MozCon 2013 Highlights & Quotes

Besides the great new tools, one of my favorite takeaways from conferences are the “potent quotables”. We’re curating a list of our favorite quotes from MozCon 2013, and we’ll post one new slidedeck here at the end of each day.

Our live notes via Google docs are getting published at the bottom of this page – you’ll have to refresh the page to see updates as we’re typing. We’ll convert to text once each day is over.

Also, be sure to check out our list of all of the tools discussed at MozCon 2013.

Day One Quotedeck

Day Two Quotedeck

Day Three Quotedeck

Day One Live Notes

Intro: The Year in SEO, Marketing, and Moz
9:00 am – 9:30am – Rand Fishkin

Beth’s Notes:

• Users are biased towards domain/branded search – brands have a unique benefit and it makes it tougher for folks that are starting out to catch up. If you are a brand, you have a powerful opportunity to dominate.
• “I don’t just get to do SEO anymore, I have to be a marketer”
• In the U.S., people listing SEO as a skill on LinkedIn gained 100,000 people in the past. Social media grew so much that we couldn’t do a direct comparison. In the last 21 days, it’s grown by 63,468 people.
• “We’re almost becoming a commodity skill – you have to have it.”
• It used to be embarrassing to tell people to not buy links, because buying links did work.
• “In this world, it’s taking longer and longer for new sites to earn the signals they need to compete… finding longtail keywords that no one is targeting is really hard.”
• “I’ve always been frustrated and annoyed by (interruption) marketing… but that’s my bias, and (interruption) and inbound marketing work together really well.”
• “Privacy doesn’t seem to be a needle-mover for consumers.”
• I think maybe it’s up to us (people like Majestic, SEMRush, FindPeopleonPlus, Full Contact, FreshWeb Explorer) to combat the end of the free and open web.
• More than half of U.S. cell users now have a smartphone. 1 in 3 people now have a tablet at home. Desktop search has not been shrinking.
• “More web use promotes more web use. It’s kind of addictive.”
• “instead of watching TV, we watch TV and play Scrabble now.”
• “We can’t even do SEO and be good at it without doing things that are bigger than SEO and better than SEO.”

Really Targeted Outreach
09:30am – 10:00am – Richard Baxter

Beth’s Notes:

• “Imagine you started your brand new SEO job this week. You’re getting it right – doing technical audit… providing recommendations… it goes up to the mgmt team and it works, they get it… Imagine that you get budget – they love it, they understand it… one of the comments is “Hey, we need to get some links.” You start hiring… get started… let’s do some outreach!” … and it starts to get difficult.”
• “Your problem is this – you started with Google.”
• Option 1: Google “write for us” + marketing or whatever
• Option 2: Collect data + analyze + be smart
• Tool: Tagul beta
• Tools: bit.ly/twitterarchiver – Martin Hawksey, SEOTools for Excel, SEOGadget, Followerwonk. bit.ly.com/followerwonkfetcher
• A Twitter OAuth Consumer Key
• “What we’re saying is: Show me what links these people have shared in the last 30 days”
• Create profiles for every target group
• bit.ly/mozcontemplate
• mailtester and rapportive for finding email addresses.
• query facebook open graph or …

Kane’s Notes:

• Bar graph of every subdomain shared by target audience on twitter in the past XX days. Bar graph is a count of the number of shares, and there’s also a “X” to display domain authority. Awesome way to
• Tagul tool for tag clouds
• 74.49 DA for domains audience is following vs 47.82 DA for scraped guest blog sources
• Really Targeted Outreach:
• 1 Who are you targeting?
• 2 Identify influencer intersects
• 3
• 4
• http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/ Get TAGS v5
• mailtester.com
• rapportive

International SEO and the Future of Your ROI
10:00am – 10:30am – Aleyda Solis

Beth’s Notes:

• Be sure to identify your current international search visibility and do your research – perform complete research in that language.
• In some countries, it’s even more important to target mobile sites than it is in the U.S.
• It is important to get native support for your efforts, to make sure it’s really feasible.
• Be sure to calculate conversion rates for break-even point. Find out whether your international SEO project is viable
• We really need to be profitable, and prioritize whether it’s going to be viable to go to another country.
• It is fundamental that we understand our international audience… and we need to research our competitors as well – why are they in those positions already? how does their online community behave? etc. Once we have all this information, we can set a specific international SEO goal to build your international business.
• Your international site needs their own web structures.
• You can use ccTLDs, subdirectories, sub-domains – all have pros and cons.
• No flags – you’re targeting languages not countries – take that into consideration.
• CNN uses sub-domains, TripAdvisor uses international TLDs, …
• Localize EVERYTHING. It’s fundamental. Get a native to help avoid mistakes.
• Don’t use URLs in English.
• Make your navigation accessible, and make it visible and crawlable to discover the international web versions.
• Give users the option to shift languages – Amazon.com as an example.
• Don’t automatically redirect users.
• Be sure to use hreflang annotations in html and in XML sitemap
• The Media Flow tool
• Use webmaster tools from the browsers that are popular whereever you’re targeting – Maybe it’s Yandex or Baidu
• Example – job advertisement in Spain. Built a microsite – “dontgotogermany.com” – it listed all the things natives loved about Spain – football team, beach, favorite food. The site went viral.
• Track each of your web versions independently.
• This is just the fundamentals – See More: International Web Analytics: A How-to Session Daniel Smulevich
• Calculate ROI – access at bit.ly/seoroi-calculator
• Kane’s Notes:
• Boy I forgot how quickly Aleyda talks. Trying to keep up here…
• @SEOhimanshu
• Nice flow chart on whether international SEO project is viable – check the slides at…
• International content needs its own URL – don’t display spanish vs english content both on http://dropbox.com, for example.
• Trip advisor goes after international TLDs. Others use sub-directories.
• ***Don’t use a flag for language targeting*** We want language, not location.
• Don’t forget to change everything – from <title> tags to URLs all the way down to footer text.
• Make your language switcher button crawlable.

Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI
10:50am – 11:50am – Avinash Kaushik

Beth’s Notes:

• Love Avinash joking about Rand rebranding the island of Moorea. 😉
• “I want to stretch your view from what you might see every day to see all the other amazing things you can do when it comes to marketing.”
• Tool: Streamgraph – great way to visualize keyword data on Google
• It doesn’t matter what you’re selling – you see, think and do – See: People who wear clothes. Think: People who wear clothes who are thinking they need some. Do: People who wear clothes who think they need some and are looking to buy them right now. – which one are you solving for?
• See & Think – Brand awareness. Do: Performance. You have to do both – and SEO primarily solves for a bit of Think and a lot of “Do.” We judge everything by its ability to drive a conversion.
• By the midpoint, the audience has pretty much decided what they want, and it’s hard to raise brand awareness.
• I find it really stupid that people care so much about likes and followers – and I get very angry about people who obsess about those things. In social media, the only thing that matters is the content you put out there.
• If you’re using a logfile parser, the data is there – why are you torturing us using $50,000 Foresee surveys?
• “I’m a little suspicious that the tool Rand actually owns ranks him higher than me.”
• “Did you not hear that the internet is being consumed on phones?” You should have a mobile-friendly website, and if you do, you have solved the problem of 2009.
• Most peoples’ brand experience now will be digital and not walking into their stores – department stores do a great job of brand experience in person, but digital experiences lag behind.
• Three things I want you to do: 1. Solving for relationships, 2. Smarter Engagement, 3. Quicker starts
• Solving for Relationships: Of the 9 calls to action Avinash highlighted, 8 are relationship-based and only orders are performance based, but different channels perform well for different CTA’s (Bing does well for social amplification)
• Smarter Engagement: What are you optimizing for? – understand thyself, really understand, take action –
• zqi.me/vizd3
• “First click attribution is like giving my first girlfriend credit for me marrying my wife.”
• Custom model – position based 10% to first interaction, 50% to everything else, 40% to last interaction. “MozCon Mindblowing Model” 🙂
• Hypothesize, test, Be less wrong
• zqi.me/amtga
• Multi-channel, multi-device modeling is really, really hard. zqi.me/MCAak
• Do we have the tools, capacity, etc. to execute this at scale? If you do, your company will do great.
• Quicker starts: Competitive intelligence helps really well –
• Tool: SimilarWeb
• “Don’t rank, own.”
• Do we  have the people to do this? Do they have the skills to do this? If we do, we’re no longer poor.
• “See. Think. Do. Win.”
• “A lot of you are here because you want shortcuts… you are going to be very sad when you realize all of that sucks. The world is very, very complicated and it changes very fast.”
• Take away – 1. Get really good at optimizing for portfolios and all of the channels, across multiple visits from see, think, do… That’s where I go to open my eyes – display, search, organic, paid, competitors. What are my competitors doing that I’m not?
• “All I’m asking for you to do is flip the funnel.”
• “I do not believe that for the audience in this room, there is a dearth of good things to think about, there is a deluge.”
• I would rather start with my competitors than other options.

Kane’s Notes:

• See -People who wear clothes – Brand
• Think – People who know they need clothes – Brand
• Do – People who want to buy clothes right now – Performance
• If you’ve created a good mobile experience for users, congratulations – you’ve solved the problem of 2009.
• Chord & Sunburst diagrams for analyzing multi-touch conversion paths.
• Custom Attribution models are > default models provided. 75 day lookback on b2b. Only give credit if traffic spends time on site.
• “Only losers use impressions”
• How to do a quick start with all of the stuff Avinash just said:
• similarweb pro

Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes
1:20pm – 1:50pm – Lena West

Beth’s Notes:

• SEO for a client once said: “We don’t do images.”
• On Facebook, photo updates get 53% more likes than text updates.
• “You can always count on Google to take it up a notch.” – re Google Glass
• No matter what Google throws at us, what I still love about images is that it will force social people to get in the same room with search people about how to build a brand – and it has to be better than filenames and alt-text.
• How can you take the mojo that we know happens when you take an image-heavy approach to your online marketing?
• Even though we’re doing all this stuff, we’re still sharing pictures online, because they’re easy to share, and they shortcut us having to say a lot.
• “You see an image and you get it.”
• “People love images. Stop making it so hard!”
• “I know some of you think they’re tired, but infographics offer a little bit of mojo for you”
• Wordless Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays, Scarlet Says Saturdays – images every week, and it’s dominated by small businesses
• Resources: KnowYourMeme.com, QuickMeme.com, MemeCenter.com, Infogr.am, Visual.ly, InfoActive.com, Piktochart, Easel.ly, many eyes, Pinwords, Pinstamatic, Quozio, ReciteThis
• “People like pictures. Give them what they already like. It’s not hard.”
• Luna Metrics social media sizing cheat sheet – has been shared off the hook – and she’s totally right – it’s a very usable, fantastic reference!
• Quotes humanize your bigger brand, and builds know, like, trust factor for smaller brands.
• For Pinterest – Motifs around your products – getting visibility, and people can add images to them.
• Brands to check out: LL Bean, Peugeot Pana, Whole Foods
• “Don’t be scared, homies. Images are your friend… be willing to try and test out and fail. Start adding images to marketing strategies for your clients.”
• “Images are a hook, but you’d be surprised about how you can tie it back (to conversions)”
• Tracking tools: Curalate, ahalogy, piquora (formerly pinfluencer), Moz Analytics

Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content
1:50pm – 2:20pm – Ross Hudgens

Beth’s Notes:

• In 2009, you just had to do some link building, on-page SEO and you’d be okay.
• “In reality, there’s a lot of different quivers now that we have to account for in addition to link building, but link building is still part of the equation.”
• “Link building still offers a lot of value where you match content to a web master that needs it. There’s more to it than just making a good piece of content and getting it published.”
• Content strategy is at the front of the content, at the very end, the link builder comes in to cross the chasm, to make sure you get all the links you should have.
• Tools: Email-Format.com – easil;y find contact formats.
• Tools: 1Password: Save time remembering outreach account passwords.
• Tools: Outdated content finder: Locate old content
• Tools: Bananatag – track opens for better follow-ups
• Tools: Linkclump – Easily bulk open URLs
• Tools: Auto Boomerang – automatically enabling follow-up, insta-select optimal Boomerang time.
• Ross thinks that two days is too soon to follow up, recommends a week
• “The more eyeballs you get on your content, the more links you get.”
• Get your team ot like non-owned Facebook posts to improve EdgeRank.
• Search “newsletter” within own Twitter network.
• Find a way to work in influencer work, then reach out
• Link drop client images in guest posts on sites that are non-related.
• The guest posts hosted on other websites are not votes of confidence for your site.
• If you comment on a blog site over time, you can use broken link building after a time to be able to get links from a blog post that has a links site.
• Nudge webmasters into preferred anchor text in outreach emails – and if they don’t get it exactly, even co-citation text helps.
• You can get a statistically significant sample for $150 from Google Consumer Surveys.
• S.U.C.C.E.S. Framework – simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, stories
• Small to medium-sized cities will take well-written content – they’re desperate for it.
• “if you have any kind of data floating around out there, do link reclamation” – you can use FreshWebExplorer to pick up on those things.
• Tools: Ahrefs – re-engage the authoritative domains you’ve lost links from
• Ross’s Q&A:
• What everyone should be spending more time on: Marketing research up front.
• Webmasters are getting oversaturated, and marketers move with them to evolve to using information that people want.

Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors
2:20pm – 3:00pm – Matt Peters

Beth’s Notes:

• “No music for the data scientist.”
• On-page signals, etc. + Search Quality Raters = Algorithm
• Here’s what they use: URL, On-page content, inbound links, anchor text (the word highlighted in web browser that you click on), social signals
• Which factors are the most important? Competing sources of information – what Google says is important, what SEOs say, what’s in the algorithm (somewhat unknown), characteristics of sites that rank well.
• Spearman Correlation measures whether increases or decreases in one factor affect increase or decrease in rank.
• “Correlation is not causation, but it sure is a hint” – Edward Tufte
• Highest Correlation – page authority, then # cblocks, IPs, root domains, external links, links to page
• Page Authority is a machine learning algorithm.
• “SEOs think links are important and this is consistent with what we find in the data.”
• One interesting thing – linking page relevance: How similar are the source and target of the link. Links from pages that are similar to your page is important
• Exact and partial match anchor text have nearly the same (high) correlation.
• Having an organic distribution of anchor text is important – a blend of anchor text that is going to occur naturally. This is related to the Penguin updates Google has done – if you have a choice about the anchor text, make sure it’s something that would occur naturally.
• Tools: Zoompf – how fast your page loads
• Document complete time had zero correlation. Response time has significant negative correlation.
• Just because site speed doesn’t have a significant impact on ranking doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Jonathan Colman has a slideshare that talks about how responsive your site is and how that affects your users.
• Keyword on the page ranks as high as some of the link-related factors.
• On-page Keyword correlations increase if you use a more sophisticated model.
• Title, metadescription, and H1 all have relatively high correlations – make sure your pages have a metadescription and that it’s related to the page itself
• Characters in HTML – number of images – probably correlation, but not causation.
• Structured data markup have almost no correlation… so far. Chances are that that is because only 36.9% of URLs are actually using it (and less for other kinds of structured data).
• Don’t ignore authorship – if implemented properly, Authorship can drive a higher clickthrough rate, even if it doesn’t have a higher ranking signal yet.
• Pages that are ranking are increasing in rank, even though the number of them is decreasing. Removal of low-quality exact-match domains is likely.
• Fresh and brand mentions of your site have a relatively high correlation for ranking.
• Other than search volumen, SEOs thought brand mentions were relatively unimportant
• Google +1s are the second highest correlation metric behind Page Authority.
• We know that Google is going to crawl Google+ – it’s possible that it just feeds directly into their pagerank algorithm and G+ links pass link juice
• Some words of caution – when you’re looking at different correlation studies, methodology matters, especially when you’re comparing one to another.
• Resources: SearchMetrics, Netmark.com – removal of navigation queries by former meant that their correlation was .29 for keyword in anchor text. Using rank-biserial correlation at the latter, they got exact-match domain as the highest correlation. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. To make data internally consistent, Moz used Spearman across the board.
• About 40% of the correlation is links – SEOs think they’re important and the data shows that that’s true.
• Page-level social metrics – SEOs don’t think it’s important, but data found some of highest levels three.
• Comparison 2011 to 2013 – one thing that decreased significantly is domain level keyword usage – exact-match domains.
• Future predictions: SEOs think perceived value to users, authorship, structured data, social signals, etc., will increase in importance. They expect paid links, exact match domains, influence of anchor text to decrease in importance.
• Sounds like Dr. Matt will be calculating no-match anchor text based on an audience member’s question – and a blog post coming tomorrow. Yay!

Strings to Things: Entities and SEO
3:00pm – 3:30pm – Matthew Brown

Beth’s Notes:

• “After Dr. Matt, I said you could refer to me as GED Matt”
• Tool: dbpedia.org –
• Use structured data to build awesome pages, and you solve the problem of getting hit by panda.
• Google did a really great job using semantic search to give us results.
• “Search is dramatically changing right before our eyes.” – ?Source?
• “This is our flagship product used by billions of people, and yet we’re saying it’s changing fundamentally.” – Jason Douglas – Google I/O 2013
• Desktop PCs sales are freefalling – everything is happening because of mobile. . 9% in 2009 – projecting by 2015, 30% of search.
• “it’s going to be a mobile search world and we have to get good at it.”
• “SEO won’t die as long as they’re user intent.”
• “All of these semantically related data sources… live in a structured database somewhere, linked together with URIs… We’ll still be building links and they’ll still be an important ranking factor going forward.”
• Good SEOs make small bets – keywords, links, social, structured data is a good bet right now.
• “we’re paying attention to the wrong people at google, yahoo and bing.”
• All of the connected things – how do we do what we do with dbpedia across the other 90% of the web.
• Resource: Google I/O 2013- From structured Data to the Knowledge Graph
• “Google is starting to determine user intent, and you can see it based on conversational search… This is going to be more of what we see happening in desktop search.”
• Massive increases in clickthrough rate after they launched semantic search at Bing
• Tools: Freebase – we can use it just like Google used it – the Freebase APIs Tapping into Google’s Knowledge Graphs
• No tilde search operator anymore in Google, but if you type in explicit.bing.net/entities/search?q=adidas – showing you what a search would look like with semantic results.
• Tools: Bottlenose
• Tools: Glimmer – what Yahoo’s doing with entity search.
• Tools: Fresh Web Explorer – look for your brand or company name.
• We’re looking for a balance of keyword signals and entity signals
• Tools: Relfinder
• Target the entity long tail –
• Mixing keyword research with an entity keyword model so that you’re semantically in the right place.
• Using related entities to find longtail keywords can help ranking – you may not be able to rank for “Things to do in Seattle” , but you probably will be able to rank for “beer guide Seattle.”
• Everything that are in the carousels are in semantic markup. I’d mark up content that is similar to what Google/Bing are already showing in entity searches.

The Mobile Content Mandate
3:50pm – 4:20pm – Karen McGrane

Beth’s Notes:

• “There is no reason anyone will need a computer in their home” … “There is no reason anyone would need to do that on mobile.”
• 1988- DEC is world’s second largest computer company. 1990- they post quarterly loss and start laying people off. In 1998- they are acquired by Compaq.
• “In inustry after industry, the new technologies that brought the big, established companies to their knees weren’t better or more advanced- they were actually worse. The new products were … in almost every way, inferior.”
• New products are disrupted from the low end. They’re cheaply made, don’t work as well. Even though they don’t compete on any criteria you’d think of as quality, they put technology into the hands of people who’ve never had before.
• Look at radios – transistor radios took over from furniture radios – the companies that made them are lost to history. First transistor radio? Sony.
• Same thing is happening today with personal computers. Christensen saw a fancy cellphone, and thought the iPhone would fail. What he didn’t see was a really cheap computer, really cheap Internet access.
• “The digital divide in this country is real. It’s easy for people in this room to forget.”
• More than half of black Americans and Hispanics have no broadband internet at home. Low-income Americans? 59% “The tools for escaping poverty are increasingly out of reach for people that are not online.”
• 88% of Americans without a high school diploma have no broadband access at home.
• Everybody has a phone. 88% of Americans have a mobile phone.
• “I guarantee that within a few years, it will go up to 95%”
• In just the last three years, the number of people who’ve used the internet on their phone has skyrocketed.
• The rise of the “Mobile Only User.”
• Of the 55% who use mobile phones to go online, 31% say they only or mostly use the internet on mobile.
• “Mobile was the final frontier in the access revolution. It has erased the digital divide. A mobile device is the internet for many people.” – Susannah Fox.
• “We treat these people like second-class citizens simply because they are accessing the Internet through a smaller screen.”
• “Before we rush in to figuring out what we want to do, we need a content strategy for mobile.”
• Three things to think of: 1. Know Your Workflow, 2. Write Better , 3.
• “People are using mobile as an excuse to create yet another silo.”
• You do not want to have a website where you have to make updates in two separate places. It’s not a strategy if you can’t maintain it.
• “There’s no such thing as how to write for mobile. There’s just good writing… Write simple clear short sentences, put the most important things up front, break up the text with headlines and bullet points.”
• “We felt it was a life-saving imperative to have all our content on mobile” – American Cancer Society
• “I think it would be disrespectful to not show mobile users all the information about cancer” – “all of your users deserve access to the same information.”
• If your content is well-written and well-structured, you don’t have to do a lot of hand-wringing about how to adjust it for mobile.
• We need to have clean, independent chunks of content…
• Responsive design won’t fix your content problem. “There’s no responsive magic wand that you can wave that automatically determines what the appropriate chunk of content is for each platform – you have to go in and figure it out yourself.”
• “It’s our responsibility to make sure that they get the same information… regardless of what platform, screen size, they decide to use.”
• “Here’s our chance to do mobile right, to clean up badly outdated content, badly outdated CMSs,… it’s our chance to do it right, right from the start.”
• “Many companies are waking up to the reality that their CMS does not support true multichannel publishing… and I find that data is usually a very compelling story. Everyone can see the skyrocketing growth in mobile.”
• “My whole schtick is to put a stake in the ground, and say that the first thing we need to achieve is content parity… Get content parity first, and then we can start thinking about different context…”

Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing
4:20pm – 4:50pm – Mackenzie Fogelson

Beth’s Notes:

• “We’re used to being on the pulse of what Google’s doing. The bigger part of our job is finding out how we can help our clients build their businesses. The focus needs to be on setting goals and create assets that Google can’t take away, helping them build better businesses, and you can do that by building community.”
• “The basic takeaway for KPIs is that they’re different for every company.”
• Do iterative testing, and execute it – stick to the strategy, and don’t get distracted by the shiny things unless it’s worthwhile
• This is the foundation for building your community – it’s no different from building a business. We’ve seen great results from it. Focus on goals, not on the tools – there will always be shiny things that might distract us – know what your goals are and whether those things will help you meet them.
• “We all have the blog post and infographic thing down… what we have to move forward to is the RCS stuff, the stuff that builds an experience for your customers and shows what your brand is about.”
• Bugaboo daytrips as an example – bridging on and offline experience, as well as having maps in the stores they were featuring.
• Failure Case Study #1:
• Hired to build community for an agency’s client – friend of a friend. Goals were set, team was set, we were basically just the hired on social media guys. What went wrong was that we didn’t take the time to set that pyramid up, we didn’t push back, didn’t break silos, didn’t effectively set expectations.
• “What we learned in all of that is that there’s a very delicate balance… in building a community that you can’t compromise on.”
• “Working with clients is just as much our choice as theirs, and we need to do our diligence there.”
• It’s our job to build our customers businesses, and if it’s not happening, we need to own that, and maybe it’s letting the client go, or maybe it’s … restructuring the marketing department based on our advice.
• “Where are you adding value and how are you making a difference in their business?”
• “Your job is not to deliver reports. Your job is to effect change.” -John Doherty
• “If we’re not making a change, we’re not doing our jobs. It’s not just SEO, content, social media, it’s businesses we’re building and that’s where the focus needs to be.”

