Bruce Clay's Blog, page 31

Make Raw Data Meaningful: Excel Formulas and Data Visualization

Make Raw Data Meaningful: Excel Formulas and Data Visualization was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

In this SMX West liveblog coverage of the session “Expert Excel Essentials,” we’re reminded that Excel is a versatile problem-solving tool that nearly everyone has access to. Let’s turn raw data into something that people understand and can make decisions using!

Moderator Chris Sherman says that an Excel-focused session has been running at SMX for a few years. It started as an experiment. Search marketers know Excel but there are different levels of knowledge and skill. If used properly Excel is a Swiss Army Knife, so it pays to invest in your Excel chops. After hearing the Excel tips shared here you’ll be inspired to go back to your job and do things in a tool (Excel) that most people have access to, so you’ll feel empowered to make a difference.

Timothy Gillman (left) and Brett Snyder share “Expert Excel Essentials” at SMX West.

Introducing our speakers:

Brett Snyder (@brettasnyder), Knucklepuck
Timothy Gillman (@TimGillmanDrums), Analytics Strategist at Portent Inc.

Brett Snyder: Excel Formulas to Solve Problems

SEO is a tactic that supports an overall strategy with many mediums and channels, says Brett Snyder. The goal of all the media is to be where people are looking when they search, and to be where they are when they’re looking so you can join their conversation.

Some are overwhelmed by Excel, a raw export of numbers. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, you should feel excited about the opportunity to manipulate data.

He’ll share some simple formulas that will help you look at the data in the way you want, save time, and focus on the right information. How you collect and assess data can only be as good as your understanding of the problem you’re facing and the kind of solution you want.

The data you collect must be:

Simple.
Valuable.
Actionable.

You should use Excel to better understand why something happened and what’s next.

He shares some Excel formulas that help you solve specific problems next:

Discover Canonical Tag Inconsistencies

When two pages of near duplicate content have to exist for the user, you tell the search engine to direct the signals to a single page using the canonical tag. In an audit you may discover canonical tag misuse. The Excel function you can use for this is the =IF function.

=IF(Logical Test, Value if Yes, Value if No)

He uses =IF function logical tests as nested functions. This allows for qualitative analysis.

For more on nested functions, check out Brett’s presentation from 2014 SMX West.

Discover Which Pages on Your Site Have No Visits

To discover which pages on your site are getting zero visits use this Excel formula:

=CONCATENATE("http://www.brettasnyder.com",C3)

Use a raw block of text like the domain name that will be the same every time or data from an individual cell.

This formula is combined with Screaming Frog, and together the two tools tell you all the things you can find from crawling your links. You’ll get a list of all the URLs on the website.

Use a vlookup function to merge the data set with the Google Analytics visits export. Now you’ll cut through the noise and be able to see the pages on your site that have no visits.

Remove Duplicate Domains from a Backlink Analysis

You want to know the best link targets and see a list of 50 different domains, not a bunch of results of links from the same domain.

Use this formula:

=LEFT(C3, FIND("/",C3,9))

Find the first slash after the ninth character and it strips out all the extensions beyond the root domain. He wrote more about how to use this function here: Remove Duplicate Domains for Competitive Backlink Analysis.

To conclude he shares a mindset to approach Excel: “It’s the most versatile problem solving tool you have.” Determine what solution you need, then back into the problem.

Timothy Gillman: 3 Steps to Visualizing Data

Timothy Gillman is an analytics strategist at Portent Inc.He says he’s an “Excel wizard” and specializes in building tools. According to Timothy, the goal of data presentation is to have no questions at the end, and an epic moment of understanding.

He’ll cover how to: 

Get the data.
Organize it.
Visualize it.

Bonus: he’ll share some high-end stuff.

He walks through a process he uses to get data from Omniture, and how to get data from Google Analytics. In this liveblog coverage, I’ve skipped coverage of the Omniture process;  I cover how the process he outlines for getting data from Google Analytics in the section titled “Using Google Analytics,” below.

Tim prompts us: why bother with Excel if the analytics platform already gives you a visualization? He says that being able to visualize raw data is something you can practice and then you can go across all your raw data sources and make them unified.

How to visualize the data:

Highlight the cells in Excel.
Go to Tables tab and pick a look and style.
Next highlight the part of the table you’re looking to drill into with a chart.
Click the Chart tab.
Pick a style. He recommends staying with 2D.
Clean up! Tufte’s Rule: Minimize the ratio of ink to data. Take away the legend and the lines.

Using Google Analytics (It’s Free and Easy!)

Here Timothy Gillman walks us through the process he uses to get data from Google Analytics.

An example scenario: You want to see all the channels of Q4 2015 based on sessions and goal conversions.

In Google Analytics (GA), go to Audience Overview,then  search for channels. Now, GA will give you what you want plus some other stuff, which you’ll clean up in Excel. Export your data to CSV to work with the data in Excel.

The data you see in GA will be labeled differently than what you see in Excel. Here’s how it translates:

GA → Excel
Dimensions → Categories
Metrics → Data Series

Click the Data tab in Excel to create a pivot table. Click the pivot table icon. Select Manual. You will have a black box. Put dimensions in row labels and metrics in the values area. Then… Voi la! Pivot table! 

Highlight the part of the table you’re looking to drill into with a chart. Click the Chart tab. Make the chart. All good, but uh oh! Conversions are in the .X percent and sessions are in the thousands so you can’t see conversions on the chart at all. In this scenario, you’ll need to add a secondary axis.

Here are some recommended places where you can learn more about power Excel use:

lynda.com Excel courses (paid)
Excel for Dummies (paid)
YouTube tutorials (free)
Microsoft Office Support site has examples and is interactive (free)

An example of all the data visualization tips he shared: the Executive Dashboard Gillman built last year.

The Executive Dashboard was built in Excel primarily off pivot tables, vlookups and logic like =IF statements.

Ask the Search Engines: Google and Bing #SMX West Liveblog

Ask the Search Engines: Google and Bing #SMX West Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s time for “Ask the Search Engines.” Search Engine Land Editor Danny Sullivan welcomes Google’s Gary Illyes and Bing’s Duane Forrester to the stage for a no-holds-barred question and answer session with two of the search industry’s most important figures. These are the men with the inside info that we all want to hear.

If a site has a large number of junk pages in the index, is the webmaster tools removal tool an effective way to remove them?

Gary: No. Kill the pages and remove them from the index. The removal tool should only be used in emergencies, like if you accidentally published something confidential, for example.

Any updates related to Penguin? Panda? Pigeon?

Gary: No.

Now that you want us all to go HTTPS, couldn’t you just pass the keywords back to us?

Gary: Right now the best solution is to use Google Webmaster Tools to get search query data.

Any recommendations you’ve heard or seen at SMX that you think advertisers or marketers should really be doing?

Duane: We’ve been talking about it a long time — marking up your content. If you still think that’s a project for next year, you need to get it done now. And mobile compliance is not optional. What do you feel like when you have a crappy experience on mobile?

Gary: You are using your mobile phone more than your laptop. Phone users are browsing the Internet. You have to provide a good experience for everyone regardless of device or location.

Duane: This is easy stuff to solve for — it’s super easy to test this stuff.

When is Bing going to go all mobile?

Duane: What makes you think we aren’t already?

Can we have a date?

Duane: June 26. It’s my birthday and you wanted a date.

I get errors because I have YouTube videos embedded. When is Google going to fix that?

Gary: We are working on it. I know we have quite a few services that are not in line with what we are asking users to work on.

If we have third-party content embedded on a page, is that going to affect our mobile friendliness?

