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Posted by randfish

Out of the many recent accomplishments that we’ve had, perhaps none is more exciting than the recent publicity we received from being named in Seattle’s Top 10 Places to Work by Seattle Met Magazine:

What do rubber band balls, coffee, cupcakes & a workspace w/ no computer have in common? The cover of this month’s Seattle Met magazine!

But, magazine articles aren’t the only things that should entice you to join our ragtag bunch…

Our Office

When you step foot inside SEOmoz, you’ll be forced to breakdance… Well, OK, that’s only if you mindlessly obey floor diagrams. You will, however, find a space that’s fun, productive, light-filled and only a block away from the Pike Place Market. We have pretty cool meeting rooms, too.

Lots of windows help keep the gloomy Seattle weather from damaging our sun-starved bodies

Xbox Kinect on Friday Nights

Our Team

The 34 people who work at the MozPlex are absolutely amazing. I noted in the Seattle Met piece that we bias toward folks who are not only smart and capable, but fit our culture of TAGFEE. That’s resulted in a group that I’m proud to call co-workers and friends.

Cyrus + Jen from Marketing, Chas from Engineering + Miranda from Product 

If you’ve met Moz team members at events or interacted with us over the web or phone, you’ve probably already been impressed. If you haven’t… you should apply for an interview at one of the positions below just to come to say Hi! (OK, probably not really, but you should at least come to our NYC meetup May 12, the Distilled Boston conference or MozCon this summer).

Our Mission: Simplify Organic Web Marketing

We’re privileged to tackle a huge, meaningful problem in a massive market. It’s our goal to take what is today a massive, complex set of tasks + challenges and make them accessible to non-experts, trackable via solid data and provide recommendations + automation to make improvement easy.

This stuff is really hard. We’re building software to make it less so. If that’s something you’re passionate about, we think there’s no better place to be.

Our Customers + Community: More than a million strong!

In March, SEOmoz + OSE had it’s first ever combined 1million+ visit month:

As if you needed another reason not to trust Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc.

Over the years, millions of people have used our tools + resources to learn more about search/web marketing and improve their sites. Our market position is an exciting one, filled with opportunity, but we know that great responsibility comes with that privilege. One of the best things we can offer to prospective employees is the chance to have a big impact on an emerging field – it’s the same thing that makes me excited to come to the office (or hop on a plane) every morning.

We’re Hiring Eight Exceptional People!

In addition to our ongoing search for world-class software engineers, I’m thrilled to announce 8 new positions on the Moz team:

SEOmoz wants people who believe in our mission and in TAGFEE. We’re unique in focusing not only on great talent, but great fit with our team. If you read the blog regularly or have stumbled across a few posts from us and feel a kindred spirit, we’d really love to talk. If you’re new to SEOmoz but curious to learn more, we are too and we hope you’ll take that first step by clicking and applying to one of the positions below:

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #4: Graphic Designer (Web UX/UI)

We’re looking for a web designer with the ability to create mind-lasers with his/her design talents and destroy web zombies with his/her Photoshop cannon abilities. Swoosh. Explosion. If you have the ability to liquefy rainbows and concentrate their pantones into web-safe colors, we want you! You’ll participate in site discussions, information gathering, team brainstorms, critiques, and presentations with the product team and marketing team. Daily tasks center on a comprehensive understanding of the design vision of SEOmoz, leading to the creation of new visual assets, concepts and the production of a full suite of site material and interface components. This role will also be involved with periodic maintenance of current site design material.

You should be a solid communicator (iambic pentameter optional), actively seeking and spreading inspiration, regularly challenging the status quo of our current designs, and curiously seeking out and learning about new tools and design trends. Did we mention you should have mad Photoshop and Illustrator skills, like pie, and where Threadless t-shirts? Those who do not love tightly-kerned Helvetica Bold need not apply, or have a good reason not to.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #5: Customer Service Expert

Do you <3 the Internet, love helping people, and laugh easily and often? Do your friends call you when their computers barf up strange error messages? Does Search Engine Optimization fascinate you? Are you unafraid of the early morning—or love making copious amounts of coffee? If this sounds like you, then we should chat. As a Customer Service Expert on our morning shift (6:30am to 3:30pm), you will contribute to the team by assisting our customers with all of their SEOmoz site and billing problems.

This includes the technical problems they encounter using our site and tools, and the billing questions they have about their accounts. You’ll diagnose problems and provide helpful advice across several different platforms: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, Windows and Macs. By understanding our customers’ needs and working closely with the product and marketing teams, you will help us build high quality, delightful products.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #6: Community Attaché

Our community is one of the most vibrant on the net. The Community Attaché, along with Jen Lopez, our Chief Community Wrangler, will connect, develop and nurture that community. Seriously, you want to have our community over for a sleep over. One of your primary responsibilities will be managing the day-to-day operations of our PRO Q&A Forum—you should be excited about increasing participation, quality and functionality. You’ll ensure questions are answered quickly, and that great answers are rewarded and recognized. You don’t mind rolling up your sleeves and reviewing dozens of questions daily. You’ll connect weekly with lots of community members and develop and manage a team of associates and moderators who will help you keep things running smoothly.

You’re passionate about user-generated content and will encouraging participation in YOUmoz (our user-generated blog), walk new authors through the process, help edit submitted posts, and publish and promote finished content. You love SEO and social media and should have experience with both. Most importantly, you aren’t afraid working with a wonderfully diverse set of people (including some very occasionally grumpy ones) who are passionate about online marketing and SEO. You must also enjoy giving and receiving hugs.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #7: Business Development (Chief Friendmaker, API Guru)

You like to create things, whether that’s partnerships, creative new uses for our API, or lasting friendships with SEOmoz customers. Maybe you’ve worn a suit in the past and want to work somewhere where shorts and a t-shirt are typical attire. You’ve got technical chops and are able to devise creative ways for others to use our data. You want to create new distribution partnerships that develop new marketing channels for SEOmoz PRO. You should have experience and knowledge with the SEO industry—you’ll be helping large agency and enterprise customers adopt our software. You’ll also be the primary point of contact for our API customers and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. You’ll feed new technology ideas to our product team who will make those ideas a reality. You’ll foster a community of API developers and host developer hack days.

You should have business development experience but not be afraid of a company that encourages honesty and informality in business dealings—we prefer friendships to partnerships.  You should also be a super-friendly person that people love to spend time with—big plus if you can do a cartwheel, know how to make friendship bracelets, or love talking partnerships over Happy Hour.

Apply for this job or refer a friend

Awesome Job #8: Software Engineers!

We’re still hiring Software Engineers and offering a $12,000 bounty both to the engineers who are hired and those who referred them. To get the full scoop, see this earlier blog post.

