Of the many competitive research tools available, Open Site Explorer shines brightly above the alternatives. It’s very intuitive – first time users will find it incredibly easy to use. You simply enter your URL, along with up to 4 competitors, and you get lots of data to start analyzing.

Total External Links

External links are useful see how you compare to competitors in online conversation and presence, and will help you set goals in your SEO strategy.

Link building can be a numbers game, and this report will help you determine whether it’s quantity, or quality (meaning high value) links that you lack compared to other sites in your industry.

Total Linking Root Domains

The Total Linking Domains report gives you a look at the diversity of domains sending links to your competitor’s websites. If you see that they have a high number of links, but a low number of total linking root domains, you know that they are getting most of their links from the same domains. It is better to have both a high number of links as well as a high number of linking root domains.

Linking C Blocks

The Linking C Blocks (or C class IPs) report refers to the IP addresses of linking websites.

While very similar to the Linking Root Domains report, this isn’t the same thing. C Blocks are your way of identifying the true backlink diversity of any given website. Getting 500 links from 500 unique C Block IP addresses is more impressive to search engines than 500 links from 500 different domains that are hosted on the same IP (or even C Block IP), which may look suspiciously like a linking network.

It is always best to have both a high number of linking root domains and a high number of linking C blocks in your link portfolio.

Evaluating the ratio between C blocks and linking root domains is also a quick way to identify whether a particular competitor is using a network of links.

Back Link Portfolio

After we have looked through these stats and set some goals on what you want to accomplish in your strategy we can next pull the backlink portfolio and see exactly where the competitors are getting their links. It is always best to sort their link portfolio by highest to lowest by page authority. This way you can start with their highest authoritative links and analyze and see how they got their link on that site and figure out a way to get a link on that site as well, weather it is a directory that you can place a link or a blog that you can offer a guest post to. It helps to think outside the box and figure out a way to get a link on their site.

Hopefully these tips will help you the next time you analyze your competitors and you will be able to find some high quality links for your site.

I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the social graph eventually subsuming the "natural" results with those biased to what our friends and connections share/+1. Fine. I get it. Link buying isn't going away, no matter how much we wish it would.

Even if link buying is working in the short-term and webspam's being less aggressive, I still think it's a waste of money for three reasons:

1. Rankings are tactical: Earning your way to the top rankings is awesome, because it brings with it the branding, familiarity, trust, social sharing and dozens of other positive marketing signals that "earned" links carry. Spam and paid links just give you some more traffic (and not even as much as a trusted brand could earn in the same position). Conversion rates are lower than your peers, and the secondary traffic benefits from other sources, word-of-mouth, etc. never come into play.
2. It's Overpriced: My wife's travel site gets offers for several hundred dollars to put in a few links on a single post, and that's not even an efficient market like those created by professional link sellers and link platforms. Playing the link buying game in the big leagues takes thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each month 
3. There's Always Risk: You're already familiar with the horrific pain of Google's Kafka-esque penalties, but maybe you're banking on not getting hit, given their relative ineffectiveness over the past couple years. Problem is, Google+ has created two new kinds of risk for link spammers. The first is that social search results, which have virtually no ties to the link graph, will overwhelm "natural" results and make those purchased links largely useless. The second is that Google+ gains enough momentum and data to leverage for webspam analysis. If you've been pointing lots of links at sites and pages that earn no social traction, get ready to feel some pain. Maybe you're risk-tolerant enough to scoff off both of these, but I don't think Google+ is going anywhere, and I give them even-odds to have a social content/sharing graph big enough to pull off both within 24 months.

"Blah, blah, blah, I've heard your white hat evangelism before, Rand" Yeah, you have. Fair enough. So how about instead of just warning about what not to do, I give you somewhere to spend all those earmarked-for-spam dollars.

Here's some rough calculations on link purchasing in a moderately competitive vertical:

• Ranking goal: single keyword phrase plus some slight modified phrases
• Required: minimum of 50 unique root domains
  • 35 will be one-time payments, but are relatively low quality, $100 is the average price (like I said, low quality)
  • 15 will require ongoing payments to maintain the link, $100/month (on average) will probably do it
• Total cost over 12 months: ($100*35)+($100*12*15) = $21,500

So, for $21,500, you can probably buy your way into the top 3 rankings for a moderately competitive phrase in a vertical like niche travel, low-volume e-commerce products, etc. Many black hats I know would argue they can get it cheaper, and they can, but that's usually because they own networks and properties or have relationships for which they wouldn't pay directly. A marketing guy working in-house at a brand has none of the connections, no networks of spamfarms, nothing except dollars and a business model that can turn $21.5K in spammy links into $100K in CLTV at 50% margins for a net of $28.5K.

Now let's try an alternative: Buying a blog.

Say you're LastWear Clothing (a site one of my favorite Moz engineers, Marty, particularly likes). They could buy some links to key pages (in spite of all the many good reasons not to) and try to get rankings for queries like men's hakama or womens underbust corset. There's a small amount of existing search query demand, and they're one of the only sources on the web selling those precise garments, so there's a good chance that would turn into sales.

But, let's try another thought experiment. I'll head over to Google Reader and run a search for "steampunk" (the aesthetic of LastWear's clothing):

The second site that pops up has a blog with 6,647 subscribers... And it's talking about the fashion of steampunk! I think we're on to something.

