What is the cost of customer acquisition via social media?

In this way, we could split social media out into the customer service side and marketing side. Engaging with your customers on Facebook may not be all that measurable in terms of direct marketing effects, it?s more of a customer service function. As such, budget for the soft side of social media need not come out of marketing budgets, but customer service budgets. This could still be measured, or course, by running customer satisfaction surveys.

Is Social Media Marketing Public Relations?

Look around the web for definitions of the differences between PR and social media, and you?ll find a lot of vague definitions.

Social media is a tool used often used for the purpose of public relations. The purpose is to create awareness and nurture and guide relationships.

Public relations is sometimes viewed it as a bit of a scam. It?s an area that sucks money, yet can often struggle to prove its worth, often relying on fuzzy, feel-good proclamations of success and vague metrics. It doesn?t help that clients can have unrealistic expectations of PR, and that some PR firms are only too happy to promise the moon:

PR is nothing like the dark, scary world that people make it out to be?but it is a new one for most. And knowing the ropes ahead of time can save you from setting impossibly high expectations or getting overpromised and oversold by the firm you hire. I?ve seen more than my fair share of clients bringing in a PR firm with the hopes that it?ll save their company or propel a small, just-launched start-up into an insta-Facebook. And unfortunately, I?ve also seen PR firms make these types of promises. Guess what? They?re never kept

Internet marketing, in general, has a credibility problem when it doesn?t link activity back to business objectives.

Part of that perception, in relation to social media, comes from the fact public relations is difficult to control:

The main conduit to mass publics, particularly with a consumer issue such as rail travel or policing, are the mainstream media. Unlike advertising, which has total control of its message, PR cannot convey information without the influence of opinion, much of it editorial. How does the consumer know what is fact, and what has influenced the presentation of that fact?

But lack of control of the message, as the Cluetrain Manifesto points out, is the nature of the environment in which we exist. Our only choice, if we are to prosper in the digital environment, is to embrace the chaos.

Shouldn?t PR just happen? If you?re good, people just know? Well, even Google, that well known, engineering-driven advertising company has PR deeply embedded from almost day one:

David Krane was there from day one as Google's first public relations official. He's had a hand in almost every single public launch of a Google product since the debut of Google.com in 1999.

Good PR is nurtured. It?s a process. The way to find out if it?s good PR or ineffective PR is to measure it. PR isn?t a scam, anymore so than any other marketing activity is a scam. We can find out if it?s worthwhile only by tracking and measuring and linking that measurement back to a business case. Scams lack transparency.

The way to get transparency is to measure and quantify.

Categories: 

marketing

Source: http://www.seobook.com/measuring-social-media

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Ten Conversion Testing Questions Answered

We talk a lot about conversion optimization tactics on Get Elastic. While they may be backed up by research, case studies or even what may be considered common sense, they can always be punctuated by one phrase: “You should test that.” I recently asked Chris Goward, author of You Should Test That some hard-hitting conversion [...]

Source: http://www.getelastic.com/ten-conversion-testing-questions-answered/

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On focus, and how we?re slowly changing our business model

Warning: this isn’t the usual SEO / WordPress related post, but more of a “personal” post about how I’ve gone about building and changing my / our business. When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to…

On focus, and how we’re slowly changing our business model is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/LFTjA6qmaDA/

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Tribes: It Depends

Following my article about paywalls, a reader raised a point about ?Tribes?. I?m paraphrasing the ensuing conversation we had, but I think it could be summarised as:

You?re wrong! The way to succeed on the internet is to build a tribe! Give your content away to the tribe! Grow the tribe!

An internet tribe is ?an unofficial community of people who share a common interest, and usually who are loosely affiliated with each other through social media or other internet mechanisms?.

The use of the term dates back to 2003. More recently, Seth Godin wrote a book on the topic. As did Patrick Hanlon. A tribe could be characterized as a special interest group, a demographic, or a group of people interested in the same thing - plus internet.

So, is cultivating a tribe by giving everything away for free a better approach than locking information behind a paywall? If we lock some information away behind a paywall, does that mean we can?t build a tribe? BTW: I'm not suggesting Seth or Patrick assert such things, these issues came out of the conversation I had with the reader.

Well, It Depends

People don't have to build a paywall in order to be successful. Or build a tribe in order to be successful. Either approach could be totally the wrong thing to do.

If anyone found the article on paywalls confusing, then hopefully I can clarify. The article about paywalls was an exploration. We looked at the merits, and pitfalls, involved.

Paywalls, like tribes, will not work for everyone. I suspect most people would agree that there is no ?One True System? when it comes to internet marketing, which is why we write about a wide range of marketing ideas. Each idea is a tool people could use, depending on their goals and circumstances, but certainly not proposed as being one-size-fits all. In any case, having a paywall does not mean one cannot build a tribe. The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive.

People may also recall The Well, the mother of all internet tribes. This tribe didn't lead to profit for owners Salon. It was eventually sold it to it's own users for a song. Salon, the parent company, has never been profitable. They have also tried various paywall models and free content models, although I think some of the free content looks very eHow: Driven by Demand Media.

With that in mind, let?s take a look at tribes and how to decide if a certain marketing approach is right for you.

Cart Before The Horse

"Cultivating a tribe" is a strategy.

Will everyone win using this strategy?

No.

Like any strategy, it should be justified by the business case. The idea behind tribes is that you form a group of people with similar interests, and then lead that group, and then, given appropriate and effective leadership, people help spread your message far and wide, grow the tribe, and eventually you will make money from them.