Why You Should Work Here in One Photo:

So, if all this seems interesting, we’d love to chat with you, and if you know one someone who’d be a good fit for any of these positions, please send them our way; there’s a nifty "Send JobVite" link on each jobs page that lets you share a position via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  We’ll always keep our careers page updated with the latest positions at www.seomoz.org/about/jobs.  Oh, and we’re definitely an equal opportunity employer.

p.s. We do offer re-location packages and assistance, but we can only accept folks who can legally live/work in the US (much as we’d love to make more international hires, navigating the US visa system is, as yet, beyond our means).

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Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Last week, Rand discussed the importance of correlation data in general and how you can use it for SEO research. It’s a lot easier to get things done if you know which tasks are high priority and which are low, and correlation data can help. This week, Rand finishes off this two-part series on correlation data by discussing some specific observations we’ve made about correlations between SEO tactics and their effects on rankings. There are some very interesting conclusions, so check it out! Also let us know in the comments below if you’ve been able to draw any correlations of your own.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week the second in our two-parter on correlation data for SEO and social media analysis. I’m really excited about this one. We’re going to be talking about very specifically a few of the really interesting things that we’ve observed from correlation data.

Last week, if you recall, we talked about a lot of the basics of correlation data. I showed some simple examples why it’s useful both in aggregate and when studying some of your own stuff.

Today I’m going to be talking about some of those big aggregate average numbers collected from thousands of points of data to see what predicts better rankings over all. I want to be really clear, just to reiterate from last week. Remember that correlation is not causation.

One of my favorite examples, the one I like to use a lot is the one with dolphins. So, dolphins swim in pods, and some of the ones that swim in the front of the pods have different characteristics than ones that swim at the end of the pods, just like things in the search results have different features at the front of the search results – the top of the search results position 1, 2, 3 – than the things that are further down on the search results, 5, 10, 15, 20. Right?

So, we look at an analysis of what makes for front of the pod swimmers in both scenarios. With dolphins, it’s things like, well, they have larger dorsal fins and they’ve got stronger flippers. They also have more damage. They’ve got like scars and pieces of glass or something like that, like cuts and scrapes in their flippers.

So two of those things, the bigger dorsal fins and the stronger flippers, that probably is causal. That’s what’s causing them to be front of the pod swimmers. But the damage is that really, it has a high correlation, it’s got a good correlation with swimming at the front of the pod. Does that mean that more damage means you’ll swim at the front of the pod? If we were to bash up a dolphin’s fins who’s swimming at the end of the pod, would he suddenly move to the front?

No. Right, it’s correlation not causation. It’s features that predict what people will look like up there. So when we are looking at things that are rankings, just remember this is correlation, not causation. Some of the features here might be things like damaged flippers, not stronger fins. So keep that in mind as we’re looking at this.

That said, let’s talk about some of these cool things. Number one, one of the things that we saw last June, we did a big analysis of Google versus Bing and the different ranking factors, looking at correlation across 11,000 search results in both. We had a very, very small standard error so that we can be very sure that these correlation numbers go across probably all the search results at the time.

We looked at things like number of linking root domains and the keyword in the title, the keyword in the domain name, document length. We looked at the length of the title and mozRank and PageRank and dozens of other features. What we found was that Google and Bing are not so different. In fact, on a lot of the SEO basics, the things that you would do for Google or for Bing are the same that you would do for the other engine.

That’s really cool to learn because it means that we don’t have to develop one site that’s trying to rank well in Google and one site that’s trying to rank well in Bing. We do different things for different ones of them. No, in fact, these engines are really, really similar. Then, of course, we found out in January of this year that Google had been running these experiments because they thought Bing’s rankings looked too close to Google rankings. They were worried, and so they did this click stream, honey pot, and, of course, discovered that Bing was essentially measuring through Internet Explorer where people click after they perform search on any engine, including Google. Google got upset about this.

Nevertheless, I think that says, oh well, our analysis that these two engines are pretty similar, kind of verified by some other data including Google people thinking, hey, wait a minute these are looking really, really similar, right?

We get this big takeaway that, unlike the late ’90s or even the early 2000s when SEOs used to build different websites targeting different search engines because they wanted different things, today we can really build one. That’s a great takeaway. God, it saves us a ton of time and worry.

Number two, Facebook shares are highly correlated with Google rankings. This was one of our takeaways very, very recently, in March of this year, so just about a month ago, maybe a little less, depending when this Whiteboard Friday airs. You can see here that Facebook shares, in fact, were our single highest correlated, number one. Highest correlated metric with ranking higher, predicting that you would rank higher in Google among all the things that we measured.

We measured about 150 different factors, everything from keyword usage on the page to link metrics, to things like tweets and that kind of stuff. Those Facebook shares just seem to have an incredibly good correlation. A correlation so high, especially in, remember this 0.29 on a scale of 0 to 1 would not be that high. In a really simple system, where there’s only one or two metrics that predict, 0.29 would be probably kind of low. But in a system where there’s supposedly 200 plus unique ranking factors – probably much more than 200 plus at this point – but in a system with that much complexity to see one metric that predicts such a high correlation is extremely rare. In fact, we’ve only seen a few metrics that are up in that 0.29, 0.3 range ever in the history of looking at correlation data.

We can kind of say, huh, seems like Google must be using these Facebook shares. Not necessarily directly. They might be getting more data from Facebook, but there’s something going on there. Of course, Google themselves and Bing as well admitted in an interview with Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land that yes, we use data from Facebook and from Twitter directly in our web rankings to help with our algorithmic search. Facebook shares, you can see that correlation. You’ve got to be thinking, as an SEO, how do I get me some of those Facebook shares on my pages?

Number three, we looked at, one of the weirdest things to come out of our March 2011 data was the fact that no-follow links seemed to have a positive correlation with rankings. One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

You kind of think about it. You scratch your head, like, "What? Wait, does Google want me to have no-follow links?" When you think that way, just remember correlation, not causation. So, it’s not necessarily that Google’s saying, "Oh, well, this website doesn’t have a lot of no-follow links so let’s rank them lower." That seems kind of crazy to me. I don’t think that ‘s the case. Possible but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

So, to have only followed links is weird. No wonder . . . I don’t what it is exactly. We don’t know what it is exactly that Google’s measuring here, but I’m sure they’re looking at this, not at this but at metrics that say, huh, this website does not interact in its ecosystem. One of the things that predicts those is no-follow links, and that’s why you see that negative correlation.

Lots and lots of cool stuff, interesting data that we can take away from correlations even though we know it’s not causal. We can say to ourselves, huh, this probably means, right? This probably means, oh, I’d better be interacting in the environment, and I shouldn’t worry about getting no- follow links. This is not going to hurt me. In fact it might actually predict that I’m doing more good things on the Web.