The Steampunk Workshop blog has thousands of subscribers, and they're already clear proponents of LastWear (I know, at this point you're thinking I planned all this from the start, but I swear, it just fell into place as I was searching/writing). That Workshop site is also running ads on the sidebar and between posts, which suggests an attempt at monetization. While not every site like this is a potential option, many are likely to be interested in an acquisition.

Here's one way I might structure it:

• Steampunk Workshop moves their blog to LastWear.com/blog
• They continue blogging about all the things they normally would - no editorial interference or direction needed
• LastWear helps with a more professional design, subscription buttons, some marketing polish, etc. to help the blog earn more traffic, visibility and fans
• In exchange for the move, LastWear offers a monthly stipend to the blogger(s) and a lump sum payment at the end of 3 years. After those 3 years, they own the blog and the content therein, and both parties can decide how they'd like to proceed with the relationship.

If LastWear went down this road, I can promise two things; #1) they'll get far greater short and long term ROI than buying links and #2) it will be less expensive in the long run.

To my mind, this is a no-brainer. When you buy a blog or any form of online community, you're not simply acquiring links, you're getting:

• An engine for brand building and indirect customer acquisition
• An ongoing methodology to pull in links, tweets, shares, +1s, likes, etc.
• Brand evangelists who will help expand your reach and credibility
• A PR opportunity like few others, even in fields where PR is hard to come by (acquisitions are talked-about, blogged-about, and make the news, even those of relatively small blogs)
• Content that's already been proven to attract an audience
• All the organic signals that search engines love to see - from links to social to usage to content to branding

I honestly don't understand why this problem exists:

It makes you want to yell, "Why don't you just go get married already?!"

Here's five questions I'd ask brands considering online marketing to answer before choosing link purchasing tactics over a blog investment strategy:

1. Which is more likely to be scalable in the long term?
2. Which is more likely to work across multiple channels (content, social, SEO, referring links, etc)?
3. Which carries a greater risk->reward ratio?
4. Which is more likely to increase conversion rate and customer lifetime value?
5. Which is more likely to earn you accolades from your community and which is more likely to earn you a rankings penalty one morning when you really need to hit your quarterly traffic numbers? 

To be fair, there's plenty of challenges and hoops to jump through in these types of transactions and some won't work out. But, I see a huge disconnect between those who are naturally earning all the signals engines say they want (blogs and online communities) vs. those need them (commercial sites) and no reason the two can't co-mingle. If you're a marketer looking to invest dollars into earning a presence in the search, social and web world, you can either build it yourself or you can buy it. I hope to see lots of dollars flowing to the content pioneers who've already proven themselves effective earners of inbound marketing signals -- the bloggers.

p.s. In the future, I hope to cover this topic in more depth and detail and provide tools and methodologies to structure discovery, transactions, value-creation, etc. but for now, I hope this post offers at least a little inspiration and an alternative use for capitol that can do far more good in the hands of bloggers than fly-by-night spam operations.

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It is hard to know how difficult achieving rankings with a new search engine optimization project will be because so many factors play into it and Google is always adjusting its algorithm. By understanding search engines you can help clients understand how difficult an SEO’s job is at times.

So how does Google’s algorithm work?

The Anatomy of a Search Engine:

This is a basic breakdown of a much more complex process.

• A URL Server sends over lists of URLs to be crawled.
• The crawlers download the web pages then send them to the store server. The store server compresses and stores the web pages.
• Every web page is given an associated ID number called a docID then sent to the indexer.
• The indexing function is performed by the indexer and the sorter.
• All of the documents (webpages) are converted into a set of word occurrences called hits. Each hit records the word, position in document and other variables.
• The indexer sends these hits into a set of “buckets”, creating a partial index.
• The indexer separates out all of the links in every web page and keeps important information about them in another file. This file contains information about where each link points from and to, and the text of the link.
• The links database is used to compute PageRanks for all the documents. The sorter takes the barrels, which are sorted by docID…., and resorts them by wordID to generate the inverted index…… The searcher is run by a web server and uses the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

A much more in depth process of this can be found at - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

In laymen’s terms this is what it happens:

Say someone is looking for information about blu ray players. Google takes the billions of documents on the web and converts them into wordID’s. Then it looks for instances or patterns of the wordID’s across all of the documents and ranks the documents based on how often the wordID’s appear. For example,

Blu ray player

Based off of the table above you can see that document 134 shows up in every document making it the most relevant and thus potentially ranking very high in the search results. Google has to sort through millions of documents on the web that could be talking about Ray-Ban glasses that are blue, blue ray jackets, Tampa Devil Rays jerseys that are blue, Devil Ray players, Blue Apple players and so on. In addition to looking for wordID’s, links and other on-pages factors are taken into consideration when trying to rank a site. This gets very complex really quick.

Key Takeaway: Google has to create an “association” or see that your site is relevant for a given keyword out of billions of documents. That association could take months if not years to create and it becomes even more difficult to create as you move closer to the top 10 results. *We know Google has around 200 ranking factors so it would be a good idea for a client to implement as many on-page elements as possible, to send a clear message to Google as to what the page is about, since on-page elements tend to be easier to control then the link building aspect.

Knowing the basic process is good but how much information does Google have to sort through in order to find the most relevant webpage for a search query?

What Does It Take To Get a List of Results?

• More than 1 million computing hours have gone into preparing Google’s index
• More than 1 billion searches are performed on Google every day
• More than 1,000 man years have been spent on developing Google’s algorithm
• Google’s Caffeine index contains over 100 million gigabytes
• In July of 2008 Google processed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs. What does that equate to: That is the equivalent of, “fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.” Google computes this every day.
• Google’s database of indexed pages is 5 million terabytes – A stack of DVDs holding Google’s index would be as tall as 3,192 Empire State buildings.

