5 Tips to Get Off the Content Marketing Struggle Bus & Create Content Your Audience Will Love

Posted by ronell-smith

(Original image source)

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."

In fishing and hunting circles circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.

Image courtesy of Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

#1—Find your audience

First, let's get something straight: When it comes to creating content worth sharing and hopefully linking to, the goal is, now and forevermore, to deliver something the audience will love. Even if the topic is boring, your job is to deliver best-in-class content that's uniquely valuable.

Instead of guessing what content you should create for your audience (or would-be audience), take the time to find out where they hang out, both online and offline. Maybe it's Facebook groups, Twitter, forums, discussion groups, or Google Plus (Yes! Google Plus!).

Whether your brand provides HVAC services, computer repair, or custom email templates, there's a community of folks sharing information about it. And these folks, especially the ones in vibrant communities, can help you create amazing content.

As an example, the owner of a small automobile repair business might spend some time reading the most popular blogs in the category, while paying close attention to the information being shared, the top names sharing it, and common complaints, issues, or needs that commonly arise. The key here is to see who the major commenters, sharers, and influencers are, which can easily be gleaned after careful review of the blog comments over time.

From there, she could "follow" those influencers to popular forums and discussion boards, in addition to Facebook groups, Google Communities, and wherever else they congregate and converse.

The keys with regard to this audience research is to find out the following:

• Where they are
• What they share
  
• What unmet needs they might have

#2—Talk to them

Once you know where and who they are, start interacting with your audience. Maybe it's simply sharing their content on social media while including their "@" alias or answering a question in a group or forum. But over time, they'll come to know and recognize you and are likely to return the favor.

A word of warning is in order: Take off your sales-y hat. This is the time for sincere interaction and engagement, not hawking your wares.

Once you have a rapport with some of the members and/or influencers, don't be shy about asking if you can email them a quick question or two. If they open that door, keep it open with a short, simple note.

With emails of this sort, keep three things in mind:

• Be brief
• Be bold
• Be gone

Respect their time — and the fact that you don't have enough currency for much of an ask — by keeping the message short and to the point, while leaving the door open to future communication.

#3—Discern the job to be done

We've all heard the saying: "People don't know what they want until they've seen it."

Whether or not you like the bromide, it certainly rings true in the business world.

Too often a product or service that's supposedly the perfect remedy for some such ailment falls flat, even after focus groups, usability testing, surveys, and customer interviews.

The key is to focus less on what they say and more on what they're attempting to accomplish.

This is where the Jobs To Be Done theory comes in very handy.

Based primarily on the research of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for helping businesses view customers motivations. In a nutshell, it helps us understand what job (why) a customers hires (reads, buys, uses, etc.) our product or service.

Christensen writes...

"Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the 'average' customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. With an understanding of the 'job' for which customers find themselves 'hiring' a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do."

Christensen's latest book provides a thorough picture of the "Jobs To Be Done" theory

One of the best illustrations of the JTBD theory at work is the old saw we hear often in marketing circles: Customers don't buy a quarter-inch drill bit; they buy a quarter-inch hole.

This is important because we must clearly understand what customers are hoping to accomplish before we create content.

For the auto repair company preparing to create a guide for an expensive repair, it would be helpful to learn what workarounds currently exist, who are the people experiencing the problem (i.e., DIYers, Average Joes, technicians, etc.), how much the repair typically costs, and, most important, what the fix allows them to do.

For example, by talking to some of the folks in discussion groups, the business owner might learn that the problem is most common for off-roaders who don't feel comfortable making the expensive repair themselves. Therefore, many of them simply curtail the frequent use of their vehicles off-road.

Armed with this information, she would see that the JTBD is not merely the repair itself, but the ability to get away from work and into the woods on the weekend with their vehicles.

An ideal piece of content would then include the following elements:

• Prevention tips for averting the damage that would cause the repair
• A how-to video tutorial of the repair
• Locations specializing in the repair (hopefully her business is on the list with the most and best reviews)

A piece of content covering the elements above, that contains amazing graphics of folks kicking up dirt off-road with their vehicles, along with interviews of some of those folks as well, should be a winner.

#4—Promote, promote, promote

Now that you've created a winning piece of content, it's time to reach back out the influencer(s) for their help in promoting the content.

First, though, ask if what you've created hits the threshold of incredibly useful and worth sharing. If you get a yes for both, you're in.

The next step is to find out who the additional influencers are who can help you promote and amplify the content.

One simple but effective way to accomplish this is to use BuzzSumo to discern prominent shares of your amplifiers' content. (You'll need to sign up for a free subscription, at least, but the tool is one of the best on the market.)

After you click "View Sharers," you'll be taken to a page that list the folks who've re-shared the amplifier's content. You're specifically looking for folks who've not only shared their content but who (a) commonly share similar content, (b) have a sizable audience that would likely be interested in your content, and (c) might be amenable to sharing your content.

As you continue to cast your net far and wide, a few things to consider include:

• Don't abuse email. Maintain the relationships by offering to help them in return as/more often than you ask for help yourself.
• Share content multiple times via social media. Change the title each time content is shared, and look to determine which platforms work best for a given message, content type, etc.
• Use engagement, interaction, and relationship to inform you of future content pieces. Don't be afraid to ask, "What are some additional ideas you'd be excited to share and link to?"

