Become Intelligent: Use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to your Advantage

Posted by Martijn_Scheijbeler

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

Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important.

The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you're working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you're on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day.

So in addition to providing you with some useful insights into why it’s so important to write down everything you do, I’ll also give you some useful tips on how to get this started with the tools you likely already use. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of drastic changes in web traffic and user engagement.

How Meta Robots & XML Issues Impacted My Perception of Web Analytics

To give you an example of why it’s useful to keep track of what you and your team are working on, let me take you back to an incident I experienced roughly two years ago. My team tested an upgrade for functionally, but forgot to check the involved technical SEO elements. After a massive drop in keyword positions for all of our top (landing) pages, we did our best to retrace our steps. In the process, we discovered we had implemented the META robots noindex tag on all pages. I’d love to say I’m joking, but our drop in search traffic says otherwise.

I think you get the point—and that it’s probably best if I don't tell you about the time that we returned XML to Google instead of proper HTML—record everything. To this end, I’m going to share my insights into what I like to track on a daily and weekly basis via Google Intelligence Events, and share occurred events with our team, using the annotations of Google Analytics for our sites. I’m also hoping to hear your ideas on anything I'm missing so that we can learn from each other.

Rebecca Lehman made a great start back in 2011 with this, but in the past years a lot of new metrics and dimensions have been added to Google Analytics, making it easier to keep track of even more changes.

What are Google Intelligence Alerts?

Analytics monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then automatically generates alerts, or Intelligence Events, when those variations occur. - Google Analytics Help Guides

Google Analytics provides you with predefined alerts that guide you through certain changes in engagement, traffic or visitor data, but they are hard to notice if you're not looking at your web analytics on an hourly basis. However, you are able to add custom intelligence alerts that update you of any changes that are important to you (e.g., when your traffic increases by 10% day over a single day). The tool makes it possible for you to respond faster to changing data, and you can also use it to keep your colleagues up to date.

Google Intelligence Alerts enable you to monitor your web analytics in many different ways, but they’re not without their disadvantages. Let’s look at both sides of the argument:

Advantages	Disadvantages
You'll be notified within 24 hours.	You're not able to share intelligence alerts with your colleagues.
If you live in the US, you can get texts message alerts of important changes.	If you don't live in the US, you can't receive text messages.
You can keep track of almost every metric and dimension in Google Analytics.	Setting up a large number of alerts is a time-consuming process.
You can use your intelligence alerts in multiple properties as they belong to your personal Google Analytics account and data.

Note: The email reports from Intelligence Alerts have a certain delay. Hopfully Google Analytics will improve this delay in the future, but for now it's the best we have to work with.

Why is this useful for you?

I've provided you with just one example of how Intelligence Alerts can be useful. Now let me give you more insight into why it's easier for you to keep track of changes with Google Alerts. The average e-commerce store has thousands of products, each of which is likely to be impacted by seasonal preferences such as who's buying umbrellas in mid-summer. But what if it suddenly starts raining and your warehouse is running out of umbrellas? What if you could set up alerts to see if sudden product categories change in performance based on your data in Google Analytics?

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Overview

Image: personal screenshots

On the left side of your Google Analytics Reporting dashboard you have the ability to view the daily, weekly and monthly automatic alerts that Google has already triggered for you. This overview provides the most important metrics and dimensions for your site. For example, the screenshot below shows you the change in views throughout April 2014 for one of my accounts. Naturally, by clicking on details you are provided with more details on the period.

Image: personal screenshots

As you can see, the detailed view shows you the metrics again so that you can determine how importance each change is to you business. In this case, the graph tells you what the per-session goal value is, so you can see the weekly progress this metric made and why it triggered an automatic alert.

Daily, weekly, and monthly events

Image: personal screenshots

The daily, weekly and monthly events provide you with a detailed view on more specific intelligence alerts, as well as the alerts you've created yourself. (I’ll cover this in more detail in the next section.) On top of this, it enables you to change the importance of the alerts, as well as the alert category, including Custom Alerts, Automatic Web Alerts and, and Automatic Adwords Alerts.

The table contains an overview of the triggered alerts based on the settings you select. The links on the right side will guide you directly to the right report, where you can take a deeper look at each metric/dimension.

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Image: personal screenshots

Overview: In the Admin of your Google Analytics View you're able to see an overview of current intelligence alerts. Click the New Alert button at the top.

Image: personal screenshots

Now you have the opportunity to add a name to the alert and select the profiles you would like this intelligence event to apply to. By selecting the time period, you will be able to compare the current day, week or month to its previous variant. By setting the alert conditions, you have the opportunity to select the metrics and dimensions that must change in order to trigger a notification.

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To save you some time, I've created a couple dozen intelligence alerts. The only things you need to do are log into your Google Analytics account and make sure you're ready to get overwhelmed with weekly or daily alerts. Seriously, though, don't feel compelled to add all of the alerts. Select only those that have the most value for you and your business.

Error/panic

A couple of alerts could help you monitor the status of your site and the Google Analytics integration into the site itself. You'll likely want to know when certain tracking codes are removed and pages trigger errors:

• No traffic
• No goal completions
• No e-commerce conversions
• 404 Tracking (based on this great blog post)
• Revenue drop of XX% or no revenue
• Referrals from your own domain (this alert tells you that a tracking code is missing on certain pages)

Engagement

These alerts are ideal for publishers with lots of traffic:

• Increase / Decrease in bounce rate
• Increase / Decrease in time onsite

Traffic sources

If you suddenly have more traffic, but don't know where the traffic is coming from, the alerts for traffic sources could come in very handy:

• Increase / Decrease in direct traffic
• Increase / Decrease in organic traffic
• Increase / Decrease in paid traffic
• Increase / Decrease in referral traffic from a specific source

E-commerce

Monitoring the conversion rate for different browsers will make you aware of any problems your site has playing nice with certain browsers:

• Changes in conversion rate
• Changes in nr transactions
• Changes in conversion rate per browser

Google AdWords

If you're running Google AdWords, you undoubtedly have alerts set up. But it would be handy to know the performance onsite and to see the corresponding spend associated with it if your spend goes up or down.

