Actually Accurate Analytics - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

Clean, useful Google Analytics data is all-important — both for you, and for the clients and colleagues that will be working on the site in the future. Ruth Burr Reedy shares her absolute best tips for getting your Analytics data accurate, consistent, and future-proof in this week's Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. I'm Ruth Burr Reedy, and I am the Vice President of Strategy at UpBuild. We're a technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics. One of the things I wanted to talk about today, Whiteboard Friday, is about analytics.

So when I talk to SEOs about analytics and ask them, "When it comes to analytics, what do you do? What do you do first? When you're taking on a new client, what do you do?" SEOs are often really eager to tell me, "I dive into the data. Here's what I look like.Here are the views that I set up. Here's how I filter things. Here's where I go to gain insights."

But what I often don't hear people talk about, that I think is a super important first step with a new client or a new Analytics account, or really any time if you haven't done it, is making sure your Analytics data is accurate and consistent. Taking the time to do some basic Analytics housekeeping is going to serve you so far into the future and even beyond your time at that given client or company.

The people who come after you will be so, so, so thankful that you did these things. So today we're going to talk about actually accurate analytics. 

Is your Analytics code on every page?

So the first question that you should ask yourself is: Is your Analytics code on every page? Is it?

Are you sure? There are a lot of different things that can contribute to your Analytics code not actually being on every single page of your website. One of them is if portions of your site have a different CMS from the main CMS that's driving your site. 

Forums, subdomains, landing pages

We see this a lot with things like subdomains, with things like forums. A really common culprit is if you're using a tool like Marketo or HubSpot or Unbounce to build landing pages, it's really easy to forget to put Analytics on those pages.

Over time those pages are out there in the world. Maybe it's just one or two pages. You're not seeing them in Analytics at all, which means you're probably not thinking about them, especially if they're old. But that doesn't mean that they don't still exist and that they aren't still getting views and visits. 

Find orphan pages

So, okay, how do we know about these pages? Well, before you do anything, it's important to remember that, because of the existence of orphan pages, you can't only rely on a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to do a crawl of your site and make sure that code is on every page, because if the crawler can't reach the page and your code is not on the page, it's kind of in an unseeable, shrouded in mystery area and we don't want that.

Export all pages

The best way, the most sure way to make sure that you are finding every page is to go to your dev team, to go to your developers and ask them to give you an export of every single URL in your database. If you're using WordPress, there's actually a really simple tool you can use. It's called Export All URLs in the grand tradition of very specifically named WordPress tools.

But depending on your CMS and how your site is set up, this is something that you can almost certainly do. I need a list of every single URL on the website, every single URL in our database. Your dev team can almost certainly do this. When you get this, what you can do, you could, if you wanted, simply load that list of URLs. You'd want to filter out things like images and make sure you're just looking at the HTML documents.

Dedupe with Screaming Frog

Once you had that, you could load that whole thing into Screaming Frog as a list. That would take a while. What you could do instead, if you wanted, is run a Screaming Frog crawl and then dedupe that with Screaming Frog. So now you've got a list of your orphan pages, and then you've got a list of all of the pages that Screaming Frog can find. So now we have a list of every single page on the website.

We can use either a combination of crawler and list or just the list, depending on how you want to do it, to run the following custom search. 

What to do in Screaming Frog

Configuration > Custom > Search

So in Screaming Frog, what you can do is you can go to Configuration and then you go to Custom Search. It will pop up a custom search field. What this will allow you to do is while the crawler is crawling, it will search for a given piece of information on a page and then fill that in a custom field within the crawler so that you can then go back and look at all of the pages that have this piece of information.

What I like to do when I'm looking for Analytics information is set up two filters actually — one for all of the pages that contain my UA identifier and one for all of the pages that don't contain it. Because if I just have a list of all the pages that contain it, I still don't know which pages don't contain it. So you can do this with your unique Google Analytics identifier.



If you're deploying Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager, instead you would look for your GTM Number, your GTM ID. So it just depends how you've implemented Analytics. You're going to be looking for one of those two numbers. Almost every website I've worked on has at least a few pages that don't have Analytics on them.

What you'll sometimes also find is that there are pages that have the code or that should have the code on them, but that still aren't being picked up. So if you start seeing these errors as you're crawling, you can use a tool like Tag Assistant to go in and see, "Okay, why isn't this actually sending information back to Google Analytics?" So that's the best way to make sure that you have code on every single page. 

Is your code in the <head> and as high as possible?

The other thing you want to take a look at is whether or not your Analytics code is in the head of every page and as close to the top of the head as possible. Now I know some of you are thinking like, "Yeah, that's Analytics implementation 101." But when you're implementing Analytics, especially if you're doing so via a plug-in or via GTM, and, of course, if you're doing it via GTM, the implementation rules for that are a little bit different, but it's really easy for over time, especially if your site is old, other things to get added to the head by other people who aren't you and to push that code down.

Now that's not necessarily the end of the world. If it's going to be very difficult or time-consuming or expensive to fix, you may decide it's not worth your time if everything seems like it's firing correctly. But the farther down that code gets pushed, the higher the likelihood that something is going to go wrong, that something is going to fire before the tracker that the tracker is not going to pick up, that something is going to fire that's going to prevent the tracker from firing.

