The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner

The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner
http://bit.ly/S8Uaqk

Posted by searchbrat

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.

There has recently been a lot of great discussion around the role of an SEO and how SEO strategies are evolving to include more tactics (PR, Social, Content, CRO, etc.). In my opinion, the role of an SEO hasn’t changed much as the focus is still on driving more organic traffic to their client’s sites.  If SEO consultants want to own more of the funnel, their title will need to change to support a more expansive role that includes multiple channels, rather than changing what the term "SEO" itself means.

A background in SEO definitely provides a solid foundation to take ownership of integrated marketing campaigns that encompass a lot more of this:

For this post, I am going to focus on two key areas of SEO from a presentation I recently gave. They are:

  • Beyond keywords
  • Content that works

My main goal for this post is to show how strong SEO’s have the skills to become great funnel owners, without having to change the term SEO. Let's get started!

1. Beyond keywords

What good SEOs already do:

Model search behavior across the funnel

Good SEO’s are already skilled in the art of modeling user search behavior across a search buying cycle. They look to identify what language prospects are using relevant to their business. How they refine their search at each stage of the cycle and what the potential competition is for each of their target phrases. This helps identify what keywords a business can complete for (taking budget and resources into account), what content should be developed for each phrase, and what are the target keywords for their link building strategy.

Good SEO’s will:

1. Use PPC data

SEO’s will create exact match Adwords campaigns for the keywords they've identified for a business. This gives them an estimation of potential traffic and conversions (whatever that may be for a given site). This would only be an estimate as there are big differences between PPC and Organic click through rates.

2. Measure head vs long tail

They use advanced segments in Google Analytics to split this traffic out by keyword length (get advanced segments for keyword lengths here). This allows SEO’s to bucket keywords into head, body, and tail, adding competition stats and potential ROI.

3. Track top of funnel keywords

They pay close attention to data from sources like Google Trends and Google Instant (UberSugget.org) to look for top of funnel keywords that are not mapped against commercial intent, but instead whose sole purpose is to attract people in the awareness stage and begin to grow the brand online.

4. Create keyword funnels

Good SEOs will map keywords across the buying cycle of a business, including lots of extra information about those keywords. In this example, we have simply added the potential revenue from that keyword and keyword difficulty from the SEOmoz tool of the same name. The keyword marked green is one whose search volume is rising fast (data from Google Trends).

5. Create content maps

The great SEO will take all this data and either map it against existing content, or create new content suitable for the target key phrase.

The smartest SEO may even start thinking about why certain pages will attract links and build this into the design.

If you need more information on keyword research, you can check out:

I want more of that funnel

What great funnel owners do:

Model the whole customer

Likely due to my background in software development, I am obsessed with persona modeling; I’ve talked about this previously on SEOmoz here and here.

Persona modeling is nothing new, and smart marketers have been using them to help with brand marketing, website design, and UI for years. In fact, SEOmoz did a great whiteboard Friday on the topic back in 2008 with Ian Lurie and Rand Fishkin sporting some very groovy hair!

Persona modeling is a critical task conducted by great funnel owners, and SEO’s can definitely apply their skills to provide this function.

In today’s data driven world, there are so many places to acquire data about your potential customers:

 

I’ve labeled these strategies either easy or hard to implement based on my experiences. What type of data you get back is heavily dependent on the market you are in. (Note that I put a question mark against psychographic data in Facebook as this is something I’ve only recently begun to look at, thanks to all the great information from @aimclear in sources like this post, this post, and his MozCon session.)

As Ian mentioned in the video above, a lot of persona modeling will still rely on gut instinct. With all this data, you can start to validate your guesswork and pivot much quicker. For example, if we use the seven steps Ian gave in the Whiteboard Friday video (see below), we can see where our data can be applied to help validate our guess work (think how much more data we have for our prospects since that video was made):

 

Bonus Tip: When at step one (brainstorming), I highly recommend Simon Sineks Ted Talk, Start With Why. This talk helps focus your mind on the type of people you are trying to attract. You define why your company exists and what your vision is, and outline how to find people who share that vision. For example, SEOmoz is famous for TAGFEE. They believe in being totally transparent, over delivering on everything they do, and building a world-class community of smart SEOs. You can see how that influences the type of marketing they execute. If SEOmoz started with the “What?” e.g. "We build great inbound marketing tools, come and get them," they may not have been as successful as they are now or attract the type of customers they currently do. Starting with "why" will help you tremendously. 