• Increase / Decrease in AdWords campaign spend
• Increase / Decrease in AdWords CTR

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In the long term, Google Analytics Annotations will really help you review statistics year-over-year. If something noteworthy happens, add an annotation to the date in Google Analytics. It's fairly simple to do, and will provide you, your colleagues, your manager, etc. with an idea of what's going on with your site and why.

My favorite annotations are reports of bugs, new website features, and UX/ CRO improvements to popular pages.

Image: personal screenshots

P.S. Dear Google Analytics product managers, if one of you is reading this, please make adding annotations available via the Google Analytics Management API. It would make it so much cooler if, for example, we could add a new annotation to our data for every new post in WordPress.

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TL;DR: Intelligence Alerts automatically keep you up to date on pre-configured changes in your data. With a daily email updates, you'll never miss important changes associated with your website's data, traffic or engagement.

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Please let me know in the comments what your favorite intelligence alerts are and how you use them to your advantage. If you have any other tools that you use to keep yourself informed, don't hesitate to share them.

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Hiring for SEO: How to Find and Hire Someone with Little or No Experience

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

SEO is a seller's market. The supply of people with SEO experience is currently no match for the demand for search engine marketing services, as anyone who has spent months searching for the right SEO candidate can tell you. Even in a big city with a booming tech scene (like Seattle, LA, New York, or Austin), experienced SEOs are thin on the ground. In a local market where the economy is less tech-driven (like, say, Oklahoma City, where I work), finding an experienced SEO (even one with just a year or two of experience) is like finding a unicorn.

You're hired. (Photo via Pixabay)

If you're looking for an in-house SEO or someone to run your whole program, you may have no choice but to hold out for a hero (and think about relocating someone). If you're an SEO trying to grow a team of digital marketers at an agency or to expand a large in-house team, sometimes your best bet is to hire someone with no digital marketing experience but a lot of potential and train them.

However, you can't plug just anyone into an SEO role, train them up right and have them be fantastic (or enjoy their job); there are definite skills, talents and personality traits that contribute to success in digital marketing.

Most advice on hiring SEOs is geared toward making sure they know their stuff and aren't spammers. That's not really applicable to hiring at the trainee level, though. So how can you tell whether someone is right for a job they've never done? At BigWing, we've had a lot of success hiring smart young people and turning them into digital marketers, and there are a few things we look for in a candidate.

Are they an aggressive, independent learner?

Successful SEOs spend a ton of time on continued learning—reading blogs, attending conferences and webinars, discussing and testing new techniques—and a lot of that learning happens outside of normal work hours. The right candidate should be someone who loves learning and has the ability to independently drive their ongoing education.

Ask job candidates about another situation where they've had to quickly pick up a new skill. What did they do to learn it? How did that go? If it's never come up for them, ask what they might do in that situation.

Interview prep is something I always look for in a candidate, since it shows they're actually interested in the job. Ask what they've done to prep for the interview. Did they take a look at your company website? Maybe do some Googling to find other informational resources on what digital marketing entails? What did they learn? Where did they learn it? How did they find it?

Give your candidates some homework before the interview. Have them read the Beginner's Guide to SEO, maybe Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, or the demo modules at Distilled U. How much of it did they retain? More importantly, what did they learn? Which brings us to:

Do they have a small understanding of what SEO is and why we do it?

I've seen a lot of people get excited about learning SEO, do OK for a year or two, and then crash and burn. The number one cause of SEO flame-out or burn-out, in my experience, is an inability to pivot from old tactics to new ones. This failure often stems from a fundamental lack of understanding of what SEO is (marketing, connecting websites that have stuff with people who want that stuff) and what it is not (any single SEO tactic).

It can be frustrating when the methods you originally learned on, or that used to work so well, dry up and blow away (I'm looking at you, siloing and PageRank sculpting). If you're focused on what tricks and tactics can get you ranking #1, instead of on how you're using digital techniques to market to and connect with potential customers, sooner or later the rug's going to get pulled out from under you.

Ask your candidates: what did they retain from their research? Are they totally focused on the search engine, or have they thought about how visits can turn into revenue? Do they seem more interested in being a hacker, or a marketer? Some people really fall in love with the idea that they could manipulate search engines to do what they want; I look for people who are more in love with the idea of using the Internet as a tool to connect businesses with their customers, since ultimately your SEO client is going to want revenue, not just rankings.

Another trait I look for in the interview process is empathy. Can they articulate why a business might want to invest in search? Ask them to imagine some fears or concerns a small business owner might have when starting up an Internet marketing program. This is especially important for agency work, where communicating success requires an understanding of your client's goals and concerns.

Can they write?

Photo via Pixabay

Even if you're looking to grow someone into a technical SEO, not a content creator, SEO involves writing well. You're going to have to be able to create on-page elements that not only communicate topical relevance to search engines but also appeal to users.

This should go without saying, but in my experience definitely doesn't: their resume should be free of typos and grammatical errors. Not only is this an indicator of their ability to write while unsupervised, it's also an indicator of their attention to detail and how seriously they're taking the position.

Any kind of writing experience is a major plus for me when looking at a resume, but isn't necessarily a requirement. It's helpful to get some idea of what they're capable of, though. Ask for a writing sample, and better yet, look for a writing sample in the wild online. Have they blogged before? You'll almost certainly be exchanging emails with a candidate before an interview—pay attention to how they communicate via email. Is it hard to tell what they're talking about? Good writing isn't just about grammar; it's about communicating ideas.

