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How we keep your account secure (without using your IP address)

Posted on June 6, 2018 by jeffriseo

.imageborder {border: 2px solid #e9e9e9; border-radius: 2px; margin-bottom: 32px !important;}

Barrier to entry

Ever logged into dotmailer only to see this?

Although this stops you getting into your account right away, it’s a good thing – it offers an extra layer of protection for your account over and above your password.

But some of you were seeing this a fair bit. Others were seeing it… a lot. And that’s because it was triggered by your IP address changing. If you only ever used dotmailer at work, your IP address probably didn’t change. But if you were logging in at home, or over public wifi (because you were in your favourite coffee house, collaborative working space or gin parlour), your IP address may have been changing fairly frequently. This is because non-corporate IP addresses are often ‘dynamic’, which means they change every time you connect to them.

And when your IP address did change, you had to verify all over again. Some of you were telling us you had to do this multiple times a day – and that didn’t feel right, so we set out to do better.

Frictionless entry

From today, we no longer use IP addresses in the verification process. Instead, when you verify, you’ll be verifying the browser on your device. If you change device or browser (or browser profile), then you’ll verify just like before. But you’re likely to do that a lot less often than changing your IP address (which mostly, you would have had no control over).

You’ll also have to re-verify if you don’t log in for 30 days or more (so that if you do change a device, you don’t have to worry about it – it will become unverified automatically).

All this means that you are much less likely to have to repeat-verify, but that your account remains secure.

Email or SMS

Just like before, we offer two ways of verifying your account: via email or via SMS. Email is the default, so if you’d rather receive a text message instead, your account owner can set up two-factor authentication on your account by following these steps.

The post How we keep your account secure (without using your IP address) appeared first on The Marketing Automation Blog.

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Posted in Social Media Syndication | Tagged Account, Address, KEEP, secure, using, without

Meet Lili Boev, our Group Account Director

Posted on September 29, 2016 by jeffriseo
  1. Why did you join the dotmailer team?

I joined as a graduate almost 8 years ago in the New Business sales team. I moved into Account Management and have progressed through the ranks in the Account Management function to now head up the Key Accounts team. I had learned about email marketing at university and marketing in general was what I enjoyed most from my degree. dotmailer offered me the opportunity to not only do what I was good at, but also support clients from the strategic side. I knew right from the first interviews that I wanted to work at such an exciting and growing company.

  1. Tell us a bit about your role

My role as the Group Account Director is to lead the Key Account team and has three main elements. One: I support and line manage the Key Account Directors, whose primary responsibilities are to develop our clients email programs to ensure they meet their objectives. The goal of the team overall is to provide outstanding service to our clients and to continually push their email marketing. Two: I work top-level with our clients from a strategic point of view. I challenge their status quo to make sure they don’t become stale with their email marketing. Three: I work closely with the other senior managers to refine the internal processes so that our key account clients have a seamless journey through the various teams at dotmailer. This ensures that we deliver the highest possible service to the client and that they continue to use the platform.

Lili, the basketball lover

  1. What accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I’m most proud of the fact that I began at dotmailer 8 years ago as a graduate and the company has rewarded my hard work and provided me with additional responsibilities and growth opportunities.  I feel very fortunate to work for that kind of a company, and that my colleagues across the business look to me for guidance and advice in the strategic direction of the business.

  1. Can you please tell us a bit about the Key Accounts function? What do you do and which customers qualify as Key Accounts?

The Key Accounts function exists to work with dotmailer’s largest and most complex clients. These businesses typically operate in many countries. They also have many business units or have quite complex requirements for their email strategy. They are often quite high touch clients and are fairly advanced with their marketing maturity. Many of our clients see us as an extension to their marketing teams. We are often involved with decisions that even go beyond email, which shows the level of trust our clients have in us. We have a very proactive approach to the development of our client’s email programs.

  1. What are your plans for the Key Accounts function?

We have spent the last few years developing a methodology and planning process that has proven to yield results. We are adding new features to the platform all the time. We are also seeing our clients have a more complex technical infrastructure. I want us to continue pushing innovative uses of the dotmailer features and to continue our strong heritage of being able to exceed the expectations of our clients no matter their unique needs.

  1. What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

The main questions I tend to get are around the services that Key Accounts offer – given we work so closely with our Key Account clients, they want to know about the team and the type of service we can provide for them.

  1. Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

Our Key Account approach and methodology is a big differentiator to our clients – as is our transparency.  When I show prospective customers our Key Account methodology they always seem so surprised to see it — as if it’s something that other businesses don’t do. I show them sample Account Plans and client roadmaps, as well as the process that we follow to achieve results. I explain that all our suggestions always tie into their business goals and we take into account any internal challenges and barriers. This seems to be a big differentiator and gets them very excited to work with us.

  1. What still surprises you in your daily interactions with dotmailer’s customers – current or prospective?

It never ceases to amaze me how some clients don’t think they are doing anything particularly interesting or unique. If I think that a client is doing something interesting and different, they laugh when I suggest they enter it for an award. Many of our clients seem to think that other organizations are doing it so much better. Digital Marketers really are a humble bunch of people. They definitely need to be recognized for the fantastic work they do. I’m so glad that we have things like the dotmailer ‘dotties’ – our award program designed to do just that.

  1. How much time is your team on the road vs. in the office? Any road warrior tips to share?

On average, the team spend about one day a week on the road, meeting with clients. Luckily, we have this awesome office that our clients love coming to as well and we’re always so glad to have them sit with us.

  1. Tell us a bit about yourself – favorite sports team, favorite food, guilty pleasure, favorite band, favorite vacation spot?

I love sports. I play basketball and do obstacle course races. I climb, cycle and on occasion snowboard.  I also play squash. I play anything that involves kicking, throwing or hitting a ball. I love ice hockey though I don’t play. I am a bit obsessed with the Chicago Blackhawks and the local team the Guildford Flames.  I enjoy getting out and about, and do as much as possible around London. Recently, I went to watch Mexican Lucha Wrestling and have been to almost all the Secret Cinema events. My not so guilty pleasure is probably modern ballet. I go at least a few times a year to watch.

Want to meet more of the dotmailer team? Say hi to Darren Hockley, Global Head of Support, Dan Morris, EVP for North America and Darryl Clark, Global Head of Technical Solutions.

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Posted in Social Media Syndication | Tagged Account, Boev, Director, Group, Lili, Meet

Getting your welcome email right

Posted on August 25, 2016 by jeffriseo

Your welcome email is the first email that your customers are likely to receive from you. It typically has the highest engagement of any email you are likely to send, and it’s your opportunity to show off what you do and how great you are. It is also a way to thank your customers for buying from you and begin building a relationship with them; yet too many retailers miss this great opportunity. You only get one change to make a first impression.

The non-existent

Office, Sweaty Betty and Hotel Chocolat didn’t send a welcome email at all after signing up. There was no thank you, no offer, and no attempts to capture extra data. This is a lost opportunity for these three companies.

The average

Charles Tyrwhitt, Reebok and Urban Outfitters did send an email after signing up. But their subject lines and content don’t come across like a welcome email and can be easily missed  for instance,  “15% off your Reebok gear”, “Start Urban Outfitting”, “Hurry, your £10 offer is waiting!” However, their emails are on brand and offer an incentive to take action.

Reebok’s welcome email

If UO replaced its hero image with an animated GIF they would probably see an increase in engagement with their emails.

UO

Urban Outfitters’ email has a nice graphic but a GIF would be more eye-catching

Diesel, Footlocker, Havaianas, Hugo Boss, and Uniqlo also send a timely email shortly after signing up. Yet their emails need a lot of work. They are text-heavy, aren’t on brand and are not particularly engaging. Diesel’s email copy is confusing and tries to get you to create an account.

diesel

Lack of branding let Diesel’s email down

All of these brands create a poor initial experience. Footlocker, Fossil and Hugo Boss’s emails are double opt-in emails. This is good for data quality, but it is at the expense of great customer experience. At least Fossil and Hugo Boss’s actual welcome emails are on-brand. But since signing up and confirming my subscription, Footlocker hasn’t sent me a single email.

hugo boss

The welcome email from Hugo Boss

The good

Adidas, Allsaints, Cath Kidston, FootAsylum, Forever21, Jack Wills, Kuoni, Levi’s, Schuh all sent what in my opinion are good welcome emails. They had clear subject lines that welcomed or thanked the user. The copy and design of these emails are on brand and again welcomed the user to the company.

levis

Levi’s welcome email is image-heavy and on brand

Some of the brands like Adidas and Forever 21 included a discount to encourage the customer to engage further, and followed best practice elements to create a positive customer experience.

adidas

Adidas offers an incentive in its welcome email

The winner

However, the outstanding winner of the welcome emails goes to FootAsylum.