The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers
4:50 – 5:20pm – Dharmesh Shah

Beth’s Notes:

• My normal existence consists of writing code and writing content
• “I’m passionate about domains… I’m from the startup world and have made 41 investments into startup companies… I think they underinvest in the domain name.”
• “It’s not just about keyword richness… what does matter is this thing called processing fluency – the simpler you can make something, the more sticky it is… alliteration works really well. Rhyme works really well.”
• “Buying a domain is like buying a house – you don’t do it very often, but when you do it, it really, really matters.”
• The wrong response is to send an email to the owner and ask if they’re willing to sell it. The first thing you need to assume – people that own domain names aren’t chumps, rookies. My default response is no.
• “If your objective is to buy this domain, your objective is to get them to respond… The way to get them to respond… is to make that initial contact and come up with a reasonable, credible offer.”
• “Make it easy for the seller and make it real… Once you have the initial contact… success is getting that domain name for less than the price you were willing to pay.”
• “Be authentic, talk about the company you represent… they have scarcity built in, so they have leverage. You have to balance out that leverage with some leverage of your own.”
• “I’m not the master of segues, so we’re going to talk about something else now.”
• “We’re constantly looking for these massively scalable things, and it’s really hard to find leverage… you can’t do the same things everyone is doing… you have to kind of find these new things.”
• Did the early Twitter movers have more followers? Yes, there’s an early mover advantage.
• Now LinkedIn supports asymmetric connections – followers, instead of reciprocal connections.
• “My theory now is that when new platforms start, they give visibility to early movers.”
• LinkedIn is a better body of followers. Rumor has it that they’re going to open up both blogging and asymmetric following – at least try it, get in and do something.
• “The market values transparency not just because they trust you, but when you open up content, it tends to work remarkably well… transparent and open content actually works.”
• “It can’t just be transparent, it has to be uncomfortably transparent.”
• “What’s more important than measuring what matters is doing what matters.”
• “It’s okay to just do what matters even if the numbers themselves don’t bear it out.”
• “Fifteen twitter followers don’t matter, but they do matter if they cause a client to do more things.”
• I can do this thing once, and if it gets a million x, it’s a success.
• “I just have to be better than the other crappy people in those search results….you need to strive for being amazing, not just somewhat better than the other people out there.”
• “We can make marketing a noble profession.”
• “The best habit I’ve learned is saying no… when you say yes, you’re essentially saying no to something else.”
• “It’s going to sound trite, but do a lot of it (with regards to writing code or content).”
• Go places others won’t. Do things others don’t.

Day Two Live Notes

Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy
9:00am – 9:30am – Phil Nottingham

Beth’s Notes:

• “Perhaps my background in video production could help me understand SEO in a certain way.”
• “With video, there are massive rewards if you can do it well.”
• You need more than $2000/month to do video well.
• “If you want to mimic Rand, it will only take $1100.”
• Resources online in Phil’s slide deck for learning.
• “Video is a media type. It’s like text, it’s like image… form has to follow function and the right approach to take is a strategic approach.”
• “A user who watches those videos is 1.9x more likely to convert… and that’s what winning looks like.”
• Include the transcriptions in HTML, not in javascript overlay…
• Tools: Speechpad
• Tools: Wistia
• A 14% month-over-month uptick (in conversions? pageviews?)… after implementing rich snippets for video
• Average level of referring traffic from YouTube is .72% – the best performing site was REI, who had a 4.37% clickthrough rate.
• If you’re putting your branded videos on Youtube, you could be losing 99% of your potential video.
• “YouTube is the best platform for brand awareness.”
• “Measure engagement, not views… what matters is engagement… you need to optimize to make sure people are sticking with it as long as they can…
• “It needs to be lean and it needs to be mean, and it needs to be quality.”
• “If you want quality, evergreen links from sites in your niche, you (can’t shoot for viral).”
• “When you embed a youtube or a vimeo video, you usually don’t link back to the owner of the video.”
• Use a secure, paid hosting system.
• Start with securely hosting, do outreach, then put the content on YouTube afterward. Click on Playback Locations, and click on Embedded locations – do outreach to them.
• The return from offering them a better experience (HD) video is huge.
• “Interviewing your customers is an amazing way to improve attention.”
• “The Youtube API will allow you to build a custom playlist and host it on your site, not on YouTube.”
• “Video is much, much better when you create content with that goal initially.”
• Video news releases are a great way to get the attention of editors, PR folks
• “YouTube advertising sucks… most companies put their TV advertising on YouTube and that sucks because YouTube is not TV… what I think people should be doing with YouTube advertising is advertise things that you’re not selling.”
• “Absolutely refine the goals and nail it…. do one piece of content every three months instead of three pieces of content every month.”
• “Think big, start small, ship it.”
• “Include transcriptions, get embeds… it’s not massively different than optimizing for a regular page, it’s just that this page is on YouTube.”

The Next Generation of Mozscape
9:30am – 9:45am – Phil Smith

Beth’s Notes:

• “Mozscape is directly available as an API… you probably know it as Open Site Explorer… it’s a search engine for backlinks.”
• “We began with hundreds of terabytes of raw crawler information, and we distilled it down to a 15 terabyte artifact…”
• “A lot of really smart people have iterated on this thing for a long time… and yet the demand for a bigger, faster web index remains… our work is never over.”
• “It’s not going to magically get better… we need a key insight.”
• “Every time we go around this loop and make a new index, it takes a couple of weeks… our existing big data team has done an awesome job getting these out as fast as possible… but still…every time we turn this loop over, we throw out these answers from the last round.”
• “Depending on how you count, maybe a lot less than half of the internet changes… but if we only knew which half stayed the same, we could hang on to it and get a 2x improvement right there.”
• “The Internet is an organic phenomenon, and it follows power distribution… the majority of links only go to a handful of pages… the majority of updates only go to a handful of sites.”
• “If everything is working well, the time it takes from the crawler arriving to everything being indexed… should be less than a day, maybe 15 minutes or so.”
• “Speed, latency, reliability… is a critical concern. Things always have to work…”
• “Did dinosaurs rampage the data center? It still has to work.”
• “It’s hard to add new things to messy code… and we like new things!”
• “Hbase has this versioning feature that turns it into a frigging Tardis.”
• “Using this meerkat system, maybe we can get drill-downs for everything, everywhere. That would be frigging great.”
• “We’re hoping to go from weeks right now to a couple of days, and I hope we’ll be able to push this to hour scale eventually.”
• “With enough processing power and enough fresh data, not only can you see what’s happening now, you can look into the future.”
• Markov Model – predicts tomorrow’s traffic.
• “We’re hacking the Matrix here!! … I’m personally really excited about that.”
• “If you can solve these message-passing type things, it’s going to pass pretty nicely onto this … model.”

How to Moz Lingo: Cross-Team Communication When Crisis Hits
9:45am – 10:00am – Carin Overturf

Beth’s Notes:

• “One of the biggest things I’ve learned is keeping good communication across teams is really important… and really hard.”
• “I think we all try to practice good etiquette, especially when it comes to email… use your subject line to set expectations.”
• “Keep your emails on topic as much as possible…. My inbox is like my to-do list. If I get an email with five unrelated topics, I put it on my procrastination list.”
• “Be aware of your tone. I love sarcasm, but it doesn’t always translate well in electronic communications.”
• “Everyone makes mistakes… pointing fingers and placing blame isn’t going to get you to the solution any faster.”
• “Since we don’t have that culture of blame… our engineers could jump on it, and Bryce could get up a blog post about it.”
• “Have a dedicated email distribution… as soon as you know what team is involved, loop them in right away.”
• “Making sure that everyone has a clear definition of what an emergency is… for us, five emails or tweets in 24 hours about the same issue… if engineers see operational emails, they send emails to the community help team…”
• “Hold that emergency definition up across all times. That way anytime anyone on any team sees these emails come through, they know to prioritize them.”
• “You want to make sure it’s really an emergency if you’re going to wake an engineer up at 8 or 9 a.m.”
• “Make sure that you put your conclusion first – the first thing someone should see is the most important piece of information.. If you can see that, you’re going to know to prioritize.”
• “Make sure that it’s really easy to skim these emails… people don’t have to read them word for word.”
• “If you’re going to write any sort of emergency email, make sure your engineers know how to reproduce the problem. They need a step-by-step way to reproduce that problem in real-time to be able to investigate.”
• “You want to provide a really open communication internally with your teams, and externally with your customers… bad news is better than no news or overly optimistic news.”
• “Empathy is really important, both to your customers and to your team.”
• “Post-mortems unfortunately can be used to cover your butt… but they can also be used as a great learning tool… let them know what you’re going to do to make sure it never happens again.”
• “Post-mortems should be actionable and educational… try to use ‘we’ as much as possible. As a manager, you want to try to accept the blame as much as possible, but be sure to call out everyone that jumped in and helped out with a situation.”
• “Practice communication with your customers during the good times and it’s going to be a lot easier and more natural when times get tough.”

Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists
10:00am – 10:15am – Aaron Wheeler

Beth’s Notes:

• “I think that customer service and inbound marketing are connected in a way we don’t often think about.”
• “Customer service is establishing that connection making them feeling good, but marketing comes in when you make it public.”
• “When you’re referred to a company, you trust it a lot more.”
• “Customers spend more if they can rely on customer service.”
• “On a broad level, I think all of you can effect big changes for your customers right now.”
• “People get value out of help content… build a help content strategy alongside your normal content strategy.”
• “Go to your customer service team and ask what the top 10 questions are about product/service X?… Empower your customer service team to write it themselves.”
• “Customers can answer each others’ questions, and those answers are so much more credible than marketing copy.”
• Modcloth and Mint.com brought up as an example of trustworthy customer feedback
• “Evaluate your performance with help content… see if your videos are getting watched and if not, cut them down…”
• “Keep in mind that customers are sharing not for you, but for themselves.”
• “On your customer service emails, you have signatures, if you have that, include a pre-generated tweet – make it really easy.”
• “There’s a lot of importance in venting in being able to speak to a specific problem.”

Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play
10:15am – 10:30am – Miranda Rensch

Beth’s Notes:

• “Agile is a process that helps you adapt over time and remember the big picture reasons you’re doing what you’re doing.”
• “Focus on the individuals communicating with each other, instead of focusing on documenting everything…. it’s a strategy for getting things done where you commit to doing small increments…”
• Tools: Trello template at end of presentation
• “Having personal mission statements can be a fun way to remember why you’re spending time on the things you’re spending time on.”
• “If you’re focusing on one thing, find two or three metrics that you’re going to measure for… Be sure to set a date to measure.”
• “If you have a ton of ideas, you create this thing called a backlog, which is just your spectrum of ideas for that.”
• “Don’t forget to celebrate your successes. It can be really motivating to see your done pile.”
• Resources: bit.ly/agiletrelloboard, bit.ly/workplayagile

Let’s Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty
10:50am – 11:20am – Joanna Lord

Beth’s Notes:

• “Loyalty is when brands create an intimate emotional connection that you simply can’t do without. Ever.” – Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi
• “When you think of the last decade and how much effort we put into acquisition, and then you think that 20% of them will represent 80% of our revenue, it should stop us and point out how important it is to give (customer loyalty) time.”
• “Our loyalty is going to be built 1:1 over many times… but we don’t live there anymore. We’re now one-to-many and we’re now trying to reach the masses.”
• “For a conversation to happen between a brand and a customer, there’s a hell of a lot of noise… we have to find a way around it, but we have to find a way to use it… it’s a challenge… but not even the biggest problem.”
• “Companies will not succeed without loyalty.”
• “Building a tribe, a loyal audience… is a requirement, it’s the new standard.”
• You started out having what they needed, then you had to create a unique value proposition, and then everyone else caught up. “Everyone offered something great in a unique and beautiful way, and that’s how we got here.”
• “Everything you talk about and focus on being about your customer is key.”
• “Every one of us, we should roll into work in the morning and ask how we can make the customer’s experience better.”
• “Marketers are intentional beings… we’re good at this.”
• “The momentum around premium loyalty customers is beautiful… we just need to fuel it.”
• “Give them money, time, devs… track them, optimize them, improve them. That is the change when it comes to telling our brand story.”
• “I think we’re really good at finding our customers… we should be using the platforms to get feedback.”
• “She told us for three minutes transparently that they lied to us… but that kind of transparently is balls-to-the-wall very exciting.”
• “There should be a budget and conversations and quarterly planning for (brand loyalty marketing).”
• “I think for a long time it was okay to go quiet and sometimes it’s the right thing to say it’s okay to go dark today, but I think it’s important to be human before being a brand.”
• “You can’t be in all the places and doing all the things, but you can be t-shaped… you can be deeply rooted in one medium or one channel…”
• “Brand loyalty takes a lot of touches.”
• “It will be hard to build brand loyalty if you only exist on one device.”
• “You need to put your customers in front of/next to your logos…”
• “They’ve handed over the keys to their prime real estate, and that’s insane… between the customer and the brand there’s nothing there.”
• Reciprocal loyalty – customer loyal to the brand/product & brand loyal to the customer.
• “(The customer) should be the start of the conversation, not the end of the year thank-you campaign.”
• Brand affinity is not easy to attribute, but it will be the case one year from today.
• “We will have this at our fingertips in a year – might as well get familiar with these KPIs now.”
• “It’s the most significant shift in the ecosystem that we have seen as marketers.”
• “Back in the day… customer loyalty was built offline. Word of mouth would happen, but then it would stop… now it’s happening at scale, we get to tell great stories, communicate with people across platforms, globally, and it’s so fun.”
• “We need to get personal with our customers and the people that keep us in business… I think that’s what we should have been doing all along… I think we’re back to it and it’s full-circle.”
• “I don’t think any of us ever succeed because we have a great logo or brand identity… but I would take the whole company and ask them what is the bigger story of your brand and start breaking that up and seeding it, making a little bit wider and more holistic.”

Ecommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale
11:20am – 11:50am – Adam Audette

Beth’s Notes:

• “SEO was a way to game the search engines and get free checks. Optimize the search engines and cash the checks.”
• “The thing is, that is all crap.”
• “It used to work, but then things changed. Brands got online and got excited about SEO… the Internet started hating crap SEO because crap SEO was spoiling the Internet for everybody…. and Google said ‘well, we better do something about this because our users are kind of unhappy.’”
• “Brands want sustainability and they want efficient marketing channels.”
• “If we think about the old mindsets, back then it was about chasing algorithms… instead of chasing the algorithms, we want to chase the people… and thinking about the users. Search engines are a means to an end.”
• “Even if they have lower volume, you may want to go for keywords that are more relevant and more closely matched.”
• “It’s about connecting with people and delivering that wow factor.”
• It was all about blowing it out in the indexes… today less is more. All we want in the index are the pages that are delivering value, and anything that isn’t, we don’t want in the index.
• “Rankings are an incidental and sometimes noisy, lousy metric.”
• “We as an industry need to do a lot better job of standing behind our work… putting real numbers to the work we’re doing.”
• “Keywords only get you about halfway there. Who’s using the keywords are who we really care about.”
• “We should still put time into how we think about schema and rich snippets.”
• “Technical SEO is more valuable and more important, not less… we need to be very savvy when it comes to technical stuff.”
• “When we think about how we prioritize our recommendations… it’s important that we understand what is going to have the most impact and what is going to be the most reliable.”
• “When we look at big sites, there’s low-hanging fruit always, and that’s high dependability.”
• “There’s money in those hills, go get it.”
• Tablets now are outpacing smartphones to visit ecommerce sites, a
• “We’ve got to be on every single device… we need to be device-agnostic, and we need to be thinking about responsive design. If you do it right, you get faster across every device.”
• “I need to know how to talk to responsive design in an educated way so we can help our clients do it.”
• “Your money pages get skipped because you have finite crawl resources.”
• “You shouldn’t fix every server error ever, but you should fix them when they spike.”
• Tools: ScreamingFrog
• “Our canonical crawl paths… you need to have a really consistent experience from the homepage down.”
• “Pagination is always an issue… we haven’t had a lot of adoption with viewalls but rel prev next works well.”
• “We see a lot of project variations… I like REI’s approach where the URL doesn’t changed based on the color. Zappos have color-specific URLs, but they reference back a non-color version in the canonical.”
• “Any overhead facets that aren’t important to search, you can append to the end with a parameter and rel canonical back to the non-appended version.”
• “Best way to handle expired products is to create a product not here page, and link back to tightly related products.”
• “We should be more open to using 404s when we aren’t constantly trying to scrape link equity.”
• “PLAs are huge and they’re taking a ton of clickshare, not only from PPC, but also from organic search.”
• “we’re seeing a plummeting of traffic from Google Image Search because of (the changes Google has made).”
• “You need to know the realities of this and set expectations with your team.”
• Facebook sends 30x more traffic than Google+… social sites are less than 2% of all referring traffic (for their clients).
• “Number of (G+) followers is pure wallet share.”
• “We don’t see many people utilizing authorship… and you can see how that stands out.”

Building Your Business: Relationship and Other Critical
1:20pm – 1:50pm – Brittan Bright

Beth’s Notes:

• “If (success) was easy, Avinash wouldn’t have had much to talk about yesterday.”
• “The skills that I learned in really challenging roles, like being a waitress… what I got good at was understanding that people wanted to have an experience when they go out to eat.”
• “Trying to learn how big machines work without people that wanted to help you very much…”
• “Cold calling – making 100 phone calls in a day to people who don’t want to talk to you… you learn what to do when people want to talk to you again.”
• “If you would have asked me what it is that I’m good at, I really didn’t think I was good at anything…what I told them I was good at was chit-chat & bullshit… the key is to learn how to communicate”
• “We like to pretend like these skills are on the outskirts… but they’re central to everything.”
• “If you’re a developer, there are languages you need to code in… and it’s comforting when you know you need to have those skills… hardcore skills can build a house, but it takes a softer touch to make a house a home.”
• “Let’s be really clear. Soft skills do not make you soft.”
• “More words does not mean more smarter.”
• “The reality is even amongst your people, people are different. They come to the table with different backgrounds, abilities, comfort zones. Don’t forget that.”
• “What typically stands in our way when we have internal obstacles with our boss are miscommunication, fear, avoidance, resentment… feelings often get in our way more…”
• “Usually visualization techniques can help inspire empathy… sometimes it’s hard for us to get up out of a situation that gives us a bowling ball in the pit of our stomach…”
• “Let’s say there’s someone on your team you can’t work with… how do you talk to your boss about that? Sometimes it helps to imagine your boss as a person…”
• “Why did she choose what to put on her desktop background? How do people approach making a space their own? What’s on your desk? Why is it there? How do you want to feel when you’re sitting down to work?”
• “First remember that you’re talking to another human being… remember what are the wants and needs of someone.”
• “Hearing with our eyes sometimes, different people communicate in different ways?”
• “How does your boss usually choose to give you a message?”
• “It’s important for me to understand my eyes and my ears and understanding what they’re saying… so I know how to adjust what I’m saying. I’m direct via email… that can seem cold or harsh, I’d much rather look in the eye of the person I’m talking to.”
• “If people like to see other peoples’ faces, try Skyping, try Google Hangouts.”
• “Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true – Charles Dickens”
• “It’s not an IQ contest… if your ideas aren’t heard, it doesn’t matter… social and emotional intelligence are really important… understanding how to elicit an emotion in another person is a really important skill.”
• “Try to adjust for the kind of intelligence the other person has.”
• “Ask someone that you trust and be open to feedback. Observe things, pay attention.”
• “It’s beautiful when people are self-aware and not overly sensitive… and know what they can bring to the table to complement what you already have.”
• “What helps facing the truth is preparation… if you have internal obstacles, find a solution. Figure out all of the details, poke all the holes… and know all of the things before you go in to talk to your boss about it.”
• “Confidence in yourself is what will help other people believe in you. If you can’t sell yourself, can’t communicate, you will not be nearly as successful as all of you hope to be.”
• “Sales skills help you with every single aspect of life… if you believe in something, first of all, you should believe in yourself… get out of your own way… become more self-aware… do what you need to do to be the most confident version of you that you can be.”

Win Through Optimization and Testing
1:50pm – 2:20pm – Kyle Rush

Beth’s Notes:

• “We exceeded expectations, none of us thought we could do it.”
• One-click donations and SMS donations were both firsts for political campaigns
• “We always had a test running, and it was always intense, the amount of traffic we had.”
• Tools: Silverback – records eyesite camera and computer at the same time
• “If you’re not gathering data, then you’re kind of flying blind.”
• “The email signup, we don’t really talk about… Email was super-important, and we spent a lot of time optimizing email acquisitions.”
• “You want to observe your users using your product, otherwise you’re not going to know how they’re using it, because you are not your user.”
• “The first step for us in experimentation was to identify our goals at a micro and a macro level.”
• “You should just measure everything!”
• “How many errors do you get if someone mistypes their email address?”
• “We found out early on that QuickDonate users were 4x more likely to make a donation in the future… some of the variations that we ran affected the followup page.”
• “The second step is to develop hypotheses – it’s just the scientific process that we all learned in grade school… it’s helpful in making sure you stay focused.”
• “One of ours was that less copy was better than more copy for conversions, so we tested that … everywhere on the site.”
• “Number three is to create experiments… and test it multiple times and create multiple experiments to test your hypotheses.”
• “Fourth is to prioritize with ROI… we ran an experiment where we had a picture of the president behind a donate screen as a control… we saw a 17% increase in conversion with an inspirational quote added.”
• “Our finance people expected a 3% lift for paying by check… but it would take a long time to implement.”
• “Test your ideas, and lastly, record your results. We ran 500 tests and we couldn’t always remember the result. We kept a Google doc that recorded the results, and without that we couldn’t have functioned…”
• “Copy is in my experience, by far, the highest ROI you can experiment with.”
• “By making the copy more direct, we got a 21% increase on conversions. Very little development effort, but a huge change in conversions.”
• “It’s very easy to switch images out…  putting a more situational image in there had a 19% change in conversion rate.”
• “Performance is a little bit techy, but page load affects conversion rate… even 100 milliseconds could drop the conversion rate by 1%… we wanted to make our pages load as fast as possible.”
• “We on average saw 5-7 page load time, which is horrendous when you’re processing (so many donations)… there were a lot of things we needed to change, so we started from scratch and built a new platform.”
• “We put one payment processor on the west coast, and another on the east coast…. if the west coast went down… all that traffic got sent to the (other) coast. There was never a downtime for accepting donations.”
• Tools: WebPageTest
• “An 80% faster time-to-paint caused a 14% increase in conversions… it’s not as big as the other changes… but it was $32 million worth.”
• “Gradual incline caused a 5% conversion lift, but we’d already picked all the low-hanging fruit, so that was a pretty big win for us.”
• “You don’t have to make this complicated… my motto is start simple and move up.”
• “If you have traffic coming to your site, and you’re not running a test, that’s wasted time right there.”
• “Don’t be afraid to fail – I can’t stress this enough. Only 20% of our experiments increased the conversion rate…. you can’t let that get you down.”
• “Placing the upsell on the conversion page resulted in a 44% decrease in conversions. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t testin enough. You’re not going to ave 100% success in your tests… you can’t gather enough data.”
• “We found that 80% of the tests just used right arrow, the left arrow just clutters the UI, and we used that to (change things) down the road.”
• “We found out that students and retired people didn’t know what to put in there because they’re not employed… we changed copy, and that reduced the error rate by 63%, and we wouldn’t have known to do that if we hadn’t done user testing.”

