Tag Archives: Management

Let us take the reins: campaign management hours

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“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” – Wayne Dyer

Email has changed the way we communicate – it empowers us as marketeers to give consumers exactly what they want and when they want it. What’s more, it continues to be the most powerful revenue-generating channel for brands to reach their customers; for every $1 spent on email, $32 are returned.

With more choice comes greater competition in the inbox, and – for email to stay relevant – innovation and transformation are both key. Today, consumers expect brand messages to be contextual, relevant to both their preferences and activity. And, to effectively achieve this seamless journey, it’s essential that you pair the right data with the right messages.

So, why not let our Digital Marketing Specialists provide a fresh perspective on your email marketing strategy? Whether you want to deliver a high-value showstopper, or just looking for interim support on the everyday stuff, we’re in the best position to step in and provide specialist support for great ROI.

Let us work alongside you to:

  1. Streamline your processes
  • We can take the pressure off by managing your daily sends in a convenient way, providing briefs and calendar templates alongside any amends you may require.
  • Let us look at what you’re currently doing and advise on whether we think something could be improved or implemented in a better way.
  1. Offer best practice
  • Are you optimizing your emails with dotmailer’s features? Let us check.
  • Our specialist team can guide you on content*, layout and design to make sure you get the very most out of your sends.
  1. Check your templates
  • Are your templates mobile-optimized? Let us do the hard work and test your templates across all major email clients to ensure your emails have the very best visibility.
  1. Experience our partners
  • We have an incredible range of partners coming up with new ideas and exciting concepts that can transform your email campaigns and enhance their performance; from rich and inspirational content to engagement generation tactics. Whether it be a countdown timer or pulling in a real-time weather forecast into an email, we’ve got you covered.

How do you stack up against other brands in their email marketing? Check out our Hitting the Mark benchmark report – a free download featuring the hottest insights into the email marketing strategy of 100 UK and US brands.

*Please speak to your Account Manager for more information on copywriting services and campaign management hours.

The post Let us take the reins: campaign management hours appeared first on The Marketing Automation Blog.

Reblogged 4 months ago from blog.dotmailer.com

Introducing Yelp Data Management and Claiming through Moz Local

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Posted by dudleycarr

Today we’re making an announcement that’s exciting for marketers at local businesses, enterprises, and agencies focused on digital marketing.

Back in August we announced the industry’s most advanced duplicate detection and closure toolset. And just last month we unleashed our new Moz Local packages, adding Google My Business sync, listing alerts, Apple Maps distribution, reputation monitoring and management, and more to the mix. Well, we have one more announcement to squeeze in before the year ends, and it’s a big deal!

Yelp data management for everyone!

We’re announcing a partnership with Yelp — the leading source for consumer reviews — bringing a new level of Moz Local product integration that will help you make Local your advantage. This integration is the first of its kind in our industry; one that will enable marketers to capitalize on the convergence of local search and consumer reviews more easily than ever before. Whether you have one location or one thousand, you can now claim and manage all your Yelp locations directly from your Moz Local dashboard.

What’s new?

Marketers will now be able to claim and manage data for all of their Yelp listings in Moz Local to increase the likelihood that more new customers will be able to find their business in local and map searches.

Claiming Yelp pages

Businesses can now use their Yelp login to claim and manage their listings through Moz Local — either individually or as a group. Create a new Yelp account or use your existing one, you can manage it all through us!

Ongoing management of Yelp pages

Once claimed, Yelp listings can be accessed and updated by Moz Local. This includes pushing updates to those Yelp pages from the Moz Local dashboard as well as monitoring the status of those updates and getting listing alerts in our recently introduced activity feed.

A Complement to our Reputation Management functionality

This new advanced Yelp functionality in Moz Local — claiming and active management functions — will complement our existing Reputation Management functionality, which provides notifications of new Yelp reviews and review snippets themselves right in the Moz Local dashboard, enabling users to link to the review user experience on Yelp.com in order to respond to a review.

What’s the big deal?

We’re excited about this partnership for a number of reasons. First off, our primary goal has always been to make it easier for brands and marketers to manage their local marketing strategy. As the leading consumer review service, Yelp is one of the most authoritative citation sources in the Local SEO ecosystem, and, as such, is an important source of information to Google. On top of that, Yelp data is critically important to Bing, Apple Maps/Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Yahoo, which use both its location data and reviews directly for their own results.

Everyone agrees Yelp is vital to local marketing strategy, and businesses that employ digital marketing have always told us they would love to be able to update and manage their Yelp listings. In both small and large-scale scenarios, they’ve been waiting for an efficient solution for updating their listings. A comprehensive solution that enables them to do this, as well as manage their Yelp reviews, streamlines the online management process substantially.

Finally, as the leading consumer review site, Yelp attracts over 100 million unique visitors monthly. It provides a critical customer touchpoint for businesses, and having listings on Yelp helps a business rank in local searches.

How will it work?

Moz Local users will provide the email address associated with the Yelp page(s) for their business location(s) to Moz Local, which will then start the claiming process. This will include a bulk claiming process that will prove especially valuable for businesses that have a large number of locations.

Once the Yelp page(s) for their business have been claimed by Moz Local on the user’s behalf, then automatically associated with Moz Local listings as appropriate, the user will be able to monitor and update those pages with all the efficiency and effectiveness that Moz Local provides through its unique, industry leading Active Location Data Management process. This will be available in all Moz Local product packages (Moz Local Essential, Moz Local Professional, and Moz Local Premium).

Yelp review snippets and review notifications are available in the Reputation tab in all Moz Local product packages.

Yelp performance metrics will become available in the Performance and Visibility tabs of Moz Local Professional and Moz Local Premium packages, our product packages that offer SEO analytics.

Cool. When will it be available?

The new Yelp advanced functionality will be available in early 2017.

Questions about this announcement? Leave a comment or contact us at help@moz.com.

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!

Reblogged 1 year ago from tracking.feedpress.it

Darryl, the man behind dotmailer’s Custom Technical Solutions team

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Why did you decide to come to dotmailer?

I first got to know dotmailer when the company was just a bunch of young enthusiastic web developers called Ellipsis Media back in 1999. I was introduced by one of my suppliers and we decided to bring them on board to build a recruitment website for one of our clients. That client was Amnesty International and the job role was Secretary General. Not bad for a Croydon company whose biggest client before that was Scobles the plumber’s merchants. So, I was probably dotmailer’s first ever corporate client! After that, I used dotmailer at each company I worked for and then one day they approached a colleague and me and asked us if we wanted to work for them. That was 2013.  We grabbed the opportunity with both hands and haven’t looked back since.

Tell us a bit about your role

I’m the Global Head of Technical Solutions which actually gives me responsibility for 2 teams. First, Custom Technical Solutions (CTS), who build bespoke applications and tools for customers that allow them to integrate more closely with dotmailer and make life easier. Second, Technical Pre-sales, which spans our 3 territories (EMEA, US and APAC) and works with prospective and existing clients to figure out the best solution and fit within dotmailer.

