Last year, Google made headlines when it released a so-called “mobilegeddon” update, which sent the procrastinators of the web world scrambling to get their sites updated for mobile friendliness. Now, nearly a year after the original mobile update, Google looks … Continue reading
The post Is Google Prepping for Another Mobilegeddon? appeared first on AudienceBloom.
Posted by TheDahv
[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]
Technology makes it easier than ever to learn about people and the world around you. Despite significant progress, however, the tech community has left a gaping hole unaddressed: the tools available to our dogs to engage in social media marketing are completely unsatisfactory.
UpDog is our new company-wide initiative to bring the benefits of human social media marketing to the canine world. If you haven't noticed, we love dogs here at Moz.
A photo posted by Moz (@moz_hq) on Aug 26, 2015 at 1:01pm PDT
We're uniquely positioned to hear and empathize with the needs of our aspiring barketers. Now that we have finished our second-quarter planning, we're ecstatic to share that the future is looking up for dogs! We intend to strategically fold canine marketing tools into all of our platforms.
Feeling skeptical? Not sure this is right for your social media barketing strategy? Well, check out what Moz's founder has to say:
"Every day, when I walk to work, hop on a plane, or speak at a conference, I see them. Thousands of humans, buried in their phones, swiping for hours through potential dating partners or friends' baby photos or short videos surrounded by crayon scratches. It made me realize — it's not fair that only our species gets this privilege. We need to be thinking about Earth's other inhabitants too, especially our best friends, dogs."
– Rand Fishkin
Before we can make progress on improving the landscape of marketing tools for dogs, we have to improve the state of content creation itself. That's why we're hereby announcing the Moz Bark-Activated InstaShot Pro tool!
We developed this sophisticated technology in-house so we could precisely meet the needs of our furry friends in the office. Each device is uniquely associated with your dog, and connects to WiFi to upload photos to the cloud.
Simply bark, upload, and watch the Likes and Hearts roll in for days. Want a taste of the kind of 10x content YOUR dog can start creating without the help of opposable thumbs? Take a look!:
Choose from your favorite filters to give your canine perspective that modern human touch!
Gratuitous pictures of breakfast, lunch, and dinner have gone to the dogs!
Duckface? Welcome to the new obsession to sweep millennial pups — dogface!
Seriously, watch out — dogs love selfies.
This whole new perspective is sure to draw tons of new followers, likes, and shares!
The device itself is sleek and beautiful. Our design team turned to the past to inspire the device of the future.
This led us to a design that seamlessly blends with all shapes, sizes, and colors. Moreover, our innovative strategy for collar customization means no dog will have to compromise to match their (probably broodingly artistic) mood on any given day.
We'll launch with our original RogerPup model, and are working on partnerships with top designer brands to innovate on iterations of future collars.
As the year progresses, keep your eyes out for improvements, integrations, and renewed focus on shaping our tools for the barketers of the world! Here's what we have in the pipeline for the coming months:
Click to open a bigger version in a new tab!
Be sure your local search barketers know what a zip code is first, though.
Our newest product will turn over an even newer leaf with cutting-edge bark-to-speech software!
The possibilities are as limitless as an off-leash dog park!
We're confident this is only the beginning, and we can't wait to see what the future holds as we continue to evolve our business model to meet the avid marketing demands of our furry comrades.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Access to the latest in internet marketing news is available right at your fingertips through the Weekly Measure! Each week we collect articles relevant to content marketing, paid search, social media, search engine optimization and link building news for your convenience. We also include a continually updated list of upcoming national and international internet marketing conferences. Keep current with industry news every week by following the Weekly Measure and never be in the dark when it comes to industry knowledge.
Rohan Ayyar lamented on clickbait headlines in an article on Marketing Insider Group. Ayyer identifies several examples of clickbait and discusses the negative effects the trend has on both readers and writers of content.
In a follow up to her article on the technical aspects of PPC landing page images on the Clix Marketing blog, Andrea Taylor wrote about the more artistic side of choosing the correct images for these pages. Taylor lists seven tips such as using photos of people when possible, the power of mascots, and remaining consistent.
Mike O’Brien published a glossary of ad buying key terms and acronyms on Search Engine Watch. The glossary is separated into three sections that cover terms and phrases that come up before, during and after the buying experience.
Lindsay Kolowich wrote about expanding social reach on Hubspot. Her article examines the best social networks to share content on, the best days to publish content, the most popular words to include in content, and the major thought leaders for eleven different industries.
Travis Lull posted on the Twitter blog about Twitter’s new universal website tag. Lull explains how the tag works, its performance in beta testing, and how users can get started using it.
Aimee Beck wrote an article on The SEM Post about writing proper meta data for search results and CTRs. She quickly defines meta data before moving on to how to improve SERP CTR and the recipe behind strong SEO titles and meta descriptions.
On Search Engine Land, Julie Joyce talked about improper outreach for manual link building. Joyce goes through seven examples of the worst outreach attempts and what lessons can be taken from them.