There is nothing wrong with this approach, and it works well for some businesses. However, like any marketing strategy, there is overhead involved. There is also an opportunity cost involved. And just like any marketing strategy, the success of the strategy should be measured in terms of return on investment. Is the cost of building, growing and maintaining a tribe lower than the return derived from it?

If not, then it fails.

How To Not Make Money From A Tribe

During the conversation I had with the reader, it was intimated that if someone can?t make money from a tribe, then it?s their own fault. After all, if someone can get a lot of people together by giving away their content, then money naturally follows, right?

The idea that profit is the natural result of building an audience resulted in the dot.com crash of 2000.

Many web companies at that time focused on building an audience first and worried about how it was all going to pay off later. Webvan, Pets.com, boo.com, and many of the rest didn?t suffer from lack of awareness, but from a lack of a sound business case and from a failure to execute.

We?ve had digital tribes, in various forms, since the beginning of the internet. Actually, they predate the internet . One early example of a digital tribe was the BBSs, a dial-in community. These tribes were replaced by internet forums and places, such as The Well.

Many internet forums don?t make a great deal of money. Many are run for fun at break-even, or a loss. Some make a lot of money. Whether they make a loss, a little money or a lot of money depends not on the existence of the tribe that surrounds them, as they all have tribes, but on the underlying business model.

Does the tribe translate into enough business activity in order to be profitable? How much is a large tribe of social-media aficionados interested in ?free stuff? worth? More than a small demographic of Facebook-challenged people interested in high margin services? Creating a tribe to help target the latter group might possibly work, but there are probably better approaches to take.

Does SEOBook.com have a ?tribe?? Should we always be looking to ?grow the tribe??

We don?t tend to characterize our approach in terms of tribes. At SEOBook.com, we do a lot of things to maintain a particular focus. We tend to write long, in-depth pieces on topics we hope people find interesting as opposed to chasing keyword terms. We don?t run an endless series of posts on optimizing meta tags. We don?t cover every tiny bit of search news. We focus almost exclusively on the needs of the intermediate-to-expert search professional. We could do many things to ?grow the tribe?, but that would run counter to our objectives. It would dilute the offering. We could have a "free trial" but the noise it would create in our member forums would lower the value of the forums to existing community members.

We do offer some free tools available to everyone, but when it comes to the paid parts of the site we leave it up to individuals to decide if they think they're a good fit for our community. If a person has issues with the site before becoming a paid member, we doubt they would ever becoming a long-lasting community member, so our customer service to people who have not yet become customers is effectively nil. In short, we don?t want to run the hamster treadmill of managing a huge tribe when it doesn?t support the business case.

The Good Things About Tribes

Tribes can help spread the word. People tell people something, and they tell people, and the audience grows and grows.

They?re great for political groups, movements, consultants, charities, and any endeavour with a strong social focus. They tend to suit sectors where the people in that sector spend a lot of time ?living digitally?.

As a marketing approach, building tribes is well-suited to the charismatic, relentless self-promoter. A lot of tribes tend to orient around such individuals.

The Problems With Tribes

Not everyone can be a leader. Not everyone has got the time to be a relentless self-promoter and the time spent undertaking such activity can present a high opportunity cost if that?s not how your target market rolls. Perhaps a relentless focus on PPC, or SEO, or another channel will pay higher dividends.

There is also an ever-growing noise level in the social media channels, but the attention level remains relatively constant. The medium is forever being squeezed. Is blogging/facebooking/tweeting all day with the aim of building a tribe really a useful thing to be doing? Only metrics can tell us that, so make sure you monitor ?em!

To build a big tribe in any competitive space takes serious work and it takes a long time. Many people will fail using that approach. Not only are some people not cut out to lead, the numbers don?t work if everyone used this method. If everyone who led a tribe also followed hundreds of other people leading their own tribes, then there simply aren?t enough hours in the day to get anything else done.

It will not be an efficient marketing approach for many.

Getting People To Follow Is Not The Goal Of Business

I know of a company that just got bought out for a few million.

Sounds great, right. However, I know they carry a lot of debt and their business model puts them on a downward trajectory. This site has a massive ?tribe?. This site is number one in their niche. People tweet, Facebook, follow them, sing their praises, they engage up, down, left, right and center. They?ve got the internet tribe thing down pat, and their tribe buys their stuff.

One problem.

The business is based on low prices. The tribe is fixated on ?getting a great price?. This business is vulnerable to competitors as that tribes loyalty, that took so long to build, is based on price - which is no loyalty at all. Perhaps they achieved their exit strategy, and did what they needed to do, but growing a massive and active internet tribe didn't prevent them being swallowed by a larger competitor. The larger competitor doesn't really have a tribe, but focuses on traditional channels.

Without getting the fundamentals right, a tribe, or any other marketing strategy, is unlikely to pay off. The danger in listening to gurus is they can be fadish. There is money in evangelizing the bright, shiny new marketing idea that sounds really good.

But beware of placing the cart before the horse. Marketing is a numbers game that comes down to ROI. Does building the tribe make enough money to justify serving the tribe?

Having followers is no bad thing. Just makes sure they?re the right followers, for the right reasons, and acquiring them supports a sound business case :)

Categories: 

marketing

Source: http://www.seobook.com/tribes-it-depends

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[Infographic] Local Consumer?s Digital Path to Purchase More Convoluted Than Ever

Local Internet marketing. So fun and easy to talk about but very, very difficult to do. It’s a trouble spot for many local marketers because there is so much ground to cover. With that knowledge, now consider putting yourself on the other side of the table as the consumer. There are so many information sources [...]

