My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KitsapKing

Finding effective ways of organizing your analytics dashboards is quite a bit easier if you can get a sense for what has worked for others. To that end, in today's Whiteboard Friday the founder of Sixth Man Marketing, Ed Reese, shares his five favorite approaches.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hi, I'm Ed Reese with Sixth Man Marketing and Local U. Welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things in terms of Google Analytics -- the dashboard.

So think of your dashboard like the dashboard on your car -- what's important to you and what's important to your client. I have the new Tesla dashboard, you might recognize it. So, for my Tesla dashboard, I want navigation, tunes, calendar, everything and a bag of chips. You notice my hands are not on the wheel because it drives itself now. Awesome.

So, what's important? I have the top five dashboards that I like to share with my clients and create for them. These are the executive dashboards -- one for the CMO on the marketing side, new markets, content, and a tech check. You can actually create dashboards and make sure that everything is working.

These on the side are some of the few that I think people don't take a look at as often. It's my opinion that we have a lot of very generic dashboards, so I like to really dive in and see what we can learn so that your client can really start using them for their advantage.

#1 - Executives

Let's start with the executive dashboard. There is a lot of debate on whether or not to go from left to right or right to left. So in terms of outcome, behavior, and acquisition, Google Analytics gives you those areas. They don't mark them as these three categories, but I follow Avinash's language and the language that GA uses.

When you're talking to executives or CFOs, it's my personal opinion that executives always want to see the money first. So focus on financials, conversion rates, number of sales, number of leads. They don't want to go through the marketing first and then get to the numbers. Just give them what they want. On a dashboard, they're seeing that first.

So let's start with the result and then go back to behavior. Now, this is where a lot of people have very generic metrics -- pages viewed, generic bounce rate, very broad metrics. To really dive in, I like focusing and using the filters to go to specific areas on the site. So if it's a destination like a hotel, "Oh, are they viewing the pages that helped them get there? Are they looking at the directional information? Are they viewing discounts and sorts of packages?" Think of the behavior on those types of pages you want to measure, and then reverse engineer. That way you can tell they executive, "Hey, this hotel reservation viewed these packages, which came from these sources, campaigns, search, and social." Remember, you're building it so that they can view it for themselves and really take advantage and see, "Oh, that's working, and this campaign from this source had these behaviors that generated a reservation," in that example.

#2 - CMO

Now, let's look at it from a marketing perspective. You want to help make them look awesome. So I like to reverse it and start with the marketing side in terms of acquisition, then go to behavior on the website, and then end up with the same financials -- money, conversion rate percentages, number of leads, number of hotel rooms booked, etc. I like to get really, really focused.

So when you're building a dashboard for a CMO or anyone on the marketing side, talk to them about what metrics matter. What do they really want to learn? A lot of times you need to know their exact territory and really fine tune it in to figure out exactly what they want to find out.

Again, I'm a huge fan of filters. What behavior matters? So for example, one of our clients is Beardbrand. They sell beard oil and they support the Urban Beardsman. We know that their main markets are New York, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest. So we could have a very broad regional focus for acquisition, but we don't. We know where their audience lives, we know what type of behavior they like, and ultimately what type of behavior on the website influences purchases.

So really think from a marketing perspective, "How do we want to measure the acquisition to the behavior on the website and ultimately what does that create?"

These are pretty common, so I think most people are using a marketing and executive dashboard. Here are some that have really made a huge difference for clients of ours.

#3 - New markets

Love new market dashboards. Let's say, for example, you're a hotel chain and you normally have people visiting your site from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Well, what happened in our case, we had that excluded, and we were looking at states broader -- Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, Texas. Not normally people who would come to this particular hotel.

Well, we discovered in the dashboard -- and it was actually the client that discovered it -- that we suddenly had a 6000% increase in Hawaii. They called me and said, "Are we marketing to Hawaii?" I said no. They said, "Well, according to the dashboard, we've had 193 room nights in the past 2 months." Like, "Wow, 193 room nights from Hawaii, what happened?" So we started reverse engineering that, and we found out that Allegiant Airlines suddenly had a direct flight from Honolulu to Spokane, and the hotel in this case was two miles from the hotel. They could then do paid search campaigns in Hawaii. They can try to connect with Allegiant to co-op some advertising and some messaging. Boom. Would never have been discovered without that dashboard.

#4 - Top content

Another example, top content. Again, going back to Beardbrand, they have a site called the Urban Beardsman, and they publish a lot of content for help and videos and tutorials. To measure that content, it's really important, because they're putting a lot of work into educating their market and new people who are growing beards and using their product. They want to know, "Is it worth it?" They're hiring photographers, they're hiring writers, and we're able to see if people are reading the content they're providing, and then ultimately, we're focusing much more on their content on the behavior side and then figuring out what that outcome is.

A lot of people have content or viewing of the blog as part of an overall dashboard, let's say for your CMO. I'm a big fan of, in addition to having that ,also having a very specific content dashboard so you can see your top blogs. Whatever content you provide, I want you to always know what that's driving on your website.

#5 - Tech check

One of the things that I've never heard anyone talk about before, that we use all the time, is a tech check. So we want to see a setup so we can view mobile, tablet, desktop, browsers. What are your gaps? Where is your site possibly not being used to its fullest potential? Are there any issues with shopping carts? Where do they fall off on your website? Set up any possible tech that you can track. I'm a big fan of looking both on the mobile, tablet, any type of desktop, browsers especially to see where they're falling off. For a lot of our clients, we'll have two, three, or four different tech dashboards. Get them to the technical person on the client side so they can immediately see if there's an issue. If they've updated the website, but maybe they forgot to update a certain portion of it, they've got a technical issue, and the dashboard can help detect that.