#5—Review, revise, repeat

The toughest part of content marketing is often understanding that neither success nor failure are final. Even the best content and content promotion efforts can be improved in some way.

What's more, even if your content enjoys otherworldly success, it says nothing about the success or failure of future efforts.

Before you make the commitment to create content, there are two very important elements to adhere to:

1.) Only create content that's in line with your brand's goals. There's lots of good ideas for creating solid content, but many of those ideas won't help your brand. Stick to creating content that in your brand's wheelhouse.

2.) This line of questioning should help you stay on track: "What content can I create that's (a) in line with my core business goals; (b) I'm uniquely qualified to offer; and (c) prospects and customers are hungry for?"

My philosophy of the three Rs:

• Review: Answer the questions "What went right?", "What can we do better?", and "What did we miss that should be covered in the future?"
• Review: You'll need to determine the metrics that matter for your brand before creating content, but whatever they are ensure they're easy to track, attainable, and, most important of all, have real meaning and value.
• Repeat: Successful content marketing efforts occur primarily through repetition. You do something once, learn from it, then improve with the next effort. Remember, the No. 1 reason we have less and less competition each year is many aren't willing to pay the price of doing the little things over and over.

This post is, by no means, an exhaustive plan of what it takes to create effortful content. However, for the vast majority of brands struggling with where to start, it's exactly what the doctor ordered.

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Google's War on Data and the Clickstream Revolution

Posted by rjonesx.

Existential threats to SEO

Rand called "Not Provided" the First Existential Threat to SEO in 2013. While 100% Not Provided was certainly one of the largest and most egregious data grabs by Google, it was part of a long and continued history of Google pulling data sources which benefit search engine optimizers.

A brief history

1. Nov 2010 - Deprecate search API
2. Oct 2011 - Google begins Not Provided
3. Feb 2012 - Sampled data in Google Analytics
4. Aug 2013 - Google Keyword Tool closed
5. Sep 2013 - Not Provided ramped up
6. Feb 2015 - Link Operator degraded
7. Jan 2016 - Search API killed
8. Mar 2016 - Google ends Toolbar PageRank
9. Aug 2016 - Keyword Planner restricted to paid

I don't intend to say that Google made any of these decisions specifically to harm SEOs, but that the decisions did harm SEO is inarguable. In our industry, like many others, data is power. Without access to SERP, keyword, and analytics data, our and our industry's collective judgement is clouded. A recent survey of SEOs showed that data is more important to them than ever, despite these data retractions.

So how do we proceed in a world in which we need data more and more but our access is steadily restricted by the powers that be? Perhaps we have an answer — clickstream data.

What is clickstream data?

First, let's give a quick definition of clickstream data to those who are not yet familiar. The most straightforward definition I've seen is:

"The process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting aggregate data about which pages users visit in what order."
– (TechTarget: What is Clickstream Analysis)

If you've spent any time analyzing your funnel or looking at how users move through your site, you have utilized clickstream data in performing clickstream analysis. However, traditionally, clickstream data is restricted to sites you own. But what if we could see how users behave across the web — not just our own sites? What keywords they search, what pages they visit, and how they navigate the web? With that data, we could begin to fill in the data gaps previously lost to Google.

I think it's worthwhile to point out the concerns presented by clickstream data. As a webmaster, you must be thoughtful about what you do with user data. You have access to the referrers which brought visitors to your site, you know what they click on, you might even have usernames, emails, and passwords. In the same manner, being vigilant about anonymizing data and excluding personally identifiable information (PII) has to be the first priority in using clickstream data. Moz and our partners remain vigilant, including our latest partner Jumpshot, whose algorithms for removing PII are industry-leading.

What can we do?

So let's have some fun, shall we? Let's start to talk about all the great things we can do with clickstream data. Below, I'll outline a half dozen or so insights we've gleaned from clickstream data that are relevant to search marketers and Internet users in general. First, let me give credit where credit is due — the data for these insights have come from 2 excellent partners: Clickstre.am and Jumpshot.

Popping the filter bubble

It isn't very often that the interests of search engine marketers and social scientists intersect, so this is a rare opportunity for me to blend my career with my formal education. Search engines like Google personalize results in a number of ways. We regularly see personalization of search results in the form of geolocation, previous sites visited, or even SERP features tailored to things Google knows about us as users. One question posed by social scientists is whether this personalization creates a filter bubble, where users only see information relative to their interests. Of particular concern is whether this filter bubble could influence important informational queries like those related to political candidates. Does Google show uniform results for political candidate queries, or do they show you the results you want to see based on their personalization models?

Well, with clickstream data we can answer this question quite clearly by looking at the number of unique URLs which users click on from a SERP. Personalized keywords should result in a higher number of unique URLs clicked, as users see different URLs from one another. We randomly selected 50 search-click pairs (a searched keyword and the URL the user clicked on) for the following keywords to get an idea of how personalized the SERPs were.

1. Dropbox - 10
2. Google - 12
3. Donald Trump - 14
4. Hillary Clinton - 14
5. Facebook - 15
6. Note 7 - 16
7. Heart Disease - 16
8. Banks Near Me - 107
9. Landscaping Company - 260

As you can see, a highly personalized keyword like "banks near me" or "landscaping company" — which are dependent upon location —receive a large number of unique URLs clicked. This is to be expected and validates the model to a degree. However, candidate names like "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump" are personalized no more than major brands like Dropbox, Google, or Facebook and products like the Samsung Note 7. It appears that the hypothetical filter bubble has burst — most users see the exact same results as one another.