In this case, right, it’s saying, oh, you know what, Facebook likes have a much lower correlation, because liking something on Facebook, clicking that thumbs up button is so much easier than sharing and actually posting to your wall. I know the like textually posts to your wall, but it doesn’t show up in top news. It only shows up in recent updates. So sharing, oh, that’s a good behavior to start encouraging. Maybe I should be encouraging more shares than likes on my pages. Having this, the Google and Bing data says, oh, I can build one website and do a lot of the key basics that are going to be the same for all of them.

This type of data is incredibly useful. We love doing it. We plan on doing a ton more. If you’ve got requests for things that you would like to see us do, please put them in the comments and we will be happy to try to measure them in the future.

Hope this data is interesting for you. Hope lots of you start doing more correlation analyses, rigorous data analyses of this type. I think it will be assume if we, as a community, start to make a lot of our insight and our intuition a little more scientifically based, math based. I’m very excited for it.

All right, everyone. Thanks for watching these two Whiteboard Fridays. We will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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Posted by Sam Crocker

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hey Mozzers! A quick introduction for those of you who don’t know me: my name is Sam Crocker. I work for a global media agency called OMD and am based in London. In addition to our work on (primarily) enterprise SEO clients we also occasionally find time to work on our search and social blog. I am an avid consumer of content in the SEO field and when I’m not doing client work I am constantly working on testing out new ideas, (working on) improving internal processes and reading/sharing SEO and tech stories on Twitter. I am also extremely happy to be writing another post for SEOmoz after a bit of a hiatus.

Introduction

As some of you may well recall, my old boss and good friend Tom Critchlow featured on White Board Friday back on April 14th talking about How to Make SEO Happen. There should be no doubt about the fact that this is an important factor to all SEO practitioners and consultants because at the end of the day it may be nice to give advice and hide behind issues around how "it’s the dev’s fault" or other classics that we’ve all been forced to use (let’s be honest, sometimes it is the dev’s fault). However, the obvious fact is that we are hired based upon our reputation or our price point, but we are retained based upon our ability to deliver results.

Perhaps, more importantly still, we are paid based upon our ability to report on the results we deliver. It is all fine and good if we get some outstanding links to our clients from "well respected" and "authoritative" sources, but at the end of the day, most of our clients are business people and regardless of how hard you worked to get that link from the New York Times, if it hasn’t had a positive and quantifiable impact on the site and on their bottom line, you can kiss that retainer goodbye.

However, any of you who are familiar with me and know about my tendency to complain about unnecessary tasks and poor allocation’s of resource will know that reporting, much like SEO forecasting, are not the way that I like to use my time or my clients budget. Important as they may be I don’t revel in the opportunity to create loads of pretty (and confusing) charts and graphs and then write up copious justifications for what I have done and why it did or did not work. As such, I was more than happy to volunteer when Tom asked me to write a post about saving time on reporting – as he was shocked by the number of Mozzers who seemed not to mind spending too much time on reporting.

The bottom line is this: clients have hired you both to deliver results and communicate those results with them in a manner that they can understand. Reporting is only valuable if the client reads the report (largely dependent on them understanding what they are looking at) and that it is profitable. You could measure the profits of this report in a number of ways – I’ve even known some to attribute time reporting to "new business" as it is essential to retaining clients. This is not, in my view, the right way to do things.

As with forecasting, SEO reporting kind of sucks, but when it needs to be done, it needs to be done as quickly as possible and be targeted to the relevant audience. I won’t go as far as Tom to say that we can eliminate it all together (much as I would like to) but there are clearly a number of ways in which we can cut down on the amount of time it takes.

Speaking of saving time, if you are very short on time and just want the long-term panacea to the reporting-suck click here. The rest of the post should help you improve everything else in the short term though!

[Note from Tom: I'd like to quickly clarify my position here and note the difference between reporting and reports. My original whiteboard friday uses the word reports but is really talking about strategy & recommendation reports. I believe length strategy reports are not good, but I think monthly reporting is definitely a good thing. After all, as I mention in my WBF communication is the key to solve all problems and reporting is part of that. This is totally my fault for not being clear in my whiteboard friday and I'll likely write a follow-up post soon to clarify. My comment here also explains my thinking a bit more clearly. Sam shares awesome tips here on making reporting actionable and clear but I don't want people thinking I'm against all reporting . Now, on with the post!]

Part I: Tips to Improve Understanding

Odds are, your client receives reporting for a handful of reasons. You may report on your work out of moral obligation (in which case you’re likely not confident in your work), you may report as an opportunity to make more money (in which case you are a savvy business person, but you’d be better off reallocating these funds), you may report because every client expects a report (in which case you are wasting your time because they probably don’t read it) or, in the best of cases you are reporting because your client genuinely knows why they have hired you and want to see that you are meeting the original goals discussed or can at least account for their investment if goals are not being achieved (in which case you are extraordinarily lucky).

Avoid This (via)

Step 1: What Are Your Shared Goals

Most SEO projects start with some sort of goal in mind. Sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing (I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to challenge a prospective with "yes but what do you want the website to do?"), but it is important to establish what the client’s goals for the project are and to lead them to the factors on which they should be focused.

Note: You may have to tell them what they should be looking for. These clients are not always the most fun to deal with and it is important to agree these things before starting work.
Step 2: Identify the Target Audience

If the project you are undertaking is for one person, you better be prepared to get to know this person well and learn what they expect, how to talk to them, etc.

However, there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.

*Bonus timesaver – be realistic with the client. If you can get them to admit that they will only read a report once every three months send over a "status sheet" once a month and run quarterly reports face-to-face.

Step 3: Create Reports Relevant to the Target Audience

The first month or two is always going to be a bit difficult and your client will likely have plenty to learn depending on their experience. If you are patient with the client in the first month, build a report-style based upon the recipient of the report’s knowledge base and include only the most relevant benchmarks for your campaign you will save a lot of time in the long run.

Make sure you get everyone who will see the reports in the room with you and walk them through the first reports!

Base Level Reporting (for the Board, Head of Marketing or "Monthly Update")

There are certain elements that you should probably plan to include in all reports, these "essentials" are what I like to refer to as "Base Level Reporting" (BLR). A BLR should be as easy to read and short as possible. The important thing to think about is what are the bare minimum metrics on which I should report?

What to include:

• (If applicable) Value of Sales from Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
• Organic Branded Visits vs. Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
• Total Number of keywords sending traffic (Month-on-Month)
• Progression against agreed goals
• "Status Sheet"

Executives of large businesses don’t have time to focus on every individual ranking (nor often do they care) and they certainly don’t have time to read about every single link that has been built. More importantly – as Justin very adeptly pointed out on the Raven blog – reporting on link building can make your reports suck.

