Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution – Whiteboard Friday

May 23, 2013 by

Posted by randfish The phrase “look before you leap” has never been more true! Before you start investing in tactics, it’s important to do your market research. Many businesses are tempted to dive into the details before answering the bigger questions, like who their customers are, how those customers make purchase decisions, where their potential users are on the web, and how customers may choose between similar companies and offerings.  In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why building out a research-based roadmap before you start you building your tactics (like SEO, content, and social campaigns) will help boost your chance of success. Leave your thoughts in the comments below! Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution – Whiteboard Friday For your viewing pleasure, here’s 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 talk a little bit about doing your market research before you start jumping in and investing in tactics. Shout out to @Andrew_Isidoro on Twitter for suggesting this topic. I really appreciate it Andrew. The reason this is so important and why I was so passionate and why I was excited when Andrew suggested it, is because I’ve seen us here at Moz and many, many other companies back when we use to do consulting, even with the folks that I try and help today, lots of people I talk to all over the industry, making this mistake of wanting to dive right into the details and start sending their tweets and building their content, tweaking their website, set up their conversion tests, optimizing their pages for search engines, all that stuff, before they have answers to the big questions. Who’s our customer target? Where on the web are they? How do they make their purchase decisions? What are their influencers? What are the things that influence them to make a purchase or not, and how do they choose between different companies and different offerings? If we answer these questions, we can build something really beautiful, a research based roadmap. We know things like the personas of who we’re targeting. What types of customers are we trying to reach? For example, when we launch SEOmoz Pro years ago, we thought we were just trying to target primarily, at least, in-house marketers, people who worked in-house at companies, not consultants and agencies. So we hadn’t built things like white labeling and custom reports and the ability to add your logo and all that kind of stuff, branding. Those personas were critical to getting the product right. About 40%, in fact, of our customers are agencies and consultants. Channels, what are the channels that we’re going to reach people at? Is it social networks? Is it things like YouTube, where there’s a lot of video going on and obviously a lot of search activity? Is it Google and Bing, where the searches are taking place? Is it content? Are they only at events? Is there a very, very small set of these folks and we need to reach them initially through events or direct outreach? Do we need to build a sales pipeline and then have introductions being made? Are we going to use LinkedIn? Those channels are critical to knowing what marketing things we’re going to do. The tactics to pursue on a per channel basis. So it could be the case that the same tactic I’m using again and again on a certain channel is going to work very well. You could see, for example, that content marketing for Moz, at least, works pretty well across all of our social channels. But it’s not exactly what we do in person. We try and have a very educational bent to a lot of our content, and that might change up a little bit depending on which forum we’re in and what kind of folks we’re trying to reach or who we’re talking to at the time. So those different tactics per channel. We want the information. We want to know how they make purchase decisions so that we can provide the information that potential customers need to make a decision. If they’re making it based on features or based on price or based on what experts have said. Is it based on feedback? Is it based on brand? A lot of times marketing decisions are made on brand. Is it based on design and UX? This roadmap can then tell us things like:  what goes on the website, where and how we’re going to spend the money. Is it going to be on people and resources to build up kind of a long-term marketing funnel through content and search and social, organic or inbound channels? Or is it going to be on a lot of one-off purchases of an email list that we’re going to blast or a homepage takeover or a lot of display ads, PPC ads, those kind of things? How are we going to measure success? How do we know whether we’re actually winning? Is it based on a percentage of the market? Is it based on market share against another company? Is it pure adoption? Is it something else? Is it brand awareness? What marketing tactics do we need to be good at? What are the ones where it’s a very competitive sphere versus the ones where it isn’t? What are things where we need to invest a lot of time and energy to build up skills and tactics versus maybe throwing dollars at it, hiring an agency to do it? All those kinds of things. This research based roadmap can answer all of those questions for you, but you can’t do it unless you’re doing market research first. I do want to talk a little bit about some types of market research and how to specifically conduct those. So a very obvious one, one that folks who are in the SEO and web marketing fields are very familiar with is