Whether you consult with teams within your company or with outside clients, the chances are fairly high that at least once, you’ve left a meeting frustrated by the actions of others, even asking yourself: “why would they do that?”
It’s easy to walk into a project thinking of it as a simple matter of “they brought me in to fix a problem.” But the reality is rarely so simple. Consulting with other teams always entails organizational and emotional nuance that you may not be privy to.
Every interpersonal relationship is unique, and hopefully the circumstances I’m discussing won’t apply to many engagements or projects you take part in. However, when you do end up in a difficult consulting situation, it’s helpful to have a bit of empathy for those you’re working with.
I’ve found that remembering these 3 points can help me put myself in the shoes of my point of contact and interact with them in a way that is sensitive to what they may be dealing within their environment.
1. Your point of contact may not have asked for your help
It is entirely possible that the person you are trying to help may not want to be helped.
Management has its own ideas sometimes and internal communication isn’t always perfect at any company. This can lead to situations where your point of contact may feel defensive, especially if their job functions seem like they might cover what you are consulting on. The best intentions of a manager who wants to help by bringing in more resources may look like distrust or undermining to the employee who didn’t get a say.
At one point during my stint as an in-house SEO, I actually found myself in this exact position. Leadership brought in an outside agency to help with SEO during a domain migration, and while their intentions may have been to provide more help, they didn’t effectively communicate that to me.
As a result, since I was the one who was responsible for that area, it made me feel insecure about how management viewed me and my skills. I was lucky enough to work with a great consultant who was able to support me and help move forward the many projects that were already in-flight. But because I initially felt like they were undermining my credibility by being involved in the first place, it took a while to build that trust and be able to get things done effectively.
The best way to deal with this potential issue is to ensure that you respect the context and institutional knowledge that the team you are helping possesses. Work to have a collaborative relationship instead of an authoritative one. The more context and communication you have, the better the recommendations you can contribute.
2. If they did ask for help, they may be feeling vulnerable or insecure
Step back for a second and think about why a team might bring in an outside consultant, to begin with. There are tons of specific issues they could need assistance with, but all of this boils down to a problem that they presumably want or need help to solve — a problem that they couldn’t solve on their own. Regardless of whether they couldn’t solve it because of knowledge, resources, or even office politics, your contributions add something that they couldn’t contribute themselves — and that can be hard to deal with.
This isn’t something that needs to be discussed with the client or another team, but it is something that you should acknowledge and keep front-of-mind when you communicate with them. Respect the vulnerability of seeking out help, and appreciate the trust that they have placed in you.
3. Your client is accountable for the results of their project
When planning a long-term strategy, making tactical recommendations, or accessing the results of a marketing campaign that you helped execute, it’s easy to feel invested or accountable for the results of a project. However, it’s important to remember that your point of contact is usually far more accountable for results than you are. Their job, success, and emotions are all on the line much more than yours.
As an outside subject matter expert, your job is to give them all the information and resources to make the best decision. At the end of the day, the choice is theirs. I know how hard it can be to see your recommendations or projects rejected, but it’s important to try not to take it personally if they, having all the facts, make what they believe to be the best decision.
If they seem like they are questioning everything you say, maybe it’s because they want to be 100 percent sure it’s the best approach. Perhaps their micromanaging comes from a place of good intentions — just wanting to follow through and get the best outcome with every aspect of a project. Even what can come off as argumentative or difficult could be them playing devils advocate to ensure that everything has been considered.
Wrapping up
All this being said, perhaps none of these circumstances apply to the client that you are finding it hard to work with. People can have bad days, hard years, or even just generally prickly dispositions. But more empathy and compassion in the world is never a bad thing. So, I would encourage anyone who works with other teams to avoid the impulse to judge a harsh response, and instead, consider what may be behind it.
Have you ever been faced with a complicated consulting situation? Share what helped you navigate it in the comments below!
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!
Search can’t live in a silo. If you want to see success, cross-collaboration across your organic, content, and paid teams is absolutely key. But that takes a huge amount of effort, from untangling communication to cross-training to getting buy-in from everyone involved. What’s a search marketer to do?
If you missed her talk this year at MozCon 2019, here’s your chance to make up for it! In today’s edition of Whiteboard Friday, Heather Physioc shares her framework for successfully integrating your organic, paid, and content practices for a smoother search experience.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Heather Physioc, and I’m Group Director of Discoverability at VMLY&R. Today we’re going to talk about nine tips to help integrate your organic search, paid search, and content practices.
1. Announce change all at once, but roll out changes one at a time
So your first tip is that you want to announce change all at once, but then you want to roll out the changes one at a time.
It can be overwhelming to integrate practices and change processes. So you don’t want to try to do everything all at the same time. It’s like trying to boil the ocean, and it’s too much to stick. So while you want to get everybody on board and aligned to the benefits and challenges they’ll be facing as you integrate, then you just progressively roll out the changes iteratively over time.
2. Document new products & processes
Next, as you develop new capabilities and processes and offerings together, you’re going to document those processes in a shared, living wiki, because those processes are going to continue to change.
So my team uses Confluence, where we document our shared workflows, but everybody on the team has access and total trust to continue refining those in the ways that they see are best for the team.
3. Make recommendations and report together
Your next step should be obvious, but a lot of people are not doing it. You should be making recommendations and reporting together. So a lot of times we’ll collect all our data for reporting from all our different channels.
We’ll smash some slides together at the last minute before we throw it over the fence to the client. It ends up with a pretty shallow, almost meaningless set of data that doesn’t tell a story. So we should be getting together, sharing our insights, observations, and findings in the room together to find the story that is the most meaningful and help prioritize for our clients the best marketing decisions they can make from that data.
4. Cross-train to build advocacy across teams
So your next tip is to cross-train so you can build advocacy across the teams. We host a lot of workshops and hands-on training. We’ve even done job swaps where we had SEOs writing performance content for product detail pages. It creates this wonderful sense of empathy and understanding for what others need in order to do their jobs well.
But it also creates these great mental checks where you ask yourself, “Am I including the right people at the right times? Is there anyone else who could add value here? Could my work be impacting someone else?” So the purpose here is not necessarily to know how to do each other’s jobs so much as it is to empower people to be able to advocate for, speak about, and cross-sell your other teams.
5. Reintroduce the team or capability
Next, when you’ve done your integration of processes and people, everyone else in the organization may not necessarily know what that means for them. So you’ll want to reintroduce your team or your new capability to the rest of the organization. Put faces with names.
Talk about what the new capability is and does and the value it brings to the organization. Tell people how to engage with that new offering and what it means for their project or initiative or client.
6. Market the joint wins
Up next, we’re going to market the joint wins. As you’re continuously integrating, you should always be looking for wins or warnings that you can share with others so they can learn how to better engage with your offerings.
So if you have a great case study, where you integrated paid and organic or organic and content, make sure you’re marketing those stories out to your colleagues, your clients, your bosses, and of course your team.
7. Hold roundtables to deep-dive search opportunities
Up next, we’re going to do roundtables so we can deep dive search opportunities with other departments. So of course it makes sense to have roundtables between organic search and paid search or organic search and performance content, but also think beyond your immediate team.
Think about other marketing teams, like social media and pairing search behavior insights with social listening data. Or think about geographic teams. What if you sat your organic search team down with your Europe group to figure out what opportunities make the most sense for that region? Or even sales and IT and finding those areas of intersection, where you can do great search work that supports more parts of the organization.
8. Host mutual lunch & learns to cross-pollinate
Next, think about hosting mutual lunch and learns so you can start to cross-pollinate different skill sets. So similar to the roundtables, this is where you’re going to bring different groups together to talk about capabilities. But think about more than just presenting your capabilities to other people. Also be sure to invite them to present their capabilities to your group. For example, we’ve invited the project management team or the client engagement team to make us stronger in our search work through the value that they bring.
9. Give ownership of change to others
And finally, as you’re making all of these changes, it can’t just come from the top, one person just handing change down for everyone else to implement. It has to be organic, pardon the pun, and everybody should have ownership over the direction that we’re heading together. So when we make changes to products or processes or we start to integrate different groups or spin up little teams to work on specific objectives, we make sure that those individuals from each side have ownership to make those decisions together and roll it out to the rest of the group.
It helps make sure we’ve considered all the angles and greatly impacts our ability to get buy-in across the team. So those are nine quick tips to integrate organic search, paid search, and content practices. Let us know what you think in the comments below. I want to hear your tips too, and we’ll see you next time on Whiteboard Friday.
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!
Take a moment to think about how you’ve used the internet today. Which posts made you stop scrolling through your Instagram feed? What webpages did you spend the most time on? What content did you enjoy?
If you’re like most of us, there’s a good chance that videos played a factor in your answers to all three of those questions. So it’s no surprise that marketing experts have been encouraging brands to use more video for years now.
Despite all this hype, many small to medium brands still use very few videos in their marketing, if they use any at all. In our experiences with clients, we’ve seen companies struggle in four major areas:
Talent. Most small marketing teams don’t have people experienced with creating or starring in videos.
Buy-in. Companies that use video well have many people across the organization committed to leveraging video content, including leadership, salespeople, customer service representatives, and subject-matter experts. But achieving this level of buy-in across an organization can be very difficult.
Consistency. While many brands have figured out how to produce frequent and consistent written content, few have figured out how to do so with video.