Source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/05/infographic-local-consumers-digital-path-to-purchase-more-convoluted-than-ever.html

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Bing Launches Sitemap Plugin, Ads Traffic Quality Center, News Carousels

Bing has been busy in recent days. The search engine has announced that the Bing Sitemap Plugin is out of beta. Bing Ads advertisers have a new resource with the launch of the Traffic Quality Center. And Bing News has rolled out news carousels.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sewblog/~3/djemAmypuhA/Bing-Launches-Sitemap-Plugin-Ads-Traffic-Quality-Center-News-Carousels

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12 Blogging Income Streams [And the Story of My 10 Year 'Overnight' Success]

Today I was speaking with a blogger (I’ll call her Alice for the sake of this post) who was feeling a little overwhelmed with the idea of monetizing her blog. She expressed that as she looked at other blogs in her niche, everyone seemed to be doing such amazing things. She said she felt she’d [...]

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

12 Blogging Income Streams [And the Story of My 10 Year 'Overnight' Success]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/UuUqOUJrELM/

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The Power of Visual Content Marketing and Brand Visuals in Action

Visual content is certainly trendy – see the meteoric rise in infographics and social engagement with images as proof. Yet the need for content that appeals on a visual level and presents information in a more engaging format than text goes far beyond what is cool or fun to create. In creating curriculum and learning [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/YRozHNfnnqk/

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The Truth About Content Marketing & SEO

Over the past few years, there’s been a tremendous focus on content creation in the search and overall digital marketing world. Once you get past the hype, there are plenty of well documented case studies showing the ROI of a content marketing approach. Unfortunately, content marketing campaigns are often guilty of paying little more than [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/AVwNHk-SmsA/

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7 Common Mistakes People Make in Form Building

7 Common Mistakes People Make in Form Building

Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services

7 Common Mistakes People Make in Form BuildingPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services One of the most important activities that any Internet marketer needs to undertake is building forms. After all, you can?t build an e-mail list without a form, even if it?s just a request for an e-mail address and a [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/quantumseolabs/~3/-pgTZANC5zc/

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Plugging the link leaks, part 2 ? site canonicalisation

A couple of months ago we took a look at how you can reclaim links that you are simply throwing away. For the second look at how to fix common ...

© SEOptimise Plugging the link leaks, part 2 – site canonicalisation

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seoptimise/~3/qnmR6IjrGCg/link-leaks-2-site-canonicalisation.html

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My wife keeps me grounded

This is a harmless “hairball” post I had as a draft. Me: Hey, they added me to popurls.com! My wife: Never heard of it. (pause) Had you heard of it before? Me: Yeah. Wife: Really? Me: Yeah! Wife: (with an extra helping of sarcasm) Really? Me: Yes! Wife: (dripping with condescension) You’re a very important [...]

Source: http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/tIarGYZDVjs/

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Experiment Driven Web Publishing

Do users find big headlines more relevant? Does using long text lead to more, or less, visitor engagement? Is that latest change to the shopping cart going to make things worse? Are your links just the right shade of blue?

If you want to put an end to tiresome subjective arguments about page length, or the merits of your clients latest idea, which is to turn their website pink, then adopting an experimental process for web publishing can be a good option.

If you don?t currently use an experiment-driven publishing approach, then this article is for you. We?ll look at ways to bake experiments into your web site, the myriad of opportunities testing creates, how it can help your SEO, and ways to mitigate cultural problems.

Controlled Experiments

The merits of any change should be derived from the results of the change under a controlled test. This process is common in PPC, however many SEO?s will no doubt wonder how such an approach will affect their SEO.

Well, Google encourages it.

We?ve gotten several questions recently about whether website testing?such as A/B or multivariate testing?affects a site?s performance in search results. We?re glad you?re asking, because we?re glad you?re testing! A/B and multivariate testing are great ways of making sure that what you?re offering really appeals to your users

Post-panda, being more relevant to visitors, not just machines, is important. User engagement is more important. If you don?t closely align your site with user expectations and optimize for engagement, then it will likely suffer.

The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it?s not as easy anymore to compete by simply producing pages at scale, unless they?re created with quality in mind. Which means for some sites, SEO just got a whole lot harder.

Experiments can help us achieve greater relevance.

If It ?Aint Broke, Fix It

One reason for resisting experiment-driven decisions is to not mess with success. However, I?m sure we all suspect most pages and processes can be made better.

If we implement data-driven experiments, we?re more likely to spot the winners and losers in the first place. What pages lead to the most sales? Why? What keywords are leading to the best outcomes? We identify these pages, and we nurture them. Perhaps you already experiment in some areas on your site, but what would happen if you treated most aspects of your site as controlled experiments?

We also need to cut losers.

If pages aren?t getting much engagement, we need to identify them, improve them, or cut them. The Panda update was about levels of engagement, and too many poorly performing pages will drag your site down. Run with the winners, cut the losers, and have a methodology in place that enables you to spot them, optimize them, and cut them if they aren?t performing.

Testing Methodology For Marketers

Tests are based on the same principles used to conduct scientific experiments. The process involves data gathering, designing experiments, running experiments, analyzing the results, and making changes.

1. Set A Goal

A goal should be simple i.e. ?increase the signup rate of the newsletter?.

We could fail in this goal (decreased signups), succeed (increased signups), or stay the same. The goal should also deliver genuine business value.