  • The email has great use of microcopy throughout.
  • It contains a clear benefit statement of being a subscriber. The benefit statement also set the expectations of what you’re likely to receive.
  • They use a great Call to Action “Stop Reading. Start Shopping!”
  • They are also the only company to use their welcome email to collect further data by having a very obvious preference centre within the body of the email.
  • Finally, the email is clearly on brand.
asylum

Foot Asylum wins the welcome email contest

Tips for welcome emails

  • Make sure you send it immediately after the customer signs up.
  • Keep the subject line clear and obvious that it’s a welcome email.
  • Set expectations for what the customer will receive and how frequently.
  • Provide a benefit statement for signing up.
  • Use this email as an opportunity to find out more about your customers.
  • Use preheader text as a follow on from your subject line.
  • Provide a safe sender message to encourage customers to add your email to their safe senders.

Want to find out more about creating the perfect welcome program? Download a copy of our free best practice guide: The email welcome program: Have your new subscribers at hello.

If you didn’t catch my first post on the sign-up process you can check it out here.

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Protecting your account from password compromise

Posted on August 17, 2016 by jeffriseo

At dotmailer we try our best to keep the bad guys out, but if they already have your password, there is very little we can do to detect, and stop them logging in as you…unless, of course, you have already turned on two-factor authentication (2FA).  Two-factor in most cases is something you know (your username/password), and something you have (a single use access code or authentication link).

But how do can they get my password in the first place?

There are various ways an attacker may have access to your login details, but some of the possible methods include:

  • Compromised computer

If the computer you use to log in to your online accounts is infected with malware, it is possible that your keystrokes and even screen captures are being logged and sent back to the bad guys…..yep, including your passwords, and other authentication details.

  • Snooping on the network

If an attacker has access to the network from which you are logging on to an online service (e.g. public Wi-Fi hotspot), in some cases it may be possible to capture the data as it passes to the server…..yep, including your password, and other authentication details.  This is where looking for HTTPS in your browser address bar becomes very important.  At dotmailer, all authentication data passes over a secure channel, thus protecting you from this sort of attack.

  • Credential reuse

It’s really important not to use the same password across different services.  We’ve seen an awful lot of very big data breaches in the news recently, and the attackers have been using the stolen authentication details from these breaches to try and log on to other online services…with what seems to be a great deal of success!  This sadly means that many people are still using the same password everywhere they go online.  This is one of the reasons why your dotmailer password is set to expire, and you are asked for a new one every 90 days; and why you should be choosing something completely different every time.  Simply incrementing that number at the end of your password is not cool!

  • Social Engineering

As we get better at using good passwords, and preventing malware infections; sometime, the bad guys just find it easier to ask us for our passwords. At dotmailer, our support team will never contact you asking for your password.

If one of the above unfortunate events were to happen, 2FA adds another layer of defense, as the attacker would also need access to the authentication link or SMS code.  In reality that would mean having access to your mailbox, or mobile phone.  We’ve already seen that it’s possible that an attacker has obtained your password due to a compromised computer, or network; which is why we would always recommend using an “out-of-band” communication such as SMS as the means to deliver the 2FA authentication token where possible. dotmailer offers SMS 2FA to all customers.  It’s simple to setup, and its free!

Without access to the authentication token, the attacker could of course try and brute force the code, but that is where our other controls such as failed login account lockouts kick in.

How to turn on 2FA in dotmailer

Log in to your account, and click the user icon in the top right, and select Account:

 

In the resulting window click on the “Account Settings” tab, and scroll down to the “Security” section.  Simply tick the Two-factor authentication box, and enter your mobile phone number, and hit save settings at the bottom of the page.

security-blog-image

 

Done! Congratulations, you have just gone one step further in protecting your valuable data.

Now you have protected your dotmailer account, check out TurnOn 2FA and see which of your other online services offer a similar feature, and SWITCH IT ON!

Check out my last post on protecting your online account from unauthorized access. See also our previous support article on securing your account with two-factor authentication, and for more general information on what dotmailer do to protect you and your data, please visit our Trust Centre.

Note: If you are a managed user, you will need to ask your account administrator to do this for you. For obvious security reasons, you will not be able to disable this feature without the help from our support team.

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Posted in Social Media Syndication | Tagged ... ..., |Add, |Adword, |Adword Keyword Tool, |GoogleAdwords, 2FA authentication, 6543777|Best, Above, Access, Account, Accounts, across, Address, Agency|Company|New, always, Another, Area|, Article, Asked, attacker, authentication data, authentication details, authentication link, Back, bad guys, bar, becomes, Been, Being, Best, Better, big data, big data breaches, box, browser, browser address bar, Capture, cases, ccw, ccw-atrib-link, Centre, Channel, Check, Choosing, Click, Code, Communication, Completely, compromise, Computer, congratulations, contact, controls, Could, Course, Customers, Data, Days, deal, Deliver, Design|Social, Details, Different, Done, dotmailer, dotmailer password, Down, Easier, end, Engineering, Enter, even, Events, Every, Everywhere, F., factor, feature, find, first, Force, free, from, general, Gone, Good, Great, great deal, Guys, Have, HAVING, Help, How..., HTTPS, Important, Include, including, Information, Just, KEEP, Know, Layer, link, little, login, Looking, Managed, Many, marketing|6198318589|Best, Marketing|Get, Marketing|Great|Increase|Business, Mean, Means, methods, Mobile, mobile phone, mobile phone number, more, Most, Need, network, Never, News, note, number, obvious security reasons, Offer, Offers, Online, Over, Page, Password, Peninsula Wineries| Cool, People, phone, phone number, place, Possible, Post, previous support article, Protecting, Public, reality, Really, Reasons, recommend, reuse, Right, same, Save, Screen, section, secure, security, Seems, Select, SEO|6198318589|Best, Service, Services, services|203, Services|JG, Set, Settings, setup, Should, Simple, Simply, Single, Social, some, sort, Step, Still, stop, Success, Such, Support, switch, Team, techniques|what, Them, There, these, They, Tick, Time, Traffic|Best|Online, trust, try, turn, Turned, TUTORIALS | LINK, two-factor authentication, Two-factor authentication box, use., User, using, Various, various ways, Very, Views|New|Online, Visit, Ways, We’ve, were, window, Wineries Geelong wineries|, without, would, yep, you.

Introducing the dotmailer U.S. Partner Program

Posted on August 17, 2016 by jeffriseo

While the program is recently revamped, dotmailer has enjoyed a 17-year history of working side-by-side with partners like Magento, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. We value these relationships as an opportunity to help deliver the best marketing strategies that lead to more business for you and your clients. Our new partnership program extends these relationships with the right tools, resources and benefits to help you build, run and grow a profitable agency, marketing or technology reseller business.

Here are the top five questions about the partner program answered:

Who is the partner program for?

Our partner program delivers two types of certification for two distinct types of audiences:

  • Partners: For example, a marketing agency that serves both B2B and B2C clients that integrates, develops, and executes email and marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients. Partners will work closely with dotmailer to sell and grow their client base with a tool that directly impacts client retention.
  • Referrers: For example, a shop that wants to refer leads directly to the dotmailer team. A referrer doesn’t handle the sale or management of the account, but still collects commission when a referral signs up for dotmailer.

What are the benefits of becoming a dotmailer partner?

dotmailer is a fast, powerful, and easy-to-use marketing automation platform with email at its core. Our world-class integrations make dotmailer extensible, and suitable for both B2C and B2B marketers alike. Here’s what some of our current partners have to say:

“We have found that dotmailer offers a strong solution. Not only do they cater to retail brands, but they also have a distinct B2B focus, which aligns with the more than 60% of our clients that have a B2B component as part of their ecommerce channels. Leveraging the dotmailer solution makes these conversations more relevant when discussing their marketing needs. As Magento’s Premier email marketing automation provider, they have invested heavily in both the technology and the sales enablement tools we need to win over customers.” – Caleb Bryant, Strategic Alliances Manager at Gorilla Group

“dotmailer enhances and extends our opportunity to bring customers a solution that provides highly personalized, automated and measureable email interactions to their customers to further nurture leads and customer engagement.” “An additional benefit of dotmailer is the pricing flexibility and geographical reach.” – Motti Danino, VP of Operations, Oro Inc.

How much does it cost?

The dotmailer partner program is free to join and benefits are offered in three tiers: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The benefits include commission, guest blogging, partner case studies, co-hosted webinars, event sponsorship and more. Our main aim is help partners become more successful and rise through the ranks as they become more affluent in offering the dotmailer platform and services.