With challenges this significant, it’s no wonder why most brands still don’t include video as a major component of their marketing efforts. The good news is that these barriers to entry give you an opportunity to beat your competitors to the punch – but that window is closing quickly.
To help our clients reap everything video marketing has to offer, we’ve put together a framework that makes building a video marketing strategy much easier to approach and manage.
The ABCs of video content
The first thing that must happen before a marketing team can successfully use video in today’s world is usually a mental shift: If your marketing team or company leadership thinks about producing video the same way they did a decade ago, it will be very difficult to create enough video content to truly make a difference because you’ll constantly face the challenges mentioned above.
The greatest thing about creating video content today is that it doesn’t always have to be this large-scale production. The days of spending thousands of dollars and weeks of time on every video you create are officially over.
We believe that every brand needs a strong mix of video content across three levels: A-level, B-level, and C-level.
A-level video content
A-level videos are the videos that most brands are already used to creating. These videos are polished and well-produced, and therefore the most expensive to create. If your company has ever created a television commercial or a brand overview video for your website, it was probably an A-level video.
A-level videos work best when you need to create a strong impression on the viewer. If it’s the first time someone is interacting with your brand or another situation when you need to convey that your company is professional and credible, an A-level video will likely work best. This is what makes them great for commercials, product videos, and company overviews.
Don’t use A-level videos when your primary goal is to convey authenticity or build a relationship with your viewer. A-level videos also aren’t cost-effective for most brands to use as consistent, regular video content to support your social media, video SEO, email communications, or blog.
A brand will need much fewer A-level videos than B or C. As such, the key to getting the most from your investment in A-level video content is repurposing. You should always consider how you can use clips or footage from your A-level content for things like social media posts, presentations, across your website, or as a quick way to add a little polish to a B or C-level video.
To create A-level videos, most brands will need to work with a third party video company or marketing agency. These videos will be scripted, shot with high-end cameras by people who really know how to use them, will often feature paid on-camera talent, and will be professionally edited.
Examples of A-level video content include this one from Slack, Kohler Industries, or Apple, below:
B-level video content
When a brand produces high volumes of video content, the majority of it is usually B-level. These videos are planned, but not perfect. Most of the how-to videos and vlogs you watch would fit into this category.
B-level videos work great when your goal is to build a relationship with your video viewers because they allow you to show more authenticity than A-level videos, and their lower cost makes them perfect for a consistent video strategy. This level works well for educational content, social media videos, a video series, team or personal intro videos, simple product demos, and video testimonials.
The best thing about B-level videos is that they can often be created by your own staff. Even if you decide to outsource them, they will be much cheaper than A-level videos because you can produce multiple videos at the same time or engage a third-party for just one part of the production process, such as editing.
To create a B-level video, all you’ll need is a basic script outline (bullet points work great), someone on your staff willing to get on camera, some basic video equipment, and an entry-level video editing program. If you don’t have people on your staff who are comfortable shooting video from a smartphone and editing it together, we recommend seeking training or considering hiring a student or recent graduate with those skills.
The keys to success with B-level videos are authenticity, volume, and consistency.
Authenticity. Brands that achieve success with these videos aren’t worried about memorizing lines and being perfect on camera. You’d be amazed at how much the occasional “um” will make you sound more human and help you connect with your audience. With that said, you do want to feature someone who is comfortable on camera, even if it takes them some practice to get there.
Volume. As long as you’re creating valuable content, the more videos you have, the better.
Consistency. Just like with a blog, magazine, or newsletter, publishing videos at a consistent interval allows you to more easily build an engaged audience of return viewers.
Examples of B-level video include this one from Solo, Simple Strat (hi!), and Moz, below:
C-level video content
This is the level where brands can really connect with their audience and stand out from the competition. C-level videos are raw, unpolished, and extremely effective in humanizing your brand and the team behind it.
To create a C-level video, all you need to do is pull out your cell phone or turn on your webcam, press record, and start talking. You may want to prepare a few quick bullet points of what you’re going to talk about, but even that is often unnecessary. These videos are great for sharing lessons on-location from industry events, making key employees shine on their social media channels, helping your salespeople stand out in their prospects’ email inboxes, and adding a personal touch to your customer service communications.
The most powerful aspects of C-level videos are that they can be personalized for individual people and they can help you get information out in almost realtime. You can use them to pack an extra punch in any email you send or to share lessons as you learn them or think about them — which is often when you’re most passionate about them and before the competition has a chance to talk about them.
C-level videos still require good lighting and audio quality, so we do recommend purchasing a cheap portable light and lapel microphone, but you can easily get everything you need for under $50. These videos don’t require anyone else to shoot them, and you often don’t need to do any editing beyond occasionally cutting out or combining a couple of video clips.
Now that you know the different levels of video content you’ll need, it’s time to put together your plan. Thinking about these levels as you begin to determine your video topics and schedules will make it easier to determine the resources you’ll need, your ideal number and frequency of videos, and how each video will fit into your larger marketing strategy and goals. Just remember your ABCs and get ready to experience the difference that video will make for your brand.
Are you currently working on a video marketing strategy for the year? What have you found useful (or not) so far?
<a class="embedly-card" data-card-via="https://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-video-selling-examples/" href="https://share.viewedit.com/yHs… + James – Social Selling Mastery for you
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!
Editor’s note: This post first appeared in April of 2017, but because SEO (and Google) changes so quickly, we figured it was time for a refresh!
Meta tags represent the beginning of most SEO training, for better or for worse. I contemplated exactly how to introduce this topic because we always hear about the bad side of meta tags — namely, the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they’re at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But we don’t want to get too negative; meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer’s repertoire.
There are meta tags beyond just description and keywords, though those two are picked on the most. I’ve broken down the most-used (in my experience) by the good, the bad, and the indifferent. You’ll notice that the list gets longer as we get to the bad ones. I didn’t get to cover all of the meta tags possible to add, but there’s a comprehensive meta tag resource you should check out if you’re interested in everything that’s out there.
It’s important to note that in 2019, you meta tags still matter, but not all of them can help you. It’s my experience, and I think anyone in SEO would agree, that if you want to rank high in search, your meta tags need to accompany high-quality content that focuses on user satisfaction.
My main piece of advice: stick to the core minimum. Don’t add meta tags you don’t need — they just take up code space. The less code you have, the better. Think of your page code as a set of step-by-step directions to get somewhere, but for a browser. Extraneous meta tags are the annoying “Go straight for 200 feet” line items in driving directions that simply tell you to stay on the same road you’re already on!
The good meta tags
These are the meta tags that should be on every page, no matter what. Notice that this is a small list; these are the only ones that are required, so if you can work with just these, please do.
Meta content type – This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and should be present on every page. Leaving this out could impact how your page renders in the browser. A few options are listed below, but your web designer should know what’s best for your site.
Title – While the title tag doesn’t start with “meta,” it is in the header and contains information that’s very important to SEO. You should always have a unique title tag on every page that describes the page. Check out this post for more information on title tags.
Meta description – The infamous meta description tag is used for one major purpose: to describe the page to searchers as they read through the SERPs. This tag doesn’t influence ranking, but it’s very important regardless. It’s the ad copy that will determine if users click on your result. Keep it within 160 characters, and write it to catch the user’s attention. Sell the page — get them to click on the result. Here’s a great article on meta descriptions that goes into more detail.
Different sites will need to use these in specific circumstances, but if you can go without, please do.
Social meta tags – I’m leaving these out. OpenGraph and Twitter data are important to sharing but are not required per se.
Robots – One huge misconception is that you have to have a robots meta tag. Let’s make this clear: In terms of indexing and link following, if you don’t specify a meta robots tag, they read that as index,follow. It’s only if you want to change one of those two commands that you need to add meta robots. Therefore, if you want to noindex but follow the links on the page, you would add the following tag with only the noindex, as the follow is implied. Only change what you want to be different from the norm.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Specific bots (Googlebot) – These tags are used to give a specific bot instructions like noodp (forcing them not to use your DMOZ listing information, RIP) and noydir (same, but instead the Yahoo Directory listing information). Generally, the search engines are really good at this kind of thing on their own, but if you think you need it, feel free. There have been some cases I’ve seen where it’s necessary, but if you must, consider using the overall robots tag listed above.
Language – The only reason to use this tag is if you’re moving internationally and need to declare the main language used on the page. Check out this meta languages resource for a full list of languages you can declare.
Keywords – Yes, I put this on the “indifferent” list. While no good SEO is going to recommend spending any time on this tag, there’s some very small possibility it could help you somewhere. Please leave it out if you’re building a site, but if it’s automated, there’s no reason to remove it.
Refresh – This is the poor man’s redirect and should not be used, if at all possible. You should always use a server-side 301 redirect. I know that sometimes things need to happen now, but Google is NOT a fan.
Site verification – Your site is verified with Google and Bing, right? Who has the verification meta tags on their homepage? These are sometimes necessary because you can’t get the other forms of site verification loaded, but if at all possible try to verify another way. Google allows you to verify by DNS, external file, or by linking your Google Analytics account. Bing still only allows by XML file or meta tag, so go with the file if you can.
The bad meta tags
Nothing bad will happen to your site if you use these — let me just make that clear. They’re a waste of space though; even Google says so (and that was 12 years ago now!). If you’re ready and willing, it might be time for some spring cleaning of your <head> area.
Author/web author – This tag is used to name the author of the page. It’s just not necessary on the page.