Gary: It doesn’t affect it right now.

Any guidance on dealing with tabbed content?

Gary: That’s not an issue. On mobile devices, you have to treat content differently because the real estate is different from that stuff, so you have to have some solution. If you have decently sized tabbed targets, then I think you will be just fine.

Duane: It strictly comes down to discoverability.

How would you recommend implementing a redirect on a home page? For instance, if I see you’re coming from California and I want to make the page look more Californian, what should I do?

Gary: We recently announced that we support local crawling. If your content changes based on the user’s IP address and you have a single URL, we will be able to see the different content. But don’t rely on this ability just yet. We launched it in a limited number of countries. The best thing you can do right now is to have a different URL for each location.

Is mobile-friendliness on a scale or is it binary?

Gary: It’s binary.

To gain the mobile friendly label, we’re going to use a stripped down version of our site until the responsive design build is complete. Will having the m dot site indexed impact our desktop site?

If the content is pretty much one to one mapping to your desktop and you’re not doing any markup, we might have a hard time knowing that it’s actually a mobile site. So you probably do want to make sure that the markup on the mobile site is correct.

Do you treat 301 and 302 redirects differently in terms of link equity?

Duane: We’ll hit a 302 redirect five times and then assume it’s a 301 and pass value.

I have pages I want to get rid of in a hurry and I’m going to 404 them. Should I include them in the sitemap or not?

Gary: Include them in the sitemap.

Duane: Don’t include them.

Share your thoughts on a 410 redirect vs. a 404 redirect.

Duane: If you truly remove it and know it’s not coming back, 410 is a firm stake in the ground. The crawler is going to show up and honor what you say — so know what you’re doing. A page is permanently removed with a 410. A 404 has more lag time — you could have made a mistake and we can give you a cushion. But not with a 410.

Gary: To the best of my knowledge, we treat a 404 separately from a 410. 404s can pop up when a server crashes. 410s show up very rarely, and it looks like the developer has to make an effort to actually put the 410 in server headers. This means that that URL is really gone and will be dropped from the index.

Are there differences in crawl depth between Google and Bing?

Duane and Gary: Yes.

You’re recommendation is everything should go to secure, right?

Gary: Yes.

Do we get a ranking boost on Bing for being secure?

Duane: Maybe.

Mobile has really disrupted digital strategy … what is the next disruptive search trend we should be keeping an eye on?

Duane: I think it will be wearables or connected devices. As we’re able to collect information, we’ll be able to learn what’s of interest to people.

Gary: The movie “Her” pretty much depicts the future. The Internet will be omnipresent — 24/7 in our lives.

It’s an Analytics Toolbox Bonanza: Advanced Tools & Custom Dashboards #SMX

It’s an Analytics Toolbox Bonanza: Advanced Tools & Custom Dashboards #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

There’s a good chance you’re not using website analytics tools to their full potential to benefit your understanding of your visitors and your site. In this liveblog coverage of the SMX West session “What’s In My Analytics Toolbox,” you’ll get familiar with Google Analytics custom dashboards that you can create for your own site and with the Google Tag Manager, which can give you insights on some of the otherwise hidden behaviors of your visitors. You’ll also be introduced to a powerful open source platform, Knime, that lets you merge data and visualize data in one place.

The speakers:

Benjamin Spiegel (@nxfxcom), Sr. Partner, Managing Director at GroupM
Jenny Halasz (@jennyhalasz), President, Founder at JLH Marketing
Steve Hammer (@armondhammer), President at RankHammer

Benjamin Spiegel: What’s in My Analytics Toolbox

Things used to be simple. The data we looked at came from one source. It was one-dimensional — a time stamp, a dimension and a metric. Fast forward to today, and we see a lot has changed. Our data is multi-dimensional: a post with or without text, hashtags that add discovery and engagement, retweets and the person’s reach. For best in class insights you have to consider all these dimensions. There are multiple sources where before, there was more or less one, and they have different metrics (views, clicks, likes).

We’re even adding our own metrics on top, making it more complex to understand. In 2013 our toolbox had many tools that didn’t fit together. There were text analytics, competitive data, real-time, media data, impressions data, offline data, and it was hard to tell one story with multiple sources. In 2014 we reset. Out with the tools. Put the questions first. With all our tools, what do we really want to do?

He asked how every level of the organization can access the data, merging the unique data to see what it means for the business and to enable visual storytelling.

Need to approach these questions from multiple perspectives: acquisition perspective, modeling perspective, visualization perspective (pictures, dashboards, scorecards and moving away from spreadsheets), and the management perspective.

The solution they found was Knime at Knime.org, a single tool, open source and free.

Comes with thousands of plug-ins for Google Analytics, Twitter and WordPress.

He loaded the URL of today’s session, put it through an algo, and turned out a word cloud of the key concepts. Then it processed the data against Twitter to see who’s tweeting about it and how often. A further node shows the Twitter users’ data. A step further, run the Twitter users against all social APIs and now you’re seeing a full online social picture of these people. From one URL, the tool runs through 10 other APIs. Twitter and social is one platform it worked for, and they also use it to extend Google Trends — to find out where people are talking about trends (cities) — seeing what states talk about what beauty product the most, for example. 

IMDB: everything
Data.gov: Run media numbers against the population.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia gives you raw data on everything including hourly page views, location specific, device segments, change history, article graph.
SNAP: They extract everything that’s extractable, like 34 million Amazon reviews; extend the voice of the consumer and what they are talking about; linguistic or network analysis.
Social Mention API: This is a near real-time API you can use for free.
Common Crawl Corpus: It’s 541 TB, the entire Internet. It’s hard to handle in terms of size, but you can use it if you’re trying to understand your link graph.

Jenny Halasz: How to Create Awesome Google Analytics Dashboards & Reports

She’s going to look at GA dashboards. They’re free and awesome. Go back and implement immediately and see a benefit.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” –Albert Einstein

http://bit.ly/GADashSMX15 a template dashboard she created. Plug and play, make adjustments based on your needs, then have a pretty report. Log in to GA, paste the link into your address bar, and GA will ask you which account the dashboard will be added to. It’s private until you share it.

Pros: It’s customizable, applicable to any GA segment, set up auto-emails, printable reports, set it up once, FREE.

Cons: It’s not user-friendly, relies on you to know what you need, requires you to set up segments, only holds 12 widgets per dashboard, can’t filter by metric values.

Where to start?

How did people get to your site? -> What did they do while they were there? -> How and why did they leave?

Know these three things and you’ll have a good idea of what’s happening on your website.

Here are the kinds of widgets you’d put on a dashboard to tell you how people got to your site:

 

These widgets show you what they did on your site:

 

And here we see why people left the site:

 

 

Adding filters to your widget, she tends to tell people to stay away from Real-Time statistics because you could spend forever looking at it and have nothing to show for it.

When you use filters, there are two ways (only show / don’t show) and Regex, which is more powerful. Test your expressions on the actual report.

You can set up regular emails of dashboards (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, once).

You may want to set up a custom report. When she looks at sites, she expects areas of the site to perform differently (category vs. product, for example), and a custom report takes customizations and applies them to the dashboard. To decide what your custom reports may be, ask questions to determine importance.

Custom report setup can be challenging because GA isn’t very user-friendly. Think of metrics as things you want to measure and dimensions as containers you want to put those metrics in. Filters are things you want to include or not include.

Remember that data is just data and analysis is what leads to insight.

Steve Hammer: Analytics Toolbox: Google Tag Manager

Designers create innovative experiences beyond the page. The collection of that data is the key to the analysis. If your input is garbage, your output will be too. Get it right up front.