What’s coming next?

dotmailer is committed to ensuring our agency partners have the tools at their disposal to continue them to grow service retainers and effectively sell a best-of-breed email marketing automation platform. Our philosophy has always been to innovate and we still run in bi-weekly development cycles with quarterly releases. We are constantly innovating on both the platform and our integrations, meaning the partner program will continue to evolve as does the dotmailer feature set.

How can I become a partner in the US?

For more information and to submit your details so we can get in touch, visit our partners page.

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Posted in Social Media Syndication | Tagged ... ..., |Add, |Adword, |Adword Keyword Tool, |GoogleAdwords, 6543777|Best, About, Account, Additional, Agency, Agency|Company|New, Agency|Company|San, always, Area|, audiences, Automated, Automation, Automation platform, B2B Marketers, B2C clients, Base, Become, Becoming, Been, Benefit, Benefits, Best, best marketing strategies, best-of-breed email marketing, bi-weekly development cycles, Blogging, Both, brands, breed, bring, Build, Business, Campaigns, Case, case studies, ccw, ccw-atrib-link, channels, Class, Client, clients, coming, component, conversations, Core, cost, Customer, Customers, Deliver, Details, Development, disposal, distinct B2B focus, dotmailer, dotmailer partner program, dotmailer platform, dotmailer team, Easy, easy-to-use marketing automation, eCommerce, Effectively, Email, email marketing, email marketing automation, Engagement, Event, Example, Fast, feature, Five, Flexibility, Focus, Found, free, Gold, Group, Grow, guest, Handle, Have, Help, History, Include, Information, Introducing, Join, Lead, Leads, Leveraging, Like, link, Magento, Main, Makes, Management, Manager, Marketers, Marketing, marketing agency, marketing automation, marketing automation platform, marketing campaigns, marketing needs, marketing strategies, marketing|6198318589|Best, Marketing|Automate, Marketing|Get, Marketing|Great|Increase|Business, Marketing|Search, Marketing|Web, measureable email interactions, Microsoft, more, Much, Needs, new partnership program, Next, Offered, offering, only, operations, opportunity, Over, Page, Part, partner case studies, partner program, partner., Partners, Partnership, Personalized, philosophy, platform, Powerful, Premier, Premier email marketing, Pricing, Program, Provider, Provides, Questions, Ranks, Reach, Referral, Referrer, referrers, relationships, Releases, Relevant, Reseller, Resources, retail, Right, right tools, Rise, run, Sale, Sales, sales enablement tools, Salesforce, Sell, SEO|6198318589|Best, Service, Services, services|203, Services|JG, Set, Shop, side, signs, Solution, some, Sponsorship, Still, Strategic, Strategic Alliances Manager, Strategies, Strong, Studies, Submit, Successful, Team, techniques|what, Technology, technology reseller business, Than, their, Them, these, They, Three, Through, Tool, Tools, touch, Traffic|Best|Online, types, U.S., Value, Video|Marketing|Video, Views|New|Online, Visit, VP, Wants, Webinars, Weekly, Wineries Geelong wineries|, work, working, World, Year, you.

Are your email leads clicking through to a secure and effective website?

Posted on August 17, 2016 by jeffriseo

Without a site that’s precision engineered for a good user experience and high conversion rates, all of your email marketing efforts could be going to waste.

Of course, you do want to market your business and email campaigns are statistically proven to be one of the most successful avenues to do so – according to McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. VentureBeat also released this year that according to their research, email is generating better return on investment than any other channel. So how do you make sure your site is secure and effective enough to keep customers there once your campaign has enticed them this far?

The homepage
For the majority of visitors, your homepage will be the first impression you get to make. A great homepage factors in a number of different ingredients to create the biggest positive impact on the user. Chief of which are…

Engagement
A great homepage is above all engaging, instantly connecting a potential customer with the brand. Engagement comes from a website having personality and a clear message, a customer should feel comfortable with the design and want to interact with it. Take the example below – Mardon, an international seafood import and export company. The large cinematic image captures attention, while the well positioned brand and informative footer let the user know who they’re interacting with. The elements on the page come together to create a beautiful and simple looking design with the feel of a company you can trust and, as a result, want to engage with.

mardon.com designed and built by Nublue.co.uk

The human element
In most cases (and where relevant), adding a human element to your homepage will encourage a positive reaction from users. Having a real life human being can enable customers to relate to your business and products more effectively. We believe in this philosophy so much that our own staff feature heavily throughout our site. Using actual staff members allows you to showcase your people, your greatest asset.

The www.nublue.co.uk homepage

The www.nublue.co.uk homepage

Excellent user experience
Once you’ve made an excellent first impression, you’ll need a functional and user-friendly website that ensures customers aren’t left frustrated by complex navigation or slow load times. Simple, intuitive menus and navigation alongside a website that’s fast enough to keep your users from having to wait.

Load speed is critical. According to surveys done by Gomez.com, 79% of online shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again. There are also statistics that suggest consumers will abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. High performance hosting is vital to addressing this issue and your site could benefit from the use of a CDN. CDN (Content Delivery Networks) improve speed by offloading your site’s static content – such as images and CSS. This frees up your hosting package to serve only the dynamic parts of your site. The result is a faster, smoother running site, regardless of the user’s location.

Better conversion processes
Trying to get people to make a purchase from an email isn’t easy and the fewer potential stumbling blocks you put in a customer’s way the better.

For ecommerce sites, an optimised checkout with guest login will produce a much smoother, simpler and more effective conversion process. Offering guest login at checkout gives the user an option of either signing up for an account or checking out without doing so, and prevents losing any sales at the last moment.

Another best practice is to introduce ‘trust signals’ so that customers feel confidence in buying from your site. Trust signals range from having visible reviews and testimonials onsite, to things like SSL certificates – which are visible in the url bar and prevent third parties seeing or accessing a customer’s personal details between their browser and your server, through encryption.

An expert design and development team will together implement the best features and functionality using a user-centric approach to ‘reverse-engineer’ your site. Effectively creating the best and simplest customer journey, improving both customer experience and conversion levels, whilst making it as quick and easy as possible for customers to buy from you.

Summary
When sending an email campaign, it’s vital that your website is not the weak link in the marketing chain and that leads are clicking through to a secure and effective page. At the heart of an effective website is a full understanding of your audience and the expertise to clearly guide them through the actions you want them to take. This is ultimately accomplished through user friendly navigation and beautiful and engaging design.

The site’s features and functionality need to be thought about and in order to get a website that’s fast enough, you’ll need a tailored, high performance hosting solution – such as CDN.

This post was created by Nublue, a web hosting and Magento ecommerce agency and partner of dotmailer.

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The Future of SEO: 2015 Ranking Factors Expert Survey Deep Dive

Posted on August 15, 2015 by jeffriseo

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Recently, Moz announced the results of our biennial Ranking Factors study. Today, we’d like to explore one of the most vital elements of the study: the Ranking Factors survey.

2015 Ranking Factors Expert Survey

Every two years, Moz surveys the brightest minds in SEO and search marketing with a comprehensive set of questions meant to gauge the current workings of Google’s search algorithm. This year’s panel of experts possesses a truly unique set of knowledge and perspectives. We’re thankful on behalf of the entire community for their contribution.

In addition to asking the participants about what does and doesn’t work in Google’s ranking algorithm today, one of the most illuminating group of questions asks the panel to predict the future of search – how the features of Google’s algorithm are expected to change over the next 12 months.

Amazingly, almost all of the factors that are expected to increase in influence revolved around user experience, including:

  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Perceived value
  • Readability
  • …and more

The experts predicted that more traditional ranking signals, such as those around links and URL structures, would largely remain the same, while the more manipulative aspects of SEO, like paid links and anchor text (which is subject to manipulation), would largely decrease in influence.

The survey also asks respondents to weight the importance of various factors within Google’s current ranking algorithm (on a scale of 1-10). Understanding these areas of importance helps to inform webmasters and marketers where to invest time and energy in working to improve the search presence of their websites.

On-page keyword features

These features describe use of the keyword term/phrase in particular parts of the HTML code on the page (title element, H1s, alt attributes, etc).

Highest influence: Keyword present in title element, 8.34
Lowest influence: Keyword present in specific HTML elements (bold/italic/li/a/etc), 4.16

Titles are still very powerful. Overall, it’s about focus and matching query syntax. If your post is about airplane propellers but you go on a three paragraph rant about gorillas, you’re going to have a problem ranking for airplane propellers.

AJ Kohn

Keyword usage is vital to making the cut, but we don’t always see it correlate with ranking, because we’re only looking at what already made the cut. The page has to be relevant to appear for a query, IMO, but when it comes to how high the page ranks once it’s relevant, I think keywords have less impact than they once did. So, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition to ranking.

