Posted by randfish

Many owners of established, older pages are facing a similar issue: they've been ranking decently for a keyword for some time, but they want to move into the coveted number one spot. However, older pages don't drive a ton of new press, new social signals, or awareness. If you want to boost your rankings for the same keyword you've been targeting for awhile, how can you move up to move the needle on your business?

Adjusting your existing, quality content can be used to help bump your site up in the SERPs. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays out the tactics you can use to boost your older page to the next level!

Here is a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today's video: 
 

Video Transcription

"Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to get a little down in the gritty details. Sometimes you've got a situation like this. Someone's performed a search for air conditioners. You're ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, "Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels." It's, "If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece."

Hyper-tactical, but it's good to know all the ways that you can move the needle on this. So if you want to go from number four to number three to number two and you've got essentially an older page, not a new page – so you're not getting lots of new press, attention, or awareness, driving all these social signals, etc. – and you're not targeting a new keyword, you have this kind of stale, older page and you want to get it ranking, there's a bunch of tactics that you can pursue, and I want to talk about each of them in a bit of detail.

So number one, point more external links to the URL. This is probably the most classic thing that folks in the SEO field have done over the last decade, 12 years. It does work, and it still does work, although it's less powerful than it used to be because search engines, Google in particular, are looking at such a broader set of figures and data sources for their ranking signals.

However, a few things about this. This is going to be pretty darn hard to do with commercial content. It's much easier if you got educational or non-promotional stuff, because reaching out and getting links from other types of folks, from other websites is much easier when it's authentic and not directly promotional or not directly revenue generating, that kind of thing. Now this is much easier for folks who are in like a non-profit space or in an educational or content space because they can reach out and say, "Hey, I have this great resource. I think your people might like it. Do you want to shoot over a link to it? Can I contribute something to your site and point to it?" Yes.

It's much harder to do that when you have a page that's ranking for air conditioners and you're just trying to beat out three other e-commerce retailers for air conditioners. This is the way it goes.

I do have some specific recommendations. I'm not going to dive into every one of these, but these are the tactics that, in my experience, work the best. So that's guest content, basically when you're writing on other people's sites. Of course, just like everything, it's got to be authentic, got to be high quality. You can't just be spamming other people's sites or submitting to really low quality ones.

Promotions do tend to work pretty well. If you're doing a promotion on your air conditioners, other people may pick that up. You can get press and attention, social attention. Partnerships can work well. Testimonials and reviews. So other people who are writing reviews about maybe an air conditioner line that you've just launched, or someone's writing a review about a new air conditioner that's come out, and you happen to be the retailer featuring that, you can be included in those types of places.

List inclusion, if you know about a list that already exists where people are covering places to get air conditioners online, you can get included in those. Again, be really careful. You don't want to go to those spammy, generic directories. You want to be going to high-quality lists. CNET Reviews is very different from Articles-about-electronics-online.info. Apologies if that's your site. If not, we should register it. I'm kidding.

Press and blogs, of course. Social media pushes you can do, especially if you've got something to announce around air conditioners. Summer's coming up, right? A Facebook page, a push on Pinterest, a push on Twitter, or on Google+.

Link reclamation, meaning you go back and find places that used to link to you that don't anymore, places that used to link to your competition but those links are now broken. You can go talk to those kinds of folks.

Those are the kinds of link building techniques that have worked best, in my experience. Please be so super careful not to build the wrong links. If you haven't watched it already, Matt Cutts has been tweeting and talking in video – Matt Cuts being the head of the Web Spam Team at Google – talking about how they're going to be taking even more aggressive action than what they took with Penguin in a Penguin 2.0 algorithm that's coming out in the next few weeks. So just please be super cautious about where you're getting these external link sources from.

Especially since links are a little less powerful than they used to be and because a lot of the linking sources are more dangerous than they once were, there are some other ways I want to mention. Those include increasing your click-through rate. Now, I'm not trying to say here that correlation equals causation, or that it even implies that, but what we do know is more people clicking through on your listing means fewer people clicking through to your competitors and a higher chance that some of those people are going to take actions that we know does increase ranking, so things like linking to you and sharing you and those kinds of things. Your page is clearly providing a more compelling experience. That tends to be exactly what Google's algorithm is trying to accomplish, and so increasing your click-through rate can help with this.

One of the ways that this can be done, and this is not to say that Google is sort of biased to people who do it, but if you supplement with PPC, with paid search ads, it tend to be the case, and lots of people have tried different tests around this and gotten different performance, but, on average, it tends to be the case that one plus one equals a little more than two. I put 2.25 for that. Your mileage may vary. But basically, if I take a look over here and I've got my air conditioner page and I also have an ad on the sidebar or on the top up here, it tends to be the case that the click-through rate here, plus the click-through rate here, is a little more than if I just had a paid ad or if I just had the organic listing. So two listings on the page slightly better than one and one. So that's certainly an angle you can try again.

Again, I urge you to test this, not to just take it on blind faith. Included in that test methodology should be testing modifications to the title and the description. So if your air conditioner page here has got a description and a title and a URL – the URL matters too, and you can do things like 301 redirect the old one to a new one – this can move the needle. I have found a lot of the time that what I'd call keyword-stuffed, kind of SEO 1.0, back in the late '90s, early 2000s type of things where it says, "Air conditioners, your air conditioners, get the best air conditioners here," followed by a brand name that's kind of off, after what people can see in the title in the search results, doesn't perform nearly as well as a brand people recognize, a compelling title that has a little bit of authenticity, a little bit of your brand and your culture and your unique value proposition embedded right in the title and the description.

The same story with the URL. Lots of hyphens separating something, a longer URL, a dynamic URL versus one that has readable keywords in it and readable text in there. Again, you're going for authenticity. You're going for, "Boy, what would I click on? What do I tend to click on? What do people like?" Think of this just like you'd think of a paid search ad. You want to optimize all the areas of this and try and test it and get better performance out of that click-through rate.

Another thing you can obviously do is add rich snippets. These are things like we could add a video to the page and add the video XML sitemap so that we get the video markup next to that result. We could add rel=author and get our profile picture next to it, assuming we connected with Google+. For some types of rich snippet results, recipes in particular, news items, you can add images and get those in there. For other types of results, air conditioners, any ecommerce result, you can have star reviews and number of reviews. All of those things can help move the needle on click-through rate.

Number three, improve and revitalize the page's content itself. Again, this isn't always a direct needle mover. It can be indirect. But Google is pretty sophisticated with analyzing content. Better content, I don't mean better content in terms of it has more keywords stuffed into it, or better content in terms of it just happens to be longer or more in-depth. I mean more compelling, more uniquely valuable, more interesting, more worthy of being shared, more special. That kind of stuff tends to perform better in Google.