How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect the Customer Experience
2:20pm – 2:50pm – Nathalie Nahai

Beth’s Notes:

• “In all the research I did, I found there are three pillars that you need to succeed online – know who you’re targeting, then once you’ve researched your audience, you need to be able to communicate with them persuasively… and then you need to use psychology to sell with integrity.”
• “There is so much incredible research that’s being done that looks at aspects of our online behavior.”
• “To distill it down, it’s about the individual and the cultural context of your customers.”
• “Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes one group of people from another.”
• “In warmer cultures, peoples are a lot more expressive, which may not be acceptable in other countries.”
• “The symbols that we use… images of national symbols are not okay in the U.K.”
• Hofstede’s Six Dimensions
• “Whether you expect and accept unequal power distribution in your society?”
• “Power distance is inculcated in the ‘American Dream.’”
• “Emphasize order in your website if you’re going for a high power-distance culture… authority figures are also useful.”
• “If you’re looking at a low power-distance culture, it’s almost the opposite. Allow your users to … explore, a rabbit-hole to fall down.”
• High UAI – clear navigation, predictable & assuring imagery
• Best – 3-5 choices with one in the middle, definitely under 7, because then you avoid choice paralysis.
• Low UAI – open dialogue, don’t be overly emotionally expressive, allow users to take greater risks, complexity & wider choice of actions, navigation can be layered.
• “English is the only language in the world that capitalizes the letter I. No other language does that.”
• Highly individualistic – personal achievment (gamification!), novelty, competition, controversial language if appropriate, material symbols of success.
• Highly collectivist – engage community, respect traditions, careful use of imagery (especially women), experience of age, privacy and security of personal information
• “Individualistic cultures tend to express greater gender differences than other cultures.”
• “Men and women have very different neurological responses to stimuli…”
• “Bear in mind these are all generalizations… men tend to like review sites from the age of 7 onward.”
• “Women are the heaviest users of email, social sites & IM”
• “Risk is one of the biggest barriers to buying things online. Men tend to be less concerned about privacy, and more likely to blog with their real name.”
• “Women are still skeptical of online information, and are much more likely to blog anonymously.”
• “There is an element of sexual harassment that happens online, and we have to be aware of it.”
• Design for men – flashy interactive and animated, goal-oriented/gamified, many sub-levels
• Design for women – attracted to colors, clean/uncluttered, prefer fewer subpage levels.
• “Whatever you are doing… you have to apply scientific rigor to your design and decision-making processes.”
• “If you are going for a global audience, you have to research your audience, even if it’s just your own culture.”
• “Researching, testing and analyzing will fast-track you on your quest to suceeed online.”
• http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html

Breaking Up with Your Keyword-Based KPIs
2:50pm – 3:20pm – Annie Cushing

Beth’s Notes:

• October 18, 2011, Google basically declared war on keyword data.
• “Google said for the sake of privacy… if you’re logged in to any Google property, if you go to Google.com, you’re going to be routed to a secure site… and you’ll be showed up as (not provided).”
• Resources: ClickConsult – 40% on average (not provided) – mine is running between 60 and 70% (not provided)
• “You have to adapt and move on…”
• “July of last year, Mozilla announced that Firefox was also going to move to encrypted search… I’m not a big conspiracy theorist… however, they posited this… and if you click on an ad, screw your privacy… when I saw this, I was like ‘Come on, we did this stuff in middle school.’ … How much you want to bet Google announcing that Chrome is following Mozilla’s example and moving to encrypted search?”
• “In February of this year, Google announced that Chrome would be moving to encrypted search, and that’s 35% of worldwide users.”
• “Between Chrome and Firefox users, that’s about 52% of users worldwide, who are not passing on keyword data.”
• “What happens is if you go to google.com, it redirects to the secure site, and if you see that, you can know your keyword data is not going to pass through to the site.”
• “Google’s new local carousel… I love anything colorful, bright… but I wanted to take a peek under the hood. I put ‘italian restaurants’ into Google, and this whole carousel showed up… when I clicked on it – the keyword data does not go through – Google updates the query to “Brio Tuscan Grille Cherry Hill.” The same thing is happening with images. The query that showed up was ‘Brio Tuscan Grille Cherry Hill.’”
• “If you’re Brio’s web master, you just took on a whole additional bunch of suck in your keyword report. Mark June 18 in your annotations”
• “You should be marking all of these things that chip away at your keyword data in your annotations.”
• “Say goodbye to keyword trending data from analytics, separating branded and non-branded traffic.
• “You have a small subset of something whose characteristics represent the entire population. If you take out the Chrome, Firefox and logged-in users, who is left? Us and Internet Explorer users. People who use opera, if that’s even a thing. Artists using Safari… that’s not a representative sample.”
• “It was amazing what I was able to do with it, but it’s a thing of the past. Move on.”
• “Any metric you’re isolating per keyword is junk data it’s … a fool’s errand. I’m not calling you a fool, just your errand.”
• Look for keyword cannibalization or conversion distress.
• “Don’t take the individual numbers to the bank, but comparisons… you can take that to the bank.”
• Filter under search – isolate traffic from web, URLs with 10+ impressions/clicks
• “You have to know how to work pivot tables in order to get any kind of insight.. it’s one of the two most critical skills you have to know as a marketer.”
• “You have to get in front of this… if you’re an agency, you need to have this discussion with your clients… before the inevitable day where your client comes to you saying they’re down… when you have an angry hippo and they’re coming after you, that’s not the time to say ‘oh no, wait, it’s (not provided) and firefox and chrome… it’s too late.”
• “It’s like when your teenager comes home and says ‘Mom, Dad, I have some news that’s going to wreck your day.’ It’s too late!!”
• “Don’t waste my time and money with things I don’t care about… am I going to have to go into my kids college savings to pay for you? Stop talking about not provided and keyword data, start retraining your boss, your clients, and you’ll thank you.”
• “Google Webmaster Tools is alrady highly suspect… if you’re doing a comparative analysis get slutty with it… but it’d be like saying ‘God told us that these keywords…’ It’s more junk in the trunk, even with rich snippets… they’re operating on the assumption that if you’re ranked #1, you’ll get x percentage of the clicks, and you can be ranked 3 and have rich snippets, and you can’t build an algorithm for that.”
• “As a marketer, you’re accountable for whatever data you provide to the client.”
• “If your landing page is fairly well-optimized… there’s no data about landing pages being withheld… you can safely extrapolate that out and say ‘this landing page is getting this much traffic, producing this much revenue, and here are the keywords that are driving traffic to it.’”

End-to-End Local Optimization
3:40pm – 4:10pm – David Mihm

Beth’s Notes:

• “Basically about one in three searches has local intent – people looking for a local business, maps, weather news, etc.”
• “Mobile is exploding… yelp and some of the other sites in the local space report even higher than 30% searches.”
• “Local is mobile, for Google.”
• Resources: Whiteboard Friday Local Search Evolution
• Place page signals, citation signals and review signals make up nearly 50% of the algorithm.
• “Google seems to be using largely the same algorithm on desktop as they do on mobile, but I expect that to change as Google takes in mobile signals over the next few years.”
• “To establish the connection between location and brand, that’s Google Places for Brand…”
• “They go for these really fancy store locations that try to sniff, or use a zip code… you’re kind of hosed when it comes to local search. Stick to something simpler.”
• “The key is unique page for each store location.”
• “You need to get a three-way connection between website, location and brand.”
• “Google is now showing a lot of localized organic results, and so you really need to focus a lot more heavily on local content.”
• “Every manager or store owner should be able to write their own 200 character description for their location.”
• “Have your managers answer the top 10 most asked questions in store to get personalized unique local content on the site.”
• “I’d encourage you guys to set up a feed to pull in photos from Facebook, integrate it into your CMS.”
• “If you’re a loyalty-driven business, you might ask your customers to come in for interviews.”
• “Yelp has a very aggressive review filters, but it filters out a lot of less tech-savvy customer reviews… you can repurpose filtered reviews on your own web site.”
• Tools: Socrata, data.gov, propublica
• “If you do want low-hanging fruit, one technique is to create discount programs with local university/colleges.”
• “Citation is a mention of your brand associated with a location.”
• Aggregators – acxiom, infogroup, factual
• Infogroup has most direct line into Google’s business index. Neustar localeze sends data to both apple maps and facebook. Acxiom is still listed – they send data to yelp and apple maps. Factual especially for international markets has a strong dataset – they feed yelp, foursquare, tripadvisor
• “Hosting events at your business… a lot of times the people doing those events will do the marketing for you.”
• “Yelp has an elite designation for people who leave a lot of reviews… you want to develop real relationships with these people.”
• “The folks who are doing really well despite being out in the suburbs, that is who you want to pay attention to… do that competitive analysis, and … create a baseline of quanity, and then you can focus on the creation of quality, and make sure those authority figures are having a good experience in your store, because what they say is going to be important … for conversion”

Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out
4:10pm – 4:40pm – Dana DiTomaso

Beth’s Notes:

• “Canada kind of gets the short end of the stick when it comes to citations… we don’t have the local carousel and probably will never get it…”
• “Small businesses have the smallest budgets in the world, and they think they should get the same stuff as REI, and you explain to them that they have a whole team, and you expect me and my $1000 to make the same thing happen. I love working with small businesses… because I like seeing the things you do for them have a massive impact.”
• “Here’s my tiny little client, and the great big brand… we focus on things that take advantage of the fact that they are that small business, that they have that personality.”
• “At Kickpoint, sometimes we get to go outside and it’s very exciting.”
• “Small businesses can show their heart much more easily than a giant brand can.”
• “As a small business owner, they are always terrified of not making that money, and they are always looking for more business.”
• “The question is no longer how do i come up, but how do I stand out? How do I make myself more awesome than the competition?”
• “If you have an advertising club in your city, you should go, and join, and listen to them, because they say really interesting things … but they don’t understand how to translate that to the Internet.”
• “We think within 10 years, every single ad agency is going to have a real department that does this right, and you have to get this right, because they’ve been doing it for years.”
• “Great advertising pisses people off… it makes you feel something.”
• “Start eavesdropping… I think it makes you understand what makes people tick.”
• “There’s a lot of psychopaths in advertising.”
• “When you start to understand the conversation, you give this little tiny business a massive voice that the big brand can’t replicate… make your brand interesting, make it stand for something, make people love you.”
• “Find out about the people who are interested in you.”
• “You know someone’s out there right now trying to figure out if they can get that terrible tattoo off their butt before they give birth.”
• “Stop thinking about the number of fans you have… you are preaching to the choir if you’re only talking to your fans on social.”
• “Referral business is the best… why do we do a shitty job of getting them via the web?”
• “If I see an increase in branded traffic, that means referrals are working… I want to see that word of mouth getting out there.”
• “How do you create this perpetual motion referral machine? You have to create the environment for unexpected social interactions.”
• “Blitz has created an army out of every person who has ever walked into your gym… people love them as a result of this.”
• “How do you make someone see you and have a feeling… how do you tell a story in 70 characters – that’s an AdWords ad?”
• “Why not think ahead, and think… nine months from now… offer a class for new moms to come in and work out with their babies.”
• “If you go through these steps with these clients, you should hopefully win the local battle.”