Revisit after – This meta tag is a command to the robots to return to a page after a specific period of time. It’s not followed by any major search engine.
Rating – This tag is used to denote the maturity rating of content. I wrote a post about how to tag a page with adult images using a very confusing system that has since been updated (see the post’s comments). It seems as if the best way to note bad images is to place them on a separate directory from other images on your site and alert Google.
Expiration/date – “Expiration” is used to note when the page expires, and “date” is the date the page was made. Are any of your pages going to expire? Just remove them if they are (but please don’t keep updating content, even contests — make it an annual contest instead!). And for “date,” make an XML sitemap and keep it up to date. It’s much more useful.
Copyright – That Google article debates this with me a bit, but look at the footer of your site. I would guess it says “Copyright 20xx” in some form. Why say it twice?
Abstract – This tag is sometimes used to place an abstract of the content and used mainly by educational pursuits.
Distribution – The “distribution” value is supposedly used to control who can access the document, typically set to “global.” It’s inherently implied that if the page is open (not password-protected, like on an intranet) that it’s meant for the world. Go with it, and leave the tag off the page.
Generator – This is used to note what program created the page. Like “author,” it’s useless.
Cache-control – This tag is set in hopes of controlling when and how often a page is cached in the browser. It’s best to do this in the HTTP header.
Resource type – This is used to name the type of resource the page is, like “document.” Save yourself time, as the DTD declaration does it for you.
There are so many meta tags out there, I’d love to hear about any you think need to be added or even removed! Shout out in the comments with suggestions or questions.
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!
I’m always fascinated with the marketing budgets of enterprise-level companies that are ready to pay astronomical sums to contractors. A recent shmooze in the community was thanks to Hertz that paid 32M to Accentura agency, which (so far) hasn’t resulted in any substantial changes to their site.
Though I personally don’t work with client’s who throw around millions of dollars, that doesn’t affect the quality of services that I provide. My average client wants to get the maximum by spending as little as possible. It might sound like a tough job for me and indeed it is, but I love the challenges that a small budget brings, as it helps me stay creative and reach new professional heights.
So while the budget isn’t a challenge, changing my client’s mindset is, and that’s because all of my clients are victims of one of the biggest misconceptions about content marketing: They think that once they start publishing content pieces regularly, inbound traffic will hit their site like a meteorite.
And it’s not just the traffic — links are a subject to a similar misconception. Each time I share studies like the one by Brian Dean that clearly shows that links don’t come on its own, there’s always someone that’s going to say: “That’s because their content’s just not good enough.” When I have a call with clients that ask for quality content with zero focus on links.
The bottom line is, traffic and links don’t just show up out of thin air. Regardless of how good your content is, how well structured and valuable it may seem, it has nearly zero chances of getting attention in today’s overcrowded digital space.
In this post, I want to share with you five bulletproof tactics that help me boost content linkability without having a big fat budget to waste.
A note on content and modern-day link building
Before we dive into the best ways to boost your content without breaking the bank, it’s important to touch on what link-building is today. Links are a digital marketing currency — which you need to earn and spend wisely. And to earn them, you need to build relationships.
A while ago, I noticed a shift in a client’s mindset: After a few projects delivered together, they started to ask for in-depth forms of content like how-to’s, case studies, and guides — which (according to Brian’s research) is exactly the type of content that has the highest chances of getting links. But that’s not necessarily the number one reason why people allocate links.
Links are inherently relationships. And if you agree that linking to a strategic partner brings more benefits compared to referring to a random stranger, then you’ll find appreciate Robbie Richards methods.
Robbie’s roundups are a textbook definition of highly linkable content. A post about the best keyword research tools published not that long ago on his blog attracted nearly 300 referring domains and a decent organic traffic share:
What’s his secret?
Robbie made sure to target the experts within his business circle. In a nutshell, his roundup posts work as part of a well-delivered outreach strategy that has a strong focus on gaining links by leveraging existing relationships. This is the key to modern-day link-building — a combination of content, links, and partnerships.
Without further ado, let’s talk the best ways to promote content that doesn’t involve any where-do-I-get-the-money-for-it drama.
5 bulletproof ways to blow up your content without breaking the bank
If you’re creating quality content with zero focus on links, you won’t be getting optimal traffic. The only chance to make your content stand out is to focus on its potential linkability even before you actually start writing it. Here are some of favorite ways to get your content seen.
1. Adding expert quotes
Quoting an expert is one of my favorite ways to boost content linkability and shareability. It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t require a significant time investment. When you write out of your expertise area, adding a quote of a thought-leader grants your content more credibility and value, not to mention boosting its linking potential.
Depending on how influential your company is, you can either select an existing quote or reach out to the experts and ask for a new one.
Here’s a tip: If you decide to go with a pre-existing quote, contact the expert in advance to confirm it. This way, you can make sure that they still stand by that opinion, plus, they’re okay with you quoting them.
Remember, while quoting experts is a good idea, you also need to find the right expert andthe right quote. Here’s how to do that:
If your brand has a big audience, I recommend starting by checking your current followers and subscribers across various channels, including social media. You might not know it, but there’s a good chance you’ll find real influencers among people who follow your brand’s pages. To speed up the process of spotting influencers among your Twitter followers, you can use Followerwonk. This tool allows you to export all your followers to a list and sort them by the size of their audience.
Another way is to analyze the websites that link back to your site. To do that, you can use Moz Link Explorer that will show the list of URLs that are referring to your site. Chances are, some of those authors are pretty influential in their niche.
Finally, you could use BuzzSumo to find relevant influencers to contact. For example, you could export a list of bloggers who are contributing to the industry-leading blogs.
The last option is less suitable for link building purposes, as the influencers that you find have no idea of your business existence and are hard to get on board. However, it’s not impossible. Before getting in touch, make sure to scratch their backs: Share their content on your social media, sign up for their newsletter, etc. To find the influencer’s most recent pieces, search on BuzzSumo Content Analyzer by “Author: [INSERT NAME].” This helps build a bridge and create the right first impression.
Don’t forget that expert quotes need to be allocated in content with special formatting which means you need to involve a designer/developer.
Here are a few examples that I personally find quite visually appealing:
And another one:
2. Strategically linking back to blogs that you’re interested in
Strategic link building is like playing poker while blindfolded. A strategic approach always pays off in the long run in almost any area, but when applied to link building, it depends on how well you can spot linking opportunities. Based on this, your chances of acquiring links are either very high or very low.
If you want industry leaders to link back to your content someday, you have to prove that your content deserves their attention. The best way to get your foot in the door is to link back to them.
You need to find the right experts to link back to. How do you do that?
The mechanic behind finding the right sites to refer to is similar to the one that I shared in a section about expert quotes. However, there’re a few more strategies that I want to add:
Are you a part of any industry groups on Facebook? If so, go and check the members of those groups and find people that are also involved in link building. Now, you have a legit reason to contact them (since you’re both a part of one group on Facebook/LinkedIn) and ask whether they’re interested in getting a link in your upcoming post. Please note, that you shouldn’t skip this step, as by this you’re making them aware that you’re expecting for the favor to be returned.
Have you ever participated in any roundups? If yes, then reach out to the experts that were also featured in this post.
Finally, check your current blog subscribers, clients, and partners. The chances that they’re also interested in partnering up on a link building side are quite high.
3. Adding good images/GIFs and hiring a designer for professional-looking visuals
In 2019, using stock images in your content is a big no. After all, they are easily recognizable for their abstract nature and give away the fact that the author didn’t invest much into creating custom visuals.
However, there is a way to adapt it to your unique brand style and still make it work. And to do it, you don’t even need to hire a designer right away.
The drag-&-drop tools like Vengagge, Canva, or Visme make it easy to create pretty nice graphics. For example, Canva has a lot of great grids and predefined templates, which makes the whole design process really fast.
What you need to do is take a good-looking cover image, for example, like the ones we use in our blog, and cheer it up with custom-made designs in Canva. You can add your picture, your brand’s logo, or anything else your heart desires. Such an approach allows us to maintain our own unique style while staying within the budget.
Static images are not the only way to pretty up your content. One of my favorite visual elements is GIFs. They are perfect for visualizing step-by-steps and how-tos and can easily demonstrate how to perform something in a digital tool. You can even use them to tell a story. At one of my recent presentations, I used a GIF to explain why simply posting on Twitter is not enough to get attention to a brand.
I saw many posts that were able to acquire loads of links and social shares thanks to good graphics, for instance, this post that featured the SEO experts in Halloween costumes.
Without a doubt, this requires a little bit of a budget, but I’d say it’s 100 percent worth it because it’s creating value. The last time our company did something like this for a client, we hired a designer who charged us $30 USD for one image. It’s not too bad since custom-made images make it way easier to pitch your posts to other blogs to get more links!
Hint: When you’re looking for custom graphics that won’t make your wallet cry, you can always find freelancers on sites like Upwork or on freelancing Facebook groups.
4. Delivering email outreach by targeting the “low hanging fruits”
We’ve done a lot of email outreach campaigns here at Digital Olympus, and so, I’ve noticed that we have a fast turnaround rate when our outreach targets are in the “right state of mind,” meaning they’re interested in cooperating with us.
There are many reasons why they might show interest. For example, perhaps they’ve recently published a piece and are now invested in promoting it. To spot content marketers and authors like these, you can use Pitchbox. Pitchbox lets you create a list of posts that were published within the last 24 hours based on the keywords of your choice.