It could be a lot of different things, and that's why the best practice is to have it as high up in the head as possible. Again, whether or not you want to fix that is up to you. 

Update your settings:

Once you've gotten your code firing correctly on every single page of your website, I like to go into Google Analytics and change a few basic settings. 

1. Site Speed Sample Rate

The first one is the Site Speed Sample Rate.

So this is when you're running site speed reports in Google Analytics. Typically they're not giving you site timings or page timings for the site as a whole because that's a lot of data. It's more data than GA really wants to store, especially in the free version of the tool. So instead they use a sample, a sample set of pages to give you page timings. I think typically it's around 1%.

That can be a very, very small sample if you don't have a lot of traffic. It can become so small that the sample size is skewed and it's not relevant. So I usually like to bump up that sample size to more like 10%. Don't do 100%. That's more data than you need. But bump it up to a number that's high enough that you're going to get relevant data.

2. Session and Campaign Timeout

The other thing that I like to take a look at when I first get my hands on a GA account is the Session and Campaign Timeout. So session timeout is basically how long somebody would have to stay on your website before their first session is over and now they've begun a new session if they come back and do something on your site where now they're not being registered as part of their original visit.

Historically, GA automatically determined session timeout at 30 minutes. But this is a world where people have a million tabs open. I bet you right now are watching this video in one of a million tabs. The longer you have a tab open, the more likely it is that your session will time out. So I like to increase that timeout to at least 60 minutes.

The other thing that Google automatically does is set a campaign timeout. So if you're using UTM parameters to do campaign tracking, Google will automatically set that campaign timeout at six months. So six months after somebody first clicks that UTM parameter, if they come back, they're no longer considered part of that same campaign.

They're now a new, fresh user. Your customer lifecycle might not be six months. If you're like a B2B or a SaaS company, sometimes your customer lifecycle can be two years. Sometimes if you're like an e-com company, six months is a really long time and you only need 30 days. Whatever your actual customer lifecycle is, you can set your campaign timeout to reflect that.

I know very few people who are actually going to make that window shorter. But you can certainly make that longer to reflect the actual lifecycle of your customers. 

3. Annotations

Then the third thing that I like to do when I go into a Google Analytics account is annotate what I can. I know a lot of SEOs, when you first get into a GA account, you're like, "Well, no one has been annotating.Ho-hum. I guess going forward, as of today, we're going to annotate changes going forward."

That's great. You should definitely be annotating changes. However, you can also take a look at overall traffic trends and do what you can to ask your coworkers or your client or whatever your relationship is to this account, "What happened here?" Do you remember what happened here? Can I get a timeline of major events in the company, major product releases, press releases, coverage in the press?

Things that might have driven traffic or seen a spike in traffic, product launches. You can annotate those things historically going back in time. Just because you weren't there doesn't mean it didn't happen. All right. So our data is complete. It's being collected the way that we want to, and we're tracking what's happening.

Account setup

Cool. Now let's talk about account setup. I have found that many, many people do not take the time to be intentional and deliberate when it comes to how they set up their Google Analytics account. It's something that just kind of happens organically over time. A lot of people are constrained by defaults. They don't really get what they're doing.

What we can do, even if this is not a brand-new GA account, is try to impose some structure, order, consistency, and especially some clarity, not only for ourselves as marketers, but for anybody else who might be using this GA account either now or in the future. So starting out with just your basic GA structure, you start with your account.

Your Account Name is usually just your company name. It doesn't totally matter what your Account Name is. However, if you're working with a vendor, I know they'd prefer that it be your company name as opposed to something random that only makes sense to you internally, because that's going to make it easier for them. But if you don't care about that, you could conceivably name your account whatever you want. Most of the time it is your company name.

Then you've got your property, and you might have various properties. A good rule of thumb is that you should have one property per website or per group of sites with the same experience. So if you have one experience that goes on and off of a subdomain, maybe you have mysite.com and then you also have store.mysite.com, but as far as the user experience is concerned it's one website, that could be one property.

That's kind of where you want to delineate properties is based on site experiences. Then drilling down to views, you can have as many views as you want. When it comes to naming views, the convention that I like to use is to have the site or section name that you're tracking in that specific view and then information about how that view is set up and how it's intending to be used.

Don't assume that you're going to remember what you were doing last year a year from now. Write it down. Make it clear. Make it easy for people who aren't you to use. You can have as many views as you want. You can set up views for very small sections of your site, for very specific and weird filters if there are some customizations you want to do. You can set up as many views as you need to use.

Must-have views

1. Raw data - Unfiltered, Don't Touch

But I think there are three views that you should make sure you have. The first is a Raw Data view. This is a view with no filters on it at all. If you don't already have one of these, then all of your data in the past is suspect. Having a view that is completely raw and unfiltered means if you do something to mess up the filtering on all your other views, you at least have one source of total raw data.

I know this is not new information for SEOs when it comes to GA account setup, but so many people don't do it. I know this because I go into your accounts and I see that you don't have it. If you don't have it, set it up right now. Pause this video. Go set it up right now and then come back and watch the rest, because it's going to be good. In addition to naming it "Raw Data Unfiltered," I like to also add something like "Don't Touch" or "For Historical Purposes Only," if you're not into the whole brevity thing, something that makes it really clear that not only is this the raw data, but also no one should touch it.