There can be often multiple goals. For example, ?increase email signups AND Facebook likes OR ensure signups don?t decrease by more than 5%?. However, if you can get it down to one goal, you?ll make life easier, especially when starting out. You can always break down multiple goals into separate experiments.

2. Create A Hypothesis

What do you suspect will happen as a result of your test? i.e. ?if we strip all other distractions from the email sign up page, then sign-ups will increase?.

The hypothesis can be stated as an improvement, or preventing a negative, or finding something that is wrong. Mostly, we?re concerned with improving things - extracting more positive performance out of the same pages, or set of pages.

?Will the new video on the email sign-up page result in more email signups?? Only one way to find out. And once you have found out, you can run with it or replace it safe in the knowledge it's not just someone's opinion. The question will move from ?just how cool is this video!? (subjective) to ?does this video result in more email sign-ups??. A strategy based on experiments eliminates most subjective questions, or shifts them to areas that don?t really affect the business case.

The video sales page significantly increased the number of visitors who clicked to the price/guarantee page by 46.15%....Video converts! It did so when mentioned in a ?call to action? (a 14.18% increase) and also when used to sell (35% and 46.15% increases in two different tests)

When crafting a hypothesis, you should keep business value clearly in mind. If the hypothesis suggests a change that doesn?t add real value, then testing it is likely a waste of time and money. It creates an opportunity cost for other tests that do matter.

When selecting areas to test, you should start by looking at the areas which matter most to the business, and the majority of users. For example, an e-commerce site would likely focus on product search, product descriptions, and the shopping cart. The About Page - not so much.

Order areas to test in terms of importance and go for the low hanging fruit first. If you can demonstrate significant gains early on, then it will boost your confidence and validate your approach. As experimental testing becomes part of your process, you can move on more granular testing. Ideally, you want to end up with a culture whereby most site changes have some sort of test associated with them, even if it?s just to compare performance against the previous version.

Look through your stats to find pages or paths with high abandonment rates or high bounce rates. If these pages are important in terms of business value, then prioritize these for testing. It?s important to order these pages in terms of business value, because high abandonment rates or bounce rates on pages that don?t deliver value isn?t a significant issue. It?s probably more a case of ?should these pages exist at all??

3. Run An A/B or Multivariate Test

Two of the most common testing methodologies in direct response marketing are A/B testing and multivariate testing.

A/B Testing, otherwise known as split testing, is when you compare one version of a page against another. You collect data how each page performs, relative to the other.

Version A is typically the current, or favored version of a page, whilst page B differs slightly, and is used as a test against page A. Any aspect of the page can be tested, from headline, to copy, to images, to color, all with the aim of improving a desired outcome. The data regarding performance of each page is tested, the winner is adopted, and the loser rejected.

Multivariate testing is more complicated. Multivariate testing is when more than one element is tested at any one time. It?s like performing multiple A/B tests on the same page, at the same time. Multivariate testing can test the effectiveness of many different combinations of elements.

Which method should you use?

In most cases, in my experience, A/B testing is sufficient, but it depends. In the interest of time, value and sanity, it?s more important and productive to select the right things to test i.e. the changes that lead to the most business value.

As your test culture develops, you can go more and more granular. The slightly different shade of blue might be important to Google, but it?s probably not that important to sites with less traffic. But, keep in mind, assumptions should be tested ;) Your mileage may vary.

There are various tools available to help you run these test. I have no association with any of these, but here?s a few to check out:

• Optimizely
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Vertiser
• Google Analytics Content Experiments
• 47 testing tools

4. Ensure Statistical Significance

Tests need to show statistical significance. What does statistically significant mean?

For those who are comfortable with statistics:

Statistical significance is used to refer to two separate notions: the p-value, the probability that observations as extreme as the data would occur by chance in a given single null hypothesis; or the Type I error rate ? (false positive rate) of a statistical hypothesis test, the probability of incorrectly rejecting a given null hypothesis in favor of a second alternative hypothesis

For those of you, like me, who prefer a more straightforward explanation. Here?s also a good explanation in relation to PPC, and a video explaining statistical significance in reference in A/B test.

In short, you need enough visitors taking an action to decide it is not likely to have occurred randomly, but is most likely attributable to a specific cause i.e. the change you made.

5. Run With The Winners

Run with the winners, cut the losers, rinse and repeat. Keep in mind that you may need to retest at different times, as the audience can change, or their motivations change, depending on underlying changes in your industry. Testing, like great SEO, is best seen as an ongoing process.

Make the most of every visitor who arrives on your site, because they?re only ever going to get more expensive.

Here?s an interesting seminar where the results of hundreds of experiments were reduced down to three fundamental lessons:

• a) How can I increase specify? Use quantifiable, specific information as it relates to the value proposition
• b) How can I increase continuity? Always carry across the key message using repetition
• c) How can I increase relevance? Use metrics to ask ?why?

Tests Fail

Often, tests will fail.

Changing content can sometimes make little, if any, difference. Other times, the difference will be significant. But even when tests fail to show a difference, it still gives you information you can use. These might be areas in which designers, and other vested interests, can stretch their wings, and you know that it won?t necessarily affect business value in terms of conversion.

Sometimes, the test itself wasn't designed well. It might not have been given enough time to run. It might not have been linked to a business case. Tests tend to get better as we gain more experience, but having a process in place is the important thing.

You might also find that your existing page works just great and doesn?t need changing. Again, it?s good to know. You can then try replicating this successes in areas where the site isn?t performing so well.