This is the task of an SEO, to try and help Google effectively sort through all of the web pages and then to help a client rank for a certain search query. This is why it takes time to potentially rank for a given keyword. As SEO’s optimize pages and build links Google is sorting through the tremendous amounts of data every day in order to better understand which pages should rank in the top positions.

As you can see a lot of time and energy has been spent by Google in order to bring back relevant results to users. It does not stop there. Since new web pages are being created daily, Google has to keep up with all of this new information. Because of that Google and other search engines need to be efficient and effective in how they manage all of this information.

Google is Always Changing

Even if a client has everything in place and is able to get to the first page of the search results, Google is always changing and tweaking its algorithm so it is an uphill battle.

Google made over 500 changes to their algorithm last year and Matt Cutts has stated,

“Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites……This change is just one of the over 500improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.”

The news came on January 19th when Google announced another algorithm change.

While the majority of these changes are small, a number of big changes took place last year that affected nearly 50% of all search queries.

For an up to date timeline of Google’s changes over the years check out SEOmoz.org. Since Google is always changing the way they rank sites it makes an SEO’s job that much more difficult. Keeping up to date on the latest changes and industry news is never ending for an SEO.

Obviously there are many more factors to consider when getting into an SEO campaign but I have found that helping clients recognize how much work it takes to get sites to rank can improve the overall relationship in a positive way.

Stats above can be found at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/underthehood.html

http://adam-thompson.me/2011/02/03/google-how-big/

Stay tuned for more SEO tips and tactics from SEO Design Solutions and the upcoming release of our new WP Ultimate Theme and WP Silo Builder plugin.

-Jeffrey

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1. Competitor Research and Analysis
2. SEO Tips for Keyword Research, Trend and Competitor Analysis
3. SEO Video about Website Silo Architecture
4. SEO Video: How to Properly Silo Your Website!
5. The SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin Video Tutorial

The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Disclaimer: Kanye West is awesome, but you understand how he is perfect to illustrate these points.

Problems with the Old Process

I’ve heard SEO called a lot of ugly things in the past few years. My favorite one lately was delivered to me by the wonderful Brittan Bright after someone passionately declared to her that SEO is the “Calculus of Marketing.” I love it simply because it fits. Just like Calculus, if you’re not looking at the aggregate value of what you’re working on you may do a lot of work for a result that doesn’t seem big in the grand scheme. Just like Calculus, SEO is quite specific and esoteric to those that haven’t studied it. Just like Calculus, you can be completely successful without it altogether. And finally SEO and Calculus both set a barrier of entry that excludes more than it includes.

With all that said, here is the typical SEO process as it has been defined over the years.

Although we often treat it like one, SEO has never been an initiative that existed within a vacuum. It has always required changes be made across a complete digital ecosystem in which there are numerous stakeholders. However, this existing process always asked for change without justification with regard to the purpose of goals of these touchpoints. For example, if my recommendation is to change a title tag there has been no justification as to how that affects the CTR of a page shared on Facebook. Perhaps the social media team has discovered that the target audience clicks through less when a page title doesn’t feature a brand name. That’s a hypothetical situation but let’s go into a little more detail as to why SEO will not continue to work this way.

No Regard for Market Research

Just as the diagram above suggests, most SEOs jump right into keywords, analytics and competitive analysis of those keywords. Wrong move; search is about fulfilling needs. Before looking at a single keyword there needs to be a deep understanding of business objectives and the market. Standard kickoff questions often look like this:

• What analytics package do you use?
• Are there any other domains or sites that you own?
• What SEO efforts have been done in the past?
• List your top 3 competitors.
• Do you have social media accounts?
• What keywords are you looking to rank for?

The biggest problem with this is we often take these inputs at face value. That is to say, very often the brands that the client believes they are competing with offline are not the sites they are competing with for keyword coverage in the SERPs. Also the keywords a client may think they should rank for are not the keywords that are going to help them meet their actual goals.

To simplify it, many SEO teams send clients kickoff questions to get a sense of the keywords they should target and then hop right into the keyword tool. Pages are optimized. Keywords are allocated to pages. Links are built. Content is pushed into social. Performance is measured to identify subsequent opportunities. Obviously it oftentimes goes far more in-depth for many, but this is basically the widely accepted process.

One of my biggest issues as a consumer of Search that understands SEO is if the results I click appear to be overly optimized I become quite leery of the content. This is simply because in my experience many copywriters (SEO or otherwise) often don’t know what they are talking about. Recalling dusty memories of early in my own SEO career when I wrote copy, in most cases I was just a human article spinner. I definitely read a few wiki articles and the top results for a given keyword and just reworded what other people said. I shared all that to say: Becoming an expert in the niche that you are optimizing for is an extremely underrated step in the SEO process. For this reason, if I were to hire an agency, I would prefer one with extensive prior experience or specialty in my vertical.  All my in-house SEOs – make some noise!

Little Regard for the Audience

Truthfully, the real differentiation between clients happens in a latter set of questions. Unfortunately, the following doesn’t get asked enough in the standard SEO kick-off:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• What are you trying to get users to do once they arrive?
• Who is your target audience?

These are typically questions that Conversion Rate Optimization teams focus on rather than SEO teams. For shame SEOs, for shame!

