New Age Website Marketing

We’re all familiar with: personalization, SPYW, and the mix of organic + local + shopping + news etc. we call “universal search“. Today, we’re going to talk about the results that APPEAR to be pure organic, ignoring AdWords, Google Places results, image, news, video, shopping, social influenced results, etc.

Now, looking just at these ordinary organic results, you might expect that if you’re signed out, cookies blocked, pws=0, and a ski mask on, you’d get the same results for a given search as you see from any one of a number of rank-checking tools.

But you’d be wrong. Well…in some cases, you’d be wrong. If your location is set (auto-detected via your IP address, or set manually by you), in some cases Google is using your location as a ranking factor.

Mini glossary

Before we dive into some examples, allow me to fabricate some terminology so we’re all talking about the same things:

• pure organic - this is what I’m calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that do NOT appear to be location-influenced
• local-ish: this is what I’m calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that DO appear to be location-influenced

Now let’s look at some examples

For each, we’re going to look at the results for our location set to three US cities: Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Brooklyn, NY. To set our location, we’ll use the “Change Location” option in Google’s left menu:

First, we’ll start with a search phrase that we’d expect to have a strong local bias in Google Places results.

Search term: “thai restaurant”

Let’s start with Portland, OR:

As expected, there’s a lot of Google Places results there. But look at result #1: Typhoon. It’s got reasonable PA/DA, but not enough to rank nationwide (unlike oshathai.com and sawatdee.com, which rank on page 1 if you set your location to “USA”). It’s a Portland restaurant–Google might know this because of its Google Places page; also, it’s got Portland in 2 of the footer links. No hCard markup on the address itself anywhere on the site however.

The 2nd result happens to be near Portland, but really located in Beaverton, and is ranking simply because of a near-match domain, in my opinion (it ranks #2 if your location is set to “USA”). Just to be sure Google wasn’t still using my IP address and geo-locating me in Portland when I specified my location as “USA”, I had Dr. Pete confirm this from his cave in Chicago (thanks Pete!).

In Dr. Pete’s honor, we’ll look at Chicago next, for this same term:

Now this is getting a little more interesting. Results 1, 3, and 4 are clearly not there because of a Google Places page, but rather, because on-page factors would make the page do pretty well if we’d actually typed in “Chicago thai restaurant”, i.e. with the location name behaving like any other keyword. Result #2 is most likely there because of its Google Places page: it’s an all-Flash site, with no mention of Chicago anywhere in the HTML; and, of course, Google’s helpful “show map of…” link is a clue .

Just to be certain, I peered into the guts of a number of these all-Flash restaurant sites using FlashProbe to see if there was location-specific text in there….and for most of them, found nothing of significance.

Next up: Brooklyn.

Google Places results all up top, then the rest of the page is all local-ish results. The menupages.com result is clearly not Google-Places related but has “Brooklyn” all over the page, whereas most of the rest must be getting identified via Google Places as “Brooklyn” doesn’t appear on their websites at all.

Next, let’s look at a search for “auto parts”, where you might imagine that what’s going to be useful to the user is going to be a mix of the national parts websites and also local parts stores.

Search term: “auto parts”

First up: Portland.

As expected: dominated by about an even mix of Google Places and pure organic. But the last two are local-ish: the first could either be Google-Places influenced, but more likely it’s a near exact match domain if you considered the city name to be one of the search terms. And a near exact match page title doesn’t hurt either.

Back to Chicago now:

Similar results to Portland.

Lastly, let’s look at Brooklyn:

Similar mix to Portland and Chicago, but clearly from looking at these three sets of results, Google is NOT “designating” slots on the page for each type of result (pure organic, local-ish, Google Places) regardless of city. The behavior is more like an ordering based on an overall scoring, where past click patterns (i.e. are users clicking on Google Places results for this term more, or pure organic, or shopping, or local-ish…etc.) might be a factor, keyword relevance (including the city name as a keyword) is a factor, PA/DA of course…etc.

Now I did some research on some other terms as well, including “web hosting”, which returned a similar mix of local-ish results + pure organic…right up to when I started doing screen shots for this blog post, after which all the local-ish results disappeared…for all cities I tried. With the heavy click volume that must happen on a competitive term like that, I can’t chalk that up to a change in click behavior statistics–it smells like a manual adjustment for that search term to me when it comes to the mix of types of results.

Conclusions

1. For some search phrases, the results that we’ve come to think of as “pure organic” are heavily influenced by location, in addition to the Google Places results.
2. There are at least two factors that Google is using to rank local-ish results:
   1. the name of the searcher’s current location is found in traditional on-page areas (page title, body text, etc.), and
   2. because the Google Places page indicates the location matches the searcher’s location.
3. Clearly the mix of ranking factors for Google Places and local-ish organic results is quite different, as in general, we’re seeing the local-ish organic results NOT match the top local results from Google Places.
4. Certain search terms generate a higher % of local-ish results than others, just like certain search terms generate a higher % of image, or news, or video, or shopping results, BUT the mix of non-local organic and local-ish organic results varies not just by search term, but also by location.
5. It seems that it’s more about a page’s overall score in the ranking algorithm getting bumped by either being local (via Google Places) or containing the user’s location name in traditional on-page elements, rather than slots in the page 1 results being set aside for local-ish results for a given term.