Enjoy Failing

?Fail fast, early and fail often?.

Failure and mistakes are inevitable. Knowing this, we put mechanisms in place to spot failures and mistakes early, rather than later. Structured failure is a badge of honor!

Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of ?failing forward? as a common tech-industry phrase puts it: in Germany bankruptcy can end your business career whereas in Silicon Valley it is almost a badge of honour

Silicon Valley even comes up with euphemisms, like ?pivot?, which weaves failure into the fabric of success.

Or perhaps it?s because some of the best ideas in tech today have come from those that weren?t so good. (Remember, Apple's first tablet devices was called the Newton.)
There?s a word used to describe this get-over-it mentality that I heard over and over on my trip through Silicon Valley and San Francisco this week: ?Pivot?

Experimentation, and measuring results, will highlight failure. This can be a hard thing to take, and especially hard to take when our beloved, pet theories turn out to be more myth than reality. In this respect, testing can seem harsh and unkind. But failure should be seen for what it is - one step in a process leading towards success. It?s about trying stuff out in the knowledge some of it isn?t going to work, and some of it will, but we can?t be expected to know which until we try it.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries talks about the benefits of using lean methodologies to take a product from not-so-good to great, using systematic testing?

If your first product sucks, at least not too many people will know about it. But that is the best time to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them to make the product better. ?It is inevitable that the first product is going to be bad in some ways,? he says. The Lean Startup methodology is a way to systematically test a company?s product ideas.
Fail early and fail often. ?Our goal is to learn as quickly as possible,? he says

Given testing can be incremental, we don?t have to fail big. Swapping one graphic position for another could barely be considered a failure, and that?s what a testing process is about. It?s incremental, and iterative, and one failure or success doesn?t matter much, so long as it?s all heading in the direction of achieving a business goal.

It?s about turning the dogs into winners, and making the winners even bigger winners.

Feel Vs Experimentation

Web publishing decisions are often based on intuition, historical precedence - ?we?ve always done it this way? - or by copying the competition. Graphic designers know about colour psychology, typography and layout. There is plenty of room for conflict.

Douglas Bowden, a graphic designer at Google, left Google because he felt the company relied too much on data-driven decisions, and not enough on the opinions of designers:

Yes, it?s true that a team at Google couldn?t decide between two blues, so they?retesting 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can?t operate in an environment like that. I?ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

That probably doesn?t come as a surprise to any Google watchers. Google is driven by engineers. In Google?s defense, they have such a massive user base that minor changes can have significant impact, so their approach is understandable.

Integrate Design

Putting emotion, and habit, aside is not easy.

However, experimentation doesn?t need to exclude visual designers. Visual design is valuable. It helps visitors identify and remember brands. It can convey professionalism and status. It helps people make positive associations.

But being relevant is also design.

Adopting an experimentation methodology means designers can work on a number of different designs and get to see how the public really does react to their work. Design X converted better than design Y, layout Q works best for form design, buttons A, B and C work better than buttons J, K and L, and so on. It?s a further opportunity to validate creative ideas.

Cultural Shift

Part of getting experimentation right has to do with an organizations culture. Obviously, it?s much easier if everyone is working towards a common goal i.e. ?all work, and all decisions made, should serve a business goal, as opposed to serving personal ego?.

All aspects of web publishing can be tested, although asking the right questions about what,to test is important. Some aspects may not make a measurable difference in terms of conversion. A logo, for example. A visual designer could focus on that page element, whilst the conversion process might rely heavily on the layout of the form. Both the conversion expert and the design expert get to win, yet not stamp on each others toes.

One of the great aspects of data-driven decision making is that common, long-held assumptions get challenged, often with surprising results. How long does it take to film a fight scene? The movie industry says 30 days.

Mark Walberg challenged that assumption and did it in three:

Experts go with what they know. And they?ll often insist something needs to take a long time. But when you don?t have tons of resources, you need to ask if there?s a simpler, judo way to get the impact you desire. Sometimes there?s a better way than the ?best? way. I thought of this while watching ?The Fighter? over the weekend. There?s a making of extra on the DVD where Mark Wahlberg, who starred in and produced the film, talks about how all the fight scenes were filmed with an actual HBO fight crew. He mentions that going this route allowed them to shoot these scenes in a fraction of the time it usually takes

How many aspects of your site are based on assumption? Could those assumptions be masking opportunities or failure?

Winning Experiments

Some experiments, if poorly designed, don?t lead to more business success. If an experiment isn?t focused on improving a business case, then it?s probably just wasted time. That time could have been better spent devising and running better experiments.

In Agile software design methodologies, the question is always asked ?how does this change/feature provide value to the customer?. The underlying motive is ?how does this change/feature provide value to the business?. This is a good way to prioritize test cases. Those that potentially provide the most value, such as landing page optimization on PPC campaigns, are likely to have a higher priority than, say, features available to forum users.

Further Reading

I hope this article has given you some food for thought and that you'll consider adopting some experiment-based processes to your mix. Here's some of the sources used in this article, and further reading:

• Marketing Experiments.com
• Convert! Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion
• Experiment! Website conversion Rate Optimization
• Unbounce resource section

Categories: 

marketing

Source: http://www.seobook.com/experiment-driven-web-publishing

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Goodbye SEOmoz. Hello Moz!

Posted by randfish

For the last two years, the 130+ Mozzers across product, engineering, marketing, and operations have been working to transform this company to the next stage of our evolution. Today, that incredibly demanding, intense, but ultimately rewarding process has reached its first goal. I'm excited to announce that as of today, SEOmoz is formally transitioning our brand, our products, our company name, and all of our efforts to Moz.