How do well thought-

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 23, 2012

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 23, 2012
http://bit.ly/TUFk6k

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Bing’s Voice Search On Xbox Now Searches The Web, Too

    Microsoft is expanding Bing’s capabilities in the living room with news today that Xbox users can search the web via their console. It’s part of the “new entertainment experience” that Microsoft is pushing out this week via the Xbox. Bing Voice Search has been available on the Xbox since June 2011, but it could only [...]

  • Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE!

    Webcast October 25, 2012 1PM EST – Inbound links are paramount to getting top search engine rankings. But how do you go about getting those links? And what’s more important, quantity or quality? During this webcast you can ask the experts these and your other link building questions. Register now!

  • Have Keywords Stopped Being A Proxy To The Customer?

    It’s said that keywords are a proxy for a customer, right? So let’s talk about the customer. Schema this, canonical that, and black and white zoo animals… if you don’t have a search expert on payroll, you’re already behind the Joneses. I get emails like the one below all the time, this one being from [...]

  • The Tale Of Goldilocks & Global Search Budgeting

    In the last few articles, we focused on minimums of keyword research and measuring performance, and now we can extend that process to budgeting. With search budgets, especially for paid search, we have three different options for budgeting. As the fairly tale goes, Goldilocks samples each of the bowls of porridge to see which was the [...]

  • Google’s Matt Cutts Inducted Into University of Kentucky’s Hall Of Fame

    Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, a name familiar to most of the readers here, was inducted into University of Kentucky’s Arts and Sciences Hall Of Fame last Friday. This was reported in the Kentucky Kernel. The article explains that Matt Cutts attended the University of Kentucky while working for the Department of Defense [...]

  • Google News Adds Expandable Clusters To Search Results

    Google News announced they have improved the search results in Google News to enable expandable clusters, like they have a year ago on the Google News home page. What this means is if you do a search within Google News, you will be able to expand a news cluster to see more sources. You will [...]

  • Mayer: Yahoo Not Planning To Invest In Local Search Right Now

    Search is a “core priority” at Yahoo, but the company isn’t planning any significant investments in local search in the near future. That’s some of what new CEO Marissa Mayer revealed today in her first earnings call since she joined the company this summer. Mayer spoke several times about Yahoo and search in general, saying [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEO & SEM

  • A Website with Pull: The SEO Attraction, BruceClay.com
  • Author reputations for sale? An SEO future?, VerticalLeap
  • Google AdWords Policies Crack Down on the Use of DKI & ‘Buy’ in Ads, Search Engine Watch
  • Google Authorship Profiles: No Verification Needed?, State of Search
  • Google EMD update: EMDs decline in SERPs for well over a year, IP Blog
  • Google News Publisher Submission Bug With Multiple Categories, Search Engine Roundtable
  • How social signals influence SEO: five things you need to know, Econsultancy
  • PPC advice from a SEO expert, State Of Search
  • Quick Tips on Google Algorithm Impact Detection & Resolution, SEO.com
  • Scale Outreach Using Pareto’s Law, SEER Interactive
  • Stop Using Google’s First Page Estimates to Set Your Bids, PPC Hero
  • What makes interviews so valuable for SEO content marketing?, SEO Copywriting
  • Why doesn’t Google release an SEO quality check up calculator?, YouTube

Social Media

Related Topics: SearchCap



SMX - Search Marketing Expo Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Who Writes the Most Popular Content on Your Blog?

Who Writes the Most Popular Content on Your Blog?
http://bit.ly/TUEtTf

Posted by robmillard

Google Analytics’ Custom Variables may seem daunting for a web marketer with relatively little technical knowledge, but they’re actually quite easy to implement and use (especially if you’re using Wordpress). This post will show you how to easily track blog post authors using Custom Variables, and also explores some of the reporting possibilities.

Why track authors?

There are many reasons to track blog post authors that apply to your content strategy, including:

Highlighting editorial success

Rewarding those who have performed well and highlighting their success is an effective means of creating enthusiasm within an organization towards SEO and content promotion. Tracking authors can make this type of report much easier to produce.

Evaluating freelancers

Is the freelance writer you’re paying worthwhile? If you’re outsourcing work to a number of freelancers, are some better at optimizing their copy for search than others? What do user engagement metrics say about the quality of their work?

Identifying successful guest authors

If a guest post author is driving a particularly large amount of traffic to your site, it may be because they have a strong social media presence to promote to or that they link from their own authoritative domain. If this is the case, why not ask them to provide content on a regular basis?