competitive research. Competitive research, very obvious to most of us because we investigate what our competitors are doing to be successful in search results, or on Twitter, Facebook, or in their content efforts. We can look at lots of attributes of competitive research. Who are the evangelists? Who are the people who are pushing this company, speaking on behalf of them? What are the marketing channels that they’re using? What are their traffic sources? Where are they getting visits and traffic from? This can be challenging to get to, and I won’t dive into all of these. Press and mentions? Where are they getting mentioned? By whom? What are people saying about them? Who do they compare them to? Hopefully it’s us. Design and UX, what are they doing successfully or not so successfully on their website? Unique value propositions, what’s the angle that they take that says, “Oh this is what’s really unique about our company. This is the particular reason why you would buy- I don’t know – Columbia Sportswear brand instead of Nike or Reebok or Mountain Gear or whatever it is.” And who’s their target market? Oftentimes these two are very tied together. The UVP or USP ties in with the target market because they’re trying to reach a particular person, and they think that those specific attributes that are unique to their company are what’s going to successfully reach them. There’s also customer research, and you can do customer research of all kinds. You can do profiling, that can be demographic or psychographic. You can do targeted surveys where essentially I have a list of customers. For example, here at Moz obviously we have a list of the 21,000 people who pay to use Moz, and we can send a targeted survey to them. We actually have a customer advisory board of about 300 folks that Jackie runs here on our product team, and she talks to those folks very directly and will send them questions to answer. There’s also, and these are quite interesting, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, just the last few years, sizing and perceptions surveys. The two big providers for those are Survey Monkey’s Audience product and Google’s Consumer Surveys product. Essentially what they’ve got is lots of people that they advertise to, they’re sort of random citizens of the web, denizens of the web, and they will take surveys based on profile data that you request. So you can get senses of how big is my brand in a space? Have people heard of this thing that I’m trying to offer? How many people are even interested in this thing? You can ask those broad, broad questions to a random group of users with specific sets of interests or for profile features. You can do in-person interviews. A lot of startups especially do in-person interviews. They talk to a customer, bring him into the office. What are you doing? How are you doing it now? What could you see making that process easier or better? What is something you would pay for? Usability studies are similar, but they are actually with a finished product or a near-finished product. Wireframe reviews are sort of a little bit less of a finished product, but more of a “hey let’s walk through these wireframes and see if this product were built, would it solve your problems? Would it be something you’d passionate about, something you would buy?” Then there’s also, there’s two more, expert data that you can gather in terms of market research, and expert data is a little bit different from customer data. So this is not saying, “Hey I want to reach out to anyone who would potentially be a customer,” but rather, “I want to reach out to the experts in the field.” This is something, again, that we do a lot of at Moz. We have kind of a core group of people inside and outside of the company who have been marketing experts, web marketing experts, for many, many years and have a lot of deep depth of knowledge in SEO and all those kinds of features. Finding those folks is really cool because a lot of times they turn out to be the evangelists and the influencers of much of the rest of the field. So by bringing them into your process, you can do those interviews, surveys, profiling, usability studies, wireframe reviews, the same as you can with customers, but potentially get very different data and oftentimes very interesting data. I would be careful, though. I’m personally biased, oftentimes, to listening to the experts at the expense of customers. Not a good idea. You should very much consider both of these folks. Experts sometimes are so deep that they can’t see the forest for the trees, which is a problem I have myself a lot of the time too. Then the last one is published or professional data, and these are often collected by large firms, Forrester Research, for example. They put together these large scale studies on different industries. This form of data is also fine, but it’s usually a leading indicator that you then want to verify and validate with some of these other forms. So by doing this, by doing these forms of market research, you can get the answers to these questions, build that research based roadmap, and then when you go and execute, you’ll know that you’re on the right path. This is really powerful because a lot of the time when you take off and you start diving into the details without it, it’s bad biscuits. Bad biscuits make the baker broke, bro. All right everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. 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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Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution – Whiteboard Friday