The problem we have is missing data. An input error on your site can be hard to capture How do you know that existed? Actions on infinite scroll are hard to capture. AJAX is hard to capture. How do you track that and what do you do about that? Google Tag Manager opens up capabilities for capturing this data. It gets sold as something easy, everyone can do it, don’t need to talk to IT. But if you do talk to IT, you can do powerful things.

The essential: Variables (macros) is data to use, triggers (rules) is when to fire, and tag is what is fired. A tag is anything you want to happen and that can include a lot of things including HTML and JavaScript.

More interesting uses are in this set of enhanced examples. Conditional firing, AJAX infinite scroll and loading code.

He gives examples of an event of a form filled out, triggered when a certain URL comes up. This breaks the myth that you need a thank-you page to get a form filled out.

Examples of enhanced events you can track through Tag Manager

Another problem Tag Manager solves is getting to the original source. We want to credit an affiliate that introduced the visitor to the channel, not the last that siphoned off the traffic. If the affiliate is the source in the first-party cookie, then you can create and input that marketing source.

Another example is using custom formulas to read form elements and set user value. A shopper for a Bentley has a different value than someone shopping for a Ford.

Infinite scroll is handled with his “theoretical no code method.” If pushstate updates URL, build regex for pagination changes, then create a history change trigger. On this, watch out for back buttons.

Another approach is to piggyback off of “loading” HTML method. The look for a “loading” in the code and then a little script shows when the user scrolled on the page.

Q&A

What do you consider the most underused GA feature?

Spiegel: Custom variables to understand your audience and enabling retargeting.

Hammer: Advanced ecommerce for tracking through the cart process.

Halasz: Tracking schema activity through Tag Manager.

To understand setting up custom variables, look to Annie Cushing of Annielytics.

Bonus tip: Check out cohort analysis in beta in GA, especially if you’re a content-driven business. See if you’ve got a sticky experience on your site. For example, set up a segment to see if people originally reached via email came back.

It’s an Analytics Toolbox Bonanza: Advanced Tools & Custom Dashboards – #SMX 32D

It’s an Analytics Toolbox Bonanza: Advanced Tools & Custom Dashboards – #SMX 32D was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

There’s a good chance you’re not using website analytics tools to their full potential to benefit your understanding of your visitors and your site. In this liveblog coverage of the SMX West session “What’s In My Analytics Toolbox,” you’ll get familiar with Google Analytics custom dashboards that you can create for your own site and with the Google Tag Manager, which can give you insights on some of the otherwise hidden behaviors of your visitors. You’ll also be introduced to a powerful open source platform, Knime, that lets you merge data and visualize data in one place.

The speakers:

Benjamin Spiegel (@nxfxcom), Sr. Partner, Managing Director at GroupM
Jenny Halasz (@jennyhalasz), President, Founder at JLH Marketing
Steve Hammer (@armondhammer), President at RankHammer

Benjamin Spiegel: What’s in My Analytics Toolbox

Things used to be simple. The data we looked at came from one source. It was one-dimensional — a time stamp, a dimension and a metric. Fast forward to today, and we see a lot has changed. Our data is multi-dimensional: a post with or without text, hashtags that add discovery and engagement, retweets and the person’s reach. For best in class insights you have to consider all these dimensions. There are multiple sources where before, there was more or less one, and they have different metrics (views, clicks, likes).

We’re even adding our own metrics on top, making it more complex to understand. In 2013 our toolbox had many tools that didn’t fit together. There were text analytics, competitive data, real-time, media data, impressions data, offline data, and it was hard to tell one story with multiple sources. In 2014 we reset. Out with the tools. Put the questions first. With all our tools, what do we really want to do?

He asked how every level of the organization can access the data, merging the unique data to see what it means for the business and to enable visual storytelling.

Need to approach these questions from multiple perspectives: acquisition perspective, modeling perspective, visualization perspective (pictures, dashboards, scorecards and moving away from spreadsheets), and the management perspective.

The solution they found was Knime at Knime.org, a single tool, open source and free.

Comes with thousands of plug-ins for Google Analytics, Twitter and WordPress.

He loaded the URL of today’s session, put it through an algo, and turned out a word cloud of the key concepts. Then it processed the data against Twitter to see who’s tweeting about it and how often. A further node shows the Twitter users’ data. A step further, run the Twitter users against all social APIs and now you’re seeing a full online social picture of these people. From one URL, the tool runs through 10 other APIs. Twitter and social is one platform it worked for, and they also use it to extend Google Trends — to find out where people are talking about trends (cities) — seeing what states talk about what beauty product the most, for example. 

IMDB: everything
Data.gov: Run media numbers against the population.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia gives you raw data on everything including hourly page views, location specific, device segments, change history, article graph.
SNAP: They extract everything that’s extractable, like 34 million Amazon reviews; extend the voice of the consumer and what they are talking about; linguistic or network analysis.
Social Mention API: This is a near real-time API you can use for free.
Common Crawl Corpus: It’s 541 TB, the entire Internet. It’s hard to handle in terms of size, but you can use it if you’re trying to understand your link graph.

Jenny Halasz: How to Create Awesome Google Analytics Dashboards & Reports

She’s going to look at GA dashboards. They’re free and awesome. Go back and implement immediately and see a benefit.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” –Albert Einstein

http://bit.ly/GADashSMX15 a template dashboard she created. Plug and play, make adjustments based on your needs, then have a pretty report. Log in to GA, paste the link into your address bar, and GA will ask you which account the dashboard will be added to. It’s private until you share it.

Pros: It’s customizable, applicable to any GA segment, set up auto-emails, printable reports, set it up once, FREE.

Cons: It’s not user-friendly, relies on you to know what you need, requires you to set up segments, only holds 12 widgets per dashboard, can’t filter by metric values.

Where to start?

How did people get to your site? -> What did they do while they were there? -> How and why did they leave?

Know these three things and you’ll have a good idea of what’s happening on your website.

Here are the kinds of widgets you’d put on a dashboard to tell you how people got to your site:

 

These widgets show you what they did on your site:

 

And here we see why people left the site:

 

 

Adding filters to your widget, she tends to tell people to stay away from Real-Time statistics because you could spend forever looking at it and have nothing to show for it.

When you use filters, there are two ways (only show / don’t show) and Regex, which is more powerful. Test your expressions on the actual report.

You can set up regular emails of dashboards (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, once).

You may want to set up a custom report. When she looks at sites, she expects areas of the site to perform differently (category vs. product, for example), and a custom report takes customizations and applies them to the dashboard. To decide what your custom reports may be, ask questions to determine importance.

Custom report setup can be challenging because GA isn’t very user-friendly. Think of metrics as things you want to measure and dimensions as containers you want to put those metrics in. Filters are things you want to include or not include.

Remember that data is just data and analysis is what leads to insight.

Steve Hammer: Analytics Toolbox: Google Tag Manager

Designers create innovative experiences beyond the page. The collection of that data is the key to the analysis. If your input is garbage, your output will be too. Get it right up front.

The problem we have is missing data. An input error on your site can be hard to capture How do you know that existed? Actions on infinite scroll are hard to capture. AJAX is hard to capture. How do you track that and what do you do about that? Google Tag Manager opens up capabilities for capturing this data. It gets sold as something easy, everyone can do it, don’t need to talk to IT. But if you do talk to IT, you can do powerful things.

The essential: Variables (macros) is data to use, triggers (rules) is when to fire, and tag is what is fired. A tag is anything you want to happen and that can include a lot of things including HTML and JavaScript.

