If the changes in the Google algorithm does deal your website a nasty blow, remember that there’s always a way to recover.
The post A Comprehensive Strategy for Dealing with Google’s Algorithm Changes by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by randfish
What you measure is what you're able to improve. While there's no one magic solution that works for everyone, setting yourself up for success involves measuring your traffic metrics the right way, so you can identify areas to work on and implement the right actions. In the first Whiteboard Friday of 2016, Rand explains what you need to include when building your own traffics metrics dashboard in the new year.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and Happy New Year. Welcome to 2016. It's going to be a very exciting year in search, in all things digital, in the web marketing world. We have an incredible year ahead of us. I want to help this year by celebrating some of the success of 2015, but also by assisting you in measuring and being able to answer critical questions about your success in 2016.
To do that, one of the things we need is a better metrics dashboard. Now look, there is no perfect solution out there. There's no plug-and-play, one-size-fits-all. What I'm going to give you here is a methodology for how you can set your team and yourself up for success, in 2016, with a great metrics dashboard that shows you how things work through your funnel.
But you're going to have to tweak this. What I'm going to show you today is not going to be perfect. It's not going to apply to you or to everyone. It's going to need some personalization on your behalf. So what I want to give you is the framework to do this and some of the ways that we think about funnel and web traffic here at Moz.
We've got our classic web marketing funnel here. It goes from awareness to "I've heard of your brand. I know something about who you are. I first visit your website. I make returning visits to your site. I make a conversion at some point." Then what happens from there is very individually tailored, and so I won't get into retention marketing and retention analytics here.
But if you have a great dashboard that can show you these phases and give you the numbers to walk through, you can do something that very few organizations can do, and that is answer the key four questions that always come up around performance: How are we doing? What are we doing?
What are we doing means how many people visited this? Did that change perform well for us? Are we improving over last month? Are we improving quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year? How much did we grow or shrink in what capacities? When did it happen? And the most important part — why? If you build this dashboard correctly, you can answer all of those. It's really a beautiful thing.
So let's start at the awareness phase. When I talk about awareness from a web traffic perspective, what we want to try and center in on is things that are happen largely outside of our site or our properties before people get to us, like how are they hearing about us and potentially getting to us?
So, from that perspective, some of the metrics we could think about are things like social media, your social media mentions. You could potentially put followers in here and fans in here and things like that.
I use Moz's Fresh Web Explorer for this and sort of get a count of mentions that I have, both in the Fresh Web as a whole and then in only sources that are in Google News. I like that. Mention.net is another good one for this.
You can get that through something like an Open Site Explorer. You could use Google Webmaster Tools. You could use just your Google Analytics numbers in there and branded search volume. I say branded search volume because what I'm trying to measure are things before they get to me. So I want to know how many people are searching for my specific branded terms and phrases. How many people are looking for Moz and for Open Site Explorer and are looking for Moz Analytics or Followerwonk or those kinds of things?
Now, what you want to do from there is build a dashboard with the numbers that you need. You can determine what those are. For some folks, they might even want to get bigger and broader in here. So you might say, "Hey, I want to get statistics on how many keywords SEMrush saw us ranking for." So I'm going add that in and I'm going have my numbers — the number of tweets about me, Facebook posts, brand mentions, new links, referring links, etc. — for each of the months and then have a column in there that's giving me a percentage increase and hopefully some year-over-year numbers. You could do that quarterly. You could do that monthly.
Now that I have this, if somebody says, "Hey, we saw traffic decline this month," you can say, "Actually, we didn't just see traffic decline, we also saw our brand efforts fall down." We can tie that back to, "You know what? We did a lot less press and PR this quarter than we did last quarter. You know what? We did a lot more advertising dollar spend here and a lot less tradeshow. It looks like that did not equate to what we were hoping, which is more stuff at the very top of the funnel building more awareness. It looks like tradeshows were actually a great thing for us."
