jondyer.net

Posted by Slingshot SEO

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.

Howdy Mozzers! You may remember us from our last study, Mission ImposSERPble (we know, that title was way better), but we're not done yet. After we finished with Google, we started in on Bing. Releasing A Tale of Two Studies in October we shook the foundation of my very desk, by jumping up and down like giddy school girls. But it wasn't all jumping and data. Our findings provided us with a terrible truth.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

In the past few months, a number of folks have brought up this old blog post of mine on SEO pricing. The now 4-year-old content there is in dire need of refreshing, but I don't think that my personal opinion and experience are of acceptable quality to make for a compelling, useful update. Thus, I've created the following survey.

If you own, manage or work at a consultancy/agency in the SEO or adjoining+overlapping fields, your participation is tremendously appreciated.

The results from this survey will be made available to everyone in a blog post that will replace the old one in the next week. Company names and websites will be removed to help protect the privacy of those who've participated (and we're not asking for any highly sensitive items like revenues or client lists).

It's my hope that this new resource can help agencies and consultants as they compare their prices to the distributions of others as well as helping buyers of SEO and inbound marketing services get a sense for the common cost structures associated with the field.

Thanks for your contribution!

p.s. As you might imagine, changing a survey that's been published and collected results is very hard. However, if you have feedback about the survey format or suggestions to improve it, we'll definitely take those into consideration for our broad industry survey, which we'll be launching again in early 2012.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by dohertyjf

As we all read last week, SEOmoz has released the second Linkscape index update of November, and with that came updated Domain Authority and Page Authority. Many of you probably noticed a change, either as a result of the broader crawl, or as a result of active linkbuilding you have been doing on your site or client sites.

The purpose of this post is to help us orientate ourselves around what our scores mean and how those might compare to other sites that we are aware of. Remember, Domain Authority and Page Authority are strictly link based, so the metrics can be influenced by either more links from more sites, or a few links from higher quality sites. One should remember, however, that Domain Authority and Page Authority are hard to directly influence, as they are a combination of 30+ data points and work on a logarithmic scale. As Matt Peters noted in his blog post called "Introducing SEOmoz's Updated Page Authority and Domain Authority":

Page and Domain Authority are machine learning ranking models that predict the likelihood of a single page or domain to rank in search results, regardless of page content. Their input is the 41 link metrics available in our Linkscape URL Metrics API call and their output is a score on a scale from 1 to 100. They are keyword agnostic because they do not use any information about the page content.

What I want to do here is provide you a framework through which to benchmark your site against others in your niche. I'm going to take a mashup of tools that are already available so that you can go forth and figure out if you have any new competitors in your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Then you can go forward and dig deeper into those sites in your own way to decide how to beat them. Let's go!

Where Do I Start?

The first step to take is deciding which keywords you want to rank for. For the sake of a more complete view of your market's landscape and SERP competitors, I recommend finding at least 20 keywords that would be very valuable for you. I've taken fewer for the sake of brevity, so here are the keywords I am going to be using for this example:

First Tool – Tom Anthony's Competitive Analysis Tool

Some months ago Tom Anthony, one of our London SEO consultants (who grows a wicked mustache, by the way), dropped a tool that he says can help you do competitive analysis in under 60 seconds with the SEOmoz API. Take your keywords and plug them into the tool. You will receive rows of data on your competitors and will be able to see how your site lines up. For the keywords above, this is the data that we see in the sheet:

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with any of the sites listed above, other than I buy from some of them periodically.

Note – you will need to make a copy of it and get your own SEOmoz API key in order for this to work for you. Full directions on how to set up the sheet are available on the original post as well. What is important to get out of this list is the list of competitors. From the data provided as well, you can see relatively where your site stands for the search results (or by simply including your site at the bottom of the list and enlarging the sheet to include your metrics as well).

Using the above metrics, if I was doing SEO for skichalet.com, I can see that my competitors to beat directly above me are the-house and Cabelas, but really I am gunning for Backcountry.com and REI.com, and I want to know how they are winning. Let's take this a step further and see why our competitors have a higher Page Authority or Domain Authority.

PA Correlation (thanks to Dr Pete)

Now that you have your competitor's DA and PA, and know roughly where you stand compared to them, you can begin to dissect why their PA or DA is so high. Remember, your metrics can be improved by either a) more links from more sites, or b) a few links from more authoritative sites. If you want to know why your competitor is beating you, I recommend using the spreadsheet in this awesome post about Link Profiling with OpenSiteExplorer. This sheet is useful because, according to Matt Peters, Page Authority is the highest correlated metric against a page's ability to rank well (from a link perspective). This sheet will give you a graph of the average Page Authorities of the sites linking to your competitors. After you have taken the data dump from OSE and plugged it into (LINK) the sheet, you will get a graph that looks like this:

If you want to see your competitors distribution compared with yours, use this sheet, which will show you the two side-by-side like so:

Using this, you can see that while your spread may be similar, the competitor on the left has many more linking root domains (the scale is much broader). That's where you need to start.