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

I would say so far it has to be helping to turn the CTS team from just 2 people into a group of 7 highly skilled and dedicated men and women who have become an intrinsic and valued part of the dotmailer organization. Also I really enjoy being part of the Senior Technical Management team. Here we have the ability to influence the direction and structure of the platform on a daily basis.

Meet Darryl Clark – the cheese and peanut butter sandwich lover

Can you speak a bit about your background and that of your team? What experience and expertise is required to join this team?

My background is quite diverse from a stint in the Army, through design college, web development, business analysis to heading up my current teams. I would say the most valuable skill that I have is being highly analytical. I love nothing more than listening to a client’s requirements and digging deep to work out how we can answer these if not exceed them.

As a team, we love nothing more than brainstorming our ideas. Every member has a valid input and we listen. Everyone has the opportunity to influence what we do and our motto is “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”

To work in my teams you have to be analytical but open minded to the fact that other people may have a better answer than you. Embrace other people’s input and use it to give our clients the best possible solution. We are hugely detail conscious, but have to be acutely aware that we need to tailor what we say to our audience so being able to talk to anyone at any level is hugely valuable.

How much of the dotmailer platform is easily customizable and when does it cross over into something that requires your team’s expertise? How much time is spent on these custom solutions one-time or ongoing?

I’ll let you in on a little secret here. We don’t actually do anything that our customers can’t do with dotmailer given the right knowledge and resources. This is because we build all of our solutions using the dotmailer public API. The API has hundreds of methods in both SOAP and REST versions, which allows you to do a huge amount with the dotmailer platform. We do have a vast amount of experience and knowledge in the team so we may well be able to build a solution quicker than our customers. We are more than happy to help them and their development teams build a solution using us on a consultancy basis to lessen the steepness of the learning curve.

Our aim when building a solution for a customer is that it runs silently in the background and does what it should without any fuss.

What are your plans for the Custom Tech Solutions team going forward?

The great thing about Custom Technical Solutions is you never know what is around the corner as our customers have very diverse needs. What we are concentrating on at the moment is refining our processes to ensure that they are as streamlined as possible and allow us to give as much information to the customer as we can. We are also always looking at the technology and coding approaches that we use to make sure that we build the most innovative and robust solutions.

We are also looking at our external marketing and sharing our knowledge through blogs so keep an eye on the website for our insights.

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

Most questions seem to revolve around reassurance such as “Have you done this before?”, “How safe is my data?”, “What about security?”, “Can you talk to my developers?”, “Do I need to do anything?”.  In most instances, we are the ones asking the questions as we need to find out information as soon as possible so that we can analyse it to ensure that we have the right detail to provide the right solution.

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

We talk a lot about working with best of breed so for example a customer can use our Channel Extensions in automation programs to fire out an SMS to a contact using their existing provider. We don’t force customers down one route, we like to let them decide for themselves.

Also, I really like to emphasize the fact that there is always more than one way to do something within the dotmailer platform. This means we can usually find a way to do something that works for a client within the platform. If not, then we call in CTS to work out if there is a way that we can build something that will — whether this is automating uploads for a small client or mass sending from thousands of child accounts for an enterprise level one.

What do you see as the future of marketing automation technology?  Will one size ever fit all? Or more customization going forward?

The 64 million dollar question. One size will never fit all. Companies and their systems are too organic for that. There isn’t one car that suits every driver or one racquet that suits every sport. Working with a top drawer partner network and building our system to be as open as possible from an integration perspective means that our customers can make dotmailer mold to their business and not the other way round…and adding to that the fact that we are building lots of features in the platform that will blow your socks off.

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

I’m a dyed in the wool Gooner (aka Arsenal Football Club fan) thanks to my Grandfather leading me down the right path as a child. If you are still reading this after that bombshell, then food-wise I pretty much like everything apart from coriander which as far as I’m concerned is the Devils own spawn. I don’t really have a favorite band, but am partial to a bit of Level 42 and Kings of Leon and you will also find me listening to 90s drum and bass and proper old school hip hop. My favorite holiday destination is any decent villa that I can relax in and spend time with my family and I went to Paris recently and loved that. Guilty pleasure – well that probably has to be confessing to liking Coldplay or the fact that my favorite sandwich is peanut butter, cheese and salad cream. Go on try it, you’ll love it.

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

Reblogged 1 year ago from blog.dotmailer.com

The Inbound Marketing Economy

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Posted by KelseyLibert

When it comes to job availability and security, the future looks bright for inbound marketers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that employment for marketing managers will grow by 13% between 2012 and 2022. Job security for marketing managers also looks positive according to the BLS, which cites that marketing employees are less likely to be laid off since marketing drives revenue for most businesses.

While the BLS provides growth estimates for managerial-level marketing roles, these projections don’t give much insight into the growth of digital marketing, specifically the disciplines within digital marketing. As we know, “marketing” can refer to a variety of different specializations and methodologies. Since digital marketing is still relatively new compared to other fields, there is not much comprehensive research on job growth and trends in our industry.

To gain a better understanding of the current state of digital marketing careers, Fractl teamed up with Moz to identify which skills and roles are the most in demand and which states have the greatest concentration of jobs.

Methodology

We analyzed 75,315 job listings posted on Indeed.com during June 2015 based on data gathered from job ads containing the following terms:

  • “content marketing” or “content strategy”
  • “SEO” or “search engine marketing”
  • “social media marketing” or “social media management”
  • “inbound marketing” or “digital marketing”
  • “PPC” (pay-per-click)
  • “Google Analytics”

We chose the above keywords based on their likelihood to return results that were marketing-focused roles (for example, just searching for “social media” may return a lot of jobs that are not primarily marketing focused, such as customer service). The occurrence of each of these terms in job listings was quantified and segmented by state. We then combined the job listing data with U.S. Census Bureau population estimates to calculate the jobs per capita for each keyword, giving us the states with the greatest concentration of jobs for a given search query.

Using the same data, we identified which job titles appeared most frequently. We used existing data from Indeed to determine job trends and average salaries. LinkedIn search results were also used to identify keyword growth in user profiles.

Marketing skills are in high demand, but talent is hard to find

As the marketing industry continues to evolve due to emerging technology and marketing platforms, marketers are expected to pick up new skills and broaden their knowledge more quickly than ever before. Many believe this rapid rate of change has caused a marketing skills gap, making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing.

The ability to combine analytical thinking with creative execution is highly desirable and necessary in today’s marketing landscape. According to an article in The Guardian, “Companies will increasingly look for rounded individuals who can combine analytical rigor with the ability to apply this knowledge in a practical and creative context.” Being both detail-oriented and a big picture thinker is also a sought-after combination of attributes. A report by The Economist and Marketo found that “CMOs want people with the ability to grasp and manage the details (in data, technology, and marketing operations) combined with a view of the strategic big picture.”