They've got a wide variety of text-based content analysis algorithms that tell them all sorts of stuff about a page, not just keywords and TFIDF and stuff like that. So things like rich media, video, images, graphics, the layout design, the user experience, the visual aesthetics, how the page looks, these actually can move the needle, not just on how it performs in the search results, but how it performs in terms of conversion rate. Conversion rate actually tends to be tied pretty nicely to how it performs in search results, because again, Google is looking at all those pieces of the algorithm, trying to piece together what provides the best experience for our users. Text content too. I'm not just talking about keywords. I'm talking about that unique value. If you haven't seen the Whiteboard Friday on unique value versus unique content, you should check that out.

I know I didn't have enough room, so I switched sides. Number four, internal links and redirects. So there are a few things that can happen here. Sometimes you have an orphaned page. It's only linked to from one section. You've got to drill way deep down into a subcategory or sub-subcategory to find this page on your site. E-commerce sites are particularly messy with this kind of stuff a lot of the time. Make sure that the page is getting link love, internal link love, relevant link love. I'm not  talking about stuffing an anchor text-rich link in the footer of every page or the category section or something like that. I'm talking about when you have pages that are relevant to air conditioning, you have a page on summer appliances, you have a page on electronics, you have a page on what should homeowners be thinking about to upgrade their homes, great. Make sure that you're linking to your air conditioner page. Those are relevant pages where people would want to see that. If you're confused, do an "air conditioners"site:yourdomain. See all the pages where you mentioned it, and yet have somehow failed to link over to your air conditioner's page that you actually got.

Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, "I'm going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together." We've done this a number of times on Moz, because we'll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, "Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old." Let's just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let's do that. Let's consolidate so people don't get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn't be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I've seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff.

Number five, newer signal, but something that I'm pretty sure in this year's ranking factors is going to prove to be very interesting, and that is branding, co-occurrence, and mentions. What I mean by this is if your brand name, that's usually your domain name and usually your company name as well, is often connected with the words "air conditioners" – by connected I mean connected when the press talks about you, when third party sites talk about you, when people blog about you, when social media users talk about you – if those words tend to appear frequently together, your brand plus thing you want to rank for, you tend to do quite well. We've seen some early signals that mentions, that co-occurrence of terms, phrases plus brand can really move the needle. So don't ignore that either.

All right. Hope these five techniques are things that you can try out. Share your experiences with the rest of the Whiteboard Friday readers in the comments, and I'll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

Read more...

Posted by randfish

Many owners of established, older pages are facing a similar issue: they've been ranking decently for a keyword for some time, but they want to move into the coveted number one spot. However, older pages don't drive a ton of new press, new social signals, or awareness. If you want to boost your rankings for the same keyword you've been targeting for awhile, how can you move up to move the needle on your business?

Adjusting your existing, quality content can be used to help bump your site up in the SERPs. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays out the tactics you can use to boost your older page to the next level!

Here is a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today's video: 
 

Video Transcription

"Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to get a little down in the gritty details. Sometimes you've got a situation like this. Someone's performed a search for air conditioners. You're ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, "Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels." It's, "If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece."

Hyper-tactical, but it's good to know all the ways that you can move the needle on this. So if you want to go from number four to number three to number two and you've got essentially an older page, not a new page – so you're not getting lots of new press, attention, or awareness, driving all these social signals, etc. – and you're not targeting a new keyword, you have this kind of stale, older page and you want to get it ranking, there's a bunch of tactics that you can pursue, and I want to talk about each of them in a bit of detail.

So number one, point more external links to the URL. This is probably the most classic thing that folks in the SEO field have done over the last decade, 12 years. It does work, and it still does work, although it's less powerful than it used to be because search engines, Google in particular, are looking at such a broader set of figures and data sources for their ranking signals.

However, a few things about this. This is going to be pretty darn hard to do with commercial content. It's much easier if you got educational or non-promotional stuff, because reaching out and getting links from other types of folks, from other websites is much easier when it's authentic and not directly promotional or not directly revenue generating, that kind of thing. Now this is much easier for folks who are in like a non-profit space or in an educational or content space because they can reach out and say, "Hey, I have this great resource. I think your people might like it. Do you want to shoot over a link to it? Can I contribute something to your site and point to it?" Yes.

It's much harder to do that when you have a page that's ranking for air conditioners and you're just trying to beat out three other e-commerce retailers for air conditioners. This is the way it goes.

I do have some specific recommendations. I'm not going to dive into every one of these, but these are the tactics that, in my experience, work the best. So that's guest content, basically when you're writing on other people's sites. Of course, just like everything, it's got to be authentic, got to be high quality. You can't just be spamming other people's sites or submitting to really low quality ones.

Promotions do tend to work pretty well. If you're doing a promotion on your air conditioners, other people may pick that up. You can get press and attention, social attention. Partnerships can work well. Testimonials and reviews. So other people who are writing reviews about maybe an air conditioner line that you've just launched, or someone's writing a review about a new air conditioner that's come out, and you happen to be the retailer featuring that, you can be included in those types of places.

List inclusion, if you know about a list that already exists where people are covering places to get air conditioners online, you can get included in those. Again, be really careful. You don't want to go to those spammy, generic directories. You want to be going to high-quality lists. CNET Reviews is very different from Articles-about-electronics-online.info. Apologies if that's your site. If not, we should register it. I'm kidding.

Press and blogs, of course. Social media pushes you can do, especially if you've got something to announce around air conditioners. Summer's coming up, right? A Facebook page, a push on Pinterest, a push on Twitter, or on Google+.

Link reclamation, meaning you go back and find places that used to link to you that don't anymore, places that used to link to your competition but those links are now broken. You can go talk to those kinds of folks.

Those are the kinds of link building techniques that have worked best, in my experience. Please be so super careful not to build the wrong links. If you haven't watched it already, Matt Cutts has been tweeting and talking in video – Matt Cuts being the head of the Web Spam Team at Google – talking about how they're going to be taking even more aggressive action than what they took with Penguin in a Penguin 2.0 algorithm that's coming out in the next few weeks. So just please be super cautious about where you're getting these external link sources from.

Especially since links are a little less powerful than they used to be and because a lot of the linking sources are more dangerous than they once were, there are some other ways I want to mention. Those include increasing your click-through rate. Now, I'm not trying to say here that correlation equals causation, or that it even implies that, but what we do know is more people clicking through on your listing means fewer people clicking through to your competitors and a higher chance that some of those people are going to take actions that we know does increase ranking, so things like linking to you and sharing you and those kinds of things. Your page is clearly providing a more compelling experience. That tends to be exactly what Google's algorithm is trying to accomplish, and so increasing your click-through rate can help with this.

One of the ways that this can be done, and this is not to say that Google is sort of biased to people who do it, but if you supplement with PPC, with paid search ads, it tend to be the case, and lots of people have tried different tests around this and gotten different performance, but, on average, it tends to be the case that one plus one equals a little more than two. I put 2.25 for that. Your mileage may vary. But basically, if I take a look over here and I've got my air conditioner page and I also have an ad on the sidebar or on the top up here, it tends to be the case that the click-through rate here, plus the click-through rate here, is a little more than if I just had a paid ad or if I just had the organic listing. So two listings on the page slightly better than one and one. So that's certainly an angle you can try again.