DA Correlation

You may also find it helpful to see the overall strength of the sites from which your competitors are getting links and the spread of those Domain Authorities across their backlink profile. For this purpose, I built a spreadsheet based off the PA Tool from Dr Pete above. The steps are exactly the same, but instead of the Page Authority graph you receive the Domain Authority graph:

Right here you may come up against a shortcoming of OSE, in that with sites that have a lot of linking root domains you may not be able to get the lower DA links. So watch out for this.

You can grab the Domain Authority Sheet right here.

Final Secret Sauce – SERP Analysis Report + Excel

Finally, now that you have gotten a quick overall look at your competitors and know where you stand and what certain domain and page authorities mean for ranking in your niche, you'll want to make this actionable. The above graphs do not go specific enough to be very actionable, so now let's use the SERP Analysis Report (available in the Keyword Difficulty Tool) to put the data for your specific keywords individually (that you used at the beginning to begin finding your SERP competitors)

A while back I presented a spreadsheet that allows you to take the SEOmoz SERP Analysis Report and dump it into an Excel sheet, which then gives you a bunch of graphs showing you where your site is weak. I'd be remiss to not say that I took this idea from Jason over at BusinessHut who gave away the original spreadsheet before the SERP Analysis Tool existed. You can read the full explanation of this sheet over at my site in the post called Making SEOmoz's SERP Analysis Tool More Awesome, but essentially what you can do with this sheet is:

1. Get your SERP Analysis Report for your keyword;
2. Export the data to Excel;
3. Copy and paste the data into the spreadsheet provided;
4. Sit back and compare your site to the competitors to find where you need to improve.

Maybe you'll find that your overall number of linking root domains is way low compared to the others in your SERP:

Or maybe you'll see that your on-page targeting is off (which is great since DA and PA are only links based. Now you get a better site picture):

Get the spreadsheet here.

I hope this post has been helpful for you in finding where you compare against your competitors. Knowing approximately what the benchmarks are for your niche can really help with speedy link prospecting and qualifying your site against others.

For those of you who are interested, here are some popular sites and their Domain Authorities, just for a quick snapshot of the web at large:

Websites taken from Rob Ousbey's post and the Getstat Codex.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by moosahemani

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.

SEO is one of the industries that has been misunderstood and underestimated by lot of people and businesses in the past. Many people have considered SEO as the alternate name to SPAM, but by the time businesses when see the great potential and greater ROI more and more people and businesses are now getting involved with this new model of advertizing and marketing.

Big brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi also understand the importance of Search and Social channels, example of Coke’s “Future Flames” and Pepsi’s selection of social media campaign over Super Bowl Ads are the prime examples.

Search and Social Industry is expanding all around the world like anything and, ethical companies with proven records are getting more and more business every day and they are looking for exponential professionals to get the job done in the possible best way.

There are lots and lots of great SEOs out there but out of them, I have selected one of the most honorable, prominent and tech savvy person and requested him to take some time out of his busy schedule, so that I can interview him!

Fellows! We have with us Gianluca Fiorelli and I’ll be asking few questions strictly related to search and social industry. Obviously, I cannot cover all the questions so you fellows can join me in the comment section.

“Gianluca Fiorelli” is one of the amazing and helpful celebrities in the list of Search Experts and an active Mozzer with the Rank ‘#3’ which trust me is hard to get and maintain!

Let’s not get more in to introduction and get directly to the list of questions!

Hello sir! How are you?

I am fine, Moosa. But, please, don’t call me a celebrity, as I am not. I am just an Inbound Marketer who is very active in the Community. But a celebrity, surely I am not.

Question 1: My question starts from the latest, we have recently seen Google eating its own eco system by including its own website in the organic listings! What is your take on this? And don’t you think this will hurt the user experience as well as fewer opportunities for businesses?

Answer: If we look this issue from the Google point of view, Google is feeding and not eating its SERPs with its properties. We must never forget that Google is a business company and not a charity organization; therefore it has to have a profit from its own products. On the other hand, Google, most of the time has the ability to create products that can be useful both for the final users and the websites. Let’s take Google Places: it can be the only opportunity for small local business to be visible in the first page for very competitive keywords.

Therefore, even if it undoubtedly a problem if we think just to organic search, on the other hand the fragmentation of the SERPs because of Universal Search is a great incentive and a real opportunity to diversify the organic traffic sources of a site.