You can't make these perfectly because these numbers don't tie exactly to every offline kind of activity and word of mouth. But this will give you a baseline, and this will tell you indicatively: What's going on with our brand on the web? How are people thinking about it? How much are people thinking about us versus some competitor?
I do like that you can do this competitively. So I could take these numbers. I can replicate this for a few competitors, and then I can compare myself, me versus XYZ, and see who's doing well and who's doing how well.
I like seeing total visits & I like seeing total new visits. Then I want to look at visits by channel. So channel could be search, and I could split that out into paid and organic. I want to look at social. I want to look at referring links. Maybe I want to look at email, whatever it is that are the channels that are sending traffic to me. One of the really important things here that I strongly suggest you do is define some metric of engagement, a minimum metric of engagement.
So, for example, I like seeing engaged versus non-engaged. For Moz, that might be something like, "Hey, did they browse at least three pages on our site during that visit?" Either that or they spent four minutes. So it could be three pages per visit or a four-minute duration time on site equals engaged.
Then I can measure by each channel, "Did I get non-engaged versus engaged visits from that channel in new visits?" Then I can see over time, like, for example, this happens all the time. We'll see a huge spike in social and referral traffic to a page that sort of had some viral component to it. Maybe it was a particularly salient article. It got lots of broad tech media attention. It didn't really send us lots of SEO professionals, folks like yourselves who are in the web marketing field who are deeply interested in the products that Moz has to offer. So maybe that's low converting traffic. It's low engaged traffic. But we see a big spike and we go, "Hang on a sec. What's going on there?"
Well, now we can say, "Aha, that was from social. It was non-engaged. That was jumping up our visit counts, but it's probably not going be an indication of converting traffic later on down the line." We'll probably see nice brand mentions and press and that kind of stuff. That could lead to things further on. Now we know whether we should keep investing in that type of broad targeted content or whether it's not worth it at all. Great for being able to do that.
My first-time visits, those are new people in my funnel, new people I could potentially reach. My returning visits, this is like my crowd. That's my community. These are people that I'm reaching with my content and my tools, my software, whatever my product is. People that I know are interested, they're coming back 2 to 10 plus times. I actually like segmenting these out.
So I've got in here that I like seeing total returning and then broken down — second, third time, four through nine, ten plus. Google Analytics actually makes this really easy. So does Omniture if you're using that. In addition to this, I want to see two key metrics about engagement levels, and that is browse rate and average time on site.
Browse rate meaning pages per visit. If I see that start to decline overall or in one of these groups, that tells me something interesting. That tells me that maybe I've made a navigation change that was poor and now I'm not driving people from one section of my site to others. Maybe I've changed calls-to-action inside my content. Maybe I'm not linking to my own stuff as much as I used to with the new content I've been publishing, whatever it is.
Then I can start to reverse engineer and say, "Aha, that's why these things are happening." If I don't have these kinds of metrics, I can't even answer the question of, "Well, what are some hypotheses about what could have happened?" If you have this, you're in good shape.
This is the most unique part. These three, there's some variation in top of funnel awareness stuff. These two really, really consistent across almost very site if you follow these models. But conversion, that's going to be totally dependent on what you are converting someone to do.
If it's an email signup that's very different from an ecommerce process, which is very different from a subscription product which is going to be pretty different from an advertising-based site where your conversion might just be a page load or a number of page loads in a visit, those kinds of things.
What I like to do is I like to segment out the places where conversion events happen on your site. For the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday, let's call that the product pages. So I want visits to the product pages. I might choose to do new and returning, again split out. I want to see the checkout completion rate, meaning the people who make it through whatever conversion process that is. Maybe that's just a form field for an email capture. Maybe it's checking out through a shopping cart, whatever that is.
Then I want to see new versus retuning customers, different than visits. This is anyone whose email address or organization I previously have in my customer database so I know that, "Aha, this is a new customer. This person has never converted with me in the past." Or, "Oh, I've seen them before. They're coming back and doing something with me again."