Again, I urge you to test this, not to just take it on blind faith. Included in that test methodology should be testing modifications to the title and the description. So if your air conditioner page here has got a description and a title and a URL – the URL matters too, and you can do things like 301 redirect the old one to a new one – this can move the needle. I have found a lot of the time that what I'd call keyword-stuffed, kind of SEO 1.0, back in the late '90s, early 2000s type of things where it says, "Air conditioners, your air conditioners, get the best air conditioners here," followed by a brand name that's kind of off, after what people can see in the title in the search results, doesn't perform nearly as well as a brand people recognize, a compelling title that has a little bit of authenticity, a little bit of your brand and your culture and your unique value proposition embedded right in the title and the description.

The same story with the URL. Lots of hyphens separating something, a longer URL, a dynamic URL versus one that has readable keywords in it and readable text in there. Again, you're going for authenticity. You're going for, "Boy, what would I click on? What do I tend to click on? What do people like?" Think of this just like you'd think of a paid search ad. You want to optimize all the areas of this and try and test it and get better performance out of that click-through rate.

Another thing you can obviously do is add rich snippets. These are things like we could add a video to the page and add the video XML sitemap so that we get the video markup next to that result. We could add rel=author and get our profile picture next to it, assuming we connected with Google+. For some types of rich snippet results, recipes in particular, news items, you can add images and get those in there. For other types of results, air conditioners, any ecommerce result, you can have star reviews and number of reviews. All of those things can help move the needle on click-through rate.

Number three, improve and revitalize the page's content itself. Again, this isn't always a direct needle mover. It can be indirect. But Google is pretty sophisticated with analyzing content. Better content, I don't mean better content in terms of it has more keywords stuffed into it, or better content in terms of it just happens to be longer or more in-depth. I mean more compelling, more uniquely valuable, more interesting, more worthy of being shared, more special. That kind of stuff tends to perform better in Google.

They've got a wide variety of text-based content analysis algorithms that tell them all sorts of stuff about a page, not just keywords and TFIDF and stuff like that. So things like rich media, video, images, graphics, the layout design, the user experience, the visual aesthetics, how the page looks, these actually can move the needle, not just on how it performs in the search results, but how it performs in terms of conversion rate. Conversion rate actually tends to be tied pretty nicely to how it performs in search results, because again, Google is looking at all those pieces of the algorithm, trying to piece together what provides the best experience for our users. Text content too. I'm not just talking about keywords. I'm talking about that unique value. If you haven't seen the Whiteboard Friday on unique value versus unique content, you should check that out.

I know I didn't have enough room, so I switched sides. Number four, internal links and redirects. So there are a few things that can happen here. Sometimes you have an orphaned page. It's only linked to from one section. You've got to drill way deep down into a subcategory or sub-subcategory to find this page on your site. E-commerce sites are particularly messy with this kind of stuff a lot of the time. Make sure that the page is getting link love, internal link love, relevant link love. I'm not  talking about stuffing an anchor text-rich link in the footer of every page or the category section or something like that. I'm talking about when you have pages that are relevant to air conditioning, you have a page on summer appliances, you have a page on electronics, you have a page on what should homeowners be thinking about to upgrade their homes, great. Make sure that you're linking to your air conditioner page. Those are relevant pages where people would want to see that. If you're confused, do an "air conditioners"site:yourdomain. See all the pages where you mentioned it, and yet have somehow failed to link over to your air conditioner's page that you actually got.

Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, "I'm going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together." We've done this a number of times on Moz, because we'll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, "Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old." Let's just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let's do that. Let's consolidate so people don't get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn't be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I've seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff.

Number five, newer signal, but something that I'm pretty sure in this year's ranking factors is going to prove to be very interesting, and that is branding, co-occurrence, and mentions. What I mean by this is if your brand name, that's usually your domain name and usually your company name as well, is often connected with the words "air conditioners" – by connected I mean connected when the press talks about you, when third party sites talk about you, when people blog about you, when social media users talk about you – if those words tend to appear frequently together, your brand plus thing you want to rank for, you tend to do quite well. We've seen some early signals that mentions, that co-occurrence of terms, phrases plus brand can really move the needle. So don't ignore that either.

All right. Hope these five techniques are things that you can try out. Share your experiences with the rest of the Whiteboard Friday readers in the comments, and I'll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

Read more...

Posted by Zach Corleissen

Greetings, Mozfolk! My name is Zach, and I'm a technical writer here at SEOmoz.

We've consistently heard from you that Mozscape needs better documentation. I'm pleased to tell you: your requests have been granted! The Mozscape wiki just underwent a thorough update and review by developers, help teamsters, and testers. We incorporated your feedback from help tickets and forums to make Mozscape easier for new users to learn, and more functional for experienced users to reference.

Hopefully this documentation update helps you get the most value from Mozscape. If you haven't taken a look through our documentation yet, we hope it encourages you to see how Mozscape data can help your business grow.

Legacy documentation: a (very) brief history

Like documentation at most startups, the legacy documentation for Mozscape was inconsistent. Not all features were documented; for example, metadata supports a command called index_stats, which returns information about the contents of the current Mozscape Index update. It's been in production for a while, but hasn't been documented until now. (Check it out, it's pretty cool.)

When features changed, sometimes the changes weren't documented. Well-intentioned authors added and edited content in ways that weren’t always comprehensive, followed by other well-intentioned authors who did the same. Not everything made sense, either; the next_update and last_update features of the metadata API return dates for the next scheduled and most recent Mozscape Index updates, but the value returned is in Unix Epoch format, which only makes semi-intuitive sense if you already understand the "Expires" part of signed authentication.

I compare Mozscape legacy documentation to how pearls are formed: created in gradual layers; often valuable; frequently irritating.

With these updates, the Mozscape documentation is definitely on the mend and ready for your viewing pleasure.

What's new (and a new feature)

The What's New page makes it easier to track feature changes in future updates. From now on, any time we add or change features in Mozscape, the change and the date it went live will appear there.

For example: as of May 15th, Mozscape now supports HTTP Secure.

What's different: easier to learn

If you're an SEOmoz PRO user and have never tried Mozscape, now is the perfect time!

Our help team emphasized that we need a better introduction to Mozscape, especially for how Mozscape calls are formed. We responded by streamlining the introduction and improving the way we describe Mozscape’s call anatomy.

What's different: easier to reference

The query parameters are now organized in the way you're actually using them: Scope and Sort together, and Limit and Offset together. We distributed parameters and values specific to each endpoint into their respective articles; for example, possible Scope values for the links endpoint...

...are discrete from the possible values of Scope for the anchor-text endpoint:

Glossary entries are re-pointed to existing (and often better) resources on SEOmoz's main site whenever possible, and we added a few much-needed entries. (How did we get this far without defining target and source URLs?)