Biased search behavior

But is that all we need to ask? Can we learn more about the political behavior of users online? It turns out we can. One of the truly interesting features of clickstream data is the ability to do "also-searched" analysis. We can look at clickstream data and determine whether or not a person or group of people are more likely to search for one phrase or another after first searching for a particular phrase. We dove into the clickstream data to see if there were any material differences between subsequent searches of individuals who looked for "donald trump" and "hillary clinton," respectively. While the majority of the searches were quite the same, as you would expect, searching for things like "youtube" or "facebook," there were some very interesting differences.

For example, individuals who searched for "donald trump" were 2x as likely to then go on to search for "Omar Mateen" than individuals who previously searched for "hillary clinton." Omar Mateen was the Orlando shooter. Individuals who searched for "Hillary Clinton" were about 60% more likely to search for "Philando Castile," the victim of a police shooting and, in particular, one of the more egregious examples. So it seems — at least from this early evidence —that people carry their biases to the search engines, rather than search engines pushing bias back upon them.

Getting a real click-through rate model

Search marketers have been looking at click-through rate (CTR) models since the beginning of our craft, trying to predict traffic and earnings under a set of assumptions that have all but disappeared since the days of 10 blue links. With the advent of SERP features like answer boxes, the knowledge graph, and Twitter feeds in the search results, it has been hard to garner exactly what level of traffic we would derive from any given position.

With clickstream data, we have a path to uncovering those mysteries. For starters, the click-through rate curve is dead. Sorry folks, but it has been for quite some time and any allegiance to it should be categorized as willful neglect.

We have to begin building somewhere, so at Moz we start with opportunity metrics (like the one introduced by Dr. Pete, which can be found in Keyword Explorer) which depreciate the potential search traffic available from a keyword based on the presence of SERP features. We can use clickstream data to learn the non-linear relationship between SERP features and CTR, which is often counter-intuitive.

Let's take a quick quiz.

Which SERP has the highest organic click-through rate?

• A SERP with just news
• A SERP with just top ads
• A SERP with sitelinks, knowledge panel, tweets, and ads at the top

Strangely enough, it's the last that has the highest click-through rate to organic. Why? It turns out that the only queries that get that bizarre combination of SERP features are for important brands, like Louis Vuitton or BMW. Subsequently, nearly 100% of the click traffic goes to the #1 sitelink, which is the brand website.

Perhaps even more strangely, pages with top ads deliver more organic clicks than those with just news. News tends to entice users more than advertisements.

It would be nearly impossible to come to these revelations without clickstream data, but now we can use the data to find the unique relationships between SERP features and click-through rates.

In production: Better volume data

Perhaps Moz's most well-known usage of clickstream data is our volume metric in Keyword Explorer. There has been a long history of search marketers using Google's keyword volume as a metric to predict traffic and prioritize keywords. While (not provided) hit SEOs the hardest, it seems like the recent Google Keyword Planner ranges are taking a toll as well.

So how do we address this with clickstream data? Unfortunately, it isn't as cut-and-dry as simply replacing Google's data with Jumpshot or a 3rd party provider. There are several steps involved — here are just a few.

1. Data ingestion and clean-up
2. Bias removal
3. Modeling against Google Volume
4. Disambiguation corrections

I can't stress how much attention to detail needs to go into these steps in order to make sure you're adding value with clickstream data rather than simply muddling things further. But I can say with confidence that our complex solutions have had a profoundly positive impact on the data we provide. Let me give you some disambiguation examples that were recently uncovered by our model.

Keyword	Google Value	Disambiguated
cars part	135000	2900
chopsuey	74000	4400
treatment for mononucleosis	4400	720
lorton va	9900	8100
definition of customer service	2400	1300
marion county detention center	5400	4400
smoke again lyrics	1900	880
should i get a phd	480	320
oakley crosshair 2.0	1000	480
barter 6 download	4400	590
how to build a shoe rack	880	720

Look at the huge discrepancies here for the keyword "cars part." Most people search for "car parts" or "car part," but Google groups together the keyword "cars part," giving it a ridiculously high search value. We were able to use clickstream data to dramatically lower that number.

The same is true for "chopsuey." Most people search for it, correctly, as two separate words: "chop suey."

These corrections to Google search volume data are essential to make accurate, informed decisions about what content to create and how to properly optimize it. Without clickstream data on our side, we would be grossly misled, especially in aggregate data.

How much does this actually impact Google search volume? Roughly 25% of all keywords we process from Google data are corrected by clickstream data. This means tens of millions of keywords monthly.

Moving forward

The big question for marketers is now not only how do we respond to losses in data, but how do we prepare for future losses? A quick survey of SEOs revealed some of their future concerns...

Luckily, a blended model of crawled and clickstream data allows Moz to uniquely manage these types of losses. SERP and suggest data are all available through clickstream sources, piggybacking on real results rather than performing automated ones. Link data is already available through third-party indexes like MozScape, but can be improved even further with clickstream data that reveals the true popularity of individual links. All that being said, the future looks bright for this new blended data model, and we look forward to delivering upon its promises in the months and years to come.

And finally, a question for you...

As Moz continues to improve upon Keyword Explorer, we want to make that data more easily accessible to you. We hope to soon offer you an API, which will bring this data directly to you and your apps so that you can do more research than ever before. But we need your help in tailoring this API to your needs. If you have a moment, please answer this survey so we can piece together something that provides just what you need.

