Episode 33: Best of Rand Fiskhin’s exclusive SEO Dinner

welcome to om report by andrei alper your interview focus podcast on topics from online marketing to internet startups eight irrational biases well i think they're irrational that i think hold back a lot of online marketers first bias is that this idea that ranking is all that counts click-through rate is biased by a lot more things than just ranking position it is true that right generally speaking a higher ranking is well correlated with getting more clicks more traffic but in fact

star ratings review price right rel author the author photos date of publication video snippet all of these things influence click-through rate actually one of my uh one of the most fascinating things that influences click-through rate is something that being discovered in a study that they performed and what they saw was that one of the biggest biases that people have is by looking at the domain right essentially people have a brand an idea of what a brand

should be and what it delivers and those brand associations will make people click more often if we go away from ranking for a second we can start by at least thinking about great snippets great titles great uh urls great meta descriptions all that kind of stuff so this this is from a search for 3d printing obviously oh if you see that in the search results would you ever click it no way first off it's a pdf like

god forbid i ever have to load a pdf it just takes forever and i despise them i i'm never i'm never going to click that but but second off i mean the url looks sketchy at best this tells me nothing about what's on the page that tells me nothing about what's on the page this sucks doesn't matter if it's ranking number one i'm not gonna click useless this is excellent on the other hand right 3d printing shapeways in the

future of personal products oh interesting now i can learn a lot more about 3d printing and who's in the market and what's going on and 3d bridging was the potential to revelation how where and where and when goods are manufactured but it isn't the technology alone that's new it's not what is that right not only is the snippet telling me something about the page it's also enticing me to make the click if you're not thinking about your

snippets in seo the same way you're thinking about ads in adwords on facebook wherever it's crazy the interesting right the interesting part about this is if you have a video you can use a variety of different video hosting providers right so you could use um say vimeo or wistia what you can't use is youtube youtube won't give you that video xml sitemap if you use another video provider you can get that in there again great way to bias your click-through

rate so we have had at moz we had uh position one two and three for for a popular search term um i can't recall what it was now but position three had the video snippet and it got more clicks than one and two combined for a lot of specialized forms of content recipes being a great example local being another example news being a great example images right you can get a lot of markup extra markup product search right google product

search you can get a lot of extra markup that will again help increase your click-through rate this is snippet optimization which is a type of seo that for some reason is an afterthought only done after we do rankings it doesn't make doesn't make any sense to me i'd rather be uh number six number seven and have a phenomenal snippet because you know what'll happen over time if i have a better snippet than the guys two three four positions above me i

will start to move up right google is using user and usage data they're using click through rate they're using pogo sticking right all of these things to determine who should rank ahead and so over time if you're getting more of that traffic more of those click-throughs you're going to be earning more links you're going to be earning more of those signals bias number two all that matters in seo of course is just the money keywords you

know as you as you move up here it gets a lot more competitive but it also gets a lot less intentional right the people who are performing a search for wordpress hosting are vast and varied and many of them are not going to sign up for a particular product the people who are searching for fastest wordpress hosting well they know exactly what they want and so if i'm you know jason cohen from wp engine that's what i really want to rank for

one of the big keys to successes that we've seen for particularly for the long tail because the long tail is not it is not simple to research the key word volume in the long tail or to find the the topics and the keyword phrases that people are searching for in the long tail and so what we've seen that works best is regular content production and user generated content and and in fact pairing up those two can work really well so if you are

seeing for example um in social media discussion topic on your own site in the comments uh or in a forum a discussion topic and something is getting hot that's the time to write about bias number three we go to the average tool we're like well that's all i need i don't need any what else do i need oh look at that old adverse tool i used to love oh nose like the new one's not actually that terrible

you can figure out some cool stuff with that with keyword planner but uh idea is bunk google news is another big one so if you're not yet using google news for keyword research this is an area where if you know your sector broadly you can do that in google news or you can perform searches bias number four well the only place i would ever do seo right is my own website why would i do seo for