What's different: complete parameter value tables

A complete list of parameter values is a big improvement for Mozscape users. For example, the links API accepts the Sort parameter, but the possible values of Sort weren't listed. Also, only some values of the Sort and Scope parameters are compatible. Today's doc update addresses both of these:

What's different: better organization

We're excited to release re-organized topics and reduced duplicate information. An example of all three is free vs. paid access to Mozscape. Here's what it looked like before:

Here's what it looks like with one of the most-requested features: a side-by-side comparison of free versus paid access to Mozscape.

The legacy documentation referred to different “versions” of Mozscape for free and paid users. This isn't technically accurate, as there's only one version of Mozscape with different access tiers. Also: notice the cleaner fonts and layout? Our awesome UI guy, Kenny brought the API wiki in line with our site-wide standards.

Best Practices is a single article now. It used to be a category:

Most of the "best practices" in the legacy documentation weren't best practices per se; they were required practices. For example: there's no way to use Mozscape without signed authentication, making it a practice that's "required" rather than "best." With the update, Best Practices now lives up to its name with value-adding information about batching calls and maximizing your value by making requests in parallel.

What's different: less information?

Our users are pretty hardcore (a good thing!), so you may notice that two or three topics now contain less information than previously. For example, some response fields were listed as being "for internal use and subject to change".

If a response field can only be generated from an internal call, there's no reason to expose it to users, so we removed them from the documentation...and it would be a rare feature indeed that wasn't subject to change.

I know what you might be saying. "But less information is less transparent! Less transparent is less TAGFEE!"

That's true; transparency is critical for good documentation. When it comes to user guides, though, more does not always mean better. TAGFEE also means empathy; if extraneous details make it harder to learn Mozscape, then the documentation lacks empathy, and that's bad. We're striving for the right balance between abundant information (transparency) and providing knowledge that will actually help you (empathy). Mozscape is awesome, and we want it to be as valuable for you as possible.

Closing with a question

How can we keep improving Mozscape documentation? Please let us know in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Read more...

Posted by Zach Corleissen

Greetings, Mozfolk! My name is Zach, and I'm a technical writer here at SEOmoz.

We've consistently heard from you that Mozscape needs better documentation. I'm pleased to tell you: your requests have been granted! The Mozscape wiki just underwent a thorough update and review by developers, help teamsters, and testers. We incorporated your feedback from help tickets and forums to make Mozscape easier for new users to learn, and more functional for experienced users to reference.

Hopefully this documentation update helps you get the most value from Mozscape. If you haven't taken a look through our documentation yet, we hope it encourages you to see how Mozscape data can help your business grow.

Legacy documentation: a (very) brief history

Like documentation at most startups, the legacy documentation for Mozscape was inconsistent. Not all features were documented; for example, metadata supports a command called index_stats, which returns information about the contents of the current Mozscape Index update. It's been in production for a while, but hasn't been documented until now. (Check it out, it's pretty cool.)

When features changed, sometimes the changes weren't documented. Well-intentioned authors added and edited content in ways that weren’t always comprehensive, followed by other well-intentioned authors who did the same. Not everything made sense, either; the next_update and last_update features of the metadata API return dates for the next scheduled and most recent Mozscape Index updates, but the value returned is in Unix Epoch format, which only makes semi-intuitive sense if you already understand the "Expires" part of signed authentication.

I compare Mozscape legacy documentation to how pearls are formed: created in gradual layers; often valuable; frequently irritating.

With these updates, the Mozscape documentation is definitely on the mend and ready for your viewing pleasure.

What's new (and a new feature)

The What's New page makes it easier to track feature changes in future updates. From now on, any time we add or change features in Mozscape, the change and the date it went live will appear there.

For example: as of May 15th, Mozscape now supports HTTP Secure.

What's different: easier to learn

If you're an SEOmoz PRO user and have never tried Mozscape, now is the perfect time!

Our help team emphasized that we need a better introduction to Mozscape, especially for how Mozscape calls are formed. We responded by streamlining the introduction and improving the way we describe Mozscape’s call anatomy.

What's different: easier to reference

The query parameters are now organized in the way you're actually using them: Scope and Sort together, and Limit and Offset together. We distributed parameters and values specific to each endpoint into their respective articles; for example, possible Scope values for the links endpoint...

...are discrete from the possible values of Scope for the anchor-text endpoint:

Glossary entries are re-pointed to existing (and often better) resources on SEOmoz's main site whenever possible, and we added a few much-needed entries. (How did we get this far without defining target and source URLs?)

What's different: complete parameter value tables

A complete list of parameter values is a big improvement for Mozscape users. For example, the links API accepts the Sort parameter, but the possible values of Sort weren't listed. Also, only some values of the Sort and Scope parameters are compatible. Today's doc update addresses both of these:

What's different: better organization

We're excited to release re-organized topics and reduced duplicate information. An example of all three is free vs. paid access to Mozscape. Here's what it looked like before:

Here's what it looks like with one of the most-requested features: a side-by-side comparison of free versus paid access to Mozscape.

The legacy documentation referred to different “versions” of Mozscape for free and paid users. This isn't technically accurate, as there's only one version of Mozscape with different access tiers. Also: notice the cleaner fonts and layout? Our awesome UI guy, Kenny brought the API wiki in line with our site-wide standards.

Best Practices is a single article now. It used to be a category:

Most of the "best practices" in the legacy documentation weren't best practices per se; they were required practices. For example: there's no way to use Mozscape without signed authentication, making it a practice that's "required" rather than "best." With the update, Best Practices now lives up to its name with value-adding information about batching calls and maximizing your value by making requests in parallel.

What's different: less information?

Our users are pretty hardcore (a good thing!), so you may notice that two or three topics now contain less information than previously. For example, some response fields were listed as being "for internal use and subject to change".

If a response field can only be generated from an internal call, there's no reason to expose it to users, so we removed them from the documentation...and it would be a rare feature indeed that wasn't subject to change.

I know what you might be saying. "But less information is less transparent! Less transparent is less TAGFEE!"

That's true; transparency is critical for good documentation. When it comes to user guides, though, more does not always mean better. TAGFEE also means empathy; if extraneous details make it harder to learn Mozscape, then the documentation lacks empathy, and that's bad. We're striving for the right balance between abundant information (transparency) and providing knowledge that will actually help you (empathy). Mozscape is awesome, and we want it to be as valuable for you as possible.

Closing with a question

How can we keep improving Mozscape documentation? Please let us know in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Read more...

Posted by JonQ

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

You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic. (A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here. Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around.

On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. There was quite a bit of interest in this area, so we thought a dedicated post on the latter part of our auditing process (see below) would give us a chance to dive in a little deeper. Although the follow-up and implementation clearly comes once your document has been delivered, a lot of the very early conversations have a big influence on how successful the project will ultimately end up being. I’ve found that getting a client in the mind-set of working together and buying into implementing your recommendations right from the start always makes getting work done so much easier!

