- Google is no longer PENALIZING link spam, they're instead IGNORING it. This opens the door to link experimentation. Research this and possibly take advantage.
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"Find something that nearly worked and make it better."
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If the results of your content are surprising, it will create discussion. Surprising content has potential for good PR. (Guardians of Galaxy death count example w/James Gunn)
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You won't get any coverage if nobody knows about your product. OUTREACH.
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Lisa Myers' agency uses Meltwater, BuzzStream, Buzzsumo, Gorkana for outreach purposes.
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Refer to James Congdon's email for an example of an outreach email from her agency.
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"Outreach is about people." "Outreach is about grit (passion + perserverance)."
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The right interview questions can determine someone's level of grit, passion and perserverance (necessary for good outreach). It's important to determine their mindset.
-
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Make design decisions based on data, not trends.
-
Oli Gardner has created a "3D Playbook" available for Data-Driven Design:
- Playbook, worksheets, and slides: http://oli.unbounce.com/mozcon-2017/
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Uses Hotjar to record customer sessions.
-
Good slides that go over how to implement data-driven driven in a methodical manner.
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Space 10 plugin turns typical web form into conversational form: https://space10-community.github.io/conversational-form/
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Every conversion is a conversation; you're answering the questions of the user.
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Questions you should answer: "1. What is this? 2. Who is it for? 3. Why should I care? 4. How does it work? 5. Why trust you? 6. What next?"
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Think of the conversion process as a conversation. You need to answer their questions in logical order.
- Hero: "Why should I care? What is it? Who is it for?
- Body: "How will my life improve? How does it work? Why should I trust you?"
- CTA: "What next?"
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Think of your customers in terms of their motivation, not in terms of their demographic. What are they coming to our product for?
-
Look for the words your customer uses over and over again when referring to your product; you should use those words too.
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Go read your competitor's bad reviews. "Not only is it great whiskey reading, it's fantastic for figuring out what you can solve that people don't like about your competitor."
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Don't explain features, explain benefits. Not what the product can do, but how will the product will make their life better.
-
Using Reddit can help to understand and unlock great content ideas.
-
Looking at the top content from particular subreddits over the past month has been helpful for finding content ideas.
- Perform keyword research to identify keyword modifiers. SEMRush/Moz are tools that can help you.
- When you have to use stock photos, think of a photo that is an analogy for what you're trying to express.
-
Find the overlap between the needs of your consumers and the needs of your business. (Example: Karma's email reminder to charge the sub-30% Karma)
-
"If you're going to email the customer, do right by the customer."
-
Not a fan of no-reply@ email addresses. ("What does that communicate to your customer?")
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Consumers have ever-increasing expectations for mobile email formatting.
-
5 W's (and an H):
- Who are you sending to?
- What do you want them to do?
- When is it appropriate to send the message?
- Where will the recipient read it?
- Why should they care?
- How are you going to measure success?
-
Negative metrics: spam and unsubscribe rates are just as important to look at as positive metrics (like open rate and click rate).
Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers and Earn the Conversion (EDITOR'S NOTE: Chat bots, basically)
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Bots have the same problem as apps: discoverability. (The platforms involved, Google + Facebook + Microsoft, are attempting to deal with this.)
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How to create a chat bot:
- Identify the goal
- Talk to customer service.
- Find the problem. What do customers want to do often? What can we help them do more efficiently?
- Identify the platforms that the audience is on.
- "Brainstorm without limits"
- If anything is possible, what would I do with my chat bot?
- Back to reality
- What's the simplest way to start?
- What should my KPIs be? (Determined by the goals of the chat bot)
- Bring it to life
- Choose the platform.
- Launch and monitor the bot.
- Identify the goal
-
Create bathroom-friendly content! "For a quick dopamine hit." Short, snappy, interesting content for when we're not doing much.
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The product should be secondary to the core content (the dopamine hit). BE ENTERTAINING FIRST.
- This is referred to as building a "snack"; a short bite that users are entertained by even without the product.
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"The number of impressions are not the number of people impressed."
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"The number of likes is not the number of people who like it."
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"Content is the guitar, spend is the amplifier." Organic and paid video content should be similar.
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If you're live streaming, you better give a "privileged view"; show something they wouldn't otherwise be able to see. If you're just live streaming your office working, nobody will tune in.