We all want traffic and we all want to rank #1 for juicy head terms, but these things are not goals. By themselves these are not KPIs that make clients successful. Simply put, if you rank highly for keywords but aren’t fulfilling the needs of people searching for them, you just put a ton of effort into exactly the wrong thing. It’s not about the keywords; it’s about the people searching for them.

Consider this offline example of Target using data on customers to identify when they’ve become pregnant to learn when to ramp up efforts to turn mothers-to-be into long-term big spenders at the wholesale department store. You can do this far more effectively with Search if you’re mindful of your audience and their needs. This measurement of intent plus interests plus demographics plus network is the Holy Grail of Marketing. With that in mind it becomes quite clear what Google’s ulterior motives are with Plus and the consolidation of privacy policies.

Recently, I had a short conversation with AJ Kohn via Twitter about personas and how client research can prove useless. I agree somewhat because clients that have done audience research beforehand may have only looked at offline factors. To that point, it is important that we validate or disprove those insights with our own research rather than taking what the client says at face value. Our goal is to optimize, not paint by numbers.

SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

As much as I hate to say it, the reality of SEO is that it disrupts much of digital planning even when it’s included from the onset.

Most other digital capabilities start from the target audience before they do anything. User Experience has user stories, personas and user flows. Strategy teams build personas and need states by examining demographics and psychographics in efforts to really try and understand what does and will influence and fulfill the target audience. 

Whichever of these teams develops these audience insights then feeds them to other teams so that efforts are glued together by the target consumer. Paid channels such as Facebook Ads, Display Advertising and Paid Search benefit from this significantly in their ability to target demographically. Media teams examine the available audience by vendor and allocate dollars based on where the delivery will be most effective.

Traditionally, Organic Search ignores this step entirely and declares “HEY! I’M HERE NOW WE’RE DOING THIS MY WAY!” This is partially why SEO gets shunned by brands when they are determining where to distribute their efforts within the marketing mix. SEO is certainly effective, but it has always been a maverick that didn’t want to play by the rules. There is little meritocracy because if channels were chosen only by ROI – Display Advertising would have died 10 years ago. Evidently, they are not chosen this way so for SEO to get buy-in it needs to be team player.

Many Link Building Initiatives Exist in a Vacuum

Regardless of the hundreds of strategies, tactics and tools that are being born for link building daily, every successful link building campaign boils down to making news and/or making friends. As SEOs, we try to strong arm how and where brands will do this. Making news and building relationships are functions of many different groups and initiatives within a business from top to bottom. How is it that we as SEOs believe our best initiatives can exist outside of the things the brand itself contributes to? 

Brands launch PR campaigns, social media efforts, events, so on and a variety of other social strategies to facilitate the awareness of the news they create. How is link building any different? The fact of the matter is, it isn’t. Therefore it should be attacked from, and included with, the same standpoint as the rest of a brand’s social strategies for both scale and effectiveness. Simply put, link building is better when the entire muscle of a brand is leveraged.

To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist. I’m skipping anything coding related because although I believe you should be able to build a website you don’t necessarily have to. SEOs are already inherently each of these things, however in most businesses these are all different capabilities that sit in different groups, or offices or cities. Who are we to upset an entire digital ecosystem and undermine so many people?

Well I work with some awesome digital strategists, content strategists, creatives, etc. and while they tend to have impressive grasps of web trends, audiences and their specific capabilities they typically don’t know how to leverage cross-channel campaigns as specifically as SEOs or Inbound Marketers.  It is now the role of Inbound Marketers to drive strategies that looks far more like this (sorry guys, Kanye had to go – busy schedule):

I wish very much that I could be there for your “aha!” moment right now as no doubt you recognize many of these steps and can guess where other tasks will fall. Now let’s break it down completely – forgive me for anything that is obvious.

• Opportunity Discovery – Opportunity Discovery is a cyclical process of understanding brand opportunity with regard to business goals, target audience, industry specifications and past performance. It’s cyclical in that insights from one step often refine insights from another step in the process.
   
• Business Objectives – Everything must be done within the context of the goals of the brand. This requires a deep understanding of where the brand has been and where it’s going. In many cases businesses large and small may not understand how to translate their goals and therefore it is the job of the Inbound Marketer to do so.
   
• Market Research – The reason why SEO gets such a bad rap for polluting the web is that so many people simply do not build content that is worthwhile or has utility for the market. At this point, the entire team must take a deep dive into the industry and be able to have more than cursory conversations on the subject matter. For those that believe this to be a largely arduous task I suggest specializing in verticals of interest.
   
• Audience Research –The Facebook Ads tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of personas. The Doubleclick Ad Planner is also good for understanding the demographics of existing sites. If available, Facebook Insights gives demographic data on the existing users visiting the site as well. The output of this is a set of user segments and stories or – personas.
   
• Analytics Mining – As always, you should mine existing analytics data to understand who is visiting. Take deep dives into keyword performance, especially in concert with any internal Search data, to identify opportunities. All in all, this is no different than normal unless the client has already been tracking their audience at which point you can see if who they are trying to attract is actually coming or not.
   
• Social Listening – Using a core set of keywords, collect data on the conversation around those keywords. Keep track of patterns and identify user segments, demographics and need states of the people partaking in that social conversation. You’ll also want to keep track of how these users are using the keywords as this will allow you to eliminate ambiguity in keyword decisions and help to create messaging that resonates with the audience during the customer decision journey.
   
• Quantitative Analysis – Services such as ComScore, Quantcast, Forrester Research, etc. track a multitude of data points on users in various verticals by demographic. Leveraging these reports gives you deeper insight into what types of users visit your competitors and exist within the market.
   