The biggest bonus of Pitchbox is that it not only pulls together a list of content pages but it also provides contact details. In addition to this, Pitchbox automates the whole outreach process.
Another tool that can pull together a list of posts published within the last 24 hours is Buzzsumo. Here’s a great piece by Sujan Patel that shows how to deliver outreach the right way.
There can be many speculations about which email outreach techniques work and which don’t, but the truth remains: It’s a very hard time-consuming job that requires lots of skill and practice. In one of my recent posts, I write about proven email outreach techniques and how to master them.
5. Adding stats that don’t involve a huge time investment
You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. How about this: A number knocks out 10 thousand words. By adding statistics to your piece, you can simply mark out the whole process of having to refer to another page.
But fresh, relevant stats don’t grow on trees. You need to know where you can find them.
The easiest and the cost-efficient way of adding numbers to your piece is by running Twitter polls. They can collect up to 1k results for only $100 USD of properly paid promotion efforts. The biggest plus of running polls on Twitter is that you can create a specific list of people (aka a tailored audience) that will see your ad. For a detailed explanation on how to work with tailored audiences, I recommend checking this post.
Besides running Twitter polls, you can use survey tools that will help you collect answers for a fee:
Survata will show your survey across their online publisher’s network with the average cost per answer starting from 1 USD;
Surveymonkey market research module starts from $1.25 for 200 complete responses. As you can see from a screenshot below, it allows you to set up a more laser-targeted group by selecting a particular industry.
Another quick hack that I use from time to time is comparing already existing data sets to reveal new insights. Statista is a great site for getting data on any topic. For instance, on one graph you can show the revenue growth on the major SMM platforms as well as the growth of their audience. Plus, don’t forget that while the numbers are good, the story is key. Statistics tend to be dry without a proper story that they are wrapped in. For inspiration, you can use this great post that shares many stories that were built on numbers.
It doesn’t always have to be serious. Numbers draw more attention than written copy, so you can create a fun poll, for example, whether your followers are more into dogs or cats.
Conclusion
Creating captivating content is hard work and often a hella lot of money, but there are ways to spare a few bucks here and there. By utilizing the strategies that I shared, you can make sure that your content gets the audience it needs without time waste, huge costs, and stress. The amount of backend work you put into research and advertising is what makes your audience not only scroll through your content but actually read it. This is what will differentiate your piece from millions of similar ones.
Create a strategy and go for it! Whether it’s polling, graphics, emails, quotes, or backlinks, make a game plan that will promote your content the right way. Then your site will rock.
Do you have any other tips or suggestions? Tell me below in the comments!
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!
Log File Analysis should be a part of every SEO pro’s tool belt, but most SEOs have never conducted one. Which means most SEOs are missing out on unique and invaluable insights that regular crawling tools just can’t produce.
Let’s demystify Log File Analysis so it’s not so intimidating. If you’re interested in the wonderful world of log files and what they can bring to your site audits, this guide is definitely for you.
What are Log Files?
Log Files are files containing detailed logs on who and what is making requests to your website server. Every time a bot makes a request to your site, data (such as the time, date IP address, user agent, etc.) is stored in this log. This valuable data allows any SEO to find out what Googlebot and other crawlers are doing on your site. Unlike regular crawlings, such as with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, this is real-world data — not an estimation of how your site is being crawled. It is an exact overview of how your site is being crawled.
Having this accurate data can help you identify areas of crawl budget waste, easily find access errors, understand how your SEO efforts are affecting crawling and much, much more. The best part is that, in most cases, you can do this with simple spreadsheet software.
In this guide, we will be focussing on Excel to perform Log File Analysis, but I’ll also discuss other tools such as Screaming Frog’s less well-known Log File Analyser which can just make the job a bit easier and faster by helping you manage larger data sets.
Note: owning any software other than Excel is not a requirement to follow this guide or get your hands dirty with Log Files.
How to Open Log Files
Rename .log to .csv
When you get a log file with a .log extension, it is really as easy as renaming the file extension .csv and opening the file in spreadsheet software. Remember to set your operating system to show file extensions if you want to edit these.
How to open split log files
Log files can come in either one big log or multiple files, depending on the server configuration of your site. Some servers will use server load balancing to distribute traffic across a pool or farm of servers, causing log files to be split up. The good news is that it’s really easy to combine, and you can use one of these three methods to combine them and then open them as normal:
Use the command line in Windows by Shift + right-clicking in the folder containing your log files and selecting “Run Powershell from here”
Then run the following command:
copy *.log mylogfiles.csv
You can now open mylogfile.csv and it will contain all your log data.
Or if you are a Mac user, first use the cd command to go to the directory of your log files:
cd Documents/MyLogFiles/
Then, use the cat or concatenate command to join up your files:
cat *.log > mylogfiles.csv
2) Using the free tool, Log File Merge, combine all the log files and then edit the file extension to .csv and open as normal.
3) Open the log files with the Screaming Frog Log File Analyser, which is as simple as dragging and dropping the log files:
Splitting Strings
(Please note: This step isn’t required if you are using Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser)
Once you have your log file open, you’re going to need to split the cumbersome text in each cell into columns for easier sorting later.
Excel’s Text to Column function comes in handy here, and is as easy as selecting all the filled cells (Ctrl / Cmd + A) and going to Excel > Data > Text to Columns and selecting the “Delimited” option, and the delimiter being a Spacecharacter.
Once you’ve separated this out, you may also want to sort by time and date — you can do so in the Time and Date stamp column, commonly separating the data with the “:” colon delimiter.
Your file should look similar to the one below:
As mentioned before, don’t worry if your log file doesn’t look exactly the same — different log files have different formats. As long as you have the basic data there (time and date, URL, user-agent, etc.) you’re good to go!
Understanding Log Files
Now that your log files are ready for analysis, we can dive in and start to understand our data. There are many formats that log files can take with multiple different data points, but they generally include the following:
Server IP
Date and time
Server request method (e.g. GET / POST)
Requested URL
HTTP status code
User-agent
More details on the common formats can be found below if you’re interested in the nitty gritty details:
WC3
Apache and NGINX
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
HA Proxy
JSON
How to quickly reveal crawl budget waste
As a quick recap, Crawl Budget is the number of pages a search engine crawls upon every visit of your site. Numerous factors affect crawl budget, including link equity or domain authority, site speed, and more. With Log File Analysis, we will be able to see what sort of crawl budget your website has and where there are problems causing crawl budget to be wasted.
Ideally, we want to give crawlers the most efficient crawling experience possible. Crawling shouldn’t be wasted on low-value pages and URLs, and priority pages (product pages for example) shouldn’t have slower indexation and crawl rates because a website has so many dead weight pages. The name of the game is crawl budget conservation, and with good crawl budget conversion comes better organic search performance.
See crawled URLs by user agent
Seeing how frequently URLs of the site are being crawled can quickly reveal where search engines are putting their time into crawling.
If you’re interested in seeing the behavior of a single user agent, this is easy as filtering out the relevant column in excel. In this case, with a WC3 format log file, I’m filtering the cs(User-Agent) column by Googlebot:
And then filtering the URI column to show the number of times Googlebot crawled the home page of this example site:
This is a fast way of seeing if there are any problem areas by URI stem for a singular user-agent. You can take this a step further by looking at the filtering options for the URI stem column, which in this case is cs-uri-stem:
From this basic menu, we can see what URLs, including resource files, are being crawled to quickly identify any problem URLs (parameterized URLs that shouldn’t be being crawled for example).
You can also do broader analyses with Pivot tables. To get the number of times a particular user agent has crawled a specific URL, select the whole table (Ctrl/cmd + A), go to Insert > Pivot Table and then use the following options:
All we’re doing is filtering by User Agent, with the URL stems as rows, and then counting the number of times each User-agent occurs.
With my example log file, I got the following:
Then, to filter by specific User-Agent, I clicked the drop-down icon on the cell containing “(All),” and selected Googlebot:
Understanding what different bots are crawling, how mobile bots are crawling differently to desktop, and where the most crawling is occurring can help you see immediately where there is crawl budget waste and what areas of the site need improvement.
Find low-value add URLs
Crawl budget should not be wasted on Low value-add URLs, which are normally caused by session IDs, infinite crawl spaces, and faceted navigation.
To do this, go back to your log file, and filter by URLs that contain a “?” or question mark symbols from the URL column (containing the URL stem). To do this in Excel, remember to use “~?” or tilde question mark, as shown below:
A single “?” or question mark, as stated in the auto filter window, represents any single character, so adding the tilde is like an escape character and makes sure to filter out the question mark symbol itself.
Isn’t that easy?
Find duplicate URLs
Duplicate URLs can be a crawl budget waste and a big SEO issue, but finding them can be a pain. URLs can sometimes have slight variants (such as a trailing slash vs a non-trailing slash version of a URL).
Ultimately, the best way to find duplicate URLs is also the least fun way to do so — you have to sort by site URL stem alphabetically and manually eyeball it.
One way you can find trailing and non-trailing slash versions of the same URL is to use the SUBSTITUTE function in another column and use it to remove all forward slashes:
=SUBSTITUTE(C2, “/”, “”)
In my case, the target cell is C2 as the stem data is on the third column.
Then, use conditional formatting to identify duplicate values and highlight them.
However, eyeballing is, unfortunately, the best method for now.