How do I set up Custom Variables?

Please don’t be deterred by this section. The plugin implementation is as easy as ticking a few boxes, and the hard-coded route isn’t particularly difficult, either.

Google Analytics for Wordpress Plugin

I would imagine that many Wordpress installations use Joost de Valk’s GA Plugin. This plugin is the easiest way to track authors, so if you haven’t already got GA tracking on your site, I’d recommend installing it. You can find GA tracking by going to Plugins > Add New > search for “Google Analytics for Wordpress” and install the top result.

Activate the plugin and go to it’s Settings page. Select “Show Advanced Settings” and you will see a table called “Custom Variable Settings.” All you need to do is select “Author Names” and hit the update button.

There are a bunch of other tracking options here such as tags, categories, and publication year. You may wish to turn these on while you’re in there as you may find a use for the data later down the line; it’s better to have it ready and waiting than to not have it at all!

Wordpress hard-coded

If you’ve hard-coded your GA tracking onto your Wordpress site, you can make a quick and simple edit to enable author tracking.

This example assumes that your GA tracking code is in the footer.php file. You can edit this by going to Appearance > Editor and selecting your footer.php file from the right hand list. Your GA code should look something like this:

Insert the following code between the two lines that start with _gaq.push:

<!--?php
if (is_single())
$ author = get_the_author();
echo " _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1,'Author','". $ author . "', 3]);";

?-->

Your code should now look like this:

Select “Update File” and you’re done.

A quick note iif you care about what this bit of PHP does: it checks whether the current page is a blog post (is_single()), gets the name of the author (get_the_author()), and then prints the Google Analytics Custom Variable code with the author name inserted using echo.

If you’re not using Wordpress…

If you're not using Wordpress, you’ll typically need to use whatever server side language you’re using to populate and print the Custom Variable within your Google Analytics tag. It should go in the same place as shown in the example above. The line you need to write looks like this:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1,'Author','', 3]);

The only caveat here is that the number one denotes with Custom Variable slot you’re using for this information. Google Analytics gives you 5 slots (1-5), so if you’re using other custom variables, ensure that you don’t have conflicting tracking that uses the same slot.

Reporting

Custom reports

The first report you probably want to see is pageviews by author; that is to say, whose content is the most popular? You can do this quite easily through Custom Reporting, in which you use Pageviews as your metric and Custom Variable (Value 01) as the Dimension Drilldown:

Adding Landing Page as a second dimension drilldown lets you click into each author to see which of their pages are attracting the most traffic. You can make this report even more interesting by adding user engagement metrics such as bounce rate and average time on page, which could be used as an indication of content quality.

Segmentation

If you want to browse Standard Reporting showing only data for a specific author, you can create a Custom Segment with Custom Variable (Value 01) as your filter. This way you can look through their keywords, referrers, content etc.

Tailored dashboards

Tracking authors also allows you to create dashboards which are tailored to a specific writer by applying filters when you create widgets. Essentially, you can create any widget and filter to show a certain value for Custom Variable (Value 01).

As an example, I’ve created a dashboard for a ukulele songbook website I made a while back, showing only data for songs written by The Beatles. (I need you to imagine that The Beatles are writing for my site. Thanks.)

This dashboard shows:

  1. Acquisition: where is traffic to their articles coming from? Traffic types, top referrers, top keywords
  2. Behaviour: what’s happening when they get to the site? Bounce rate, avg. time on site, visit and pageview trends, top pages
  3. Outcomes: what’s the result of their work? In this case, AdSense revenue and top AdSense pages, but this could also be conversion and eCommerce data.

This makes dashboards a whole lot more interesting for a particular writer, so hopefully they’ll come back and check it more often. Why not schedule it to email to them on the day they tend to plan their work?

Most linked to authors

Exporting this data and combining it with other sources can produce useful reports. For example:

  • Use a Custom Report with a flat table, Landing Page and Custom Variable (Value 01) as dimensions and Visits as the metric.
  • Export up to 5000 rows of this report with the URL hack.
  • Use a VLOOKUP() to combine this data with an export of the Top Pages report from Open Site Explorer.
  • You can then use a Pivot Table to show the most linked to writers. Select the whole table, then click Insert > Pivot Table > Click ok on the wizard. Then use your author column as a row label, and drag inbound links into values. This will give you a list of authors by the sum of all links their content has generated.

Obviously there are many, many different ways to use this data. Are there any ways you use the above data differently? Leave your good tips in the comments!