I like to give candidates a scenario like "A client saw traffic to their website decline because of an error we failed to detect. We found and corrected the error, but their traffic numbers are still down for the month," and have them compose a pretend email to the client about what happened. This is a great way to test both their written communication skills and their empathy for the client. Are you going to have to proofread their client emails before they go out? That sounds tedious.

How are their critical thinking and data analysis skills?

A brand-new digital marketer probably won't have any experience with analytics tools like Google Analytics, and that's OK—you can teach them how to use those. What's harder to teach is an ability to think critically and to use data to make decisions.

Have your candidates ever been in a situation where they needed to use data to figure out what to do next? What about tell a story, back up a claim or change someone's mind? Recent college grads should all have recent experience with this, regardless of their major—critical thinking and data analysis are what college is all about. How comfortable are they in Microsoft Excel? They don't have to love it, but if they absolutely loathe it, SEO probably isn't for them. Would it make them miserable to spend most of a day in a spreadsheet (not every day, but fairly regularly)?

Are they a citizen of the web?

Even if they've never heard of SEO, a new employee is going to have an easier time learning it if they're already pretty net savvy. An active web presence also indicates a general interest in the the Internet, which is one indicator of whether they'll have long-term interest in digital marketing as a field. Do some recon: are they active on social media? Have they ever blogged? What comes up when you Google them?

Prior experience

Different applicants will have different backgrounds, and you'll have the best idea of what skills someone will need to bring to the table to fill the role you need. When I'm reading a resume, I take experience in any of these areas as a good sign:

• Marketing
• Advertising
• Public relations
• APIs (using them, creating apps with them, what have you)
• Web development or coding of any kind
• Web design
• Copywriting

Your mileage may vary

Photo via Knowyourmeme

Very few candidates are going to excel in all of the areas outlined above, and everyone you talk to is going to be stronger in some areas than others. Since digital marketing can include a wide variety of different tasks, keep in mind the things you'd actually like the person to do on the job; for example, written communication becomes somewhat less important in a non-client-facing role. At the very least, look for a smart, driven person who is excited about digital marketing as a career opportunity (not just as a next paycheck).

Hiring inexperienced people has its risks: the person you hire may not actually turn out to be any good at SEO. They may have more trouble learning it than you anticipated, and once they start doing it, they may decide that SEO just isn't what they want to do long-term.

On the other hand, hiring and training someone who's a great fit for your company culture and who is excited about learning often results in a better employee than hiring someone with experience who doesn't really mesh well with your team. Plus, teaching someone SEO is a great way to make sure they don't have any bad habits that could put your clients at risk. Best of all, you have the opportunity to unlock a whole career for someone and watch them grow into a world-class marketer—and that's a great feeling.

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!

Everything You Need to Know About Mobile App Search

Posted by Justin_Briggs

Mobile isn't the future. It's the present. Mobile apps are not only changing how we interact with devices and websites, they're changing the way we search. Companies are creating meaningful experiences on mobile-friendly websites and apps, which in turn create new opportunities to get in front of users.

I'd like to explore the growth of mobile app search and its current opportunities to gain visibility and drive engagement.

Rise of mobile app search

The growth of mobile device usage has driven a significant lift in app-related searches. This is giving rise to mobile app search as a vertical within traditional universal search.

While it has been clear for some time that mobile search is important, that importance has been more heavily emphasized by Google recently, as they continue to push mobile-friendly labels in SERPs, and are likely increasing mobile-friendliness's weight as a ranking factor.

The future of search marketing involves mobile, and it will not be limited to optimizing HTML webpages, creating responsive designs, and optimizing UX. Mobile SEO is a world where apps, knowledge graph, and conversational search are front and center.

For the top 10 leading properties online, 34% of visitors are mobile-only (comScore data), and, anecdotally, we're seeing similar numbers with our clients, if not more.

It's also worth noting that 72% of mobile engagement relies on apps vs. on browsers. Looking at teen usage, apps are increasingly dominant. Additionally, 55% of teens use voice search more than once per day.

If you haven't read it, grab some coffee and read A Teenagers View on Social Media, which is written by a 19-year old who gives his perspective of online behavior. Reading between the lines shows a number of subtle shifts in behavior. I noticed that every time I expected him say website, he said application. In fact, he referenced application 15 times, and it is the primary way he describes social networks.

This means that one of the fasting growing segments of mobile users cannot be marketed to by optimizing HTML webpages alone, requiring search marketers to expand their skills into app optimization.

The mobile app pack

This shift is giving rise to the mobile app pack and app search results, which are triggered on searches from mobile devices in instances of high mobile app intent. Think of these as being similar to local search results. Considering mobile searcher behavior, these listings dominate user attention.

As with local search, mobile app search can reorder traditional results, completely push them down, or integrate app listings with traditional web results.

You can test on your desktop using a user-agent switcher, or by searching on your iOS or Android device.

There are slight differences between iPhone and Android mobile app results:

From what I've seen, mobile app listings trigger more frequently, and with more results, on Android search results when compared to iOS. Additionally, iOS mobile app listings are represented as a traditional website result listing, while mobile app listings on Android are more integrated.

Some of the differences also come from the differences in app submission guidelines on the two major stores, the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Overview of differences in mobile app results

1. Title - Google uses the app listing page's HTML title (which is the app's title). iOS app titles can exceed 55-62 characters, which causes wrapping and title truncation like a traditional result. Android app title requirements are shorter, so titles are typically shorter on Android mobile app listings.
2. URL - iOS mobile app listings display the iTunes URL to the App Store as part of the search result.
3. Icon - iOS icons are square and Android icons have rounded corners.
4. Design - Android results stand out more, with an "Apps" headline above the pack and a link to Google Play at the end.
5. App store content - The other differences show up in the copy, ratings, and reviews on each app store.