So what do I do with this information?

• Directory-type websites: you’ve got a shot at ranking your city-specific pages…even if the user doesn’t type their city name in as part of the search.
• Local businesses: tune your pages for your city name as well as doing your Google Places page properly (but do NOT put your location name in your Google Places category), as you’ve got a shot at 2 listings on page 1: a Google Places listing, and a local-ish listing.

I look forward to seeing ideas/theories in the comments that are different from, crazier than, and more accurate than mine. Thanks to David Mihm, Tom Critchlow, Tom Anthony, Wil Reynolds, Carson Ward, Kate Morris, and Pete Meyers for their thoughts and research.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/tU5LXNT47tc/local-organic-ranking

We all know that when it comes to getting high rankings in the search engines link building is one of the most critical activities you can engage in…whether you are using tactics to get a large amount of links or zeroing in on attracting high-authority links.

But most of that work is done manually. This can be time-consuming and boring.

This is why I’ve been exploring ways to automate my search for link building opportunities with free alerts.

I’ll share these tools with you…and then explain how you can take advantage of the link building opportunities that arise from these discoveries.

Finding link building opportunities with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the old-school way of finding link building opportunities. It’s nice, too, that you don’t need a Google account to get started.

For each Alert, you’ll need to decide the following:

Content of the search – This is the topic you want alerts about. It could be your full name, your businesses name or competitor’s name.

You can get more accurate results by using the Advanced Search features (+, -, “”, or, not) or Operators (link:, site:). This will keep your alerts from delivering content that is too broad.

For instance, if you wanted to receive alerts about “Facebook” but to scrub content if it’s talking about Mark Zuckerburg, you would use “Facebook” – “Mark Zuckerburg.” Or you could filter out certain sites with these operators.

Type of results – Would you like alerts to be from blogs only? News? The web in general? Videos? Groups? Comprehensive…meaning all of the above?

Frequency of search results – Google will return alerts to you based on three options: as-it-happens, once a day and once a week.

Keep in mind that Google only sends you content that appears in the top 20 SERs for the web and top 10 for SERs in news. That way you only get alerts when there is something important being shared.

If you need to stay on top of the buzz on your brand or product, then you’d choose “as-it-happens.” If you just need a general sense of mentions, then “once a week” would work.

Delivery of results – You can receive results as RSS feed or email. Depending which type of results you will be getting, you’ll get an email that breaks down the results by category.

By the way, Google Alerts will allow you to set up to 1,000 alerts in several languages.

Finding link building opportunities with social alerts

Social media sites like Twitter have given many people the power to share their feelings about a brand or person…whether negative or positive.

It’s crucial to stay on top of these mentions, responding to the negative criticism and thanking anyone for the positive. Why should you respond to these criticisms…and what do they have to do with building links?

Often people who tweet about a bad experience will then write a full length review or blog post. If you don’t do anything to turn that person’s criticism around then you’ll end up with a link to your site that’s full of negative sentiment.

Instead, encourage someone to write an encouraging review or blog posts by responding to their complaints on the social web. That positive-experience post or review can lead to a link back to your site with positive sentiment.

When it comes to tracking all things social, Social Mention is probably the best all around tool. You can search real time for mentions.

Here’s a search for “QuickSprout”:

From that search I can see what people are saying about me and my blog.

But since we are talking about automating our social mention search for link building opportunities, sign up for Social Mention alerts.

Social Mention basically watches the social web for any mentions of your keywords and then sends you an email with updates based upon your frequency. The content has to be publically available…meaning it can’t be “private…but social mention will cover hundreds of sites including StumbleUpon, Digg and Quora.

Finally, you can grab the Social Mention widget which will show you a stream of mentions of your name and brand…but you’d have to watch it constantly to use it effectively. That’s not a great use of your time.

Twitter Alerts

While Social Mention is supposed to cover the entire social web…it’s not perfect. That’s why when it comes to tracking Twitter mentions I’d recommend using a tool dedicated to it.

Now, you can manually search Twitter with its Twitter search or you can join a Twitter alert service like Twilert. Twilert works the same way that Google Alerts does…just on Twitter.

The steps to getting started are easy. Sign up through Google or Twitter:

Next, enter the keyword you want to track. This can be your name, brand or product, a hashtag or even a Twitter handle (@neilpatel).

What’s nice about Twilert is you can assign exactly when you want to receive Twilerts in the “When” sub form.

And don’t forget the Advanced Search features that include operators like language and attitudes/sentiment:

Now, it’s possible to use Google Alerts to track your Twitter mentions, but a lot of mentions will fall through the cracks. That’s why I recommend you use a service like Twilerts dedicated to searching and notifying you of these mentions.

Finding link building opportunities on Facebook through Hyper Alerts

Facebook can be one of the richest places to monitor activity that might uncover some great examples for link building.