But well-rounded marketers are hard to come by. In a study conducted by Bullhorn, 64% of recruiters reported a shortage of skilled candidates for available marketing roles. Wanted Analytics recently found that one of the biggest national talent shortages is for marketing manager roles, with only two available candidates per job opening.

Increase in marketers listing skills in content marketing, inbound marketing, and social media on LinkedIn profiles

While recruiter frustrations may indicate a shallow talent pool, LinkedIn tells a different story—the number of U.S.-based marketers who identify themselves as having digital marketing skills is on the rise. Using data tracked by Rand and LinkedIn, we found the following increases of marketing keywords within user profiles.

growth of marketing keywords in linkedin profiles

The number of profiles containing “content marketing” has seen the largest growth, with a 168% increase since 2013. “Social media” has also seen significant growth with a 137% increase. “Social media” appears on a significantly higher volume of profiles than the other keywords, with more than 2.2 million profiles containing some mention of social media. Although “SEO” has not seen as much growth as the other keywords, it still has the second-highest volume with it appearing in 630,717 profiles.

Why is there a growing number of people self-identifying as having the marketing skills recruiters want, yet recruiters think there is a lack of talent?

While there may be a lot of specialists out there, perhaps recruiters are struggling to fill marketing roles due to a lack of generalists or even a lack of specialists with surface-level knowledge of other areas of digital marketing (also known as a T-shaped marketer).

Popular job listings show a need for marketers to diversify their skill set

The data we gathered from LinkedIn confirm this, as the 20 most common digital marketing-related job titles being advertised call for a broad mix of skills.

20 most common marketing job titles

It’s no wonder that marketing manager roles are hard to fill, considering the job ads are looking for proficiency in a wide range of marketing disciplines including social media marketing, SEO, PPC, content marketing, Google Analytics, and digital marketing. Even job descriptions for specialist roles tend to call for skills in other disciplines. A particular role such as SEO Specialist may call for several skills other than SEO, such as PPC, content marketing, and Google Analytics.

Taking a more granular look at job titles, the chart below shows the five most common titles for each search query. One might expect mostly specialist roles to appear here, but there is a high occurrence of generalist positions, such as Digital Marketing Manager and Marketing Manager.

5 most common job titles by search query

Only one job title containing “SEO” cracked the top five. This indicates that SEO knowledge is a desirable skill within other roles, such as general digital marketing and development.

Recruiter was the third most common job title among job listings containing social media keywords, which suggests a need for social media skills in non-marketing roles.

Similar to what we saw with SEO job titles, only one job title specific to PPC (Paid Search Specialist) made it into the top job titles. PPC skills are becoming necessary for more general marketing roles, such as Marketing Manager and Digital Marketing Specialist.

Across all search queries, the most common jobs advertised call for a broad mix of skills. This tells us hiring managers are on the hunt for well-rounded candidates with a diverse range of marketing skills, as opposed to candidates with expertise in one area.

Marketers who cultivate diverse skill sets are better poised to gain an advantage over other job seekers, excel in their job role, and accelerate career growth. Jason Miller says it best in his piece about the new breed hybrid marketer:

future of marketing quote linkedin

Inbound job demand and growth: Most-wanted skills and fastest-growing jobs

Using data from Indeed, we identified which inbound skills have the highest demand and which jobs are seeing the most growth. Social media keywords claim the largest volume of results out of the terms we searched for during June 2015.

number of marketing job listings by keyword

“Social media marketing” or “social media management” appeared the most frequently in the job postings we analyzed, with 46.7% containing these keywords. “PPC” returned the smallest number of results, with only 3.8% of listings containing this term.

Perhaps this is due to social media becoming a more necessary skill across many industries and not only a necessity for marketers (for example, social media’s role in customer service and recruitment). On the other hand, job roles calling for PPC or SEO skills are most likely marketing-focused. The prevalence of social media jobs also may indicate that social media has gained wide acceptance as a necessary part of a marketing strategy. Additionally, social media skills are less valuable compared to other marketing skills, making it cheaper to hire for these positions (we will explore this further in the average salaries section below).

Our search results also included a high volume of jobs containing “digital marketing” and “SEO” keywords, which made up 19.5% and 15.5% respectively. At 5.8%, “content marketing” had the lowest search volume after “PPC.”

Digital marketing, social media, and content marketing experienced the most job growth

While the number of job listings tells us which skills are most in demand today, looking at which jobs are seeing the most growth can give insight into shifting demands.

digital marketing growth on indeed.com

Digital marketing job listings have seen substantial growth since 2009, when it accounted for less than 0.1% of Indeed.com search results. In January 2015, this number had climbed to nearly 0.3%.

social media job growth on indeed.com

While social media marketing jobs have seen some uneven growth, as of January 2015 more than 0.1% of all job listings on Indeed.com contained the term “social media marketing” or “social media management.” This shows a significant upward trend considering this number was around 0.05% for most of 2014. It’s also worth noting that “social media” is currently ranked No. 10 on Indeed’s list of top job trends.

content marketing job growth on indeed.com

Despite its growth from 0.02% to nearly 0.09% of search volume in the last four years, “content marketing” does not make up a large volume of job postings compared to “digital marketing” or “social media.” In fact, “SEO” has seen a decrease in growth but still constitutes a higher percentage of job listings than content marketing.

SEO, PPC, and Google Analytics job growth has slowed down

On the other hand, search volume on Indeed has either decreased or plateaued for “SEO,” “PPC,” and “Google Analytics.”

seo job growth on indeed.com

As we see in the graph, the volume of “SEO job” listings peaked between 2011 and 2012. This is also around the time content marketing began gaining popularity, thanks to the Panda and Penguin updates. The decrease may be explained by companies moving their marketing budgets away from SEO and toward content or social media positions. However, “SEO” still has a significant amount of job listings, with it appearing in more than 0.2% of job listings on Indeed as of 2015.

ppc job growth on indeed.com

“PPC” has seen the most staggered growth among all the search terms we analyzed, with its peak of nearly 0.1% happening between 2012 and 2013. As of January of this year, search volume was below 0.05% for “PPC.”

google analytics job growth on indeed.com

Despite a lack of growth, the need for this skill remains steady. Between 2008 and 2009, “Google Analytics” job ads saw a huge spike on Indeed. Since then, the search volume has tapered off and plateaued through January 2015.

Most valuable skills are SEO, digital marketing, and Google Analytics

So we know the number of social media, digital marketing, and content marketing jobs are on the rise. But which skills are worth the most? We looked at the average salaries based on keywords and estimates from Indeed and salaries listed in job ads.

national average marketing salaries

Job titles containing “SEO” had an average salary of $102,000. Meanwhile, job titles containing “social media marketing” had an average salary of $51,000. Considering such a large percentage of the job listings we analyzed contained “social media” keywords, there is a much larger pool of jobs; therefore, a lot of entry level social media jobs or internships are probably bringing down the average salary.