Peter Meyers

In my experience, most of problems with organic visibility are related to on-page factors. When I look for an opportunity, I try to check for 2 strong things: presence of keyword in the title and in the main content. Having both can speed up your visibility, especially on long-tail queries.

Fabio Ricotta


Domain-level keyword features

These features cover how keywords are used in the root or subdomain name, and how much impact this might have on search engine rankings.

Highest influence: Keyword is the exact match root domain name, 5.83
Lowest influence: Keyword is the domain extension, 2.55

The only domain/keyword factor I’ve seen really influence rankings is an exact match. Subdomains, partial match, and others appear to have little or no effect.

Ian Lurie

There’s no direct influence, but an exact match root domain name can definitely lead to a higher CTR within the SERPs and therefore a better ranking in the long term.

Marcus Tandler

It’s very easy to link keyword-rich domains with their success in Google’s results for the given keyword. I’m always mindful about other signals that align with domain name which may have contributed to its success. These includes inbound links, mentions, and local citations.

Dan Petrovic


Page-level link-based features

These features describe link metrics for the individual ranking page (such as number of links, PageRank, etc).

Highest influence: Raw quantity of links from high-authority sites, 7.78
Lowest influence: Sentiment of the external links pointing to the page, 3.85

High-quality links still rule rankings. The way a brand can earn links has become more important over the years, whereas link schemes can hurt a site more than ever before. There is a lot of FUD slinging in this respect!

Dennis Goedegebuure

Similar to my thoughts on content, I suspect link-based metrics are going to be used increasingly with a focus on verisimilitude (whether content is actually true or not) and relationships between nodes in Knowledge Graph. Google’s recent issues with things, such as the snippet results for “evolution,” highlight the importance of them only pulling things that are factually correct for featured parts of a SERP. Thus, just counting traditional link metrics won’t cut it anymore.

Pete Wailes

While anchor text is still a powerful ranking factor, using targeted anchor text carries a significant amount of risk and can easily wipe out your previous success.

Geoff Kenyon


Domain-level brand features

These features describe elements that indicate qualities of branding and brand metrics.

Highest influence: Search volume for the brand/domain, 6.54
Lowest influence: Popularity of business’s official social media profiles, 3.99

This is clearly on deck to change very soon with the reintegration of Twitter into Google’s Real-Time Results. It will be interesting to see how this affects the “Breaking News” box and trending topics. Social influencers, quality and quantity of followers, RTs, and favorites will all be a factor. And what’s this?! Hashtags will be important again?! Have mercy!

Marshall Simmonds

Google has to give the people what they want, and if most of the time they are searching for a brand, Google is going to give them that brand. Google doesn’t have a brand bias, we do.

Russ Jones

It’s already noticeable; brands are more prominently displayed in search results for both informational and commercial queries. I’m expecting Google will be paying more attention to brand-related metrics from now on (and certainly more initiatives to encourage site owners to optimize for better entity detection).

Jason Acidre

Page-level social features

These features relate to third-party metrics from social media sources (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc) for the ranking page.

Highest influence: Engagement with content/URL on social networks, 3.87
Lowest influence: Upvotes for the page on social sites, 2.7

Social ranking factors are important in a revamped Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. Essentially, if your content gets a lot of natural tweets, shares, and likes, it will rank prominently for a short period of time, until larger and more authoritative sites catch up.

Dev Basu

Social popularity has several factors to consider: (1) Years ago, Google and Bing said they take into account the authority of a social profile sharing a link and the popularity of the link being shared (retweets/reshares), and there was more complexity to social signals that was never revealed even back then. (2) My experience has been that social links and shares have more power for newsy/fresh-type content. For example, a lot of social shares for a dentist’s office website wouldn’t be nearly as powerful (or relevant to consider) as a lot of social shares for an article on a site with a constant flow of fresh content.

Laura Lippay

Honestly, I do not think that the so-called “social signals” have any direct influence on the Google Algorithm (that does not mean that a correlation doesn’t exist, though). My only doubt is related to Twitter, because of the renewed contract between Google and Twitter itself. That said, as of now I do not consider Twitter to offer any ranking signals, except for very specific niches related to news and “news-able” content, where QDF plays a fundamental role.

Gianluca Fiorelli


Page-level keyword-agnostic features

These elements describe non-keyword-usage, non-link-metrics features of individual pages (such as length of the page, load speed, etc).

Highest influence: Uniqueness of the content on the page, 7.85
Lowest influence: Page contains Open Graph data and/or Twitter cards, 3.64

By branching mobile search off of Google’s core ranking algorithm, having a “mobile-friendly” website is probably now less important for desktop search rankings. Our clients are seeing an ever-increasing percentage of organic search traffic coming from mobile devices, though (particularly in retail), so this is certainly not an excuse to ignore responsive design – the opposite, in fact. Click-through rate from the SERPs has been an important ranking signal for a long time and continues to be, flagging irrelevant or poor-quality search listings.

Rob Kerry

I believe many of these will be measured within the ecosystem, rather than absolutely. For example, the effect of bounce rate (or rather, bounce speed) on a site will be relative to the bounce speeds on other pages in similar positions for similar terms.

Dan Barker

I want to answer these a certain way because, while I have been told by Google what matters to them, what I see in the SERPs does not back up what Google claims they want. There are a lot of sites out there with horrible UX that rank in the top three. While I believe it’s really important for conversion and to bring customers back, I don’t feel as though Google is all that concerned, based on the sites that rank highly. Additionally, Google practically screams “unique content,” yet sites that more or less steal and republish content from other sites are still ranking highly. What I think should matter to Google doesn’t seem to matter to them, based on the results they give me.

Melissa Fach


Domain-level link authority features

These features describe link metrics about the domain hosting the page.

Highest influence: Quantity of unique linking domains to the domain, 7.45
Lowest influence: Sentiment of the external links pointing to the site, 3.91

Quantity and quality of unique linking domains at the domain level is still among the most significant factors in determining how a domain will perform as a whole in the organic search results, and is among the best SEO “spot checks” for determining if a site will be successful relative to other competitor sites with similar content and selling points.

Todd Malicoat

Throughout this survey, when I say “no direct influence,” this is interchangeable with “no direct positive influence.” For example, I’ve marked exact match domain as low numbers, while their actual influence may be higher – though negatively.

Kirsty Hulse

Topical relevancy has, in my opinion, gained much ground as a relevant ranking factor. Although I find it most at play when at page level, I am seeing significant shifts at overall domain relevancy, by long-tail growth or by topically-relevant domains linking to sites. One way I judge such movements is the growth of the long-tail relevant to the subject or ranking, when neither anchor text (exact match or synonyms) nor exact phrase is used in a site’s content, yet it still ranks very highly for long-tail and mid-tail synonyms.

Rishi Lakhani


Domain-level keyword-agnostic features

These features relate to the entire root domain, but don’t directly describe link- or keyword-based elements. Instead, they relate to things like the length of the domain name in characters.

Highest influence: Uniqueness of content across the whole site, 7.52
Lowest influence: Length of time until domain name expires, 2.45

Character length of domain name is another correlative yet not causative factor, in my opinion. They don’t need to rule these out – it just so happens that longer domain names get clicked on, so they get ruled out quickly.

Ross Hudgens

A few points: Google’s document inception date patents describe how Google might handle freshness and maturity of content for a query. The “trust signal” pages sound like a site quality metric that Google might use to score a page on the basis of site quality. Some white papers from Microsoft on web spam signals identified multiple hyphens in subdomains as evidence of web spam. The length of time until the domain expires was cited as a potential signal in Google’s patent on information retrieval through historic data, and was refuted by Matt Cutts after domain sellers started trying to use that information to sell domain extensions to “help the SEO” of a site.

Bill Slawski

I think that page speed only becomes a factor when it is significantly slow. I think that having error pages on the site doesn’t matter, unless there are so many that it greatly impacts Google’s ability to crawl.

Marie Haynes


The future of search

To bring it back to the beginning, we asked the experts if they had any comments or alternative signals they think will become more or less important over the next 12 months.

While I expect that static factors, such as incoming links and anchor text, will remain influential, I think the power of these will be mediated by the presence or absence of engagement factors.

Sha Menz

The app world and webpage world are getting lumped together. If you have the more popular app relative to your competitors, expect Google to notice.

Simon Abramovitch

Mobile will continue to increase, with directly-related factors increasing as well. Structured data will increase, along with more data partners and user segmentation/personalization of SERPs to match query intent, localization, and device-specific need states.

Rhea Drysdale

User location may have more influence in mobile SERPs as (a) more connected devices like cars and watches allow voice search, and (b) sites evolve accordingly to make such signals more accurate.