This is not the data we're using. This is not the data we're make decisions by. This is just our backup. This is our backup data. Don't touch it. 

2. Primary view - Filtered, Use This One

Then you're going to want to have your Primary view. So however many views you as a marketer set up, there are going to be other people in your organization who just kind of want the data.

So pick a view that's your primary filtered view. You're going to have a lot of your basic filters on this, things like filtering out your internal IP range, filtering out known bots. You might set up some filtering to capture the full hostname if you're tracking between subdomains, things like that. But it's your primary view with basic filtering. You're going to want to name that something like "Use This One."

Sometimes if there's like one person and they won't stop touching your raw data, you can even say like, "Nicole Use This One." Whatever you need to label it so that even if you got sick and were in the hospital and unreachable, you won the lottery, you're on an island, no one can reach you, people can still say, "Which of these 17 views that are set up should I use? Oh, perhaps it's the one called 'Use This One.'" It's a clue. 

3. Test view - Unfiltered

Then I like to always have at least one view that is a Test view. That's usually unfiltered in its base state. But it's where I might test out filters or custom dimensions or other things that I'm not ready to roll out to the primary view. You may have additional views on top of those, but those are the three that, in my opinion, you absolutely need to have.

4. All Website Data

What you should not have is a view called "All Website Data." "All Website Data" is what Google will automatically call a view when you're first setting up GA. A lot of times people don't change that as they're setting up their Analytics. The problem with that is that "All Website Data" means different things to different people. For some people, "All Website Data" means the raw data.

For some people, "All Website Data" means that this is the "Use This One" view. It's unclear. If I get into a GA account and I see that there is a view named "All Website Data," I know that this company has not thought about how they're setting up views and how they're communicating that internally. Likely there's going to be some filtering on stuff that shouldn't have been filtered, some historical mishmash.

It's a sign that you haven't taken the time to do it right. In my opinion, a good SEO should never have a view called "All Website Data." All right. Great. So we've got our views set up. Everything is configured the way that we want it. How that's configured may be up to you, but we've got these basic tenets in place.

Goals

Let's talk about goals. Goals are really interesting. I don't love this about Google Analytics, but goals are forever. Once you set a goal in GA, information that is tracked to that number or that goal number within that goal set will always be tracked back to that. What that means is that say you have a goal that's "Blue Widget Sales" and you're tracking blue widget sales.

Goals are forever

Over time you discontinue the blue widget and now you're only tracking red widget sales. So you rename the "Blue Widget Sales" widget to now it's called "Red Widget Sales." The problem is renaming the goal doesn't change the goal itself. All of that historical blue widget data will still be associated with that goal. Unless you're annotating carefully, you may not have a good idea of when this goal switched from tracking one thing to be tracking another thing.

This is a huge problem when it comes to data governance and making decisions based on historical data. 

The other problem is you have a limited number of goals. So you need to be really thoughtful about how you set up your goals because they're forever. 

Set goals based on what makes you money

A basic rule is that you should set goals based on what makes you money.

You might have a lot of micro conversions. You might have things like newsletter sign-ups or white paper downloads or things like that. If those things don't make you money, you might want to track those as events instead. More on that in a minute. Whatever you're tracking as a goal should be related to how you make money. Now if you're a lead gen biz, things like white paper downloads may still be valuable enough that you want to track them as a goal.

It just depends on your business. Think about goals as money. What's the site here to do? When you think about goals, again, remember that they're forever and you don't get that many of them. 

Group goals efficiently

So any time you can group goals efficiently, take some time to think about how you're going to do that. If you have three different forms and they're all going to be scheduling a demo in some way or another, but they're different forms, is there a way that you can have one goal that's "Schedule a Demo" and then differentiate between which form it was in another way?

Say you have an event category that's "Schedule a Demo" and then you use the label to differentiate between the forms. It's one goal that you can then drill down. A classic mistake that I see with people setting up goals is they have the same goal in different places on the website and they're tracking that differently. When I say, "Hey, this is the same goal and you're tracking it in three different places," they often say, "Oh, well, that's because we want to be able to drill down into that data."

Great. You can do that in Google Analytics. You can do that via Google Analytics reporting. You can look at what URLs and what site sections people completed a given goal on. You don't have to build that into the goal. So try to group as efficiently as possible and think long term. If it at any time you're setting up a goal that you know is someday going to be part of a group of goals, try to set it up in such a way that you can add to that and then drill down into the individual reports rather than setting up new goals, because those 20 slots go quick.

Name goals clearly

The other thing you're going to want to do with goals and with everything — this is clearly the thesis for my presentation — is name them clearly. Name them things where it would be impossible not to understand exactly what it is. Don't name your goal "Download." Don't name your goal "Thank You Page."

Name your goal something specific enough that people can look at it at a glance. Even people who don't work there right now, people in the future, the future people can look at your goals and know exactly what they were. But again, name them not so specifically that you can't then encompass that goal wherever it exists on the site. So "Download" might be too broad.

"Blue Widget White Paper Download" might be too specific. "White Paper Download" might be a good middle ground there. Whatever it is for you, think about how you're going to name it in such a way that it'll make sense to somebody else, even if you don't work there anymore and they can't ask you. Now from talking about goals it kind of segues naturally into talking about events, event tracking.