Job titles containing “Google Analytics” had the second-highest average salary at $82,000, but this should be taken with a grain of salt considering “Google Analytics” will rarely appear as part of a job title. The chart below, which shows average salaries for jobs containing keywords anywhere in the listing as opposed to only in the title, gives a more accurate idea of how much “Google Analytics” job roles earn on average.national salary averages marketing keywords

Looking at the average salaries based on keywords that appeared anywhere within the job listing (job title, job description, etc.) shows a slightly different picture. Based on this, jobs containing “digital marketing” or “inbound marketing” had the highest average salary of $84,000. “SEO” and “Google Analytics” are tied for second with $76,000 as the average salary.

“Social media marketing” takes the bottom spot with an average salary of $57,000. However, notice that there is a higher average salary for jobs that contain “social media” within the job listing as opposed to jobs that contain “social media” within the title. This suggests that social media skills may be more valuable when combined with other responsibilities and skills, whereas a strictly social media job, such as Social Media Manager or Social Media Specialist, does not earn as much.

Massachusetts, New York, and California have the most career opportunities for inbound marketers

Looking for a new job? Maybe it’s time to pack your bags for Boston.

Massachusetts led the U.S. with the most jobs per capita for digital marketing, content marketing, SEO, and Google Analytics. New York took the top spot for social media jobs per capita, while Utah had the highest concentration of PPC jobs. California ranked in the top three for digital marketing, content marketing, social media, and Google Analytics. Illinois appeared in the top 10 for every term and usually ranked within the top five. Most of the states with the highest job concentrations are in the Northeast, West, and East Coast, with a few exceptions such as Illinois and Minnesota.

But you don’t necessarily have to move to a new state to increase the odds of landing an inbound marketing job. Some unexpected states also made the cut, with Connecticut and Vermont ranking within the top 10 for several keywords.

concentration of digital marketing jobs

marketing jobs per capita

Job listings containing “digital marketing” or “inbound marketing” were most prevalent in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and California, which is most likely due to these states being home to major cities where marketing agencies and large brands are headquartered or have a presence. You will notice these four states make an appearance in the top 10 for every other search query and usually rank close to the top of the list.

More surprising to find in the top 10 were smaller states such as Connecticut and Vermont. Many major organizations are headquartered in Connecticut, which may be driving the state’s need for digital marketing talent. Vermont’s high-tech industry growth may explain its high concentration of digital marketing jobs.

content marketing job concentration

per capita content marketing jobs

Although content marketing jobs are growing, there are still a low volume overall of available jobs, as shown by the low jobs per capita compared to most of the other search queries. With more than three jobs per capita, Massachusetts and New York topped the list for the highest concentration of job listings containing “content marketing” or “content strategy.” California and Illinois rank in third and fourth with 2.8 and 2.1 jobs per capita respectively.

seo job concentration

seo jobs per capita

Again, Massachusetts and New York took the top spots, each with more than eight SEO jobs per capita. Utah took third place for the highest concentration of SEO jobs. Surprised to see Utah rank in the top 10? Its inclusion on this list and others may be due to its booming tech startup scene, which has earned the metropolitan areas of Salt Lake City, Provo, and Park City the nickname Silicon Slopes.

social media job concentration

social media jobs per capita

Compared to the other keywords, “social media” sees a much higher concentration of jobs. New York dominates the rankings with nearly 24 social media jobs per capita. The other top contenders of California, Massachusetts, and Illinois all have more than 15 social media jobs per capita.

The numbers at the bottom of this list can give you an idea of how prevalent social media jobs were compared to any other keyword we analyzed. Minnesota’s 12.1 jobs per capita, the lowest ranking state in the top 10 for social media, trumps even the highest ranking state for any other keyword (11.5 digital marketing jobs per capita in Massachusetts).

ppc job concentration

ppc jobs per capita

Due to its low overall number of available jobs, “PPC” sees the lowest jobs per capita out of all the search queries. Utah has the highest concentration of jobs with just two PPC jobs per 100,000 residents. It is also the only state in the top 10 to crack two jobs per capita.

google analytics job concentration

google analytics jobs per capita

Regionally, the Northeast and West dominate the rankings, with the exception of Illinois. Massachusetts and New York are tied for the most Google Analytics job postings, each with nearly five jobs per capita. At more than three jobs per 100,000 residents, California, Illinois, and Colorado round out the top five.

Overall, our findings indicate that none of the marketing disciplines we analyzed are dying career choices, but there is a need to become more than a one-trick pony—or else you’ll risk getting passed up for job opportunities. As the marketing industry evolves, there is a greater need for marketers who “wear many hats” and have competencies across different marketing disciplines. Marketers who develop diverse skill sets can gain a competitive advantage in the job market and achieve greater career growth.

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!

Reblogged 2 years ago from tracking.feedpress.it

Data Mining with Majestic

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Majestic offers an incredible amount of data for us to use in our SEO efforts to increase rankings in the organic arena and position our Brand. As the size of the website increases so does the challenge to identify the most appropriate dataset to answer a specific question Management will formulate: Why has there been…

The post Data Mining with Majestic appeared first on Majestic Blog.

Reblogged 3 years ago from blog.majestic.com

Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? – Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by RuthBurrReedy

It was once commonplace for developers to code relative URLs into a site. There are a number of reasons why that might not be the best idea for SEO, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy is here to tell you all about why.

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

Let’s discuss some non-philosophical absolutes and relatives

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Ruth Burr Reedy. You may recognize me from such projects as when I used to be the Head of SEO at Moz. I’m now the Senior SEO Manager at BigWing Interactive in Oklahoma City. Today we’re going to talk about relative versus absolute URLs and why they are important.

At any given time, your website can have several different configurations that might be causing duplicate content issues. You could have just a standard http://www.example.com. That’s a pretty standard format for a website.

But the main sources that we see of domain level duplicate content are when the non-www.example.com does not redirect to the www or vice-versa, and when the HTTPS versions of your URLs are not forced to resolve to HTTP versions or, again, vice-versa. What this can mean is if all of these scenarios are true, if all four of these URLs resolve without being forced to resolve to a canonical version, you can, in essence, have four versions of your website out on the Internet. This may or may not be a problem.

It’s not ideal for a couple of reasons. Number one, duplicate content is a problem because some people think that duplicate content is going to give you a penalty. Duplicate content is not going to get your website penalized in the same way that you might see a spammy link penalty from Penguin. There’s no actual penalty involved. You won’t be punished for having duplicate content.

The problem with duplicate content is that you’re basically relying on Google to figure out what the real version of your website is. Google is seeing the URL from all four versions of your website. They’re going to try to figure out which URL is the real URL and just rank that one. The problem with that is you’re basically leaving that decision up to Google when it’s something that you could take control of for yourself.

There are a couple of other reasons that we’ll go into a little bit later for why duplicate content can be a problem. But in short, duplicate content is no good.

However, just having these URLs not resolve to each other may or may not be a huge problem. When it really becomes a serious issue is when that problem is combined with injudicious use of relative URLs in internal links. So let’s talk a little bit about the difference between a relative URL and an absolute URL when it comes to internal linking.