Note- the "status sheet" is in my view one of the most important ways to document who is responsible for what and what the timeline is. This can be incredibly powerful if you are ever dealing with a slightly less motivated client to document the fact that you both have agreed obligations as part of the project and will ensure that you are not always taking orders from the client or grief for "overdue" tasks. It goes both ways and will keep everyone honest.

Quarterly/Yearly Reporting (May be more Regular for In-House SEO Manager, Marketing Directors, Webmasters, etc.)

The quarterly report can be essential and warrants a slightly larger time investment. However, this does not need to become overly onerous, but should include more detail about what you have done (i.e. how your time has been spent, how rankings have performed, etc.). This type of report truly is a measure of performance and effort combined. It is an opportunity to go over your biggest successes and potentially discuss strategy.

What to cover (in addition to the BLR):

• "Visibility metrics" – I would advise against showing every single move for every single term.
• Organic Traffic Brand vs. Non-Brand (Year on Year) + Commentary on seasonal trends
• Top 10 New Terms Sending Traffic
• Links Built – provide list as appendix, report on links by MozRank buckets if required
• Additional organic traffic generated (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Performance of engagement metrics or goals (e.g. PDF downloads)
• Performance of individual content (linkbait) efforts

This report will be more time consuming to pull together but still should not be overcomplicated. The vast majority of these items should be supplied as a means to build trust and provide documentation for their investment (e.g. links built) but do not warrant in-depth analysis. I would advise against supplying the full list of keywords and ranking within the report (e.g. visibility metrics) as they can be confusing and over-complicate the situation. This can always be provided as an appendix.

Example "New Links" Chart

*KEY POINT – this should not be a written report. Get together with all relevant parties and talk through some slides – it will take less time if you set an agenda and stick to it. Feel free to provide handouts, but do not write out your entire strategy and try to justify every single task. Firstly, it almost always looks more defensive in person and secondly, it’s way too easy for your competitor to use if you ever lose an account.

Project Review Reporting

The BLR should be largely neutral in tone. By all means you should celebrate huge successes as and when they occur by way of a phone call or an email. The Quarterly report allows a bit more opportunity to focus on individual successes, however it is still important to stay mostly neutral. However, at the end of the project or the end of a fiscal year is an opportunity for you to focus solely on your achievements. This is the time to sell so feel free to bust out all of your case studies and be biased here.

However, painting a rosy picture every month means that the success will begin to mean less and the failures will be more glaring (especially if you are not reporting on them regularly). Save your big "look at us" case studies for the end of the month. You can share these successes over a celebratory beer with your contact at the agency but don’t go cluttering up every monthly report talking about how great you are.

Additional Communication (ad hoc)

It is obviously important (particularly if you want to cut down on reporting time at the end of the month) that you stay in regular contact with your clients. Although some agencies rely on a service model "you get one day a week" it’s important to deliver education and regular communication. You don’t have to be on the phone every day and you need to know when to rein it in, but you should be available to discuss strategy and implementation at least once a week. If it becomes an issue, put a cap on it.

Also, there is no justification for writing an individual email to every single one of your clients whenever something changes. Your client may not have time to monitor every change in the marketplace and in the algorithms (and it’s probably best they don’t) but you should keep them up to date. If you create a blog and tell them where to find it and update it regularly this should be fine. Alternatively, you could always write a recap newsletter that everyone receives once a month.

Most importantly, and in the spirit of being open and transparent, be ready to jump on the phone when things go south. There is nothing a client hates more than to phone their SEO agency to ask them why they’ve dropped out of the rankings. If you establish the trust and catch these things when they occur you can drastically cut back on the number of "how come Beth sees us ranking number 4, but I see us ranking first!?" conversations.

Part II: Ways to Increase Profitability, Save Time… and Get Better Results for Your Clients

Alright folks, so hopefully the above has helped you gain a better understanding of the types of things we like to report on and ways to make sure you are speaking to the right person and in a language they understand.

One of the main lessons from the above section is that sometimes it is actually quicker to produce two reports than to try to combine a report designed for an in-house SEO manager with one that is designed for a Head of Marketing who has five other advertising channels to worry about. However, the other lesson that is a bit more subtle is: you do not always need a report.

I hope the following will increase the profitability of your reporting, save you loads of time and will ultimately get better results for your clients. The below are the lessons Tom hoped I would share.

Option 1: Increase your Rate

It’s a realistic option. You could always charge more for your reporting. If it is something your client cares exorbitantly about, be very specific about the costs associated with "better" reporting.

We have a dedicated team of data scientists that we could use for reporting and though I’m sure our clients would be impressed with the results, I’m also not sure that they would like the cost associated. More importantly, your client doesn’t need that expensive 50 page report.

Increasing your Rate is an option, but not one that I would ever prefer and not one that would likely lead to better results for any of our clients. The only case in which I would suggest increasing your rate would be to allocate that money to building a template, investing in a dashboard, or offsetting a software for reporting.

Option 2: Reduce Time Spent on Reporting

For me, this is clearly the preferred option. Although charging more money for reporting is nice, spending more time reporting is not something I really fancy – nor is it something I would expect anyone else on the team to spend too much of their valuable time on. Below are some of the tactics I’ve made use of to reduce reporting times.

1.) Be transparent and open with your hours

The benefits to this in a number of other respects is obvious, however it is a powerful bargaining tool. If you are open with your hourly rate and willing to share the previous month(s) breakdown of hours spent on work a strong argument can be made about how much time as follows. If your rate for your time is £100/hr (and you should know your rate) it is as simple as this:

"Last month we spent 6 hours on your report. – at a cost of £600, but more importantly at a cost of 6 hours of my time. You have hired me to consult on and implement SEO which is what I do most efficiently and most effectively. Please consider investing that money in a software to improve reporting or consider reducing the frequency of our reports"

Note, my favourite time tracking software of the moment is Harvest – a big "thank you" to all who suggested it.

2.) Automate as much as possible

This one also seems fairly obvious but it’s something that we’ve all been guilty of at one point or another. We can’t all be Excel wizards and building a template can be costly. This is where you can save a lot of time by making use of an expert to build a template for you. If the template is intuitive enough you pretty much copy and paste data/segments from the Google Analytics API and the rest is auto-generated.

As you will see from my last point, my personal view is that this should be taken to the next level.

3.) Report less frequently

Another obvious opportunity. As I’ve touched on in a number of instances above there is no reason to report on all the metrics listed in the BLR and Quarterly Report every single month. It is important to be accountable for your work but having too many charts and too much analysis month-on-month will almost certainly lead to your clients no longer reading your reports- in which case everyone loses.

This is exactly why it’s so important to have a frank conversation with your clients and remind them how valuable your time is and how much better spent (break it down to dollars and cents) your time would be creating great content and getting links than on filling out a report.

