MozCon 2012 Live Blog - Day Three

At the last marketing conference I attended (SearchFest in Portland in February) I walked away with 7 pages of handwritten notes after a single day. But, handwritten notes don’t do me or anyone else any good, they just get locked away in the file cabinet. So for MozCon I’m going to publish my notes here. I’m not promising a hardcore live blogging session, but I’ll publish notes on everything that I feel is worth writing down.

You can also find me tweeting @KaneJamison – I’ll try to embed any important tweets from myself and others into this post.

Previous Days: MozCon 2012 Day One Recap & MozCon 2012 Day Two Recap

Other Live Blogging Sessions and Recaps I’m Aware Of:

• @RuthBurr, SEOMoz’s inhouse SEO, has some excellent tweets coming out fast and furious from each post, definitely worth following her to get some quicker updates since wi-fi takes awhile to get updates out.
• All presentations from the weekend can be downloaded here: http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon-live/agenda
• Full list of tools mentioned at MozCon – http://www.thogenhaven.com/dozens-of-content-seo-and-social-tools-from-mozcon-2012

Day: Friday, July 27

If MacGyver Did SEO – Martin Macdonald

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/747d18a4ea05ecf20480.pptx

Description: Martin looks at how you can push Excel to do much more than you ever thought possible. In this case, build an index of the web to give you early warnings about index updates and get the full picture of your vertical.

• Ranking data is the #1 indicator of Google’s algo, and we don’t understand the factors quickly enough
• If you’re in-house there’s no reason not to be analyzing 25K keywords for your industry daily
• Martin has created a way of tracking ranking changes over time in Excel
• Factors Tracked:

1. Domains
2. Landing URLs
3. Keywords
4. Keyword Volume via Adwords
5. Keyword Rankings by date
6. SEO Metrics
7. Social metrics via socialcrawlitics

• Full positional data is available in a drill down by site, by day, by keyword type
• This is awesome -> SocialCrawlitics.com – in beta mode – this is like a crawler version of SharedCount.com – it will crawl all URLs on a site and pull those metrics. Really happy to see this developed – it’s not tricky we just needed to have it built, and it will make it easier to pull in social metrics the same way we currently get link data.
• Recap of Functionality:

1. Competitive market analysis
2. SERP tracking
3. Opportunity finding
4. Ranking analysis
5. Quick and easy algo update data
6. Fully built in excel – no coding required
7. Interfaces with 4+ API’s

SEO Project Management – Aleyda Solis

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/487002593e5b680351b2.pdf

Description: Learn how to make the most out of project management best practices and methodologies when implementing SEO in big companies and how to sniff out what’s working and what’s not.

Notes:

• “Even for good SEOs, issues always happen with projects”
• Situation 1 – Client always complaining regardless of performance
• Solution involves improvement in communication process
• Go overboard on setting expectations
• Agree on necessary resources and timing from the start
• Identify potential risks from the start
• Aleyda’s post on Setting SEO Goals
• Define the communication channels well
• Situation 2– The Developer messed up
• Best practice checklists are a great way to implement some structure, accountability, and reliability
• Ask for early tests to check changes before authorizing a complete roll out
• Use SEO task schedules as a spreadsheet to make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Situation 3– The SEO process with no control

Attribution Modeling: Why You Must Be Doing It and How To Do It Easily With Google Analytics – Mike Pantoliano

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/581717f1788143a61aa6.pdf

Description: Figure out what’s working for your site with attribution modeling. Mike takes two basic tools: GA and Excel and turns them into a goldmine of information.