Unfortunately you probably don’t have the time to stay on top of all of your Fan page interaction. You can track your Facebook fan page activity through notifications. But what would be really nice is to get notifications via email of a summary of activities.

That’s what makes an email alert service like Hyper Alerts so great.

Getting started is simple. Go to Hyper Alerts website and enter your email address and password…

Add alerts, based upon frequency of when you want to receive those alerts…

And enter your Facebook page web address:

Your next step is to choose from four different settings:

1. Frequency of alerts
2. Fan posts
3. Fan comments
4. Your own content

What makes Hyper Alerts great is that you don’t need access to your Facebook account. Plus, all of your notifications are rendered in text so it is perfectly archivable and searchable.

Here’s a tip: filter all these emails to a folder so you can search them later.

Finally, you can track multiple fan pages. For example, say you own a company that runs 30 different hotels. You can create a fan page for each hotel and receive notifications for each. Unfortunately you will receive 30 different emails.

Probably the only downside with Hyper Alerts is you can’t respond to comments in the email. You will have to jump onto your Facebook fan page to do that…but really that doesn’t matter right now since we are talking about finding link building opportunities.

You can also track fan activity through alerts published by the Page Notifier or Fan Page Notifier apps.

Plus, you could use the Postling app that allows you to get notifications for all of your social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and your blog, while getting reviews from TripAdvisor or Yelp or phrases you are tracking appear on Google News or WordPress.

Search for these kinds of link building opportunities

Once you get all your alerts set up and start receiving notifications, you can start to look for opportunities like these:

• See when someone mentions your business or name – Is this an influential blogger or thought leader in your industry? Can you start a relationship with this person that might lead to a link down the road?
• Follow the mentions of your competitors – Are the people mentioning your competitors sharing positive or negative experiences? Is there are relationship you could nurture among these signals?
• Track the guest posts of your competitors when they are published – Are they posting on a site that could provide an opportunity for you to guest post? Is the host of the blog open to an interview that could lead to a link? This tactic can help you discover your competitor’s link building strategy, thus helping you get the same links.
• Answer the questions that someone in your industry is asking – If you get notifications that show up in the context of a question …can you answer that question? Maybe you offer to write a short post for them to publish to their site.
• Get notified when a blog or site in your industry is looking for content – Naturally, track keywords that will notify you when there are calls for guest posting opportunities.
• Get news about your industry when it is released – Sometimes if you can jump on a story early enough you can provide additional information that the reporter may wish to include in an update on the article…rewarding you with a nice link back to your site.
• Discover new sites or blogs that are launched in your industry – Get notified when new content publishers start…these sites may be looking for content.
• Hear about any mentions of the top players in your field – Track what authorities in your industry are doing or saying and look for opportunities to network with them, which could lead to a link.

The possibilities are endless, but hopefully this list will give you an idea of ways you can turn free alerts into link building opportunities.

Conclusion

If you’re like me, you don’t have time to manually search for ways to build links…or maybe you just find the process boring. Fortunately there are ways you can automate the process so that you get ideas straight in your inbox through free alerts.

However, don’t give up searching manually on occasion (or outsourcing this work). Like I said above, these techniques and tools will work…but they won’t catch everything. You’ll also discover opportunities when you look for yourself.

What other techniques and tools help you automate the process of finding linking opportunities?

About the author: Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/AoUg-4tuATU/the-inside-scoop-to-finding-linkbuilding-opportunities-with-free-alerts

For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google’s AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It’s the best source we’ve got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what’s actually happening on Google’s search engine. I’ll illustrate with an example.

An SEOmoz blog post ranks in the top 2-3 results for many keywords around the phrase “blog traffic.” Here’s a screenshot of some of those rankings:

I went into our Google Analytics account and pulled the related keywords along with how much traffic they’ve sent in the past 30 days:

Then I went to Google’s AdWords Tool and searched for “blog traffic” to compare the suggestions:

Here I got confused, because many of the terms that we receive traffic for are NOT shown above in the list… Is Google hiding them? Do they not know about them?

To be sure, I typed them into Google’s AdWords Tool manually, performing [exact match] searches only:

Holy cow… There they are. So, AdWords does have volume for these, and will display it, but only if you enter them exactly (or rather, “more exactly” – you can find them if you do sets of imprecise, but closer queries, too). I made the chart below to illustrate which terms were available from the broad reserach:

As you can see, there’s ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and could lead to some serious missed targeting opportunities.

THE IMPORTANT LESSON: Running discovery-focused searches in AdWords may not show you all the valuable/high-volume keyword phrases connected to a word/phrase.