What?! Why?! How?! I know - there are lots of questions, and I will do my best to answer them all. For those of you who'd like to skip ahead, here's what you'll find in this post:

• Why We're Retiring SEOmoz
• The Mission & Vision for Moz
• The Beta Launch of Moz Analytics
• Plans for the Years Ahead
• Notable Changes & Announcements

Why We're Retiring SEOmoz

The company and the name 'SEOmoz' began in 2004 with a blog. I'd been reading, participating, and sharing a lot on SEO forums and wanted a place to post in my own format with more detail than what I could do on other sites. Fast forward to 2006; SEOmoz had became quite a popular site, and we changed the name of the company to match it. In 2009, when we retired our consulting business to focus exclusively on software, SEOmoz was seeing more than 500,000 visits a month (in April 2013 that number was over two million).

The SEOmoz site in 2005 - designed and built by yours truly (in Dreamweaver; oh yeah!)

But today, we're retiring that brand for a number of reasons

• Calling ourselves "SEO"moz is no longer transparent and authentic. With products like Fresh Web Explorer, FollowerWonk, GetListed, and the beta of Moz Analytics (alongside the vast array of non-SEO content we publish), we're no longer purely an SEO software company. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous, and that violates our core values.
• SEO is bigger than just SEO - as hard as I've fought personally and we've fought as an organization over the last decade to make marketers and organizations think more holistically about organic search, the branding of the past remains. SEO is seen as a narrow set of activities that move rankings up and bring search visitors in. To truly help with SEO, we have to do more than just place keywords, make sites accessible, and build links, but first we need the influence to make these changes. A broader marketer is often granted that influence, while pure SEOs still, unfairly, must strive for it.
• For many folks outside of our community, the acronym SEO has (unfair) associations with spam or manipulation. To quote an all-too-frequent comment we see when our site is mentioned around the web, "Don't trust any domain with SEO in the name." That feedback is hard to hear, and it's wrong, but that doesn't change the impact. We know that the "SEO" in SEOmoz has, in the past, hurt our ability to persuade people about the incredible value of organic search marketing. Moz gives us a chance to do something all marketers love - test something new and observe the results :-) 
• It's surprisingly hard for folks who don't know to say the acronym "SEO" as letters to pronounce the brand name. I've heard everything from see-oh-moez to say-ow-mahz to sh-ow-moss. For years, I didn't think it was a big deal, but fluency bias suggests this probably has a substantive negative impact on the brand's perception.
• The SEOmoz name retains a strong branding connection and expectation to our historical consulting business (just last week, I received 4 consulting inquiries!). We haven't offered consulting in many years, and this move can help distance our 2004-2009 incarnation from the software focus we have today.
• For the sake of transparency, I need to be honest that this is also marketing move - a rebrand is a chance to earn a second look from people who've long known us and had associations with the company. We hope that second look is going to lead those who haven't yet seen what we've become over the last few years to check out our content, Moz Analytics, and the many functions our research tools provide.

What we are not doing, and I am most certainly not doing, is giving up on the fight for the legitimacy, value, and importance of SEO. Organic search remains my personal passion, and one of the most powerful marketing channels in history. For as long as I'm active in the field, I will be shouting the value of SEO from the stages on which I present, the publications where I write, and the social channels where I share.

Moz will be part of that battle, too.

The Mission & Vision for Moz

Moz's mission is to help people do better marketing.

We've long had a similar core purpose with SEOmoz - to simplify the promotion of ideas on the web. But "better marketing" is a more accurate and succinct description of why we exist. Moz is about educating marketers and those they work with. It's about providing tools and software to help measure and improve marketing efforts. It's about giving marketers a platform to ask questions and show off their skill and knowledge. The catalyst for all of that is a belief we hold - that, tragically, a lot of marketing sucks.

Together, we can change that. The marketers who are part of the Moz community are on the cutting edge of technology and tactics, but they're also passionate about bringing value from their efforts without compromising ethics or burning bridges with customers. We want to constantly push ourselves and the world of marketing to join them and do better.

Moz's current vision is to power the shift from interruption to inbound marketing by giving every marketer affordable software to measure and improve their efforts.

Today, 90% of marketing investment is spent on channels that interrupt people in order to get their attention. TV commercials, print ads, radio spots, and billboards are part of this, but so too are web channels like banner advertising, pop-ups and pop-unders, non-opt-in emails, and interstitials.

It's not that these channels are evil or wrong - interruption-based marketing can still be effective if it's done empathetically and delights its audience. But on the web at least, less than 10% of all the clicks and traffic go through these channels. The vast majority of web users' time and attention, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile goes to inbound sources - personal & opt-in emails we want to read, content we want to consume, search results we want to click, social media we want to engage with, videos we want to watch, etc.

We believe that in the next decade, the effort and dollars put toward web marketing will become more sophisticated, and growth in channels like SEO, social media marketing, content creation, etc. will dwarf the growth rates of those in more traditional, interruption-based endeavors. For many institutional and historic reasons (including the self-interest of web properties to encourage the flow of ad dollars), these may never be fully proportional, but our passion and our goal is to help marketers, especially those outside Fortune 1000s, with analytics and recommendations for these earned channels.