somebody else a lot of the time there are other websites where if i put content on there i can actually own the rankings more easily than i could for my own site so google has talked recently about like hey don't do guest posting right to to build links or exclusively to build links i would still do a lot of guest posting if i thought that i could better own search engine real estate by posting on someone else's site

dominating serps this is you know again something that that we really like to do at moz and i think a lot of folks who have essentially some proprietary claim to a keyword or really want to own that keyword real estate they can't just do it with their own site but you know i get mark collier from open algorithm writing about domain authority i get you know the video results i have distilled right about like now i can

really own all of the search real estate around us bias number five all i have to do write social media right i produce some content then i just share it on social and i'm done easy fire and forget i see a lot of uh surprising things right so one of the big ones of course being that timing matters a lot and you'll see a lot of social articles about how timing matters the thing that i don't i urge you not to

do is to read an article that says the best time to share is at you know 9 00 am greenwich mean time that's like the average for the whole planet right that does not apply to you which comes via my my followerwonk account is much more accurate and facebook does this inside what's facebook's like ad insights right via facebook insights they actually show you something just like this for facebook so you can see the percent of your audience that's

online interacting at any given time which is pretty awesome 10 am i am seeing that the percent of activity is like six and a half percent so what this tells me is if i share a link you know and i have i don't know what it is like 150ish thousand followers or something on twitter right now if i share a link and i get a thousand clicks you know i used to be kind of sad about that what what the

hell man less than you know 0.1 that's just pathetic totally tragic less than one percent are seeing it but if i know that only six percent of my followers online i go oh actually i'm capturing 15 20 of the addressable audience who's online right now and by the way that's probably different people than the people who are online here and here and so if i'm not sharing multiple times i know that i'm likely missing out on my

audience social media is so temporal in nature that that this is the case now this is really true for uh twitter this is less true for google plus and facebook where plus you probably don't want to share something three four or five times maybe twice at the most bias number six seo you know as all good seo snow is just about figuring out reverse engineering the algorithm and then getting the best fit all right i used to get that the most

value when i did uh seo consulting was just making pages accessible just getting people's pages to be crawled and to be fair this is still highly useful today for a lot of websites embarrassingly and then you know building links to individual pages doing some on-page optimization creating content that people want to consume and share and optimizing metadata and schema and you know the the very few rich nimitz that did exist pre-2009 sort of around that 09 2010 2011 time stream

it really shifted right it became this world of boy the people who do content marketing really well and content strategy who build stuff that people have a natural desire to share have phenomenal return right and this is you know i think this has been a challenge for a lot of seo consultancies and agencies is that they now feel like they're overlapping with creative agencies with branding firms right with in-house marketers more so than in the past and

that's sad because i think that i think that we should be working together with those folks and in fact when it's done most effectively is when both sides of those equations come together and then still making pages accessible and optimizing building links right especially the building rather than earning process that going out and like getting links one by one or buying links or you know bribing people for links or whatever it is it can work temporarily and then it can burn down

your whole damn site and you have to spend months or years trying to get it back in the index and it's just it's not worth it anymore bias number seven increasing traffic is always hard it's always a slop it always takes a long time and a ton of effort well actually even in the age of a much more advanced google we see a bunch of stuff that's really simple that works and rei did this very simple thing right

where they improved their page speed slightly by like you know i think it was uh yeah one point minus 1.5 seconds and what did they see their crawl rate increased massively their traffic increased their user happiness increase their conversion rates increase their links per url over time increase their shares for url everything just it all got a ton better from a relatively simplistic change and a big part of that was them moving to a cdn and uh getting a great cache and

doing some uh on-page optimization site speed specific optimization mostly for their e-commerce product pages retargeting and the value that we get from retargeting is better than the value that we get from any other paid advertising channel that includes affiliate that includes paid search shockingly that includes all of our social advertising any offline advertising we do any sponsorships retargeting can very much help with that it can be like hey you remember that site with the nice looking robot that

you saw the other day all right this one most people are doing a little bit of this right sharing to their networks the one that for some reason i don't understand is people not sharing their content to google plus like that is not a hard thing to do and you realize that everything you share to google plus all the people who follow you on google plus if they ever do a search related to that even with like one or two words matching