Cater to Your Audience via UX
4:40pm – 5:10pm – Allison Urban

Beth’s Notes:

• “If we want to build the kind of businesses that last… we need to think about the engine of our growth – and that’s our customers. If we think of them as people we want to delight, rather than leads or conversions, it changes everything.”
• “It shows when we don’t think about the user experience.”
• “User experience is a key differentiator… because customer happiness is a leading indicator of the future health of any business.”
• “Consider the needs of the people using our product – we all need to feel safe… we all need to feel a sense of connection… “
• “The needs we have in our real lives are the same as the needs we have in our digital lives.”
• “We need things to be meaningful – we spend a tremendous amount of time with technology, and we need to feel that that time is well-spent.”
• “Usability is making things as easy to understand and usable as possible.”
• “What’s convenient and usable to one person might actually be pushy to another. Think about different scenarios and design for them whenever you can.”
• “What makes us want to buy them is what makes them usable – it’s aesthetics, gamification, personality (for Pinch, Epic Win, and Carrot, respectively?)”
• “Pleasure doesn’t have to be at the forefront of your app. You can incorporate just a little bit of joy pleasure and surprise, and that can work surprisingly well.”
• “When you send your campaign, people are usually relieved… success pages are a great place to do something fun, because they’re outside of the task workflow.”
• “When we create emotionally engaging experiences, people stop thinking of our products as just dumb interfaces, and start thinking of them as people they want to interact with, and that’s really powerful.”
• “We all want to feel like we’re spending our time well… we want to be appreciated. While we can’t necessarily meet them, there are small ways we can try to make our product more meaningful.”
• “When we think about user experience, we need to think about delighting customers, and not necessarily the immediate return on investment… you need to think long-term. If we focus on profit instead of the user experience, they’d see right through us.”
• “People recognize others with mailchimp shirts as having the same values, being part of the same strange tribe.”
• “To make your product meaningful, celebrate milestones… reward achievements… say thank you. That personal bit of attention can really make a difference between you and your competitors.”
• “People want to feel connected to you and what you do, because of course, it means something to them.”
• “It’s possible to grow your business and be a positive force in your customer’s needs. You can do that by catering to your audience with user experience.”
• “You don’t have to be silly, you just want to be yourself, and communicate like you’re talking to a friend instead of with corporate speak. When you write something, say it out loud.”

Living in the Future of User Behavior
5:10pm – 5:40pm – Will Critchlow

Beth’s Notes:

• “I’m really excited about the future… I’m trying to pick out the trends that will be important to us as marketers as they become more widespread.”
• “We’ve always marketed to humans and robots…”
• “We control our interaction with the Internet more now in any ways… we timeshift our internet content.
• Tools: Instapaper, Pocket
• “We’re following people more than ever before. We’re getting stuff curated for us by people that we trust. We want people we trust to tell us what to read…”
• “The main reason people like brands on Facebook is because they actually like that brand, but we don’t check out their tweets, etc.”
• “We all buy toilet cleaner but none of us wants to do any kind of social media competition.”
• “Nothing has really come along to replace RSS.”
• “I basically watch for the stuff everyone is sharing, and that’s a ridiculous way to consume news.”
• “When something gets shared like crazy, there’s no telling what site it’s going to be on – I’m a new visitor to far more sites than I used to be.”
• “Audience fragmentation is a huge power for anyone who can own that audience… what we need to be doing is building audiences for people, because they’ve lost the power to do that…”
• “We need to be aiming not to appear out of the blue, but that they come seeking us repeatedly.”
• “Technology works for us, our devices work for us.”
• 77% of mobile searches are done in a location where a PC is likely to be available… because they’re convenient.
• “Devices and channels are blurry. It’s not clear whether I’m mobile or not – does it matter?”
• Chrome Sync will be targeted across platforms ?
• “It’s making the actual physical device irrelevant. If I get another physical device, I sign in to my google account, sign in and reconnect everything.”
• Unified alerts are going to be important.
• “It used to be really annoying that you’d get the same notification on every device… our devices will work for us more because the technology is designed for human.”
• “You need to play nice with this tech… you should let people timeshift your stuff.”
• Tools: Featherlight
• “Your titles are going to become tweets in a lot of cases.”
• “Although I’m in more control of how I consume media than ever before… there’s a whole bunch of things I’m really not in control of.”
• “The robots are starting to understand, not just index… this is not just clever keyword stuff.”
• “Context is being added to the queries we do… we should be thinking in two parts – explicit query – what we type in; and implicit query – what the context is.”
• “We start trusting the system to know so much about us that the queries change.”
• “The search query I did was not breakfast places in Boston, it was just breakfast… they work!”
• “The only rational thing that ties it all together, Google is trying to make everything less about keywords… in the future you won’t need to do a query, we’ll just hand stuff to you – Sergey Brin, ten years ago.”
• “The robots have decided I’m not paying attention, and decided I don’t need to see it anyway.”
• “You can make these robots angry in all sorts of ways… the future of this is less about penalty, but more about invisibility… your audience won’t find you because the robots will have decided you should be invisible.”
• “I don’t think AuthorRank is a thing yet, but I think it’s going to be.”
• “Links continue to be a powerful factor… when Matt Cutts talks, you’re going to treat it with a huge grain of salt, but things that look like links are going to be around for a long time.”
• “Google is making huge progress by spreading fear…”
• “Fundamentally, the big trend that I think we need to do to make ourselves successful… is that we need to realize that we’re not gaming and tweaking little factors… but we need to be helping our businesses earn attention and gain real audiences. The thing we lost was the thing where the audience was sitting waiting for us… “
• “They try to claim we don’t need ranking, but I think we need it to debug stuff… we need broader, more holistic KPIs.”
• “I think… the push notifications are just things I didn’t used to have… and those are searches I wouldn’t have performed. Google is never going to … to position ourselves, the answer is going to be building brand, and building all of the things we’ve been hearing about – getting people to love you. If you are big enough or loved enough or so much the right answer, that’s the position that dominates.”
• “I think Google Glass is going to be huge, but I don’t think we’re going to walk around with glasses here, but if they make a contact lens, I’m all over that… it’s just an extension of always-connected.”
• “There will still be times where we’ll have to explicitly search for things, when we’re reading, researching, discovering.”

Day Three Live Notes

Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking
09:00am – 9:40am – Pete Meyers

“When I get a criticism about MozCast, it’s always the same – I’m white hat, so I don’t need to pay attention to the algorithm.”

• “It’s entirely possible… that you did nothing wrong at all. Google just changed the rules overnight and your world changed with it.”
• “Rankings are a diagnostic… but if all you know is the number… you don’t know anything. This world is changing.”
• “This is an expanded domain sitelink… 10-pack Domain sitelinks.”
• 10-pack domain sitelinks, Related searches, similar searches, standard image block, image mega-block, news results, video thumbnails, recipe ratings, authorship thumbnail, mini authorship, event sitelinks, search result snippets, forum sitelinks, disambiguation box, Google+ brand box, paid shopping – left, paid shopping – right, paid shopping- single, paid credit card ads, Google Maps inlay, traffic map, local 7-pack, local “near” box, local “one-box”, knowledge graph, KG Zagat Ratings, KG related searches, related search carousel, KG celebrity bio, KG events songs albums, album carousel, KG movie box, KG book box, book carousel, KG geographic info, KG medical info, KG drug info, related health searches, health condition snippet, poison control info box, symptom/treatment answer box, UPS tracking answer box, local time answer box, sunrise/sunset answer box, scientific calculator, graphing calculator, 3d graphing calculator, unit conversion calculator, unit conversion answer box, definition answer box, translation answer box, earthquake answer box, population answer box, flight answer box, flight status KG form, flight status answer box, paid flight info, paid flight search, paid hotel info, movie answer box, showtimes answer box, people answer box, relationship answer box, event date answer box, holiday answer box, box score answer box, division standings, playoff answer box, brackets answer box, list answer box, enhanced list answer box, movie list carousel, best of carousel, things to do carousel, team roster carousel, local carousel, stock ticker answer box, weather answer box, nutrition answer box, nutrition KG, KG aromabase, KG Image box (test), in-depth news box (test), paid insurance quotes (UK), paid insurance comparison (test),
• “I think you’re going to see more combos… Google has a very interesting idea about user intent… the knowledge graph is not a toy. This is the beginning of semantic search… and it is changing search.”
• “This is an incredibly competitive query… we took an entire journey down on the righthand side of the SERP… what’s that on the left? It’s all the organic search we care about and nobody fucking cares… we didn’t even see it. Everything about this has changed… I think if you’re in these spaces, you’re going to be surprised and not in a good way”
• “In June… if I just looked at the ones with 10 results, … 15% were 10 blue links, 85% had some kind of rich information.”
• “It’s just not funny at all, you guys are hosed.”
• “Bing announced they were going to start showing 4-8 results on page 1, and it would be based on user signals…”
• “Local searches don’t even have SERPs anymore.”
• “Desktop is going to be more like mobile… it’s pins on your map on your desktop plus a google+ layer, so I can see what is near me that my friends like.”
• “Google Now, where there’s no query at all… paramaterless results. How do you rank in a SERP where there’s no query? … You don’t.”
• “Can we do anything? This is very depressing… I think we get so fixated on tactics and we’re missing a change in mentality.”
• “We’re not replacing each tactic with a new tactic, we’re adding a layer of complexity.. if you’re trying to game any one signal, you will lose. You need a strategy that will cover all of these because no one piece will be enough.”
• “There is no one secret sauce… “
• “Entities – this is the web of things, the web of objects that represent our real world… Google’s job is not to build the perfect, fair environment, their job is to model the real world.”
• “The problem with us… is that you can’t fake it… I’m going to do the math for you – if you have RCS without RC, you know what you’re left with? Shit.”
• “We do this to rank, so that we can sell… why? what happens if Google changes the rules? You don’t sell.”
• “You’ve tricked Google so you can become 100% dependent on Google. Nice work. You showed them.”
• “Our tactics don’t really have to change, but the way we approach our tactics have to change.”
• “The days where you as a smaller media business could be a national presence just because you’re online are gone… your reach is a certain group of people, demographic, etc. Be local in that sense.”
• “It’s time to be a real business, time to do real marketing.”
• “Think of it – what’s the corollary in the real world of Kayak? That’s where we start to see trouble… if you’re doing that with no added value, you’re not going to be around a while, and Google will take that over if they see the money in it.”
• “Good for users isn’t always the right thing to do… paid inclusion bothers me, because it’s not transparent.”
• “I think when Google started to seriously worry about Bing… there is danger for them.”
• “The next thing we’ll be getting into is some of these SERP features… hopefully next couple months.”

Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement
9:40am – 10:10am – Carrie Gouldin

• “What we’re doing is working… what’s unusual about ThinkGeek is that we slot in our stuff between other things, kind of like commercials.”
• “You want to be in the moment… something that people get some information from… or just useful in the sense that it’s good to share socially… when you can, use humor. It shows you have a human presence behind a brand.”
• “What we’re doing seems to be working.. but we’re also keeping our engagement very high.”
• “It doesn’t matter if you have a trillion followers on Facebook if no one’s engaging… but it is helpful to see if you’re growing or shrinking.”
• “You want to make sure that people are sharing your content, because then you get into conversion and revenue.”
• Each social network has their own tracking code
• “Even if you aren’t getting a ton of money every day, you have these softer social ROI points.”
• “When you need to give your customer a reason to ship on your site, you need to have a likeable presence.”
• “You can have a customer service ninja army out there… that’s invaluable.”
• “With great metrics, comes great responsibility. You should always be testing and trying new things.”
• “You should tailor your content to the time of day… morning is rushed, something quick about the day’s events, maybe in the afternoon you can post a longer-form article where you have some time to read it.”
• “There is risk in queued up posts – the day’s events may change the tone … be careful with that.”
• “Facebook, much like Google, is trying to figure out what their customers want to see.”
• “If your customer has clicked on a text-only post, they may be less likely to see an image post in the future.”
• “Comments have more weight than links.”
• “If you see a post die out in the first half hour, it’s probably because it wasn’t getting enough traction in the first half hour.”
• “Facebook is not handling video as well as Google+”
• “You can also tailor content to your audience that is unique to you.”
• “If you’re working in a tool that silos you away from the stream, log in to your account and use the tool in its native environment.”
• “The weirder the contest, the better it does.”
• “Pinterest is our secret weapon in terms of content. We can post all the time.”
• “Seeing what floats to the top of our Pinterest board helps inform what we post on other networks.”
• Use timers, anchor links, etc., to get right to the meat of a post/video, etc. Don’t overdo hashtags. Dress up your icon for special occasions. Set up offline events and share online.
• “At cons we’ll go and meet with Timmy fans who are making the same costumes.”
• “Not everyone who mans a social media account pays attention to the day’s news.”
• “You’re doing it right because you’re asking if you’re doing it right.”
• “Even though Google’s taking away some of the short-term strategies, the long-term goal is good content.”
• “A lot of it comes from management allowing this experiment to happen…”
• “You don’t have to have a mascot… but I would say mascots are great, do it.”

The Search for Company Culture and Why It Matters
10:30am – 11:00am – Sarah Bird

• “I will never know if I could have been a change agent… I just bailed.”
• “I moved to Moz… and there were a lot of things that were awesome… but we still didn’t know what we were doing.”
• “We knew that we loved marketing and wanted to make big changes…”
• “She pushed us in a board meeting to do some values work… we were very reluctant to go down that path… but she was quietly persistent… and we actually spent the next year and a half talking about it.”
• “Transparency has always been a big part of our lexicon, as has generosity.”
• “TAGFEE – transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic and exceptional.”
• “It really worked, it brought us back together, and not in the ways that we thought it would…”
• “Disagreement happens, but when you all agree (about TAGFEE), suddenly it takes motivation entirely off the table… it puts you back in learner mode, so that you can sit back and try to see where the other person is coming from.”
• “We have much more efficient communication… it’s better to have agreed-upon criteria by which we’re going to judge success.”
• “It’s also really helpful when you’re trying to explain decisionmaking… trying to ask a team member to leave is really hard… it’s a very complicated conversation because there are competing values, but when you have an agreed-upon code, you can shorten that conversation up a bit.”
• “People who are TAGFEE tend to know and hang out with a lot of other TAGFEE folks.”
• “We want to work with great vendors who are like us…”
• “Your top people, if you don’t have a culture where they can live with integrity in their values every day… they’re going to just leave. Even if they don’t bail physically, they’re going to bail emotionally.”
• “When people are engaged, they care, and if you care about something, you speak your mind.”
• “If they don’t care, they’re like ‘hey whatever guys, i’m just doing my job.’”
• “I do it just because… it’s kind of like climbing a mountain. You do it just to do it (not because of ROI)”
• “Every group has a culture… even your family has a culture. The question is – are you conscious about your culture or not?”
• “Values are the standard that we use to judge whether our culture is healthy.”
• “Culture does not equal perks… perks can be a nice manifestation of your culture and your values, but they’re neither necessary nor sufficient… you do not need a budget to have a good culture.”
• “Communication is the skill that helps you implement transparency. Transparency is complicated, we’re still working on how to do it effectively.”
• “Authenticity and transparency tends to get to noisy, but it’s wonderful.”
• “We think of exceptional as being an exception to the rule… how can we do it better? What’s unique? How can we innovate?”
• “Velocity is an issue in our organization – it’s a problem in an environment … where we all value everyone else’s opinion. It can take like six months to get everyone’s feedback.”
• “Diversity… I worry about it… I worry about the virtuous recruiting cycle, having same values with a different style.”
• “Disagreeing in a TAGFEE way is like ninja skills… it can be hard to do.”
• “i have seen TAGFEE used as a weapon… occasionally it can be used as a way to write someone off.”
• “Culture is a marathon, not a sprint… in fact, research on micro-affirmations and micro-inequities… it’s not usually that overt, what they’ve found is that it comes from these subconscious movements in your body. (Micro-affirmation) could be something as small as saying hi to them in the hall.”
• “Culture is made up of thousands of small decisions every day.”
• “When you only focus on the circumstances beyond your control when you have a problem… that’s the victim trap.”
• “We have to learn when we’re slipping into that mode (and avoid it)”
• “You plant lots of seeds – nothing ever happens overnight… talk about them with everyone in your organization.”
• “Start with your collaboration team… have a conversation about accountability… and then maybe eventually follow it up by seeing if others would like you to hold them accountable.”
• “Even if you do all of this stuff… you may still fail. Most things in life are partly out of your control…”
• “I would much rather have tried my best, lived in alignment with my values, and failed… I’d rather live with a resilient heart having lived my values, than guilt and shame.”
• “Remember every day are little challenges, but you’re practicing for the big stuff.”
• “If you are focused solely on your People magazine version of success… you are going to live in fear… when you focus on whether you’re in alignment with your values, you unleash a lot of creativity… you can be bold. Focus on what you can control.”

Why the Internet Hates Us and Can #RCS Change That Perception?
11:00am – 12:00pm – Wil Reynolds

• “This whole RCS thing wasn’t a marketing idea. Someone bought the domain last year – that’s definitely fake company shit.”
• “Being inspired and doing nothing with it is useless.”
• “New experiences make you a better marketer, make you empathize and engage. I wasn’t going to learn how hard it was to get through the rain in a wheelchair by coming to marketing conferences.”
• “There’s an SEO in the room, but trust me at the end of the three days, you’ll see he’s a good guy.”
• “RCS requires respecting other disciplines… when we do that inbound graph, we do that to everyone else.”
• “Tom Critchlow… there is no ‘just.’”
• “I spent six hours trying to ‘just’ 301 a page for a bank… doing content because you love something will always win out.”
• “I want you to bring me an issue that you have… “
• Resources: Quiet, Setting the Table, Nudge, Switch, Words that Work, Selling the Invisible
• Link: bit.ly/batman-campaign
• “Every time we go around talking about doing RCS, and showing design agency stuff, we’re basically saying they’re better than us at content marketing.”
• “Either they’re going to learn all of our little tips and tricks, or we’re going to have to learn better at telling stories, pitching… are we going to invest in learning these things?”
• “We opensourced the thing we’d be working on for a year and a half… we got on the front page of Hacker News… some guy thanked me yesterday for that shit. Create things that add value for the long-term.”
• “I can’t walk you guys out there with that kind of thing and not have the numbers to convince you.”
• “If you say my clients won’t invest in RCS, you’re helpless, but if you say ‘I don’t know how to pitch’ then you are in control to become better at that and every day work to improve.”
• “I didn’t do that for SEO value – I don’t need to rank for anything other than SEER interactive.”
• “We did no outreach on it… how can I create something that helps me understand the creative process.”
• “If Avinash says something you wrote is interesting, that means … you must have killed it.”
• “If you want to know if you’re doing RCS, search for your assets with your brand name.”
• 69% came in through referral… people will use what you title it (like a nudge)
• Gizmodo- 4.2%, the Brazilian Gizmodo blew up this thing.
• 20% of the people that hit this were on mobile… and I didn’t want to build it. They forced me to do it.
• “Make friends outside of your circle… there is no we’re ‘just’ gonna do.”
• “An SEO company got the news to show up and videotape our stuff… it doesn’t move the SERP… but we need to get some help, some people who know what the hell they’re doing.”
• “Ethan walked around the city of Philadelphia on his time to build this, because we wanted to build some epic shit.”
• “You need to know who’s feeding who, because you can get things on the Today show.”
• “Adam and I refused to get our asses kicked by blackhats for sex toy.”
• “We got to 4 and we didn’t use any blackhat shit.”
• bit.ly/collegecitations
• “This guy took scrap wood from his woodworking shop… and got this link – turned garbage into DA 90 links left and right.”
• “I want you guys to get your bosses to say ‘they’re doing what?’”
• Tools: IFTTT, Gmail, Evernote, Page2RSS
• Real-time competitive analysis in one tool – @conversionfac
• Wil is giving tons of great IFTTT recipes to drop into evernote, so that you can see the competitive analysis when you want to see it.
• If you get hacked, have iFTT send you a text message.
• When they have the word confidential on their site, you can capture the entire document using IFTTT and Evernote
• Image Raider RSS, Competitor byline, discussions, take someone you want to stalk and figure it out.
• “Still stalking you Rand… watch out, I’m in your bushes.”
• CEO mentions, new links to your assets, competitor assets, bylines of competitor interviews, brands being pushed by competitors, reporters covering new pieces in your industry, copied images from your site to reclaim, where competitors are commenting, popular infographics..
• “I had a client who was hit by Penguin, and I had an idea and it totally didn’t match her business… but I give her something more viral that didn’t tie exactly into her business.”

Building Your Community From the Ground Up
1:30pm – 2:00pm – Jen Lopez

• “You have to start somewhere…”
• “We’ve kept that consistent voice over time.”
• “You’ve gotta start with some goals – you can take your company goals and make them your community goals.”
• “You guys are my passion.”
• “I am a colon cancer survivor, and about three years ago, I had surgery… and went through chemo… and I am fucking passionate about making sure that people get their butts out there (get it?) and get checked for colon cancer.”
• “Know exactly what you want to get out of it… you have to have something in mind to get there.”
• “This is offline engagement… mostly because the WiFi sucks…”
• “That engagement is what we are going to measure to make sure that we’re meeting the goal of educating inbound marketers.”
• “The first thing you have to figure out is why – how does that (goal) map to the marketing goal, and how does it map to the wider (company) goal?”
• “If you’re just starting out and you don’t have any engagement, you have to start somewhere…” re. measuring followers
• “You can’t just be like “I’m going to track all the goals the same way.” It’s going to be different depending on what your actual goals are.”
• Tools: PageLover
• “It’s not about the tools… I could care less what tools you use, I want you to find something that works for you and your organization.”
• Tools: SproutSocial
• “In Q&A, you can get some of our speakers to answer your great questions, but the majority of questions are answered by you guys.”
• “When you work on your community… you can see over time, we’re getting more backlinks as we grow this community.”
• “It’s fun to have a little fun with it.”
• “You want to take someone within the organization that may already have this great network… is there someone on your team that loves social media?”
• “You want to find that engineer in your organization… you want to have them as part of building that community.”
• “Does a community already exist? Is there something already out there?”
• “You want to check out your competitors… see what they’re not doing.”
• “Take the one or two you want to do, and kick ass at it.”
• “Sometimes you start adding things and then you realize you need another person and sometimes it works the other way…”
• “It was easier to have everyone involved when there were only 20 employees…”
• “Test it, try new things, and when you’ve found the right thing, test some more.”
• “Is there an area where you should be … where are they that you’re totally missing out on?”