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How Can Small Businesses/Websites Compete with Big Players in SEO? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can't, in spite of their natural advantages.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how you, as a small site, could compete against big sites.

Big site advantages

Now look, big sites in SEO have some big advantages. Those include things like:

• Domain authority
• Quantity and diversity of the links that are coming to them, which bias engines to generally rank their content higher than they ordinarily might if it were on a brand-new site or a smaller site that they didn't recognize.
• Trustworthiness. They've built brand associations in the space through advertising and through their size and scale and their reputation over time and over years that means that people have these biases towards trusting that brand, liking that brand, buying from that brand.
• Financial resources that likely you are not going to have as a small website. If we're talking about Expedia here versus randstravels.com, they have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that they can put towards their web marketing efforts and their SEO efforts, and I have, well, my bad self.
• Ability to invest if and usually not just if, but if and when, if and when something is a major priority. If it's not the case that something is a major priority, then Expedia is probably not going to invest in that, and this is where a lot of your advantages come from.

Small site advantages

So as a small website:

• Nimbleness. You can choose to say, "Here are all the things we could be investing in right now, and you know what, this is the highest priority right now," and a week later decide this is no longer the highest priority. We're going to change direction and go pursue this instead. You don't have to check with a manager or a team or a boss. You don't have three layers of management that you have to run that approval process through. You can be extremely nimble. Small teams can get remarkable amounts done in small amounts of time compared to much larger teams.
• Creativity. You are allowed to go outside the boundaries of what's been set. If you have an idea, you can execute on it. If you have an idea at Expedia, you need to get a lot of approval before you can go after it, and you better make sure that all of the rest of your work is done, too.
• Focus. As a small business, you can choose to focus your web marketing efforts on one specific thing. So if you know that SEO is where all of your opportunity lies, you can ignore your other web marketing channels, you can ignore retargeting for a few weeks, you can ignore your PPC accounts for a few weeks and simply focus on SEO. At Expedia, a marketing manager is going to have a long list of things that they need to do that they are responsible for, and they can't simply ignore all their duties to focus on something new.
• Niche appeal. So yes, Expedia built up their brand around travel, and they have associations around hotels and flights and bookings and all this kind of stuff. But you can choose to take a small slice of those for your particular business and say, "We're going to focus exclusively on this, and we're going to become the authority in this particular niche," which gives you a bunch of advantages that we'll talk about.
• Authenticity on your side. So a big brand will often have big brand associations. A smaller brand can build very strong positive associations with, granted, a smaller audience, but you don't need to monetize as many or as fast or as directly as a big brand needs to. You can concentrate on building your brand's appeal to your very specific niche. If you monetize them well enough over time, you can build a great business, a small business but a great small business.

5 ways to compete

So, five ways to compete.

1. Target keywords the big sites are unwilling, unable, or so far aren't trying to compete on.

First off let's talk about keywords. So in the SEO keyword universe, there are going to be keywords that a big brand, like in this example Expedia, is unwilling, unable, or has chosen not to target yet because they have an indirect path to ROI or legal issues or PR issues. Those can be things like:

• Long-tail keywords. So maybe Expedia is definitely targeting something like "Istanbul city guide," but they are definitely not targeting something like "best shops to visit in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar." By the way, I looked that up, and I could not find a great list. So if someone wants to make a list of those, that would be real handy because the Grand Bazaar, very hard to find things.
• Comparison keywords. So Expedia can't go after their competitors' brand names, and they certainly wouldn't choose generally to compare themselves to another brand. So Venere flights versus Expedia flights, they're just not going to have a page on that. But you can have a page on that, and you can compare those things to each other. That's an advantage that a small website is going to have over a larger one.
• Editorial keywords. So Expedia has business relationships with a lot of different hotels. Therefore, it is not in their interest to rank hotels in a particular locale from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 100. As a small website, you don't have that constraint, and you can go after those types of keywords that your bigger competitors bias against doing, and that can be very powerful as well.

2. Aim for authority and brand association in a very specific niche

So like we talked about, Expedia is focused on travel. But Rand's Travels can focus on city-specific itineraries or ranking travel destinations or some other thin slice of a niche that Expedia can't build that same brand equity in.

3. Pursue indirect/harder-to-monetize content

So Expedia knows that they're generally pursuing not just keywords, but content that helps people buy directly from Expedia, and they're going to be looking at that path to conversion. But you might say, "I don't care if it takes three visits or four visits or five visits for someone to convert. I want to build trust. I want to build authority in my niche. Therefore, I can go after content that Expedia would not go after." They might be hotels, flights, cars, and cities. You might be recommended websites and travel education and news and tactics and tips and neighborhoods.

4. Go deeper and provide more value with content than what your big competition can afford to scale

You can invest more in a single piece of content than Expedia or a big brand ever could. So when you take your small niche and you say this keyword or this set of keywords is extremely important to me. This search intent is extremely important. I'm going to create 10x content. I'm going to put 10 times more effort and energy and resources into building that than what my big brand competitor can do. If they are a two-star resource, I'm going to be a five-star resource.