• Keyword Research – Keyword Research must be completed with regard to the audience not just a determination of whether the keyword is viable from a search volume standpoint, but whether the keyword intent matches the business goals. Keywords should then be correlated with target personas and need states to help drive the build of content that is optimized for people first and search engines second. 
   
• Site Audit – Under the New SEO Process the Site Audit becomes decidedly more comprehensive, as it covers UX issues that would normally fall into a CRO Audit. Specifically, the audit talks about things impeding the conversions due to incongruence with the target audience in addition to the standard SEO technical issues that it covers.
   
• Asset Inventory – A standard practice SEOs are already doing wherein there is an understanding of what a brand controls and is willing to leverage to the benefit of the campaign.
   
• Content Audit – What content inside our outside of the site can be leveraged?
   
• Brand Relationships – What other companies, businesses, groups and events are the brand involved with?
   
• Offline Assets – What tools, venues, prizes, etc. are at the brands disposal?
   
• Competitive Analysis – As always, competitive analysis is a collection of high-level audits of competitors across the vertical. The difference is that since site audits are completed with regard to the audience, the competitive analysis must also include a determination of how other brands are capturing that audience.
   
• Measurement Planning –A standard practice amongst analytics teams the Measurement Plan is the Statement of Intent and determination of Key Performance Indicators with regard to the business goals and audience. Avinash Kaushik covers measurement planning in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model post. (Hat tip: @scotttdodge)
   
• Content Strategy & Development – Content Strategy and Development are big picture initiatives with a variety of stakeholders, so it often carries with it the most pushback. Creative teams just want to take big swings for big ideas and brand managers just want to advertise. To be effective we have to show how our content ideas will connect with the brand’s target audience and make sure content is designed to our specification.
   
• Content Ideation –With all this social data we have collected and correlated to keywords we can now come with ideas for content with portions of the target audience built-in. Do so.
   
• Wireframes – are an early deliverable in the design phase of a website wherein we can annotate considerations for SEO and CRO to ensure that Creative teams design with both in mind. Be very involved in this phase.
   
• Content Build – Once all your points are baked in, it’s time to let the Creatives do what they do. If they come back with creative is not congruent with what is agreed upon in an earlier phase, then you now have data to back up your position with the client.
   
• Technical Development –Technical SEO is the price of admission and cannot be ignored, so this where we make sure that the structure of the house is sound.
   
• Technical Build –At this point, we’ve done all we can do now we just wait to see what the tech teams come back with. We’ve specified everything in wireframes and hopefully have had some say in the build of the CMS, but the tech team is going to do what they know. We’re just going to have to wait to see what they come back with unless they are open to our input during the actual build. 
   
• Implementation Audit – We’ll always have to double-check the work of a technical team and this is the spreadsheet in which we do it. An implementation audit briefly recounts the issues outlined in the site audit and wireframes and says whether or not they were successfully implemented. This is the easiest way to show that the bottlenecks are not so much with the SEO team but the tech team – as they oftentimes are.
   
• Social Strategy – Typically link building is an initiative that exists by itself, in the new SEO process link building is an initiative that must be completed as part of a broader scope. While it is clear that low quality tactics like blog commenting continue to work, even those are far more effective coupled with a social push across PR and social media. Leveraged strategically, you are launching a piece of content with a cross-channel marketing push and therefore the link velocity will appear more natural to search engines and the return on the social strategy is likely to be higher. While link building has always been about casting the widest net, social strategy is about casting the rightest net the widest. I just made up a word. Kanye approves.
   
• Link Strategy – Link building for most businesses, particularly small businesses, is not an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Therefore it is not enough to just launch content and hope for the best, we must continue to supplement content launches with smaller complementary content launches, outreach and manual submission link building. This is where this strategy is defined with its own measurement plan. Yes, I’m saying we should report both our prospects and the links we close. If you’re proud of your work that shouldn’t be a problem. Link Building is just like a PR campaign in that there is no guarantee of placements and should be explained as such.
   
• PR – News is better than advertising, so a key part of social strategy is doing things that make news. Users spend a large part of their day reading, sharing and linking to news so make it a large part of the social strategy to make sure that content is newsworthy and get it to the news outlets that your audience frequents. 
   
• Contests – Contests are an excellent way to get a one-to-many return on incentives. Rather than performing outreach and directly offering them a free sample or (gasp) money request that they enter a contest wherein their entry is a blog post about the brand’s topic that contains a link. Also add a layer of gameplay to the contest by determining the winner through the number of times their post is shared in social media. Unbounce had a similar blogging contest in 2011 but link building wasn’t the goal of the campaign so they had all the posts on their own site.
   
• Events – Throwing a party, conference or trade show is another one-to-many return for link building. Simply host an event and invite influencers in the brand’s audience where the stipulation for attendance is that people must blog about it and link back to you.
   
• Social Media – is a two way street. Not only is it a place for discovery but also a place for conversation. Use that conversation to find the influencers in the space with regard to the target audience and business goals. Build social media profiles to be authoritative and engaging to easily get your content shared and also convert sharers into linkers. Regardless of where Google is headed, the social graph will never completely replace the link graph.
   
• Social Implementation – is the phase when you let it all rip for the best synergy.
   
• Measurement – is not just about whether or not we hit the goals. It’s the insights into why that makes measurement the most valuable step in Online Marketing. Measuring with regard to the audience helps with understanding the why even further than speaking in concrete abstracts such as bounce rate of a keyword. After all the ability to tangibly measure is why digital marketing is far more effective than traditional.
   