With an absolute URL, you are putting the entire web address of the page that you are linking to in the link. You’re putting your full domain, everything in the link, including /page. That’s an absolute URL.

However, when coding a website, it’s a fairly common web development practice to instead code internal links with what’s called a relative URL. A relative URL is just /page. Basically what that does is it relies on your browser to understand, “Okay, this link is pointing to a page that’s on the same domain that we’re already on. I’m just going to assume that that is the case and go there.”

There are a couple of really good reasons to code relative URLs

1) It is much easier and faster to code.

When you are a web developer and you’re building a site and there thousands of pages, coding relative versus absolute URLs is a way to be more efficient. You’ll see it happen a lot.

2) Staging environments

Another reason why you might see relative versus absolute URLs is some content management systems — and SharePoint is a great example of this — have a staging environment that’s on its own domain. Instead of being example.com, it will be examplestaging.com. The entire website will basically be replicated on that staging domain. Having relative versus absolute URLs means that the same website can exist on staging and on production, or the live accessible version of your website, without having to go back in and recode all of those URLs. Again, it’s more efficient for your web development team. Those are really perfectly valid reasons to do those things. So don’t yell at your web dev team if they’ve coded relative URLS, because from their perspective it is a better solution.

Relative URLs will also cause your page to load slightly faster. However, in my experience, the SEO benefits of having absolute versus relative URLs in your website far outweigh the teeny-tiny bit longer that it will take the page to load. It’s very negligible. If you have a really, really long page load time, there’s going to be a whole boatload of things that you can change that will make a bigger difference than coding your URLs as relative versus absolute.

Page load time, in my opinion, not a concern here. However, it is something that your web dev team may bring up with you when you try to address with them the fact that, from an SEO perspective, coding your website with relative versus absolute URLs, especially in the nav, is not a good solution.

There are even better reasons to use absolute URLs

1) Scrapers

If you have all of your internal links as relative URLs, it would be very, very, very easy for a scraper to simply scrape your whole website and put it up on a new domain, and the whole website would just work. That sucks for you, and it’s great for that scraper. But unless you are out there doing public services for scrapers, for some reason, that’s probably not something that you want happening with your beautiful, hardworking, handcrafted website. That’s one reason. There is a scraper risk.

2) Preventing duplicate content issues

But the other reason why it’s very important to have absolute versus relative URLs is that it really mitigates the duplicate content risk that can be presented when you don’t have all of these versions of your website resolving to one version. Google could potentially enter your site on any one of these four pages, which they’re the same page to you. They’re four different pages to Google. They’re the same domain to you. They are four different domains to Google.

But they could enter your site, and if all of your URLs are relative, they can then crawl and index your entire domain using whatever format these are. Whereas if you have absolute links coded, even if Google enters your site on www. and that resolves, once they crawl to another page, that you’ve got coded without the www., all of that other internal link juice and all of the other pages on your website, Google is not going to assume that those live at the www. version. That really cuts down on different versions of each page of your website. If you have relative URLs throughout, you basically have four different websites if you haven’t fixed this problem.

Again, it’s not always a huge issue. Duplicate content, it’s not ideal. However, Google has gotten pretty good at figuring out what the real version of your website is.

You do want to think about internal linking, when you’re thinking about this. If you have basically four different versions of any URL that anybody could just copy and paste when they want to link to you or when they want to share something that you’ve built, you’re diluting your internal links by four, which is not great. You basically would have to build four times as many links in order to get the same authority. So that’s one reason.

3) Crawl Budget

The other reason why it’s pretty important not to do is because of crawl budget. I’m going to point it out like this instead.

When we talk about crawl budget, basically what that is, is every time Google crawls your website, there is a finite depth that they will. There’s a finite number of URLs that they will crawl and then they decide, “Okay, I’m done.” That’s based on a few different things. Your site authority is one of them. Your actual PageRank, not toolbar PageRank, but how good Google actually thinks your website is, is a big part of that. But also how complex your site is, how often it’s updated, things like that are also going to contribute to how often and how deep Google is going to crawl your site.

It’s important to remember when we think about crawl budget that, for Google, crawl budget cost actual dollars. One of Google’s biggest expenditures as a company is the money and the bandwidth it takes to crawl and index the Web. All of that energy that’s going into crawling and indexing the Web, that lives on servers. That bandwidth comes from servers, and that means that using bandwidth cost Google actual real dollars.

So Google is incentivized to crawl as efficiently as possible, because when they crawl inefficiently, it cost them money. If your site is not efficient to crawl, Google is going to save itself some money by crawling it less frequently and crawling to a fewer number of pages per crawl. That can mean that if you have a site that’s updated frequently, your site may not be updating in the index as frequently as you’re updating it. It may also mean that Google, while it’s crawling and indexing, may be crawling and indexing a version of your website that isn’t the version that you really want it to crawl and index.

So having four different versions of your website, all of which are completely crawlable to the last page, because you’ve got relative URLs and you haven’t fixed this duplicate content problem, means that Google has to spend four times as much money in order to really crawl and understand your website. Over time they’re going to do that less and less frequently, especially if you don’t have a really high authority website. If you’re a small website, if you’re just starting out, if you’ve only got a medium number of inbound links, over time you’re going to see your crawl rate and frequency impacted, and that’s bad. We don’t want that. We want Google to come back all the time, see all our pages. They’re beautiful. Put them up in the index. Rank them well. That’s what we want. So that’s what we should do.

There are couple of ways to fix your relative versus absolute URLs problem

1) Fix what is happening on the server side of your website

You have to make sure that you are forcing all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one version of your domain. For me, I’m pretty agnostic as to which version you pick. You should probably already have a pretty good idea of which version of your website is the real version, whether that’s www, non-www, HTTPS, or HTTP. From my view, what’s most important is that all four of these versions resolve to one version.

From an SEO standpoint, there is evidence to suggest and Google has certainly said that HTTPS is a little bit better than HTTP. From a URL length perspective, I like to not have the www. in there because it doesn’t really do anything. It just makes your URLs four characters longer. If you don’t know which one to pick, I would pick one this one HTTPS, no W’s. But whichever one you pick, what’s really most important is that all of them resolve to one version. You can do that on the server side, and that’s usually pretty easy for your dev team to fix once you tell them that it needs to happen.

2) Fix your internal links

Great. So you fixed it on your server side. Now you need to fix your internal links, and you need to recode them for being relative to being absolute. This is something that your dev team is not going to want to do because it is time consuming and, from a web dev perspective, not that important. However, you should use resources like this Whiteboard Friday to explain to them, from an SEO perspective, both from the scraper risk and from a duplicate content standpoint, having those absolute URLs is a high priority and something that should get done.

You’ll need to fix those, especially in your navigational elements. But once you’ve got your nav fixed, also pull out your database or run a Screaming Frog crawl or however you want to discover internal links that aren’t part of your nav, and make sure you’re updating those to be absolute as well.

Then you’ll do some education with everybody who touches your website saying, “Hey, when you link internally, make sure you’re using the absolute URL and make sure it’s in our preferred format,” because that’s really going to give you the most bang for your buck per internal link. So do some education. Fix your internal links.