Our core values remain unchanged. They are TAGFEE:

• Transparency - we believe in sharing what we know and what we do openly, and in letting everyone participate in the adventure that is Moz.
• Authenticity - we never want to be someone other than ourselves. We won't put on a figurative fancy suit just to impress; we will embrace our true identities and let everyone experience the real us.
• Generosity - we believe in giving without thought of return, and in sharing what we have with others. Our generosity should extend to our co-workers, our customers, and our communities, all of whom have already given so generously to us.
• Fun - work is only work if you make it so. We want to always love what we do, and we believe that love and enjoyment of our professional tasks will carry us through the tough times.
• Empathy - it is our duty to put ourselves in the shoes of others and see things from their perspective. Empathy begins with kindness, too, and we seek to apply warmth and understanding in every aspect of how we do business.
• The Exception - wherever there is a common practice or standard methodology, we seek to question its value before deciding what to do. We believe that immense opportunity exists where others fear to tread. Our goal is to be the exception, not stick to the rules.

These three elements - our mission, vision, and values - are the architecture that helps us operate and grow the company. They're also the yardstick against which we measure ourselves and expect to be judged by others. If you see us engaging in behavior that's not a match with this, or if you're ever confused by how what we've done compares to our mission, vision, and values, call us on it. Being held accountable is the best way for us to stay true to the right path.

The Beta Launch of Moz Analytics

The move to Moz isn't purely a branding change. It's also the launch of Moz Analytics in Beta, our upgrade (and eventual replacement) for SEOmoz PRO. Moz Analytics dramatically upgrades the SEO-focused features of SEOmoz PRO while adding much more depth and breadth for tracking 4 other critical inbound channels: social, content, links, and mentions. A handful of our customer advisory board members have been given access today, and over the next 60-90 days, we'll be sending invitations to every PRO subscriber.

Below is a glimpse of what's to come:

(Note that I've used sample data in this screenshot and the one below! Thankfully we got more than 115 direct visits in March)

Moz Analytics is designed to bring together all of the functionality of SEOmoz PRO into the search section, and add large sets of new data and reports in the new tabs: overview, social, links, brand + mentions, and content (a section that will be added after the launch of the others). We believe that all your data about inbound channels should be aggregated in one place, and while this is only the first step, it's a significant collection of metrics, tracked over time, and comparable against your competition.

(Note that this "competition" section in the overview isn't yet ready, but is on the list of "coming soon" features)

In the weeks to come, our product team will be posting a detailed walkthrough of each section and all the features in Moz Analytics, so I won't dive too deep here. I will, however, note that the Beta launch means there's still kinks to be worked out and plenty of features to add. We'd love your feedback via this feature suggestion/bug report page (and you can see our planned work items there, too).

There are two ways to join the Moz Analytics invite list:

1. Sign up for a free trial of Moz PRO (which includes access to all of our research tools like Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, FollowerWonk, Fresh Web Explorer, Keyword Difficulty, Rank Tracker, etc) and request your Moz Analytics invite. Moz subscribers will be the first folks to get access, in order of when you request your invitation.
2. Request an email invite to Moz Analytics once it's open to new subscribers. This may take a bit longer, but we'll email you as soon as we're ready to allow public access. My best guess is that this will be 60-90 days from now.

If you're not yet on the waiting list for an invite, you can sign up via the link below.

Here's our current plan for opening up access to Moz Analytics (subject to change):

• Over the next 30 days: Roll out access to our customer advisory board members and fix the bugs and UI issues they help us discover (thank you so much!)
• 30-60 days out: Enable access for our paying subscribers and those in a free trial (your campaigns will migrate directly over)
• 60-90 days out: Send emails to those on the invite list which will give the ability to create campaigns and test the software
• 90+ days out: Open from private to public beta, and allow new folks visiting Moz.com to set up campaigns via a free trial

​It's important to note that these dates may shift earlier or later as we have more people testing the application and importing data. We have a very talented group of engineers and product folks behind Moz Analytics who want to make sure that those who get access have a usable experience with consistent, accurate data. If we need more time to give a great first look, please be patient! In the meantime, all of our research tools and the PRO Web App will still be available and fully functional.

UPDATE: For those asking, Moz Analytics will be part of your current subscription package at no extra cost. If you're currently a subscriber, you'll get access automatically in the weeks/months ahead as we roll it out and import everyone's campaigns.

Plans for the Years Ahead

Today, we're setting the foundation for the future. Moz Analytics is a first step, but there's many more to come. We've got some big priorities on our plate, and I want to make these transparent. Here's our priorities, in rough order:

#1: Make Moz Analytics Incredible

The beta launch today and the refinements in the weeks to come are just the beginning of what this product will eventually become. The goal of Moz Analytics boils down to three primary components:

• All the data from your inbound channels tracked in one place, over time, against competition, with great reporting functionality
• Prescriptive recommendations everywhere it makes sense to provide them
• A robust set of research tools to dig into the field at large and discover opportunities, expose interesting data, and explore web-scale metrics

Today's launch provides a chunk of early features that address these goals. But I'm always passionate about the future, and I know the horizon holds some remarkable advances. Of particular interest to me are our plans to upgrade rank data to help make it more accurate, more aggregated, more useful, and to show comparisons with other sources of similar information (e.g. the VED parameter). Later, when we launch the content section, we'll be able to track the pages on your site that earn the most traffic, links, shares, and engagement, and compare them against the most successful content produced by your competitors. We're also in the process of building multi-seat access in so you can give multiple users the ability to view campaigns (with controls to select who can see and do what).

Now that Moz and Moz Analytics have launched, you can expect to see far more transparency from us about our product roadmap, and the progress we're making.