Events

Event tracking is one of the best things about Google Analytics now. It used to be that to track an event you had to add code directly to a page or directly to a link. That was hard to do at scale and difficult to get implemented alongside conflicting dev possibilities. But now, with Google Tag Manager, you can track as many events as you want whenever you want to do them.

You can set them up all by yourself, which means that now you, as the marketer, as the Analytics person, become the person who is in charge of Google Analytics events. You should take that seriously, because the other side of that coin is that it's very possible to get event creep where now you're tracking way too many events and you're tracking them inefficiently and inconsistently in ways that make it difficult to extract insights from them on a macro level.

What do you want and why?

So with events, think about what you want and why. Any time somebody is like, "I want to track this," ask them, "Okay, what are we going to do with that information?" If they're like, "I don't know. I just want to know it." That might not be a good case to make to track an event. Understand what you're going to do with the data. Resist the urge to track just for tracking's sake.

Resist data for data's sake. I know it's hard, because data is cool, but try your best. 

Naming conventions

As you take over, now that you are the person in charge of events, which you are, you're taking this on, this is yours now, develop naming conventions for your events and then become the absolute arbiter of those conventions. Do not let anybody name anything unless it adheres to your conventions.

Category

Now how you name things is up to you. Some suggestions, for category, I like that to be the site section that something is in or maybe the item type. So maybe it's product pages. Maybe it's forms. Maybe it's videos. However you are going to group these events on a macro level, that should be your category.

Action

The action is the action. So that's click, submit, play, whatever the action is doing. 

Label

Then the label is where I like to get unique and make sure that I'm drilling down to just this one thing. So maybe that's where I'll have the actual CTA of the button, or which form it was that people filled out, or what product it was that they purchased. Again, think about information that you can get from other reports.

So for example, you don't need to capture the URL that the event was recorded on as part of the label, because you can actually go in and look at all of your events by URL and see where that happened without having to capture it in that way. The important thing is that you have rules, that those rules are something that you can communicate to other people, and that they would then be able to name their own categories, actions, and labels in ways that were consistent with yours.

Over time, as you do this and as you rename old events, you're going to have a more and more usable body of data. You're going to be increasingly comparing apples to apples. You're not going to have some things where Click is the action and some things where Click is the label, or things that should be in one category that are in two or three categories. Over time you're going to have a much more usable and controllable body of event data.

Be consistent

Then you need to be ruthless about consistency with usage of these naming conventions. There will be no just setting up an event real quick. Or, in fact, there will be just setting up an event real quick, but it will be using these rules that you have very thoroughly outlined and communicated to everybody, and that you are then checking up to make sure everything is still tracking the same way. A big thing to watch for when you're being ruthless about consistency is capitalization.

Capitalization in category action and label and event tracking will come back as two different things. Capital "C" and lowercase "c" category are two different things. So make sure as you're creating new events that you have some kind of standardization. Maybe it's the first letter is always capitalized. Maybe it's nothing is ever capitalized.

It doesn't matter what it is as long as it's all the same. 

Think about the future!

Then think about the future. Think about the day when you win the lottery and you move to a beautiful island in the middle of the sea and you turn off your phone and you never think about Google Analytics again and you're lying in the sand and no one who works with you now can reach you. If you never came back to work again, could the people who work there continue the tracking work that you've worked so hard to set up?

If not, work harder to make sure that's the case. Create documentation. Communicate your rules. Get everybody on the same page. Doing so will make this whole organization's data collection better, more actionable, more usable for years to come. If you do come back to work tomorrow, if in fact you work here for the next 10 years, you've just set yourself up for success for the next decade.

Congratulations. So these are the things that I like to do when I first get into a GA account. Obviously, there are a lot of other things that you can do in GA. That's why we all love GA so much. 

Homework

But to break it down and give you all some homework that you can do right now.

Check for orphan pages

Tonight, go in and check for orphan pages.

When it comes to Analytics, those might be different or they might be the same as orphan pages in the traditional sense. Make sure your code is on every page. 

Rename confusing goals and views (and remove unused ones)

Rename all your confusing stuff. Remove the views that you're not using. Turn off the goals that you're not using. Make sure everything is as up to date as possible. 

Guard your raw data

Don't let anybody touch that raw data. Rename it "Do Not Touch" and then don't touch it. 

Enforce your naming conventions

Create them. Enforce them. Protect them. They're yours now.

You are the police of naming conventions. 

Annotate everything

Annotate as much as you can. Going forward you're going to annotate all the time, because you can because you're there, but you can still go back in time and annotate. 

Remove old users

One thing that I didn't really talk about today but you should also do, when it comes to the general health of your Analytics, is go in and check who has user permissions to all of your different Analytics accounts.

Remove old users. Take a look at that once a quarter. Just it's good governance to do. 

Update sampling and timeouts

Then you're going to update your sampling and your timeouts. If you can do all of these things and check back in on them regularly, you're going to have a healthy, robust, and extremely usable Analytics ecosystem. Let me know what your favorite things to do in Analytics are. Let me know how you're tracking events in GTM.