• Reporting – is tailored specifically to the goals of the client. There’s no one-size-fit-all report. For example, a client business goal may be to get user segment A to watch a video and therefore, the primary metrics reported should be the Time On Site and persona type versus traffic and keyword. Rankings are only important with regard to how they’ve affected traffic. Everything should be focused on who (persona A) and why (because the message is unclear) rather than what (“blue widgets for sale ranked #5”). 
   
• Link Reporting – Under the umbrella of social strategy there is a lot to be said about what has been done to increase visibility. Aggregate rankings should be reported with regard to link building efforts to show the direct correlation between the two. Furthermore, link prospects and closes should also be reported with close rates to show clients what is being done on their behalf. This is obviously a subject of contention within the community, but if the links you build are so suspect that you are afraid to show them to the people you’re building them for – you need a different approach.
   
• Optimization – I had an art teacher once that always used to say “No work of art is ever finished, we just give up.” The art and science of SEO is never complete and there is always an opportunity to do more.
   
• Conversion Rate Optimization – While CRO is far more baked into this strategy it still likely to take its own seat at the table. That is to say that while SEOs may also be CROs they may be too close to the project to properly optimize. This is much the same way that the mixing engineer of a song is not supposed to also be the mastering engineer. At this point, a separate CRO Team should run A/B Tests, Usability Tests and so on and report back.
   
• Continued SEO – Do it all over again!

A Better Web

Not to go all “land of milk and honey” on you guys, but the consumer is the biggest winner here. Naturally businesses benefit immensely as well, but the more we optimize with people in mind the more likely their needs will be fulfilled and consequently, the more likely we are to get those people to convert. Including people throughout the process and making the core goal to encourage them to do something ultimately makes the web a better place because everything we create will have a distinct purpose for the user and never solely for search engines. This is not to say we are circumventing the technical tenets of SEO as they are the price of admission.

Brand Buy-In

SEO has always been an industry that explains itself using empirical data. Starting from the audience, a place that businesses can understand, it is far easier to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. So when we make recommendations and explain the impact of our efforts on a target audience that has been determined as a focus of all initiatives, it’s easier to obtain brand buy-in than when we’re just talking about keywords and traffic.

Compare the following statement:

“We want to build links targeting websites with a PageRank of 3 or higher. We’ll reach out to a variety of prospects and target anchor text for keyword opportunities identified by our extensive keyword research in order to gain rankings for your brand.”

with:

“We’d like to launch a contest targeting Influential Moms with over 5000 followers on Twitter. To enter they’d write blog posts that link back to our properties in order to drive traffic for our target Listener Moms that are using Search to buy more healthy cereal.”

Both ideas would potentially accomplish the same goals however the former will require far more explanation for the client and ultimately more effort on the part of the SEO team. Whereas the latter explains a link building campaign in terms of the brand’s target audience and business goals then further lays out a campaign wherein the brand commits cross-channel resources that the SEO team can leverage. Understanding the business objectives and the audience make it easier to develop and deliver strategies that client can easily get behind.

Scalability

Getting on the same page with the other capabilities allows SEO efforts to be scaled considerably for brands large and small. This is how we regularly achieve those otherwise rare instances of synergy between capabilities when the PR team is facilitating Link Building, the Content Strategy teams and Creative teams are creating link bait and SEO is both driving and supplementing those efforts. That is the perfect storm where we spend far more time chiseling our perfect sculptures rather than polishing poop and our efforts have far more impact with less effort. 

Cross-Channel Optimization

Learnings and wins in SEO can influence other channels. Imagine we discover through social listening, keyword research and/or measurement are a large number of the client’s target audience is looking for “red kanye west t-shirts” but the client only sells every color but red. We now have a tight business case as to why that client should start manufacturing the t-shirt in red. Conversely, what if we find out that people love the shirt but bounce from the landing page because they hate the user experience of the site? There is any number of scenarios that when explained purely from the context of search brands are far less likely to make a move. However when you explain these insights through the context of personas and market research you have a tighter case that can affect change across all channels and capabilities.

[not provided]…so what?

Google has positioned itself to take away all of our organic keyword referral data and let’s be honest they ultimately will take it all. Plus, and the consolidation of privacy policies to allow cross-product data access, is Google’s way of positioning itself to attain the Holy Grail of Marketing. However, measuring through our audience essentially allows us a new way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We know the keywords we are targeting for a given page and we can see rankings and analytics of a given landing page by channel to determine whether or not Search is driving traffic. The true measure of success was never the rankings, nor the traffic but how well the page a given page converted for our visitors. If we track conversions based on audience that is the only metric that is truly worth optimizing against. The holistic performance of a channel is what brands are concerned with, not necessarily the performance of a given keyword.

The following are a list of posts, pages, tools and presentations to help get a deeper understanding of personas and need states and how to apply them to various Inbound Marketing efforts.

Personas

• 10 Steps to Personas [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Develop Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO [SLIDESHARE]
• Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media [MOZINAR]

Need States

• AIDA: Attention-Interest-Design-Action
• Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process
• McKinsey Customer Decision Journey [VIDEO]
• Customers Go On a Journey, Escaping the Funnel

Useful Social Tools

• SocialMention
• Amplicate
• Topsy
• Trendistic
• MentionMapp
• Twtrland
• FollowerWonk
• Listorious
• KnowEm.com
• Radian6 - PAID
• Lithium - PAID

Quantitative Analysis Providers (PAID)

• ComScore
• QuantCast
• Compete
• Hitwise
• Forrester Research

During the #seochat I did on the SEO Process there were some questions of whether this applies to small businesses or not, citing that small businesses only care about the #1 spot and they “just want rank.” Yes, understanding what makes an audience tick applies to all businesses. Again, the ability to quantify the interests and intent of your audience and track a brand’s ability to persuade is the advantage of digital marketing of any kind. As I said on Twitter, #1 is not a goal, but a means to an end. #1 gets users to the door; it doesn’t keep them in the house.