So these are just a few. I'm a huge fan of dashboards. They're very powerful. But the big key is to make sure that not only you, but your client understands how to use them, and they use them on a regular basis.

I hope that's been very helpful. Again, I'm Ed Reese, and these are my top five dashboards. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Build a Company and a Content Strategy Based on Values: Inside Rand Fishkin’s Journey With Moz

Do you have a favorite author or blog whose content is always so amazingly useful that it earns an automatic read every single time something new comes out?

Rand Fishkin is one of those authors for me. And Moz is one of those blogs.

Rand’s slide deck on content marketing is one of our favorite content resources here at Buffer. His article about individual contributors has been hugely impactful for the way I view my role at Buffer. Moz’s blog posts on measuring social media success ...

The post How to Build a Company and a Content Strategy Based on Values: Inside Rand Fishkin’s Journey With Moz appeared first on Social.

15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs

Posted by randfish

It's been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO—the structure of domain names and URLs—and I think it's high time to revisit. But, an important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an "it would be great if we could," not an "if we don't do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well." Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.

#1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

It's hard to argue this given the preponderance of evidence and examples of folks moving their content from a subdomain to subfolder and seeing improved results (or, worse, moving content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the engines use to judge whether content should inherit the ranking ability of its parent domain seem to have trouble consistently passing to subdomains.

That's not to say it can't work, and if a subdomain is the only way you can set up a blog or produce the content you need, then it's better than nothing. But your blog is far more likely to perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of your site's content perform well if it's all together on one sub and root domain.

For more details and plenty of examples (in the post and comments), check out this recent Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

#2: The more readable by human beings, the better

It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.

Readability can be a subjective topic, but hopefully this illustration can help:

The requirement isn't that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean and perfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and, hopefully, compelling to those seeking its content.

#3: Keywords in URLs: still a good thing

It's still the case that using the keywords you're targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is true for several reasons.

First, keywords in the URL help indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they hover on a link to click that they're getting what they want and expect, as shown in the Metafilter example below (note how hovering on the link shows the URL in the bottom-left-hand corner):

Second, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, and when there's no anchor text used in a link, the URL itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for rankings), e.g.:

Third, and finally, keywords in the URL show up in search results, and research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click.

#4: Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize 'em!

If you have two URLs that serve very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there's no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if you want to maintain slightly different versions for some visitors, e.g. a printer-friendly page).

Duplicate content isn't really a search engine penalty (at least, not until/unless you start duplicating at very large scales), but it can cause a split of ranking signals that can harm your search traffic potential. If Page A has some quantity of ranking ability and its duplicate, Page A2, has a similar quantity of ranking ability, by canonicalizing them, Page A can have a better chance to rank and earn visits.

#5: Exclude dynamic parameters when possible

This kind of junk is ugly:

If you can avoid using URL parameters, do so. If you have more than two URL parameters, it's probably worth making a serious investment to rewrite them as static, readable, text.

Most CMS platforms have become savvy to this over the years, but a few laggards remain. Check out tools like mod_rewrite and ISAPI rewrite (for IIS) to help with this process.

Some dynamic parameters are used for tracking clicks (like those inserted by popular social sharing apps such as Buffer). In general, these don't cause a huge problem, but they may make for somewhat unsightly and awkwardly long URLs. Use your own judgement around whether the tracking parameter benefits outweigh the negatives.

Research from a 2014 RadiumOne study suggests that social sharing (which has positive, but usually indirect impacts on SEO) with shorter URLs that clearly communicate the site and content perform better than non-branded shorteners or long, unclear URL strings.

#6: Shorter > longer

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.

This isn't a direct problem with Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed, and while these might all add up to only a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).

#7: Match URLs to titles most of the time (when it makes sense)

This doesn't mean that if the title of your piece is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of them cost me my entire Lego collection)" that your URL has to be a perfect match. Something like

randswhisky.com/my-favorite-7-islay-whiskies

would be just fine. So, too would

randswhisky.com/blog/favorite-7-bottles-islay-whisky

or variations on these. The matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver on that expectation with the headline/title.

It's for this same reason that we strongly recommend keeping the page title (which engines display prominently on their search results pages) and the visible headline on the page a close match as well—one creates an expectation, and the other delivers on it.

For example, above, you'll see two URLs I shared on Facebook. In the first, it's wholly unclear what you might find on the page. It's in the news section the BBC's website, but beyond that, there's no way to know what you might find there. In the second, however, Pacific Standard magazine has made it easy for the URL to give insight into the article's content, and then the title of the piece delivers:

We should aim for a similar level of clarity in our own URLs and titles.

#8: Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

You can see in the URL of this particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in "for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.

#9: Remove/control for unwieldy punctuation characters

There are a number of text characters that become nasty bits of hard-to-read cruft when inserted in the URL string. In general, it's a best practice to remove or control for these. There's a great list of safe vs. unsafe characters available on Perishable Press:

It's not merely the poor readability these characters might cause, but also the potential for breaking certain browsers, crawlers, or proper parsing.

#10: Limit redirection hops to two or fewer

If a user or crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C, but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops, you could get into trouble.

Generally speaking, search engines will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they've recommended against the practice in the past, and for less "important" URLs (in their eyes), they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.

The bigger trouble is browsers and users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers in particular can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings. Keep redirects to a minimum and you'll set yourself up for less problems.