I want to hear all about everything you all are doing in Analytics. So come holler at me in the comments. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Economics of Link Building

Posted by Alex-T

Life has taught me that good things should be expensive — especially when it comes to any type of digital marketing services. If you’re not an expert, you can end up getting something far from what you’ve been expecting.

Here’s an example of “the best mascot image you can get for your event” that I paid for when organizing one of our first Digital Olympus events:

Just for reference, this is how our mascot looked originally:

My point is, just like working with freelance designers, hiring SEO consultants is only safe when you know exactly what you need and can control every step of the contract. This both relates to the scope or work and the price of contract.

I get really confused when I hear that the price of an average SEO agency contract starts at $1k USD. This number was first shared by Rand Fishkin in 2012 when he asked 600 agencies about their typical rates. Later, in 2018, that same number was published by Ahrefs when they did a similar survey.

As an SEO practitioner, I’m a bit disappointed with the stability of rates, but what bothers me the most is that this rate doesn’t really include link building. I can hardly imagine a successful SEO campaign for an SMB site without acquiring links. To back up my statement with some numbers, I’d like to mention Ross Hudgens' claim that acquiring a good link on a top-notch site should cost $1k USD. Ironically, that’s the whole budget of an average SEO contract.

But to be honest, I don’t quite agree with those rates even though I truly respect the opinion. It doesn’t seem that realistic at scale: if you want to build 10 links, it would cost you $10k, a hundred links, $100k etc. That’s just plain impossible for the majority of companies. Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to work with those rates, but I can hardly imagine a business willing to pay one hundred thousand dollars for one hundred links. And to be completely fair, in some niches even a hundred links won’t move the needle.

See for yourself. Here’s one of our clients who thought that 100 links would help them:

And here’s what’s been going on with their organic traffic coming back to their blog from the links that we built:

To give you some context for their SEO situation, this client also wanted to rank for keywords related to link building. Below you can see one of my favorite examples of how fierce the competition is in the niche where people want to rank for such a generic term as “link building”:

This screenshot is screaming a simple fact out loud: you need to have at least 2,000 referring domains to outrank the pages that are currently in the top. Remember the link building rates that I’ve just named? How much would such work be worth? Looks like you might need a new round of investments if a rate per link remains at $1k USD.

Now, look, I feel for you. Link building should be affordable for SMB sites because what’s the point in getting into it if the game’s been fixed to begin with? In this post, I’ll show you that link building shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, and even a small site can do it with enough dedication put into solving the issue. I’ll walk you through some of the most popular link building strategies and explain why some of them aren’t economically attractive. And I’ll explain the costs of certain options (or in other words, why the hell does your link builder charge you so much?) and show you what benefits they can offer your business.

Link building landscape: Email outreach strategy to rule them all

Some time ago, I had quite a long flight to Bali where I was speaking at the DMMS conference. I had a chance to watch a few movies including Tolkien, who was among my favorite authors growing up. Sadly, the movie had a weak plot that doesn’t really begin to explain how Tolkien came to invent his own language. However, it did bring up something to do with link building, believe it or not. Connections that you build throughout your life impact you a great deal. Put “your site” in place of “you” in the last sentence and voilá — here’s my point. If you follow the wrong path, you’ll surround yourself with bad connections (and, using my link building metaphor, bad links).

I’m always keen to discuss things from a philosophical point of view, but let’s get practical for a moment. How can you build high-quality links that will bring the best SEO results and will still be affordable?

Even though there are tons of link building strategies, on a general note, you can narrow them down to a few:

Links that are acquired through email outreach 

First of all, let’s clear up on the terminology. I see any strategy that includes sending emails to other websites to negotiate the possibility of getting a link as email outreach. For instance, such well-known strategies as broken link building, building links through guest posting, scraping SERPs and then pitching your content to those sites, and many others. That’s all email outreach because they all involve pitching something to someone through emails. The only way in which some of those strategies are different from the others is that they require some sort of written content. For example, guest posting requires you to write a post — that’s obvious. This significantly increases the costs of work, and here we are, approaching the above-mentioned number of 1k USD. To be honest, guest posting is not my favorite strategy due to many limitations that it has (I’ll share them with you later in this post, so keep reading!)

Links from digital PR campaigns 

Even though this strategy also relies on sending emails, your recipients aren’t website owners but journalists. So, this strategy is quite harder to execute. They require newsworthy content, you should have the necessary connections, be able to pitch it to the journos etc. etc. Also, digital PR campaigns always cost 10X more than any traditional email outreach campaign. That’s just because they bring links from media outlets that have not only great SEO value, but also let your brand connect with a broader audience.

Paid links

I don’t like these types of links and I don’t recommend anyone to try to acquire them. But I feel that I can’t skip this point as, in reality, paid links are in high demand. Some marketers are always trying to find the shortcut and look for sites that sell links.

There aren't too many options out there when it comes to link building. Let me show you how some of the listed options aren’t economically right or simply won’t bring any solid SEO boost.

What are the pros and cons of each strategy?

Below you’ll find a quick sum-up of the most significant pros and cons of each strategy. It’s important to mention that here, at my agency, we only build links through email outreach as I believe it is by far the most cost-effective strategy. As of links built through digital PR, I used to do that, but in my experience, the results were not quite worth their significant costs.