• http://bit.ly/excel-ninja – beginner guide to excel that Mike wrote
• @SpaceTheShiba – 21 year SEO industry expert
• Attribution modeling is crediting the entire customer journey from discovery to purchase rather than last-touch attribution (at time of sale)
• Attribution Modeling is all about finding the actual ROI for digital marketing
• Attribution modeling very often helps SEO channels get credit for sales they’re responsible for
• Attribution models:
• Glengarry Glenross – always be closing (last touch attribution)
• Madonna – first touch (like a version)
• Oprah – equalized across channels
• Beavis & Butthead – U-curve – first touch and last touch get most credit, some equalized in the middle
• Cell phone bars – time decay model – where last touch is most and first touch is least
• Custom modeling – less credit or more credit depending on where your efforts are focused or other criteria
• Default in Google Analytics
• Path length report
• Assisted conversions report – gives you the real ROI of social media, which last-touch modeling doesn’t give enough credit to
• Use custom channel grouping rather than default Google reports to get way better value – affiliates and other partnerships for example.
• Splitting branded and non-branded organic search is one of the essential segmentations
• Google Analytics premium is pricey (over $150,000 per year) and has true attribution modeling, and is a data geek’s wet dream
• http://bit.ly/mozmodeling is a free Excel doc version of this attribution modeling that GA Premium does.
• Sweet and easy to do by exporting a specific report from GA
• GA has 30 days of data so works poorly with longer sales processes
• WANT MORE BUDGET FOR ORGANIC SEARCH? PROVE YOU’RE WORTH IT WITH CORRECT ATTRIBUTION MODELING <– Good takeaway
• “Attribution modeling gives you the confidence to invest in channels that you didn’t know were killing it” – @MikeCP

Estimating Traffic Based on Keyword Research – Jessica Bowman

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/918bd422a6bb8de802c2.pptx

Description: Don’t let changes in Google’s tools get you down. Jessica’s going to improve your spirits by showing you how to estimate your keywords’ traffic with the data at your fingertips.

Thus far Jessica’s presentation is over my head, but she just mentioned an Excel doc to make things easier so I’m warming up to it… apparently we need to email her for the XLS sheet, will post the link if she allows.

Tweets to embed:

• @jeffjgold – To take search intent into consideration, look at SERP and see what percentage of results are relevant to your intent, then X by vol #Mozcon
• @george_andrews – Challenges = 1. Listings not equal (rich snippets) 2. Ranking data not as useful (geo, social, personalization)
• @jeffjgold – Define highest possible rank and lowest on page 1. Gives you traffic range. Use internal data (GWT) and CTR studies to determine CTs #Mozcon
• Clickthrough Rate studies mentioned by Jessica:
• http://www.optify.net/inbound-marketing-resources/new-study-how-the-new-face-of-serps-has-altered-the-ctr-curve/1
• http://www.slingshotseo.com/resources/white-papers/google-ctr-study/

A New Form of CRO – Joanna Lord

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/16a7f03100a99a8f7cd4.pptx

Description: Are you ready to rock Conversion Rate Optimization? Joanna walks you through the psychology of the new consumer and how to rethink traditional CRO to capture more conversions, more engagement, and keep customers happy.

• A marketer’s job has gone way beyond our websites – we have so many social and third party sites we need to work on.
• So what should we spend our time on? Joanna has 10 suggestions for us:
• 10 – Your Story – test and improve your story
• http://bit.ly/dcDsbx – must watch Ted Talk regarding the Golden Circle Theory
• Focus on
• Why? The Cause
• How? Value Prop
• What? Product/Services)
• Kiva is a great example of getting your story in people’s faces
• 9 –  Your Pillars
• These are the things that are never changed on your site (navigational pieces, core pieces)
• You need to test these aspects of your site – be prepared for pushback
• Dropbox is a great example – homepage has a video and a download button, and small text links below that.
• 8 – You Relationships
• Rethink how your partnerships with other sites are providing value and whether it can be improved or should be changed.
• Things to test:
• words
• placement
• photos
• who
• context
• video
• 7 – Your Triggers
• These are things like Call to Actions and similar site elements.
• People have 3 brains:
• New Brain – appeals to our sense of logic, ration, and reason
• Middle Brain – emotions, gut feelings, spans the two other brains
• Reptilian Brain –
• 6 – Your Unique Value Proposition
• Testing this doesn’t mean putting it everywhere
• Figure out new UVPs depending on audience and specific product
• Zappo’s main page has different UVP than their Juniors page, which focuses on getting it now.
• Pottery Barn calls out shipping when appropriate and pricing on a different product where customer sensitivity matters.
• Is your UVP still the same as what it once was?
• 5 – Your Schedule
• Testing WHEN you do things – time / day of week
• Testing your email triggers after a sale or signup
• What are you scheduling? What else could you be scheduling instead?
• 4 – Your Tools
• The tools we use change weekly
• What makes for CRO tool euphoria?
• Affordability – price/budget often stops us from trying new tools
• Feedback –
• Analytics –
• Usability –
• Built-in Logic – Doing basic analysis for you rather than making you do it each time
• Contact Team – Gotta have someone to talk to with issues
• Resources – Unbounce blog for example
• Easy-to-Use –
• Tools Joanna Recommends:
• Usability
• UserTesting.com
• FiveSecondTest
• Usabillia
• Landing Pages:
• Unbounce
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Optimizely
• Activity:
• Reinvigorate
• Lucky Orange
• Crazy Egg
• 3 – Your Thank You
• Optimize how you thank your customers. This is your job, not just customer service.
• Chill is a great example of thanking customers at the one-month anniversary (by providing a good video of a dog)
• Make sure your emails don’t bore people to death…
• 2 – Your Feedback Channels
• How can people tell you their problems?
• Do your pages have a quick access way for people to ask questions?
• Places to improve:
• Analytics
• Survey Tools
• Live Chat
• Cancel Forms
• Help Tickets
• Listening Tools
• 1 – Your Biggest Success
• “Dare to change your best performers for more win in less time.”
• This is as risky as it gets, and this is how big companies get subsequent successes
• Stop “setting up tests”
• I think the takeaway is to continue testing, not just testing it once and accepting it
• Stop waiting for resources
• outsource
• do it yourself
• Stop owning it
• It’s not all about you – it’s a team effort. Let others take responsibility for tasks, too.
• Stop pushing pennies
• “Think bigger” -Tom Critchlow to Joanna
• Stop stopping
• Part of determining your value is how determined you are to being valuable
• So what is Conversion Rate Optimization nowadays?
• story optimization
• relationship optimization
• process optimization
• value optimization
• loyalty optimization
• “It’s more than running tests, and it demands that we think bigger”