Finally, the new SEO process is a call for us to speak the language of other capabilities and deliver strategies that can plug and play with what brands truly understand. The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves. It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results. It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively. And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak.

So fellow marketers—what’s it gonna be? Keep it classy or keep it Kanye? 

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Continuing from my previous post, 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign, I thought I’d share with you some simple yet powerful tactics to outsmart your competitors and reach out to your target audience. Facebook offers some incredible targeting options, so here are my five top tips to get the most out of these features.

#1 Targeting your competitors’ fans

There has never been a more fertile hunting ground for systematically picking off competitors’ customers and fans than Facebook ads. At the time of writing, there are no legal limitations in targeting users who express positive or negative interests in other companies’ protected brands. I doubt that this frontier mentality will last legally; but meanwhile, you can certainly get it while it’s hot!

Why do you want to target your competitors customers and fans? You need to keep in mind that brand interests carry important customer qualifiers. For instance, consider luxury brands, especially if the marketing task involves high-quality goods. Those interested in luxury items tend to prefer the finer things and are willing to spend. Brands such as Rolex, Mercedes-Benz, Burberry, Issey Miyake, Chanel and Swarovski are great examples and well represented on Facebook. Users displaying interests in these brands may qualify to view your ads.

Also, people interested in a competitor’s product or service may be interested in yours too.  Conferences are a great example; Distilled could target users who already like the Search Marketing Expo Facebook page. That’s because these conferences attract attendees surrounding the same topical content: SEO, PPC and Social Media.

#2 Targeting users who hate your competitors

Users who display colourful expressions of negativity toward your competitors’ brands provide powerful fodder for marketers for a couple of reasons. First, they were once interested in the actual products and their bad experiences have pushed them away from the brands. Second, it is reasonable to assume that these unhappy customers might actually be in the market for an alternative, which we are only too happy to offer up. For example, Spotify could target users who like the fan page “iTunes sucks”.

Please note that marketing to competitors’ disenfranchised customers is nothing new, and Facebook offers lush ground to mine negative sentiment. As in life, community members are more than willing to explicitly share what bothers them about brands, including general hatred.

Wouldn't Ford love to pounce on the opportunity to belittle Toyota when they recalled large number of cars due to faulty brakes?

#3 Targeting general things people dislike

If your client or organisation is a college or university and you offer online distance learning, you could target young adults who are fans of the pages “I don’t hate school, I hate waking up at six in the morning” and “I hate waking up in the morning” and write ultra targeted ad copy to entice these users to call you or sign up for more details. Facebook users hate many things; sell privacy fences to those who hate their neighbours, sell anti-romantic or lonely-person products to those who hate Valentines Day. The list is practically endless.

#4 Occupation and employment

Next ask yourself “what are the occupations and places of employment that indicate a user might be interested in my product or service?” Targeting occupations can be an extremely potent strategy, because after family, profession is one of the most powerful components of an individual’s identity. I am aware that LinkedIn gets all the publicity as a ‘business’ platform, while Facebook has been known as the ‘personal’ platform. The reality could not be further from the truth. We work with many B2B clients. One thing nearly all of them have in common is that they openly question the value of Facebook ads for marketing to professionals.

If you look at Facebook’s PPC targeting girth, they boast of over 800 million users worldwide (and counting)! That number amounts to almost one in seven people on earth. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that business people use Facebook at sometime in their daily cycle. If you sell specialised goods to large manufacturing companies, then you could target users with the following job titles, “procurement manager” or “purchasing manager”. If you sell DNA testing services in order to distinguish who a child’s father is, you could target specific lawyers who deal with these types of cases.

If you’re a local restaurant or a coffee shop located next to well known businesses, then you could target your ads to these professionals as they are your target customers. Also, certain job roles require certain types of productivity software, tools, machines, clothing gear etc.

#5 Final list of ideas

In addition to the list above, here’s a list to inspire you to come up with even more creative niche segments:

• Political orientation – people who support the Green Party have different values to those who support the Conservative party.
• Leaders – there are users who idolise certain people e.g. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, the Dalai Lama etc.
• Sports teams – users who are fanatical supporters of Manchester United or Barcelona FCs.
• Family roles – Facebook’s new broad category targeting allows you direct access to family status.

• Books and authors – the saying ‘you can judge a person by the books they read’ has never been truer. Think about your target audience and think about what books, authors, magazines and newspapers they would read. The type of material they read would give you an insight into their internal psychological values.
• Applications – this is specifically important if you are trying to promote an app or a game yourself. Facebook tells me that there are 2,367,780 users who are 18 and over in the UK who like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars”. We know they have downloaded these applications, so we have every reason to believe that this target segment would be interested in another application.

As you can see, there’s a universe of creative ad targeting ideas for marketers. More important than the examples above is that I hope this post has inspired you to look deeply at contextual targeting in a whole new light. As always, I would love to hear your views, ideas and tips on advanced Facebook targeting, so feel free to add to the discussion below.