More interesting uses are in this set of enhanced examples. Conditional firing, AJAX infinite scroll and loading code.

He gives examples of an event of a form filled out, triggered when a certain URL comes up. This breaks the myth that you need a thank-you page to get a form filled out.

Examples of enhanced events you can track through Tag Manager

Another problem Tag Manager solves is getting to the original source. We want to credit an affiliate that introduced the visitor to the channel, not the last that siphoned off the traffic. If the affiliate is the source in the first-party cookie, then you can create and input that marketing source.

Another example is using custom formulas to read form elements and set user value. A shopper for a Bentley has a different value than someone shopping for a Ford.

Infinite scroll is handled with his “theoretical no code method.” If pushstate updates URL, build regex for pagination changes, then create a history change trigger. On this, watch out for back buttons.

Another approach is to piggyback off of “loading” HTML method. The look for a “loading” in the code and then a little script shows when the user scrolled on the page.

Q&A

What do you consider the most underused GA feature?

Spiegel: Custom variables to understand your audience and enabling retargeting.

Hammer: Advanced ecommerce for tracking through the cart process.

Halasz: Tracking schema activity through Tag Manager.

To understand setting up custom variables, look to Annie Cushing of Annielytics.

Bonus tip: Check out cohort analysis in beta in GA, especially if you’re a content-driven business. See if you’ve got a sticky experience on your site. For example, set up a segment to see if people originally reached via email came back.

SEO, Paid Search and Social Media Strategy Integration #SMX Liveblog

SEO, Paid Search and Social Media Strategy Integration #SMX Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This SMX West 2015 session (“Search and Social: Making It Happen”) features four speakers sharing their latest insights on SEO, paid search and social media:

Janet Driscoll Miller (Present and CEO of Marketing Mojo)
Elizabeth Marsten (PPC Director at Mercent)
Cynthia Johnson (Director of Marketing & Social Media at RankLab)
Graeme Jamieson (Senior manager of social and content at Merkle)

From left: Moderator Monica Wright, followed by speakers Graeme Jamieson, Janet Driscoll Miller, Elizabeth Marsten, and Cynthia Johnson.

Claiming Social Profiles and Reputation Management

Don’t rely on social alone, says Cynthia Johnson — you do not own your social profiles and viral content fades quickly.

It is important to claim your social profiles; if you don’t claim your business page, Facebook and Google Plus will create pages for you. They can use/add your address, phone number, etc. and are often misinformed on everything else. Yelp also auto creates business pages. Take control of your reputation online by creating these pages yourself.

Social Reputation Management in 6 Steps

Search for your business and find all additional and/or incorrect pages.
Ask Google to combine pages or remove inaccurate profiles.
Verify your Google Plus profile (check to be sure that the Google Map is correct).
Create a local Facebook page with your company’s address and phone.
Let Facebook know that the created page is a duplicate of another and have the incorrect one removed.
Always check you score. SEO and Social media are both constantly evolving. Don’t get comfortable.

Using Social to Marry Intent with Identity

Janet Driscoll Miller is the present and CEO of Marketing Mojo. Her company decided that every time they conducted paid search, they were also going to invest in paid social.

The goal was to mirror the intent of someone’s search with someone’s identity. How do you marry intent from search with identity? You find identity on social media. 

Miller recommends looking at Facebook and LinkedIn ad targeting to compile psychographic data (in other words, insights on personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests and lifestyles.)

As it turns out, Miller has found revenue per click and revenue per conversion are better when you integrate social ads and search ads.

For example, let’s say there’s a LinkedIn ad for health care CIOs. A user clicks on that ad (a social ad) and then arrives at a landing page for a webinar registration. A cookie uses their click-through to the landing page topic to mark them as someone who is a, or is interested in becoming a, healthcare CIO. Whether or not they sign up, they can now be retargeted on search channels with ads that relate to being or becoming a healthcare CIO.

You can also use social log-ins to your advantage. Allowing people to log into your service using social log-in gives you a lot more data about that user than if they log in using a traditional form.

Your Strategy Needs Paid Social; Organic is Dead

Elizabeth Marsten, PPC Director at Mercent, says organic social is dead. In light of the death of organic social, she advises PPC and social media teams to collaborate to make stronger ads. She encourages them to share resources. The paid team should know about the social team’s calendar and know what types of things are coming up that they can capitalize on.

Marsten’s Preferred Content Promotion Tools:

Taboola
Outbrain
Shareaholoic (in beta)
Sprout Social

Create; Boost; Push: Remarket: The “Shake and Bake” Strategy

Marsten suggests social teams try to create one piece of content that can be used in four ways:

Share on organic social.
Boost on social channels.
Push through content promotion.
Tag and bag visitors for remarketing later.

Marketers Need to Decide Between Engagement or Clicks

Determine what “success” is.
Run with campaigns in mind.
Don’t forget about direct or organic. (It’s dead… but… not dead.)

Don’t Work Without Strategy; Audience Comes First

Graeme Jamieson, senior manager of social and content creation at Merkle, tells us that this week he’s heard an awful lot about keywords but he believes that keywords only tell you half the story. As a matter of fact, as consumer insights go, he thinks keywords are a bit weak.

His strategy: Audience comes first; strategies are define by client objectives; use better, broader data analysis.

It’s important that you don’t just talk about your brand; you need to understand the common ground that your brand and its desired audience share.

Keywords capture demand, and content captures imagination; both should work together and play off each other’s strengths. He recommends Fanpage Karma for content development.

How to Improve Search and Social Teamwork #SMX Liveblog

How to Improve Search and Social Teamwork #SMX Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Not unlike peanut butter and jelly, search and social work best together. In this SMX West 2015 liveblog coverage, Ford Motor Company Director of SEO Ellen White, and Kenshoo Content and Media Manager Kelly Wrather, discuss the importance of teamwork and cross-channel strategy between social media and search marketing teams.

From left: moderator Lauren Donovan, speaker Ellen White and speaker Kelly Wrather.

Ellen White on Digital Marketing Teamwork

Ellen White has been at the helm of Ford’s SEO since July 2011.  She is “very committed to bringing rigor, discipline and standardization to the search profession.” She mentions “They Say, I Say” is one of her favorite business books.

Social media is new and young and exciting and sexy — and there’s a bit of a rivalry between search engine optimization and social media.

Search and social professionals tend to veer naturally toward a cowboy mentality; a mindset contingent on rugged individualism and characterized by:

Competence
Getting things done
An “I’ve got this” attitude

but also …

Rivalry
Jockeying for position
Fear of showing inadequacies
Ignoring weaknesses
Low-grade anxiety
An “I’ll figure it out” mentality
Tendency to focus time and effort on what is already known
Potential for burnout

White encourages digital marketers to move away from rugged individualism toward teamwork.

She encourages search and social pros to keep these five truths in mind:

No single person or team can master all the complexities in today’s search and social discipline. (Tweet this!)
Your colleagues’ knowledge in no way diminishes your knowledge.
Sharing your knowledge in no way threatens your place in this world. A rising tide raises all the ships. (Tweet this!)
Knowledge gaps are not intelligence.
We are all capable of learning.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Hedgehogs are mentality is characterized by clarifying focus; they know what they are doing. The fox on the other hand is scattered, diffused and inconsistent. White says it’s easy to feel like the fox in the digital marketing industry, but it’s better to be the hedgehog.

Focus on the one thing you do better than anyone else at the table. Be a specialist. (Tweet this!)

The best thing thing you can ask your manager? What can I do to help you?