Ranking in mobile app search results

Ranking in mobile app search results is a combination of App Store Optimization (ASO) and traditional SEO. The on-page factors are dependent upon your app listing, so optimization starts with having solid ASO. If you're not familiar with ASO, it's the process of optimizing your app listing for internal app store search.

Basics of ASO

Ranking in the Apple App Store and in Google Play is driven by two primary factors: keyword alignment and app performance. Text fields in the app store listing, such as title, description, and keyword list, align the app with a particular set of keywords. Performance metrics including download velocity, app ratings, and reviews determine how well the app will rank for each of those keywords. (Additionally, the Google Play algorithm may include external, web-based performance metrics like citations and links as ranking factors.)

Mobile app listing optimization

While I won't explore ASO in-depth here, as it's very similar to traditional SEO, optimizing app listings is primarily a function of keyword targeting.

Tools like Sensor Tower, MobileDevHQ, and App Annie can help you with mobile app keyword research. However, keep in mind that mobile app search listings show up in universal search, so it's important to leverage traditional keyword research tools like the AdWords Tool or Google Trends.

While there are similarities with ASO, optimizing for these mobile app search listings on the web has some slight differences.

Differences between ASO & mobile app SEO targeting

1. Titles - While the Apple App Store allows relatively long titles, they are limited to the preview length in organic search. Titles should be optimized with Google search in mind, in addition to optimizing for the app store. Additionally, several apps aggressively target keywords in their app title, but caution should be used as spamming keywords could influence app performance in Google.
2. Description - The app description on the App Store may not be a factor in internal search, but it will impact external app search results. Leverage keyword targeting best practices when writing your iOS app description, as well as your Android app description.
3. Device and platform keywords - When targeting for app store search, it is not as important to target terms related to the OS or device. However, these terms can help visibility in external search. Include device and OS terms, such as Android, Samsung Note, iOS, iPad, and iPhone.

App performance optimization

Outside of content optimization, Google looks at the performance of the app. On the Android side, they have access to the data, but for iOS they have to rely on publicly available information.

App performance factors

• Number of ratings
• Average rating score
• Content and sentiment analysis of reviews
• Downloads / installs
• Engagement and retention
• Internal links on app store

For iOS, the primary public metrics are ratings and reviews. However, app performance can be inferred using the App Store's ranking charts and search results, which can be leveraged as proxies of these performance metrics.

The following objectives will have the greatest influence on your mobile app search ranking:

1. Increase your average rating number
2. Increase your number of ratings
3. Increase downloads

For app ratings and reviews, leverage platforms like Apptentive to improve your ratings. They are very effective at driving positive ratings. Additionally, paid tactics are a great way to drive install volume and are one area where paid budget capacity could directly influence organic results in Google. Anecdotally, both app stores use rating numbers (typically above or below 4 stars) to make decisions around promoting an app, either through merchandising spots or co-branded campaigns. I suspect this is being used as a general cut-off for what is displayed in universal results. Increasing your rating above 4 stars should improve the likelihood you'll appear in mobile app search results.

Lastly, think of merchandising and rankings in terms of internal linking structures. The more visible you are inside of the app store, the more visibility you have in external search.

App web performance optimization

Lastly, we're talking Google rankings, so factors like links, citations, and social shares matter. You should be conducting content marketing, PR, and outreach for your app. Focus on merchandising your app on your own site, as well as increasing coverage of your app (linking to the app store page). The basics of link optimization apply here.

App indexation - drive app engagement

Application search is not limited to driving installs via app search results. With app indexing, you can leverage your desktop/mobile website visibility in organic search to drive engagement with those who have your app installed. Google can discover and expose content deep inside your app directly in search results. This means that when a user clicks on your website in organic search, it can open your app directly, taking them to that exact piece of content in your app, instead of opening your website.

App indexation fundamentally changes technical SEO, extending SEO from server and webpage setup to the setup and optimization of applications.

This also fundamentally changes search. Your most avid and engaged user may choose to no longer visit your website. For example, on my Note 4, when I click a link to a site of a brand that I have an app installed for, Google gives me the option not only to open in the app, but to set opening the app as a default behavior.

If a user chooses to open your site in your app, they may never visit your site from organic search again.

App indexation is currently limited to Android devices, but there is evidence to suggest that it's already in the works and is soon to be released on iOS devices. There have been hints for some time, but markup is showing up in the wild suggesting that Google is actively working with Apple and select brands to develop iOS app indexing.

URI optimization for apps

The first step in creating an indexable app is to set up your app to support deep links. Deep links are URIs that are understood by your app and will open up a specific piece of content. They are effectively URLs for applications.

Once this URI is supported, a user can be sent to deep content in the app. These can be discovered as alternates to your desktop site's URLs, similar to how separate-site mobile sites are defined as alternate URLs for the desktop site. In instances of proper context (on an Android device with the app installed), Google can direct a user to the app instead of the website.

Setting this up requires working with your app developer to implement changes inside the app as well as working with your website developers to add references on your desktop site.

Adding intent filters

Android has documented the technical setup of deep links in detail, but it starts with setting up intent filters in an app's Android manifest file. This is done with the following code.

<activity android:name="com.example.android.GizmosActivity"
android:label="@string/title_gizmos" >
<intent-filter android:label="@string/filter_title_viewgizmos">
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
<data android:scheme="http"
android:host="example.com"
android:pathPrefix="/gizmos" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>

This dictates the technical optimization of your app URIs for app indexation and defines the elements used in the URI example above.