Although this post is about the follow-up process, I also want to spend some time touching on other areas that have a direct influence on that part of the project. Let's go!

Sales kick-off and briefing

The sales process is such a critical part of any project; and not just for the obvious reasons. A well thought out sales conversation is the ideal opportunity to discuss goals, understand the clients business, and really find out what they need to achieve. Ron Garrett summed it up brilliantly in this post, and covered some great points with regards to the important details that every initial conversation with a potential client should cover. In terms of how the conversations held at the beginning of a project can impact on the effectiveness of your follow-up, it’s so important to make sure you’re starting the project with the right goals in mind. After all, how can you measure success if you don’t understand what KPIs make a true difference to your clients business?

Q: How much should I give away during the sales process?

On a very similar point, we had a couple of questions crop up in the Mozinar Q&A from people asking how much to give away during the sales process. Some people like to run a sample audit, whilst others won’t give anything away until they have ink on paper. Really, this is down to you. From my perspective, you have to be sensible with your time and learn to consider each situation by its own circumstances. I’ve been in the situation many times before where you sense the company in question is just inviting agencies to pitch in order to gain some free expert knowledge. It takes time to put a proposal together, so you have to make a judgement on the best use of that time. Feel each situation out and you should be just fine.

This is not just about selling projects; it’s about understanding the situation well enough to sell the right project to solve the right problem.

Kick-off and briefing

If you take a step back and think about all the projects you’ve worked on that haven’t worked out well, it’s crazy to think how much probably went wrong before you’d even started. If everyone was in an honest mood, I think we’d all admit to being involved in projects before where it all felt just a little too rushed. As a result, a good solid brief can be skipped meaning the team get dropped in with no idea at all of delivery dates, or what the client actually wants or needs from the project. Clearly, things don’t tend to go well from here. At best, the project just ends up being another report on another desk – at worst reputations get damaged.

So with implementation and a smooth follow-up in mind, what should a good brief cover? As a bare minimum, I suggest the following should always be included:

• Deliverables
• Key dates
• Goals/objectives
• KPIs
• Key personnel

Why is this so important? One of the biggest and most common reasons for a project failing is that for a variety of reasons they simply miss the mark. Usually when a project doesn’t tick the right boxes, the issue can nearly always be traced back to the brief or a miscommunication at the start. The other point here is that if the project is simply being dumped on the team, they’re not likely to be too happy about it. Get your team excited and they in turn will get the client excited. If the client is excited about getting things done, suddenly getting work implemented is a far more enjoyable and productive process.

Deliverables

A major part of any project is the format in which you present your documentation. Sometimes a "highlights" presentation deck detailing the biggest issues is the way to go, whereas some situations require a detailed document and a large set of data to refer to. The best way to do this is really going to depend on who you’re delivering to, and what the initial outline of the project was. We had some really good questions on this during the webinar, so it felt right to pick out some of the best and answer them directly:

Q: What exactly should be delivered? A large document, a set of data, or just the top ten action points?

At SEOgadget, we’ve found that the best approach is to do a combination of all three, with the exact delivery style adjusted to whomever you’re meeting or presenting to. A typical situation for us would be to create a master document containing detailed explanations of our findings alongside all the necessary change requests. Of course, if we’re running crawls and conducting log-file analysis then there’s also going to be a pretty substantial amount of data on hand too. I like delivering the data for two reasons: first, data always backs up what you’re recommending. It’s always so much more valuable to show and not tell. Having the ability to clearly walk the client through exactly what you’ve found can work wonders for adding credibility to what you’re saying. Second, providing the data makes it much easier for a developer to work out what’s going on and gives a reference point for future questions should anything crop up. What’s more, in 90% of situations clients always ask for the data anyway!

Task lists also have a very valuable place. The first question that always comes back is, "OK, so where do we start?" If a question keeps cropping up, then answer it before it gets asked! At the top of all our documents we provide a prioritized list of all change requests (as seen above). This forms a great base for follow-up calls and meetings as everyone can refer back to the same task list. With development resource often being high in demand, it also enables you to start scheduling the biggest fixes first.

Q: Some clients are not "techy," and talking them website audit is not that easy. How many details we should give those clients? Should we spent a lot time and train them about SEO?

This is where being able to give a high-level view first is extremely important. Not everyone understands the details of SEO. You might not always be working directly with an SEO department; you could be working with a traditional marketing team or leading into an Ecommerce manager where their role touches on SEO, but it’s not something they do all day every day. In this case, the best approach is to deliver a "highlights" type of presentation. Break the problems down and focus on the benefits of resolving the issues. Show the client what you’ve found, but think more about explaining the benefits of fixing each issue will have on their business. It’s less about canonical tags and more about ROI. Again, get the client excited about the impact of fixing things and you’ll buy yourself a heap of influence. Even though you’re only presenting on a few key areas, you’ll still have the full document to refer back to in more detail later down the line.

Follow-up support

I’m a big believer in the idea that a technical project shouldn’t be about completing a review and then thinking it’s "job done." It’s so much more important to have the ability to really influence change and action. In fact, the most important part (and often hardest part!) of any technical audit is the follow-up process and getting your work implemented. A good SEO can diagnose issues – a great SEO follows up and makes sure these problems get fixed. Going right back to what we touched on earlier when talking about the sales process, having a good grasp of development resource can really help here. Do you have an understanding of what processes are in place for booking requests? Did you check when development resource is available and allocated for SEO? Getting ahead of the game in these areas is one of the biggest keys to winning!

The follow-up process can be greatly helped by having a central resource to track changes and keep on top of progress or indeed challenges with implementing your recommendations. Using tools such as Basecamp or Asana  can be a great way of keeping communication clear, and for making sure you have the right tasks in front of the right people. If you’re not keen on using these tools, a simple Google Docs sheet to display tasks and provide a place to leave comments is sometimes all that’s needed. Combining this with regular calls or checking in via email gives you the ability to keep the project moving in the right direction, and the retain focus when you come to catching up in a meeting or on a call.

If you’ve got any further questions on the process side of technical SEO audits, feel free to drop them in the comments, or tweet myself or Dan and we’ll do our best to answer them.

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!

Read more...

Posted by JonQ

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

You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic. (A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here. Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around.

On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. There was quite a bit of interest in this area, so we thought a dedicated post on the latter part of our auditing process (see below) would give us a chance to dive in a little deeper. Although the follow-up and implementation clearly comes once your document has been delivered, a lot of the very early conversations have a big influence on how successful the project will ultimately end up being. I’ve found that getting a client in the mind-set of working together and buying into implementing your recommendations right from the start always makes getting work done so much easier!

Although this post is about the follow-up process, I also want to spend some time touching on other areas that have a direct influence on that part of the project. Let's go!