the title your site will rank in my last bias conversion rate optimization going in a different marketing tax protect is all about testing variations of content and design right we want to see if the green button works better than the red button that's cro the challenge is like what if this is not actually our problem what if this is not causing lower conversion rates at all what if the problem is my post content what if my posts suck

and people don't want to read them then subscribing via email i can make the very best call to action in the world and people like yeah that's man i was very compelled to click that except your writing sucks and so i don't want to get that in my ear the conversion decision the things that go into a conversion decision are massively broad and incredibly complex and it is not just about the call to action specifically it's not just about your checkout

process or your button or your lander it can be you know whether people like and trust and know your brand it could be the design itself it could be their historical experiences the social proof the associations you have your price your process whether you have word of mouth the amount of pain and effort required all of these this was a few years ago now so we asked people who had never taken a free trial of mazda software we asked them well

what are you seeking from us and what brought you back what would make you more likely to sign up right so these are people who took a free trial but didn't convert we asked them well what made you take that free trial what objections did you have to taking a free trial and how did you overcome them what caused you to cancel what would you what it would have made you stay we asked the people who took the free

trial and stayed customers for a long time well what was the initial thing that made you want to try us what objections you have how do you overcome them what's been most valuable have you had success with moz and if so can we share asking these questions produced a process that totally revolutionized uh moss right and and in fact made us a tremendous amount more conversions and dollars we asked these questions for two reasons number one to gain a deep understanding

of what makes buyers buy number two determining what is it that made some qualified visitors meaning people who are just like or in a lot of ways just like the people who did buy what made them not buy and then you build your landing pages on the answer to those questions what i do is i i flip the question on his head like i'm not sure about uh germany's use of google plus yet but uh in in the us it actually has more

monthly actives than twitter right so technically google plus users uh is higher than facebook's right it's multiple billions like there's a 1.7 billion or something who are you know opted in right like through youtube through gmail all this other stuff but monthly actives is bigger than twitter bigger than linkedin bigger than pinterest second only to facebook it's either taiwan or singapore like everybody there is on google plus you know so they are they're taking off like i would

i would be shocked if um so we can't defend ourselves again you can't coming it's already here like the idea that google plus is a ghost town is just that's mythology if i share this aj will get an alert and it's not just an alert in google plus that alert will appear in his gmail in his google search in youtube you are in front of someone in a way that you can't do with twitter you can't

tweet at someone and then be inside their email you can google plus be in front of someone when they're in your email the the level of visibility that this this offers is pretty extreme right and and very powerful and so hummingbird i think hummingbird has been rolled out in very few languages so far um is it i assume it's in german we assume too we don't know so you can not much have changed you should be able to do searches to uh to

figure out right like to what extent um let's try i'll translate so basically what you'll see is you will see essentially instead of a lot of keyword matching you'll see a lot of intent matching right so like this one i mean one of my terms is in there right like that's well okay on the page but i'm just saying like you wouldn't either in the title is what you would expect to see for such a popular query and so

google generally speaking right pre hummingbird this would have been all the pages that are in the title talking about the best bank interest rates and they have anchor text pointing to those pages with you know best bank interest rates and all that kind of stuff now it's much more than trying to identify the top pages so this is the type of thing i would have expected to see this is surprising to me that's surprising to me that's surprising to me

right and and this is uh very hummingbirdish like they're where to travel in the usa in the winter like they're doing a lot more broad intent matching than sort of historic keyword matching how do you think does that happen uh so part of it is data part of it is semantic connectivity part of it uh almost certainly is search user behavior right so like what what what types of things they see people click on or what they see people

who for refining searches uh exactly and i think there's there's a lot of combinations of that data but hummingbird is a very very big powerful update hummingbird is also a you don't need to do sort of hardcore old school seo in order to rank well right we want to reward the best content not necessarily the person who keyword match best om report and andre ipa would like to thank you for your attention you can get more episodes on

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