• The <intent-filter> element should be added for activities that should be launchable from search results.
• The <action> element specifies the ACTION_VIEW intent action so that the intent filter can be reached from Google Search.
• The <data> tag represents a URI format that resolves to the activity. At minimum, the <data> tag must include the android:scheme attribute.
• Include the BROWSABLE category. The BROWSABLE category is required in order for the intent filter to be accessible from a web browser. Without it, clicking a link in a browser cannot resolve to your app. The DEFAULT category is optional, but recommended. Without this category, the activity can be started only with an explicit intent, using your app component name.

Testing deep links

Google has created tools to help test your deep link setup. You can use Google's Deep Link Test Tool to test your app behavior with deep links on your phone. Additionally, you can create an HTML page with an intent:// link in it.

For example :

<a href="intent://example.com/page-1#Intent;scheme=http;package=com.example.android;end;"> <a href="http://example.com/page-1">http://example.com/page-1></a>

This link would open up deep content inside the app from the HTML page.

App URI crawl and discovery

Once an app has deep link functionality, the next step is to ensure that Google can discover these URIs as part of its traditional desktop crawling.

Ways to get apps crawled

1. Rel="alternate" in HTML head
2. ViewAction with Schema.org
3. Rel="alternate" in XML Sitemap

Implementing all three will create clear signals, but at minimum you should add the rel="alternate" tag to the HTML head of your webpages.

Effectively, think of the app URI as being similar to a mobile site URL when setting up a separate-site mobile site for SEO. The mobile deep link is an alternative way to view a webpage on your site. You map a piece of content on your site to a corresponding piece of content inside the app.

Before you get started, be sure to verify your website and app following the guidelines here. This will verify your app in Google Play Developer Console and Google Webmaster Tools.

#1: Rel="alternate" in HTML head

On an example page, such as example.com/page-1, you would add the following code to the head of the document. Again, very similar to separate-site mobile optimization.

<html>
<head> 
... 
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/http/example.com/page-1" /> 
...
</head>
<body>
</body>

#2: ViewAction with Schema.org

Additionally, you can reference the deep link using Schema.org and JSON by using a ViewAction.

<script type="application/ld+json"> 
{ 
"@context": "http://schema.org", 
"@type": "WebPage", 
"@id": "http://example.com/gizmos", 
"potentialAction": { 
"@type": "ViewAction", 
"target": "android-app://com.example.android/http/example.com/gizmos" 
} 
} 
</script>

#3 Rel="alternate" in XML sitemap

Lastly, you can reference the alternate URL in your XML Sitemaps, similar to using the rel="alternate" for mobile sites.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 
<url> 
<loc>http://example.com/page-1</loc> 
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/http/example.com/page-1" /> 
</url> 
... 
</urlset>

Once these are in place, Google can discover the app URI and provide your app as an alternative way to view content found in search.

Bot control and robots noindex for apps

There may be instances where there is content within your app that you do not want indexed in Google. A good example of this might be content or functionality that is built out on your site, but has not yet been developed in your app. This would create an inferior experience for users. The good news is that we can block indexation with a few updates to the app.

First, add the following to your app resource directory (res/xml/noindex.xml).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<search-engine xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"> 
<noindex uri="http://example.com/gizmos/hidden_uri"/> 
<noindex uriPrefix="http://example.com/gizmos/hidden_prefix"/> 
<noindex uri="gizmos://hidden_path"/> 
<noindex uriPrefix="gizmos://hidden_prefix"/> 
</search-engine>

As you can see above, you can block an individual URI or define a URI prefix to block entire folders.

Once this has been added, you need to update the AndroidManifest.xml file to denote that you're using noindex.html to block indexation.

<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.example.android.Gizmos"> 
<application> 
<activity android:name="com.example.android.GizmosActivity" android:label="@string/title_gizmos" > 
<intent-filter android:label="@string/filter_title_viewgizmos"> 
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/> 
... 
</activity> 
<meta-data android:name="search-engine" android:resource="@xml/noindex"/> 
</application> 
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/> 
</manifest>

App indexing API to drive re-engagement

In addition to URI discovery via desktop crawl, your mobile app can integrate Google's App Indexing API, which communicates with Google when users take actions inside your app. This sends information to Google about what users are viewing in the app. This is an additional method for deep link discovery and has some benefits.

The primary benefit is the ability to appear in autocomplete. This can drive re-engagement through Google Search query autocompletions, providing access to inner pages in apps.

Again, be sure to verify your website and app following the guidelines here. This will verify your app in Google Play Developer Console and Google Webmaster Tools.

App actions with knowledge graph

The next, and most exciting, evolution of search is leveraging actions. These will be powerful when combined with voice search, allowing search engines to take action on behalf of users, turning spoken language into executed actions.

App indexing allows you to take advantage of actions by allowing Google to not only launch an app, but execute actions inside of the app. Order me a pizza? Schedule my meeting? Drive my car? Ok, Google.

App actions work via entity detection and the application of the knowledge graph, allowing search engines to understand actions, words, ideas and objects. With that understanding, they can build an action graph that allows them to define common actions by entity type.

Here is a list of actions currently supported by Schema.org

• AchieveAction
• AssessAction
• ConsumeAction
• ControlAction
• CreateAction
• FindAction
• InteractAction
• MoveAction
• OrganizeAction
• PlayAction
• SearchAction
• TradeAction
• TransferAction
• UpdateAction

For example, the PlayAction could be used to play a song in a music app. This can be achieve with the following markup.

<script type="application/ld+json">
 {
 "@context": "http://schema.org",
 "@type": "MusicGroup",
 "name": "Weezer", "potentialAction": {
 "@type": "ListenAction",
 "target": "android-app://com.spotify.music/http/we.../listen"
 }
 }
</script>	

Once this is implemented, these app actions can begin to appear in search results and knowledge graph.