Aidan Beanland

I really think that over the next 12-18 months we are going to see a larger impact of structured data in the SERPs. In fact, we are already seeing this. Google has teams that focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are studying “relationships of interest” and, at the heart of what they are doing, are still looking to provide the most relevant result in the quickest fashion. Things like schema that help “educate” the search engines as to a given topic or entity are only going to become more important as a result.

Jody Nimetz


For more data, check out the complete Ranking Factors Survey results.

2015 Ranking Factors Expert Survey

Finally, we leave you with this infographic created by Kevin Engle which shows the relative weighting of broad areas of Google’s algorithm, according to the experts.

What’s your opinion on the future of search and SEO? Let us know in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Intelligence, Intent, Into, Invest, Issues, It's, Jason, Jody Nimetz, Just, Kevin Engle, Keyword, keyword term/phrase, keyword usage, keyword-based elements, keyword-rich domains, Keywords, Know, Knowledge, Knowledge Graph, Larger, larger impact, Laura Lippay Honestly, Lead, Learning, length, Less, Level, Like, Likes, link, link metrics, link schemes, link-based featuresThese features, link-based metrics, Linking, Links, Listings, little, load speed, Local, local citations, location, LONG, long term, long time, long-tail growth, long-tail queries, longer domain names, Look, Looking, low numbers, Machine, machine learning, Made, Mailer, Main, main content, Making, Manipulation, manipulative aspects, Many, Marcus Tandler, Marie Haynes, Marketers, Marketing, marketing|6198318589|Best, Marketing|Automate, Marketing|Get, Marketing|Great|Increase|Business, Marketing|Search, Marketing|Web, Marshall, Marshall Simmonds, Marshall Simmonds Google, Match, match root domain, Matching, Matt, Matt 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Why No One Pays Attention to Your Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

Posted on August 15, 2015 by jeffriseo

Posted by randfish

Ever mass-deleted a bunch of impersonal emails from your inbox? Brand fatigue is a real threat to your marketing strategy. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why brands become “background noise” and how you can avoid it.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about why no one is paying attention to your brand, to your marketing. It’s the perilous pitfall of brand fatigue.

Brand fatigue sucks

So you have all had this happen to you. I promise you have. It’s happened in your email. It’s happened in your social streams. It’s happened through advertising in the real world, online and offline.

I’ll give you an illustration. So I sign up for this newsletter. I decide, “Hey, I want to get some houseplants. My house has no greenery in it.” So I sign up for Green Dude Houseplants’ newsletter. What do I get? Well, I get a, “Welcome to Our Newsletter.” Oh, okay.

And then maybe the next day I get, “Meet Our New Hires.” Meet our new hires? I’m sure that your new hires are very important to you and your team, but I just got introduced to your brand. I’m not sure I care that much. To me, you’re all new hires. You might as well be, right? I don’t know you or the team yet.

“Best Summer Ever Event,” okay, maybe, maybe an event. “Edible Backyard Gardens, you know, I don’t have a backyard. I was signing up for a houseplant newsletter because it was in my house. “See Us at the Garden Show,” I don’t want to go to the garden show. I was going to buy from you. That’s why I’m online.

Okay, thanks.

How to cause brand fatigue

It’s not just the value of the messaging. It’s the frequency that it happens at. You’ve seen this. I’m on an email list that I signed up for, I think it’s called FounderDating. It’s here in Seattle. I think it’s in San Francisco. I thought it was a really cool idea when I signed up for it. Then I have just been inundated with messages from them. I think some of them are actually worthy of my participation, like I should have gone to the forum. I should have replied. I should have checked out what this particular person wanted. But I get so much email from them that I’ve just begun to hit Delete as soon as I get it.

We’ve actually had this problem at Moz too. If you’re a Moz subscriber, you probably get a new email every time a new crawl is completed, and a campaign is set up, and you have new rankings data. Some of that’s really important, right? Like if you’re paying attention to this particular site’s rankings and you want to see every time you get an update, well yeah, you need that email. But it’s actually kind of tough to opt in to which ones you want and with what frequency and control it all from one place.

We have found that our email open rates, engagement rates have actually drifted way, way down over time because, probably, we’ve inundated you with so much email. This is a big mistake that Moz has made in our email marketing, but a lot of brands make it in tons of places. So I want to help you avoid that.

1) Too many messages on a medium

Brand fatigue happens when there are too many messages, just too many raw messages on a medium. You start to see the same brand, the same name, the same person again and again. Their logo, their colors, the association you have, it just becomes background noise. Your brain goes into this mode where it just filters it out because it can’t handle the volume of stuff that’s coming through. It needs a filtration mechanism. So it starts to identify and associate your brand or your logo or your name or a person’s name with “filter.” Filter that out. That goes in the background.

2) Value provided is too low or infrequent to deserve attention

It also happens when the value provided is too low or too infrequent to deserve attention. So this might be what I’m talking about with FounderDating. One out of every maybe five or six messages, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that was interesting. I should pay attention to that.” But when it becomes too infrequent, that same filtration happens.

Too few of the high value messages means you’re not going to pay attention, you’re not going to engage with that brand, with that company anymore. All of us marketers will see that in the engagement rates. No matter the medium, we can look at our numbers and see that those are going down on a percentile basis, and that gets really frustrating.

3) The messaging can’t be effectively tuned or controlled by the user

So this is the problem that Moz is having where we don’t have that one email control center where you say how often you want exactly which messages updating you of which notifications about which campaigns, and newsletter and da, da, da. So your message frequency is either all the time high or very high and so you’re, “I don’t like any of those options.”

Very frustrating.

How NOT to cause brand fatigue

Now, I do have some solutions and suggestions. But it’s platform by platform.

Email

Start very conservative with your email marketing and highly personal. In fact, I would actually recommend personally sending all the messages out to your first few hundred users if you possibly can, because you will get a great rapport that you develop individually with person by person. That will give you a sense for what your audiences like and what kind of messaging they prefer, and they’ll know they can reply directly to you.

You’ll create that highly-engaged experience through email that will mean that, as you scale, you have the experience from the past to tell you how often you can and can’t email people, what they care about and don’t, what they filter and don’t, what they’re looking for from you, etc. You can then watch your open, unsubscribe and engagement rates through your email program. No matter what program you might be using, you can almost always see these.

Then you can watch for, “Oh, we had a spike.” That spike is a good thing. That means that people were highly engaged on this email. Let’s figure out what resonated there. Let’s go talk to folks. Let’s reach out to the people who engaged with it and just say, “Hey, why did you love this? What did you love about it? What can we do to give you more value like this?”

Or you watch for dips. Then you can say, “Oh man, the last three email newsletters that we’ve sent out, we’ve seen successive declines in engagement and open rates, and we’ve seen a rise in unsubscribe rates. We’re doing something wrong. What’s going on? What’s the root cause? Is it who we’re acquiring? Is it new people that signed up, or is it old-timers who are getting frustrated with the new stuff we’re sending out? Does this fit with our strategy? What can we fix?”

Be careful. The thing that sucks about brand fatigue is a lot of platforms, email included, have systems, algorithmic systems set up to penalize you for this. With email, if you get high unsubscribes and low engagement, that will actually kill your long-term chances for email marketing success, because Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s various mail programs and whatever installed mail your targets might have, whatever they’re using, you will no longer be able to break through those email filters.

The email filter that Gmail has says, “Hey, a lot of people click Unsubscribe and Report Spam. Let’s put this in the Promotions tab.” Or, “Hey, a lot of people are clicking Report Spam. You know what? Let’s just block this sender entirely.” Or, “Gosh, this person has in the past not engaged very much with these messages. We’re going to not make them high priority anymore.” Gmail has that automatic high priority system. So you’re getting algorithmically turned into noise even if you might have had something that your customers really cared about.

Blog or other content platform

This is a really interesting one. I would strongly urge you to read Trevor Klein from Moz’s blog post about the experiment that we and HubSpot did around how much content to produce and whether lowering content or increasing content had positive effects. There are some fascinating results from that study.

But the valuable thing to me in that is if you don’t test, you’ll never know. You’ll never know the limits of what your audience wants, what will frustrate them, what will delight them. I recommend you don’t create content unless you can have a great answer for the question, “Who will help amplify this and why?” I don’t mean, like, “Oh, well I think people who really like houseplants will help amplify this.” That’s not a great answer.

A great answer is, “Oh, you know, I know this guy named Jerry. Jerry runs a Twitter account that’s all about gardening. Jerry loves our houseplants. He’s a big fan of this. He’s particularly interested in flowering cacti. I know if we publish this post, Jerry will help amplify it.” That’s a great answer. You have 10 Jerrys, great. Hit Publish. Go for it. You don’t? Why are you making it?