#11: Fewer folders is generally better

Take a URL like this:

randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin/15yr/distillers-edition/pedro-ximenez-cask/750ml

And consider, instead, structuring it like this:

randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin-distillers-edition-750ml

It's not that the slashes (aka folders) will necessarily harm performance, but it can create a perception of site depth for both engines and users, as well as making edits to the URL string considerably more complex (at least, in most CMS' protocols).

There's no hard and fast requirement—this is another one where it's important to use your best judgement.

#12: Avoid hashes in URLs unless absolutely essential

The hash (or URL fragment identifier) has historically been a way to send a visitor to a specific location on a given page (e.g. Moz's blog posts use the hash to navigate you to a particular comment, like this one from my wife). Using URL hashes for something other than this, such as showing unique content than what's available on the page or wholly separate pages is generally a bad idea.

There are exceptions, like those Google enables for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.

#13: Be wary of case sensitivity

A couple years back, John Sherrod of Search Discovery wrote an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

In an ideal world, you want URLs that use the wrong case to automatically redirect/canonicalize to the right one. There are htaccess rewrite protocols to assist ( like this one)—highly recommended if you're facing this problem.

#14: Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators

Notably missing (for the first time in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat underscores and hyphens similarly.

Spaces can work, but they render awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability of your pages. Try to avoid them if possible (it's usually pretty easy in a modern CMS).

#15: Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy

Check out the search result listing below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL. That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against wanting to click.

Repetition like this doesn't help your search rankings—Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don't hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs.

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Best of luck with all your URL creation and optimization efforts! Please feel free to leave any additions, ideas, or observations in the comments below.

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7 Popular Goal-Setting Strategies That Will Help You Achieve Great Things on Social Media

“How cool would it be to have 1 million Facebook fans?”

This is how I tend to go about setting social media marketing goals. I pull an aspirational number out of the air and go for it.

Would it be cool to have 1 million Facebook fans? Absolutely!

Is this the right way to set goals?

Coming up with goals for our Facebook page and other social media channels has often been a bit haphazard for me. Imagine having a system of goal-setting to ...

The post 7 Popular Goal-Setting Strategies That Will Help You Achieve Great Things on Social Media appeared first on Social.

Building Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Posted by MorganChessman

Building marketing strategies for small businesses is one of my favorite things. In my first marketing role, I worked in the marketing department for a small company before moving on to Distilled, where I've been lucky enough to continue working with small businesses that have enormous potential. Despite the various industries, locales, and personalities, one of the prevailing similarities between them is that small businesses often don't position their company or use the web as effectively as they could. While this is partially due to the time and resource crunch small business owners feel, it's also because, beyond building a website, they don't know where to begin.

It doesn't have to be so overwhelming though. I'll walk you through the preliminary steps I take my small business clients through.

1. Define the brand

A number of the small companies I've worked with didn't have a brand. That's not to say that they didn't have a name, a website, and a logo. It's that they didn't stand for something.

For example, what comes to mind when you think of Apple? Innovative and well-designed products? Exactly. So many small businesses are built from an individual wanting to work for themselves or because they see an opportunity to improve on an existing product. They figure, build the website and they will come.

But it's not that way. You need a brand. As we've seen throughout history, the companies that have staying power have a brand, something that differentiates them from their competitors, something that people connect with and, coupled with good products and customer service, something that keeps people coming back.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Well that's all fine and good, Morgan, but I don't know how you go about building a brand." That's fine. There are people who make careers out of building brands you could contact, market research surveys you could pass out, and focus groups you could run, but, realistically, small businesses don't usually have the financial resources to invest in these strategies. This doesn't mean you can't have a brand though; you'll just have to run a lightweight brand building exercise which goes something like this:

1. Think about your origin story

Ask yourself: "Why did I start this company? What am I proud of?" Oftentimes what drove you to start your own company and how it's reflected in your business practices is what makes you unique.

2. Talk to your customers

Ask your customers: "What do you like about our company? What don't you like? Why did you choose us over our competitors? What are your pain points?" When you listen to customers talk about your business, you'll have a better understanding of the aspects of your company that resonate with people and what should be reflected in your brand messaging.

3. Do competitor research

Take a look at your competitors' websites. Ask yourself: "What are they doing well? What aren't they doing well? How do they talk about their company?" You're looking for holes in your industry, a way to make your company different than your competitors.

4. Compile all information and develop a brand

Once you've researched your origin story, competitors' tactics, and customer sentiment, it's time to start building a brand. What from your origin story and customer conversations stood out and got you excited? How can you talk about those things in a way your competitors haven't? Once you have that figured out, you have a brand position.

Let's make this final step more concrete with an example. I worked with a tech consulting and recruiting firm that had a history of success in the immediate area, but was looking to attract people from the greater region as well as gain new client companies. In order to stand out from the other technical consulting firms and get people excited about working for them, we knew that they had to have more than a website that stated they were a consulting firm. They were going to have to develop a brand. We ran through the steps above with the following takeaways:

• Origin Story: The owner started the company because he liked working with really competent developers, and realized that the best way to ensure he did so was to start his own company.
• Customer Research: Customers preferred going with this particular company because the quality of work was always so high. People liked working for this company because there was always a lot of challenging work.
• Competitor Research: The rest of the companies weren't run by people with technical backgrounds. This company was, though, and as a result was able to do more rigorous testing and find the best people.

The main theme here was that the company only hired the best (origin story), because they had the technical chops to know who the best were (competitor research), which meant that this company's employees did exceptional work (customer research), which in turn made sure they landed challenging contracts (customer research).