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Mozscape in the Wild: How The API is (and Could be) Used

May 23, 2013 by

Posted by Ryan_Watson Did you know that there are over 90 billion URLs are packed into our Mozscape API ? That’s a lot of links. So many links, in fact, that it can be daunting to dream up all of the many ways that you could put those links to good use. When we originally built Linkscape (the predecessor to Mozscape), we mainly had one thing in mind… SEO and backlinks. But there’s a whole lot more than that. Links are only the beginning, it’s what those links can tell us that’s so darn interesting. Which is why I wanted to call out all of the amazing ways that developers (and marketers) are using Mozscape data to better their work, as well as encourage new uses of Mozscape data that have yet to be explored. (Feel free to jump in and create your own API key any time.) How Mozscape is Being Used Today Mozscape’s wealth of links can be used in a variety of ways: from SEO audits, to domain valuations, to excel integration. Here at Moz, we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we can utilize the API. We currently use it to run some of our own tools such as Open Site Explorer and the Mozbar . But I don’t want to focus on the way we use it. Let’s take a look at the way other developers have demonstrated some exciting uses for Mozscape. Hopefully these will get your mind going, thinking up other ways to use the data as well. SEO Audits We’ll start with the most obvious of use cases, SEO audits. There quite a few examples of SEO audit tools that use Mozscape data, but a few of our favorites (that are in front of a paywall) are the HubSpot Website Grader and The Found SEO Audit Tool , both of which bring the heat. Mozscape data is what powers things like the total pages indexed by search, MozRank, a list of the most authoritative pages, along with their corresponding anchor texts. The beauty of this use case is that it can provide a great lead-gen funnel for all of the SEO agencies out there, proving value up front with an email address required prior to running the report. As a digital marketing agency, using Mozscape data to develop a site audit is a great way to get users into your sales funnel. You know, that inbound marketing stuff — cold calls are old news. Domain Valuation How valuable is a website, purely from an online authority perspective? Traditionally, that was a very tough question. You could look at things like site traffic (which typically isn’t very accurate) or rankings for certain terms, but that’s a far-sighted approach to the question. Think about using the metrics behind Mozscape, like MozRank, Domain Authority, and MozTrust instead. Flippa , for example, uses Mozscape data as a datapoint for due diligence. You could imagine this kind of domain valuation anywhere else domains are bought or sold, most of which have yet to use Mozscape data. The value, of course, is providing as much confidence to the buyers of web properties based on the “web footprint” of the site. Spreadsheet Kung-Fu The spreadsheet kung-fu of this industry is unmatched anywhere else. With the integration of Mozscape data to Excel, some have been able to make Excel sing. The beauty of using Excel for analyzing Mozscape data is that you can slice and dice as you please, without setting up complex API calls. Perhaps our favorite example of Excel comes from the illustrious Richard Baxter, with the Links API Extension from SEO Gadget. However, if Google Docs are more up your alley, the amazing Aleyda Solis created just the thing for you (so did Chris Lee ). Tools like these allow the average marketer to dig into the firehose of data available through the API in a simple and recognizable interface. Client Reporting Yes, that’s right. iAcquire uses the data when creating client reports as it not only helps them to inform the client about how their pages are doing but to also show the importance of certain pages on their site. The data is both a research tool and an education tool. “Below is a screenshot from a ranking research report showing data we gathered for the keyword ‘inbound marketing tips.’ Moz stats are represented throughout the stats columns. As we work with these reports we are able to see if any of our content distribution efforts resulted in links on page or domain as can be seen in the far left columns.” How Mozscape Could Be Used That’s how Mozscape is being used today, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. A few folks have realized the potential outside of the traditional use cases that I’ve mentioned above. The power of the data comes when we take Mozscape data outside of its traditional context of pure link evaluation. Let me show you what I mean. Link Building Its relatively easy to imagine Mozscape’s data being used for link building. With Mozscape’s massive amount of link data, SEOs are able to prioritize their link building efforts, and focus on value added efforts. CRM You could imagine that some of the examples noted above have been used for link building, but what about a deeper integration into a contact manager? Something that would allow the user to prioritize outreach by the value of a domain. Just as one can do with the Klout score (or Social Authority ) on Twitter, the same can be done for customer relationship efforts in filtering Domain Authority to determine importance. Top Lists We’ve seen hints of blogs using Mozscape data determine a top startup list, like the GeekWire 200 , but the same could be applied for any rankings list of web properties. Traditionally, lists have used Alexa or Compete traffic data to determine web prominence, but they’re so inaccurate . Other lists have used social specific metrics like social followings, but those too fall short. Geekwire’s list of the top 200 startups in Seattle uses a blend of both social and web data (External links, MozTrust) to determine just how influential a site is, providing the full picture. How Could You Use the API? I’m sure we’ve missed a ton of ideas, so we’re calling on you to help us find those new opportunities for Mozscape. Things like a tightening relationship between links and social networks, and categorizing link sources. How would you use this data, and how would you build it? Better yet, why not create your key and get going?  We want to make it easy for you. We’ve been working quite hard to make our indexes faster and have recently updated our Mozscape API documentation . We want to make it as simple for you to use the data to get your idea up an running as possible. Plus, if you create something, it’s likely we’ll get you added to our app gallery . We have everything from large corporations to individuals who have used the API and we show off their work in the gallery. We’d love to hear from you. Obviously we always encourage folks to jump in and check out the free API (as well as the paid), and use the data for something useful for you. We’re also quite open to hearing about ways we can improve our own tools with the data or help educate people better. I look forward to reading through your feedback and seeing if there are ways we can help get people started using Mozscape. 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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Mozscape in the Wild: How The API is (and Could be) Used