-
Start small and in-house. Don't try to replicate what the big guys are doing right out the gate. The big guys are used to buying eyeballs.
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People > keywords. Develop relationships and a good reputation.
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"Content that doesn't guide the user to their ultimate destination is disreputable [in search engines]."
-
Figure out peoples' "why's" by looking into search queries that are related to your computer. (Figure out why people are looking for your product, and target your search engine content to that.)
-
Scrape your own and competitors' reviews to "figure out peoples' why".
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Alter the title and description to reflect peoples' "why" in searches.
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Optimize your existing high ranking pages to reflect peoples' "why" in searches. Service user intent.
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You have to speak to people with your keywords. It's more art than science.
-
Google has decided to reward category pages. Category pages rank great. (The majority of organic results pages.)
-
Quality keyword research and thorough segmentation by intent stages is crucial. The three intent stages: informational intent, commercial intent, transactional intent.
-
Informational: start of the path to purchase.
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Commercial example: determining best type of product to purchase.
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Transactional: actually buying the product.
-
-
Good UX is good SEO.
-
Good UX is a long-term and ongoing process.
-
Focus your UX on what makes people leave your various pages.
-
The large number of long-tail pages are important to traffic.
-
Used Searchdex for their SEO migration: https://www.searchdex.com/
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It takes 3 months for Google rankings and changes to stabilize.
-
Awareness is worth paying for (e.g. pages that don't have a direct conversion path) if you can get cheap awareness that still achieves your cost per conversion goals.
-
Segment your paid campaigns (target demographics: location, gender, age, etc.).
-
Targeting influencers and journalists with your paid advertising. (Custom segments targeting journalist emails, for instance.)
-
Target your competitor's followers on Twitter! (Does this also work on Facebook?)
-
Convert drip campaign from email to advertisements on Facebook.
-
Third-party video tools: Soapbox (Wistia), BigVu, Promo, Shakr.
-
Works for Content Harmony.
-
Broad audiences are good for display networks (car insurance, for example). If your audience is narrow, don't waste it on display networks.
How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer's Transformational Journey
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Disengagement/churn "is the #1 limiting factor of businesses."
-
Engage humans' hearts and minds via their aspirations. "They want to be healthier. They want to be wealthier. They want to be wiser." "The primal motivation behind most purchasing decisions in TRANSFORMATION."
-
Serve your customer's aspirations!
-
Rethink what you sell.
- You sell a transformation, not a product.
- Problem-first > product-first.
-
Rethink your customer.
-
From: Existing customer base and target buyers of your product.
-
To: Anyone dealing with the problem you exist to solve.
- Define the problem from a human perspective.
- Become the expert on their Journey.
-
-
Rethink your marketing.
- From: Stories about your product, features.
- To: High-value fuel for their Journey.
-
Shift from a marketing focus on growth to a focus on engagement.
- Shift marketing from about you to for them and their journey.
-
Every channel you rely on will eventually suffer fatigue. (People will search less. Paid marketing will fail. Email won't be delivered. Etc.)
-
You need to be able to understand the "why?" behind the "what?" (the problem).
-
There are only three ways to grow a company:
- Acquisition
- Retention
- Monetization
-
The stakeholders that need to be present at roadmaps are:
- creative stakeholders
- analytical stakeholders
- technical stakeholders
- stakeholders with intuition
-
Put T-shaped employees into leadership roles.
-
Tips on how to grow (verbatim):
-
Get ruthless on product prioritization.
-
Revisit prices often, adjust for the business.
-
Don't lose yourself in partnerships.
-
Fire the wrong people, hire the right ones.
- "Structure around the outcome, not the people."
-
Structure around output not people.
-
-
Classpass focused on referral channels and closed many other marketing channels.
-
Stop building for others (marketers, boards, etc.)
-
Factors that contribute to low conversion rates:
- User experience
- Slow loading pages, difficult to navigate, etc.
- Site content and personalization
- Does it speak to the user?
- Actionable web analytics
- Development resources
- Is website optimization a core focus of the development team?
- User experience
-
Recommends CrazyEgg (heat mapping tool).
-
Drive conversion with personalization. Make it personal! Make it entertaining! Build personalized experiences.