Due to this insight, we positioned the company as the elite option, heavily citing the fact that only 4% of people could pass the technical interview—to work for this company was to work with the best and that to hire them was to have the best working for you. This resonated well with both target audiences, and they saw a heightened brand awareness with both potential recruits and clients.

2. Review the website content and language

Although most small businesses have websites, it's necessary for owners to take a step back and review the website through the eyes of a consumer. Too often people assume that website visitors have a certain level of company knowledge, or that they speak the same jargon. That's not always the case. For example, the aforementioned tech company originally wrote so vaguely about their services using insider jargon that neither target audience understood the company's mission. Once the text was rewritten with specific consumers in mind, people started coming to the owner and saying "Now that you've redone your website, I finally understand what your company is about." In order to not find yourself in that position, ask yourself:

1. Does the website have the information my target audience needs?

A company website is useless if it doesn't have the information your target audience needs. On the most basic level, this should include what your company does, in-depth product or service information, prices associated with your services, and contact information. It's actually astonishing how often companies, both large and small, don't do this.

Just the other day, I was looking at marketing software and even now I couldn't tell you what their product does. If they had taken a step back and assumed that people didn't know what their company did, their website would be more effective and they'd likely increase leads.

2. Am I using the language my target audience would use?

Oftentimes, we get so wrapped up in our industry that we forget that others, especially customers, don't necessarily use the same terms as us. By using terms that are different from those of your target audience, your organic traffic will suffer and your website won't be nearly as effective. When you talk to your customers during the branding exercise, see what terms they use. Use keyword research to validate your findings and use this language on the website.

Remember that your brand position is at the heart of this language and content. You want to talk about your core competencies in a language that's accessible, but through the lens of what makes you different. The tech consulting firm I worked with, for example, rewrote their text so that there were pages dedicated to both their recruiting and consulting services. Both of those pages used the terms that those specific audiences would use, spoke in depth as to what these services were, and did so by concentrating on the 'elite' factor in a way that appealed to both sides. The content and language need to be there for your audience, but use the defining aspects of your brand to spice it up.

3. Develop overarching marketing strategy

So at this point, you have a website that reflects your brand and differentiates you from your competitors. I'm going to assume that your website is already optimized for search engines and that you have a good user experience. You're done, right? Yes and no. You could be done if you're not relying on online to be a huge source of business. If you are counting on online, it's time to start working on your overarching online marketing strategy.

This is the part that tends to feel the most overwhelming for small businesses. With so many different avenues out there, it can be stressful knowing what to pursue. My first piece of advice? Don't pursue them all. It's okay not to. You're a small business owner with limited resources, so only go with the ones that will have the biggest ROI.

So how do you know which ones are worth your time?

Content strategy

In the online marketing world, content is king. Google wants you to deliver value to your site visitors and unique content is one way of going about this. Building a content strategy isn't easy though. You don't want to write the same thing that everyone else in your industry is writing about. There's no unique value in that, and because your site likely isn't strong from a domain authority perspective (yet!), you'll usually find it difficult to rank against the big sites who are writing the same content.

Instead, you'll need to take stances on issues or solve your clients' unique problems, giving them a reason to keep coming back to your site. If you can do this, great, but don't just write content for the sake of it. If you're a small ice cream shop for example, it's going to be difficult to write content that's on-brand and relevant to your audience. In this case, focus on other marketing strategies.

Paid

Doing paid, whether search, display, or social, can be really effective if done correctly. The downside? It can take a lot of time and money to monitor and improve on your campaigns. Highly competitive terms can have extremely high cost-per-click (CPC) rates, and the cost-per-action (CPA) is usually even higher. For example, terms in the insurance industry can have CPCs of $50 in a search environment.

In order to be as cost efficient with this strategy, you'll have to constantly monitor your campaigns and see what is working well and what isn't. Even though it can eat through your time and money, it's a good option for people who aren't showing up in SERPs or driving traffic from other avenues.

Social

Social can be a really effective way of engaging consumers and building brand loyalty, but I normally only suggest starting a social strategy once a company has built out their brand and website. You're going to need unique content, images, or deals in order to have a social marketing strategy. It's often easier to start in other areas and build a catalog of resources before you launch into social.

Once you have content to share, decide which social platforms best fit your company's mission. For example, LinkedIn and Twitter are usually better for B2B while Facebook is better for B2C. Just like you don't have to chase every marketing strategy, you don't have to have a social campaign for every platform. Concentrate on the one or two that will best reach your audience. Make sure the content you're sharing will do well on that platform. For Facebook and Pinterest, you'll need image based content while Twitter and LinkedIn will be best for article-based content or quick updates.

Email

Email marketing isn't an effective method of gaining new customers, but is a great avenue for businesses trying to increase retention or brand loyalty. If this is your goal, make sure your emails contain value. For example, you open email from your doctor's office reminding you about an appointment or from a local ice cream shop that offers discounts because these emails contain value. When people open these emails, their lives get easier or they're given something that gives them tangible value. It's vital that your email marketing communications do the same whether it be content or deals.

Local

If you're a small business using the Internet to drive traffic to your store, I absolutely believe you should be invested in local. While there's the initial time investment to get it set up, there's a minimal time investment needed to keep it up-to-date.

Promotions

At Distilled, we have a whole team responsible for reaching out to bloggers and publications in order to get our clients and their content featured in the right places. Their work not only helps build brand awareness but, when our clients' work is covered and linked to, also has the added SEO benefit of natural links and, in turn, a stronger site.