Question 2: What is Schema.org and rel=Author and do you think this is one of the important ranking factors for 2012?

Answer: Both can be considered a way Search Engines can better understand what a page is about (Schema) and how authoritative is the source of that content (Rel=”author” and the soon to be Rel=”publisher”).

Then, both are showing the next future of the Web, hence of Search, which is clearly Semantic. What before was a “movement”, and a mostly a theory, is now promoted directly by the Search Engines. That’s why, especially Schema, will be a ranking factor. My suggestion: the sooner you apply Schema the better, even though it can be a real pain, especially for enormous sites.

Question 3: As you live and work outside US, so probably you have a better idea about International SEO as you might have dealt with the similar kind of clients in your day to day life, my question here is what the best practice is, in your opinion for International SEO, Local TLD, Sub-domain or Subfolder? And why?

Answer: Personally, I would suggest to before understanding what is goal your site has to achieve. Is the business locally present with offices, plants, shops, etc. or not? Are you focusing a specific market, or are you focusing a language-based market? What is the nature of the site? Is it an eCommerce or not?

Just when everything is very clear, then you can decide what to use, if a ccTLD or a Subfolder or, if for some reason you have no other choice, a sub-domain.

Hannah Smith of Distilled wrote a great post about this topic, so I invite you to go read it.

Question 4: Most people in the industry think that Google is one of the most important search engine and they should be ranking well for targeted keywords in Google. Do you think this is a right approach? And Bing and other search engine are ignorable?

Answer: In theory, that is not the right choice. When you optimize a site, you should optimize it so to make it rank perfectly in every search engine. But to concentrate just in Google sometimes it is a quite obvious obligation. For instance, in Italy and Spain Google represent almost the 98% of the search volume, so it is quite natural the SEO and Optimization for Google is practically a synonym.

Question 5: You recently took the interview to Avinash Kaushik, one of the amazing people in the search industry. So, my question is what do you think; is Data important for business? If yes, how important it is to have an eye on data?

Answer: Data is essential for SEO and for any business. Without a perfect analysis of the data, we would be like blind people walking in a dark room. We could guess how successful or how much a failure has been a choice we took, but that would be just that: a guessing.

Thanks to web analytics, we can know for sure what is going wrong and what is going well, but also why; therefore correct our strategy on the go and/or reinforce those tactics we are using and that are giving us conversions.

Personally, I believe that every SEO should learn to know Analytics as much as he knows coding.

Question 6: Let me quickly jump over to the Social side for a while and here is a question for you; Google+ have an impact on rankings and while Google+ was new, I saw people talking about link building is dead; social is the new link building. What’s you take on this?

Answer: I think that to declare that links are dead is incorrect. Surely, social signals are having an increasing importance as ranking factor, as simple citations. But the link related metrics are still important and, even if decreasing in percentage, it still represents the biggest ranking factor.

So, to think your site can rank without link building is a supreme stupidity.

Question 7: You are in the industry from quite a long time now, and this is obvious that you might have done some mistakes a various times, would you like to share the top three mistakes that you committed in the past related to search and social and advice people to avoid them?

Answer: I did and do still a lot of mistakes. In the beginning of my career as an SEO they were due to my inexperience and because I used tricks that caused me penalizations. But, apart those kind of mistake, the ones I learned the most are not technical, but organizational ones. To not be able to manage a project because of a bad organization and so not to be able to get things done, that was my biggest error in the past.

That is why, as a freelance consultant, right now I accept just those jobs that I can successfully manage, and I have learnt to be able to say no if I know I cannot assure the quality the Client deserves.

Question 8: Relatively an easy question, but I don’t see many people asking about this, so in your opinion what are the top 3 on-page factors that least affects the rankings? Like, they have an impact but no big impact?

Answer: Nice question, because us SEOs tend to magnify every little detail transforming it in the new holy grail of search engine optimization.

Personally I consider the Headings over valuated, as the use of bold/italic or the same repetition of that targeted keywords. Not that they are not important, but to get fixated over those kinds of factors is what makes content a bad one, the classic craft-for-bots content. Instead of stressing you about how to use them for SEO, stress yourself about writing a relevant content, a rich one, and an interesting one. Write for your readers, clients and prospects. Doing so you will naturally use those elements that can also add an SEO plus, but you will have done it in a natural way.

Question 9: This time I am coming straight! What is the number one technique you used to acquire high authority links for you and your clients? (Sorry for the direct question)

Answer: In my personal case networking, my secret is becoming familiar with those ones who are behind the high authority sites. And be able to present myself as an authority in my field.

This is a tactic I use also with my clients. First: build your own authoritative voice and at the same time start creating connections with other authoritative voices. With time, these relations will start creating links naturally, or make easier to propose to your contacts a content/service/tools… what so ever to link for.