4.) Just report ROI

Ranking reports and "new traffic" are great and sometimes necessary for reporting. However, what have we really been hired for? This all comes back to the notion that our audience wants to know what we’ve been up to, but if you are getting results (the very results that you all agree you have targeted) the rest can be supplied as documentation and potentially never need discussion at all.

In the ideal situation you don’t even need all of the metrics from the BLR in a monthly report. In the case of eCommerce clients ultimately you should be reporting on number and value of sales generated from your efforts and perhaps providing an appendix or two to document your linkbuilding activities, beyond this, try to save the other stuff for a quarterly or biannual report.

At the end of the day this should be the main monthly focus of any eCommerce client whilst brand building may be something to keep an eye on and report on less regularly. This isn’t always an option but is just one example of how to reduce the intensity and frequency of your reporting.

5.) Present your report (PPT or Prezi)

Another no brainer for me really. How do you feel when you receive an email or document that is 50 pages long? I feel frustrated and overwhelmed. The solution is to set up a monthly phone call (or face-to-face where possible) and present your charts/figures to the client. Send over all of the data a day before the call and make sure they have a serious look through it before you speak on the phone.

Setting up a phone call prompts and ensures action from the clients’ perspective (it means they are much more likely to read your report) and also shows that you are proactive. I cannot tell you over the years how many clients I’ve seen won and lost as a result of poor communication – and sometimes there have been great results to back up the work!

At the end of the day odds are you don’t want to spend loads of your time writing pages and pages of analysis, so walk them through the report and let them ask questions!

Biggest Timesavers:

6.) Empower and /Educate

In the long run, absolutely nothing has saved me more time on reporting than speaking with the client at the beginning of a project and getting a feel for what they expect or want out of a report. Questions to ask:

Who else will see this report? What will you (the client) be judged upon? What other things would you ideally like to see in a report?

It’s important to revisit this after the first 3-4 months as well to make sure that they are getting all of the data they need, but also that they are not getting loads of superfluous data they don’t understand.

For me, it is all about building your template or dashboard based upon their needs, billing the client for this cost and taking the time to teach them what it is they are looking at, when "up" is a good thing and when it is a bad thing so that ultimately they can look through larger sets of data on their own time should they choose.

If you are planning to have a long relationship with this client the 5-6 hours this may take up front will save you loads of time in the long run.

7.) Dashboard, Dashboard, Dashboard

Pro

So, this is a bit of a new one for our team but we have recently been privately testing a reporting solution that we think shows a great deal of promise. These solutions tend to be immensely costly which, again, means having an earnest conversation with the client about footing the bill but as many clients as we can get set-up with this solution we will pursue this option because it makes the most of a scarce resource.

Some of these platforms create dashboards (based on ranking and analytics data) that are truly impressive and, perhaps more importantly, dynamic. These platforms allow you to create which reports are created (see above suggestions in the BLR and QR sections) but the client can then click around and get stuck into the data if they are so inclined.

Once this has been set-up it truly is a "set it and forget it" type situation. It will require more up-front training for the client but it is a must for any tech/SEO savvy client. Some of these products are still early days and have limited support/data for Europe so be very scrupulous and ask a lot of questions if you’re thinking of going this route!

*If this interests you have a look at Covario, Bright Edge (US Only), Conductor or any others you can find!

Con

The con to going this route is that at the moment the solutions that are actually worth their cost are stupidly expensive and often the cost is set-up on a "per client" basis rather than an "unlimited number for a set cost" basis. The result is, this will rule this option out for almost any SME or local-business clients.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of extraordinarily talented developers and Excel wizards out there. This is something that could easily be created on a microsite for your client(s) and would almost certainly be less expensive in the long run.

For me, dashboarding still has a long way to go, but in mind it will replace about 90% of the time I spend on reporting over the next six months… and I’m pretty happy about that.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful and would love to hear your thoughts on reporting in the comments. Any other time-saving measures you’ve taken and care to share with the class would be much appreciated or if you’re a bit shy feel free to share them with me on Twitter.

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Posted by Sam Crocker

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hey Mozzers! A quick introduction for those of you who don’t know me: my name is Sam Crocker. I work for a global media agency called OMD and am based in London. In addition to our work on (primarily) enterprise SEO clients we also occasionally find time to work on our search and social blog. I am an avid consumer of content in the SEO field and when I’m not doing client work I am constantly working on testing out new ideas, (working on) improving internal processes and reading/sharing SEO and tech stories on Twitter. I am also extremely happy to be writing another post for SEOmoz after a bit of a hiatus.

Introduction

As some of you may well recall, my old boss and good friend Tom Critchlow featured on White Board Friday back on April 14th talking about How to Make SEO Happen. There should be no doubt about the fact that this is an important factor to all SEO practitioners and consultants because at the end of the day it may be nice to give advice and hide behind issues around how "it’s the dev’s fault" or other classics that we’ve all been forced to use (let’s be honest, sometimes it is the dev’s fault). However, the obvious fact is that we are hired based upon our reputation or our price point, but we are retained based upon our ability to deliver results.

Perhaps, more importantly still, we are paid based upon our ability to report on the results we deliver. It is all fine and good if we get some outstanding links to our clients from "well respected" and "authoritative" sources, but at the end of the day, most of our clients are business people and regardless of how hard you worked to get that link from the New York Times, if it hasn’t had a positive and quantifiable impact on the site and on their bottom line, you can kiss that retainer goodbye.

However, any of you who are familiar with me and know about my tendency to complain about unnecessary tasks and poor allocation’s of resource will know that reporting, much like SEO forecasting, are not the way that I like to use my time or my clients budget. Important as they may be I don’t revel in the opportunity to create loads of pretty (and confusing) charts and graphs and then write up copious justifications for what I have done and why it did or did not work. As such, I was more than happy to volunteer when Tom asked me to write a post about saving time on reporting – as he was shocked by the number of Mozzers who seemed not to mind spending too much time on reporting.

The bottom line is this: clients have hired you both to deliver results and communicate those results with them in a manner that they can understand. Reporting is only valuable if the client reads the report (largely dependent on them understanding what they are looking at) and that it is profitable. You could measure the profits of this report in a number of ways – I’ve even known some to attribute time reporting to "new business" as it is essential to retaining clients. This is not, in my view, the right way to do things.

As with forecasting, SEO reporting kind of sucks, but when it needs to be done, it needs to be done as quickly as possible and be targeted to the relevant audience. I won’t go as far as Tom to say that we can eliminate it all together (much as I would like to) but there are clearly a number of ways in which we can cut down on the amount of time it takes.

Speaking of saving time, if you are very short on time and just want the long-term panacea to the reporting-suck click here. The rest of the post should help you improve everything else in the short term though!