Sales kick-off and briefing

The sales process is such a critical part of any project; and not just for the obvious reasons. A well thought out sales conversation is the ideal opportunity to discuss goals, understand the clients business, and really find out what they need to achieve. Ron Garrett summed it up brilliantly in this post, and covered some great points with regards to the important details that every initial conversation with a potential client should cover. In terms of how the conversations held at the beginning of a project can impact on the effectiveness of your follow-up, it’s so important to make sure you’re starting the project with the right goals in mind. After all, how can you measure success if you don’t understand what KPIs make a true difference to your clients business?

Q: How much should I give away during the sales process?

On a very similar point, we had a couple of questions crop up in the Mozinar Q&A from people asking how much to give away during the sales process. Some people like to run a sample audit, whilst others won’t give anything away until they have ink on paper. Really, this is down to you. From my perspective, you have to be sensible with your time and learn to consider each situation by its own circumstances. I’ve been in the situation many times before where you sense the company in question is just inviting agencies to pitch in order to gain some free expert knowledge. It takes time to put a proposal together, so you have to make a judgement on the best use of that time. Feel each situation out and you should be just fine.

This is not just about selling projects; it’s about understanding the situation well enough to sell the right project to solve the right problem.

Kick-off and briefing

If you take a step back and think about all the projects you’ve worked on that haven’t worked out well, it’s crazy to think how much probably went wrong before you’d even started. If everyone was in an honest mood, I think we’d all admit to being involved in projects before where it all felt just a little too rushed. As a result, a good solid brief can be skipped meaning the team get dropped in with no idea at all of delivery dates, or what the client actually wants or needs from the project. Clearly, things don’t tend to go well from here. At best, the project just ends up being another report on another desk – at worst reputations get damaged.

So with implementation and a smooth follow-up in mind, what should a good brief cover? As a bare minimum, I suggest the following should always be included:

• Deliverables
• Key dates
• Goals/objectives
• KPIs
• Key personnel

Why is this so important? One of the biggest and most common reasons for a project failing is that for a variety of reasons they simply miss the mark. Usually when a project doesn’t tick the right boxes, the issue can nearly always be traced back to the brief or a miscommunication at the start. The other point here is that if the project is simply being dumped on the team, they’re not likely to be too happy about it. Get your team excited and they in turn will get the client excited. If the client is excited about getting things done, suddenly getting work implemented is a far more enjoyable and productive process.

Deliverables

A major part of any project is the format in which you present your documentation. Sometimes a "highlights" presentation deck detailing the biggest issues is the way to go, whereas some situations require a detailed document and a large set of data to refer to. The best way to do this is really going to depend on who you’re delivering to, and what the initial outline of the project was. We had some really good questions on this during the webinar, so it felt right to pick out some of the best and answer them directly:

Q: What exactly should be delivered? A large document, a set of data, or just the top ten action points?

At SEOgadget, we’ve found that the best approach is to do a combination of all three, with the exact delivery style adjusted to whomever you’re meeting or presenting to. A typical situation for us would be to create a master document containing detailed explanations of our findings alongside all the necessary change requests. Of course, if we’re running crawls and conducting log-file analysis then there’s also going to be a pretty substantial amount of data on hand too. I like delivering the data for two reasons: first, data always backs up what you’re recommending. It’s always so much more valuable to show and not tell. Having the ability to clearly walk the client through exactly what you’ve found can work wonders for adding credibility to what you’re saying. Second, providing the data makes it much easier for a developer to work out what’s going on and gives a reference point for future questions should anything crop up. What’s more, in 90% of situations clients always ask for the data anyway!

Task lists also have a very valuable place. The first question that always comes back is, "OK, so where do we start?" If a question keeps cropping up, then answer it before it gets asked! At the top of all our documents we provide a prioritized list of all change requests (as seen above). This forms a great base for follow-up calls and meetings as everyone can refer back to the same task list. With development resource often being high in demand, it also enables you to start scheduling the biggest fixes first.

Q: Some clients are not "techy," and talking them website audit is not that easy. How many details we should give those clients? Should we spent a lot time and train them about SEO?

This is where being able to give a high-level view first is extremely important. Not everyone understands the details of SEO. You might not always be working directly with an SEO department; you could be working with a traditional marketing team or leading into an Ecommerce manager where their role touches on SEO, but it’s not something they do all day every day. In this case, the best approach is to deliver a "highlights" type of presentation. Break the problems down and focus on the benefits of resolving the issues. Show the client what you’ve found, but think more about explaining the benefits of fixing each issue will have on their business. It’s less about canonical tags and more about ROI. Again, get the client excited about the impact of fixing things and you’ll buy yourself a heap of influence. Even though you’re only presenting on a few key areas, you’ll still have the full document to refer back to in more detail later down the line.

Follow-up support

I’m a big believer in the idea that a technical project shouldn’t be about completing a review and then thinking it’s "job done." It’s so much more important to have the ability to really influence change and action. In fact, the most important part (and often hardest part!) of any technical audit is the follow-up process and getting your work implemented. A good SEO can diagnose issues – a great SEO follows up and makes sure these problems get fixed. Going right back to what we touched on earlier when talking about the sales process, having a good grasp of development resource can really help here. Do you have an understanding of what processes are in place for booking requests? Did you check when development resource is available and allocated for SEO? Getting ahead of the game in these areas is one of the biggest keys to winning!

The follow-up process can be greatly helped by having a central resource to track changes and keep on top of progress or indeed challenges with implementing your recommendations. Using tools such as Basecamp or Asana  can be a great way of keeping communication clear, and for making sure you have the right tasks in front of the right people. If you’re not keen on using these tools, a simple Google Docs sheet to display tasks and provide a place to leave comments is sometimes all that’s needed. Combining this with regular calls or checking in via email gives you the ability to keep the project moving in the right direction, and the retain focus when you come to catching up in a meeting or on a call.

If you’ve got any further questions on the process side of technical SEO audits, feel free to drop them in the comments, or tweet myself or Dan and we’ll do our best to answer them.

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!

Read more...

Posted by JonQ

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

You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic. (A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here. Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around.

On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. There was quite a bit of interest in this area, so we thought a dedicated post on the latter part of our auditing process (see below) would give us a chance to dive in a little deeper. Although the follow-up and implementation clearly comes once your document has been delivered, a lot of the very early conversations have a big influence on how successful the project will ultimately end up being. I’ve found that getting a client in the mind-set of working together and buying into implementing your recommendations right from the start always makes getting work done so much easier!

Although this post is about the follow-up process, I also want to spend some time touching on other areas that have a direct influence on that part of the project. Let's go!

Sales kick-off and briefing

The sales process is such a critical part of any project; and not just for the obvious reasons. A well thought out sales conversation is the ideal opportunity to discuss goals, understand the clients business, and really find out what they need to achieve. Ron Garrett summed it up brilliantly in this post, and covered some great points with regards to the important details that every initial conversation with a potential client should cover. In terms of how the conversations held at the beginning of a project can impact on the effectiveness of your follow-up, it’s so important to make sure you’re starting the project with the right goals in mind. After all, how can you measure success if you don’t understand what KPIs make a true difference to your clients business?