Most small businesses don't have the resources for this kind of promotion, but if you want your brand and organic traffic to grow, it's vital that you partake in a variation of this. Instead of scoping out bloggers and target publications like the New York Times though, start small. Build relationships with other businesses in your area or be active in industry specific forums. Building those relationships and positioning yourself as a thought leader will help your business as well as your own name grow which can then result in brand awareness and links. For small businesses, it's important to network even in a way that isn't necessarily 'online first.'

There's a lot that goes into marketing for any size company, but it can be particularly overwhelming for small businesses which have limited time and resources. It'll be a lot of work, no doubt about it, but will feel a little more manageable, even for one-person teams, if you take it one step at a time.

Start by figuring out what makes your company different and communicating that. In my experience, this alone will put you ahead of many of your small business counterparts. Then it's time to think about your customers' needs and how you'll address them. Having content that's valuable to your customers and their problems, content they'll actually want to consume, is a huge part of the battle.

Now that you've got the content, decide which marketing strategies will be most likely to help you reach your target audience. Just remember that you don't have to overextend yourself and use every possible marketing channel to do this. So: Brand. Language. Content. Share. You've got this.

Tell me about your small business branding adventures in the comments below!

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Master The LinkedIn Company Page: 12 New Data-Backed Tips To Max Out Yours

When it comes to social media, lately I’ve been surprising myself by how often I’m turning to LinkedIn. With the addition of LinkedIn Publishing, there seems to be more awesome content on the business social network than ever before.

And I don’t think I’m alone. LinkedIn has more than 347 million users across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

We’ve written before about some of the best practices to make the most of your LinkedIn marketing, but I’ve recently discovered even more vital facts and stats ...

The post Master The LinkedIn Company Page: 12 New Data-Backed Tips To Max Out Yours appeared first on Social.

Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Investing in advertising might feel like we're simply buying people's time and attention, but there's far more to it than that. Done right, advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about advertising investments and how paying for advertising can actually yield positive results for SEO, for links, for social shares, for content investments, for email marketing, for all of these organic channels.

I know this seems weird, but it actually can work. Google has some guidelines around this. They say, "Look, if you're over here and you're saying like, "Hey, man, I'll give you 500 bucks for a link on your site, a live, followed back link directly,' that is not okay." Even if the person on the other side says, "Sure, I'll take your 500 bucks and add that link."

Google doesn't want to count those links. They treat those as web spam. They're going to find ways to avoid that type of manipulation. They can, in fact, penalize you for it, and lots of times they do.

However, Google is totally fine with and they even support, endorse, and run systems, a whole advertising network around this to say, "Hey, I'd love to buy some ad spots from this website." Sure. My sidebar ads are no followed, and they cost $150 a month. This is totally 100% okay by Google.

In fact, this is okay by any form of things. So social networks are fine with this. Email things are fine with this. The FCC, the Federal Communications folks here in the U.S. are totally fine with this. The EU is fine with this. It's totally okay. As long as it's disclosed that this is an advertising relationship on the website, you're in the clear. In fact, very often it's the case that there's a correlation, a strong correlation between advertising and organic types of relationships and returns.

Tactics that are worth trying (depending on your business goals)

Blogs, forums, niche websites, or news/media sites

So a lot of times you'll see an ad buy is the first step to a deeper relationship between a website or a blogger or a media source and an advertiser, and that will lead to some forms of content sharing. Maybe some of the content will be promoted on the advertiser's site or the other way around. That might lead to some business development of some kind. That could lead to guest contributions of content or guest posting of some kind. It can lead to social sharing where the advertiser shares something that they've sponsored on the media sites or the other way around. It can lead to email inclusions and email sponsorships.

It can even lead directly to links and brand mentions. People will say, "Hey, I want to thank my advertiser," or "Hey, one of my advertisers came out with this cool product that, in fact, they didn't pay me to endorse, but I am organically endorsing it because I really like it. By the way, they happen to be top of mind for me because they're an advertiser." Sometimes you don't even realize those relationships are happening, but they do.

This is why often there is a very strong connection between advertising dollars and those kinds of more organic forms of relationships. While Google certainly is smart enough to realize that those relationships exist, they don't say, "No, it's not okay that you bought an advertising format from this person, and that eventually led to a more organic kind of relationship and now they're endorsing you without a followed link, without payment in an editorial kind of way." That's actually totally fine.

This is why advertising can be so powerful, not just for search and for links, although that's certainly a big one. So I've actually got a few suggestions, some places where we've seen over the course of time, and I've seen certainly in some of the companies that I occasionally help out informally, where they've benefited from these types of things. On the other side, I've seen from bloggers, journalists, and media sites and niche websites and forums, how they have also benefited from these forms of advertising.

Some of these tactics may be worth trying. It's really going to depend on your business goals and who your audience is. But the first and most obvious one is really what's reflected over here, and that is reaching out to these bloggers, forums, niche websites, news and media sites. They often offer direct forms of sponsorship or display or text ads on their site. They are going to be no followed, or they're going to use some sort of JavaScript redirect.

What you want to do, though, is you want to go direct. So I want to buy from NicheBloggerABC.com, not from Google Ads or Federated Media, which happens to power advertising on their site. So you want those direct advertising inquiries, where you have the relationship personally, and that's what you're building. Don't use that generic ad provider.