5. Build relationships 1-on-1 that big competition will never invest in

In addition to that element of building better content, you can also build better, more direct relationships with the people you need those relationships with. So Expedia goes through their PR team, and they have their teams of folks that do their relationships. But you can go direct. You can say, "I'm Rand's Travels. I'm going to go meet with people in Istanbul while I'm there and forge those relationships personally and build those relationships up on social media and have conversations and leave blog comments, and that will reinforce my authenticity and my niche appeal."

That's a huge advantage as well, and that can help to amplify the reach of your content and to get you visibility on these keywords and this content that your competitors simply can't touch because they're too big. They need to do this stuff at scale. When you need to do things at scale, you simply can't focus in the same way, and that's where your big advantages come from as a small website.

Now, looking forward to our comments and hearing more from you about how you've been able to compete against the big guys, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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I've Optimized My Site, But I'm Still Not Ranking—Help! - Next Level

Posted by jocameron

Welcome to the sixth installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, Jo took you on an adventure diving for treasure in the long tail of search. This time around we're answering the call for help when you feel like you've done all you can, but you're still not ranking. Read on and level up!

You’ve optimized your pages, written delightful title tags, concocted a gorgeous description to entice clicks, used your target keyword in your copy with similar words, and your content is good, like really good. As far as you’re concerned you’re doing everything you can on that page to say to Google “This is relevant content!” But, lo and behold, you’re not ranking.

Frustrating, right? Well, no more. I’m going to show you how you can discover what’s holding you back, and how to make sure your site is a lovely big target for visitors, just like this happy fellow:

You’ll learn some tricks you can do in your browser and then we’ll speed things up with some cat magic and pixie dust to sprinkle all over your site.

To start, pop open these tools in another tab so you’re ready to go:

• Campaign deliciousness in Moz Pro (if you don't have it set up, take the free trial for a spin to follow along)
• Your pot of keyword gold

Dreamy!

Step 1: Put in a quick call to Google

Well, you could try to call Big G (that’s what I like to call Google sometimes, just for kicks), but you may have better luck phoning yourself from 1995 with the idea for Google — then you could fix the rankings in your favor. Totally worth it.

Hello, operator?

Instead of messy and possibly future-altering time travel, you can put a call in by running a search operator like this:

site:yourfabsite.com
site:yourfabsite.com/blog
site:http://ift.tt/2eqkKiT

It’s like saying, "Hey, Big G, show me all the result you have in your index for yourfabsite.com." This is what you don’t want to see:

If you’re seeing the above, you won’t be able to rank because your site isn’t indexed. It’s got to be indexed before it can rank, and it’s got to be crawled before it can be indexed. Trying to rank without being indexed is like applying for a job and forgetting to attach your CV.

Search Console is here to console you

In the results page above, Google is directing you straight to the Google Search Console.

Not quite as fun as Xbox or as comforting as a hug from a loved one, Google’s Search Console is still pretty sweet all the same.

Go — right now, right, right now, don’t read any more, you should have already gone — go and set up your Search Console. Once you’re all set up and your site is verified, you can go to the page that I like to think of as the Fires of Mount Doom and throw in your precious.

http://ift.tt/MX3YzE

Don’t worry, that analogy doesn’t hold up. It won’t destroy your site. :-)

Head to "Google Index" and then "Index Status" to see the data similar to what we looked at above, but in graph form! Definitely handy for tracking how your pages have been indexed over time.

If your site is not being indexed, you’re going to want to take a closer look at your robots.txt file. Check your Search Console Messages to see if there's a reason Google couldn’t index your site. If Google can’t access your robots.txt file they'll stop indexing to avoid crawling pages listed there.

Toolkit:

Google Search Console – Find out why you’re not being crawled and indexed

Further reading:

A Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console

What is Robots.txt?

How to check which URLs have been indexed by Google using Python

Step 2: Find out where you’re ranking

Now that you know your pages are being crawled and indexed, you want to get them to the top of the results where they gosh-darn-well should be, right?

Find your rankings with your bear hands

Yes, I DO mean bear hands. This is a manual job and your soft, tender, indoor keyboard hands just won’t do. So attach your bear hands and start digging. Search Google for your brand name, primary keywords, secondary keywords, words, and phrases you used on your page (one at a time, of course). Feel the ache in your chest as you scan the page: "Where is my jazzy title? My tantalizing description? My adorable URL?"

Turn up the volume

Not finding your site on the first page? Instead of clicking through to the many ooooos of Google, we’re going to change the settings in your browser to show 50 or 100 results per search so we can view more results with every search. I’m going to want to see A LOT more pet costume results, so I’ll click on the gear icon in Chrome and hit "Search Settings," then toggle up the "Results per page":

Now we’ve got a whole page of 50 or 100 results to search through. Use CMD + F for Mac (or CRTL + F for Windows) to search for your domain.

This process is great for doing a quick check to see if you’re in the top 50 or top 100. Remember that your browser can return personalized results when you’re logged into Google, so log out and enter incognito mode.

Like any good detective, make sure you record the keyword, position, and URL in a spreadsheet for Future You to discover and applaud Present-Day You on your fabulousness.

Start cooking with gas

Manual searches aren’t for everyone. I mean come on, we work in technology — we don’t want to be lugging keywords around the hot, dry Google search page, plugging them in one after another. I hear ya buddy, loud and clear. Let’s detach those bear hands, grab your list of keywords, and plug them straight into Keyword Explorer.

Check if you’re on the first page

Remember, you’ll need a Medium or higher Moz Pro subscription or a standalone Keyword Explorer subscription so you can create your keyword list.