Q: How much should I give away during the sales process?

On a very similar point, we had a couple of questions crop up in the Mozinar Q&A from people asking how much to give away during the sales process. Some people like to run a sample audit, whilst others won’t give anything away until they have ink on paper. Really, this is down to you. From my perspective, you have to be sensible with your time and learn to consider each situation by its own circumstances. I’ve been in the situation many times before where you sense the company in question is just inviting agencies to pitch in order to gain some free expert knowledge. It takes time to put a proposal together, so you have to make a judgement on the best use of that time. Feel each situation out and you should be just fine.

This is not just about selling projects; it’s about understanding the situation well enough to sell the right project to solve the right problem.

Kick-off and briefing

If you take a step back and think about all the projects you’ve worked on that haven’t worked out well, it’s crazy to think how much probably went wrong before you’d even started. If everyone was in an honest mood, I think we’d all admit to being involved in projects before where it all felt just a little too rushed. As a result, a good solid brief can be skipped meaning the team get dropped in with no idea at all of delivery dates, or what the client actually wants or needs from the project. Clearly, things don’t tend to go well from here. At best, the project just ends up being another report on another desk – at worst reputations get damaged.

So with implementation and a smooth follow-up in mind, what should a good brief cover? As a bare minimum, I suggest the following should always be included:

• Deliverables
• Key dates
• Goals/objectives
• KPIs
• Key personnel

Why is this so important? One of the biggest and most common reasons for a project failing is that for a variety of reasons they simply miss the mark. Usually when a project doesn’t tick the right boxes, the issue can nearly always be traced back to the brief or a miscommunication at the start. The other point here is that if the project is simply being dumped on the team, they’re not likely to be too happy about it. Get your team excited and they in turn will get the client excited. If the client is excited about getting things done, suddenly getting work implemented is a far more enjoyable and productive process.

Deliverables

A major part of any project is the format in which you present your documentation. Sometimes a "highlights" presentation deck detailing the biggest issues is the way to go, whereas some situations require a detailed document and a large set of data to refer to. The best way to do this is really going to depend on who you’re delivering to, and what the initial outline of the project was. We had some really good questions on this during the webinar, so it felt right to pick out some of the best and answer them directly:

Q: What exactly should be delivered? A large document, a set of data, or just the top ten action points?

At SEOgadget, we’ve found that the best approach is to do a combination of all three, with the exact delivery style adjusted to whomever you’re meeting or presenting to. A typical situation for us would be to create a master document containing detailed explanations of our findings alongside all the necessary change requests. Of course, if we’re running crawls and conducting log-file analysis then there’s also going to be a pretty substantial amount of data on hand too. I like delivering the data for two reasons: first, data always backs up what you’re recommending. It’s always so much more valuable to show and not tell. Having the ability to clearly walk the client through exactly what you’ve found can work wonders for adding credibility to what you’re saying. Second, providing the data makes it much easier for a developer to work out what’s going on and gives a reference point for future questions should anything crop up. What’s more, in 90% of situations clients always ask for the data anyway!

Task lists also have a very valuable place. The first question that always comes back is, "OK, so where do we start?" If a question keeps cropping up, then answer it before it gets asked! At the top of all our documents we provide a prioritized list of all change requests (as seen above). This forms a great base for follow-up calls and meetings as everyone can refer back to the same task list. With development resource often being high in demand, it also enables you to start scheduling the biggest fixes first.

Q: Some clients are not "techy," and talking them website audit is not that easy. How many details we should give those clients? Should we spent a lot time and train them about SEO?

This is where being able to give a high-level view first is extremely important. Not everyone understands the details of SEO. You might not always be working directly with an SEO department; you could be working with a traditional marketing team or leading into an Ecommerce manager where their role touches on SEO, but it’s not something they do all day every day. In this case, the best approach is to deliver a "highlights" type of presentation. Break the problems down and focus on the benefits of resolving the issues. Show the client what you’ve found, but think more about explaining the benefits of fixing each issue will have on their business. It’s less about canonical tags and more about ROI. Again, get the client excited about the impact of fixing things and you’ll buy yourself a heap of influence. Even though you’re only presenting on a few key areas, you’ll still have the full document to refer back to in more detail later down the line.

Follow-up support

I’m a big believer in the idea that a technical project shouldn’t be about completing a review and then thinking it’s "job done." It’s so much more important to have the ability to really influence change and action. In fact, the most important part (and often hardest part!) of any technical audit is the follow-up process and getting your work implemented. A good SEO can diagnose issues – a great SEO follows up and makes sure these problems get fixed. Going right back to what we touched on earlier when talking about the sales process, having a good grasp of development resource can really help here. Do you have an understanding of what processes are in place for booking requests? Did you check when development resource is available and allocated for SEO? Getting ahead of the game in these areas is one of the biggest keys to winning!

The follow-up process can be greatly helped by having a central resource to track changes and keep on top of progress or indeed challenges with implementing your recommendations. Using tools such as Basecamp or Asana  can be a great way of keeping communication clear, and for making sure you have the right tasks in front of the right people. If you’re not keen on using these tools, a simple Google Docs sheet to display tasks and provide a place to leave comments is sometimes all that’s needed. Combining this with regular calls or checking in via email gives you the ability to keep the project moving in the right direction, and the retain focus when you come to catching up in a meeting or on a call.

If you’ve got any further questions on the process side of technical SEO audits, feel free to drop them in the comments, or tweet myself or Dan and we’ll do our best to answer them.

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!

Read more...

Posted by bradfriedman

We've got new, delicious data for you! The second Mozscape index of the month is now live. Consume all the data with your favorite apps, including Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Below is the histogram with the crawl dates.

Here are the metrics for this index:

• 90,641,413,665 (91 billion) URLs
• 7,388,144,649 (7.4 billion) Subdomains
• 158,669,066 (159 million) Root Domains
• 926,144,106,342 (926 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.14% of all links found were nofollowed/li>
  • 57% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43% are external
• Rel Canonical - 14.42% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 79 links on it
  • 68 internal links on average
  • 11 external links on average

And the correlations with Google's US search results:

• Page Authority - 0.36
• Domain Authority - 0.19
• MozRank - 0.24
• Linking Root Domains - 0.30
• Total Links - 0.25
• External Links - 0.29

Please feel free to leave feedback! You can find a list of our previous index updates with metrics here.

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Moz on, Brad out.

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!

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Posted by bradfriedman

We've got new, delicious data for you! The second Mozscape index of the month is now live. Consume all the data with your favorite apps, including Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Below is the histogram with the crawl dates.