In order for an atmosphere of unique expertise to thrive, all parties must feel safe. (Tweet this!)

Everything is emerging. No one is a complete expert. 

We are in a constantly changing environment and that can make communication challenging. Vocabulary, strategies, tactics, goals and objectives — they’re all constantly changing.

Remember to:

Rely on the knowledge of others.
Receive knowledge graciously.
Assume a level of expertise with all teams and clients.
Avoid the tendency to jump to “I knew it first.”
Don’t worry about your weaknesses, worry about the weaknesses of your teams. (Tweet this!)
Expose your weaknesses so that you can get knowledge and training.

Use Checklists

Create a set of checklists that fit your organization.
Create checklists for processes and teams.
Add communication checkpoints.
Print your checklists.
Use the checklists and refine.
Avoid the dumb mistakes.
Complexity of today’s digital world demands checklists.
Don’t let overconfidence cause you to make mistakes.

White recommends reading “The Checklist Manifesto.”

Search Marketing Strengths:

Deep research on important terms.
Strong knowledge of ranking factors.
Success measured on one platform.

Search Marketing Challenges:

Slow turnaround.
Architecture and design roadblocks.
Frequently restrained from using common language.

Social Media Strengths:

Quick insertion into the cultural conversation.
Ability to use common language.

How Search and Social Can Work Together:

Social can — and should — leverage the SEO team’s knowledge of linking and keyword research data. (Tweet this!)
SEO can leverage the social team’s ability to deploy content when brand site content is thin, non-existent or unable to be reached by search engine crawlers.

Kelly Wrather on Search and Social Cross-Channel Strategy

62 percent of global marketers agree that messaging, execution and delivery strategies aren’t actually aligned across channels. Cross channel coordination is important but people just aren’t doing it.

The top challenges in coordination?

Current technology
Organization Structure
Budget

Cross-channel strategy is not having two channels operating in silos or focusing strategies to fit. Cross-channel strategy is leveraging success across channels, gaining a holistic view, reaching targeted audiences and optimizing for true value of all interactions. 

3 Reasons Why Search and Social Should be the Next Channels You Integrate

(Tweet this!)

They are the top online activities.
Consumers trust search engines and social media. 65 percent of users trust search engines for news and 47 percent of users trust social media for news and information.
Search and social comprise more than half of digital advertising budgets.

Running Facebook ads on top of search ads can improve paid search campaign performance, says Kenshoo, who performed case studies that found a direct positive affect all around when adding Facebook ads into the mix.

She advises digital marketers to target people, not just keywords. She also praises the ability take search data and create custom audiences — that data fuels our custom audiences.

Develop a Cross-Channel Plan

Rally internal stakeholders.
Create a measurement framework for both search and social.
Figure out how to solve pain points using cross-channel initiatives.
Always be testing.
Show how the industry (and competitors) are advancing.

The Cutting Edge of Structured Data Implementation: Deep App Actions & Sitewide Dynamic Triggering #SMX

The Cutting Edge of Structured Data Implementation: Deep App Actions & Sitewide Dynamic Triggering #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is liveblog coverage of the SMX West session “The Next Generation of Structured Data: Taking Markup To The Next Level.” Here you’ll learn about some advanced things you can do with structured data. Our presenters go beyond Rich Snippets into the cutting edge of what Google’s developing in data markup.

Mike Arnesen (left) and Justin Briggs

A quick intro of our speakers: Mike Arnesen (@mike_arnesen) is the director of analytics and optimization at SwellPath, and Justin Briggs (@justinrbriggs) is CEO and founder of Briggsby.

Justin Briggs: Structured Data: Beyond Rich Snippets

Schema takes you from web to data. Instead of a bag of words you specifically define what the content means. Structured data is defined by triples: subject -> predicate -> object

The Knowledge Graph is built off structured data. You can leverage this same concept on your website and give your website more visibility in SERPs. Rich Snippets are enhanced search results that are powered by structured data. Examples include reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events and music. Click-through rate increase is the advantage.

Encoding with Structured Data

There are two flavors: 

Microdata RDA is markup inline where the content lives. You wrap content with tags that explain what that data is.
JSON-LD is not inline but pulled out. It’s the same vocabulary but pulled out in a different way.

What’s the difference between microdata and JSON-LD? Which should I use and what are the pros and cons of each?

Microdata gives you contextual relevance in the copy, in the code, and you can also mark up links. You may worry about it adding excess code to the page and wonder if you have to hide it.

JSON is more compact. Your developers are going to understand it really well, it’s good for marking up data that’s not on the page, and you can mark up data that’s not text on the page.

Search is rapidly becoming more mobile and conversational. Search was historically an information retrieval process, and we’d tag our content with keywords to have them show up in retrieval of documents. Now people are using wearables and conversational search, and it’s changing our expectations of search. Now search is a layer of interface, a layer between databases and applications.

You can search for data, not just documents. Google can go out on the searcher’s behalf and do things for us.

App indexation (app deep links) is a driving factor for marketers needing to advance their understanding of what structured data can do. A good example is a view action, a basic application action to open an application.

The coming April 21st Google change has two parts. First, sites may expect to shift one to three positions as mobile-friendly becomes a ranking factor in Google mobile search and causes a shift in current rankings. The second part is that if a user has an app installed on their mobile, that site will rank higher in the user’s personalized results. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

2. More relevant app content in search results

Starting today, we will begin to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, we may now surface content from indexed apps more prominently in search. To find out how to implement App Indexing, which allows us to surface this information in search results, have a look at our step-by-step guide on the developer site.

App actions:

Define a deep link URI that maps to your action, such as playing a song.

Think of all the kinds of actions a user can take in your business (sign up, send a meeting invite) and think of mapping all those actions from your website. Through KG itself you have an opportunity to get visibility in the SERP.

Directly from SERPs you can drive action deep in your application. In this example, a user can play a song on YouTube and other apps.

Order my pizza? Schedule my meeting? Drive my car? OK, Google. Organic search becomes an interface for taking actions that you map across your site.

Personalized Google Now Cards

A search on Google Now for restaurants around my hotel means that Google knows your hotel, your information when it’s needed, and personal information about where you are. This is all driven by an understanding of a user’s email (Gmail signed-in users).

For you, leverage structured data from email: transactional email, confirmation email, any email associated with a time.

Take actions in the inbox with structured data in emails that can appear in search results.

By having a reservation marked up with structured data, it allows the user to search for restaurants about my hotel because the hotel is tied back to a real-world entity.

Other uses are upcoming events. Mark up the data on the website of the event itself. Doing this will get the event to show up in the KG. There’s some straightforward event structured data. Along with the visibility through KG, this opens up the opportunity for pushing this info through Google Now to users looking for events near them in a given period of time.

Mike Arnesen: An Elegant Solution for Tracking & Executing Semantic SEO

Next Generation Structured Data from Mike Arnesen

SEOs are actually shaping how the web behaves. We’re interacting with search engines to shape how users use the web. He’ll cover how to implement database driven building of JSON-LD files that can be pushed out to your whole site. The tool that does this is the Google Tag Manager.

Mike was able to get clients to implement Rich Snippet structured data, but he was left wanting for tracking — knowing what pages have structured data, know when that Rich Snippet shows up in a SERP and see the click in Google Analytics. He figured out there’s a technology he was already using to start doing some of this: Google Tag Manager.

Overview of Tag Management

Tags
Rules
Macros

Port that into GA and apply a secondary dimension like “Semantic Analytics,” and it gives you the semantic information so you can track pages with markup, compare to other pages without markup, and drill down to which events/speaker/marked up pieces are driving the most visits.