By the way, if you're going direct, make sure those links are no followed. You don't want to buy followed links, or you'll get into the problem that we had over here. You're trying to build a relationship, not a followed link. Hopefully, all those other positive organic things, those will come later if you buy these no followed links, if you start that relationship with advertising.

Conference and event sponsorships

Especially, in particular, more creative and more audience relevant forms of advertising can create much greater engagement. So if you buy a booth at a conference, well that can help. Maybe you've got a trade show booth and people come by and that kind of thing, and that does work for some folks, especially if they're looking for leads.

We've done a few things with conference and events, even here at Moz, where we've done forms of sponsorship that are more creative. We give out swag. We share some content. We do something that's very special for the audience, that happens to be relevant to their interests, usually along the lines of SEO stuff. That works much better. That often will get pickup and coverage by press and media, by bloggers who attend events, by people on social media who go to these events.

Weirdly, almost ironically, the less promotional you are in your advertising, which seems counterintuitive, the better this works for all of the organic kinds of things you're seeking. It might not work quite as well for that direct lead capture or sales capture. But by saying, "Hey, we're going to provide free Wi-Fi to the entire conference, and all you have to do is enter a repetition of our brand name three times as the password." Well, guess what? That builds a lot of brand equity, and it is much more appreciated than, "Hey, we're going to need you to take this free demo" or "You need to give us your email address and be promoted to," and these kinds of things. That less promotional can often have greater returns.

Outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising

Then the last one I'll mention here, even though this list could go on and on and you can use your imagination, is outdoor TV, radio, print, those old school forms of advertising. I think one of the most interesting studies I saw was a couple of years ago showing the correlation between these forms of advertising and search volume. The team from SEER Interactive put up a case study about some outdoor advertising.

Now, it could have been SEER. It might have been Distilled. I'm going to make sure, and I'm going to put it in the blog post itself. I'll link over to that study for you guys, showing that when one of their clients had invested in these forms of advertising, they saw a direct bump in search traffic.

Editor's note: Rand offered up a couple of other relevant links for more information about the relationship between offline ads and search traffic:
Mercedes-Benz: Quantifying how online and offline marketing work together to drive sales volume
Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?

Essentially more people were searching for their brand name, for their products, and those people went to their website. Now that's a beautiful thing, especially if you are trying to increase search demand and search click-through rate.

So if you perceive that you have a weakness in terms of, "Hey, we're just not getting as much branded search. We're not getting as high a click-through rate. Our brand recognition is low. That's hurting us in search results. People are getting better engagement than us, and as a result they are getting higher rankings and better links and all this other kind of stuff." This is a great way to potentially combat this.

With any form of tactic that you're trying like this, you're going to want to think really carefully about audience makeup. So many of the times when you're doing more traditional kinds of advertising, what you're seeking is an audience that's made up of people who are going to buy your product, people who have a high potential to be a customer.

That's actually not necessarily what you're seeking when you do these forms of advertising. You are really seeking, yes, people who might become customers, but also people who might influence customers. Customer influencers is often a very different group than direct customers themselves. It might be that you're reaching a much smaller audience, but it is more targeted to that flow.

For conferences and events, you really want those press and media types of people. For these blog, forums, and niche websites, you might be targeting influencers and journalists and other bloggers and social media mavens and that kind of stuff, who consume this type of content online far more than your regular customers do.

So you want to be careful about that when you're choosing advertising that is supposed to be helping you with organic channels. This is a really interesting topic. It's one of the newer kinds of forms and ways that people are leveraging paid advertising. It can run the risk, if you get too aggressive with it, that you actually step on some of these FCC guidelines or Google's guidelines. So you've got to be very careful. But if you walk this line well, you can experience great benefit to your SEO, your social, your content, your email, your brand by paying for it and getting those indirect benefits as a second order effect.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments. Hopefully, you all have some stories to share about this, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Defeat Duplicate Content - Next Level

Posted by EllieWilkinson

Welcome to the third installment of Next Level! In the previous Next Level blog post, we shared a workflow showing you how to take on your competitors using Moz tools. We're continuing the educational series with several new videos all about resolving duplicate content. Read on and level up!

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Dealing with duplicate content can feel a bit like doing battle with your site's evil doppelgänger—confusing and tricky to defeat! But identifying and resolving duplicates is a necessary part of helping search engines decide on relevant results. In this short video, learn about how duplicate content happens, why it's important to fix, and a bit about how you can uncover it.

Now that you have a better idea of how to identify those dastardly duplicates, let's get rid of 'em once and for all. Watch this next video to review how to use Moz Analytics to find and fix duplicate content using three common solutions. (You'll need a Moz Pro subscription to use Moz Analytics. If you aren't yet a Moz Pro subscriber, you can always try out the tools with a 30-day free trial.)

Workflow summary

Here's a review of the three common solutions to conquering duplicate content:

1. 301 redirect. Check Page Authority to see if one page has a higher PA than the other using Open Site Explorer, then set up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original page. This will ensure that they no longer compete with one another in the search results. Wondering what a 301 redirect is and how to do it? Read more about redirection here.
2. Rel=canonical. A rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of ranking power as a 301 redirect, and there's a bonus: it often takes less development time to implement! Add this tag to the HTML head of a web page to tell search engines that it should be treated as a copy of the "canon," or original, page:
   <head> <link rel="canonical" href="http://moz.com/blog/" /> </head>

   If you're curious, you can read more about canonicalization here.