Watch your browse rate, your conversion rate, and conversion rate…. I don’t mean necessarily all the way to whatever you’re selling, your ecommerce store products or your subscription or whatever that is. Conversion rate could be conversion rate to an email newsletter or to following you on a social platform or whatever.

You can watch time on site and amplification per post to essentially get a sense for like, “Hey, as we’re producing content, are we seeing the metrics that would indicate that our content marketing is being successful?” If the answer to that is no, well we need to retool it. It turns out there’s actually no prize for hitting Publish.

You might think that your job as a content producer or a content marketer is to make content every day or content every week. That’s not your job. Your job is to have success with the metrics that are going to predict and correlate to the strategies you need as a business to acquire customers, to grow your marketing channels, to grow your brand’s impact, to help people, whatever it is that your mission is.

I highly recommend finding your audiences’ sweet spot for both focus and frequency. If you do those things, you’re going to do a great job with avoiding brand fatigue around your content.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media

Last one is social. I’ll talk specifically about Twitter and Facebook, because most things can be classified in there, even things like Instagram and LinkedIn and the fading, sadly, Google+ and those sorts of things.

Twitter, generally speaking, more forgiving as a platform. Facebook has more of those algorithmic elements to punish you for low engagement.

So, for example, I’ve had this happen on my personal Facebook page where I’ve published a few things that people just didn’t really find interesting. This is on my Rand Fishkin Facebook page, different from the Moz one. It turns out that that meant that it was much harder for me next time, even with content that people were very engaged around, to reach them.

Facebook essentially had pushed in. They were like, “You know what? That’s three or four posts in a row from Rand Fishkin that people did not like, didn’t engage with. The next one we’re going to set the bar much higher for him to have to climb back up before we decide, ‘Hey, we’ll show that to more and more people.'”

Lately I’ve been having more success getting a higher percentage of my audience into the impression count of people who are actually seeing my posts on Facebook by getting better engagement there. But that’s a very challenging platform.

Users of both, however, are pretty sensitive, nearly equally sensitive. It’s not like Facebook users are more sensitive. It’s just that Facebook’s platform is more sensitive because Facebook doesn’t show you all the content you could possibly see.

Twitter is just a super simplistic newsfeed algorithm. It’s just, who posted last. So Twitter has that real time kind of thing. So I would still say for both of these, aim to only share stuff that gets high engagement, especially as your brand.

Personal account, do whatever you want, test whatever you want. But as your brand’s account, you want that high engagement over and over again because that will predict more people paying attention to you when you do post, going back and looking through your old social posts, subscribing to you, following you, all that sort of thing, considering you a leader.

You can watch both Twitter Analytics and your Facebook page’s stats to see if you’re having a dip or a spike, where you’re having success, where you’re not.

I actually love using Twitter and a little bit LinkedIn or Google+ to see what gets very high engagement and then I know, “Okay, I should re-share that on Twitter because my audience on Twitter is very temporal.” Two hours from now it’s going to be less than 1% overlap between who sees a Twitter post now and who sees a Twitter post 2 hours from now, and that’s a great test bed for Facebook as well.

So if I see something doing extremely well on Twitter or on Google+ or on LinkedIn, I go, “Aha, that’s the kind of thing I should post on Facebook. That will increase my engagement there. Now I can go post and get more engagement next time and build up my authority in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm.

So with all of this stuff, hopefully, as you’re producing content, sharing content, building an email subscription, building a blog platform, you’re going to have a little less brand fatigue and a little more engagement from your users.

I look forward to chatting with you all in the comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Posted in Expert SEO Consulting | Tagged ... ..., +2, |Add, |Adword, |Adword Keyword Tool, |GoogleAdwords, 6543777|Best, About, Account, Acquire, Actually, Advertising, Agency|Company|New, Agency|Company|San, aha, Algorithm, always, amplification, Amplify, Analytics, Another, answer, Anymore, Area|, Around, association, ATTENTION, Audience, audiences, Authority, Automatic, Avoid, Avoiding, Back, background, bar, Because, Become, becomes, bed, Been, Before, Being, Best, Better, better engagement, Between, big fan, bit, Blog, blog platform, blog post, Both, Brain, BRAND, brand fatigue, brands, break, browse rate, Build, building, bunch, Business, buy, Called, Campaign, Campaigns, Can't, care, care.Video transcription, cause, ccw, ccw-atrib-link, Center, chances, channels, Chat, chatting, Checked, Click, clicking, colors, coming, comments, Company, content, content marketer, content marketing, Control, conversion, conversion rate, Could, crawl, Create, Customers, Data, Decide, delight, Design|Social, Develop, Different, dip, discusses, Doesn't, Doing, Don't, Down, Dude, eCommerce, ecommerce store, edition, Effectively, Effects, Elements, Email, email list, email marketing, email newsletter, emails, engage, Engagement, engagement rates, even, Event, Ever, Every, Example, Exclusive, exclusive digest, Experience, Experiment, Expert|Seo, Facebook, Facebook page, Facebook users, fact, fan, fans, fascinating results, fatigue, Figure, Filter, find, Finding, first, Fishkin, Fishkin Facebook page, fit, Five, Focus, folks, following, FORUM, Forward, Found, Four, Francisco, frequency, Friday, from, Garden, gets, Getting, give, Gmail, Going, Gone, Good, good thing, Google, Gosh, Great, great answer, great job, Green, Grow, Handle, Happened, Have, HAVING, Help, Here's, Hey, High, high engagement, high priority, high resolution image, Higher, higher percentage, hindi|Seo, Hopefully, hottest pieces, Hours, House, How..., HubSpot, HUNT, I.e., idea, illustration, Image, Impact, Important, inbox, increase, Increasing, Instagram, Into, It's, job, Just, kill, kind, Know, Leader, Less, Like, link, Linkedin, Links, List, little, little bit, Logo, LONG, Look, Looking, Love, Loves, Made, Mail, Mailer, Making, Man, Many, Marketer, Marketers, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, marketing success, marketing|6198318589|Best, Marketing|Automate, Marketing|Get, Marketing|Great|Increase|Business, Marketing|Search, Marketing|Web, Mass, Matter, Mean, Means, Media|Multimedia, Medium, Meet, Message, messages, Messaging, Metrics, Microsoft, Might, mission, mistake, more, Most, Moz, Moz fans, Moz Subscriber, Moz team, Moz's, Much, Name, Need, Needs, Never, new hires, new people, new stuff, new tab, News, Newsletter, Next, noise, numbers, of SEO, Offline, Often, Okay, ones, Online, only, OPEN, open rates, opt, options, Over, overlap, Page, particular site, Past, Pay attention, Pays, Peninsula Wineries| Cool, People, percentage, Person, Personal, pieces, place, Places, platform, Platforms, Positive, Post, posts, priority, prize, Problem, produce, Producing, products, Program, Programs, promise, Promotions, Provided, question, rad links, Rand, Rand Fishkin, rankings, rankings data, Rate, rates, Reach, Read, Real, real time, real world, Really, recommend, reference, Report, resolution, Results, Right, Rise, Root, same, San Francisco, scale, Seattle, semimonthly mailer, sender, sense, SEO, SEO news, SEO|6198318589|Best, Set, share, sharing, Should, Show, Sign, Site, Social, social streams, Solutions, some, sort, sorts, Spam, speaking, Speechpad.com, Spot, Start, starts, Stats, Still, Store, Strategies, Strategy, Study, stuff, Success, Successful, suggestions, Summer, Super, System, Systems, take, Talk, Talking, targets, Team, techniques|what, Tell, Term, test, Than, Thanks, their, Them, There, There's, these, They, Thing, things, Think, Those, thought, Three, Through, Time, Tips, Today, Today's, Tons, Tough, Traffic|Best|Online, Trevor, Turned, Twitter, Twitter account, twitter analytics, Unless, unsubscribes, Update, Updating, urge, Users, using, Value, Various, Very, Video, Video transcription, Video transcriptionHowdy, Video|Marketing|Video, Views|New|Online, VOLUME, Want, wanted, Wants, Watch, way, Week, Welcome, Well, were, What's, Whiteboard, Whiteboard Friday, Wineries Geelong wineries|, World, would, Yahoo, yeah, you., You'll, You're, You've

Raising the Bar: A Publishing Volume Experiment on the Moz Blog

Posted on July 23, 2015 by jeffriseo

Posted by Trevor-Klein

Content marketers hear regularly about how quality is far more important than quantity. You can publish a thousand blog posts in a year, but if only three of them are truly noteworthy, valuable, and share-worthy content—what Rand would call 10x content—then you’ve wasted quite a bit of time.

Here at Moz, we’ve published blog posts on a daily cadence since before almost any of us can remember. If you didn’t already know, Moz began as SEOmoz in 2004, and was little more than a blog where Rand fostered one of the earliest SEO communities. He offered a bit more background in a recent interview with Contently:

“It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities.”