The custom JavaScript is what keyed him in to being able to track in this way.

A basic example is setting up a tracking ID that fires on all pages. Walk-through time.

Macro is the most important part of tracking structured data on your page. A custom macro, a JS function, looks in your doc for itemtype=whatever. The example for the walk through is an itemtype=”Event”. Presence of an event itemtype on the page is the condition to fire the tag.

Macro semantic values will pull out all the semantic data we want and put it in a readable format, a human readable label that will go into GA. A page drove 500 visitors, and the markup that drove it is Mike Arnesen at an event.

The rule that fires this macro is the loading of the page. The tag is a page view tag, again triggering if the semantic markup exists. Apply a secondary dimension called “semantic markup” and GA will pull in all the data of pages with semantic markup.

http://moz.com/blog/semantic-analytics

The Data Layer

This is a layer of data that goes between two things every website has. Application is the database/CMS/what drives your content/where content is stored. The experience layer is the front end of the website that users interface with. The data layer is in the middle. and that’s where Google Tag Manager lives. Within the data layer we can put JavaScript object notation for linked data. JS is our transporter for structured data.

You can even take microdata off the diagram because we don’t need it anymore when you add the data layer.

With GTM you can export and import containers. Arnesen has a semantic analytics head start package: http://bit.ly/semantic-gtm

Build out a dynamic label without hard coding. A script that will apply the tracking code across the site. Now he’s getting really deep into using GTM that fires across a site, on every product page, structured data is applied to every page, even new pages. An identifier makes it so it only fires on pages you want it to. A new validation tool for structured data markup from Google recognizes JSON-LD. The upshot of all this is Rich Snippets in SERPs without adding any new code to the site! Mind blown!

Epilogue: It’s not enough just to implement structured data. That’s par for the course, a requirement now and not an advanced opportunity. We’re not early adopters and we have to think about the next step, like semantic analysis and enhanced analytics. See what’s doing well, what are people actually interested in. This data is accessible in GA. It will get more and more exciting as Google rolls out JSON-LD for more structured data types.

SMX West Keynote: How to Get Critical Online Reviews in Today’s Social Economy

SMX West Keynote: How to Get Critical Online Reviews in Today’s Social Economy was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This SMX West keynote presentation covers what we know about online reviews and how online reviews are changing business. Our expert, Bill Tancer, also gazes into the future of online reviews.

Bill Tancer, author of “Everyone’s a Critic,” is the general manager of global research at Experian Marketing Services. This makes him the world title holding data geek. On Twitter he’s @billtancer. For today’s keynote he’s going to do something different and never before presented. He’s going to share a behind-the-scenes tour of his book “Everyone’s a Critic.” The story involves an Icelandic volcanic eruption, a review that “this place sucks,” and a near heart attack at his kitchen table.

The SMX agenda describes this keynote as such:

Everyone, it seems, consults online review sites before making a purchase. But what do we really know about how those sites work, how consumers interact with them and how businesses should engage with them? Bill Tancer does. Tancer, who’s general manager of global research for Experian and a New York Times best selling author, spent over a year studying the online review scene to write his latest book, “Everyone’s A Critic.” In his talk, Tancer will open up the world of Yelp reviews, TripAdvisor posts and more. He’ll cover the funny, wacky and weird way consumers use these services to vent, complain and praise. He’ll also help attendees understand how important these venues are to their businesses and the types of strategies to use.

‘This Place Sucks’

Bill Tancer on stage at SMX West

The restaurant Pizzeria Delfina can have an hour-plus wait. The chef won the James Beard Award. One time the chef/owner decided to read his online reviews. He came across a one-star review that “this place sucks.” He wanted to do something about it.

He created a black T-shirt for everyone on staff. On the front it had a single star. On the back it said “this place sucks.” As a result he and his restaurant were featured on national TV and radio. The chef made that single one-star review go far. How often do people think of online reviews as a tool and an opportunity?

The book was partly data driven but mostly driven by his personal experience. The story of this book goes back a year before the story at Pizzeria Delfina. At the time Tancer had written his first book and was obsessed with the reviews posted about his book on Amazon. He’d sit at his kitchen table and refresh the Amazon page. Then he got his first negative review. “An exercise in navel gazing.” “It’s written like someone with ADD.” “Bill Tancer may be the king of measuring online research but the king would do well to hire a better editor.” As a result of these reviews, Bill stopped writing for a while. To get out from under this paralysis he decided to write about reviews, the very thing that was crippling him.

The Online Review Landscape

Reviews by the numbers:

82% of consumers say that they consult online reviews before making a purchase decision
In an online retail setting, having 10-30 product reviews on a specific product page can increase converts by 3-5%
Analysis of 148k reviews on over 3000 restaurants revealed that a half-star increase in rating translates to a 19% increase in tale bookings
Analysis of Yelp reviews for 60k restaurants revealed a 5-8% increase in revenues for each increase in star rating.

When you set out to write a book you look for a gap. This data and the implications of reviews for online businesses is significant.

If you look at online review visits by age you see there are two big groups that stand out. 18-to-24-year-olds write them more than other age groups; 55+-year-olds read reviews more often than other age groups.

There’s a 1-9-90 rule for social media:

1 posts
9 engages/interacts
90 lurks and watches

The rule for posting online reviews is 10-90 where 10% posts and 90% read and watch.

Reviews & Search

Here he grouped the data for all the reviews regardless of category. He found that 66% of all traffic going to review sites are coming from search.

Review-Driven Best Practices

What are some things we can do to change the way we practice business? In researching the book he found a few businesses doing great things to drive reviews. But first, you should know something about the bad review. No one likes to hear their baby is ugly and negative reviews can shut someone down completely from reading their reviews. But “when there are specific negative comments, the reader tends to believe the reviewer. If the complaint doesn’t highlight a deal breaker, it can translate into increased sales.” —Panagiotis Ipeirotis, NYU professor

With negative reviews present, the reader tends to believe the positive reviews even more.
Even negative reviews (one star) says good things about the product/business.

Getting over the negative review is one of the first steps to getting reviews to work for you.

The story of the Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano of 2010: Tancer had a two-day trip planned to Iceland but the volcano eruption happened while he was there, turning the two-day trip into a 10-day stay. The hotel he chose to stay at didn’t rank well but he picked it because it had five-star reviews. When he arrived at the hotel he was greeted on arrival with the same beverage he had asked for the last time he stayed there: a latte with biscotti. Because his trip was extended he went to a travel conference where he talked to hotel owners. Here’s what one said:

“I hate reviews. Before TripAdvisor I could charge a premium for my rooms just based on my brand. Now even five-star hotel rooms have been commoditized.” —CEO of a five-star hotel chain

Reviews Dilute the Brand

The brand doesn’t have as much power because the service is reflected in online reviews.

“I love the fact that I’m held accountable for every little thing I do, I know that my competition is held accountable as well, and my competition sucks.” —Jay Sofer, Lockbusters

The story of Jay the locksmith is a story of a 28-year-old who realized that millennials were looking at Yelp for locksmiths. When he searched Yelp for locksmiths in New York City, everyone had two stars. He decided to be the Four Seasons of locksmiths in New York. He now has 255 nearly exclusively five-star reviews. He found something little he could do that would give people a reason to review him. If you had asked Tancer if Jay’s idea to gain a business through getting online reviews for locksmith service was a good idea, he would have told you no because you can’t get people to leave reviews for a service like a locksmith.