See the crawl frequency of subdirectories
Finding out which subdirectories are getting crawled the most is another quick way to reveal crawl budget waste. Although keep in mind, just because a client’s blog has never earned a single backlink and only gets three views a year from the business owner’s grandma doesn’t mean you should consider it crawl budget waste — internal linking structure should be consistently good throughout the site and there might be a strong reason for that content from the client’s perspective.
To find out crawl frequency by subdirectory level, you will need to mostly eyeball it but the following formula can help:
The above formula looks like a bit of a doozy, but all it does is check if there is a trailing slash, and depending on the answer, count the number of trailing slashes and subtract either 2 or 1 from the number. This formula could be shortened if you remove all trailing slashes from your URL list using the RIGHT formula — but who has the time. What you’re left with is subdirectory count (starting from 0 from as the first subdirectory).
Replace C2 with the first URL stem / URL cell and then copy the formula down your entire list to get it working.
Make sure you replace all of the C2s with the appropriate starting cell and then sort the new subdirectory counting column by smallest to largest to get a good list of folders in a logical order, or easily filter by subdirectory level. For example, as shown in the below screenshots:
The above image is subdirectories sorted by level.
The above image is subdirectories sorted by depth.
If you’re not dealing with a lot of URLs, you could simply sort the URLs by alphabetical order but then you won’t get the subdirectory count filtering which can be a lot faster for larger sites.
See crawl frequency by content type
Finding out what content is getting crawled, or if there are any content types that are hogging crawl budget, is a great check to spot crawl budget waste. Frequent crawling on unnecessary or low priority CSS and JS files, or how crawling is occurring on images if you are trying to optimize for image search, can easily be spotted with this tactic.
In Excel, seeing crawl frequency by content type is as easy as filtering by URL or URI stem using the Ends With filtering option.
Quick Tip: You can also use the “Does Not End With” filter and use a .html extension to see how non-HTML page files are being crawled — always worth checking in case of crawl budget waste on unnecessary js or css files, or even images and image variations (looking at you WordPress). Also, remember if you have a site with trailing and non-trailing slash URLs to take that into account with the “or” operator with filtering.
Spying on bots: Understand site crawl behavior
Log File Analysis allows us to understand how bots behave by giving us an idea of how they prioritize. How do different bots behave in different situations? With this knowledge, you can not only deepen your understanding of SEO and crawling, but also give you a huge leap in understanding the effectiveness of your site architecture.
See most and least crawled URLs
This strategy has been touched up previously with seeing crawled URLs by user-agent, but it’s even faster.
In Excel, select a cell in your table and then click Insert > Pivot Table, make sure the selection contains the necessary columns (in this case, the URL or URI stem and the user-agent) and click OK.
Once you have your pivot table created, set the rows to the URL or URI stem, and the summed value as the user-agent.
From there, you can right-click in the user-agent column and sort the URLs from largest to smallest by crawl count:
Now you’ll have a great table to make charts from or quickly review and look for any problematic areas:
A question to ask yourself when reviewing this data is: Are the pages you or the client would want being crawled? How often? Frequent crawling doesn’t necessarily mean better results, but it can be an indication as to what Google and other content user-agents prioritize most.
Crawl frequency per day, week, or month
Checking the crawling activity to identify issues where there has been loss of visibility around a period of time, after a Google update or in an emergency can inform you where the problem might be. This is as simple as selecting the “date” column, making sure the column is in the “date” format type, and then using the date filtering options on the date column. If you’re looking to analyze a whole week, just select the corresponding days with the filtering options available.
Crawl frequency by directive
Understanding what directives are being followed (for instance, if you are using a disallow or even a no-index directive in robots.txt) by Google is essential to any SEO audit or campaign. If a site is using disallows with faceted navigation URLs, for example, you’ll want to make sure these are being obeyed. If they aren’t, recommend a better solution such as on-page directives like meta robots tags.
To see crawl frequency by directive, you’ll need to combine a crawl report with your log file analysis.
(Warning: We’re going to be using VLOOKUP, but it’s really not as complicated as people make it out to be)
To get the combined data, do the following:
Get the crawl from your site using your favorite crawling software. I might be biased, but I’m a big fan of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, so I’m going to use that.
If you’re also using the spider, follow the steps verbatim, but otherwise, make your own call to get the same results.
Export the Internal HTML report from the SEO Spider (Internal Tab > “Filter: HTML”) and open up the “internal_all.xlsx” file.
From there, you can filter the “Indexability Status” column and remove all blank cells. To do this, use the “does not contain” filter and just leave it blank. You can also add the “and” operator and filter out redirected URLs by making the filter value equal “does not contain → “Redirected” as shown below:
This will show you canonicalized, no-index by meta robots and canonicalized URLs.
Copy this new table out (with just the Address and Indexability Status columns) and paste it in another sheet of your log file analysis export.
Now for some VLOOKUP magic. First, we need to make sure the URI or URL column data is in the same format as the crawl data.
Log Files don’t generally have the root domain or protocol in the URL, so we either need to remove the head of the URL using “Find and Replace” in our newly made sheet, or make a new column in your log file analysis sheet append the protocol and root domain to the URI stem. I prefer this method because then you can quickly copy and paste a URL that you are seeing problems with and take a look. However, if you have a massive log file, it is probably a lot less CPU intensive with the “Find and Replace” method.
To get your full URLs, use the following formula but with the URL field changed to whatever site you are analyzing (and make sure the protocol is correct as well). You’ll also want to change D2 to the first cell of your URL column
=”<a href="https://www.example.com" &d2
Drag” class=”redactor-autoparser-object”>https://www.example.com”&D… down the formula to the end of your Log file table and get a nice list of full URLs:
Now, create another column and call it “Indexability Status”. In the first cell, use a VLOOKUP similar to the following: =VLOOKUP(E2,CrawlSheet!A$1:B$1128,2,FALSE). Replace E2 with the first cell of you “Full URL” column, then make the lookup table into your new. crawl sheet. Remember to sue the dollar signs so that the lookup table doesn’t change as you. apply the formula to further roles. Then, select the correct column (1 would be the first column of the index table, so number 2 is the one we are after). Use the FALSE range lookup mode for exact matching. Now you have a nice tidy list of URLs and their indexability status matched with crawl data:
Crawl frequency by depth and internal links
This analysis allows us to see how a site’s architecture is performing in terms of crawl budget and crawlability. The main aim is to see if you have far more URLs than you do requests — and if you do then you have a problem. Bots shouldn’t be “giving up” on crawling your entire site and not discovering important content or wasting crawl budget on content that is not important.
Tip: It is also worth using a crawl visualization tool alongside this analysis to see the overall architecture of the site and see where there are “off-shoots” or pages with poor internal linking.
To get this all-important data, do the following:
Crawl your site with your preferred crawling tool and export whichever report has both the click depth and number of internal links with each URL.
In my case, I’m using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, going exporting the Internal report:
Use a VLOOKUP to match your URL with the Crawl Depth column and the number of Inlinks, which will give you something like this:
Depending on the type of data you want to see, you might want to filter out only URLs returning a 200 response code at this point or make them filterable options in the pivot table we create later. If you’re checking an e-commerce site, you might want to focus solely on product URLs, or if you’re optimizing crawling of images you can filter out by file type by filtering the URI column of your log file using the “Content-Type” column of your crawl export and making an option to filter with a pivot table. As with all of these checks, you have plenty of options!
Using a pivot table, you can now analyze crawl rate by crawl depth (filtering by the particular bot in this case) with the following options:
To get something like the following:
Better data than Search Console? Identifying crawl issues
Search Console might be a go-to for every SEO, but it certainly has flaws. Historical data is harder to get, and there are limits on the number of rows you can view (at this time of writing it is 1000). But, with Log File Analysis, the sky’s the limit. With the following checks, we’re going to be discovered crawl and response errors to give your site a full health check.
Discover Crawl Errors
An obvious and quick check to add to your arsenal, all you have to do is filter the status column of your log file (in my case “sc-status” with a W3C log file type) for 4xx and 5xx errors:
Find inconsistent server responses
A particular URL may have varying server responses over time, which can either be normal behavior, such as when a broken link has been fixed or a sign there is a serious server issue occurring such as when heavy traffic to your site causes a lot more internal server errors and is affecting your site’s crawlability.
Analyzing server responses is as easy as filtering by URL and by Date:
Alternatively, if you want to quickly see how a URL is varying in response code, you can use a pivot table with the rows set to the URL, the columns set to the response codes and counting the number of times a URL has produced that response code. To achieve this setup create a pivot table with the following settings:
This will produce the following:
As you can see in the above table, you can clearly see “/inconcistent.html” (highlighted in the red box) has varying response codes.
View Errors by Subdirectory
To find which subdirectories are producing the most problems, we just need to do some simple URL filtering. Filter out the URI column (in my case “cs-uri-stem”) and use the “contains” filtering option to select a particular subdirectory and any pages within that subdirectory (with the wildcard *):
For me, I checked out the blog subdirectory, and this produced the following:
View Errors by User Agent
Finding which bots are struggling can be useful for numerous reasons including seeing the differences in website performance for mobile and desktop bots, or which search engines are best able to crawl more of your site.