10 Link Removal Pro-Tips That Will Change Your Life
2:00pm – 2:20pm – Sha Menz

• “Link removers can actually be TAGFEE too.”
• “Link removal does have a bad reputation, and it’s not hard to find reasons for that.”
• “What actually happens, one of the reasons people find it difficult to do link removal is that they make lots of assumptions about the task before they start.”
• “Some think the work is thankless, some think success is impossible, and some think nothing good can come of it, it’s all too late. Frankly, all of those are just wrong.”
• “In this industry, there are lots of people who have their opinions about it – for some people it’s Google’s fault, for some it’s the webmaster’s fault, and for some it’s actually the site owner’s fault.”
• “You can have that person who didn’t believe in link building sending thank-you notes in your inbox.”
• “We can all see the problems, but it’s time for solutions.”
• 1. Create a separate inbox at the target domain, and turn the spam filters off.
• Webmasters want to know that it’s an authentic request, and not a competitor trying to get a leg up on you.
• 2. Identify directory sites you want to remove links and serve them a 404 status via .htaccess.
• “You find the user agent, serve them a 404, and when the bot comes knocking, nothing to see.”
• 3. Get to know the sites that don’t accept email and go right to the submission form.
• Resource: privacyprotect.org
• 4. Be grateful when you discover that ArticleSnatch is amongst the domains you need to deal with.
• “Often spam articles are set up by bulk submitters, and they can’t actually get into the directory to do anything about it. He offers people the option to reclaim their articles.”
• 5. WordPress hosted blogs do have a default email address – wordpress@subdomain.wordpress.com
• 6. Write your link removal request as you would write an email to a potential new customer.
• “It’s a human-to-human transaction… if you approach people on the right level, you’re likely to get the right kind of response.”
• 7. Know your TLD .ca – Canadian private person registrants can be contacted via the Interested Party Registration Tool (??),
• 8. UK non-trading registrants who have opted out of the WhoIs can be opted back in. – secure.nominet.org.uk/account/whois-complaint.html
• 9. Lodge a spam report to have egregious spam removed
• “You should really be careful that you only use this when you have to. If I get to this point, that’s really disappointing.”
• 10. You’re asking for favors – the occasional cookie or cupcake can’t hurt.
• “People bang on about paying for removal, but paying for link removal may be fun, and if a webmaster has been. especially helpful, you may actually get a link out of it.”
• Be a real person and prove it, every interaction is human-to-human, and do everything you can to protect your brand, and always wrap it up with TAGFEE.”
• “We see in our work that if you send four or five emails, they decide you won’t stop and clean them up on four or five.”
• “The most important thing is to get a complete look at the link profile.”
• Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools
• Tools: Referral report in Analytics and turn it upside down.

How to Be a One-Person Link Building Army
2:20pm – 2:40pm – Mike Arnesen

• “I have a confession: I don’t like building links. There are actually some days I hate building links… I struggle with finding creative ways to get people to want to link to my client’s sites.”
• “We all can’t be great linkbuilders… and we don’t all have the advantage of building links to sites that people want to link to.”
• “It’s one of the best feelings you can get as a search marketer – someone linked to us.”
• “We get into this habit of wanting links… and we get kind of addicted… we never get sick of that sweet, sweet taste of links.”
• “We know from the ranking factors, links are still important.”
• “We don’t all have time, budget, a team… but we can find ways to build links anyway.”
• “We can put in more effort and do things smarter… it can be done.”
• “We need to make sure that every ounce of effort we put into this is worthwhile.”
• “We also need to increase the likelihood that happy accidents will happen in the future.”
• “You can leverage that information; you can just piggyback off (your competitors).”
• “You want to know when people are mentioning you online, and see whether it actually includes a link to your site.”
• Tool: Text Expander
• “While we want to be efficient, we also want to be more effective.”
• “Branch out into related topics… use gmail filters to filter good requests out, but include a good variety of questions.”
• “We also need to be nimble and opportunistic… and when you’re on your phone, set up twitter notifications.”
• Tools: AuthorCrawler
• “We need to take steps to make sure our content is as linkable as possible.”
• “Using technical tips and enhancement really makes our content stand out.”
• “Be more linkable than the content you’re competing with.”
• “Real expert shit is really important and we need to not be afraid to specialize.”
• “Be the person who is the reliable expert that people want to send their people to for expert advice.”
• “Ask people how you can help them without any expectations in return.”
• “Find your advocates and nurture those relationships”
• “Move away from the mentality that you’re building links and see what you can do to earn links.”
• “I think we can work harder, want it more, and get better results on our own and be awesome.”

Throw Out Best Practices, Double Email Conversion
2:40pm – 3:00pm – A. Litsa

• “We increased our conversion 146%… and you can do it too.”
• “We decided we were going to completely disregard everything we knew about email design.”
• “We discovered that our lame, boring template was really readable. They didn’t have to pinch … to see the content.”
• “Our new submission form was intended for smartphone users.”
• “When we switched to the smartphone oriented template… we got a 146% lift.”
• “Smartphone oriented did better on every front, open rate, clickthrough rate, etc.”
• “56% of the people that clicked through on the email did so on the smartphone. We were not expecting that.”
• “After we implemented the new design… we saw overall, our submissions went from 17 to 47.”
• “Think about how unfortunate it is when people base their mobile designs on data alone and don’t look at anything qualitative.”
• “It’s a good thing that … we looked at the world, brought people into a usability lab, and turned to data when we needed to test our hypotheses.”
• “Forget about marketing best practices… they’re not based on what email is today. For most people, today, email is an app.”
• “If you’re site traffic is not heavily mobile, that’s not a reason to believe that you’re immune from the mobile revolution.”
• “When friends are talking to friends about content on your site, chances are one of them is using a smartphone.”
• “I wonder if there’s a correlation between mobile-friendly parts of your site, and whether they have high social access.”
• “If you’re a retailer… the store is a channel, and that channel sends 100% smartphone traffic to your site.”
• “Is there some engagement you can stick on the site so you can capture those leads, learn of the intent of that mobile audience coming in?”
• “Maybe they won’t reserve a flight, but they might hold a price.”
• “If there are little low-risk, low-effort engagement that you can put in front of your smartphone users.”
• “We have to share ideas with each others, take risks, share theories, observations, data, too.”

Anatomy of a Viral Hit: Reach Millions, Cultivate Relationships, & Generate Links – 3:00pm – 3:20pm – Kelsey Libert

• “By creating an emotionally compelling, accessible, and broadly understood campaign, we had viral success.”
• Resources: The Engagement Project
• “The fascinating familiar – we all have these services or products that we have, but don’t use as often… how do we get them in the front of our consumer’s minds… have it viewed in a unique way.”
• “Synaptic play – when you make connections between unrelated ideas… and when you make those, you experience creative joy.”
• “The energy exchange – when you share content, you’re driven to share it based on the emotional experience you engage in… it’s something we’re biologically wired to do. What emotional response is your content eliciting?”
• “Reframing emotions as data is the x factor. You can’t control it, and you can’t afford to ignore it” – CEO of Upworthy
• “There are ten emotions that appear more often – amusement, interest, and surprise. These are the emotions you want to include in each of your content campaigns.”
• “Contrasting emotions increased emotional score.”
• “If you’re going to do any type of viral campaign, you want to evoke the surprise, not the same thing you see every day.”
• “It’s very valuable for you to be pursuing these viral ideas.”
• “Viral content isn’t just a single hit, and if it’s done right, it does sustained traffic.”
• frc.tl/ROI-calculator

The Secret Ingredients of Better Marketing
3:40pm – 4:40pm – Rand Fishkin

• “The heist is not google stealing our keyword data… not external. It’s not penguin, it’s not panda.. It’s not Google rewarding brands. The heist is right here in all of us. We are what’s holding us back.”
• “We have let our role define our influence, instead of our influence define our role. Take it back! We can do better”
• “There’s literally no time during the year when everything is not on sale at Jos. A. Bank.”
• “We are burning out our users. We are making people not trust the Internet.”
• “The average US Internet user is getting 1,700 banner ads a month.”
• “Eight percent of Internet users account for 85% of clicks… I imagine there’s this group of people in New Mexico.”
• “50% of clicks on mobile are accidental.”
• “You’re more likely to have seen Pluto Nash on opening weekend than click on a display ad. Oh my God, we’re killing the Internet. It’s like we don’t love the people anymore.”
• “More people are clicking in more diverse places.”
• “Why do we pretend like all we’re trying to do is bump up the rankings? Give me a #5 position with great content… and I can guarantee I will go up in the ranks.”
• “We’ve lost 40% of our audience even though we earned the click (re. load times).”
• “70% of CEOs say they’ve lost trust in marketers…”
• “We need the audience. We want to capture that audience.”
• “There’s more aggregated reviews for SEO gigs on Fiverr in the last week than there were on Whiteboard Friday.”
• “We have all these new tools, but old ways of thinking. We’re lost in that pre-web world, because that’s where a lot of minds… still think about this stuff.”
• “We don’t have a cohesive narrative… we lack the broad vision that brings together fantastic, creative results.”
• “We prioritize the short-term… the acquisitions over long-term, let me invest in something that isn’t going to produce me results in a month or 3 or 6 but will provide me results years from now.”
• Tool: FullContact
• “Real transparency is uncomfortable… it lays something bare that you might consider a dirty secret.”
• “That honesty was surprising, eye-opening… it’s what made people pay attention to it. It’s letting data win instead of opinions. Opinions win because people aren’t comfortable… with revealing that data and listening to it.”
• “If you are transparent on behalf of other people who are trying to obscure data, you will find great marketing.”
• “If we don’t have hard truths, I don’t think we’re going to make this leap.”
• “Our data isn’t that interesting? No, you’re just not that creative.”
• “Authenticity is infusing the things you believe… into your marketing, representing you honestly, and your company honestly.”
• “When we mix pop culture and our content, we often get terrible results, but this had the authenticity to resonate.”
• “They know what their audience loves, and how they feel, and geniusly, they’ve made their advertising … good enough to replicate as content.”
• “When you don’t let your company reflect who you really are, you are in a state of cognitive dissonance, and that dissonance will resonate.”
• “Most of their links come from people who have attended their real-world events.”
• “They rely on karma to say ‘you know what I think you will pay $85 for a pullover’ … because you share our beliefs.”
• “‘Our budget can’t support this.’ You know what you’re really hearing? Ignorance. Money is not generosity.”
• “Generosity prioritizes long-term serendipity over short term ROI… that’s why great companies are overnight successes after years of hard work.”
• “They are making sure that if they show up in the visible search results, you are so going to click that.”
• Empathy:
• http://slid.es – tricky to see features without “getting started” – causes user to lose interest and bounce
• http://www.hellosign.com – great example of an empathetic user experience
• img.ur no knead pizza recipe
• “Respect your audience’s biases, and present in a familiar format”
• “Give before asking something in return (like the PS used at the end of the noknead pizza functioning as a CTA)”
• “When others are desparate for your data, that’s a great time to share openly”
• Swissotel “ultimate guide to worldwide etiquette” piece of content. Doesn’t spend a fortune on complex design – simple and it earns shares and links. Agency was SEOGadget.

Kane Jamison

Kane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing platform that helps you build better content briefs. Schedule a demo to chat with him personally about your team's content workflow.

Website: https://www.kanejamison.com

Twitter: @kanejamison

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