[Note from Tom: I'd like to quickly clarify my position here and note the difference between reporting and reports. My original whiteboard friday uses the word reports but is really talking about strategy & recommendation reports. I believe length strategy reports are not good, but I think monthly reporting is definitely a good thing. After all, as I mention in my WBF communication is the key to solve all problems and reporting is part of that. This is totally my fault for not being clear in my whiteboard friday and I'll likely write a follow-up post soon to clarify. My comment here also explains my thinking a bit more clearly. Sam shares awesome tips here on making reporting actionable and clear but I don't want people thinking I'm against all reporting . Now, on with the post!]

Part I: Tips to Improve Understanding

Odds are, your client receives reporting for a handful of reasons. You may report on your work out of moral obligation (in which case you’re likely not confident in your work), you may report as an opportunity to make more money (in which case you are a savvy business person, but you’d be better off reallocating these funds), you may report because every client expects a report (in which case you are wasting your time because they probably don’t read it) or, in the best of cases you are reporting because your client genuinely knows why they have hired you and want to see that you are meeting the original goals discussed or can at least account for their investment if goals are not being achieved (in which case you are extraordinarily lucky).

Avoid This (via)

Step 1: What Are Your Shared Goals

Most SEO projects start with some sort of goal in mind. Sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing (I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to challenge a prospective with "yes but what do you want the website to do?"), but it is important to establish what the client’s goals for the project are and to lead them to the factors on which they should be focused.

Note: You may have to tell them what they should be looking for. These clients are not always the most fun to deal with and it is important to agree these things before starting work.
Step 2: Identify the Target Audience

If the project you are undertaking is for one person, you better be prepared to get to know this person well and learn what they expect, how to talk to them, etc.

However, there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.

*Bonus timesaver – be realistic with the client. If you can get them to admit that they will only read a report once every three months send over a "status sheet" once a month and run quarterly reports face-to-face.

Step 3: Create Reports Relevant to the Target Audience

The first month or two is always going to be a bit difficult and your client will likely have plenty to learn depending on their experience. If you are patient with the client in the first month, build a report-style based upon the recipient of the report’s knowledge base and include only the most relevant benchmarks for your campaign you will save a lot of time in the long run.

Make sure you get everyone who will see the reports in the room with you and walk them through the first reports!

Base Level Reporting (for the Board, Head of Marketing or "Monthly Update")

There are certain elements that you should probably plan to include in all reports, these "essentials" are what I like to refer to as "Base Level Reporting" (BLR). A BLR should be as easy to read and short as possible. The important thing to think about is what are the bare minimum metrics on which I should report?

What to include:

• (If applicable) Value of Sales from Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
• Organic Branded Visits vs. Organic Non-Brand Visits (Month-on-Month)
• Total Number of keywords sending traffic (Month-on-Month)
• Progression against agreed goals
• "Status Sheet"

Executives of large businesses don’t have time to focus on every individual ranking (nor often do they care) and they certainly don’t have time to read about every single link that has been built. More importantly – as Justin very adeptly pointed out on the Raven blog – reporting on link building can make your reports suck.

Note- the "status sheet" is in my view one of the most important ways to document who is responsible for what and what the timeline is. This can be incredibly powerful if you are ever dealing with a slightly less motivated client to document the fact that you both have agreed obligations as part of the project and will ensure that you are not always taking orders from the client or grief for "overdue" tasks. It goes both ways and will keep everyone honest.

Quarterly/Yearly Reporting (May be more Regular for In-House SEO Manager, Marketing Directors, Webmasters, etc.)

The quarterly report can be essential and warrants a slightly larger time investment. However, this does not need to become overly onerous, but should include more detail about what you have done (i.e. how your time has been spent, how rankings have performed, etc.). This type of report truly is a measure of performance and effort combined. It is an opportunity to go over your biggest successes and potentially discuss strategy.

What to cover (in addition to the BLR):

• "Visibility metrics" – I would advise against showing every single move for every single term.
• Organic Traffic Brand vs. Non-Brand (Year on Year) + Commentary on seasonal trends
• Top 10 New Terms Sending Traffic
• Links Built – provide list as appendix, report on links by MozRank buckets if required
• Additional organic traffic generated (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Performance of engagement metrics or goals (e.g. PDF downloads)
• Performance of individual content (linkbait) efforts

This report will be more time consuming to pull together but still should not be overcomplicated. The vast majority of these items should be supplied as a means to build trust and provide documentation for their investment (e.g. links built) but do not warrant in-depth analysis. I would advise against supplying the full list of keywords and ranking within the report (e.g. visibility metrics) as they can be confusing and over-complicate the situation. This can always be provided as an appendix.

Example "New Links" Chart

*KEY POINT – this should not be a written report. Get together with all relevant parties and talk through some slides – it will take less time if you set an agenda and stick to it. Feel free to provide handouts, but do not write out your entire strategy and try to justify every single task. Firstly, it almost always looks more defensive in person and secondly, it’s way too easy for your competitor to use if you ever lose an account.

Project Review Reporting

The BLR should be largely neutral in tone. By all means you should celebrate huge successes as and when they occur by way of a phone call or an email. The Quarterly report allows a bit more opportunity to focus on individual successes, however it is still important to stay mostly neutral. However, at the end of the project or the end of a fiscal year is an opportunity for you to focus solely on your achievements. This is the time to sell so feel free to bust out all of your case studies and be biased here.

However, painting a rosy picture every month means that the success will begin to mean less and the failures will be more glaring (especially if you are not reporting on them regularly). Save your big "look at us" case studies for the end of the month. You can share these successes over a celebratory beer with your contact at the agency but don’t go cluttering up every monthly report talking about how great you are.

Additional Communication (ad hoc)

It is obviously important (particularly if you want to cut down on reporting time at the end of the month) that you stay in regular contact with your clients. Although some agencies rely on a service model "you get one day a week" it’s important to deliver education and regular communication. You don’t have to be on the phone every day and you need to know when to rein it in, but you should be available to discuss strategy and implementation at least once a week. If it becomes an issue, put a cap on it.

Also, there is no justification for writing an individual email to every single one of your clients whenever something changes. Your client may not have time to monitor every change in the marketplace and in the algorithms (and it’s probably best they don’t) but you should keep them up to date. If you create a blog and tell them where to find it and update it regularly this should be fine. Alternatively, you could always write a recap newsletter that everyone receives once a month.

Most importantly, and in the spirit of being open and transparent, be ready to jump on the phone when things go south. There is nothing a client hates more than to phone their SEO agency to ask them why they’ve dropped out of the rankings. If you establish the trust and catch these things when they occur you can drastically cut back on the number of "how come Beth sees us ranking number 4, but I see us ranking first!?" conversations.