You might want to see which particular URLs are causing issues with a particular bot. The easiest way to do this is with a pivot table that allows for filtering the number of times a particular response code occurs per URI. To achieve this make a pivot table with the following settings:
From there, you can filter by your chosen bot and response code type, such as image below, where I’m filtering for Googlebot desktop to seek out 404 errors:
Alternatively, you can also use a pivot table to see how many times a specific bot produces different response codes as a whole by creating a pivot table that filters by bot, counts by URI occurrence, and uses response codes as rows. To achieve this use the settings below:
For example, in the pivot table (below), I’m looking at how many of each response code Googlebot is receiving:
Diagnose on-page problems
Websites need to be designed not just for humans, but for bots. Pages shouldn’t be slow loading or be a huge download, and with log file analysis, you can see both of these metrics per URL from a bot’s perspective.
Find slow & large pages
While you can sort your log file by the “time taken” or “loading time” column from largest to smallest to find the slowest loading pages, it’s better to look at the average load time per URL as there could be other factors that might have contributed to a slow request other than the web page’s actual speed.
To do this, create a pivot table with the rows set to the URI stem or URL and the summed value set to the time taken to load or load time:
Then using the drop-down arrow, in this case, where it says “Sum of time-taken” and go to “Value Field Settings”:
In the new window, select “Average” and you’re all set:
Now you should have something similar to the following when you sort the URI stems by largest to smallest and average time taken:
Find large pages
You can now add the download size column (in my case “sc-bytes”) using the settings shown below. Remember that the set the size to the average or sum depending on what you would like to see. For me, I’ve done the average:
And you should get something similar to the following:
Bot behavior: Verifying and analyzing bots
The best and easiest way to understand bot and crawl behavior is with log file analysis as you are again getting real-world data, and it’s a lot less hassle than other methods.
Find un-crawled URLs
Simply take the crawl of your website with your tool of choice, and then take your log file an compare the URLs to find unique paths. You can do this with the “Remove Duplicates” feature of Excel or conditional formatting, although the former is a lot less CPU intensive especially for larger log files. Easy!
Identify spam bots
Unnecessary server strain from spam and spoof bots is easily identified with log files and some basic command line operators. Most requests will also have an IP associated with it, so using your IP column (in my case, it is titled “c-ip” in a W3C format log), remove all duplicates to find each individual requesting IP.
From there, you should follow the process outlined in Google’s document for verifying IPs (note: For Windows users, use the nslookup command):
Conclusion: Log Files Analysis — not as scary as it sounds
With some simple tools at your disposal, you can dive deep into how Googlebot behaves. When you understand how a website handles crawling, you can diagnose more problems than you can chew — but the real power of Log File Analysis lies in being able to test your theories about Googlebot and extending the above techniques to gather your own insights and revelations.
What theories would you test using log file analysis? What insights could you gather from log files other than the ones listed above? Let me know in the comments below.
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!
After you’ve put in the work with technical SEO and made your discoveries, there’s one thing left to do: present your findings to the client and agree on next steps. And like many things in our industry, that’s easier said than done. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Benjamin Estes from Distilled presents his framework for making technical recommendations to clients and stakeholders to best position you for success
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi. My name is Ben. I’m a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. Today I’d like to talk to you about something a bit different than most Whiteboard Fridays.
I’d like to talk about how to work with clients or bosses in a different way. Instead of thinking about technical SEO and how to make technical discoveries or see what problems are, I want to talk about how to present your findings to your client after you’ve done that discovery.
Problem
What’s the problem that we’re dealing with here? Well, the scenario is that we’ve got a recommendation and we’re presenting it to a client or a boss.
Easy enough. But what’s the goal of that situation? I would argue that there’s a very specific goal, and the best way to look at it is the goal is to change the action of the individual or the organization. Now, what if that wasn’t the case? You know, what if you worked with a client and none of their actions changed as a result of that engagement? Well, what was the point?
You know, should they have even trusted you in the first place to come in and help them? So if this is the specific goal that we’re trying to accomplish, what’s the best way to do that? Most people jump right to persuasion. They say, “If only I could something, the client would listen to me.” “If only I could present the forecast.”
If only I could justify the ROI, something, some mysterious research that probably hasn’t been done yet and maybe can’t even be done at all. My argument here is that the idea of persuasion is toxic. When you say, “If only I could this,” really what you mean is, “If only I had the evidence, the client would have to do as I say.” You’re trying to get control over the client when you say these things.
It turns out that human beings basically do whatever they want to do, and no matter how well you make your case, if it’s made for your reasons and not the client’s, they’re still not going to want to do the thing that you recommend. So I’ve introduced a framework at Distilled that helps us get past this, and that’s what I’d like to share with you right now.
Approach
The key to this method is that at each step of the process you allow the client to solve the problem for themselves. You give them the opportunity to see the problem from their own perspective and maybe even come up with their own solution. There are three steps to this.
1. Suggest
First, you suggest the problem.
When I say “suggest,” I don’t mean suggest a solution. I mean you plant the idea in their mind that this is a problem that needs solving. It’s almost like inception. So you first say, “Here is what I see.” Hold up the mirror to them. Make the observations that they haven’t yet made themselves.
2. Demonstrate
Step two, demonstrate, and what demonstrate means is you’re allowing them to emulate your behavior.
You’re demonstrating what you would do in that situation if you had to deal with the same problem. So you say, “Here’s what I would do if I were in your shoes.”
3. Elaborate
Finally, you elaborate. You say, “Here’s why I think this is a reasonable activity.” Now I’ve got to be honest. Most of the time, in my experience, if you use this framework, you never even make it to elaboration, because the client solves the problem somewhere back here and you can just end the meeting.
The key, again, is to let the client solve the problem for themselves, for their own reason, in the way that they feel most comfortable.
Example
Let’s look at an example, because that is, again, kind of abstract. So let’s say that you’ve made an observation in Google Search Console. The client has all these pages that Google has discovered, but they shouldn’t really be in the index or indexable or discoverable at all.
Start by suggesting
So you start by suggesting. “I see in Search Console that Google has discovered 18 million pages,”when it should be, let’s say, 10,000. “This is from your faceted navigation.” Now notice there’s no judgment. There’s no hint at what should be done about this or even the severity of the problem. You’re just presenting the numbers.
Now we’re already sort of at a turning point. Maybe the client hears this and they do a sort of a head slap and they say, “Of course. You know, I hadn’t seen that problem before. But here’s what I think we should do about it.” You reach some sort of agreement, and the problem is solved and the meeting is over and you get that hour back in your day. But maybe they sort of have some sort of questions about what this means, what this implies, and they want to hear your solution.
Demonstrate what you would do
Well, now it’s time to demonstrate what you would do when presented with that fact. You say, “This would be fixed by adding ‘nofollow’ to links to that faceted content.” Maybe they see how this is an obvious solution to the problem that’s completely compatible with their tech stack, and again you get 50 minutes back in your day because the meeting is done.
You’ve done your job. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they don’t understand why that would be a good solution.
Finally, elaborate
So finally, you get to this stage, which is elaboration. “Here’s why I think this is a good idea. These pages are important for user experience. You don’t want to get rid of the faceted navigation in your e-commerce store, but you do want to not link to those pages for SEO reasons, because maybe there’s no search volume for related terms.”
So for a particular cost range for an item or something like that, there’s just no associated search activity. You need the pages still. So you say, “These pages are important for user experience, but they don’t satisfy any search intent.” At that point, the client says, “Of course. You’ve come up with the ideal solution, and I’m going to implement your recommendation exactly as you’ve given it to me.”
Or they don’t. If they don’t, you’re no worse off. You can basically walk out of that meeting saying, “I’ve done everything possible to get the client on board with my recommendation, but it just didn’t work out.” That feeling of being able to know that you did the right thing has been a very powerful one, at least in my experience. I’ve been consulting for about eight years, and just going through this process helps me sleep better at night knowing that I really did my job.
We’ve also found that this has a really high success rate with clients too. Finally, you’ll discover that it’s much, much easier to put together presentations if you know that this is the format that you’re going to be presenting in. So if you think that your job is to give the evidence to the client to convince them of something, there’s really no end to the evidence that you could gather.
You could always gather more evidence, and when you get to that final meeting, you can say, “Oh, it’s not because I saw the problem in the wrong way or I communicated it in the wrong way.It’s that I didn’t justify the ROI enough.” There’s no leaving that. That rabbit hole just keeps going, just keeps going. So again, this method has been extremely successful for Distilled. If you’re interested in engaging with this more, you can read at this URL, dis.tl/present, where I give a more thorough write-up on this.
Of course, I’d love to hear any thoughts or experiences that you have with this method. Thank you very much.
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!
Last time I counted, there were upwards of 35 components to a single Google Business Profile (GBP). Hotel panels, in and of themselves, are enough to make one squeal, but even on a more “typical” GPB, it’s easy to overlook some low-lying features. Often, you may simply ignore them until life makes you engage.
A few weeks ago, a local SEO came to me with a curious real-life anecdote, in which a client was pressuring the agency to have all their staff hit the “like” button on all of the brand’s positive Google reviews. Presumably, the client felt this would help their business in some manner. More on the nitty-gritty of this scenario later, but at first, it made me face that I’d set this whole GBP feature to one side of my brain as not terribly important.
Fast forward a bit, and I’ve now spent a couple of days looking more closely at the review like button, its uses, abuses, and industry opinions about it. I’ve done a very small study, conducted a poll, and spoken to three different Google reps. Now, I’m ready to share what I’ve learned with you.
Wait, what is the “like” button?