There are a few ways to address this challenge:

1. If you have the budget, my top recommendation is to buy a few, very broad keywords in AdWords, send them to a relevant landing page on your site, but realize you probably will lose money on the campaign. The goal isn’t conversions, but rather to learn by watching the keyword terms/phrases for which you get impressions. This is also great conversion-testing if you have the budget to invest, but even a week or two of data can be highly valuable for future keyword targeting.
2. When searching in AdWords, start broad, and then enter narrower queries and note the new phrases that come up. Make sure to use exact match, and be diligent in testing variations. Google only lies through omission.
3. The relative numbers of searches aren’t perfect (as you can see above), but they are relatively decent. In fact, I’d say they’ve improved in what they show vs. the actuals you’ll see compared to prior years. However, 
4. Use your own analytics as a guide to find new terms/phrases you might be imperfectly targeting. And if you see keyword variations that have a unique or different intent, it might even pay to create a more targeted page for that query, and you often need less work to rank, since Google uses the “indented results” system to drop a second URL from the same domain directly underneath the first one on a given page.

Now I’d love to hear from you – what are your experiences around keyword research in AdWords? Are you seeing the same thing we are? You can share your thoughts in the comments and/or use the poll below (from a new service called Quipol that has some fun twists):

BTW – Given that 30%+ of our referrals from Google searches are keyword (not provided), I’d venture to guess that all of the numbers from our analytics are underreporting by about that same percent. Keep that in mind when comparing the data from AdWords vs. our analytics above.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/YWfMvoLSA-o/be-careful-using-adwords-for-keyword-research

Google+ has crept into SERPs near you. From getting hyper-personalized results popping up everywhere to recommending people to follow or showing you results you’ve +1′d or posts you’ve made, Google+ isn’t giving you the choice to ignore it. (Unless you use Bing, Yahoo!, or another search service entirely.) Sure, there are ways to depersonalize it; but who has the time for another click, unless you’re really getting results you aren’t happy with or being an SEO super-sleuth. From author spotlights or highlights from those you’ve circled, it seems the closer you are to a keyword and its SERPs, the more intense the personalization gets.

Check out my entire page of personalized results when I search for “SEOmoz”:

As anyone knows who’s tried to do a little bit of personalization to customers, personalization is hard. There are zillions of factors and complex algorithms to work through. But we also know when it comes to conversions, personalization is a huge win-sparkle.

But Google has the employee bandwidth and some of the best minds of several generations working on making personalization happen. Despite their numerous products, search is Google’s crown jewel; 80% of searches are done there because they generally deliver better results than their competitors. (Sorry, Bing and Yahoo!, but “Google” is a verb.) In the long-run, personalized results are going to be easier for Google and provide more relevant results for users, which will keep users coming back for more.

Google+ Worker of a You-Sourced Search Engine

Have you signed up for a Google product? Congratulations, you are now a Google volunteer. No, you don’t get any benefits except one: using Google’s (mostly) free products. Instead, as you surf the web, your movements will make your own crowd-sourced engine. Or as a crowd of one, you-sourced.

When you search for “angel,” are you looking for a brooding vampire, not ethereal creatures or charity networks? Don’t worry, Google already knows because you’re subscribed to the Tumblr Angel Does Stuff and you wrote a blog post about how much you love Lilah Morgan. Not to mention, you’ve visited Angel‘s IMDB page while rewatching it with your sweetie and playing “who’s that actor?”

Maybe you’re new to a field, say it’s “SEO.” Go ahead and circle Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, or Aaron Wall, SEO influencers as suggested by Google, and bam: their recommendations guide your results.

Note: Danny Sullivan, more circlers than Lady Gaga.

Got Authority? Yes, You Do.

A huge problem Google has right now is site authority and quality. Page rank and domain authority are attempts to inform rankings which sites have authority and quality content. But this doesn’t always work. Spammers and black hats have had years of perfecting the dark force to beat Google.

Last year’s Panda algorithm change was a direct assault on sites with duplicate and weak content that were squeezing into rankings. Panda didn’t happen to cause SEOs to tear our hair out. No, it was a direct punch against snake oil SERP results and results that made all of us go “meh.” You can argue that some sites didn’t deserve the hit and got caught in the crossfire, but Panda tossed out a lot of junk. 

Now in combination with Panda’s tweaks, Google+ creates the ultimate SERP authority: you. You are awesome, and no one knows what you want better than you. Google+ just isn’t sending you SERPs based on your subtle hints and wish list anymore; now, it’s going directly to you, the source. And if you don’t know about it, perhaps your “circles” will.

I’ve told Google that I love Sherlock, the BBC series, and think way too much about it. Google serves me “Sherlock” SERPs completely filled with what I love. No mention of the books, other TV or film, or various businesses, services, or products using the Sherlock name. My personalized SERP kicks off 3 links that “normally” rank in the top 10. Including a pub chain in Texas, which I’m sure fought hard for that ranking.

Additionally, by giving bloggers the incentive of authority and our tiny photos in SERPs, hooking in your Google+ profile to your blogging platform creates a type of article authority Google hasn’t had before. There’s a reason Rand has a ridiculous number of Google+ followers; if he put out crap, they’d uncircle him. Now Google knows that Rand’s articles are quality content — mostly likely around SEO, inbound marketing, and entrepreneurship — Rand’s content becomes an extremely strong “safe” ranking factor to serve results on. And he gets his smiling face as a recommended follow for “SEO.”