Part II: Ways to Increase Profitability, Save Time… and Get Better Results for Your Clients

Alright folks, so hopefully the above has helped you gain a better understanding of the types of things we like to report on and ways to make sure you are speaking to the right person and in a language they understand.

One of the main lessons from the above section is that sometimes it is actually quicker to produce two reports than to try to combine a report designed for an in-house SEO manager with one that is designed for a Head of Marketing who has five other advertising channels to worry about. However, the other lesson that is a bit more subtle is: you do not always need a report.

I hope the following will increase the profitability of your reporting, save you loads of time and will ultimately get better results for your clients. The below are the lessons Tom hoped I would share.

Option 1: Increase your Rate

It’s a realistic option. You could always charge more for your reporting. If it is something your client cares exorbitantly about, be very specific about the costs associated with "better" reporting.

We have a dedicated team of data scientists that we could use for reporting and though I’m sure our clients would be impressed with the results, I’m also not sure that they would like the cost associated. More importantly, your client doesn’t need that expensive 50 page report.

Increasing your Rate is an option, but not one that I would ever prefer and not one that would likely lead to better results for any of our clients. The only case in which I would suggest increasing your rate would be to allocate that money to building a template, investing in a dashboard, or offsetting a software for reporting.

Option 2: Reduce Time Spent on Reporting

For me, this is clearly the preferred option. Although charging more money for reporting is nice, spending more time reporting is not something I really fancy – nor is it something I would expect anyone else on the team to spend too much of their valuable time on. Below are some of the tactics I’ve made use of to reduce reporting times.

1.) Be transparent and open with your hours

The benefits to this in a number of other respects is obvious, however it is a powerful bargaining tool. If you are open with your hourly rate and willing to share the previous month(s) breakdown of hours spent on work a strong argument can be made about how much time as follows. If your rate for your time is £100/hr (and you should know your rate) it is as simple as this:

"Last month we spent 6 hours on your report. – at a cost of £600, but more importantly at a cost of 6 hours of my time. You have hired me to consult on and implement SEO which is what I do most efficiently and most effectively. Please consider investing that money in a software to improve reporting or consider reducing the frequency of our reports"

Note, my favourite time tracking software of the moment is Harvest – a big "thank you" to all who suggested it.

2.) Automate as much as possible

This one also seems fairly obvious but it’s something that we’ve all been guilty of at one point or another. We can’t all be Excel wizards and building a template can be costly. This is where you can save a lot of time by making use of an expert to build a template for you. If the template is intuitive enough you pretty much copy and paste data/segments from the Google Analytics API and the rest is auto-generated.

As you will see from my last point, my personal view is that this should be taken to the next level.

3.) Report less frequently

Another obvious opportunity. As I’ve touched on in a number of instances above there is no reason to report on all the metrics listed in the BLR and Quarterly Report every single month. It is important to be accountable for your work but having too many charts and too much analysis month-on-month will almost certainly lead to your clients no longer reading your reports- in which case everyone loses.

This is exactly why it’s so important to have a frank conversation with your clients and remind them how valuable your time is and how much better spent (break it down to dollars and cents) your time would be creating great content and getting links than on filling out a report.

4.) Just report ROI

Ranking reports and "new traffic" are great and sometimes necessary for reporting. However, what have we really been hired for? This all comes back to the notion that our audience wants to know what we’ve been up to, but if you are getting results (the very results that you all agree you have targeted) the rest can be supplied as documentation and potentially never need discussion at all.

In the ideal situation you don’t even need all of the metrics from the BLR in a monthly report. In the case of eCommerce clients ultimately you should be reporting on number and value of sales generated from your efforts and perhaps providing an appendix or two to document your linkbuilding activities, beyond this, try to save the other stuff for a quarterly or biannual report.

At the end of the day this should be the main monthly focus of any eCommerce client whilst brand building may be something to keep an eye on and report on less regularly. This isn’t always an option but is just one example of how to reduce the intensity and frequency of your reporting.

5.) Present your report (PPT or Prezi)

Another no brainer for me really. How do you feel when you receive an email or document that is 50 pages long? I feel frustrated and overwhelmed. The solution is to set up a monthly phone call (or face-to-face where possible) and present your charts/figures to the client. Send over all of the data a day before the call and make sure they have a serious look through it before you speak on the phone.

Setting up a phone call prompts and ensures action from the clients’ perspective (it means they are much more likely to read your report) and also shows that you are proactive. I cannot tell you over the years how many clients I’ve seen won and lost as a result of poor communication – and sometimes there have been great results to back up the work!

At the end of the day odds are you don’t want to spend loads of your time writing pages and pages of analysis, so walk them through the report and let them ask questions!

Biggest Timesavers:

6.) Empower and /Educate

In the long run, absolutely nothing has saved me more time on reporting than speaking with the client at the beginning of a project and getting a feel for what they expect or want out of a report. Questions to ask:

Who else will see this report? What will you (the client) be judged upon? What other things would you ideally like to see in a report?

It’s important to revisit this after the first 3-4 months as well to make sure that they are getting all of the data they need, but also that they are not getting loads of superfluous data they don’t understand.

For me, it is all about building your template or dashboard based upon their needs, billing the client for this cost and taking the time to teach them what it is they are looking at, when "up" is a good thing and when it is a bad thing so that ultimately they can look through larger sets of data on their own time should they choose.

If you are planning to have a long relationship with this client the 5-6 hours this may take up front will save you loads of time in the long run.

7.) Dashboard, Dashboard, Dashboard

Pro

So, this is a bit of a new one for our team but we have recently been privately testing a reporting solution that we think shows a great deal of promise. These solutions tend to be immensely costly which, again, means having an earnest conversation with the client about footing the bill but as many clients as we can get set-up with this solution we will pursue this option because it makes the most of a scarce resource.

Some of these platforms create dashboards (based on ranking and analytics data) that are truly impressive and, perhaps more importantly, dynamic. These platforms allow you to create which reports are created (see above suggestions in the BLR and QR sections) but the client can then click around and get stuck into the data if they are so inclined.

Once this has been set-up it truly is a "set it and forget it" type situation. It will require more up-front training for the client but it is a must for any tech/SEO savvy client. Some of these products are still early days and have limited support/data for Europe so be very scrupulous and ask a lot of questions if you’re thinking of going this route!

*If this interests you have a look at Covario, Bright Edge (US Only), Conductor or any others you can find!

Con

The con to going this route is that at the moment the solutions that are actually worth their cost are stupidly expensive and often the cost is set-up on a "per client" basis rather than an "unlimited number for a set cost" basis. The result is, this will rule this option out for almost any SME or local-business clients.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of extraordinarily talented developers and Excel wizards out there. This is something that could easily be created on a microsite for your client(s) and would almost certainly be less expensive in the long run.