Overview of mobile app search opportunities

In summary, there are five primary ways to increase visibility and engagement for your mobile app in traditional organic search efforts.

The growth of mobile search is transforming how we define technical SEO, moving beyond front-end and back-end optimization of websites into the realm of structured data and application development. As app indexing expands to include iOS, I suspect the possibilities and opportunities associated with indexing applications, and their corresponding actions, to grow extensively.

For those with Android apps, app indexing is a potential leapfrog style opportunity to get ahead of competitors who are dominant in traditional desktop search. Those with iOS devices should start by optimizing their app listings, while preparing to implement indexation, as I suspect it'll be released for iOS this year.

Have you been leveraging traditional organic search to drive visibility and engagement for apps? Share your experiences in the comments below.

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

Posted by randfish

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

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

Video transcription

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conference and event sponsorships

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

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

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

Outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Introducing New Buffer Analytics: Find Your Most Clicked, Retweeted or Liked Posts

We’ve been having a lot of fun hearing some of the amazing feedback on how many of you are using Buffer.

One of the key areas that we heard about where we felt we could improve was our social media analytics area. We then reflected and brainstormed with many customers about how we could make analytics better.

Today, I’m really excited to unveil one of a series of planned analytics improvements for paying Awesome and Business plan customers. If you don’t want ...

The post Introducing New Buffer Analytics: Find Your Most Clicked, Retweeted or Liked Posts appeared first on Social.

How to Defeat Duplicate Content - Next Level

Posted by EllieWilkinson

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

---

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

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

Workflow summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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You Don't Need to Be a Brand Publisher to Win at Content Marketing

Posted by ronell smith

"Man, I'm sorry. You guys weren't ready to adopt the brands as publisher mindset. I suspected you'd never be ready to do it successfully. I knew it; I could sense you knew it. I wish I'd spoken up when I saw the intra-departmental debates waging. That's on me. My bad."

Those were my words to the executive of a midsize lifestyle brand I worked with in 2014. It took me months to get up the nerve to reach out and make it right, even though I'd done nothing wrong.

He seemed to understand. But he did have a question that stopped me in tracks and continues to haunt me.

"If we couldn't get it right, with all of our resources, what does it say about the feasibility of becoming a brand publisher?" he inquired. "Does that make content marketing [in and of itself] a bad idea?"

A fair question, to be sure, and one I did not have a sufficient answer for. But in looking back, I realized this exec, like so many others before him, made the mistake of thinking he could do quickly what he had not yet learned to do well. Content marketing wasn't the missile that sank his boat. The decision to do content marketing at warp speed and with little direction was his brands' albatross.

Four things doomed his efforts from the start, and each was self-induced:

1. He drank the brands-as-publishers Kool-Aid
2. He chose the wrong goals for his brand
3. He attempted to execute a plan that wasn't meant for his business
4. He attempted to do content marketing by skipping the small but important steps

Any one of these could have led to failure. Facing them all at once is akin to content marketing suicide. I see these same four elements dooming content marketers so frequently that I've resorted to naming them the four horsemen of content marketing failure.

For the purposes of this post, I want to illuminate how attempting to be a brand publisher is a lofty, needless goal for all but a handful of brands. Then I will highlight how to make steps 2, 3, and 4 work for your brand, not against it.

Before I begin, however, I want to make one thing abundantly clear: The ideas shared in this post have been formed through working with hundreds of brands over more than a decade, either as a writer, business strategist, content strategist, product marketing consultant or in a PR/media relations capacity.

I'm under no illusion that each (or any of them) will apply to everyone, but experience has shown me that these elements play an invaluable role in the success (or failure) of most brands embarking on the content marketing journey.

Where content marketing went off course

(image source)

The web is rife with examples of marketers sharing the "wisdom" of brands becoming publishers, and no less common are the examples of brands who've done just that, adding content publisher to the laundry list of services they already provide. Here's the problem with that logic: You're not a publisher, and attempting to become one is fraught with risks that more often than not lead to failure.

The logic of brands as publishers

Brand publishing refers to brands attempting to behave as media companies, specifically with regard to content breadth and frequency. Also, and most important, it requires a mindset wholly different from that of a typical content marketer: These brands view publishing as part of their business model.

That's where the confusion comes in. A lot of very knowledgeable people say any brand that publishes blog posts or adds updates on social media is a brand publisher. But that's akin to saying anyone who runs is a marathoner. It's about scale. While content marketing's goal is to attract and retain customers through the creation and distribution of content, being a brand publisher means you have layers of staff, strategic insight, vision, resources to build platforms for sharing new content and, most important, the ability to produce content at a rate that rivals, well, publishers.

If content marketing is a single-family dwelling, brand publishing is a city of one-million-plus.

It's not that being a brand publisher is a bad idea all by itself. It's that too many companies, who are barely ready to do content well, now think being a publisher is a sound idea.

As brands continue to bite off more than they can chew, the realities are tough to stomach, and have led to some interesting conclusions:

1. Brands who have and who can successfully make the transition to being a publisher can be very successful (e.g., seeing increased links and traffic, greater organic visibility, a significant lift in paid search and enviable social traction).
2. The number of brands who can successfully pull off being publishers is miniscule.

After months spent developing content strategies for clients looking for content marketing help, I decided that, in good conscience, I would never again that brands become publishers.

Instead, I adopted a strategy that's as far away from one-size-fits-all as possible.