Hit "Create or upload a new list" and choose "Enter Keywords" to pop those straight in there, bish-bash-bosh.

Open up a list you’ve created and pop in your URL to to see your rank from 1–10.

Want to see if you’re in the top 50?

Heck yeah! Take that same list and paste them into a new campaign in Moz Pro.

If you already have a campaign running you can also transfer these straight over from Keyword Explorer. Just check the box next to the keywords you want to track, then choose a campaign from the drop down.

You know before (about 30 seconds ago), when we talked about manual searches returning personalized results? Checking rankings in Moz Pro avoids all that nonsense by anonymizing the data and, in my experience, provides the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see. Pretty snazzy, right?

A new campaign will build in about 30 minutes, which is just enough time to catch up on “Stranger Things” and reminisce about Winona Ryder circa 1990…

On the other hand, adding to an existing campaign will be a bit longer. You’ll see data as soon as your campaign updates next. So you can binge watch the whole series, because why not, right?

...and we’re back! Check out where you’re ranking for your target keywords, which URL is ranking, and over time, whether you’ve moved up or down.

We also pull in search volume from Moz’s Keyword Explorer to give you an idea of demand. When looking at search volume, don’t forget that the higher the demand, the more competition you’ll likely face. Don’t be disheartened by ranking well for keywords with lower search volume, especially if they convert better.

Tracking your rankings is crucial to understanding why you’re not performing as well as you expected. If you’re seeing a lot of down arrows, you need to investigate who is jumping ahead of you and why.

Dig into keywords with falling rankings

Let’s find some keywords that have that sad little down arrow, meaning we’ve dropped down in rankings since our last update.

Here's a little bundle of keywords that I can investigate. I’ll click on the keyword to open up the Analysis report and scroll down to "Your Performance." Now we can see a historical graph of your rankings and track those other sites who want to push us to one side. And what do we have here?

They’ve gone and nipped in front of us! This will not stand! It’s likely that for some reason your competitors result has been getting stronger engagement for this keyword. More clicks and more people who do click staying on the page. So let’s find out what you can do to set things right.

Toolkit:

Keyword Explorer Lists – Check your rankings on the fly

Moz Pro – Track your rankings (and your competitors’) over time

Step 3: Make sure you and your content are best friends

There are 2 parts to this step, just like those ‘Best Friend’ heart necklaces that were so popular in the '90s. Separately they look like BE FRIE and ST NDS, but together…. awww, the secret code is unlocked.

Get your basic on-page optimization in order.

Check your content is tip-top quality

Don’t go changing (too often)

I don’t want to recommend you jumping in and making changes to content too often. Even Google needs time to register your updates. However, if your content is a bit dusty and you’re losing out to competitors, then it’s time to check that everything you think is in place is actually in place.

View your page like a bot

I like to think of this as a “bot’s-eye-view.” When a little bot comes along, it doesn’t go, “Oooh, look at that lovely header image! Oooh, I love that font, the white space is really working for me! Oh, how the Internet has changed since my days as a junior bot trawling through gifs of dancing babies!" It reads the code and moves on. We can do this too, with a little bit of knowhow.

Using Firefox or Chrome, you can right-click and view the page source.

If you’re unfamiliar with reading code, it’ll look pretty intimidating.

We’re going to use CMD + F (or CRTL + F for Windows) to hunt for the bits and pieces we’re after.

Pro tip: If you’re seeing og:title, this is a Facebook tag.

Likewise, if you’re using the meta property="og:description," this is also a Facebook tag. These help format posts when the URL is shared on Facebook. You’ll want to make sure you also have Title and Description tags link these:

<title>The best title for this page</title>

<meta name="description" content="The best description for this page" />

Basic page optimization

This is relatively straightforward because you control your pages. However, maybe for that very same reason, it’s still a bit of a stumbling block for beginners. I’ve been there. I once spent a whole morning trying to write a single title tag.

If you’re confused and locked in a mind-melt of madness because you can’t figure out if you should use the primary keyword and/or the secondary keyword in the title tag, chill your boots.

Here is a brisk and fairly brief run-through on how to get into a productive page optimization mindset.

Title tag basics

This is the bit you click on in the SERPs. Should be about 55 characters of punchy goodness that is relevant to your content. Because it’s relevant to your content, it includes the words you want to rank for and accurately describes what you’re talking about. You better believe Google is paying attention to click signals, so draw that click with your awesome headline. Think about the titles you click on when you’re searching for lovely things. Do your own searches to see what title tags are out there; it’s not like they’re hard to find, they’re literally a click away.

Description tag basics

This is the bit of text under the title tag in the SERPs. They should be about 155 characters of tender lovin’ poetry that talks to the user like they’re a real human being, because they are, and so are you (unless you’re part of the cat colony I suspect controls large portions of the web). This is not a direct ranking factor, but it can heavily influence clicks. Clicks from humans. And what do clicks do? They signal to Google that you’re hot stuff!

On-page copy

Yep, you’re going to want to pop your keywords here, too. But really, let’s not get too hung up on this. If you’re writing something super-duper about your topic, this will flow naturally. Make it as long as it needs to be to make your point. Don’t rattle off the same words over and over; use language to the best of your ability to describe your topic. Remember all those clicks you worked so hard to get with your title and description tags? Well, if they all bounce back to search, you just know Google is paying attention to this. Your content has to be worth the click.