Paid links

Let’s start with the tricky option — paid links. Here I’m talking about the links that you can purchase through sponsored content and that won’t be labeled with a special tag. I’m not going to talk about the ethical side of this strategy, as that would require a separate post. I just want to state that I know tons of sites that do it.

Pros:

• It’s very fast. You can build as many links as you’d like. The only limitation is your budget.

Cons:

• Sites that sell links do it at scale. At some point, they will be penalized by Google.
• Consequently, if those links are risky, you’ll have to disavow them some time later.
• Most likely there will be a tiny number of sites with exceptionally high domain ratings.

Digital PR link building

A few years ago, I was one of the biggest digital PR fans around, but time passed, and now I clearly see what kind of limitations this approach bears. Digital PR is an essential part of the promotion strategy for businesses that have recently established their brand and want to build trust with their audience. Plus, links from media outlets will automatically give Google’s a signal that your site is a trustworthy business. The only downside is that the majority of businesses don’t have a big fat budget for a proper digital PR campaign. Here’s a good post from Gisele Navarro that shares some extra angles on why brands do and don’t need digital PR.

Pros:

• Getting links from media outlets will eventually grow your domain authority and give Google enough reasons to believe that your brand is trustworthy.
• They make your brand more visible to a broader audience.
• Showing to your potential clients that your brand was featured in The New York Times or on BBC is cool. Like, really cool.

Cons:

• It’s very, very expensive. The costs for an average digital PR campaign start from $30k–$40k USD.
• This strategy requires specific content which is why it gets so pricey.
• It takes a few months to build such links — to ideate and execute the campaign, gather attention, get coverage, etc.
• The price per link is very high. Normally it revolves around $1k USD.

Email outreach link building

I believe this to be the best link building strategy that fits nearly every business’ needs, especially if your goal is to start getting traffic to already existing pages. And to top it off, its cost per link is affordable even for small and medium-sized businesses.

Pros:

• You can build links to nearly any page (including your commercial pages).
• The price per link doesn’t go through the roof (it varies from $100 to $500 USD depending on the referring site’s domain quality)
• A lot of link building agencies even allow you to buy one link (however, we aren’t within that tier as we prefer quality over quantity).
• It allows you to build relationships with your industry peers.
• It makes your brand more visible to your target audience.
• It helps you get links from top-notch industry sites.

Cons:

• Requires some special skills and knowledge (an average email has only an 8.5% open rate which makes it quite a hard practice).
• Such links can’t be built overnight. However, the time they take is less than the PR-based links.
• Such links have some hidden reputational risks (if you do it the wrong way, sending tons of outreach emails = being potentially seen as a spammer).

To sum it up, there are many reasons to believe that link building through email outreach is your to-go strategy if your main goal is to get more organic traffic from Google. The next big question is how many links you need and what it's going to cost you.

How to estimate the number of links you need

A few weeks ago, I was lucky to listen to Robbie Richards’ speech at the DMSS conference where he confirmed my link building formula. If you’re competing with a site with similar on-site characteristics (both sites are https, mobile-friendly, fast, Google considers them both a brand plus a few other factors) then, in order to outrank it in search, you need to keep in mind only two factors*:

• Your domain’s authority should be circa the same number as of the pages that you want to outrank;
• You should have the same or a bit more referring domains compared to the pages that currently outrank you.

*In particular cases, internal linking plays a huge role. Not that long ago, my good friend Joe Williams published a great post where he goes into more detail on the topic.

This formula might vary based on your estimated domain authority (DA) or on your domain rating (DR). If you have a higher domain score than the pages that you want to outrank, then you’ll just need fewer links. But if your DR is lower, you’ll need significantly more links, and that’s something you need to account for.

Here’s some context: let’s take a look at my own site. Digital Olympus is not doing very well in the SERPs because of its DR. On average, all sites that are ranking for search queries related to email outreach have a domain rating of 70–80, while our own site is only 56. So, this means that we need at least two times more links referring to our pages in comparison to the sites that are above us in search. For instance, to get this page to the top of search results for “email outreach,” we need to build around 200 links. As you can see from a screenshot below, the rest of the URLs have 100+ links, so we need to double that number to stand a chance:

Another approach to this situation would require us to calculate how many links we need to get the overall domain rating of 70. That’s around 250 links from sites with DR higher than 30 (I don’t consider sites that have smaller DR of good quality).

Once you know the necessary number of links to build, you should decide whether you’re capable of doing it on your own. I’m not trying to convince you to hire an agency, but if you’ve never done link building, it’s going to take around a year to set up the process and start building from 10–20 links a month, realistically speaking.

I don’t want to demotivate you, but such tasks are truly skill-demanding. A few years ago, I could barely build several links per month. So, if you have a budget and need links right away, it makes sense to hire someone to help you. The main reason why our clients hire us is that we’ve built relationships in the industry. We’re known, which allows us to build links fast.

What’s the right price for an email outreach link building campaign?

Different agencies have different rates when it comes to link building through email outreach. As a time-consuming strategy, it very much relies on the agency’s approach which is always unique even if it relies on the common practices. Some charge per campaign, some per link, and some would prefer to ask you to pay not less than a certain amount on a monthly basis.