Crash course: Rolled out in 2016, this simple function allows anyone logged into a Google account to thumbs-up any review they like. There is no opposite thumbs-down function. From the same account, you can only thumb up a single review once. Hitting the button twice simply reverses the “liking” action. Google doesn’t prevent anyone from hitting the button, including owners of the business being reviewed.
At a glance, do Google review likes influence anything?
My teammate, Kameron Jenkins, and I plugged 20 totally random local businesses into a spreadsheet, with 60 total reviews being highlighted on the front interface of the GBP. Google highlights just three reviews on the GBP and I wanted to know two things:
How many businesses out of twenty had a liked review anywhere in their corpus
Did the presence of likes appear to be impacting which reviews Google was highlighting on the front of the GBP?
The study was very small, and should certainly be expanded on, but here’s what I saw:
60 percent of the brands had earned at least one like somewhere in their review corpus.
15 percent of the time, Google highlighted only reviews with zero likes, even when a business had liked reviews elsewhere in its corpus. But, 85 percent of the time, if a business had some likes, at least one liked review was making it to the front of the GBP.
At a glance, I’d say it looks like a brand’s liked reviews may have an advantage when it comes to which sentiment Google highlights. This can be either a positive or negative scenario, depending on whether the reviews that get thumbed up on your listing are your positive or negative reviews.
And that leads us to…
Google’s guidelines for the use of the review likes function
But don’t get too excited, because it turns out, no such guidelines exist. Though it’s been three years since Google debuted this potentially-influential feature, I’ve confirmed with them that nothing has actually been published about what you should and shouldn’t do with this capability. If that seems like an open invitation to spam, I hear you!
So, since there were no official rules, I had to hunt for the next best thing. I was thinking about that SEO agency with the client wanting to pay them to thumb up reviews when I decided to take a Twitter poll. I asked my followers:
Unsurprisingly, given the lack of guidelines, 15 percent of 111 respondents had no idea whether it would be fishy to employ staff or markers to thumb up brand reviews. The dominant 53 percent felt it would be totally fine, but a staunch 32 percent called it spam. The latter group added additional thoughts like these:
I want to thank Tess Voecks, Gyi Tsakalakis, and everyone else for taking the poll. And I think the disagreement in it is especially interesting when we look at what happens next.
After polling the industry, I contacted three forms of Google support: phone, chat, and Twitter. If you found it curious that SEOs might disagree about whether or not paying for review likes is spam, I’m sorry to tell you that Google’s own staff doesn’t have brand-wide consensus on this either. In three parts:
1. The Google phone rep was initially unfamiliar with what the like button is. I explained it to her. First, I asked if it was okay for the business owner to hit the like button on the brand’s reviews, she confirmed that it’s fine to do that. This didn’t surprise me. But, when I asked the question about paying people to take such actions, she replied (I paraphrase):
“If a review is being liked by people apart from the owner, it’s not considered as spam.”
“What if the business owner is paying people, like staff or marketers, to like their reviews,” I asked.
“No, it’s not considered spam.”
“Not even then?”
“No,” she said.
2. Next, here’s a screenshot of my chat with a Google rep:
The final response actually amused me (i.e. yeah, go ahead and do that if you want to, but I wouldn’t do it if I were you).
3. Finally, I spoke with Google’s Twitter support, which I always find helpful:
To sum up, we had one Google rep tell is it would be fine and dandy to pay people to thumb up reviews (uh-oh!), but the other two warned against doing this. We’ll go with majority rule here and try to cobble together our own guidelines, in the absence of public ones.
My guidelines for use of the review likes function
Going forward with what we’ve learned, here’s what I would recommend:
As a business owner, if you receive a review you appreciate, definitely go ahead and thumb it up. It may have some influence on what makes it to the highly-visible “front” of your Google Business Profile, and, even if not, it’s a way of saying “thank you” to the customer when you’re also writing your owner response. So, a nice review comes in, respond with thanks and hit the like button. End of story.
Don’t tell anyone in your employ to thumb up your brand’s reviews. That means staff, marketers, and dependents to whom you pay allowance. Two-thirds of Google reps agree this would be spam, and 32 percent of respondents to my poll got it right about this. Buying likes is almost as sad a strategy as buying reviews. You could get caught and damage the very reputation you are hoping to build. It’s just not worth the risk.
While we’re on the subject, avoid the temptation to thumbs-up your competitors’ negative reviews in hopes of getting them to surface on GBPs. Let’s just not go there. I didn’t ask Google specifically about this, but can’t you just see some unscrupulous party deciding this is clever?
If you suspect someone is artificially inflating review likes on positive or negative reviews, the Twitter Google rep suggests flagging the review. So, this is a step you can take, though my confidence in Google taking action on such measures is not high. But, you could try.
How big of a priority should review likes be for local brands?
In the grand scheme of things, I’d put this low on the scale of local search marketing initiatives. As I mentioned, I’d given only a passing glance at this function over the past few years until I was confronted with the fact that people were trying to spam their way to purchased glory with it.
If reputation is a major focus for your brand (and it should be!) I’d invest more resources into creating excellent in-store experiences, review acquisition and management, and sentiment analysis than I would in worrying too much about those little thumbs. But, if you have some time to spare on a deep rep dive, it could be interesting to see if you can analyze why some types of your brand’s reviews get likes and if there’s anything you can do to build on that. I can also see showing positive reviewers that you reward their nice feedback with likes, if for no other reason than a sign of engagement.
What’s your take? Do you know anything about review likes that I should know? Please, share in the comments, and you know what I’ll do if you share a good tip? I’ll thumb up your reply!
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!
Show of hands if the following scenario has ever happened to you:
You make it to a conference. You sit through three to four days of amazing content, network like a boss, fill up on coffee and donuts, and cover page after page of notes — your wrist is dangerously close to being diagnosed with carpal tunnel. The energy in the room is contagious and everyone leaves the conference with the promise of new strategies, connections, and ideas that have the possibility to transform the way you think about business.
Photo credit: Turk Photos
At least, that’s the dream. The reality? Once the conference is over, you’re back to the grind, no longer surrounded by that vibrant “we can do anything” energy that had you so inspired and hyped just days before. The buzz is now a dull hum. Your notebook is full of scribbles that you can no longer decipher, and you have a daunting to-do list to catch up on while you nurse a sugar hangover from eating three-days worth of donuts.
You’ve lost the fire. The conference motivation is gone. You, my friend, have the post-conference scaries.
With MozCon fast approaching, the excitement is building. But so is the anxiety: you know there’s going to be a ton of insightful talks and takeaways to write home about — how do you keep all that goodness going after MozCon?
We’ve all been there! And we want to make sure you’re set up for success. So myself and our Subject Matter Experts whipped up an extensive and effective guide to ensure you can put all the goodness you’ve absorbed at MozCon to work straight away. Read on to see what Britney Muller, Rob Bucci, Cyrus Shepard, Dr. Pete, and Miriam Ellis have to offer!
Before you head to MozCon, though, make sure you do these things first
We know this isn’t your first rodeo. But on the off chance that it is, or if you need a reminder before you set foot in MozCon, make like the Boy Scouts of America: Be prepared.
Because I’m a keener (remind me to tell you about the time I waited for 24 hours to be first in line for The Fellowship of the Ring movie) with a tendency to overprepare (remind me also to tell you about my first day of school where I packed all my favorite Nancy Drews, my best pencil crayons, a raincoat, and a pair of extra socks), I spend quite a chunk of time ensuring I have everything I need before an event.
You don’t need to be as prepared as my eight-year-old self, but here’s a brief checklist of things to do before you pack your bags and set sail for MozCon:
Study the agenda — You’ve likely already glanced at who’s speaking. Take another skim to get an idea of who is speaking and what topics will fulfill an educational gap. Even if a topic isn’t related to your area of work, it’s still worthwhile to listen — who knows what you’ll uncover.
Set goals for what you’d like to learn — Whatever your game plan looks like, flesh it out to flesh out. Show up ready to learn.
Prepare your note-taking tools — There is no such thing as too many pens, not at a conference like MozCon. You’ll be taking a ton of notes, so prepare your note-taking tools, whatever they may be — charge your laptop or tablets, pack a spare notebook and some well-inked pens, or practice your telepathy if you plan on sending takeaways to your team via your mind.
Subscribe to the Moz blog — We have oodles of content for you to sink your teeth into and there’s something for everyone, from basic SEO to local search to the nitty-gritty technical. Plus, we’ll be doing conference recaps after each day, so even if you couldn’t make it this year, you’ll get all the juicy details straight to your inbox when you subscribe.
Make connections — There is ample opportunity at MozCon to network and meet new people but it never hurts to get a lay of the digital land before you step foot in Seattle. Follow the hashtag #mozcon on Twitter to stay up to date with MozCon goers and ask important questions of our speakers, like this:
You can also join the Facebook group to find out when people are arriving and pop in on conversations to get your name and face out there. If you know of people you want to reconnect that will be attending, now is a good idea to reach out and reconnect. Set up a time to chat over a coffee or maybe make plans to sit together at our Birds of Feather table.
At the conference
It’s Day One of MozCon and you’ve successfully found the coffee. Now what?
Attend every session…
And we mean every. Single. Session.
The great thing about MozCon is that it’s a single track session, so you don’t have to pick one talk over another. That also means, though, that the temptation can be high for skipping one or two.