Holy cow… excellent presentation.

Special Session: Community Speakers

Community Speakers: Dana Lookadoo, Darren Shaw, Jeff McRitchie, & Fabio Ricotta

For the first time ever, MozCon invites four speakers from our community based on their amazing pitches to deliver quick, actionable tips directly to you. Prepare to be blown away. 👇

Rock Your SEO With Structured Social Sharing – Dana Lookadoo

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/11890d611d77870bf980.pptx

Description: Get the best practices for optimizing social sharing and how this structured markup makes a difference for SEO. Get tips on optimizing pages to create and tracking the best share snippet. Plus, quickly and automatically create UTM variables to track the effectiveness of each social share with an Excel spreadsheet to make everything easier.

10 Steps for Optimized Engagement With Microdata & Analytics

1. OG:Title
2. OG:Description
3. OG:Image
4. OG:Type
5. OG:Url
6. UTM Variables
7. Share blurb for Facebook & G+
8. Hashtags
9. Twitter/Retweetable
10. Document & Track

• Resources from Dana:
• Snippet Tester: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
• G+ Snippets: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/snippet/

The Best Citations to Get and Other Local SEO Tips – Darren Shaw

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/b81fa0b53eeb1f48bde8.pptx

Description: Get the best local citations for your city. Darren gives his tips over 93 cities with 650+ keywords in 71 different business categories. Time to start building your local rankings today.

• Basically Darren pulled SERPs for local businesses in 93 cities
• Pulled stats on how well a Local portal (e.g. Yelp or FindLaw.com) was ranking for keyword sets
• FULL LIST OF SITES IS PUBLISHED HERE: http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-category.aspx
• 2nd list is for Moz only – can’t publish link or password
• Other places to find citations
• Link Prospector
• Citation Finder
• More tactics:
• site:.edu portland oregon sponsors
• Write for local pennysaver papers with a citation/link at the end
• Find local G+ users and get them to come to your business
• G+ local pages are getting treatment that past local pages didn’t get – and you can build links to them 😉
• Use a “near=” URL parameter to tweak google results
• Offer other local non-competitors a coupon for their customers and a link to the coupon page
• 5th Google review is a big booster
• Learn to use Mapmaker
• G+ probably looking at CTR – get 10 reviews to get Zagat rating and increase CTR

Creating Awesome Video on a Budget – Jeff McRitchie

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/338baaf8d587a692717d.pptx

Description: Having trouble finding the ROI for your video marketing initiatives? Video doesn’t have to be hard or expensive anymore. Learn to create awesome video content that supports your SEO efforts without spending a fortune. Jeff shares how he’s created 500+ videos in less than a year all for around $50 each.