Then I want total revenue. You can break this down. I would break this down something like product page visits, the completion rate of whatever it is that the conversion event is, new buyers, retuning buyers, average revenue per buyer, total transactions, and total revenue. That might be a reasonable ecommerce type of approach. It will change if you're SaaS. It will change if you're email lead capture, but this is fine.
What's great about this is if you set this up now, if you set this up and you have this data for January, you can set it up any way you want — a Google spreadsheet and you manually fill some stuff in, you pull in some stuff through APIs, you ask one of your developers to build something for you, great. It's very imperfect, but you can set up a custom Google Analytics dashboard that gets close-ish, approximate-y, depending on how much sophistication you need. You won't be able to get any of this stuff in the awareness side from GA, but the rest of it you can get close to.
If you do this in January and you measure it throughout the year and you can get year over year data, go back to 2015, or at least in 2017 be able to look back at 2016, you will set yourself up for so much more success than was ever possible before you measured things. I tend to find that what we measure is what we were able to improve. If you measure this stuff, you'll be improving the right stuff.
All right, everyone. Congratulations on making it through 2015. I'm looking forward to a great 2016 with you and lots of great Whiteboard Fridays to come. Take care and Happy New Year.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Ilya Grigorik talks about how important the PageSpeed score really is and what Service Worker is and how it could change the way we develop websites.
The post Google’s Ilya Grigorik Talks PageSpeed and Service Worker by @brentcsutoras appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Did you see that year that just flew by?
It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that Sonia Simone welcomed 2015 with My Challenge to You for 2015: Only Connect.
In that post, Sonia talks about how business success is about getting the “Big Thing” right.
What’s your Big Thing?
You’ll recognize it as the overarching reason behind your business. It’s your motive for wanting to connect with people online. It’s what gets you out of bed every morning.
When you’re clear about your Big Thing, the details tend to fall into place.
This past year, Copyblogger took a deep dive into the details of effective content marketing.
Choosing the “best” posts from this embarrassment of riches is impossible. I mean, really? How does one choose?
It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. So, I loaded up on coffee and took a nice, long stroll through all the content we put together for you in 2015.
Before I share my list, I want to take a moment to thank Demian Farnworth and Stefanie Flaxman for their work on the editorial team this year.
Demian’s can-do attitude and epic content marketing skills made for some exceptional posts this year.
And Stefanie’s eagle-eyed editing instincts have polished every post below into its best possible form.
To all the guest writers whose work we published this year, thanks to you, too. You accepted our suggestions with grace, met our deadlines with style, and helped to spread the word. Great work!
I especially want to thank you, our faithful readers.
You’ve stayed with us and let us know your thoughts on social media, in emails, and even in person. We appreciate the time and attention you’ve given to our pages over the past year.
Want to brush up on a particular subject as you head into the new year?
Pour yourself a cup of your preferred beverage, pull up a chair, and start reading.
And be sure to come back for a visit on the first Monday of 2016. We’ve got some fantastic content lined up for you. And a few surprises, too! It’s going to be a great year.
By the way, have you signed up for our free Copyblogger Content Challenge yet?
Starting Monday, January 4, we’ll be teaching an enthusiastic group of several thousand people how to create solid cornerstone content for their websites. Join us!
Trolls, Unkind Words, and How to Know You’re on the Right Track
If you want your content to be remembered, you’ve got to be willing to take a stand, trolls be damned. Sonia Simone has some words of wisdom for you if you struggle with feeling exposed to unfriendly people online.
The Introvert’s Guide to Surviving an In-Person Conference
Fess up: are you one of the many self-proclaimed introverts who read Copyblogger? If so, this post is for you.
The Dangerous Myth of the Magical Tool
If you’ve found yourself thinking, “If only I had the right software, my business would be transformed,” please take a moment to read this post.
How Not to Be a Sleaze (or a Martyr) in Your Business
Sonia drops some wisdom with her usual combination of story and savvy in this post about finding balance in your business.
5 Things to Take Advantage of When You’re Starting Something New
Small is beautiful! Here’s why you should enjoy the early days of your business to the fullest.