-
There is no more need to laser focus on keyword stuffing and exact matches of tense. Google is smart enough to handle these things on their own.
-
"Experiment with inverted pyramids." In other words: put the answer up top, in shortened (paragraph?) form, and then expand on the details below that.
-
Mobile-first indexing is launching in 2018. (Probably.)
-
Google says mobile is anything that is not a desktop, prioritizing portable devices.
-
Chat bots are growing faster than apps did at their genesis. (NOTE: Not made clear whether it is growing in users or number of chat bots.)
- Communities can help re-engage old users that aren't converting.
-
"What secrets is your website hiding?"
-
Started with an in-depth site audit.
-
Moz had 70,000 pages of "indexed crap."
-
They had 175,000 total indexed pages. 41% of those indexed pages were community profile pages.
-
They
meta noindexed all profiles under 200 MozPoints, going from 71,500 profile pages to 1,490. -
"Find the low traffic/converting pages on your site" and prune those pages. Pruning those pages pushes authority to the pages that deserve it.
- You can do a
site:search on Google to find thin, highly ranked pages.
- You can do a
-
-
-
Check out Google Search Console's URL parameters and ensure they're configured properly, if so. In particular, set whether the parameters change the page content.
-
Research the self-referencing
rel="canonical"tag; Google may prefer this to be present. -
"Optimize for your user's journey. What do your users want?"
-
"Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience." - Tony Hsieh
-
Recap:
- Remove crappy pages/dead weight.
- Configure URL parameters.
- Update CMS/metadata.
- Optimize for the user journey.
- "Mozzers are not perfect SEOs."
-
Check out SEMRush for keyword tracking.
-
GTMetrix and Pingdom for auditing sites.
-
Etsy A/B tested title tags using an experimental framework.
-
Site speed/image optimization may result in improved SEO.
-
Define, design, analyze
- Define: what do you want to test? Form a hypothesis.
- Design: determine experimental variables.
- Analyze: analyze the results.
-
4 criteria of sound hypothesis:
- Confident
- Measurable
- Cost-effective
- Specific
-
To conduct SEO experiments, Etsy groups similar pages into different variant buckets. (For instance, 3 in a control, 3 in a variant, 3 in another variant.)
-
Getting bucketing right is critical to run a clean test. Use stratified sampling (random assignment) to assign the various pages to buckets.
-
Etsy also uses multiple control groups because there are so many uncontrollable variables.
- Ensure that your two controls have very similar behavior. If the test is sound, the two control groups should operate similarly.
-
-
-
Causal Impact by Google is what they use for analyzing the results: https://google.github.io/CausalImpact/CausalImpact.html
-
Etsy cares most about visits and sales – not search engine rankings.
-
Etsy's experiment results:
- 301 redirects resulted in a significant drop.
- Canonical redirects resulted in a significant drop.
- h1 tag experiments resulted in a significant increase in visits.
- They changed the word "unique" to "popular".
- Meta description changes drove more visits to the site with a 95% confidence.
-
Experiments people should consider:
- Have an audit done to ask where you're most lacking.
- Best practices are, based on Etsy's testing, truly best practices.
-
"Humans are drawn naturally to variety. When given the choice between going through a door or not going through the door, we'll usually choose to go through the door."
-
Choice overload is a thing; many times more items are sold when less items are present.
-
Those choosing from many options tended to experience buyer's remorse afterwards. The more features and attributes to compare, choice complexity becomes worse.
-
When too many options are present, we may defer (postpone) or abandon choice.
- Costs of thinking and costs of searching are the cause of this.
-
Choice reduction is often a powerful strategy. Think about Apple and the iPhone.
-
-
Allowing filtering/sorting caters for different choosing strategies.
-
Google's rich and featured snippets are removing credit from the original sites in question.
-
The 5-Part Path to surviving Google:
- An SEO strategy that segments searcher intent.
- Content strategy that prioritizes complex tasks.
- A traffic strategy that diversifies sources.
- Business goals that sync with your SEO and content.
- Incorporate Google's future plans into your own.
-
Moz and AHrefs have a "Keyword Explorer".
-
Use influentier marketing to become the brand searchers recognize.
- Become the thing people search for rather than attacking the SERP or the keyword.