3. noindex, follow. Add the values "noindex, follow" to the meta robots tag to tell search engines not to include the duplicate pages in their indexes, but to crawl their links. This works really well with paginated content or if you have a system set up to tag or categorize content (as with a blog). Here's what it should look like:
   <head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> </head>

   If you're looking to block the Moz crawler, Rogerbot, you can use the robots.txt file if you prefer—he's a good robot, and he'll obey! More about meta robots (and robots.txt) here.

Can't get enough of duplicate content? Want to become a duplicate content connoisseur? This last video explains more about how Moz finds duplicates, if you're curious. And you can read even more over at the Moz Developer Blog.

We'd love to hear about your techniques for defeating duplicates! Chime in below in the comments.

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Death to Wishy-Washy Reports: Simple Edits to Put the Authority Back in Your Writing

Posted by Isla_McKetta

True life confession: Although I've worked with some of the smartest SEOs, architects, and CPAs in the business, you couldn't always tell from their writing. Which is a problem. Because while some of them are client-facing (so the client gets to know their smarts firsthand—either in person or on the phone), some are only known by the lackluster reports they turn in.

This is a post about how anyone (whether you're an expert in SEO, PPC, social media, or even... content marketing) can write a clearer, more persuasive report. And the lessons contained herein can help you with any form of corporate communication, whether you're writing for a client or your boss.

Get ready to sound smarter.

Be assertive

Being assertive doesn't mean you should stand on your desk and shout your opinions like you're auditioning to be the next Hulk. Instead, have confidence in the data and recommendations you're reporting and convey that confidence in your writing. Because if you're not confident, you might not be ready to write the report. So go double-check your research and then use the following tactics to sound like the authority you are:

Ditch "I think"

I think there are a lot of things you could possibly say to show a client what they might or might not do depending on how they interpret your recommendations.

Notice how that sentence had no spine? That's because it's filled with empty phrases—words that do nothing for the sentence but convey how unwilling its author is to make a point.

Phrases like "I think," "I feel," and "might" are couching words—things you say when you're trying to leave yourself an out, and they make you sound passive and unsure. Go through your report and check for couching words. Ask yourself if you need them (in case of actual uncertainty like "Google might…") or if you can cut them out and strengthen your points.

Dump the passive voice

Mistakes are often made as we try to get around to a point with our writing.

One of those mistakes is in failing to use the active voice. Every sentence has an actor (subject) and an action (verb). While it's nice to vary your sentence structure sometimes, stick to "actor commits action" when you have something important to say (especially when you have bad news to break).

Be careful with dependent clauses

If you want to sound confident and decisive, lead with an independent clause instead of a dependent one (like I did here).

Time for a (mercifully quick) jump back to elementary school grammar. Independent clauses are the ones that can stand on their own as a complete sentence. They have a subject, verb, and usually an object. Dependent clauses don't.

Dependent clauses are often added to an independent clause to increase the level of information in a sentence. Let's flip that last sentence so you can watch the dependent clause move from the end to the front:

To increase the level of information in a sentence, dependent clauses are often added to an independent clause.

Dependent clauses are very useful, but some writers fall into a pattern of starting most of their sentences with them. That delay of the independent clause can make you sound like you're hesitating to get to the point. It can also make you seem passive or like there's something you're trying to hide. That's not how you want to come off in a report.

Choose a point of view (and stick to it)

Some companies prefer to write from a formal (and somewhat) distant third person perspective where "I" is never used; I prefer the more conversational first person.

You can write your report from any point of view you want, but be careful with those pronouns.

The most common mistake I see is for the writer to get indecisive with the pronouns and start throwing around the word "we" as in "we need to fix your title tags." Which could mean that the consultant is taking responsibility for the title tags, or it could be a general suggestion that the title tags need fixing.

Try instead, "your title tags need to be updated; we plan to start work on those during the second month of our engagement." Still uses the word "we," but now it's more obvious who's doing what (and will save you some embarrassing followup conversations).

Write for your audience

Industries with a high degree of fiduciary responsibility are often more accustomed to the use of a formal tone. Meanwhile, writers in other industries, like fashion, automotive, and anything related to the Internet, can get away with a much more casual voice.

You may have noticed by now that I start a lot of sentences with conjunctions like "and" and "but." I also use contractions. Both are part of a conversational tone that's "Mozzy," but if I was writing for a different audience, I would button the top button on my style (and maybe even add a tie).

You know your clients and their style of communication. It's reflected in everything from their RFP to the latest call. Try to mirror their tone (unless you think they came to you for a big shakeup) and your audience will feel like you understand their culture and needs. That means your work is more likely to be accepted.

Explain things

Remember that you were hired because of your unique expertise. That means that you know things the person reading the report doesn't.

When you're introducing a concept your client or boss likely hasn't encountered (or might be a little rusty on), give a short refresher to keep them engaged.

Don't over-explain things

No one likes to feel like an idiot. Going step by step through all the things anyone could ever want to know about a concept (whether foreign or not) has the potential to not only annoy your audience, but also distract from your main point.

If you come across a concept in writing your report that requires extensive education of your reader, either create an addendum where they can read as much as they need to, or schedule a phone call, training, or other way to get them all the info they need.

Use numbers (wisely)

Ninety-nine percent of SEOs have more data than they can ever reasonably convey to the client.

That's because clients (at least sane ones) don't want to know what every single keyword ranked on every day last month. They want to know if their overall rankings are up or down, what that means for their business, and how to push rankings upward in general in the future.

Numbers are very useful (and can be very powerful) if you're using graphs and tables that tell a story, but without your interpretation, they’re all kind of meaningless.