We’ve taken occasional days off for major holidays when we knew the traffic volume wouldn’t be there, but the guiding philosophy was that we published every day because that’s what our audience expected. If we stepped back from that schedule, we’d lose our street cred, our reliability, and a sizeable chunk of our audience, not to mention the opportunities for increased traffic.

It’s now quite easy to have those discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and other networks, making our old approach an outdated philosophy that was based more on fear of the unknown and a misguided assumption than on actual data.

This May and June, we decided to change that. We’re raising the bar, and we want to show you why.

It started with a tweet:

This week, Hubspot published 49 unique blogposts (or ~10/weekday). I wonder if they’ve tested various quantities and found that to be ideal?
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 9, 2015

The ensuing discussion piqued the interest of Joe Chernov and Ginny Soskey at HubSpot, as they wondered what effects it might have to publish more or less frequently. We decided to collaborate on a pair of experiments to find out.

The setup

The experiments were simple: Set a benchmark of two “normal” weeks, then adjust the publishing volumes on each blog to (roughly) half the normal cadence for two weeks and double the normal cadence for two weeks.


One thing we should note from the get-go: We were always sure that Whiteboard Friday would continue to be a weekly tradition, so we didn’t alter the publishing schedule for those. This experiment altered the schedule from Monday-Thursday.

We closely monitored our blog traffic and engagement metrics, as well as subscriptions to our emailed blog newsletter. HubSpot ran their experiment first, allowing Moz to learn a few lessons from their experience before starting our own.

The results from HubSpot’s experiment were also published today; make sure you take a look.

The results

We had several central questions going into this experiment, and hypotheses for how each one would come out. There are six parts, and they’re laid out below as follows:

  1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic
  2. Engagement thins as volume grows
  3. Subscription slowdown
  4. Community complaints/backlash
  5. Trading quantity for quality

Important note: We know this is non-scientific. These results are intended to be directional, not definitive, and our takeaways—while they represent our best attempts at progress—are by no means perfect. We want this to be an ongoing discussion, so please chime in with your ideas in the comments!


1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic

Hypothesis

Publishing fewer posts each week will lead to a significant decrease in overall traffic to the blog. Publishing more posts each week will lead to a significant increase in overall traffic to the blog. These changes will be proportional to the decrease/increase in publishing volume.

Results

Let’s get the high-level overview before we dive into details. Traffic on the Moz Blog can obviously vary quite a bit depending on the content, but all things considered, it’s remarkably steady. Here are total daily unique pageviews to all pages on the blog so far in 2015:

Spikes and dips here and there, but we’re able to pull a pretty good benchmark from that data. Here’s what that benchmark looks like:

Average weekday uniques:

38,620

Average weekly uniques:

227,450

Now, here’s the traffic from the four weeks leading up to the reduced/increased publishing frequency, as well as the two weeks at half-cadence and the two weeks at double-cadence (I’ve also included a line for the average of 38,620):

There’s a bit of a difference. You can tell the traffic during half-cadence weeks was a little lower, and the traffic during double-cadence weeks appears a little higher. I’d take the numbers highlighted above in green over the ones in red any day of the week, but those curves show far smaller variation than we’d anticipated.

Here’s a look at weekly numbers:

That makes the dip a little clearer, but it’s hard to tell from that chart whether the loss in traffic is anything to be worried about.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the two testing periods and see if we can’t pick apart something more interesting. You might notice from the above daily charts that the blog traffic follows a regular weekly pattern. It peaks on Tuesday and falls gradually throughout the rest of the week. That’s characteristic of our audience, which finds less and less time to read the blog as the week goes on. We wanted to take that variability into account when looking at each day during the testing period, and the following chart does just that.

It plots the traffic during the tests as a percent deviation from the average traffic on any given day of the week. So, the four Tuesdays that passed during the test are compared to our average Tuesday traffic, the four Wednesdays to the average Wednesday, and so on. Let’s take a look:

This is a more noteworthy difference. Dropping the publishing volume to half our normal cadence resulted in, on average, a 5.6% drop in unique pageviews from those daily averages.

That actually makes perfect sense when it’s put in context. Somewhere around 10-15% of our blog traffic comes from the most recent week’s worth of posts (the rest is to older posts). If we publish half as many posts in a given week, there are half as many new pages to view, so we might expect half as many unique pageviews to those newer posts.

That’s pageviews, though. What about sessions? Are fewer people visiting the blog in the first place due to our reduced publishing volume? Let’s find out:

That’s a bit more palatable. We lost 2.9% of our sessions that included visits to the blog during a two-week period when we cut our publishing volume in half. That’s close enough that, for a non-scientific study, we can pretty well call it negligible. The shift could easily have been caused by the particular pieces of content we published, not by the schedule on which we published them.

Another interesting thing to note about the chart showing deviations from daily averages: Doubling the publishing volume did, on average, absolutely nothing to the number of unique pageviews. The average increase in uniques from daily averages during the double-cadence period is just a bit over 3%. That suggests relative saturation; people don’t have time to invest in reading more than one Moz Blog post each day. (I’m not surprised; I barely have time to read more than one Moz Blog post each day!) 😉

It also emphasizes something we’ve known all along: Content marketing is a form of flywheel marketing. It takes quite a while to get it up to speed, but once it’s spinning, its massive inertia means that it isn’t easily affected by relatively small changes. It’ll keep going even if you step back and just watch for a short while.


2. Engagement thins as volume grows

Hypothesis

The amount of total on-page engagement, in the form of thumbs up and comments on posts, will remain somewhat static, since people only have so much time. Reducing the blog frequency will cause engagement to approach saturation, and increasing the blog frequency will spread engagement more thinly.

Results

Moz’s primary two engagement metrics are built into each page on our blog: thumbs up and comments. This one played out more or less to our expectations.

We can get a good sense for engagement with these posts by looking at our internal 1Metric data. We’ve iterated on this metric since we talked about it in this post, but the basic concept is still the same—it’s a two-digit score calculated from several “ingredients,” including metrics for traffic, on-page engagement, and social engagement.

Here’s a peek at the data for the two testing periods, with the double-cadence period highlighted in green, and the half-cadence period highlighted in red.

#onemetric-table td {
text-align:center;
}
#engagement-table td {
text-align:center;
font-size:14pt;
font-weight:bold;
}
.half-cadence-row {
background-color: #ffbfbf;
}
.half-cadence-row-alt {
background-color: #ffdfdf;
}
.double-cadence-row {
background-color: #c9ffc9;
}
.double-cadence-row-alt {
background-color: #ebffeb;
}

Publish Date Post Title 1Metric Score Unique Pageviews
25-Jun How Google May Use Searcher, Usage, & Clickstream Behavior to Impact Rankings – Whiteboard Friday 81 12,315
25-Jun How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches 56 7,445
25-Jun How to Build Links in Person 36 5,045
24-Jun What to See, Do, and More at MozCon 2015 in Seattle 9 2,585
24-Jun The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 80 15,152
23-Jun Why ccTLDs Should Not Be an Automatic Choice for International Websites 11 2,259
23-Jun Brainstorm and Execute Killer Content Ideas Your Audience Will Love 38 5,365
22-Jun The Alleged $7.5 Billion Fraud in Online Advertising 85 44,212
19-Jun How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche – Whiteboard Friday 78 15,258
18-Jun The Colossus Update: Waking The Giant 62 14,687
17-Jun New Features in OSE’s Spam Score & the Mozscape API 10 1,901
17-Jun How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy 44 7,312
16-Jun Dissecting and Surviving Google’s Local Snack Pack Results 15 2,663
15-Jun Can You Rank in Google Without Links? New Data Says Slim Chance 81 15,909
15-Jun Study: 300 Google Sitelinks Search Boxes – Triggers and Trip-Ups Analyzed 23 3,207
14-Jun How to Choose a PPC Agency 14 2,947
12-Jun Why We Can’t Do Keyword Research Like It’s 2010 – Whiteboard Friday 90 22,010
11-Jun Eliminate Duplicate Content in Faceted Navigation with Ajax/JSON/JQuery 38 5,753
9-Jun 5 Spreadsheet Tips for Manual Link Audits 50 6,331
5-Jun Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? – Whiteboard Friday 79 15,225
3-Jun How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs) 50 10,486
1-Jun Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked 51 9,847

The 1Metric scores for the half-cadence period (in red) average almost 60, suggesting those posts performed better overall than those during the double-cadence period, which averaged a 1Metric score of 45. We know the traffic was lower during the half-cadence weeks, which suggests engagement must have been significantly higher to result in those scores, and vice-versa for the double-cadence weeks.