Here are the metrics for this index:

• 90,641,413,665 (91 billion) URLs
• 7,388,144,649 (7.4 billion) Subdomains
• 158,669,066 (159 million) Root Domains
• 926,144,106,342 (926 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.14% of all links found were nofollowed/li>
  • 57% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43% are external
• Rel Canonical - 14.42% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 79 links on it
  • 68 internal links on average
  • 11 external links on average

And the correlations with Google's US search results:

• Page Authority - 0.36
• Domain Authority - 0.19
• MozRank - 0.24
• Linking Root Domains - 0.30
• Total Links - 0.25
• External Links - 0.29

Please feel free to leave feedback! You can find a list of our previous index updates with metrics here.

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Moz on, Brad out.

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!

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Posted by wilreynolds

Image Credit: Vermin

When Disavow first launched, many people felt like they were doing "Google's job." At first, I completely disagreed with that sentiment. I loved it. I needed disavow, and yes, Bing did get to it first! However, since Matt Cutts' announcement of Disavow at Pubcon to present day, I have started to change my tune a bit based on experiencing what I can only call disavow hell. I truly do understand Google's position on the tool, but I am thinking a lot of small business owners need more transparency, as they cannot battle what they are up against.

SEER recently took on a client for whom we have disavowed what feels like about 85% of their links. Their owner is an amazingly awesome woman whose business is getting hurt due to the efforts of her previous SEO firm. The firm left her business in a bad place. She was doing #RCS already, and had built a real business that helped people find solutions to the issues of her niche. She was doing content marketing and building assets that added value well before she employed an SEO firm. Instead of showing some discretion on their aggressive tactics, they slammed the gas and went full bore on the spam. Her business grew and she hired people, not knowing that her SEO firm was setting her up for failure.

At first, I was a big fan of disavow. Now that I am personally spending tons of time helping out on two clients affected negatively by the tool, I can't help but think...seriously, is the the best use of my time to help these clients succeed online? Instead of spending the same time strategizing on how to build assets that add value, I'm hunting down spammy link networks. Google, is this what you want me and the SEER Interactive team to be doing? After disavowing 5,800 domains and being declined again, I am starting to see this as a serious needle in a haystack. If it is a needle in a haystack for companies like SEER, can you imagine what it's like for the average small business owner?

Having submitted a few disavows and ending with them denied time and time again, I realized, man, this is a waste of time. However, we will keep at it because we'll never quit trying to help our clients succeed. Instead of the SEER team working on RCS and brainstorming on how to create valuable content that will add value (i.e. doing all the things Google says we should do), we are spending time trying to find link networks and things we don't know a ton about because we didn't build those crappy links to begin with.

We pitched a concept (to be shown at Mozcon, hopefully; buy your tickets now!) that got a client on several news stations (it was quite a rush seeing a SEER Idea on the 6:00 and 11:00 news, along with our CEO being interviewed), newspapers, and countless other sites, but we've minimized our work on it because our disavow requests for that client keep getting denied....you serious?? This is the best thing we've ever built, yet we are spending a portion of our time on disavow and trying to understand why one or two links somewhere is the tipping point over what we already disavowed. So we went nuclear, disavowing every link before SEER started with a DA under a certain level, that is not on blogspot.com style subdomains. Are we throwing out some of the good with the bad? Yup. But we want to get back to adding value and building things we can be proud of.

Google is giving spammers more business with disavow, not less

There are good people out there who are worried about their businesses, not just their rankings. These people will try to do what’s right to get back in Google's good graces, so they'll pay people to help them save their businesses. I know I would. Once they've decided to reach out for help, who are they going to go to? Probably the same types of people who built their crap link networks in the first place. Who knows how to remove spam links best, a spammer or a marketing agency?

Once again, the spammers get rewarded. Those who spammed the Internet spent their hours not creating value, but trying to create patterns in low-quality sites that Google wouldn't pick up on. It worked for years, and then suddenly, it didn't work anymore. Now the same people who created all the spam are the same ones these companies are relying on to find the patterns on how Google does it, since the companies who didn't do this stuff never spent their time architecting crappy links.

Disavow was needed. For the business owner in this example, she called and asked what's up the minute she realized these guys had hurt her business more than they helped. She had to spend countless hours away from building quality content and trying to grow her business in order to learn about link networks, and when she said, "Hey, can you guys remove these links you got?" her old firm charged her $12,000. If she declined to pay the price tag, they were holding her site ransom. If she agreed to the payment, she would be out 12k for link removal.

Ultimately, our business owner paid the fee. Two weeks later, disavow was announced, and - guess what - the old firm didn't remove even close to all the links. So again, I get the need for Disavow, but man, it also gets my team completely off what I'd like them to do. More importantly, it distracts my team from what Google would like them to do. Their time is taken away from building things that add value, and spent on figuring out how spam on the web used to work. This is definitely a skill I'd rather not be investing in, since we all know the shelf life of that skill is pretty limited.

Maybe someday Google will use Webmaster Tools as an understanding when a client moves to a new agency, consultant, etc. I'm not convinced that is the right solution, but I guess we need to start somewhere to figure out how we get away from spending time on spam. If you are building spam links (which would make you a spammer) or if you are spending time understanding spam to make disavow work (which is everyone else), it's a bad use of time for everyone.

Here are three big takeaways from what I've seen with my limited Disavow work:

1. Cut the bleeding, hardcore

This is the wrong time to get nitpicky about Disavowing links, especially if you have switched firms and 90% of what the old firm did was spam. Simply go into Webmaster Tools, pull the link report (with dates), and start Disavowing everything before the old firm started that has a low domain authority. It surprises me at how often people get picky.

I’d say you are better off over-Disavowing the links, and then go back when you have time and are out of the penalty to pick back out the ones you think you may have been too aggressive on. It's not a perfect solution, but this way, you get out of the penalty sooner rather than later.

2. Don't cry wolf (too much)

I have no proof of this, but I can only imagine that if you keep nibbling off one link at a time and submitting Disavows, Google may begin to get sick of it and might stop reviewing your requests as frequently.

I also remember that, when Disavow launched, the Google team was a bit worried that people would disavow the good links along with the bad. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you Disavow quality links, Google has ways of saying "you probably made a mistake and didn't mean that," especially when they compare the good links to their expansive list of bad links, link networks, etc.

3. Go do some real marketing!!!

You want rankings? You can't just stop doing the bad; you have to start doing the good! Put priority on doing the things Google wanted you to do all along. Reference the high quality stuff you've done in your re-consideration requests, and let Google know you are making real investments and turning over a new leaf.

So often when we talk about disavowing links, clients go…OMG well I’m going to lose some of my rankings… well, RIGHT BUDDY! When your rankings are propped up on fake marketing tactics and you haven’t done enough #RCS, then you are stuck with never having built real assets that attract real links. For the future of your business, you gotta start somewhere, and if your business isn't worth marketing in some way other than SEO, then you are probably the exact kind of site that Google doesn't want to rank well in most verticals.

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!

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