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Decoding Google’s Referral String (or, how I surviVED Secure Search)

May 22, 2013 by

Posted by timresnik Last week, I held a Mozinar outlining a method to extract SERP vertical — called Universal Search by Google — from Google referral strings. Since the Mozinar concluded, the number of people who have reached out with their own theories and ideas has been impressive. I want to post everything that I know here and then leave it up to you folks in the SEOmoz community to start hacking and sharing your insight. For those of you who did not see the Mozinar, you can access it here (voiceover included). You can also download or view the slides without VO on Slideshare here . Before getting into the step-by-step process and providing examples of how to use the Google referral string to interpret where in Universal Search your traffic came from, I want to lay out a problem we were having at AudienceWise. In 2011, Matthew Brown and I started an agency to help news publishers with technical SEO and audience development. In our other jobs, specifically Matthew at the New York Times, we struggled with reconciling for the lack of data around Universal Search referrals. As far as our web analytics platforms were concerned, a visit from web search, a News OneBox link, and an image result were all treated exactly the same: as organic search traffic. Then came Google Secure Search , and referral data got even more opaque. In addition to not knowing which Universal vertical the referral came from, now in about 10% of cases we didn’t even know the keyword that referred the traffic. The question that kept going through our collective ginger minds was: how can we help our clients with content strategy if we know nothing about WHY they are receiving said search traffic? Unfortunately, Secure Search has vastly expanded and now accounts for a large percentage of all Google referral traffic. As way of an example, here is the latest percentage of keyword = (not provided) for SEOmoz: Matthew and I knew the only way to reclaim *some* of this lost data was to start looking at other sources. Luckily, Matt speaks Spanish (sort of) and came across this blog . The author posited that the ‘ved’ parameter in the Google referral string held some magic in determining the vertical that result appeared in. After doing some quick searches, and looking at the “href” values for the results, it seemed like he was onto something. We immediately set up Google Analytics profile filters to extract this parameter on a client that receives 300,000 search referrals from Google per day. After a couple of hours, we were loaded with enough data to start confirming some of the authors theories and coming up with a few of our own. I will layout what we found, provide a step-by-step tutorial to setup Google Analytics filters, and provide a few examples of how to use the data. First, let’s talk about where you can find this parameter. Simply, the Google referral string is the “href” value assigned to each URL in a set of search results. When a user clicks on the above, she is being redirected through a google URL prior to reaching her final destination; Radiohead.com, in this case. Google most likely does this for internal data aggregation reasons — we’re not suppose to know where our traffic comes from, but they sure make use of it — probably for aggregating data around SERPs. There are two parameters that I will focus on here: ‘cd’ and ‘ved.’  The ‘cd’ parameter has been written about before and tells us the position of the search result in the set. As far as I can tell, the ‘ved’ parameter is divided into three parts and tells us which Universal vertical the result is part of, the position within that vertical (relative position), and the position within the search result (absolute position). I will focus on just the Universal aspect for this post and will follow up with relative vs. absolute position in a follow-up. Let’s have a look at a few examples. When QFj is in the ‘ved’ parameter that the result is a standard web search result, such as: One of the attendees of the Mozinar made this astute observation about a special variation for the web search ‘ved’: When QqQIw (that’s a capital “i” not a lowercase “L”) it is a Universal result that resides within the Google News OneBox. When QpwI is present that means the result was the thumbnail image within the News OneBox. You get the idea. Here are some other values of ‘ved.’ I suspect that there are many more and am curious to see what the community here can find and SHARE here within: Setting up Google Analytics filters You should have a good understanding now of potential power of this information. Did I mention that it is still available even if the keyword is “(not provided)”? We could potentially interpret the keyword by comparing ‘ved.’ Anyone up for the challenge? I go through one example below. While ‘ved’ appears to persist through Secure Search only about 50% of the search referrals within GA have this data. If anyone can shine light on this, I’m sure the rest of the community would shower you with thumbs ups! Step 1: Set up a Google Analytics Profile filter Go to the account’s administrative dashboard and select “New Profile.” I would recommend against setting this filter up on an existing profile as that it will overwrite some data that you otherwise want. I called mine ‘Universal Search.’ Next, you will need to set up two advanced filters; one to extract ‘ved’ and ‘cd’ from the Google referral string, and the other to display the data within Google Analytics. Universal Extract Here’s the text of the regex that I used Field A  (?|&)(ved)=([^&]*) Field B (?|&)(cd)=([^&]*) Universal Display There’s many different ways to do this. I’ve decided to overwrite the campaign dimension of source since that’s where I am checking my organic search referrals. Filters work while the data is streaming in and will not be reflected retroactively. That’s fine; you just have to wait for a day or so (or an hour or so for bigger sites) to start digging in. Here’s what it should look like: Step 2: Set up Advanced Segments I prefer to do this level of analysis in Excel, but Advanced Segments can be created to make it all look pretty in GA. I will walk you through the setup of one, which will inform you how to do the rest. You will want to name your Advanced Segment something that will clue you in to which vertical you are analyzing. In this case, I have called out that it is a standard ‘blue link’ result from a News OneBox. From there, all you need to do is search on ‘Source’ for anything containing the ‘ved’ you are trying to isolate. In this case, we are looking for ‘QqQIw.’ Here’s an example of what you will see: Wow! There is an actionable result right in front of me. It’s probably time to do some image optimization. Google apparently respects the site as a news authority, but not one that creates good images. Another useful ‘ved’ to investigate is Sitelinks. Sitelinks are a subset of results triggered by a branded search. Google algorithmically determines which links to include, but webmasters have the ability to demote links in Webmaster Tools. The ‘ved’ parameter can come in handy to measure performance of Sitelink pages and action can be taken. In order to figure out the Sitelink that sent the search referral, look at the ‘cd’ value that was passed with the referral string. We accounted for this in the filters and it is in your data here: Here’s what the ‘cd’ values mean in relation to Sitelink results: There are myriad of use cases for bubbling up SEO action items. Here are a few, and please add more in the comments: Calculating ROI and resource allocation for different SEO efforts : News, image, branded, and semantic markup. As marketers, we are only as valuable as what we can quantify. A challenge with SEO is demonstrating value. This does not solve the problem, but exposes a few more variables to work with. Optimizing branded search Sitelinks : As I outlined above, there is value in knowing which branded links send you traffic. This is also one area where you can mitigate the loss of keyword data due to Secure Search. When you see that a keyword is (not provided) AND ved = xxxxQjB, you can interpolate that keyword = YOUR BRAND. Image optimization for Google News : The top link in the Google News OneBox is most often a different source than the image thumbnail. If ved = xxxxQqQIw ÷ ved = xxxxQpwI, or the ratio of links to images, is way off-kilter it suggests there is an image optimization issue. Publishers can then use this data to measure optimization efforts against a pre-established baseline. Optimizing video thumbnails : Images of video that are alongside a link are always from the same source as the link. Marketers can use a similar ratio as above to analyze click-through rates and on-page analysis when ved = xxxxQuAIw. Analyzing efficacy of semantic markup : As the occurrences of SERPS that include clickable rich-snippets and knowledge graph elements increase, being able to parse and understand the referrals using ‘ved’ is clear. I have only started looking at results that have rich-snippets, but the initial data suggests that ‘ved’ may even indicate what type event, of rich snippet was clicked. Here are a few examples: (This is one area that could use a lot more research from the community!) Events Markup: ved = xxxBE0MGM Music Markup: ved = xxxQ6hEw SERP landscape analysis : If you can scrape a Google SERP, you can tell which ‘ved’ elements are on the page and know which verticals are in each. The ‘href’ lives within Java Script so the simplest way to retrieve it is by using a headless browser such PhantomJS. That about wraps it up for my first — of hopefully many — posts on ‘ved.’ In the months to come, Moz will be collecting Google referral string data on a great number of SERPs for various keywords. We plan to unleash our data hound  to sniff out the most useful elements. In the meantime, I would like to use this post as a place for the hacking to begin and the sharing of your thoughts in the comments. Dig in! 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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Decoding Google’s Referral String (or, how I surviVED Secure Search)

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