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Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE!

Webcast: Link Building Demystified – Ask the experts – LIVE!
http://bit.ly/P2o7ux

Webcast October 25, 2012 1PM EST – Inbound links are paramount to getting top search engine rankings. But how do you go about getting those links? And what’s more important, quantity or quality? During this webcast you can ask the experts these and your other link building questions.

Register now!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: SMX & DMD Alerts



SMX - Search Marketing Expo Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Election 2012: Searching And Researching The Presidential Debates

Election 2012: Searching And Researching The Presidential Debates
http://bit.ly/P2nnFJ

The final debate between U.S. presidential candidates Obama and Rommney airs tonight. Until the election next month, a lot of attention will continue to be on the presidential and vice presidential debates.

Here’s an easy and free way to keyword search debate video and then immediately view the video online.

In fact, all of the presidential debates back to 1988 can offer keyword searchable video.

Where do you search and access?

Visit the wonderful, irreplaceable and important C-SPAN Video Library.

I’ll be taking an in-depth look at this resource in an upcoming report but in a nutshell, the C-SPAN Video Library allows you to search (keyword search and/or browse) and view just about everything that has ever aired on the C-SPAN Network since 1987. This means about 194,500 hours of video content as of today.

While C-SPAN is best known for providing live coverage of Congressional activity, you’ll also find political rallies,  book talks, one-on-one interviews, special events and much more like this recent forum on Google and anti-trust.

Quickly and Easily Keyword Search Presidential Debate Video

You can watch the first two Oct 3, 2012 and Oct 16, 2012 debates where President Obama and Mitt Romney debated a wide range of policy issues in nationally televised debates.  Or view the October 11th debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan. You’ll find links to tonight’s final debates on the C-SPAN Video Library homepage or in the Campaign 2012 section of the library.

Direct links to video to debates between 1988-2008 are available here.

In Depth How-To: Searching The 2012 Vice-Presidential Debate

You’ll see a link labeled, “View Full Event (3 Programs)“.

Here you can access both the prologue to the debate (Martha Raddatz talking to the audience, not seen on other networks) and the switched screen feed of the debate (the camera switching between both candidates).

Whichever video you select, they’re all searchable. Let’s head back to where we first landed a moment ago, the “Split Screen” feed. 

Scroll down and find the transcript search box. Make sure it’s marked “text”. Here’s where you enter the search terms.

Enter your search term(s). You can search all speakers or limit to either candidate or the moderator.

Using quotation marks for phrases does not work. So, just enter your term(s). In this case I’m looking for the phrase american people.

Click the arrow or hit return.

Your search term(s) should appear if they were spoken. The transcript you’re searching was mechanically generated using the closed captioning from the broadcast. It’s not perfect so be careful.

To view the video beginning where your terms are spoken simply click the results box where those words are found.

Other Useful C-SPAN Video Features

It’s also possible to browse and view using the text timeline. Select it from the pulldown menu where you selected text transcript. Cursor over each speakers name to see the text of what was spoken.

On the right side of the page you’ll find the “speaker” header. Click here and you’ll find direct links to video of each time the person appeared on C-SPAN.

Below the video box you’ll find the clip and share links. You can quickly share the entire video on Twitter, Facebook or Google. Embedding is also possible. The clip link lets you select a portion of the video to save or share.

I plan to write much more about the C-SPAN Video Library in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, enjoy the debate tonight and viewing the historical archive that this rich repository offers.

Related Topics: Features: General | Search Engines: Government Search Engines | Search Engines: Video Search Engines



SMX - Search Marketing Expo Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal

How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal
http://bit.ly/VzBQgh

Posted by larry.kim

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.

How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal

Want to know how to get a link from the Wall Street Journal?

No ... I'm not talking about dropping some dopey, no-followed article comment or some black-hat trickery - those schemes don't count for anything and will probably land you in the Google SEO jail.

I'm talking about landing a real, legitimate editorial link from one of the most trusted and highest authority websites on the planet – it's an SEO's (or any marketer's) dream come true!! Sounds impossible?

It's not!

In my content marketing case study today, I’ll describe in detail exactly how my team and I recently did just that!

But first - this post reads best with the mission impossible theme song playing in the background, so, cue the Mission Impossible music!