For me, dashboarding still has a long way to go, but in mind it will replace about 90% of the time I spend on reporting over the next six months… and I’m pretty happy about that.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful and would love to hear your thoughts on reporting in the comments. Any other time-saving measures you’ve taken and care to share with the class would be much appreciated or if you’re a bit shy feel free to share them with me on Twitter.

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Posted by JoannaLord

Disclaimer: This post doesn’t contain any awesome SEO tips, tactics, search engine revelations, or anything of that nature. Instead this post contains information on how to make some quick cash…don’t hate me, k?!

Can you believe it’s been almost 5 months since we launched the affiliate program here at SEOmoz?! Crazy I know. I guess time flies not just when you are having fun, but also when you are making money! We now have just around 1,000 affiliates helping us spread the good word that is SEOmoz PRO, and we couldn’t be more thankful. It has been a unique learning experience on both a company wide and personal level, as we created the program, set it live, befriended affiliates, and collaborated to help educate a greater marketing circle about our PRO tools.

Now that we have almost half a year under our belt (and lots of data to help guide us) we have decided to make some pretty bold moves on the affiliate program front, and I wanted to take a little time today to tell you all about them. 

#1 Get paid $25.00 for every free trial lead
We are changing our payout from "pay per PRO signup" to "pay per free trial lead" {insert crowd gasp here}! Yup, you read that right. Previously we were paying out only if you sent us a visit that signed up for PRO right away, at a price point of $99/month. Needless to say we knew this put a huge burden on our affiliates. That price tag was a high barrier to entry for a lot of visitors who really wished they could try out our SEO management services first. 

Back in February we launched our first 30-day free trial of SEOmoz PRO. Since then we have been revamping the site in hopes of showing off the free trial to new visitors. Since we have changed the site to really sell this signup process, we think it’s only fair to pay affiliates for every free trial lead. We are super excited about this change, and optimistic it will help our affiliates across the board.

#2 Affiliates get paid faster with less hassle
We have moved to the PayQuicker online payment platform to pay out our affiliates more efficiently. The PayQuicker platforms empowers affiliates to choose the way they want to be paid out. This platform with also save SEOmoz quite a few hours validating affiliates, issuing payments, and more. All around we are excited to see this facilitate us paying out more and more commissions in a less time consuming, more ideal way for our affiliates.

* I would like to take a quick second to send a huge thank you to Mick, our PayQuicker rep. We really appreciate your great service in helping us get set up and grooving on the PayQuicker payment platform.
           
#3 Get all new affiliate assets to work with
Given that we are now paying out $25.00 per free trial signup, we made sure to update pages, update banners, and do as much as we could on our end to set you up for success. We are also currently hiring for another online marketer to help me manage this program (as well as other acquisition channels) so you can expect top-notch customer service from your affiliate management team.

Phewww, okay who is excited? I know I am. The truth is, the team here at SEOmoz has always been so thankful for all of your support. We know that even without getting paid for it, many of you are willing to send around our name and SEOmoz PRO as your SEO software of choice. Our success to date is largely due to your generous evangelizing. These changes are our way of saying "thank you." 

As more and more marketers, journalists, entrepreneurs and site owners jump on the search engine optimization fan bus, we are hoping they give SEOmoz PRO a chance to be their SEO management platform of choice. If you know someone that could benefit from our tools, feel free to signup for our affiliate program, grab your unique affiliate ID, and send it their way. If they sign up for our free trial, you get paid $25 a pop. It’s that easy friends.

Okay I’ve taken enough of your time today. If anyone has any questions about the affiliate program feel free to send them my way, you can email me at joanna@seomoz.org. You can always read more about the affiliate program details here, and if you want to skip all of that and just get started, you can sign up for the program here.
 

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Posted by randfish

The local listings in Google + Bing are becoming more competitive sector by sector and for some local businesses on the web, even tactics like competitive citation analysis and tools like Whitespark’s awesome local citation finder aren’t enough. Here, then, are five more unique and useful ways to boost the visibility of your local site on the web, earn more Places citations + reviews and potentially appear in even the most competitive local SERPs.

#1 – Discussion Search + Local Keywords

Google’s "discussion search" feature is underutilized in general, but I was surprised when browsing the recommendations of other citation-focused threads to see that it hadn’t ever been mentioned! Watch how easy it is:

The discussions not only lead you to sites where listings are often possible, but they also give a great opening to mention or promote your business (just make sure you do it authentically + transparently). It’s also a tremendous source of competitive intelligence and goes deeper than the usual reviews in terms of researching what customers and potential customers want and why they might be choosing other businesses.

#2 – Image Results for Competitors’ Business Names

Another great vertical for finding opportunities is the image search results. A variety of query types function here, but a few of the ones that I like include:

• Names of competitors’ businesses
• Cityname + business type/category
• Products/services you offer + cityname
• Both of the above w/ neighborhood names (rather than citynames)

Here’s an example of the potential value:

Note that hovering on an image shows its location, which can help you quickly determine if the source is one you’ve already got, or something new and worth investigation. Sources that show local images have a surprisingly good crossover with possible listing opportunities.

#3 – Events Calendars, Sponsorships + Donations

Google Places’ list of sources (and Bing Maps’ too) are pulling from more and more obscure pages and sites that have little to do with simply listing local businesses. It seems as though any sites that regularly mention or link to local businesses and include address/phone info and descriptions become sources for discovery, and possibly rankings, too. They may not have the trusted feed or the same direct effect, but it appears that in some competiive SERPs, they’re making the difference (NOTE: If you know lots more about Places rankings than I and have tested this, please do leave a comment).

An example:

To find these opportunities is, thankfully, not that hard. Here’s a few searches to get you started (just replace the cityname or business type with your own):

• Seattle Events Calendar
• Local Sponsorship Seattle
• Seattle Donations in Kind

From there, you can expand, get creative and likely build some serious citation power.

#4 – Social Profiles w/ a Local Focus

Given the expansion of data sources/types that Google’s using, social profiles, where you can often add information about your business including name/address/phone/site/etc. make a lot of sense. Here’s an example:

Sites like Formspring, About.me, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Hunch, OpenForum, Slideshare, etc. all offer potential, and you can likely find many more.

#5 – Cityname + Business Type + Listings/Businesses/Results

These are simple searches to perform, but again, I didn’t see them mentioned in my review of many recommendations-style posts. An example:

Using this sample query

The idea is simply to find places that you might not have discovered through competitive analysis, either because your competitors aren’t there or because Google’s not showing them in the "more about this place" or "reviews from around the web" sets. In the former case, they’re definitely worth nabbing, in the latter case, it’s a less sure ROI, but potentially worth the effort, particularly if you’ve already exhausted the other opportunities.

If you have great recommendations for earning Google Places / Maps / Local citations, please do add them in the comments! I’ll be among those handing out the thumbs up

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