For example, the people at LinksHero charge from $3k USD and promise to build around 5–15 links per month:

In case you want to pay as you go and don’t want to be bound by any monthly commitments, then DFYlinks.com is your best choice. Their link building services are highly recommended by such well-known experts as Cyrus Shepard, Ryan Stewart, and many others. DFYlinks sell guest post links and their cheapest option will cost you only $160 USD:

Another link building agency trusted by such industry experts as Ryan Stewart and Steven Kang is Authority Builders. Even though they don’t have a pricing page, I had a chat with their founder, Matt Diggity, and he said that their basic rate is $170–$180 USD.

If you’re wondering where my agency stands, we’re from a bunch that charge per number of acquired links, post-factum. I think it’s the best option for small and mid-size businesses, as it gives you more freedom and allows you to build links at your own pace.

Our rate is somewhere in the middle, even though the quality of our links is above average, as we’re getting our links from corporate and top-notch blogs. Plus, we don’t send mass emails so you won’t face any associated reputation risks. We’ve spent the last couple of years building relationships with people, so right now we’re simply reaching out to them instead of doing mass email blasts. For our services, we charge from $300 USD per link, so you can easily calculate your overall budget to build, say, a hundred links. However, we work only in the B2B niche — specializations are important to consider before you choose an agency.

So that’s the rundown on how much it costs to build links. Hopefully you should now be able to estimate your budget in order to build the desired number of links to your site. And let me just say this: for businesses that have already built some trust and visibility, getting even sixty new, quality referring domains can make all the difference and help them achieve sustainable organic traffic growth:

That’s a lot to take in, I know. But there’s more to talk about. For example, there are tons of hidden benefits to email outreach delivered the right way. Just stay with me, we’re getting there.

How to get more from every link that you earn

I love handmade email outreach link building as it allows you to do more than build links. You’re also building relationships that can help you move the needle far beyond link building alone.

People who are your link building partners today can organize a conference tomorrow and invite you to speak, which can allow you to become more visible within your niche. That’s not as rare as it may seem! And if you're curious, yes, I’m referring to our own experience: besides doing link building, we also run our own digital marketing conference Digital Olympus (which, by the way, will be next held in Krakow on April 5th 2020).

Another benefit worth mentioning is that the companies that you connect with during your email outreach link building campaign also invest in growing their businesses. As a result, the site that has a domain score of 50 might get it up to 70 in a few months. In other words, today you’re paying for something that might get much more valuable in the future, and that’s what makes email outreach link building epic!

Here's a list of sites from which we built links for one of our clients. You can see how their domain scores have grown since May 2019:

Start working on a link building profile that will rule them all!

Your next step is up to you, but in my experience, it’s important to start working on links as early as possible. Otherwise, there’ll be a huge gap between your site and your competitors who have been working on link building for a while.

Also, I know that the majority of businesses would like to run their link building campaigns in-house. Starting early gives you a leg-up to build your processes and test things. If you decide that it’s your way, please don’t follow the “best practices,” as 99% of them are infinitely outdated. Most of those strategies have been discontinued years ago in the link building community, and only rookies still fall for them.

The list of no-BS resources

If you’re looking for more information about doing DIY link building, here are a few useful posts that won’t turn you into a spammer who’s asking for a link because “they’ve been following another person’s blog for ages” (that’s a link builders private joke):

• This post by Venngage explains how to find and reach out to people that have already shared your blog’s content.
• This post shows the anatomy of great email outreach and explains why your emails have to be 100% personalized.
• Here I’m sharing our very own approach to link building that we use to build links to Digital Olympus.
• Tips from the industry’s best link building practitioners. Zero BS, tons of value.
• This post will help you persuade your email outreach prospects to open and, what’s more, to reply to your emails. Even though Talia Wolf didn’t write this post specifically about email outreach copy, I found tons of really actionable tips in it to make my pitches irresistible.
• The last bastion of value amid the many outdated link building strategies is broken link building, which you can read about in this extensive guide.
• I use the points from this post to explain to my clients why link building takes time and why guest posting is not always the right way to go.

Conclusion

I’m not sure what else is there for me to say to convince you that email outreach is the way to do link building. And so I won’t try to convince you anymore — I’ll just sum up what I’ve told you already.

First of all, assess your situation and decide what’s more important for you at the moment: building links fast or building your own process of acquiring links in-house. If you decide in favor of the first option, calculate the number of links you need to build, estimate your budget, and find a reputable agency to help you out. And if you settle for the latter, get ready to spend some time on building relationships, mastering your outreach email copy, and streamlining creating valuable content.

But don’t worry — in the end, it’s all going to be worth it.

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6 Local Search Marketing DIY Tips for the Crafting Industry

Posted by MiriamEllis

Think crafting is kids’ stuff? Think again. The owners of quilting, yarn, bead, fabric, woodworking, art supply, stationers, edible arts, and related shops know that:

• The crafting industry generated $44 billion in 2016 in the US alone.
• 63% of American households engage in at least one crafting project annually, while more than one in four participate in 5+ per year.
• The top three craft store chains in the country (Michaels, JOANN, Hobby Lobby) operate nearly 3,000 locations, just among themselves.
• There are an estimated 3,200 US storefronts devoted to quilting alone. Thousands more vend everything from the stuff of ancient arts (knitting, with a 1,000-year history) to the trendy and new (unicorn slime, which, yes, is really a thing).