Sometimes your dev team going to say, “No, we can’t do that. We’re not going to recode the whole nav. It’s not a good use of our time,” and sometimes they are right. The dev team has more important things to do. That’s okay.

3) Canonicalize it!

If you can’t get your internal links fixed or if they’re not going to get fixed anytime in the near future, a stopgap or a Band-Aid that you can kind of put on this problem is to canonicalize all of your pages. As you’re changing your server to force all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one, at the same time you should be implementing the canonical tag on all of the pages of your website to self-canonize. On every page, you have a canonical page tag saying, “This page right here that they were already on is the canonical version of this page. ” Or if there’s another page that’s the canonical version, then obviously you point to that instead.

But having each page self-canonicalize will mitigate both the risk of duplicate content internally and some of the risk posed by scrappers, because when they scrape, if they are scraping your website and slapping it up somewhere else, those canonical tags will often stay in place, and that lets Google know this is not the real version of the website.

In conclusion, relative links, not as good. Absolute links, those are the way to go. Make sure that you’re fixing these very common domain level duplicate content problems. If your dev team tries to tell you that they don’t want to do this, just tell them I sent you. Thanks guys.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Reblogged 3 years ago from tracking.feedpress.it

How to Use Server Log Analysis for Technical SEO

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Posted by SamuelScott

It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your logs are?

I’m introducing this guide with a pun on a common public-service announcement that has run on late-night TV news broadcasts in the United States because log analysis is something that is extremely newsworthy and important.

If your technical and on-page SEO is poor, then nothing else that you do will matter. Technical SEO is the key to helping search engines to crawl, parse, and index websites, and thereby rank them appropriately long before any marketing work begins.

The important thing to remember: Your log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how search engines are crawling your website. By helping Google to do its job, you will set the stage for your future SEO work and make your job easier. Log analysis is one facet of technical SEO, and correcting the problems found in your logs will help to lead to higher rankings, more traffic, and more conversions and sales.

Here are just a few reasons why:

  • Too many response code errors may cause Google to reduce its crawling of your website and perhaps even your rankings.
  • You want to make sure that search engines are crawling everything, new and old, that you want to appear and rank in the SERPs (and nothing else).
  • It’s crucial to ensure that all URL redirections will pass along any incoming “link juice.”

However, log analysis is something that is unfortunately discussed all too rarely in SEO circles. So, here, I wanted to give the Moz community an introductory guide to log analytics that I hope will help. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

What is a log file?

Computer servers, operating systems, network devices, and computer applications automatically generate something called a log entry whenever they perform an action. In a SEO and digital marketing context, one type of action is whenever a page is requested by a visiting bot or human.

Server log entries are specifically programmed to be output in the Common Log Format of the W3C consortium. Here is one example from Wikipedia with my accompanying explanations: 

127.0.0.1 user-identifier frank [10/Oct/2000:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2326
  • 127.0.0.1 — The remote hostname. An IP address is shown, like in this example, whenever the DNS hostname is not available or DNSLookup is turned off.
  • user-identifier — The remote logname / RFC 1413 identity of the user. (It’s not that important.)
  • frank — The user ID of the person requesting the page. Based on what I see in my Moz profile, Moz’s log entries would probably show either “SamuelScott” or “392388” whenever I visit a page after having logged in.
  • [10/Oct/2000:13:55:36 -0700] — The date, time, and timezone of the action in question in strftime format.
  • GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0 — “GET” is one of the two commands (the other is “POST”) that can be performed. “GET” fetches a URL while “POST” is submitting something (such as a forum comment). The second part is the URL that is being accessed, and the last part is the version of HTTP that is being accessed.
  • 200 — The status code of the document that was returned.
  • 2326 — The size, in bytes, of the document that was returned.

Note: A hyphen is shown in a field when that information is unavailable.

Every single time that you — or the Googlebot — visit a page on a website, a line with this information is output, recorded, and stored by the server.

Log entries are generated continuously and anywhere from several to thousands can be created every second — depending on the level of a given server, network, or application’s activity. A collection of log entries is called a log file (or often in slang, “the log” or “the logs”), and it is displayed with the most-recent log entry at the bottom. Individual log files often contain a calendar day’s worth of log entries.

Accessing your log files

Different types of servers store and manage their log files differently. Here are the general guides to finding and managing log data on three of the most-popular types of servers:

What is log analysis?

Log analysis (or log analytics) is the process of going through log files to learn something from the data. Some common reasons include:

  • Development and quality assurance (QA) — Creating a program or application and checking for problematic bugs to make sure that it functions properly
  • Network troubleshooting — Responding to and fixing system errors in a network
  • Customer service — Determining what happened when a customer had a problem with a technical product
  • Security issues — Investigating incidents of hacking and other intrusions
  • Compliance matters — Gathering information in response to corporate or government policies
  • Technical SEO — This is my favorite! More on that in a bit.

Log analysis is rarely performed regularly. Usually, people go into log files only in response to something — a bug, a hack, a subpoena, an error, or a malfunction. It’s not something that anyone wants to do on an ongoing basis.

Why? This is a screenshot of ours of just a very small part of an original (unstructured) log file:

Ouch. If a website gets 10,000 visitors who each go to ten pages per day, then the server will create a log file every day that will consist of 100,000 log entries. No one has the time to go through all of that manually.

How to do log analysis

There are three general ways to make log analysis easier in SEO or any other context:

  • Do-it-yourself in Excel
  • Proprietary software such as Splunk or Sumo-logic
  • The ELK Stack open-source software

Tim Resnik’s Moz essay from a few years ago walks you through the process of exporting a batch of log files into Excel. This is a (relatively) quick and easy way to do simple log analysis, but the downside is that one will see only a snapshot in time and not any overall trends. To obtain the best data, it’s crucial to use either proprietary tools or the ELK Stack.

Splunk and Sumo-Logic are proprietary log analysis tools that are primarily used by enterprise companies. The ELK Stack is a free and open-source batch of three platforms (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) that is owned by Elastic and used more often by smaller businesses. (Disclosure: We at Logz.io use the ELK Stack to monitor our own internal systems as well as for the basis of our own log management software.)

For those who are interested in using this process to do technical SEO analysis, monitor system or application performance, or for any other reason, our CEO, Tomer Levy, has written a guide to deploying the ELK Stack.

Technical SEO insights in log data

However you choose to access and understand your log data, there are many important technical SEO issues to address as needed. I’ve included screenshots of our technical SEO dashboard with our own website’s data to demonstrate what to examine in your logs.

Bot crawl volume

It’s important to know the number of requests made by Baidu, BingBot, GoogleBot, Yahoo, Yandex, and others over a given period time. If, for example, you want to get found in search in Russia but Yandex is not crawling your website, that is a problem. (You’d want to consult Yandex Webmaster and see this article on Search Engine Land.)

Response code errors

Moz has a great primer on the meanings of the different status codes. I have an alert system setup that tells me about 4XX and 5XX errors immediately because those are very significant.