#2: Grow Mozscape & Freshscape

Mozscape's index (which powers Open Site Explorer) has a great signal to noise ratio and its metrics are the best correlated with Google's rankings. The sites, pages, and links in its index are almost always ones Google has seen and indexed, and the links, when hand-checked, nearly always still exist. By contrast, Mozscape's primary competitors have much larger indices, often poorer metrics, and a larger percent of transient links. For a long time, we believed that this differentiating proposition was a valuable one, but we've heard otherwise from many of our customers.

What Mozscape needs to be is the perfect link index. It should be:

• Close to Google's main index's size and freshness, including links that may be purely spam (though not including links that are highly ephemeral and don't exist when hand-checked)
• Maintain extremely good metrics that correlate well to the pages/sites performing well in Google's results
• Highly flexible, containing numerous, fast options for sorting and filtering data
• Able to be queried historically to show trends, lost & gained links, and changes over time (even to those who haven't been tracking the data in their campaigns)
• Eminently useful and usable via a robust API (we've already made some recent upgrades here)

This is a major focus for our big data team over the next 9 months, and you should anticipate remarkable progress toward each of these goals.

Likewise, Freshscape, the index that powers Fresh Web Explorer, needs to become bigger while retaining a high ratio of signal to noise. We currently have ~4 million feeds in Freshscape. Our initial pull of anything with an RSS feed from Mozscape revealed many millions more, but the quantity of junk was far too high (lots of sites have feeds for just about everything they publish). Thus, we're trying a bunch of tactics now to uncover and include the feeds that show links and mentions marketers actually care to see.

Another major feature we'll be adding to FWE is email alerts. The index already shows tons of mentions and links that Google Alerts ignores, and we think the ability to select a range of feed authority sites to display, along with many more knobs to tune will make FWE alerts a remarkably useful service.

#3: Launch a Product for Local Marketers

A huge percent of the marketers we meet and interact with serve primarily local clients operating in specific geographic markets. They may care about a few standard web rankings, but they also care deeply about local/maps results, along with their ratings/reviews/visibility/accuracy on services like Yelp, FourSquare, CitySearch, TripAdvisor, Urbanspoon, Apple Maps, and the like.

With the acquisition of GetListed and the help of David Mihm, we've got a local squad of engineers, designers, product folks, and marketers working in concert to create the functionality local marketers (whether they be small business owners or consultants/agencies) need. We hope to have this product available by the end of 2013 as a standalone, and we'll be adding many of the features to Moz Analytics as well (probably in a separate tab on the left sidebar).

#4: Organize the Web's Domains to Make Link & Mention Data More Useful

As I do research into my links and those of my competition and colleagues, I want to see what percent come from blogs, what percent come from e-commerce sites, what percent come from sites about software, hardware, movies, heck, even crafting sites. And beyond these percentages, I want to be able to browse all the blogs on the subject of toys and games in descending Domain Authority order. Annotating this data to millions of sites is hard, but it's possible and it's incredibly valuable.

In the year to come, we have teams working on both manual classification and machine learning to help build this structured data layer on top of our Mozscape and Freshscape indices (and on top of the domains that refer traffic in your Moz Analytics account). 

#5: Create a Traffic Prediction Algorithm that Actually Works

Alexa, Compete, Doubleclick, Google Trends for Websites, and Quantcast all try to give predictions for a website's traffic, but none of them are remotely close to accurate, not even directionally!

For the top several thousand sites on the web, the metrics can be decent, but anyone running a non-top-1,000 web property knows that the stats from these services simply don't add up. At Moz, we believe we've got access to enough kinds of valuable data - the link graph, search results, social media metrics, brand mentions, etc. - to give us the potential for a far better traffic prediction algorithm that truly works in the long tail of the web. We'll likely never get to the level of granular accuracy that true visitor analytics provide, but we might be able to provide something much more correct and useful than what the existing field does today.

This is a long-term project for the Mozzers, and I have no guesses today about when such a service might launch. I can promise to keep you up-to-date as we make progress against this goal over the months and years to come. 

Notable Changes & Announcements

Moving our site from seomoz.org to Moz.com isn't the only big change happening today. As part of this rebrand, our social accounts, RSS feed, and other important resources are also moving a bit. Here's the important ones:

• You can now find us on the Twitter account @Moz
• Our Facebook page has changed to Facebook.com/Moz
• This blog's RSS feed has moved to http://feeds.feedburner.com/mozblog
  
• YouMoz is also moving its RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/youmoz 

Naturally, with any shift of this magnitude, there'll be some kinks to work out. We'd ask for your patience as we make some fixes, but we'd also love your help - if you discover anything broken/not working right with our content, our site, or our social profiles, please let us know by tweeting at us or dropping a line to help at seomoz dot org.

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Finally, I'd like to say thank you. Thank you so, so much for helping a tiny blog turn into something so remarkable. I'm overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, the offers of help, the kind words, and the incredible team and community that have built up around Moz these past 9 years. As I left the office last night, it was a bit like saying goodbye to an old friend.

SEOmoz was something special, and Moz, with your help and support, will be something even more special. If ever I can help repay my debt of gratitude, just let me know and I'll do my best to fit it into this crazy schedule I've somehow found myself in. You can reach me directly now via rand at moz.com (replacing my old rand at seomoz.org email), or tweet @randfish.

With hugs, love, and gratitude,

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz Moz

p.s. We'll be sure to do an interesting case study on the impact this domain migration has on our search traffic. :-)

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