Beth Hayden has spent a hefty chunk of 2015 generously sharing what she knows about email marketing — and she knows a lot.
If you’re trying to understand how all the pieces of the email marketing puzzle fit together, take a look at the posts below.
You may have heard the term “adaptive content” a few times in 2015. As Demian Farnworth says, adaptive content means to “tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires.”
Sound intriguing? Read the posts in this section to fully understand adaptive content and discover how to put it to work for you in 2016.
16 Stats that Explain Why Adaptive Content Matters Right Now
Demian leads off with a rallying cry: adaptive content matters because it offers your readers a better, more tailored experience.
13 Simple Questions to Help You Draft a Winning Content Strategy [Free Worksheet]
If Demian’s 16 stats about the importance of adaptive content got you fired up to use it on your site, this post will help you take the first step. We’ve created a free worksheet you can download and fill out to help you start using adaptive content strategies.
3 Adaptive Content Resources for Advanced Marketers
To implement adaptive content, you must fix your older content so it works well today, understand who’s on your site, and use marketing automation to serve up unique content experiences to your site visitors. Fortunately, Editor-in-Chief Stefanie Flaxman has gathered resources to help you do all three.
Here’s How Henry Rollins Writes (Slightly NSFW)
Those of us who had the honor of seeing Henry Rollins speak at 2015’s Authority Rainmaker event in Denver won’t soon forget the energy and passion in his words. But how does he get those words onto paper?
4 Revelations that Drove Me to Quit My Job and Start a Business
Raubi Perilli shared a personal story about what it was like for her in the early days of her business (hint: it wasn’t all pretty, but it taught her many lessons).
Claiming Your Power as a Writer
Stepping into your full power as a writer means putting on your Big Person Underpants. Need details? Count on Sonia Simone to fill you in.
Introducing Rainmaker.FM: The Digital Marketing Podcast Network
We like to comment on news that impacts content marketers. But, of course, it’s even more fun to make news. That’s what happened when we launched our Rainmaker.FM podcast network last March. That’s right: we didn’t just launch a show or two. It was (and is) a full-blown podcast network. Go big or go home, as we say around here.
Will Your Website Survive the Google Mobile Penalty?
This year, Google recognized the profound change that has happened in web surfing and began to penalize websites that didn’t display properly on mobile devices. Ahead of the change, Demian Farnworth offered some advice to help you prepare.
Why Copyblogger Is Killing Its Blog
Every once in a while (on April Fools’ Day each year, to be precise) we like to make fake news. This year was no exception.
Why the Ad Blocking Panic Shouldn’t Scare Smart Publishers
2015 was the year that ad blocking software became widely available, which sent some online publishers into a panic. But not smart content marketers like us! Demian Farnworth explains why you can breathe easy about ad blocking software.
Copyblogger Media Rebrands as Rainmaker Digital
Name change alert! Our company officially outgrew its original name in 2015 and we debuted a new (more flexible and accurate) name: Rainmaker Digital. Brian Clark explains the decision in this post.
Is Podcasting Replacing Written Content Marketing?
Sometimes when you make news, your moves create more questions than answers. I wrote this post to answer the question people had been whispering to me when they thought no one was listening.
Introducing Digital Commerce Institute: Online Training Plus a Killer Live Event
2015 was a big year for us, and we wrapped it up by launching an entirely new web property this past fall: Digital Commerce Institute. If you’re working to master online business, head over to the Digital Commerce Academy and check out our offerings, which include next year’s live event, Digital Commerce Summit.
We do this thing around here (you may have noticed). We experiment with new techniques and invite you along for the ride so you can learn at the same time we do.
That’s why you saw an abundance of posts about podcasting on Copyblogger in 2015. We were learning, and we shared what we discovered with you in real time.
Conduct Better Podcast Interviews with This Simple 6-Step Preparation Process
Jerod Morris shared the process he uses to prepare for his podcast interviews in this detailed post.
How a Podcast Is Born [Infographic]
Who better to explain the technical steps behind bringing a podcast into the world than our own podcast midwife … er, Director of Multimedia Production, Kelton Reid? It’s a complex process, but this infographic makes it easy to understand.
