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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

May 16, 2013 by randfish

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! How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday 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!

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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

Filed Under: Advertising, affiliate marketing, articles, Beginner, blogging, conversion, Ecommerce, email marketing, facebook, Featured, Google, Google: Analytics, How To, Interviews, keywords, Link Building, linkedin, location, Marketing, mitt, online marketing, Paid Search, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, PPC, research, sea, Search Marketing, seo, social media, success, Testimonials, Top News, traffic, twitter, Video, websites Tagged With: alternative, business, facebook, friends, linkedin, management, marketing, web-design

Why We Can’t Just Be SEOs Anymore – Whiteboard Friday

May 2, 2013 by randfish

Posted by randfish There’s a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are chaning their practices and titles from “SEO” to “online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing.” Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today’s game, or are we missing the bigger picture? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from “SEO” to “inbound marketing” and what the future holds for our industry at large. Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below! Why We Can’t Just Be SEOs Anymore – 20130422 – Rand For your viewing pleasure, here’s a still image of the whiteboard used in this week’s video: Video Transcription “Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to address an elephant in the room. It’s a topic that I’ve talked about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know it’s a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org to lots of blogs and news sites. It’s: Why is it that there’s this movement from some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices, from saying, “We do SEO,” to saying, “We do inbound marketing,” or, “We do online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing”? I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some really good reasons that I think we’re seeing this shift happen, and I’m actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I’ve revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and I’ve become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I’m seeing this bigger picture, and I want to try to share that picture that I’m seeing with you. The first one is I can’t argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define or have defined SEO for the last decade. That’s not really true of the 2010 to 2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late ’90s into the late 2000, the “aughts.” What I mean is there are these old-school tactics. “Oh, you’re going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done. You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don’t try to tell me that it’s more than that.” This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who’s trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, “But wait a minute. This only works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data, domain data, and topic analysis.” Now, we have a lot more ranking factors, right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They’re definitely looking at brand signals. They’re looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are patent applications, thinking about offline data. They’re looking at social graph signals. What’s an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I’ve got to be able to work on everything that’s marketing. That’s everything from social media to community building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the content. What am I going to do if I’m tasked with SEO, but I’m only given responsibility over these things? It’s just not going to work. In order to influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past. It’s an untenable kind of situation. Thus, what we’d really like to do and what we’ve been working hard at as an industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding and working really hard to not have the word “SEO” be associated with scumminess and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so hard to change. It’s been established for such a long time now, and the small efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO and get marketing, it’s true. I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you’ve felt the same pain that I’m talking about. People say, “Oh, SEO. So you’re a spammer. You manipulate things. You’re unethical. You’re breaking the search engine’s rules. What does Google think of you?” These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it’s pretty clear to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It’s comment spam on their blogs. It’s a spammy, scummy email that’s trying to get them to sign up for something. It’s someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It’s a forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, “Oh, are you wondering why this malware happened? That’s the SEOs doing that.” That’s why all these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs. To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I’m not innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don’t think we’re winning. That’s another reason why I think it’s really hard to do SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, “I do web marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that leads to more conversions on their site.” They’re like, “Oh, okay. I get it. Web marketing. Understood.” SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels, but one of the channels they focus on. The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, “I’m an SEO,” your boss, your client, your management says, “Why are you meddling with our design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?” You are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can’t do great even at just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above. By the way, we’re selling ourselves short even more than just this, because when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels, that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things that influence SEO that we’re trying to move the needle on to get better results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on search. Yet, we’re not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were responsible for it. Again, we’re selling ourselves short. But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there’s anything that SEOs can be assured of, it’s that things will change tomorrow, that things will change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices don’t mature. I’m clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there’s massive shift or a new industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage. I think the stage for us is deciding: Do we want to keep committing to a brand that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too. An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture, or something like that, and you’re talking about a thousand plus dollars an hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way, the more you can effect change and have a positive influence. I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I’m sure there will be good comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.” 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!