Go and look at what type of content is already ranking. This is not an exercise in scraping content, but a way to make sure that your content isn’t just as good, but much better.

This task can be done manually for a small site or for a few pages you’ve cherry-picked, no problem.

Check your whole site regularly

Maybe you've been creating content like a content-creating super machine and you might have skipped a few description tags. Or maybe you copy and pasted a title tag or two. In this case, you’ll want to check that it’s all hunky-dory on a larger scale and on a regular basis.

We’re going back to our Moz Pro campaign to take the heavy lifting out of this job.

Head to the Rankings tab and hit that little "Optimize" button.

Once you hit that little button, you’ve set off a chain of events where our bot looks at the keyword you’re targeting, then has a good old dig-around on your page and gives you a score out of 100.

We’re hoping for that wheel of destiny to roll around to 100.

If we make it part-way around, it’s time to look at the suggestions to see how you can improve your on-page optimization.

Focus on top-level pages, pages that convert, and high-authority pages first.

Toolkit:

Moz Pro Page Optimization – Check that your whole site is optimized correctly

Further reading:

8 Old School SEO Practices That Are No Longer Effective - Whiteboard Friday

Step 4: Become a keyword connoisseur

It’s easy to become fixated on a keyword beyond what is reasonable or healthy. Are you carrying a torch for a golden keyword? Stalking it in the SERPs even though it’s completely entranced with the likes of Wikipedia, eBay, AdWords, and Image Packs?

Ranking in the high-click zone for your keywords is all about beating other sites. This special, golden ticket to traffic wonderland might be a good long term goal, but you’re not going to get to the top of the results in the near future.

On the other hand, maybe you’re afraid of competition, so you only target keywords with very low difficulty.

This can be a winning strategy if the keywords have strong intent and you’re targeting the long tail of search, but you don’t want to put in all that work creating content and find that no one is searching for it. No searches means no traffic, and no traffic means no humans to click a thing that makes a person somewhere in the world look at their analytics data and smile.

A little bit of competition is a good thing — it indicates a healthy, profitable industry.

So we’re looking for a sweet spot: keywords with some demand and less competition. I’m going to break down what organic competition is, and how you know what level of keyword difficulty you can target.

What's the meaning of this so-called 'competition?'

If you want to rank organically, your competition is the other sites that are currently on the first page for the keywords. It’s not the total number of sites that are using your keywords in their content, and it’s not the AdWords competition.

If someone on your team, or an agency or a client sends you competition data that’s defined as low, medium, or high, this is very likely to be AdWords competition, and it relates to the cost-per-click.

Moz’s Keyword Difficulty score uses the top 10 organic results to calculate the Difficulty metric. It’s a score out of 100, where a higher number means that the competition is strong, and it may take you longer to see results from your efforts. Every search you bash into Keyword Explorer shows you the Difficulty score, and you can build these into lists so you can compare related keywords.

Benchmark your site’s Difficulty rating

We know that Difficulty is out of 100, but a question we get all the time is: How do I know what level of Difficulty is too high?

Well, first off, testing is a sure way to find out. But if you want a little pointer before you head down that road, here's how you can quickly benchmark your site’s Difficulty rating.

I learnt this tip from Russ Jones at Mozcon, so I apologies for the blatant rip-off here, but it’s too handy not to share.

Time for another consoling hug from Google Search Console. Grab the keywords that are already sending you traffic from Search Traffic > Search Analytics and download them to CSV.

Save these to a list in KWE.

I usually copy those darlins out of the CSV and plonk them right into a new list.

Hit "Save," and now you have a benchmark to use when looking at other keywords you could potentially rank for.

When you’re looking at keywords to target in the future you'll have a good idea whether it’s a short-term or long-term goal.

You can also capitalize on keywords you’re already getting traffic for by looking for opportunities in the SERP Features. Can you steal a Featured Snippet?

I also want to track these keywords over time to see if I’m losing or gaining ground, so I’ll add them from my list straight to my Moz Pro campaign.

Next time my campaign updates, and forevermore into the future, I’ll be keeping the sharpest of eyes on these keywords.

Toolkit:

Google Search Console – Grab keywords already sending you traffic

KWE – Find the real organic competition and benchmark Difficulty

Step 5: Build your site’s authority

Now step 5 is a real doozy, and it’s a common stumbling block for new sites. Just like networking in the real world, online authority is built up over time by your connection to sites that search engines already trust.

I like to think of authority as the pixie dust from the J.M. Barrie novel Peter Pan. It’s almost mentioned as an afterthought, but without it Wendy and the gang were just kids jumping up and down on their beds. They’re thinking happy thoughts. They might even get a bit of temporary lift, you know, just like when you might get a bit of traffic here and there — enough to keep you jumping. But there's a very big difference between jumping up and down on a spring-loaded mattress and flying off to a world of perpetual youth.

Track your authority

To figure out how much dust you have in your tank, you’ll need to take a look at the Moz metric Domain Authority. This is our best prediction of how well a site will rank for any given search. It’s on a scale of 1–100, and higher DA means more authority.

You can get your paws on DA free through Open Site Explorer or the MozBar Chrome extension. I like to keep MozBar on DA mode so I can check this metric out as I scoot about the web.

You’ll want to check your DA monthly to see how you’re progressing and save this to a sheet, as incoming fresh data will replace the current data in OSE and MozBar. Once you’ve got your data, think about plotting a tasty graph to show how you’re performing versus your competitors.