“It may be tempting to sleep in on a morning session, but so much magic happens when you aren’t there. You never know what nuggets of insight you’ll miss.” — Cyrus Shepard
“I often find I have some of my best ideas at conferences, even if they’re not related to anything the speaker is talking about. Capture those ideas, too, and add them to your action plan.” — Dr. Pete
…But don’t be afraid to mingle in-between sessions
“Take breaks if you feel like it and spend some time meeting people out in the lobby. New MozCon friends can help hold each other accountable after the conference. I’ve met some of my closest industry friends in the lobby of conferences during a session — hi, Cyrus!” — Britney Muller
Remember what you learn
There’s a lot of information to digest and chances are that your hurried note-taking isn’t going to make a ton of sense once the MozCon high is over. To make deciphering your notes easier once you’re back at the office, add three key takeaways or any follow up you want to do on the topic after each session.
You can also create a page dedicated to takeaways that you think are worthy. While I’m definitely taking notes during each session, I reserve a separate page for any ideas, theories, or strategies that I think are valuable to explore.
Make sure you’re keeping your goals in mind, too. If you had planned on learning new things at MozCon, keep your ears open for any topics that piqued your interest.
“Write down at least one topic that grabbed your interest but that you felt could be studied further and commit to doing that study at your business and publishing your findings. Don’t forget to ping the original presenter when you do, letting them know their talk inspired your further investigation.” — Miriam Ellis
“At the end of each conference day, I also like to schedule emails to myself (a few weeks out) as reminders to attempt the things I learned about that day.” —Britney Muller
Keep tabs on live tweeters
MozCon has some pretty prolific live tweeters that know just how to distill all the right takeaways into 280 characters (which, IMO, is quite a feat). Some of our past MozCon live-tweeters have included:
You can also keep up with the conference goers by following the conference hashtag, #mozcon.
“Also, follow Cyrus Shepard on Twitter and do everything he says!” — Britney Muller
Take note of any free templates, tools, or spreadsheets
Much like parents who want nothing but the best from you (and also to sometimes show off your life successes on the family fridge), the speakers want you to excel in life after MozCon. Which is why you’re bound to find a plethora of downloadable templates and spreadsheets during their talk. Take note of any that you’d like to try back at the office. Make sure to also follow the speakers on Twitter for any updates or insider tips on how to make the most of their new resources.
Thanks #mozcon! Here is the Google Tag Manager recipe we released today to help you measure if people are actually reading your content. Enjoy! https://t.co/9Iy8VQA51l
I’m sure you already know, but on the off chance you didn’t know, you’ll be able to download all the speaker’s slide decks once their talks are over. So if there was something you missed, wanted to share with the team at home base, or needed clarification on, you can do so with one click of a button once they’re available.
After the conference
Write about it
I know the last thing you want to do right after three days of learning and writing is to go and do more writing. But Future You will be so happy that Past You did this one thing.
The second you’re done MozCon-ing, write everything down. Get it all out of your brain and onto paper. Because otherwise, you’ll forget why you underlined a word or phrase three times or the cool new project ideas you had while chatting at dinner. You won’t mean to, obviously. It’s just one of those unfortunate facts of life. Kind of like drifting off to sleep with a really great idea for a band name — you’ll tuck it away in a pocket of your brain, certain you won’t forget about it in the morning. But you will. And the world will never know of They Might Be Little Pigeons.
So, write everything down the second you can.
“I’m one of those people who takes notes like, “Cheese fritters + SEO = YES!” and am very excited about it and have no idea what it meant a week later. So: Re-copy your notes or write a summary, ASAP, while it’s still fresh in your mind— even if it’s on the flight home.” — Dr. Pete
Schedule thinking time
The first week back at the office, block out some time in your calendar to percolate over what you learned at MozCon. I can’t stress this one enough: When we get back into the real world, we dive right into our list of to-dos, at home and at work. And the longer we delay the thinking and brainstorming process, the bigger the chance we’ll lose motivation or get bogged down by more projects.
Carve out some thinking time for yourself in your calendar the second you’re back at your desk to ask yourself some questions:
What really stood out for me?
What do I want to apply right away?
What is going to be effective short term vs. long term?
I like to ideate to-do lists from these questions — maybe that’s a follow-up email with the speaker or a task to read further resources from their talk. Or maybe it’s to set up a meeting with my team to try out a new strategy. The point is: if I take this time now to marinate, the better chance I have of helping out future me — and future me really appreciates that.
“It’s so easy to go from hundreds of ideas to doing nothing concrete, and as soon as you return to your desk, you’re going to be buried in emails and requests. Commit to something actionable before you open up your inbox.” — Dr. Pete
Review your action items
Now that you’ve done your big thinking, it’s time to turn those takeaways and actions items into, well, action.
Think back to the goals you outlined before you set foot inside MozCon — did you meet any of them? How well did the topics address your questions? And how will you apply your action items? When I’m looking over my notes for any new ideas we can execute on, I like to make a table with two columns: 1) Things that we don’t do but could and 2) Things we’re currently doing but could be doing better.
Got a lot of action items and feel a tad overwhelmed? Just remember: If you apply just one action item a week, even if it’s small, that’s still fifty small changes you’ve made in one year. And they can all add up to one big change.
You’ll want to prioritize them like so:
Strategic initiatives to implement right away
Processes you can improve
Areas for future learning
“A week after the conference, review your “action items” — either by yourself or with your team. Prepare a presentation for the top things you learned and share with any team members that didn’t attend.” — Cyrus Shepard
“Pin yourself down to three specific to-dos for the month after the conference.” — Dr. Pete
Stay inspired
Remember that anything in life worth having (relationships, bangs, product launches, puzzles) requires more than just an idea — it takes time and work. Rather than let all that enthusiasm you had at MozCon fade away, keep the momentum going by reading and learning new things. A good place to start is by subscribing to daily industry reads that can fuel your inspiration. Here is just a sampling to get you started:
“Having a go-to list of daily industry reads is a really good way to keep the sense of inspiration up.” — Rob Bucci
Use your connections
What good was all that networking if you don’t put it to use — especially if, like me, you’re a Level-12 Introvert?
Make sure all those hard-earned connections don’t go to waste. Chances are, if you saw them at MozCon, you’ll be seeing them at the same tracks and conferences, so it’d be good to set some sort of foundation
All it takes is a LinkedIn message or an email. And they’ll appreciate you following up — bonus points if you make it personal. I’ve made several follow up emails after conferences and almost all blossomed into successful working relationships thanks in large part to emails that began as though we were continuing the conversation we had at MozCon. It doesn’t have to be the same as “Hi, how’s your dog, is she still afraid of traffic cones?,” but a nice “Hi, how is life after MozCon — are you settling back into the 9-5, yet?” goes a long way.
“It’s great to collect business cards, but it’s better to form life-long relationships. If you haven’t connected with those you met at MozCon, now is the time to do so. At a minimum, email everyone you enjoyed meeting with and let them know that you can be a resource for them.” — Cyrus Shepard
Takeaways
MozCon only comes once a year — like International Pancake Day or 7-11’s Free Slurpee Day — so make sure you’re prepared so you can keep that MozCon fire burning all year round.
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!
Once you’ve identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our “Featured Snippet Opportunities” series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we’re focusing on how to actually make changes that’ll help you do that.
For those of you that need a little brush-up, what’s a featured snippet? Let’s say you do a search for something like, “Are pigs smarter than dogs?” You’re going to see an answer box that says, “Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs.” How cool is that? But you’ll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?
Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs can help you discover your featured snippet opportunities. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don’t have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don’t worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.
So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren’t familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.
1. Identify
All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you’re on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.
2. Understand
From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I’m doing all of this with you. It’s been a struggle, and it’s been fun, but sometimes this isn’t very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I’m not even looking at some of this stuff when I’m comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I’ll tell you what I mean in a second.
3. Target
So we have an example of how I’ve been able to already steal one. Hopefully, it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?
Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that’s easy to consume.
Summaries do well. Whether they’re at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
Provide unique info
Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.
How To Target Featured Snippet Examples
What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I’ve been working on cleaning up.
Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it’s a big deal, maybe it’s not. I just changed them to numbers to see what’s going to happen. I’ll keep you posted.
Fix broken links. But I’m also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I’m fixing broken links. I have the Check My Links tool. It’s a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what’s a 404 or what I might need to update.
Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors’ eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I’ve even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it’s that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You’re just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.
One interesting thing that I’ve come across recently was for the keyword “MozRank.” Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it’s not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.
So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, “Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney.”
I don’t know if that’s going to work. I know it’s a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I’ll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.
How we nabbed the “find backlinks” featured snippet
All right. How did I nab the featured snippet “find backlinks”? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.
Clean up the title
So we go from the title “How to Find Your Competitor’s Backlinks Next Level” to “How to Find Backlinks.” I’m just simplifying, cleaning it up.
Clean up the H2s
The first H2, “How to Check the Backlinks of a Site.” Clean it up, “How to Find Backlinks?” That’s it. I don’t change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I’m just tweaking text a little bit here and there.
Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies
I changed “Enter your competitor’s domain URL” — it felt a little duplicate — to “Enter your competitor’s URL.” Let’s see. “Export results into CSV,” what kind of results? I changed that to “export backlink data into CSV.” “Compile CSV results from all competitors,” what kind of results? “Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors.”
So you can look through this. All I’m doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.
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!