So although you have access to all the numbers in the world, the real magic of your report is in getting inside your reader's head and figuring out what they need to understand about the numbers. Then use the analysis portion of your report to translate that data into answers.

Write fewer words

Concision is an art. Redundancy is annoying. Write as few words as you can to convey your point.

Don't let big words interfere with meaning

An immense vocabulary can obfuscate significance.

This is true of using big words to sound smart and also if you're spouting jargon at people who don't understand it. You might notice from reading this post that I use very little jargon. That's because the vocab words I learned in creative writing won't mean anything to most of you and I can usually find a clearer way to express marketing jargon.

So if your clients (and all the people who will read the report) regularly use words like "earned media," "freemium," and "EPV," you can use them too. But if you have any doubt, try to find a way to use a more accessible word or add some context so everyone can follow you.

Think about general scanability

Your clients are busy. You want them to get the most out of a report they might only ever scan.

All the things you've learned about writing for the Internet apply to writing reports:

• Short sentences (that aren't choppy) are easier to read.
• Keeping each paragraph to one topic with a topic sentence makes it easier to scan.
• Using bullet points (when appropriate) will help your reader digest all that information you've created for them.

Help your reader out by making all your great information intelligible.

Employ an executive summary

Keep the person who signs your checks in the loop with a few words.

To write an effective executive summary, give the highlights:

• Why was the work undertaken?
• What problems were found?
• Next steps

The summary should run between a paragraph and a page (depending on how long your report is). That means you want to save all that delicious analysis you've slaved over for the report itself.

Use templates at your own risk

I know, a lot of the things you're saying to one client are 90% the same as what you're saying to the next client, and creating a template just makes your job more efficient. But if you aren't carefully reading the resulting document, you might be making a mistake (like using the wrong client name or giving them instructions for Omniture when they use GA) that takes much longer to clean up than writing an original report would have.

Trust me, about the third time you're reading over the same words in the same order (even if for different clients), you are too far inside the template to see the mistakes. But your client is reading this report for the first time ever and they won't miss a thing :/. Speaking of which...

Proofreading isn't optional

You aren't qualified to proofread you're [sic] own work.

Not saying anything about your reading or grammar skills, but I'm 99% certain that you've spent so long staring at that report that you are beyond spotting your own typos. Find a second reader. If you're in absolute dire straits and can't find a buddy, read the report aloud to yourself.

Feel smarter already? I hope so. Because you've worked too hard to pull all that information together just to have it fall flat because of a bad report. Tell me about your report writing disasters (and things you'd like help with) in the comments.

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Announcing the New & Improved Link Intersect Tool

Posted by randfish

Y'all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called "Link Opportunities?" While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we're stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:

Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data - links and mentions that come from newly published pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it's not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it's intentionally avoiding those!

For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don't link to SmittenKitchen.com.

• Using the Fresh Web Explorer query RD:SeriousEats.com RD:SplendidTable.org -RD:SmittenKitchen.com gets me only 1 result (a post on Splendid Table that links to SeriousEats)
• Using the new, Mozscape-powered Link Intersect tool, I found 672 pages that fit those parameters!

That's 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

How does the new Link Intersect work?

The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 mllion links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

This means it's possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won't show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you'll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

• Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you're interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor's site)
• Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
• Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you're trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

Note that it's possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you'll get a nice email like this one:

Please ignore the grammatical errors. I'm sure our team will fix those up soon :-)

Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you'll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

They're also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they're unlikely to ever link to you - if they've linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I've helpfully illustrated above, because that's just the kind of SEO dork I am).

Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity - so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

3 examples of Link Intersect in action

Let's look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

#1: I'm trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn't want to use something like the NYTimes' review of books, because we'd be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

You'll also note that I've used a fake website as my excluded URL - this is a great trick for when you're simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don't need to remove a particular target.

#2: I've got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

In this instance, I'll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

#3: I'm planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

First, I'm going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that's received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar's SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

While those domain names make me fear for humanity's intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn't previously considered - climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.

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I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been - I think it's one of the best things we've put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we're releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

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

The New Link Intersect Upgrade is Powerful, Deep, Fast, and Finally Launched

Posted by randfish

Y'all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called "Link Opportunities?" While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we're stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:

Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data - links and mentions that come from newly publishes pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it's not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it's intentionally avoiding those!

For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don't link to SmittenKitchen.com.

• Using the Fresh Web Explorer query RD:SeriousEats.com RD:SplendidTable.org -RD:SmittenKitchen.com gets me only 1 result (a post on Splendid Table that links to SeriousEats)
• Using the new, Mozscape-powered Link Intersect tool, I found 672 pages that fit those parameters!

That's 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

How does the new Link Intersect work?

The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 mllion links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

This means it's possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won't show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you'll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

• Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you're interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor's site)
• Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
• Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you're trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

Note that it's possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you'll get a nice email like this one:

Please ignore the grammatical errors. I'm sure our team will fix those up soon :-)

Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you'll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

They're also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they're unlikely to ever link to you - if they've linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I've helpfully illustrated above, because that's just the kind of SEO dork I am).

Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity - so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

3 examples of Link Intersect in action

Let's look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

#1: I'm trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn't want to use something like the NYTimes' review of books, because we'd be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

You'll also note that I've used a fake website as my excluded URL - this is a great trick for when you're simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don't need to remove a particular target.

#2: I've got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

In this instance, I'll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

#3: I'm planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

First, I'm going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that's received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar's SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

While those domain names make me fear for humanity's intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn't previously considered - climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.

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I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been - I think it's one of the best things we've put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we're releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

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