4 Copywriting Techniques for Engaging Podcasts and Audio Presentations
We republished this classic post in 2015 because once we found ourselves creating audio content, we saw Brian Clark’s advice here in a whole new light.
The Savvy Marketer’s Checklist for Seductive Landing Pages
Henneke came around with her usual sparkly prose and offered some memorable advice on creating effective landing pages. This one includes a checklist you can use when creating your own landing pages.
9 Landing Page Goofs that Make You Lose Business [Infographic]
Is your landing page lagging? Henneke helps you steer your way around common roadblocks that keep your landing page from performing as well as it should.
5 Insider Tips to Make More Sales During Your Webinars
Beth Hayden shares a confession: she used to be terrible at making sales during live webinars. Then she tried the techniques she outlines here and everything changed (for the better).
Bundle Like a Boss: How to Put Together Irresistible Product Packages
If you’ve created more than one digital product, you’ve got the makings of a bundle on your hands. Read Ali Luke’s post for some innovative ways to package your products together.
The Traffic Light Revision Technique for Meticulously Editing Your Own Writing
It’s not easy to really “see” your own work after you’ve written it, which is why mistakes can creep in. Employ the method Stefanie Flaxman outlines here and you’ll catch all those blunders before you hit publish.
Content Marketing Is Easier When You (Partially) Delegate These 12 Tasks
Content marketing can be a slog — to make an impact you have to show up and do the work day in and day out. Fortunately, Charlie Gilkey wrote a post that shows you how you can delegate at least some of your content marketing tasks to others. It’s an innovative approach to delegation!
4 Ways to Turn a Mature Membership Site into a Treasured Resource Your Members Will Love
It’s a good problem to have: you’ve created a membership site, and you now have so much content on it, your members are feeling overwhelmed with your offerings and aren’t sure where to start. Debbie Hodge found herself in this situation and detailed exactly how she solved it.
One of the aspects I’ve most enjoyed about joining the editorial team this past year has been the opportunity to brainstorm useful resources to create for you.
10 Ways to Piss Off David Ogilvy (Free Poster)
In this post, Demian Farnworth gathered some thought-provoking quotes from legendary copywriter David Ogilvy, and we put them together into a mini poster for you (complete with digital coffee stains).
The Credit Belongs to You
Jerod Morris didn’t need to twist our arms when he pitched this idea: the poster we put together contains one of the most inspiring quotes I’ve ever read. It’s guaranteed to put the wind back in your sails when you’re having a tough day.
11 Insights on Finding a Writing Voice Readers Take Seriously [SlideShare]
“Develop a recognizable writing voice.” Easy to say, but not so easy to do. Until you read the SlideShare we created for you. It’s chock-full of inspiration direct from the mouths of well-known writers whose voices are unforgettable.
6 Simple Exercises to Help You Write Better Short Sentences [Free Worksheet]
Content marketing requires a special type of writing. The best content marketers communicate their messages with shorter sentences. In this free worksheet, Demian Farnworth provides some guidance you can apply to your own writing.
The Perfect Anatomy of a Modern Web Writer [Infographic]
If you read Copyblogger on a regular basis, then you either already write for the web or you aspire to. Either way, the infographic here will help you double-check to see if you’ve got what it takes to make it in the wild world of content marketing.
11 Essential Ingredients Every Cornerstone Content Page Needs [Infographic]
Cornerstone content pages form the foundation of an authoritative website. They share what you want to be known for. You’ll link to them frequently and may even put them in your navigation menu. It’s important to craft them carefully and this handy infographic offers tips.
How Do You Compare to Serious Business Bloggers? [Infographic]
Andy Crestodina interviewed business bloggers to gather the data in this comprehensive survey, and Barry Feldman put together a beautiful infographic to make the data easy to understand.
A Simple Content Marketing Strategy for Creative Folks
Our Lead Designer, Rafal Tomal, brought us this post with his approach to content creation — it’s a method any creative person can use.