Temporary redirects

Temporary 302 redirects do not pass along the “link juice” of external links from the old URL to the new one. Almost all of the time, they should be changed to permanent 301 redirects.

Crawl budget waste

Google assigns a crawl budget to each website based on numerous factors. If your crawl budget is, say, 100 pages per day (or the equivalent amount of data), then you want to be sure that all 100 are things that you want to appear in the SERPs. No matter what you write in your robots.txt file and meta-robots tags, you might still be wasting your crawl budget on advertising landing pages, internal scripts, and more. The logs will tell you — I’ve outlined two script-based examples in red above.

If you hit your crawl limit but still have new content that should be indexed to appear in search results, Google may abandon your site before finding it.

Duplicate URL crawling

The addition of URL parameters — typically used in tracking for marketing purposes — often results in search engines wasting crawl budgets by crawling different URLs with the same content. To learn how to address this issue, I recommend reading the resources on Google and Search Engine Land here, here, here, and here.

Crawl priority

Google might be ignoring (and not crawling or indexing) a crucial page or section of your website. The logs will reveal what URLs and/or directories are getting the most and least attention. If, for example, you have published an e-book that attempts to rank for targeted search queries but it sits in a directory that Google only visits once every six months, then you won’t get any organic search traffic from the e-book for up to six months.

If a part of your website is not being crawled very often — and it is updated often enough that it should be — then you might need to check your internal-linking structure and the crawl-priority settings in your XML sitemap.

Last crawl date

Have you uploaded something that you hope will be indexed quickly? The log files will tell you when Google has crawled it.

Crawl budget

One thing I personally like to check and see is Googlebot’s real-time activity on our site because the crawl budget that the search engine assigns to a website is a rough indicator — a very rough one — of how much it “likes” your site. Google ideally does not want to waste valuable crawling time on a bad website. Here, I had seen that Googlebot had made 154 requests of our new startup’s website over the prior twenty-four hours. Hopefully, that number will go up!

As I hope you can see, log analysis is critically important in technical SEO. It’s eleven o’clock — do you know where your logs are now?

Additional resources

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Reblogged 3 years ago from tracking.feedpress.it

How to Combat 5 of the SEO World’s Most Infuriating Problems – Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by randfish

These days, most of us have learned that spammy techniques aren’t the way to go, and we have a solid sense for the things we should be doing to rank higher, and ahead of our often spammier competitors. Sometimes, maddeningly, it just doesn’t work. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about five things that can infuriate SEOs with the best of intentions, why those problems exist, and what we can do about them.

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

What SEO problems make you angry?

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about some of the most infuriating things in the SEO world, specifically five problems that I think plague a lot of folks and some of the ways that we can combat and address those.

I’m going to start with one of the things that really infuriates a lot of new folks to the field, especially folks who are building new and emerging sites and are doing SEO on them. You have all of these best practices list. You might look at a web developer’s cheat sheet or sort of a guide to on-page and on-site SEO. You go, “Hey, I’m doing it. I’ve got my clean URLs, my good, unique content, my solid keyword targeting, schema markup, useful internal links, my XML sitemap, and my fast load speed. I’m mobile friendly, and I don’t have manipulative links.”

Great. “Where are my results? What benefit am I getting from doing all these things, because I don’t see one?” I took a site that was not particularly SEO friendly, maybe it’s a new site, one I just launched or an emerging site, one that’s sort of slowly growing but not yet a power player. I do all this right stuff, and I don’t get SEO results.

This makes a lot of people stop investing in SEO, stop believing in SEO, and stop wanting to do it. I can understand where you’re coming from. The challenge is not one of you’ve done something wrong. It’s that this stuff, all of these things that you do right, especially things that you do right on your own site or from a best practices perspective, they don’t increase rankings. They don’t. That’s not what they’re designed to do.

1) Following best practices often does nothing for new and emerging sites

This stuff, all of these best practices are designed to protect you from potential problems. They’re designed to make sure that your site is properly optimized so that you can perform to the highest degree that you are able. But this is not actually rank boosting stuff unfortunately. That is very frustrating for many folks. So following a best practices list, the idea is not, “Hey, I’m going to grow my rankings by doing this.”

On the flip side, many folks do these things on larger, more well-established sites, sites that have a lot of ranking signals already in place. They’re bigger brands, they have lots of links to them, and they have lots of users and usage engagement signals. You fix this stuff. You fix stuff that’s already broken, and boom, rankings pop up. Things are going well, and more of your pages are indexed. You’re getting more search traffic, and it feels great. This is a challenge, on our part, of understanding what this stuff does, not a challenge on the search engine’s part of not ranking us properly for having done all of these right things.

2) My competition seems to be ranking on the back of spammy or manipulative links

What’s going on? I thought Google had introduced all these algorithms to kind of shut this stuff down. This seems very frustrating. How are they pulling this off? I look at their link profile, and I see a bunch of the directories, Web 2.0 sites — I love that the spam world decided that that’s Web 2.0 sites — article sites, private blog networks, and do follow blogs.

You look at this stuff and you go, “What is this junk? It’s terrible. Why isn’t Google penalizing them for this?” The answer, the right way to think about this and to come at this is: Are these really the reason that they rank? I think we need to ask ourselves that question.

One thing that we don’t know, that we can never know, is: Have these links been disavowed by our competitor here?

I’ve got my HulksIncredibleStore.com and their evil competitor Hulk-tastrophe.com. Hulk-tastrophe has got all of these terrible links, but maybe they disavowed those links and you would have no idea. Maybe they didn’t build those links. Perhaps those links came in from some other place. They are not responsible. Google is not treating them as responsible for it. They’re not actually what’s helping them.

If they are helping, and it’s possible they are, there are still instances where we’ve seen spam propping up sites. No doubt about it.

I think the next logical question is: Are you willing to loose your site or brand? What we don’t see anymore is we almost never see sites like this, who are ranking on the back of these things and have generally less legitimate and good links, ranking for two or three or four years. You can see it for a few months, maybe even a year, but this stuff is getting hit hard and getting hit frequently. So unless you’re willing to loose your site, pursuing their links is probably not a strategy.

Then what other signals, that you might not be considering potentially links, but also non-linking signals, could be helping them rank? I think a lot of us get blinded in the SEO world by link signals, and we forget to look at things like: Do they have a phenomenal user experience? Are they growing their brand? Are they doing offline kinds of things that are influencing online? Are they gaining engagement from other channels that’s then influencing their SEO? Do they have things coming in that I can’t see? If you don’t ask those questions, you can’t really learn from your competitors, and you just feel the frustration.

3) I have no visibility or understanding of why my rankings go up vs down

On my HulksIncredibleStore.com, I’ve got my infinite stretch shorts, which I don’t know why he never wears — he should really buy those — my soothing herbal tea, and my anger management books. I look at my rankings and they kind of jump up all the time, jump all over the place all the time. Actually, this is pretty normal. I think we’ve done some analyses here, and the average page one search results shift is 1.5 or 2 position changes daily. That’s sort of the MozCast dataset, if I’m recalling correctly. That means that, over the course of a week, it’s not uncommon or unnatural for you to be bouncing around four, five, or six positions up, down, and those kind of things.