1. Begin With the End in Mind

Every great content marketing operation starts with an objective. For this mission, I set a high bar. I wanted to try to acquire:

  1. Real, editorial links from the WSJ. But not just any link. Ideally, links in an article that:
    • In some way mentioned WordStream (my company) so that we could get a bit of media exposure out of this effort
    • Links to both our homepage and contained to a deep page on our site with relevant anchor text.
  2. Get links from least 500 other high value, unique business and IT publications, like Fox Business, the Motley Fool, or CNET, etc.
  3. Have the story go viral on Social Media Networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
  4. Generate a huge spike in overall website traffic that month
  5. Create a 10% uplift in our overall steady-state traffic from SEO

With these seemingly impossible mission goals clearly defined, we realized that we'd need super-viral-grade content – something new and exciting, as well as a methodological plan to succeed!

Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to acquire a link from the Wall St. Journal

Your Mission, should you choose to accept, is to acquire an editorial link from the Wall St. Journal!

2. Intelligence Gathering

The Wall Street Journal is not just any old news organization – it’s the finest business news organization on the planet!!

Therefore we would need to create a story more powerful than the typical 'how to' or 'X ways to succeed at Y' kinds of articles that we usually run on our blog. Those angles are great for daily blog content, but are hardly newsworthy of the Wall St. Journal, and just not the right tool for this ambitious content marketing mission!

We started our intelligence gathering effort by closely analyzing the objectives and by reviewing the kinds of articles the Wall St. Journal had covered in the past, in order to get a clear idea of the kind of content that we’d need to develop.

To achieve our lofty objectives, it was determined that we would need content that was:

  • Easy to Understand – We search marketers write about all sorts of dorky shop-talk about this signal or that metric. But since +99.99% of the readership of the Wall St. Journal aren’t search marketers, our story would have to be easily understandable to a broader audience of business people.
  • Unique – Our content would have to be based on new, original data and new insight. You cannot get the attention of the staff of the prestigious Wall St. Journal merely by rehashing old stuff that is already out there.
  • Newsworthy – new and unique is necessary but not sufficient. But is it newsworthy? Is the content timely in some way, such that it might merit coverage by the world’s most powerful business newspaper?
  • Easily Sharable – We would illustrate the key takeaways of our content in the form of an infographic, to enable easy sharing and make the content more visually appealing.

planning our content marketing operation

Planning our Content Marketing Operation...

3. Gear-Up!

In order to achieve our mission we would need the right gear for the job.

Our big idea was to conduct original research into what industries contributed to Google Revenues. We thought that this idea was both relevant to our core business (search marketing) yet sufficiently generalized to be relevant to the business readers of the Wall St. Journal.

Last year, Google made $ 37.9 Billion in revenues, of which 95% came from advertising. But Google doesn’t provide detailed insight into exactly what industries and companies make up all that money. So, we thought it might be interesting if we could provide an answer!

But how the heck are we supposed to know where Google made their money from if they don’t share that information?!

At WordStream, we have access to a ton of search marketing data that nobody else does, for example:

  • Our Free Keyword Tool which consists of over 1-trillion search queries – using this data, I can model what people were searching for in 2011.
  • Our AdWords Grader has collected some AdWords data including average cost per click data across different industries, etc.

Using this data, along with our proprietary keyword classification technologies, and other data available on the internet (such as spyfu, etc.), it would be possible to develop a fairly sophisticated data model to figure out what people were searching for in 2011, and how much revenue Google generated for clicks on searches in different industries, such as “Travel and Tourism” or “Finance and Insurance” and many other industries.

But our content was still in need of a newsworthy angle. Since Google was announcing their 2011 year-end financial results on January 19th, it was decided that we would have to conduct and publish our data analysis within a day or two of the official Google 2011 earnings announcement. Our content would explain where all Google's money came from!

Finally, we partnered with my colleague, Mr. Brian Wallace of NowSourcing and his crack team of infographic design aces to convert my data into a nice infographic that illustrated the Google Earnings data, in order to make it more visually appealing and easily sharable. Here's what it looked like (Click to Enlarge)

Where Google made Their Money

In a nutshell, we had developed content that was easily understandable to business readers, unique, newsworthy and sharable –perfect for our mission!

content marketing gear

Using the Right Gear (Content) for the Mission!

4. Mission Execution

Having set our goals, put a plan in place, and developing the right tools for the job, all that was left was to execute! We published our infographic just days after Google’s 2011 year-end earnings announcement.

And, as you probably expected, we were indeed successful in getting coverage of our story in the Wall Street Journal!!

Here's a snapshot of what that looked like:

we did it!

An