• Any one video they create doesn’t get many users that need it – so they need to produce 1000s affordably to get a positive ROI
• Goal for 2011 – create over 1000 videos with positive ROI
• They figured three ways to do that:
• 1 – Leverage existing content
• Cost per video to add a opening and closing branding credit was under $5 per video, but they couldn’t control the message well
• 2 – Use animation
• Cost using animated static images was not bad, less than $10 per video, but customers told them it sucked and wasn’t helpful
• 3 – Use demo and how to videos
• Cost stayed around $50 per video and has been very successful
• They’re making about 10 videos per week now

Tips on Getting This Done:

• DON’T use faces in video so you don’t have to sync voice
• DON”T script, just talk
• DO Brainstorm lists of what customers care about
• DO Group similar videos to save on recording costs and get lots done at once

They have attributed sales to video more than covering the production costs (Positive ROI!)

• Regarding Hosting: Their website hosts a self-hosted version for their site, and they post a version to Youtube that gets embedded on their blog.
• Where to Get Materials($500 budget setup)
• 8 foot table
• Wide piece of paper with stand
• Lighting from amazon (kits) $300-400
• Kodak ZI8 cameras for $90 and have since upgraded
• ShahMenz asked about comedic videos and creative angles – Jeff said that some has worked and some has fallen flat – but worthwhile

E-Commerce SEO — Tips & Tricks – Fabio Ricotta

Download Presentation Here: https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/e7469ced3c52d6c2754e.pptx

Description: US consumers will spend $327 billion online in 2016, and the competition’s getting really serious. To succeed, sites need to improve their advanced strategies because everyone’s doing a good job on the basic key SEO factors. This session covers tips and tricks such as link building strategies, scalable content creation, and measurement and reports with Google Analytics, developed for one of Brazil’s biggest online retailers.

I had to miss this preso and I never touch e-commerce so I’m not the best guy to comment on it.

Head-to-Head: How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy – Rand Fishkin

Download Presentation Here: http://bit.ly/mozcontentstrategy

Description: An in-depth look at the structure of great content marketing campaigns including how to set up your site, content, and team for success.

• Rand said “don’t try to take notes…” – we’ll see about that:
• A list of content you think is going to go viral, does not a content strategy make
• Content marketing is one way of solving the customer acquisition process
• Roadmap for a Content Strategy:
• What are your ultimate goals?
• Customer acquisition? Retention? Hiring?
• Usually it’s traffic, awareness, retention, or sales/conversions.
• Where is your target group on the web today?
• Executing against this well-designed strategy is far easier.
• Checklist To Produce A Content Strategy:
• Marketing Goal(s)
• Target Customer(s)
• Target Channels
• Influencers
• Experience to Deliver
• ROI comparison against other marketing channels (PPC, offline, etc)
• Tips

1. Invest for a 5 Year ROI
2. Don’t “Target” Influencers, Involve Them

• Tableau Marketing

1. Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

• Don’t be afraid to take someone else’s good idea and make it better
• Steal from the media – they’re going for pageviews and can’t deliver the branded experience that you can provide.

1. Expand Your Definition of “Content”

• Not just blog articles and photos and press releases, etc.
• APIs
• 404s
• Comments
• News
• Your employee benefits (if they’re unique)
• Your workplace (if it’s worth talking about)

Seattle Children’s Hospital Video that Rand Played:

• Rand & Geraldine are matching the delta/change on any donations made to Seattle Children’s Hospital today. Donate Here.

Head-to-Head: How to Make Your Content Marketing Efforts Reach Further – Tom Critchlow

Description: Detailed tactics to make every piece of content you create have more social shares, earn more links, and bring more and more valuable traffic to your site.

• The SEO industry has been chasing tactics, but we’re getting beat out at producing awesome content by ad firms and creative agencies.
• “Influence online sits with the people who have highly-engaged specialized audiences, not NYT & traditional media companies”
• Kapost eBook on the ROI of Content Marketing
• “Content for Huffpo? Has to work for everyone. Content for Tim Ferris? Only has to work for Tim Ferris.
• Lots more to Tom’s presentation that I probably won’t write here… (and he ended up winning the head to head)

Wrap-Up: Give It Up Session w/ Closing Thoughts – All Speakers

Description: All our speakers take the stage to give you their nifty techniques to send you home with your brain buzzing with more awesome. Plus, some closing thoughts and extra MozCon love.

Not supposed to blog this I think… it was intended for attendees only. But they released the video years later so updating the post with that instead.

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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