Barrie Smith explored link building strategies for small businesses in 2016 on Search Engine People. He dives into how SMBs can use assets, PR and relationships to build links relevant to desired keywords.
Posted by DavidPierce
[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]
Technology makes it easier than ever to learn about people and the world around you. Despite significant progress, however, the tech community has left a gaping hole unaddressed: the tools available to our dogs to engage in social media marketing are completely unsatisfactory.
UpDog is our new company-wide initiative to bring the benefits of human social media marketing to the canine world. If you haven't noticed, we love dogs here at Moz.
A photo posted by Moz (@moz_hq) on Aug 26, 2015 at 1:01pm PDT
We're uniquely positioned to hear and empathize with the needs of our aspiring barketers. Now that we have finished our second-quarter planning, we're ecstatic to share that the future is looking up for dogs! We intend to strategically fold canine marketing tools into all of our platforms.
Feeling skeptical? Not sure this is right for your social media barketing strategy? Well, check out what Moz's founder has to say:
"Every day, when I walk to work, hop on a plane, or speak at a conference, I see them. Thousands of humans, buried in their phones, swiping for hours through potential dating partners or friends' baby photos or short videos surrounded by crayon scratches. It made me realize — it's not fair that only our species gets this privilege. We need to be thinking about Earth's other inhabitants too, especially our best friends, dogs."
– Rand Fishkin
Before we can make progress on improving the landscape of marketing tools for dogs, we have to improve the state of content creation itself. That's why we're hereby announcing the Moz Bark-Activated InstaShot Pro tool!
We developed this sophisticated technology in-house so we could precisely meet the needs of our furry friends in the office. Each device is uniquely associated with your dog, and connects to WiFi to upload photos to the cloud.
Simply bark, upload, and watch the Likes and Hearts roll in for days. Want a taste of the kind of 10x content YOUR dog can start creating without the help of opposable thumbs? Take a look!:
Choose from your favorite filters to give your canine perspective that modern human touch!
Gratuitous pictures of breakfast, lunch, and dinner have gone to the dogs!
Duckface? Welcome to the new obsession to sweep millennial pups — dogface!
Seriously, watch out — dogs love selfies.
This whole new perspective is sure to draw tons of new followers, likes, and shares!
The device itself is sleek and beautiful. Our design team turned to the past to inspire the device of the future.
This led us to a design that seamlessly blends with all shapes, sizes, and colors. Moreover, our innovative strategy for collar customization means no dog will have to compromise to match their (probably broodingly artistic) mood on any given day.
We'll launch with our original RogerPup model, and are working on partnerships with top designer brands to innovate on iterations of future collars.
As the year progresses, keep your eyes out for improvements, integrations, and renewed focus on shaping our tools for the barketers of the world! Here's what we have in the pipeline for the coming months:
Click to open a bigger version in a new tab!
Be sure your local search barketers know what a zip code is first, though.
Our newest product will turn over an even newer leaf with cutting-edge bark-to-speech software!
The possibilities are as limitless as an off-leash dog park!
We're confident this is only the beginning, and we can't wait to see what the future holds as we continue to evolve our business model to meet the avid marketing demands of our furry comrades.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Is your content a mess?
It might be high quality (it might not be), but that doesn’t mean that it’s organized.
It also doesn’t mean that you’re producing all of the right kind of content that your readers want to see.
Most online businesses that use content marketing have weaknesses in their content.
Either the content isn’t performing as well as it could be, or they’re missing content on certain topics and keywords altogether.
And this includes good businesses too, so don’t feel bad if you don’t think your content marketing is quite as good as it could be.
Instead, recognize that this is an opportunity to further improve your content marketing processes.
So, how do you find these weaknesses?
As you may have guessed, you find them with a content audit.
A content audit helps you assess your current content as well as shape your future content strategy.
In this post, I’m going to show you a 5-step content audit that you can follow (although there are many other effective content audit processes).
The first thing you need to do is take stock of what you have.
You’ll want to compile a list of URLs and put them in a spreadsheet.
If you have a small site, you can do this manually, but otherwise I suggest you use software like Screaming Frog to generate a list.
The free version will crawl up to 500 links on a site, so as long as your site is small, you’ll be fine. Otherwise, you’ll want the premium version, which is worth the investment for any serious marketer.
Enter a starting URL in the text bar at the top of the tool, and press Start:
You can’t configure the options in the free mode, but the defaults should be fine.
When it’s done, set the filter to HTML, and export the results.
From this list, you’ll want to keep all the URLs with a status code of “200.”
If you find that you’re missing a lot of URLs, which is possible if your internal linking isn’t great, you can use another option like a sitemap generator.
If you use the tool I just linked to, enter your starting URL again, and the tool will crawl up to 500 pages:
You can then copy the results and paste them into a spreadsheet. You might have to clean them up a little, but it will work.