Good for business doesn't mean good for your business

First, I refrained from using the term brand publisher. Next, I became a vocal proponent of the good-for-business-doesn't-mean-good-for-your-business philosophy, which meant that in meetings with managers, directors and C-Suite execs, I had the courage of my convictions in sharing that while content marketing is a sound practice, becoming a full-fledged publisher is something that requires a minimum of three things to be successful:

• Near-limitless resources: Take a look at the companies crushing it as true brand publishers, and you very quickly see why there aren't many like them. Red Bull, consistently singled out as the leading brand-as-publisher, invests in the full gamut of content, including movies, books, TV shows, magazines and more. The privately held company doesn't release figures related to those activities, but it's likely in the tens of millions. "[The expense is] something we grapple with on a daily basis," says Werner Brell, head of Red Bull Media House, the content arm of the brand. "It's obviously expensive."
• Come-hell-or-high water commitment: If you choose the brand-as-publisher route, understand that you'll get up close and personal with the word commitment. Aside from the financial commitment, including staff and the cost of producing content, you'd better be prepared for publish or perish to become part of your brand's DNA. There is no "This isn't working. Let's change tactics." This is your horse and you'll keep riding it. It's the lot you've chosen.
• A change in your brand's overall corporate philosophy: This is the big, hairy gorilla that (fortunately) saves many brands from dooming themselves from choosing the brand publisher route. Few C-Suite denizens are willing to disrupt their corporate model and add publishing to their mantle. And if you're the VP of content or CMO, you're wise to accept this level of restraint.

If your company is ready to shoulder such a commitment, then by all means dive right in. If not, there's a better way to do content marketing, one that is no less effective but does not require you to mortgage your future in the process.

A better way: content marketing for your brand

Instead of attempting to become a publisher, or even a content marketer, focus your efforts on becoming a brand that consistently creates content that puts the needs of prospects and customers first, while simultaneously providing meaningful solutions to their problems.

I've been a very vocal haranguer of content marketing, though not because of its inefficacy.

I'm simply not a proponent of brands thinking of themselves as anything other than what they are in the minds of their prospects and clients.

Hopefully, at the core of your business is a product or service customers clamor for, not a content engine.

That's why becoming a customer-first brand that has meaningful content as part of its DNA is the safest, surest, easiest-to-adopt model for brands with the desire to do content marketing right but who aren't willing to re-org the business to get it underway.

In this way, you keep the main thing the main thing. That main thing in this case is serving your core audience.

At this point, I'm hoping you see the light, realizing that becoming a brand publisher isn't necessary for your company to be successful at content marketing.

If you're ready to chart a solid, more reliable path to success, it begins with turning away the four horsemen of content marketing failure.

We've banished the first horsemen. Let's do the same with the other three.

Choose the right goals for your business

Whenever I sit down with a prospect to discuss their business, I open up my notebook and write down the following three phrases, including a checkbox next to each, on a sheet of paper:

• "...Be successful."
• "...Rank No. 1 in Google."
• "...Increase...conversions."

Then I ask "What are your goals for the business?" all the while knowing full well the answer will be one of the three things I've written down.

The followup question, too, is canned: "What are you doing to get there?" That answer, too, is typically never a surprise: "That's what you're here for, right?"

Wrong!

After I've apprised them that the shortest path to failure is not having a clear view of their goals, I have their attention and they are ready to begin the goal-setting process.

Here's the catch: Only you and your team can decide what those goals are/should be. It's important that the goals take into account the entirety of the business, not just SEO, content, social media, etc.

Also, I've found it helps if the metrics assigned to measure a business's success toward their goals are meaningful (e.g., a sincere help to the overall business) and clearly communicated (e.g., everyone involved is aware of what they're working for and being judged against).

(image source)

No matter what specific goals you decide on, applying the principle of "HAS," as in holistic, adherable (er, sticky) and sustainable, can be a huge help:

• Holistic—Content marketing success requires that a lot of moving work parts in unison. Your goals must take into account the entirety of the business, though not all at once.
• Adherable—How likely are you to stick with the goals, seeing them through to fruition? It won't matter how sound your goals are if they don't make sense for your business, or don't make sense for your business at a given time.
• Sustainable—Will you be able to maintain the needed level of effort for the goals to reach maturity?

I've found that keeping these principles top of mind helps to order a brand's steps, ensuring that everyone is aware of the goals and of their role in working toward them.

As an example, let's say you're a small business ready to jump into the murky waters of content marketing, but you don't yet have a website.

The right goal would be to launch a new website. To make the goal as HAS-friendly as possible, you could assign a timeframe—say, 90 days—then break out the associated tasks by order of importance (see image below).

(image source)

I'd even suggest keeping a checklist in a Google Doc where team members can stay abreast of what's going on, in addition to seeing who's responsible for what and having a better understanding of where the team is in terms of completing each task related to their goals.

Execute a plan that's right for your business

If I had to single out the No. 1 reason content marketers I've worked with have failed it would be that they based their goals on what the competition was doing instead of what's best for their own business.

Seeing a competitor rank higher for their main keywords; having thousands of web pages indexed by Google; spending mad cash on paid media; and having brand pages on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, these businesses attempt to do the same.

Sounds comical, right, until you realize it happens all the time and to businesses of all sizes.

So we just had a new client shut down our social strategy to instead "copy anything and everything their competitors are doing" #brilliant

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) January 26, 2015

Problem is, no two businesses are entirely alike and, well, "You aren't them," as the saying goes.

Aside from having little idea of how much real success the competition is enjoying from their search, social and content efforts, these brands are taking their eyes off the main prize: their own business.

An approach that works well and is easy to carry out entails taking an inventory or where you are in relation to where you want to be while keeping a keen eye on the competition.

With your goals solidly in hand, begin by sketching out a plan based not on where you are, or on what the competition is doing, but on those actions that would likely lead to success for you.