Influx in Creativity

A man named Matt decided to turn his barber shop into his dream spot with a bar and games like shuffleboard. He opened the shop and couldn’t get the shuffleboard leveled before the store opened. He got a few five-star reviews and then a two-star review when someone said they loved the shop and had a beer but gave the shop two stars because the shuffleboard always sent the rocks to the right.

To embrace this, Matt printed a sign and posted it on his window: “People hate us on Yelp.” He parlayed this into a Facebook page where he’d post the negative reviews and invite people to comment with how he should reply. Know that not responding at all as a business (aloof service) will get you worse reviews than actively bad service.

Explaining the Cupcake

In studying how people share WOM experiences, explaining why they liked a positive hedonic experience will make them like it a little less, while explaining a negative hedonic experience will make them hate the experience a little less. The opposite is true of utilitarian experiences.

Think of how you’re reinforcing the message behind your interactions on social media and how you respond to readers.

5 Rules to Getting Reviews

Passion drives positive reviews
Build power through transparency
Make reviews central to the conversation
Leverage reviews for insight and motivation
Give them something to write about

The online review space is one of the most massive repositories of competitive intelligence. Find the opening and what’s not working.

The Future of Online Reviews

Reviews are going to continue to become more ubiquitous. Tancer’s online review predictions:

Sharing economy will fuel bilateral review growth and change the 10/90 rule
Reviews will serve as a bridge between online and offline retail
Authentication and fraudulent review detection will become more critical
Perspective will be the next disruption in search

In search we’ve got an algorithm for authority but in reviews there’s no accounting for perspective. Someone may positively review someone for the same service behavior that someone else reviews negatively.

Q&A

Question: Have you looked at incentivizing reviews?

The underside of reviews is cross-incentives and fake reviews. Go to Craigslist and you’ll find people selling reviews for $5 or $10. Elite Yelpers can extort businesses for stuff. There are incentives built into the system to game it, on both ends as a business and consumer.

Question: Regarding the time to respond, is it reasonable to respond once a week, every few weeks, or every day?

Tancer hasn’t done research on the topic of timing. He says that he tells bizes of all sizes to pay attention. He noticed a trend of reviews for a coffee shop client. Negative reviews were being posted the same time in the afternoon every day. It turned out the shop owner took afternoons off and that employees were slacking during that time. That’s info gleaned by reading reviews.

Question: It can be hard to get reviews from certain kinds of people. What do you think of that?

We found different personas of reviewers we were able to group together, and they’re covered in the book. A few are:

One-star assassins — using reviews as their platform to have a voice in the world, maybe they have a grudge against the world
Benevolent reviewers — met and liked the owners and want the business to succeed
Communitarians — giving back to the community

Want more from Bill? Grab his book but first, read our exclusive interview with Bill Tancer to get you thinking about how to build review acquisition into your business.

Unconvinced HTTPS is Worth It? Better Read This #SMX Liveblog (with Insights from Google)

Unconvinced HTTPS is Worth It? Better Read This #SMX Liveblog (with Insights from Google) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

If you’re unconvinced that a move to HTTPS is for you … then keep reading. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes will share why Google values secure search so much, and what he and the Google team are planning next when it comes to secure search. Joining Illyes on the stage are fellow search savants Eric Enge (president of Stone Temple Consulting and author of “The Art of SEO”) and Bill Hartzer (senior SEO Strategist at Globe Runner), who will also share their insights into secure search.

From left: Gary Illyes, Eric Enge, Bill Hartzer.

 

Gary Illyes: Why Secure Search Matters, Plus What’s Next

More and more companies realize that users must feel safe. That’s why Google began experimenting with HTTPS rankings. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes mentioned this idea to Google Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, back in March. Illyes says that before he could get the idea fully out, Cutts got super excited. By the end of July, Google was ready to make the change. They published a blog post and turned it on.

Internal Statistics from Google

10 percent of discovered URLs are HTTPS. It’s really low, Illyes says. He thinks it should be at 100 percent.
30 percent of the queries have at least one HTTPS URLs in the results.

Why Aren’t More Sites Switching to HTTPS?

People complain that HTTPS is slow. But it’s not, Illyes says. It has long been known that Google is obsessed with site speed. Google would not launch a search feature that slowed down the SERP, even by milliseconds. The notion that HTTPS slows down a site is simply false. (Click to Tweet)
People say “it’s not worth it.” They are just plain wrong, Illyes contends. Users have a basic need for security — it’s in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Sites must offer users security and safety.
People say HTTPS is complicated. Illyes says if he can do it, anyone can do it. He migrated his site in just four hours.

What’s Next for HTTPS?

Illyes says he’s seen a significant number of sites with broken certificates. This is a bad user experience and needs to be addressed. In the future, these sites will somehow be highlighted as unsafe. Illyes says he plans on starting to work on this next week.

Google is interested in implementing a stronger ranking boost for secure login and purchasing pages. This is something that Google is thinking about because security is so important on these pages.

Illyes Answers Audience Questions

Does Google have a list of certificates that they accept or do not accept?

There is no list. Just make sure to follow industry standards. Certificate providers should know, for example, that SHA-1 is deprecated. Perhaps — in the future — a list would be helpful, though.

What are the hurdles that more complex sites need to overcome when switching to HTTPS?

The main struggle for big sites that I talk to is the inability to get the CDN to serve scripts from HTTPS. We are working with CNDS to try to convince them to offer better SSL or HTTPS services. It’s an ongoing effort. There are good people working on it so at one point it will happen.

How important is it for smaller non-ecommerce sites to switch to HTTPS? Does, say, a plumber’s site need to be secure?

I would say so. I have a scuba blog and I switched to HTTPS. I love it, although I might be a touch biased.

Does secure offset page speed? If it’s slowing you down a tiny bit from moving to secure will it hurt me?

No.

What’s the benefit of going secure for a site that has no log-in, nothing for sale, etc.?

Integrity.

Every time I do a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, am I losing a little link juice?

I think it would actually be a 100 percent transfer.

Is it worse to be secure and have your security fail or be non-secure?

It is worse to just be non-secure. If you’re certificate is not correct, you’re not doing anything for the user.

How often do you use Bing?

20 or 30 times a week. For some queries they perform better. (Illyes is investigating.)

If a website is using schema markup, will review stars be affected by a move to secure search?

No. As soon as you start the redirect, all the information from URL A will be transferred to URL B.

Eric Enge: The Hack that Preserves Your Social Share Count

Data from Searchmetrics suggests that when sites switch to HTTPS there is an average six percent increase in visibility. (Click to Tweet) 

Tracking the pages that had been converted to HTTPS on StoneTempleConsulting.com, Enge found that changing to HTTPS had a very small impact. Based on a sample of twelve pages, Enge found:

6 rankings improved
5 rankings got worse
1 had no change
Net impact: no material change

Enge reminds the audience that SHA-1 certificates are deprecated. Avoid them. (Click to Tweet)

Useful Tip for Lost Social Share Data

HTTPS can disrupt social sharing. All your social share counts will revert to zero. This PHP code (featured in slide) will make the HTTPS page pull the social sharing data from the HTTP post. If a post is prior to migration date use the PHP code in this slide:

 

Bill Hartzer: Step-by-Step Checklist for Moving to HTTPS (Click to Tweet)

Bill Hartzer is the senior SEO strategist of Globe Runner (and Duane Forrester‘s mentor). He shares his a step-by-step listing for preparing and moving to HTTPS.