Now that you have a good idea about what you have, it’s time to figure out how it’s performing.
Just because you have an article about “SEO for cats,” which is a topic you wanted to cover, doesn’t mean that the article is getting traffic or doing anything with the traffic it gets.
Content that is underperforming is going to be the first main weakness that we’ll identify.
Below is a list of metrics that you might want to collect. Add a column to your spreadsheet for each one. Feel free to add any others that you care about:
If you plan on doing multiple content audits or you’re working on a very big site, doing all this manually would be crazy.
Some of it is easy to do all at once, like collecting numbers from Screaming Frog.
But all the other actions can also be done in bulk (and automated) with a little technical know-how.
Hire a programmer to build you a simple tool that pulls all this data from different APIs, and it will save you hours of work.
We’ll take a step away from your actual content for this part and instead focus on your target audience.
This step consists of two parts.
Part #1 – Identify your reader: It’s a basic rule for any marketing – create things that your target audience is interested in.
It applies to social media marketing, content marketing, SEO…and so on.
But in order to do that, you first need to determine who your reader is.
Refer to this section of one of my ultimate guides if you need help doing this.
Part #2 – Determine what they’re interested in: Now, you can start to learn and understand what they’re interested in.
You figure that out by researching demographics (age, gender, etc.) and psychographics (what they believe in).
Here’s a good introductory guide that will walk you through the most important demographics and psychographics.
Once you’ve done that, you should have a fleshed out reader avatar.
Part #3 – Use those interests to identify topics and keywords: Once you have a pretty good understanding of your target audience (be as specific as possible with everything), it’s time to translate that to content.
A good place to start is to use basic keyword research tools.
After that, use these advanced keyword research methods to find even more keywords and topic ideas.
You should record all of these keyword and topic ideas in another spreadsheet, complete with any search volume data they have.
Note that you are not limited to just these topics for content. From your knowledge of the reader, you might be able to know that they’d be interested in something that can’t be searched for.
You can still add these topics to the list; you’ll just have to get traffic for them from sources other than search engines.
Now we have two spreadsheets:
It’s time to look at them together.
Area #1 – See which content you’re missing altogether: This has to be done manually and will take quite a bit of time.
Start by pairing up those keyword and content ideas to the content you already have.
Essentially, you’re copying the entire row from the first sheet that we made and pasting it right beside the keyword it matches.
Here’s a small snapshot of what it might look like:
What you’ll find at the end of it, in almost all cases, is that for some of the content/keyword ideas, you don’t have any matching content.
That’s a clear problem: you have a gap.
Obviously, you’ll need to fill these gaps, but we’ll get to that later.
Area #2 – See which content is not performing: I mentioned this briefly before. If your current content isn’t generating any traffic, it’s about as useful as if it was missing altogether.
That’s not good enough.
The challenge here is to identify this underperforming content.
Unfortunately, there’s no specific formula I can give you here.
It comes down to what you consider good. For some sites, getting 200 visitors a month to a piece of content is horrible, while for others, that’s great.
On top of the absolute amount of traffic your content gets, you want to consider two other main factors:
If a page is ranking in positions #4-10, it’s not getting much traffic.
However, with some extra work, you could easily get it to rank in the top 3 and get more traffic.
But you also have to consider if it’s worth the effort.
If the keyword gets a few thousand searches a month, it probably is. If it gets 20? Probably not.
At this point, you just want to highlight which content isn’t getting much traffic.
Next, we’re going to bring it all together.
The final step is to create a content strategy that will address all the weaknesses that have been identified up until this point.
And it requires a lot of manual work and careful consideration.
Step #1 – Create a column for action: It’s time to add another column to your spreadsheet.
I suggest adding it to the very beginning.
In this column, you’ll add a final label reflecting the corresponding action you want to take on it.
Again, choose any labels you want, but you could use these ones if you’d like:
You’ll need to go through each idea, one by one, to do this.
Step #2 – Create a column for priority: There’s one final column you need to make. Put it right next to the action column.
Some gaps are bigger than others.
It makes sense to fill those big gaps first and get to the smallest ones only when you have time.
Here, you’re going to assign each action (other than “leave”) a priority from 1-10 (10 being the highest).
You need to factor in those things we looked at like potential for SEO traffic.
If a piece of content has the potential to generate a ton of new traffic, it gets a high priority and should be edited or created as soon as possible.
Finally, create an action list: Now that your sheet is filled out, sort all the actions based on their priorities.
Then, plan your content marketing goals, tasks, and resources so that you can start filling in these gaps one by one, in order of priority.
No collection of content is ever “complete”—there will always be some gaps.
Conduct a content audit on a regular basis, and identify your biggest weaknesses.
It’s a ton of work and leads to even more work (taking action on your results), but it is an extremely effective way to consistently improve the results from your content marketing.
This can get a little overwhelming if you haven’t done a content audit before, so if you’re confused about any of this, leave me a question below.