(image created by author)

In the graph above, created in Google Docs, you can see that I mainly focused on the content-related activities that would have the biggest impact over the next 90 days. (Caveat: This is simply a high-level overview of one area of the business, but it's plenty thorough enough for a team to begin working from.)

The key is to take the time to get to know (a) what success looks like for your business, then (b) focus on specific, actionable elements that can be done in the allotted timeframe.

Sweat the (seemingly) small but important stuff

(image source)

"Why do you hate content marketing?" I get asked these words at least once a month. The answer is always the same. I don't hate content marketing. I hate most brands' approach to content marketing.

There is so much more to the making it a success than we're typically led to believe there is.

The focus is always on produce, produce, produce. Outreach, outreach, outreach. Produce more. Outreach evan more. Rinse and repeat.

As marketers, we've seemingly trained a generation of brands that the focus should be on doing fast (and often) what they barely know how to do at all.we never learn to do well.

Yeah, I know it works...for some. But is it scalable over the long-term? Better yet, will it remain scalable into the future?

If you want to position your brand for success in content marketing, make sweating the small but oh-so-important steps a priority.

This process starts with clarity.

1. Begin by defining who you are and who you desire to be in the minds of your prospects and clients. I can see the eye-rolling. But without answers to these questions, you're wasting your time and, likely, money. Devote the time to having weekly brainstorming sessions with your core team. During these meetings, keep the air open, relaxed and free-flowing, allowing ideas to bounce freely around the room. The goal is to start each meeting with a big question. Then let it "breathe." Your first big question should be "Who are we?" followed by "Who are we to our customers?" Put on your introspection hats, viewing yourselves through the words and interactions of prospects and customers, who have likely shared comments via email, phone, text, and your website.
   
2. Ask "why" a lot. During Mozcon 2014, Wil Reynolds dropped a slide that gave me goosebumps:
   
   
   (image source)
   
   

   Simple. Brilliant. What I loved about this slide and the line of thinking is it helps brands (and the staff who work for those brands) stay the course, focused on their already-defined objectives. For example, once you know who you are and who you are in the minds of your core prospects and customers, any actions you take should be done with this information in mind.

   Therefore, if the team begins to get distracted by shiny-things syndrome, anyone has the right to ask "Why are we doing this?" or "Why does this...make sense?"

   Nothing like forcing someone to defend a bad idea to provoke clarity.

3. Get to know your audience. The better you know your audience, the easier it is to market to them. Even if you cannot afford the fancy tools and platforms Mike King has previous talked about to develop personas, you can have staff members spend an hour each per week scouring social media, forums, discussions boards and sundry websites' comments sections looking for people who are likely interested in the products/services your business offers. Gather as much information (e.g., age, income, occupation, etc.) about these people and their needs as possible, in addition to what sites they frequent, how often and for what. In this way, you're developing personas without it feeling like an onerous task. Keep copious notes, which can be entered into a Google Doc and shared with teammates.
   
4. Build a community. I hate the term secret sauce, mainly because no such thing exists. However, if a brand wants to set itself apart from the competition, they should adopt this mentality: Get to know your audience, but build a community. An audience might read your blog, consume and share your information, and recognize your content from the rest of the pack. A community, however, is engaged and passionate, actively seeking out your content, sharing it broadly and fervently, and is easily willing to help in the creation of content for your business (e.g., YouMoz) Have your team keep a watchful eye on out for engaged, visible members of your audience, especially via social media. Share their content, answer their questions and, as resources permit, surprise them with personaliized GIFs or mail them skotskes. The audience-to-community threshold is smaller than you likely think.
   
5. Create and share meaningful content. Notice that I saved content creation until last. That's no accident. Content marketing is cruelest to those who dive in headfirst without clear goals, lacking a plan of action and who're content to simply "be on social media" or to "share some blogs." If you're committed to creating and sharing meaningful content, there are three areas you must focus on:
   • Inspire. People want to feel good about themselves and the work they're doing. Why not use your content to help them and generate buzz for yourself in the process? For example, if your business sells email solutions for small business, a sizable portion of your content should cater to helping business owners "take back a part of your day." When creating content, put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and ask yourself "What can I create that'll inspire and compel them?" In this way, it's less about the action you need them to take and more about tapping the emotion needed to bring that action to reality.
   • Immediacy. While evergreen content certainly deserves a spot in your quiver, make certain to offer content that speaks to the immediate needs of the community. This is when a sincere effort at thinking like a publisher comes in handy, especially if you have experts in-house who can speak, with your brand's voice, to these needs. A great example is the job Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen are doing at sharing information regarding Google's updates and important social media news. Look for ways your brands can contribute in a similar fashion.
   • Indispensability. Your content needs an I-can't-do-without-this component. It's the surest path to ensure your content gets read and shared; your website retains steady traffic; your blogs always have significant eyeballs; and your brand is sought-after online. Look at the job the Buffer folks are doing in educating their community on all things social media, time management and productivity hacks. Their posts are read and shared by thousands daily, with many (including myself) seeing the blog as can't-do-without material. Same for the excellent work the Bruce Clay, Inc. content team, whose comprehensive resources add a layer of "stickiness" to the brand that's hard to beat. How can you do the same? Commit wholeheartedly to learning the needs of your community, especially those needs associated with pain points they desperately need removed. Creating content around these areas/topics is the easy part.

I can't say for certain that, if you refrain from attempting to be a brand publisher, you'll be a successful content marketer. I also cannot promise that going all-in with the three points outlined above ensures your success.

What, however, I can say is the vast majority of brands would do better if they banished "I want to be a brand publisher" from their lexicon and decided to focus on the right goals, executed a sensible plan and made the small things part of the main things.

What about you? Are you ready to do content marketing wisely? Dive into the discussion in the comments below.

(main image: licensed by the author )

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