If you haven’t started building your authority with the articles you’re writing, it’s time to jump in. You too can become a safe SERP in your field, interest, or hobby. Are you an authority on something? Is your brand an authority? It’s time to start creating content, curating content, and building up your following. If you’re considered an authority, your rankings may jump higher than they’ve ever gone before.

SEOs: No Longer a Pain in Cutts’ Butt

Google+ radically changes an SEO’s game strategy towards rankings. Good luck getting another SERP into my results for “SEOmoz” the old-fashioned way. That said, the cries of “SEO’s finally dead” still remain highly exaggerated. Sloppy SEO and some black hat tactics are certain staked in their tracks. Your keyword stuffed article isn’t going to get my +1.

Now I don’t expect Google+ to remain ungamed. There’s a whole subset of the SEO industry who’s made their way on gaming every change Google’s made. But the amount of time and energy you’d have to put into gaming Google+ to convince me that you’re not a bot…I think you got a little bleach on your hat there.

Ultimately, white hat tactics of quality, linkbait content will prevail in the world of Google+. Whether you’re focusing on how-tos or selling jewelry, your content isn’t going to get the love of the +1 if it doesn’t appeal to the people.

Nowhere Near Perfect

Right now, Google’s crowd-sourcing is nowhere near perfect. Not enough people are using Google+ on a regular basis to make a huge impact. Yes, Google says they have 90 million users (800 million on Facebook and 200 million on Twitter for comparison), but no one’s sure just how many people are actually using it. 

I know my personal information stream seems a little bare with a few heavy-weight champions *cough*SEOs*cough* dominating my results. Not to mention, my own information comes up a lot. This is great when I share out a link, and I’m trying to find it again. This is not so great if I’m say looking for an image of Doctor Who as I still have those on my harddrive. Or if I’m searching for videos of adorable baby pandas (very likely) and Google serves me White Board Friday Videos posted on SEOmoz’s Google+; no offense, SEOmoz teammates, but I’d much rather watch the bears with the giant heads.

Besides mass user adoption, the biggest hurdles left are of the philosophical nature: privacy and group-think.

Privacy, know our friend “not provided”? Know how Google Analytics went to court in Germany? Or how SOPA came about? When the non-web marketer sees their friends showing up in their SERPs, they’re going to start freaking out. I have a feeling that zombies are on the way out and Skynet and killer robots are back as the villains reflected in our cultural subconscious. 

Subtle personalization has been happening for a long time. We like seeing ourselves reflected back in the mirror of advertising, and the best inbound marketing reflects what we need to see, not just what we want to see. 

“I’d rather make a show 100 people need to see than a show that 1,000 people want to see.” — Joss Whedon, producer/writer of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Firefly

I love the above quote from Whedon because this is what personalization does at it’s best. It gives us what we need, not just want we want. And in giving us what we need, we’re less likely to call shenanigans on Google’s privacy policy. (Just look at Facebook, who may have even better access to personalization data than Google, and a platform that people get lost on for hours.)

By giving us what we need, Google will also give us diversity of opinions and our feeds can avoid group-think. If my results are completely personalized based on my searches and my circles, they are unlikely to carry thoughts that aren’t similar to my own. Seeing only results from other liberal-minded, web marketers who are giant geeks isn’t what I need, even if that’s the feed I may want to live in.

In order to be truly innovative and understand humanity on the whole, we need a variety of ideas. I need to know that people disagree with my opinions, whether political, personal, or otherwise. And our “circles” have an inherent selection bias in that we generally surround ourselves with people like ourselves. 

Not to mention, our circles aren’t experts in everything. My coworker Jen Lopez found that her circles don’t know anything about hotels in Madrid:

Google+ Personalization: Easy-as-Pie Win-Sparkle.

As Google+ builds and more people find value in adopting it as part of their social world, the SERPs will improve. And given that Google adjusts its search algorithm over 500 times in a year, I suspect there’s already geniuses working on these problems. The more Google builds out Google+ for personalization and pushes its you-sourced engine, the better the results will get and the easier it will be for Google to serve each of us what we need.

As we head into a world of personalization, we SEOs are going to focus on the creation of content and distribution of content more than ever. We’re investing in building our authority on subjects for our businesses and hobbies, and there’s nothing better than getting in on the ground-floor.

Make Google+ personalization a win-sparkle for you and your customers. Embrace better content, build your own authority, and make the you-sourced search engine even cooler.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/nYa4VmhuFX8/google-plus-the-ultimate-you-sourced-search-engine

When I began to practice SEO 8 years ago, I never would have guessed that I’d be writing a post about data visualization. Perhaps I might have foreseen myself writing about web analytics or information architecture, but data visualization seemed like something for the statistics fans. But today in web marketing, the emphasis on content has never been stronger, and it just so happens that one eminently shareable form of content is the data visualization. And I’ve come to love the crap out of data viz.