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Why We Can’t Just Be SEOs Anymore – Whiteboard Friday

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Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics – Whiteboard Friday

April 26, 2013 by randfish

Posted by randfish As SEO continues to evolve, the metrics that indicate success continue to change with it. However, many of our client’s needs don’t seem to be changing as rapidly. With clients focused on specifics like the number of links they’re getting and weekly ranking reports, it’s tough to move the needle in the right direction for true SEO success. How do we push other inbound channels (like search, content marketing, and social) forward to offer a more holistic and strategic approach to inbound marketing that our clients can get behind? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the current broken culture of SEO metrics, and offers advice on what we can do to fix it. For your viewing pleasure, here’s a still image of the whiteboard used in this week’s video. Video Transcription “Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, I want to share an experience I had with you and then get to our Whiteboard Friday topic, which is going to be all about metrics and how we change this broken culture that we have in the SEO world that’s sort of carried over from the past. I got to go to SMX Sydney, which was an incredible time and an amazing visit, and I spoke there with Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, who is a well-known SEO guy in Australia, very, very smart guy, leads an agency down there. He asked me some questions that I think are very important and resonated with me because they’re things that I’ve heard from a lot of people and seen reflected in a lot of the questions that we get all the time. That was: “Rand, I want to do more of this broader inbound marketing. I want to get more strategic about the way I help people with SEO. I want to get less focused on things like the number of links I send you and your particular ranking report for a week. But these are things that our clients care about. When we talk specifically with clients and we pitch them on SEO, they tell us, ‘Hey, look, you’re not here for that. You’re here to get me more links. I want this many links and I want these rankings. I want my page rank to go up. I want my DAPA to go up.’” Those kinds of metrics have been ingrained as what SEO is all about, and tragically that’s not the way to be successful at our jobs. The way that we really move the needle on search, on social, on content marketing, on any of these inbound channels is to have a holistic and strategic focus on them, not this little tactical, rinky-dink, “I’m going to get 50 links That’s going to move this one ranking up.” We know this. We’ve been talking about it for a long time here on Whiteboard Friday and across the SEO world. You can find it on nearly every reputable SEO blog out there. So Dan and I were chatting and I said, “Well, I think what we have to do is take that conversation a level higher and say, ‘What do you want those metrics to accomplish? Why do you want links? Why do you want your rankings higher?’” The answer is often, “Well, we’re trying to attract more traffic and expose people to this new branding campaign,” or, “We’re trying to get more people signed up for this webinar. We’re trying to get more people in our salespeople’s funnel. We’re trying to convert more leads to perform these types of comparison searches and then buy from one of our partners.” Okay, good. That is getting us all the way down from these what I call “leading indicator metrics” down to the business KPIs. Business KPIs, the things that indicate the performance of the business, are where we should take our strategic initiative, our strategic lead, for any sort of online marketing effort, whether that’s SEO, whether it’s PPC, advertising. I don’t care what it is that you’re spending money on, it should be focused on this, centered on this, trying to achieve these things, and then, yes, we can use metrics like links and rankings, even something like page rank or crawl depth, as leading indicators, performance indicators that things are maybe going the right way, that they’re not going the right way. We can compare them against our competition, and they’re fine metrics for that. We just can’t focus on them as where we take our strategy. If the strategy is “go get me more links,” I’m probably going to do some gray or black hat SEO because very frankly, that’s how you move the needle on that one indicator. If you don’t care about potentially getting banned or hurting your brand impression or making a bad impression with the search engines and eventually getting into trouble that kind of way, then, yeah, you’re going to do stuff that is non-ideal for your business metrics. So let’s have this conversation first. I’m going to start down here. Business KPIs, things that I think about as being business metrics, and these are just a sample. I don’t want you to get the idea that these are the only metrics or that these have to fit in these buckets. But in this purple bucket down here, I have things like conversions. Conversions might even be a marketing KPI for you, depending on what your true business goals are. But transaction value, life time customer value, retention of those customers and recidivism of customers, those are the business KPIs, typically, in most organizations. They’re trying to get people to the site, perform some type of action that will lead to revenue, lead to a goal being accomplished. Marketing KPIs, these are one step up, but not yet at that level of sort of the SEO leading indicators. These are things like visits and traffic, tweets, shares, +1′s. Those are signals of engagement and success over social media, so is followers