Solve Your Blank-Page Problem with This Visual, 3-Step Content Creation System
Kelly Kingman stopped by with a solution that uses tangible objects to get you past the blinking cursor on a blank page. Break out those markers and sticky notes!
6 Easy Ways to Adapt Your Writing Style to the New World of Content Consumption
Effective online content has a look and style that makes it easy to consume. If you’re a long-time writer (and even if you’re not), becoming aware of what works best on the web will make your ideas easier to consume.
How to Survive and Thrive as a Corporate Content Marketer
Susan Daffron shared her front-line observations about life as a corporate content marketer in this witty, informative post.
The Single Best Way to Create Hit Content in Record Time
Over the past year, we’ve deliberately combed our archives and brought back evergreen content we wanted to highlight once again. In this post, Demian Farnworth outlines exactly how we go about republishing our best information.
Why Content Marketers Need Editors
Published just this week, Stefanie Flaxman’s post makes a compelling case for the role of an editor on any content marketing team. Plus, you’ll get content marketing inspiration from some bottles of nail polish. Really!
What Is Content Marketing?
And finally, the Mother of All Content Marketing Posts. Buckle up and click that link.
How to Pre-Sell Your Product by Offering Tantalizing Samples
Sean D’Souza facilitates sales by offering samples of his information to whet his prospects’ appetites. Read on to discover how to use this technique yourself.
3 Simple Copywriting Techniques to Get Your Customer ‘Beyond’ the Buy Button
The “buy” button can seem like a huge hurdle to get your site visitors over. But with the techniques Amy Harrison outlines in this post, you’ll be armed with copywriting tips that will make it easy.
How to Create a Visual Brand and Fight the Dark Forces
Only Rafal Tomal would watch Star Wars and think about branding! In this post, he builds an analogy that will help you keep your visual brand on track.
The Transformative Effect of a Well-Built Brand Statement
How you talk about your business changes how people perceive it — and even how you feel about it. Craft a brand message that resonates with the simple exercise outlined in this post.
How to Fully Engage Your Readers’ Brains with Images
Images are an important part of any content strategy, and this instructive post shows you how to choose and use them on your website.
This year, we’ve highlighted some of our amazing customers in a series of posts called The Hero’s Journey. You’ll meet Belinda Weaver, Darren DeMatas, Michaela Clark, Chris Healy, Lindsay Barto, Amy Butcher, and Chris Hargreaves.
More to come in the year ahead!
Have you noticed what Stefanie Flaxman does for you every Friday?
She reaches into the Copyblogger archives to put together mini “courses” for you on a variety of content marketing topics. The posts below are especially good. Pay attention on Fridays and take some time to read Stefanie’s Copyblogger Collection posts.
Don’t get me wrong: every one of the posts below contains valuable information. You’ll learn a lot from them. Once you stop giggling over the post images.
Conquer Content Shock with Illegitimate Ideas
Demian Farnworth explains why sometimes you’ve got to step way — way — outside the box to get noticed. Warning: once you see this image, you cannot unsee it.
The 5 Words that Are Key to Podcast Monetization
Jon Nastor weighs in on how to monetize that podcast you work so hard to put together (and keep your dog entertained).
Don’t Panic, but This Article Was Written by an Algorithm
Will machines replace writers? Demian Farnworth asks this provocative question, and based on the image, I suspect the answer is a resounding “no.”
Our free Copyblogger Content Challenge begins this Monday, January 4.
We’re going to be walking folks just like you through a powerhouse strategy to make your site more authoritative, more attractive to your audience, and just plain more awesome. We’ve got tutorials, a free webinar, and even a pop-up forum to help you get it done. And it’s all free.
If you haven’t registered yet, click here to find out more and register now.
About the authorPamela Wilson is Executive Vice President of Educational Content at Rainmaker Digital. Follow her on Twitter, and find more from her at BigBrandSystem.com.
The post Jump-start Your 2016 with the Best of Copyblogger 2015 appeared first on Copyblogger.