Another person that loves the crap out of data viz is Edward Tufte. ‘ET’, as he’s sometimes referred, has been preaching the merits of quality data visualization since before the world wide web existed, let alone SEO. He has authored 4 books on the topic, is a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University, and actually serves on Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act panel in order to provide transparency in the use of recovery funds. I was fortunate enough to catch him when he was in Seattle during his traveling seminar tour. I learned a lot that day, and have since learned quite a bit more through reading his and others’ writing on the topic.

David McCandless’s Information Is Beautiful Blog is a must-bookmark, and his TED talk below is a great data viz primer.

What’s This Gotta Do With SEO?

Alright, enough with the intro. Let me quickly lay out what I hope this post will accomplish for the SEOmoz reader.

• Understanding of what makes great data viz great.
• Inspiration to think up and create (great) data viz for your company or your clients.
• (Maybe slightly self-serving, but…) Influence readers to cast a more discerning eye on data visualizations.

So far I’ve yet to say it, but there’s an elephant in the room. Infographics. The buzz around the word has reached a fever pitch. Yes, infographics are a form of data visualization, but there are so many ways that infographics are being abused that the backlash seems to be rightfully mounting. Are all infographics bad? Of course not. Just the bad ones.

So, Wait. Am I Gonna Get Links or What?

As I stated earlier, and as you’ve probably seen, data visualization is a super-effective and shareable form of content creation. Now stay with me here: In this post I’m going to detail some of the principles of great data visualization as per Tufte’s teachings, with examples that fit the bill. As of the writing of this sentence, I’ve yet to pull link metrics for any of the examples I’ve got planned. By the end of this post, I’m hoping to prove to you (and myself, really) that Tufte’s principles aren’t just highfalutin, hoity-toity, stats nerd stuff, but a checklist for highly effective data visualization link building.

These principles to which I’m referring are discussed in the first chapter of Tufte’s Visual Display of Qualitative Information

1. Show The Data

Well, yeah. There have certainly been successful “infographics” that don’t actually display any real data, but that’s not really a piece of data visualization, is it? The Trustworthiness of Beards by Matt McInerney comes to mind. Regardless, it’s funny as hell and was viewed by everyone and their mom.

No matter what the rest of this post says about data visualizations for attracting links, the bottom line is that if you’ve got a good idea that would be best be shared in graphic form, roll with it. Because this graphic was originally hosted on imgur.com, the link metrics behind it are a bit fragmented. The .jpg file itself has over 200 linking root domains in OSE, and according to the designer it was, “Viewed over 1,000,000 times and featured #1 on the reddit homepage, LaughingSquid, FHM, and the LATimes”.

2. Provoke Thought about the Subject at Hand

Tufte’s full thought on this:

Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the tech of graphic production, or something else.

Tufte wrote this originally in 1983, and while the spirit still holds, I think it should be revised for today’s times, especially framed in the context of link building: Our data visualization should provoke thought AND influence the reader to share.

Data visualizations built around economic and social matters are surefire ways to get your audience thinking and also have an inherent shareability (a product of the times and the human condition, I suppose). David McCandless’s The Billion Dollar Gram is a visualization that provides context to the incomprehensibly large monetary figures we hear in the media.

Despite not offering an embed code or dead-simple social sharing buttons, this visualization was a success: 2,801 tweets, 4,677 Facebook Shares and Likes, and 298 linking root domains.

Regarding the focus on substance rather than methodology, Tufte explains that the map makes a fantastic visualization medium because we’ve no reason to question methodology. A map is recognizable, allows us to put a lot of data in a small space, and displaying the data within allows us to easily understand and compare as needed. We’ll see a map before this post is done.

3. Avoid Distorting the Data

It should go without saying that a great piece of data visualization should tell the story honestly. Pie graphs, and especially exploded 3D pie charts, are the favorite whipping boy of data viz geeks, often because of their distortion and lack of clarity (“chart-junk”).

Bad 3D Exploding Pie Chart

I can’t believe I’m putting this in a blog post, but ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. Yikes, quick shower, hold on.

But, it is true. If you’ve got great data, do it justice by presenting it honestly.

NPR did a visualization about the makeup of the US military that took a ton of interesting data, and represented it in a variety of formats.

Did it work? Well, it didn’t exactly kill it according to OSE (12 linking root domains, handful of tweets, and 700+ Facebook shares/likes), but I don’t suspect a news organization like NPR makes much of a link building outreach effort.

4. Present Many Numbers in a Small Space

Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer that created what Tufte calls, “The greatest statistical graphic ever drawn”: A map of the Napoleon’s Grande Armée’s advance and retreat into Russia.

The graphic impressively manages to depict 6 different sets of data: latitude, longitude, direction of movement, time, temperature, and size of the army.

Obviously, because this is a graphic made in the 1800s, looking up link metrics would be a bit silly.

5. Make Large Datasets Coherent

Distilling down a big chunk of data is not easy, and the onus often falls on the designer. Tufte laments that the “lack of quantitative skills of professional artists” is what makes designing a great data visualization difficult. The best designed visualizations exist as a symbiosis between smart quantification and beautiful and elegant design.