I think we should understand what can be behind these things. That’s a very simple list. You made changes, Google made changes, your competitors made changes, or searcher behavior has changed in terms of volume, in terms of what they were engaging with, what they’re clicking on, what their intent behind searches are. Maybe there was just a new movie that came out and in one of the scenes Hulk talks about soothing herbal tea. So now people are searching for very different things than they were before. They want to see the scene. They’re looking for the YouTube video clip and those kind of things. Suddenly Hulk’s soothing herbal tea is no longer directing as well to your site.

So changes like these things can happen. We can’t understand all of them. I think what’s up to us to determine is the degree of analysis and action that’s actually going to provide a return on investment. Looking at these day over day or week over week and throwing up our hands and getting frustrated probably provides very little return on investment. Looking over the long term and saying, “Hey, over the last 6 months, we can observe 26 weeks of ranking change data, and we can see that in aggregate we are now ranking higher and for more keywords than we were previously, and so we’re going to continue pursuing this strategy. This is the set of keywords that we’ve fallen most on, and here are the factors that we’ve identified that are consistent across that group.” I think looking at rankings in aggregate can give us some real positive ROI. Looking at one or two, one week or the next week probably very little ROI.

4) I cannot influence or affect change in my organization because I cannot accurately quantify, predict, or control SEO

That’s true, especially with things like keyword not provided and certainly with the inaccuracy of data that’s provided to us through Google’s Keyword Planner inside of AdWords, for example, and the fact that no one can really control SEO, not fully anyway.

You get up in front of your team, your board, your manager, your client and you say, “Hey, if we don’t do these things, traffic will suffer,” and they go, “Well, you can’t be sure about that, and you can’t perfectly predict it. Last time you told us something, something else happened. So because the data is imperfect, we’d rather spend money on channels that we can perfectly predict, that we can very effectively quantify, and that we can very effectively control.” That is understandable. I think that businesses have a lot of risk aversion naturally, and so wanting to spend time and energy and effort in areas that you can control feels a lot safer.

Some ways to get around this are, first off, know your audience. If you know who you’re talking to in the room, you can often determine the things that will move the needle for them. For example, I find that many managers, many boards, many executives are much more influenced by competitive pressures than they are by, “We won’t do as well as we did before, or we’re loosing out on this potential opportunity.” Saying that is less powerful than saying, “This competitor, who I know we care about and we track ourselves against, is capturing this traffic and here’s how they’re doing it.”

Show multiple scenarios. Many of the SEO presentations that I see and have seen and still see from consultants and from in-house folks come with kind of a single, “Hey, here’s what we predict will happen if we do this or what we predict will happen if we don’t do this.” You’ve got to show multiple scenarios, especially when you know you have error bars because you can’t accurately quantify and predict. You need to show ranges.

So instead of this, I want to see: What happens if we do it a little bit? What happens if we really overinvest? What happens if Google makes a much bigger change on this particular factor than we expect or our competitors do a much bigger investment than we expect? How might those change the numbers?

Then I really do like bringing case studies, especially if you’re a consultant, but even in-house there are so many case studies in SEO on the Web today, you can almost always find someone who’s analogous or nearly analogous and show some of their data, some of the results that they’ve seen. Places like SEMrush, a tool that offers competitive intelligence around rankings, can be great for that. You can show, hey, this media site in our sector made these changes. Look at the delta of keywords they were ranking for versus R over the next six months. Correlation is not causation, but that can be a powerful influencer showing those kind of things.

Then last, but not least, any time you’re going to get up like this and present to a group around these topics, if you very possibly can, try to talk one-on-one with the participants before the meeting actually happens. I have found it almost universally the case that when you get into a group setting, if you haven’t had the discussions beforehand about like, “What are your concerns? What do you think is not valid about this data? Hey, I want to run this by you and get your thoughts before we go to the meeting.” If you don’t do that ahead of time, people can gang up and pile on. One person says, “Hey, I don’t think this is right,” and everybody in the room kind of looks around and goes, “Yeah, I also don’t think that’s right.” Then it just turns into warfare and conflict that you don’t want or need. If you address those things beforehand, then you can include the data, the presentations, and the “I don’t know the answer to this and I know this is important to so and so” in that presentation or in that discussion. It can be hugely helpful. Big difference between winning and losing with that.

5) Google is biasing to big brands. It feels hopeless to compete against them

A lot of people are feeling this hopelessness, hopelessness in SEO about competing against them. I get that pain. In fact, I’ve felt that very strongly for a long time in the SEO world, and I think the trend has only increased. This comes from all sorts of stuff. Brands now have the little dropdown next to their search result listing. There are these brand and entity connections. As Google is using answers and knowledge graph more and more, it’s feeling like those entities are having a bigger influence on where things rank and where they’re visible and where they’re pulling from.

User and usage behavior signals on the rise means that big brands, who have more of those signals, tend to perform better. Brands in the knowledge graph, brands growing links without any effort, they’re just growing links because they’re brands and people point to them naturally. Well, that is all really tough and can be very frustrating.

I think you have a few choices on the table. First off, you can choose to compete with brands where they can’t or won’t. So this is areas like we’re going after these keywords that we know these big brands are not chasing. We’re going after social channels or people on social media that we know big brands aren’t. We’re going after user generated content because they have all these corporate requirements and they won’t invest in that stuff. We’re going after content that they refuse to pursue for one reason or another. That can be very effective.

You better be building, growing, and leveraging your competitive advantage. Whenever you build an organization, you’ve got to say, “Hey, here’s who is out there. This is why we are uniquely better or a uniquely better choice for this set of customers than these other ones.” If you can leverage that, you can generally find opportunities to compete and even to win against big brands. But those things have to become obvious, they have to become well-known, and you need to essentially build some of your brand around those advantages, or they’re not going to give you help in search. That includes media, that includes content, that includes any sort of press and PR you’re doing. That includes how you do your own messaging, all of these things.

(C) You can choose to serve a market or a customer that they don’t or won’t. That can be a powerful way to go about search, because usually search is bifurcated by the customer type. There will be slightly different forms of search queries that are entered by different kinds of customers, and you can pursue one of those that isn’t pursued by the competition.

Last, but not least, I think for everyone in SEO we all realize we’re going to have to become brands ourselves. That means building the signals that are typically associated with brands — authority, recognition from an industry, recognition from a customer set, awareness of our brand even before a search has happened. I talked about this in a previous Whiteboard Friday, but I think because of these things, SEO is becoming a channel that you benefit from as you grow your brand rather than the channel you use to initially build your brand.

All right, everyone. Hope these have been helpful in combating some of these infuriating, frustrating problems and that we’ll see some great comments from you guys. I hope to participate in those as well, and we’ll catch you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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