and fans, and these might be in leading indicators, tweets, shares, +1′s could easily be in leading indicators rather than marketing KPIs, brand mentions, pre-conversion action. So people, for example, visiting pages that lead to a conversion on your site and following through that funnel that you’ve got set up on your site, those are the types of marketing KPIs that the marketing team might be reporting and that you particularly, if you’re doing any type of consulting working or if you’re working in-house and trying to help move the needle, you do want to have a dashboard that’s showing you these. Then those leading indicators, those are much more of a, “Hey, I think this is a signal that we might be on the right path,” or, “This is a test. Let’s see if moving the needle on links actually moves the needle on these other things that we care about and these business metrics that we care about,” or, “Boy, you know, sometimes it seems like it doesn’t.” Sometimes it seems like other things that we might focus on, perhaps social is really moving the needle, because you’re finding that you’re having a huge brand impact that’s biasing clicks in the search results, that’s moving you up in positions through usage and user data types of algorithms, and that’s really doing a much better job for you than raw links and raw rankings. Maybe you’re expanding your portfolio of content, and that’s what’s moving the needle for you. You could easily put things like content production in here. You could put that in a leading indicator, or you could put it in a marketing KPI. You could put content engagement, things like comments or registrations. Those could fit into marketing KPIs. It’s okay to have different things in these different buckets. Just know what they are and make sure if you’re working with someone, that you’re getting the right answers here so that you can make the right decisions here. Don’t focus on these. If you focus on these from a strategic point of view, your tactics are probably going to lead you in the wrong direction, and, by the way, those of you who might be buying consulting services or hiring an in-house SEO or an in-house marketing team and having them focus on this stuff, you’re really going to be misleading your marketers, and they’re going to be focused on the wrong kinds of things that aren’t going to move the needle for the business. They need to be up here. Let me show you in a more precise fashion how I love to see this visualized and illustrated, how I love to see this done. We actually do this right now at Moz. We’ve got an internal tool that does some of this stuff, and then we have a big Google docs spreadsheet that I would love to make more sophisticated, and we probably will after we release some of the big, new things we’re working on here. But basically, there are three categories up in this leading indicators column that I pay attention to, and those are things like I want to look at the leading indicators, whatever they are, and compare them versus my budget and my goals. So I might have, okay, this was our goal, and we are +x over that goal. This is our goal and we’re -y over this goal, and this is our other goal, we’ve got +c over here, compared to last year this time, Q1 2012. Q1, January 1st to April 1st of 2013, here’s what we’ve done so far, and here’s how far ahead we are of where we were this time last year, what we performed in Q1 of last year. I like doing this because seasonality plays a big role in many, many businesses, not every one but many, many businesses. So comparing year over year is really healthy for this. Then compare versus the competition. The wonderful thing about leading indicators, and often one of the big reasons why a lot of folks use them is because we can compare. We can see where our competitors are ranking. We can see what sort of links they’re getting. We can see their DA and PA. Maybe we can’t see their crawl rate and depth, but those other sorts of leading indicators, even things like tweets and shares and +1′s, followers and fans, those indicators we can put in here, and we can compare against our competition. Once we get down a layer, and I would encourage you to have the top layer, which we care about and it’s interesting, but it’s not the focus. It’s just a leading indicator. When we get to the marketing KPIs, we’ve got, again, budget year over year and competition. Then when we go to the business KPIs, we almost never can get competition, the data on what the competition’s doing. So we just have budgeting year over year. But being able to see this, being able to visualize this, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in this funnel view, but being able to see this and compare and then to show your clients, your managers, your team members what you’re doing and how that stacks up against what the business is trying to accomplish, this is incredibly powerful. It’s so much more powerful than saying, “I want links and rankings.” If you’re hearing from folks, “I want links and rankings,” please have them watch this whiteboard video, have them leave comments, have them e-mail me. My goodness, I don’t think that this is going to be how successful SEO gets done in the future. This is how tactical SEO was done in the past, and, unfortunately, it’s how a lot of black and gray hat SEO became the norm – well, I don’t want to say “the norm” – but became very popular in our world. By focusing on bigger things, we can be smarter. We can accomplish a lot more. All right everyone, look forward to your comments, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.” 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!

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Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics – Whiteboard Friday

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