Part One: Preparation

Choose the right certificate: 2048-bit key
Choose the right, trusted provider
Talk to your web host about the switch
Review current server needs
Check if CDN can handle SSL
Consider moving and/or upgrading server at the same time
Consider adding CloudFlare to hosting
Decide whether to move all content or just some of the content
Prepare your site (internal links, canonical tags, etc.)
Review links to site and identify links to update
Create a list of all social accounts and profiles to update with new link
Perform a Google Webmaster Tools review
Make a copy of the site by going through Screamingfrog and making a list of all the URLs for later reference
Ensure all internal links point to HTTPS
Check CMS settings
Check canonical tags
Check images, CSS, JavaScript URLs
Set up 301 redirects (always use 301 Permanent Redirect)

Part Two: Plan for the Move

When will you switch/move?
Detail the process for moving to HTTPS
Decide internally: who is responsible for what?

Part Three: Moving Day

Verify your site in Google Wbmaster Tools
Test the website

Test SSL with the Qualys Lab Tool
Test for heartbleed vulnerability
Perform a server header check
Crawl site with Screamingfrog SEO spider
Switch social media profiles
Check Google Analytics for referrers



Part Four: Post-Moving Day

Update and watch Google Analytics
Update social media accounts and profiles
Update email signatures with new URL
Update company themes and templates
Contact link owners

Results: BillHartzer.com Case Study

One month out from moving his site from HTTP to HTTPS, Hartzer saw:

Sessions up 9.56 percent
Uses up 11.01 percent
Page views up 93.91 percent
Pages/Session up 7,699 percent
Average session duration up 8.67 percent

Conversion Tactics for SEOs – #SMX West Liveblog

Conversion Tactics for SEOs – #SMX West Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

At this SMX West session, our esteemed speakers talk of conversion SEO, emphasizing that the role of SEO doesn’t end at getting traffic to the site. You’ll read about one speaker’s vision to “think about SEO not as search engine optimization but as search experience optimization” and get UX recommendations through streamlining the checkout process to surveying search visitors.

We’ll hear from:

Mark Munroe, founder of SEORadar (@markemunroe)
Matt Storms, SEO at MattStorms.com (@matt_storms)
Lisa Williams, president and founder of Sustainable Digital Marketing (@SEOPollyAnna)

Lisa Williams: What Shark Tank and SEO Conversion Have in Common

Lisa Williams (left) and Mark Munroe on stage at SMX West

1. Have a great product or service.

This makes a difference for conversion. Your sucking and being bad at what you do will ruin your business. Obvious, sure. But be proud of what you do and what you have. If you’re not doing this, what the panelists share today won’t help.

2. Laser focus your goals and assets.

Focus your lead generation, brand awareness, engagement, lead nurturing, sales, customer retention, evangelism.

3. Think outside the box.

Leverage content research:

Search dialog box at landing page level
Pre [not provided] data
Forget keywords, think about categories and topics
PC data
Competition
Question mining

Search isn’t just search engines. Think about SEO not as search engine optimization but as search experience optimization. That’s the one biggest wish she has for the industry.

SEO and topical assets: Know the location of all campaign assets and how you can optimize them for a topic/category. This includes landing pages, posts, videos, PR, product and other schema, social sharing structured data.

Duane Forrester implores us to think of SEO and usability together. Do people on your marketing team understand how much SEO impacts usability? When doing focus group testing and user testing, make sure that data is passed along to the SEO.

Marcus Tober, founder of Searchmetrics, dives in to how search affects mobile. Yes, SEO impacts mobile, but it’s important to note that engagement (like task completion) is very different on mobile. Cisco projects that in 2017, Americans on average will own 7 devices.

Jonathan Colman, content strategist for Facebook, says that SEOs have work to do making sure that everyone in a marketing team understands that the things that align us are far greater than the things that are different about us. Developers, programmers, user experience optimizers, content strategists and SEOs are all working toward the same goal. Our users are interacting on lots of different channels and don’t convert on the one they’re on now.

4. Help non-SEOs understand.

Scorecards:

Model and build out your scorecard/dashboard before campaign launch (for more details, see Lisa Williams’s post).
Use storytelling (numbers and words).
Include case study illustration.

Help them understand link building. Organic link building isn’t going anywhere, and you don’t have to call it “link building.”

5. Ask for feedback and advice.

What would your customers think about:

How you got them to a landing page?
Your landing page?
The check-out process?
Your social engagement?
The links you acquire?

6. Think like a customer.

7. Agree on what success looks like.

Mark Munroe: Improving the SEO User Experience

When your visitors are happy with your site, search engines notice. It may not be worth obsessing over how they notice as much as that they do. Long-term SEO success is a happy Google. Google wants to “kill the search” and have the user go on to the next search. Don’t sacrifice the broad user experience at the expense of conversion.

If you look at your traffic-driving keywords in Google Webmaster Tools, you see a mix of customers, prospects and drive-by traffic. We typically focus on our prospects and customers, but we should also worry about everyone else.

Interstitials are an example where the focus on conversions satisfies a few at the expense of many. Google isn’t a fan of interstitials, saying they may be “too disruptive to the user experience of the site.” A quick abandonment and bounce back to Google doesn’t look good for your site. An interstitial bounce is even worse for you than a regular bounce.

How are we doing:

To find out what users say, you could ask and you could do surveys. Net Promoter Score (NPC) is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. Is NPC good for SEO? He had a client who couldn’t understand why they were hit by Panda when their NPC was 65. They asked their customers (the most likely group to like them) and not their site visitors whether or not they had a good experience.

The first 10 seconds are crucial. Then, the next 10 seconds are crucial. People want to know “will this answer my question and do I trust it?”

Satisfaction surveys:

On a site that was hit by Panda, he surveyed visitors to the site coming from search, asking a single question: “Do you think this site has what you’re looking for on Google?” About 58 percent of the respondents had negative feedback and comments. The site team continued to build and refine their survey as they got more information. Create a survey based on your hypothesis. Keep one open question to catch what you missed. If you’re missing something important, adjust and restart the survey. If there’s a disconnect between what users want and what you have, partner with someone to bring that information to your site or send the user to a place where they can get it. You want to continue the user along their journey even if you don’t have the info.

Left to right: Lisa Williams, Mark Munroe and Matt Storms

Matt Storms: Page Speed & the Conversion Funnel for SEO

Have you ever gone to a website that’s really slow to load? Whose fault is that? It’s the website manager’s fault. That could be the CEO or CTO and the developer. Fast is where it’s at. How fast is your site?

Simple Math

1 second = 1000 milliseconds

How fast should your pages load?

Landing page
Product page
Search page
Checkout page

He says that you want to get to a load time between 250 and 300 milliseconds. He does code audits all the time to remove code bloat. http://robhammond.co/tools/wmt-crawl-stats: Export the crawl stats from GWT as a csv file.

How many think that SEO involves getting people to the page and then your job is done? Move on to conversion SEO. Once you hook the fish, what’s next? Most sites make you log in or register, enter shipping info and verify stuff, then enter a credit card and then verify your purchase. Make it simple.

Apply your SEO principles to your checkout process. Think through the logical mindset of your user. Look at your drop-off rate and abandonment rate. If you address the cart/checkout process, you can increase revenue.

The hardest thing to get? The credit card number. Plastic is hard. The user has to get their wallet. Be sure you’re designing the shopping process for women. Most developers are men and don’t consider that a lot of online shoppers are women.

Spanx (1 step to Paypal / 5 steps on site) and Art.com (3 steps to Paypal / 7 steps on site): These sites had the best checkout process he could find and he spent hours looking.

What should happen:

Grab the credit card.
Grab the shipping info.
Grab the billing info.
Offer to get email spam.

No reason to lose the golden opportunities that are ready to be plucked from the earth.