Question 10: This is not a technical question, but I usually ask this from every search celebrity! How difficult it is to make people i.e. parents, friends who are not in this field and others to understand what SEO is? And what usually is their first reaction?

Answer: It is not an easy task… and usually I tend to explain it just if they ask me. I say to people who are not in the search industry that my job is to help users to find my clients sites on the web when they need them. The answer I give to my small kids: I try to make the web a better place.

Thank you sir, for your time and answering all questions. I am sure this is going to help people understand SEO better!

Moosa Hemani is an SEO Analyst and a continuous SEO learner. I don’t have any personal blog but I often writer on different search blogs as a Guest Writer. One can find more about me on my profile or follow me on twitter @mmhemani.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by caseyhen

This week we are joined by Carlos del Rio from Agillian, who is based here in Seattle, WA. Carlos will discusses a method that will help you make great content by following 3 easy steps. After watching the video dive into the comments and discuss what your thoughts are on using CRO to make great content.

P.S. It looks like we might have also been joined by a fly, so please excuse him when he flies across the screen a few times….

Video Transcription

Hey Mozzers. I'm Carlos del Rio. I own a consultancy called Agillian, and I am the author of "User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want" and a "Strategic Framework for Emerging Media," which is kind of a mouthful. Even I have trouble saying it.

I am here today to tell you how to use CRO to make great content, and when I say to make great content, I mean for any portion of your marketing campaign. So, you need to make sure that you meet the most basic portion of conversion optimization. I mean the three things that are the most important for all conversion rates are a clear action, a clear purpose, and a clear value. That's what every landing page is trying to do. That's what every pay-per-click ad is trying to do. Tell a person what you want them to do, tell them what it is about, and communicate what the value they're going to get out of the interaction. So, "Buy tires cheap," or "Buy tires, free delivery." Something where they know what it is that they are coming for and that they get something at the other end. For example, if you are writing a piece of content for your blog, you want to be able to answer, "Is it clear what the purpose of this blog is? Is it clear what the topic is? Is it clear that there is a value for this person to share it with their friends?" Essentially if you are doing blog and content marketing, it is really for the links. We know that's what it's about. Same thing with if you're making LOLcats. Same thing if you're sending out an email to solicit a link buy.

So, in all of your strategies you want to know what is this particular campaign doing. Is it helping our users understand what they can do with us? Is it helping them understand who we are, or is it helping them understand what the value is? Each one of the individual pieces, like each piece of link bait or each email or each tool that you build is supposed to answer all three of these very clearly. You want to know exactly how to interact with it. You want to know what it is going to do. You want to know why is it of value to you.

So, if you take the example of, like, LOLcats, we've all seen these. The difference between the millions of LOLcats that nobody cares about and the LOLcats that end up being in your Facebook stream every 15 minutes are that the ones that get shared answer the clear action, which is share me; what is the purpose, this is a LOLcat; and what is the value, this is the funniest LOLcat that I've seen all day. This is the LOLcat that crosses over with my community. If I was to make a cat playing on a computer that said, "I'm up in your Internet messing with your title tags," you're going to find that funny because you are in SEO, but almost everybody else is going to be like, uh, lame.

If you were, say, This or That, Rebecca Kelley did a thing recently that was, "Does Justin Beiber look like Velma from Scooby Doo?" This enrages both people who like Justin Beiber and people who like Velma. So, what she is doing is creating a place where you interact with this piece of content, and she has two groups of people that want to interact with this type of content. They get to show what they think, and they get a value out of having you know what they think. When they pass this on to their friends who come in and do those three things to derive value for themselves, you get traffic, which you are monetizing.

It is the same thing with the LOLcats. Cheezburger makes money off of people coming to visit. They get people coming to visit by thinking about a clear action, a clear purpose, and a clear value from the perspective of their users.

In the same way, you are here in the Moz community, and they have two kinds of users. They have basic users and they have premium users. Well, they keep building new tools, and they have to think about: What is the action of this tool, what is the purpose of this tool, and is it going to be valuable to the community? When they write out to every one of the basic members and say, "We have this great new tool," they have to really go through this process twice. They have the process of does the tool meet these standards? Is it clear what I can do with the tool? Is it clear what the tool is going to deal with? Is it clear that I can get some value out of it? They also have to write an email that it's very clear what they want you to do, which is switch from being a basic to being a premium user. It has to be very clear what this tool is going to do for you, and it has to be very clear that you're going to derive value out of it. Otherwise, they aren't going to get a good conversion rate.

So, hopefully, these examples will give you something that's actionable for your business and let you take conversion rate optimization into all of the things that you're doing for your marketing.

I'm Carlos del Rio. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Do you like this post? Yes No