To make this a whole lot easier, head to the Moz Pro "Links" tab. Here you’ll find your historical link metrics, alongside those of your direct competitors.

Pixie dust isn’t just powering your rankings, but everyone else's as well. These metrics are relative with respect to the other sites similar to your own, including your competitors.

Gather a pocket full of pixie dust

The first thing we always recommend when people reach out to us to find out how they can improve their Domain Authority is to improve the overall SEO of their site. The good news for you is we’ve already done that in steps 1-4 — highest of high fives to you!

The second thing you have to do is get backlinks. This is commonly known as link building. When I started doing SEO for an ecommerce site back about what feels like a thousand years ago now, I had no idea what I was doing; this term irked me, and still kind of does. It sounds like you need to build links yourself, right? Nope! It’s like you’re playing Minecraft, but instead of building the structures, you’re actually trying to encourage other people to build them for you. In fact, you’re not allowed to build anything yourself, because that's cheating. Game changer!

Don’t forget you don’t want just anyone building these structures. You need good people who themselves have authority; otherwise, your lovely gothic mansion might turn into a pile of rubble. (This is my analogy for having spammy links that could get your site penalized by search engines.)

A lot of link building today is PR and outreach. I’m not going to go into that in this post, but I’ll include some links in the toolkit below to help you in that department.

We're going to look at what actions you can take to track and build your authority.

Check for any leaks

There’s no point grabbing up pixie dust if you have a whopping great hole in your pocket.

Find and plug any holes quick-smart. Open Site Explorer has a handy tab just for this job. Pop in your domain and hit “Link Opportunities.”

Now here's a list of broken pages on your site that have inbound links. Any page on your site that's down isn’t passing on its value to the other pages on your site — not to mention it’s a shoddy user experience. Look out for any pages serving a 404 status error. I can priorities the pages with the highest DA and more linking domains.

Internal links

I said before that you can’t build any of your links yourself. However, as with everything in SEO there's a caveat: in this case, links from within your own site are not only key to your site’s usability, but they also pass equity. Internal linking is primarily for user experience, but it also helps bots navigate your site for the purposes of lovely indexing.

Don’t stuff too many links on your page

Your homepage and other top pages will probably have the strongest authority, as other sites will link to your homepage in many cases.

You want that high-equity page to link out to other pages in a natural way that resembles a pyramid structure. Don’t forget the user in your rush to dish out equity; do visitors want to go from your homepage straight to some random deep page on your site? Does this help them on their journey?

Use the Crawl Test research tool in Moz Pro to find out if any pages of your site are flagged for having too many on-page links.

You also shouldn't go overboard with keyword-rich anchor text. Once again, think about the user, not about gaming search engines. This one can get you penalized in some way, so keep it natural.

If in doubt, just watch Season 2 Episode 4 of the IT Crowd for this delightful moment:

If you’re scooping up big swaths of copy to get keyword-rich anchor text but it doesn’t really help the person reading the article, then maybe you’ve got yourself an awkward link at your dinner party.

To follow or nofollow?

Links come in two flavors: follow and nofollow. Generally speaking, you do want your internal links to be “follow.” Bots will follow them on the journey of your choosing and equity will be passed on, which is just what you want.

You can use the MozBar to check your pages for follow and nofollow links.

Nofollow links can be marked on a link-by-link basis, or a whole page on your site can be allocated as nofollow. Let’s find the "Meta-robots Nofollow" column in your crawl CSV and filter by TRUE to check if you intended to mark these pages as nofollow.

Convert mentions to links

If people or sites are already talking about your brand, then you’re not a million miles away from converting that to a link.

What you’re searching for are pages that mention your brand term but don’t link to you yet. This takes a bit of digging to do manually, but thankfully this is automated in your Moz Pro campaign.

Head to the "Links" tab in Moz Pro and hit "Opportunities."

If you’re not seeing suggestions, you’ll want to modify your Brand Rules (Rankings > Add & Manage Keywords > Manage Brand Rules) and add a few more options. I already had my brand term, “fantasycostumes,” but you can probably guess this won’t be mentioned that often. So I added broader mentions like “fantasy costumes” as well as more specific mentions of my domain “fantasycotumes.com.”

Back in my campaign’s Link Opportunities tab, I can see the site that mentioned the broader term “fantasy costumes” and their authority. Now we can start to use mentions and DA to judge other sites:

Having looked at these examples, maybe they’re not talking about me exactly, but that’s ok. They’re still discussing my niche, so let’s go and see who's linking to them by popping their URL into OSE.

This will give me an idea of what sort of content is valued and linked to, and I can use this to figure out my next step forward.

Toolkit:

MozBar – In-browser link analysis

Moz Pro Crawl Test – Find those nofollow pages and pages with too many links

OSE – Explore backlink analysis

Fresh Web Explorer – Track mentions of your brand and closely related terms

Further reading:

Moz’s guide to link building

Google’s guide to follow and nofollow links

Wrapping up

I hope this helps you begin to uncover why your content isn’t ranking for your target keywords, and sets the wheels in motion for climbing up the SERPs.

Try Moz Pro + KWE, free for 30 days

Don’t forget that Moz Pro is available free for the first 30 days and it includes Keyword Explorer, so you can start to understand your site’s authority, check your on-page optimization, track your rankings over time, and figure out how to improve them.

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