David McCandless and Lee Byron made a graphic of Facebook post-break-up status messages by the time of year. Over 10,000 status updates in this pretty little graph:

Some fun data, for sure, and people loved it. Open Site Explorer shows 92 linking root domains, 3,000+ Facebook shares/likes, and nearly 1,000 tweets.

6. Encourage Eyes to Compare Data

Though not necessary, interactivity makes comparing data in a visualization particularly fun and engaging. Sometimes the best use of a dataset is to present the viewer with the controls, letting them uncover things on their own.

I had a lot of fun playing around with Hotspots’ interactive display of Twitter buzz for this year’s Superbowl ads. It’s too new for link metrics, but I’m honestly surprised at the lack of social mentions: Only 29 shares/likes and 96 tweets?

7. Reveal Data at Several Levels of Detail

Many ambitious datasets call for a visualization that gracefully handles the large, 30,000 foot figures way down to the super granular, all while maintaining the proper spatial relations. This allows the viewer to explore the data; he or she understands the big figures quickly, but has the opportunity to pick out some of the more minute details.

This infographic by the Technology Review details the space launches by country. It’s a two horse race between the US and the USSR/Russia, but it’s pretty fun to see how other countries have done space launches as well.

Its links were split between the PDF infographic and the post announcing the infographic. All told, it’s still one of the least linked-to (roughly 30 LRD) and socially mentioned visualizations (~300 likes/shares, 29 tweets) in this post, but as with the NPR visualization, there likely wasn’t much link building outreach done.

8. Serve a Reasonably Clear Purpose

What’s the hook? After brainstorming ideas for clients at Distilled, this is how we narrow down our options. If you’re not telling a story to an audience that will care, you’re destined for a piece of linkbait that’ll fall flat. I could expend the effort to visualize, say, the number of fast food restaurants in Bergenfield, New Jersey (my home town – I cried when Roy Rogers was closed) over time, but who would really care?

We put together an interactive visualization for Food Service Warehouse that compared the average calories consumed per day with the percent of income spent on food broken down by country.

The result was a successful infographic (still a bit new for link metrics, but 26 LRD including newyorker.com, one.org and heifer.org, to go with 2,000+ likes/shares, and 1,200+ tweets) that highlighted the food consumption and economic disparity throughout the world.

9. Be Closely Integrated with Statistical and Verbal Descriptions of the Dataset

While your data visualization should be able to speak for itself, every release should include a link off to the raw data, and some explanation of the how and why. Your writeup provides you with an opportunity to explain why your findings are important, as well as highlight other interesting findings. Sometimes your visualization warrants further explanation, but doesn’t fit within the graphic itself.

Thomson Travel’s How Music Travels – The History of Western Dance Music was a one-page interactive graphic, with further explanation and sources in the announcement blog post.

This data visualization was arguably the most successful of the ones in this post, with almost 250 LRD, 24,000+ shares/likes, and 5,000+ tweets.

In Conclusion

So if you follow each of these principles will you definitely succeed in getting links for your data visualization? Of course not.

It’s important to remember that the data visualization is still just a medium for presenting (hopefully) interesting content, in the same way that the a blog might be home for a link bait blog post. Sure it helps to have a beautiful visualization or a crazy-awesome design for your blog, but it’s still just a frame around what matters most.

Still, in the same way that your blog should follow some best practices for allowing maximum exposure like proper keyword research, social buttons, comments, etc., I’m hoping some of Edward Tufte’s principles help improve the quality of your next great data visualization.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cSdGLmeZpKI/data-visualization-principles-lessons-from-tufte

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it…{big gulp}…today’s marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it’s true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We’ve covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won’t go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand’s posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

The real question you may be asking yourself is, “why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?” Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn’t help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I’d run through some ways that I’m leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz’s costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I’ve leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads?  Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander…coincidence? I think not. 

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts. 

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it’s really time consuming. Secondly, it’s not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It’s immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can’t get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels. 

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it…none.

In the past, my argument was “it didn’t drive enough free trial signups to show ROI.” What I’ve realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what “conversion” means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn’t it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities — content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today’s marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand’s logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this “fueling the fire.” While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it’s a new audience and sometimes it’s my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these “social votes” I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It’s a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand’s Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I’ve worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money…which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money…not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, “Is this the best use of my time and money?” I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I’m super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren’t connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be. 

I’d love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this? 
 

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/nqeuPAsfWlw/10-ways-paid-marketers-can-leverage-inbound-marketing

I’m a reluctant Capitalist. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money (my dad was a country preacher, and my mom was a schoolteacher), and the transition from academia to building a start-up and then running my own consulting firm has been rocky at times. The one thing I still hear almost every week is “You need to charge more,” and I preach the same message to new SEOs even as I try to remember it. This post is a reminder to myself (and to you) of why what you charge matters, and why it’s not just about greed.

Almost every new consultant, freelancer, and even agency makes a critical math error. Pay attention, because this mistake could could haunt your business for years to come. It goes something like this:

I need to make $37,000 to pay the bills, and I’d like to make $50,000. A year is about 2000 work hours (50 weeks x 40 hours), so if I can just charge $25/hour, I’ll easily pay the bills and make my $50K goal.