Taking a look at our on-page engagement metrics, we see that play out quite clearly:

The number of thumbs up and comments stayed relatively level during the half-cadence period, and fell sharply when there were twice as many posts as usual.

We’re incredibly lucky to have such an actively engaged community at Moz. The conversations that regularly happen in the comments—65 of them, on average—are easily one of my favorite parts of our site. We definitely have a “core” subset of our community that regularly takes the time to join in those discussions, and while the right post will tempt a far greater number of people to chime in, you can easily see patterns in the users who spend time in the comments. Those users, of course, only have a limited amount of time.

This is reflected in the data. When we published half as many posts, they still had time to comment on every one they wanted, so the number of comments left didn’t diminish. Then, when we published twice the number of posts we normally do, they didn’t spend twice as much time leaving comments; they were just pickier about which posts they commented on. The number of comments on each post stayed roughly the same.

The same goes for the thumbs.


3. Subscription slowdown

The Moz Blog is available via an email subscription through FeedPress, linked to from a few different places on the site:

We wondered, what would happen to those subscriptions during the half-cadence period?

Hypothesis

With fewer opportunities to impress people with the quality of the blog’s content and earn a spot in their inboxes, subscriptions to the blog posts will drop significantly during the half-cadence period.

Results

As it turns out, there was minimal (if any) effect on email subscriptions. Check out the numbers for both periods below:

Here’s a view that’s a bit easier to digest, similar to the one for traffic in part 1 of this post. This shows daily deviations from the average number of new email subscriptions we get (about 34/day):

On the whole, this is a very uninteresting (and for that reason interesting!) result. Our subscription rate showed no noteworthy fluctuations during either of the two testing periods.

These numbers are based on the total number of subscribers, and with half as many emails going out during the half-cadence period, we can fairly confidently say that (since the total subscriber rate didn’t change) we didn’t get a decrease in unsubscribes during the half-cadence week, as we’d have seen an increase in the subscription rate. That’s a good sign: If people were fatigued by our rate of new emails already, we’d likely see a reduction in that fatigue during the half-cadence weeks, leading to less churn. No such reduction happened, so we’re comfortable continuing to send daily emails.

One important note is that we don’t send multiple emails each day, so during the double-cadence period we were sending daily digests of multiple posts. (Were we to send more than one each day, we might have expected a significant rise in unsubscribes. That’s something HubSpot was better able to track in their version of this experiment.)


4. Community complaints / backlash

This was another primary concern of ours: If we skipped days on the editorial calendar, and didn’t publish a new post, would our community cry foul? Would we be failing to meet the expectations we’d developed among our readers?

Hypothesis

Having multiple days with no new post published in a relatively short period of time will lead to disappointment and outcry among the readership, which has grown to expect a new post every day.

Results

While we didn’t proactively ask our community if they noticed, we were watching social traffic specifically for word of there not being a blog post on one or more of the days we skipped during the half-cadence period. We figured we’d find a bunch of “hey, what gives?” Our community team is great at monitoring social media for mentions—even those that don’t specifically ping us with @Moz—and this is what we found:

A single post.

I guess @Moz is looking into only posting 3 blogs a week. It’s the most depressing A/B test I’ve ever come across.
— Ben Starling (@BeenStarling) June 4, 2015

That’s really it. Other than this one tweet—one that elicited a heartfelt “Awww!” from Roger—there wasn’t a single peep from anyone. Crickets. This hypothesis couldn’t be more busted.

We asked in our most recent reader survey how often people generally read the Moz Blog, and 17% of readers reported that they read it every day.

Even if we assume some statistical variance and that some of those responses were slight exaggerations of the truth (survey data is never squishy, right?), that’s still a sizeable number of people who—in theory—should have noticed we weren’t publishing as much as we usually do. And yet, only one person had a reaction strong enough that they posted their thoughts in a place we could find them.


5. Trading quantity for quality

This is a far more subjective hypothesis—we can’t even measure the results beyond our own opinions—but we found it quite interesting nonetheless.

Hypothesis

If we post fewer times per week, we’ll have more time and be better able to focus on the quality of the posts we do publish. If we publish more frequently, the quality of each post will suffer.

Results

As nice an idea as this was, it turned out to be a bit backwards. Publishing fewer posts did leave us with more time, but we didn’t end up using it to dive deeper into revisions of other posts or come up with additional feedback for our scheduled authors. The Moz Blog is written largely by authors outside our own company, and even though we had more time we could have used to recommend edits, the authors didn’t have any more time than they otherwise would have, and it wouldn’t have been fair for us to ask them for it anyway.

What we did do is spend more time on bigger, more innovative projects, and ended the two half-cadence weeks feeling significantly more productive.

We also noticed that part of the stress of an editorial calendar comes from the fact that an artificial schedule exists in the first place. Even with the reduction in volume, we felt significant pressure when a scheduled post wasn’t quite where we wanted it to be by the time it was supposed to be finished.

Because we ended up spending our time elsewhere, our experiment didn’t focus nearly as much on the comprehensiveness of the posts as the HubSpot experiment did. It ended up just being about volume and maintaining the quality bar for all the posts we published, regardless of their frequency.

Our productivity gains, though, made us begin to think even more carefully about where we were spending our time.


Wrapping up

With some basic data clearly showing us that a day without a blog post isn’t the calamity we feared it may be, we’ve decided it’s time to raise the bar.

When a post that’s scheduled to be published on our blog just isn’t quite where we think it ought to be, we’ll no longer rush it through the editing process simply because of an artificial deadline. When a post falls through (that’s just the life of an editorial calendar), we’ll no longer scramble to find an option that’s “good enough” to fill the spot. If we don’t have a great replacement, we’ll simply take the day off.

It’s got us thinking hard about posts that provide truly great value—those 10x pieces of content that Rand mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday. Take a look at the traffic for Dr. Pete‘s post on title tags since it was published in March of 2014:

See all those tiny bumps of long-tail traffic? The post still consistently sees 3-4,000 uniques every week, and has just crossed over 300,000 all-time. That’s somewhere between 60-100x a post we’d call just fine.

60-100x.

Now, there’s just no way we can make every post garner that kind of traffic, but we can certainly take steps in that direction. If we published half as many posts, but they all performed more than twice as well, that’s a net win for us even despite the fact that the better posts will generally continue bringing traffic for a while to come.

Does this mean you’ll see fewer posts from Moz going forward? No. We might skip a day now and then, but rest assured that if we do, it’ll just be because we didn’t want to ask for your time until we thought we had something that was really worth it. =)

I’d love to hear what you all have to say in the comments, whether about methodology, takeaways, or suggestions for the future.

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Posted in Expert SEO Consulting | Tagged ... ..., .double-cadence-row { background-color, .double-cadence-row-alt { background-color, .half-cadence-row { background-color, .half-cadence-row-alt { background-color, +2, |Add, |Adword, |Adword Keyword Tool, |GoogleAdwords, 1-Jun Misuses, 100x, 10X, 15-Jun Study, 16-Jun Dissecting, 17-Jun New Features, 18-Jun The Colossus, 1metric score, 1Metric scores, 2010, 2014, 2015, 23-Jun Brainstorm, 6543777|Best, A/B test, About, Above, Absolute, Absolute Beginner, Absolute URLs, Account, across, actively engaged community, actual data, Actually, Additional, additional feedback, Advertising, Agency, Agency|Company|New, Agency|Company|San, Ajax, Ajax/JSON/JQuery, always, Amount, Analytics, Analytics Metrics Debunked, Another, API, APIs, approach, Area|, Around, artificial deadline, artificial schedule, Asked, Audience, Audience Will Love, Audits, authors, Automatic, Automatic Choice, available, average increase, average number, average traffic, 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Top Way to Improve Your Flow Metrics

Posted on July 11, 2015 by jeffriseo

Are you craving that one fool proof way to increase the Flow Metrics of your Twitter account without doing too much link building? Well look no further. One of the best ways to improve your flow metrics is:… To beat a former Wimbledon Champion at tennis! I know, it’s not exactly fool proof, yet by…

The post Top Way to Improve Your Flow Metrics appeared first on Majestic Blog.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tagged ... ..., |Add, |Adword, |Adword Keyword Tool, |GoogleAdwords, 6543777|Best, Account, Area|, Best, best ways, Blog, building, ccw, ccw-atrib-link, Doing, exactly fool proof, first, flow, Flow Metrics, fool proof way, Former, Improve, increase, Know, link, Look, Majestic, marketing|6198318589|Best, Marketing|Great|Increase|Business, Metrics, Much, Post, Proof, SEO|6198318589|Best, Traffic|Best|Online, TUTORIALS | LINK, Twitter, Twitter account, way, Ways, Well, Wineries Geelong wineries|, without, you.

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