Image credit: HikingArtist.com

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Related posts:

1. 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign
2. A Summary of Major F8 Facebook Updates
3. Facebook Insights for Domains – Measuring Social Media Success

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

I own and run ShirtsThatGo, which is a small ecommerce site running on the Volusion platform. I started the company about three years ago and have been learning everything myself. I have taken a particular interest in the marketing piece, especially search engine optimization. I have made all the usual mistakes and I am sure I have many more lessons to come.

I am a pure white hat and have done the SEO effort the hard way by slowly gaining links and trying to do everything by the book. I ran into a rather perplexing problem about one year ago and it took me over a year to resolve it.

My home page www.shirtsthatgo.com and the ice cream truck product page disappeared from the SERPs. The pages looked fine in the index but they would not rank for anything including the title tags. I read some of the great SEOmoz posts about what to do when a page will not rank for its title tag and tried to follow the steps. I had inbound sidebar links (non-paid) taken down for fear that I was seen as buying links. Yes, I went through a phase of chasing Google PR so I begged everyone to give me sidebar links! Sound familiar to anyone?

Next I reached out to some of you and begged for help to this issue. I was getting desperate to solve the problem and did not know how to solve it. I even asked folks on the Google Webmaster Forum and my forum posts would show up in the SERPs and not my missing page!

As it turns out I just needed to learn to listen. I was getting some great guidance from Dean Peckenpaugh, who is an SEO and e-commerce specialist and one of the main contributors at the Volusion customer internal forum. Most forums tend to have one or two contributors who really know their stuff that everyone listens to. At the Volusion forum Dean is one of those guys. So Dean was pushing me away from over optimizing and telling me to think like a computer but to write my pages for people. I got so caught up in optimizing that the site content was (well it still is) written more for the bots than my prospective clients.

My other product pages ranked so well that I was afraid to change anything. When I started to actually listen to what Dean was saying I took another look. Upon closer inspection the Ice Cream Truck page had maybe five more instances of the keyword than all the other product pages. I took a chance and backed way off the keyword count. I figured nothing would happen at all and that my needle in a haystack problem would still be there. On the next crawl the page was in position one on page one for the target keyword. Could it be this simple? I was blown away! I had badly overstuffed my site and my problem was so easy to fix!!!

For any given page there is clearly a keyword limit and the algorithm will simply flag the offending page and refuse to serve it up. Stay above the limit and the page is banished. Drop below the limit and it will rank! My expectation is that this is going to differ somewhat from page to page but the rule will hold.

Just this week I deployed some new product pages. I tend to put them online a few days in advance with a teaser product photo so that the page is already ranking by the time I have the product ready for the site. I ran into the problem again with our tank t-shirt page. I had inadvertently stuffed it a bit too full of the target keyword. On large pages a quick way to check this is to view source and use the find feature. This will paint all the instances and as you scroll through it will be apparent if a term is appearing too frequently. Note this screen shot does not show all the other instances that are below the fold.

As my pages are ranking great I do not want to make any drastic moves. That said I know my pages are still way over-optimized. Over time I will pull back on the keywords in the body and see if I can rely on the title tag, a couple of headings, and maybe one instance of the keyword in the body. Once I find a happy medium I will update all the pages. As I see it Google knows what the page is about by the title and the H1. Everything else that is not written purely for humans is stuffing plain and simple.

Here is a sample of our police car sell page and as you can see the target keyword is in there a lot. This page is ranking on page one for “kids police car t-shirts” and was just deployed a few days ago.

Once the ice cream truck page was ranking it was time to deal with the home page. At the time the home page was relatively skinny but I had content with anchor links pointing to almost all of the product pages. The home page was not even ranking for its title tag, so definitely something was way wrong. In this case though I did not see a keyword stuffing issue so I decided to think like a computer on this one and looked at the structure of the page for anything that might be confusing.

I noticed first that the page did not have an H1 or H2 which is how Volusion pages come out of the box. I read about how the importance of these tags is diminishing but they do add structure which is important. Also the page had content that was more about the various product pages. I had the idea that I was passing PR from my home page to all my product pages and thus helping them rank. It was not working!

As a computer I might be confused by the home page so I made the following change to add a very clear structure to the page and overall site:

Here are the changes that I made:

1. Added structure by putting an H1 and H2 that had exact match to the title tag main keyword.
2. Removed all content about product pages and the links to the product pages.
3. Added new content that was built up around the target keyword and the general topic of my site.
4. Added a link to the home page from the bottom of every product page with anchor text matching the <title> and <h1>< h2 >of the home page.

Within a few days the page started to rank for the title tag! After a few weeks the site was sitting around position 70 or so for the target keyword “kids t-shirts”. About a month later the page jumped to around page 20 or so in the SERPs for “kids t-shirts”. Position 20 seems about right given the other players in the space and the authority we have built up. I find it interesting the way the site sat in a lower position for many weeks then as if something came unblocked it popped up in the SERPs. This may illustrate some kind of a holding place Google uses for pages recently emerging from being flagged prior to giving them full ranking.

Here are the key takeaways from this experience that I wanted to share with you all:

• Consider keyword count if a page is indexed but not ranking for its title tag.
• Look closely at the structure of your site and ask yourself is it clear what the site is about.
• The idea of home page being general and product pages being specific makes a lot of sense.
• Be careful not to send mixed signals about what pages are about when building internal links.

I welcome all and any feedback. Any feedback about my site as well would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Nick Morgan
ShirtsThatGo

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