I sincerely commend you for doing the math – it’s important to know what you need to pay the bills and to figure out what that means on a daily and hourly basis. Here’s the problem – in a 40-hour week, especially starting out, you’re going to spend half that week pounding the pavement (or more). You need to network, build your site/portfolio, blog, make phone calls, write proposals, and on and on. Once clients come in, you’ve got administrative work to do – somebody has to send the invoices, pay the taxes, and buy the toilet paper.

So, at best, only 20 hours of your week will be billable. Now, your $25/hour just netted you $25,000. You not only fell short of your $50K goal – you didn’t even pay your bills.

But wait, it gets worse. That 20-hour billable week assumes that all of your pavement-pounding actually gets instant results. When it does finally pay off, what happens? You get a nice, juicy contract, pour all your time into delivering it, and then realize that you didn’t actually keep selling while you were doing the work. So, after you get that check, you go a month with no work at all while you rebuild your lead pipeline. Ultimately, you’ll be working a 20-hour billable week about every other week, especially for the first year or two. So, you’re averaging 10 hours per week and your $25/hour just netted you a $12,500 bottom line.

This one’s mostly for the freelancers and independent consultants. Revenue does not equal salary. Even being a consultant costs money – it’s not a high-overhead profession, but everything’s coming out of your pocket now. Some things that you didn’t think twice about when you were employed will suddenly seem shockingly expensive. Want to go to an industry tradeshow? With the full-conference pass, airfare, car, hotel, and meals, that’s about $2,000-3,000. Need a copy of Photoshop? You can’t just pop down to IT anymore – Adobe CS5.5 starts at $1,299. Suddenly your old boss doesn’t seem like such a cheapskate.

That doesn’t count the perks you’ve lost. You’ll hear all about the amazing tax breaks of self-employment from your friends who dream of self-employment but don’t actually have any idea what they’re talking about. Sure, you might be able to write off half your phone bill or a corner of your condo as office space, but meanwhile you’re paying both halves of your employment taxes, your own health insurance, and you’ve got no 401K. Even if you hit that $50K revenue goal, it’s probably more like a $40K salary. The $12,500 you barely squeezed out in the realistic scenario above is more like $10K, and that assumes you skip health insurance, which will run you roughly that entire amount.

People are funny – when we discount our prices, we expect the buyer will understand they’ve gotten a bargain. When we pay discount prices, we think we’ve walked away with something of less value. Let’s say you go to a fancy restaurant with a 50% Groupon – a month later, do you think “I should go back to that place, since I got such a great deal last time!” No, you think – “If I go back to that place, I’ll have to pay full price. That sucks!” My wife would rather die than go to Bed, Bath and Beyond without a coupon, and it’s entirely their fault for sending us 11 a day. They’ve set their value, and the message is “We don’t have any.”

What’s worse is that you send a broader message that that discount rate is your value to the market, and you even begin to believe it. Unless there’s an amazing opportunity and you’re 100% clear that this is a one-time deal, don’t even start. The legacy of discount pricing could haunt you forever.

We tend to price future work based on past work. On the surface, that makes perfect sense, but the problem is simple – the cost of 10 hours/week when you have nothing to do is a lot less than the cost of 10 hours/week when you’ve already got 40 hours booked. You only have so many hours in the day, and as you run out, they become more valuable. Think of your time like any marketable resource – with more scarcity comes higher prices.

Your time is like MegaBus. When the bus is empty, you may be able to charge $1 for a seat, but that last seat should fetch a premium price. People naturally want to book every available hour, but there’s an opportunity cost to being left with no time at all. Once the hours start to book, it’s time to raise your prices and protect your most non-renewable resource.

Some people may take offense at this, but experience has taught me over and over (and by “taught” I mean “beat with a bat and left me for dead in the alley”) that the people who fight you over price will never stop fighting you. It’s easy to think that, since you gave them a discount and gave into all their demands, they’ll appreciate you more and manage their own expectations, but that’s never happened to me in almost 15 years of working with clients.

It’s almost never about the money – there are some people who just think vendors are meant to be beaten. If you win, they lose. Unfortunately, that means they’ll never see your relationship as win-win. Learn to recognize those clients during negotiation, and get out while you can.

There’s one exception – if you really want to help an organization and you know money is an issue for them, consider doing the work pro-bono. Scope a one-time project and donate your time. There’s nothing wrong with helping people. Where you go wrong is when you start letting other people define your value.

That’s the Million-dollar question, isn’t it? According to our SEO pricing survey last month, the most common hourly rate is between $76-$200 US. That’s quite a range. I think it comes back to that math in Reason #1. The trick is to do the math realistically. Be realistic about your costs and the number of hours really left in the day after sales and marketing are done (and you need to do sales and marketing every day, even when you’re working on deliverables). Maybe more importantly, decide what you want long-term and be careful about setting your value too low just to land a few clients. Today’s discount “just to pay the bills” could set your price for years to come.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Q5ROkcIIUic/6-reasons-you-need-to-charge-more