Our local search marketing industry has devoted abundant time to advising major local business categories over the past couple of decades, but crafting is one substantial retail niche we may have overlooked. I’d like to rectify this today.

I feel personally inspired by craft store owners. Over the years, I’ve learned to sew, quilt, embroider, crochet, knit, and bead, and before I became a local search marketer, I was a working fine artist. I even drafted a sewing pattern once that was featured in a crafting magazine. Through my own exploration of arts and crafts, I’ve come to know so many independent business owners in this industry, and have marketed several of them. These are gutsy people who take risks, work extremely hard for their living, and often zestfully embrace any education they can access about marketing.

Today, I’m offering my six best marketing tips for craft retailers for a more successful and profitable 2020.

First, a quick definition of local search marketing

Your store is your location. Your market is made up of all of your customers’ locations. Anything you do to promote your location to the market you serve is considered local search marketing. Your market could be your neighborhood, your city, or a larger local region. Local search marketing can include both offline efforts, like hanging eye-catching signage or getting mentioned in local print news, and online efforts, like having a website, building listings on local business listing platforms, and managing customer reviews.

Whatever you do to increase local awareness about your location, interact online with customers, bring them through your front door, serve them in-store, and follow up with them afterwards in an ongoing relationship counts. You’re already doing some of this, and in the words of Martha Stewart, “It’s a good thing.” But with a little more attention and intention, these six tips can craft even greater success for your business:

1. Take a page from my Google scrapbook

To engage in local search marketing is to engage with Google. Since they first started mapping out communities and businesses in 2004, the search engine giant has come to dominate the online local scene. There are other important online platforms, but to be in front of the maximum number of potential customers and to compete for rankings in Google’s local search results, your crafting business needs to:

1. Read the Guidelines for representing your business on Google and follow them to the letter. This set of rules tells you what you can and can’t do in the Google My Business product. Listing your business incorrectly or violating the guidelines in any way can result in listing suspension and other negative outcomes.
2. Create your free Google My Business listing once you’ve read the guidelines. Here’s Moz’s cheat sheet to all of the different fields and features you can fill out in your listing. Fill out as many fields as you possibly can and then Google will take you through the steps of verifying your listing.
3. Reckon with Google’s power. As our scrapbook says, Google owns your Google My Business listing, but you can take a lot of control over some of its contents. Even once you’ve verified your listing, it’s still open to suggested edits from the public, questions, reviews, user-uploaded photos and other activities. Main takeaway: your GMB listing is not a one-and-done project. It’s an interactive platform that you will be monitoring and managing from here on out.

2. Weave a strong web presence

Your Google My Business listing will likely be the biggest driver of traffic to your craft store, but you’ll want to cast your online net beyond this. Once you feel confident about the completeness and ongoing management of your GMB listing, there are 4 other strands of Internet activity for you to take firm hold of:

Your website

At bare minimum, your website should feature:

• Your complete and accurate name, address, phone number, email, and fax number
• Clear written driving directions to your place of business from all points of entry
• A good text description of everything you sell and offer
• An up-to-date list of all upcoming classes and events
• Some high-quality photos of your storefront and merchandise

A more sophisticated website can also feature:

• Articles and blog posts
• Full inventory, including e-commerce shopping
• Customer reviews and testimonials
• Online classes, webinars and video tutorials
• Customer-generated content, including photos, forums, etc.

The investment you make in your website should be based on how much you need to do to create a web presence that surpasses your local competitors. Depending on where your store is located, you may need only a modest site, or may need to go further to rank highly in Google’s search engine results and win the maximum number of customers.

Your other local listings

Beyond Google, your business listings on other online platforms like Yelp, Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps, Factual, Foursquare, and Infogroup can ensure that customers are encountering your business across a wide variety of sites and apps. Listings in these local business information indexes are sometimes referred to as “structured citations” and you have two main choices for building and maintaining them:

• You can manually build a listing on each important platform and check back on it regularly to manage your reviews and other content on it, as well as to ensure that the basic contact info hasn’t been changed by the platform or the public in any way.
• You can invest in local listings management software like Moz Local, which automates creation of these listings and gives you a simple dashboard that helps you respond to reviews, post new content, and be alerted to any emerging inaccuracies across key listing platforms, all in one place. This option can be a major time saver and deliver welcome peace of mind.

Structured citation management is critical to any local business for two key reasons. Firstly, it can be a source of valuable consumer discovery and new customers for your shop. Secondly, it ensures you aren’t losing customers to frustrating misinformation. One recent survey found that 22% of customers ended up at the wrong location of a business because online information about it was incorrect, and that 80% of them lost trust in the company when encountering such misinformation. Brick-and-mortar stores can’t afford to inconvenience or lose a single customer, and that’s why managing all your listings for accuracy is worth the investment of time/money.

Your unstructured citations

As we’ve just covered, a formal listing on a local business platform is called a “structured citation.” Unstructured citations, by contrast, are mentions of your business on any type of website: local online news, industry publications, a crafter’s blog, and lists of local attractions all count.

Anywhere your business can get mentioned on a relevant online publication can help customers discover you. And if trusted, authoritative websites link to yours when they mention your business, those links can directly improve your search engine rankings.

If you’re serving a market with little local competition, you may not need to invest a ton of time in seeking out unstructured citation opportunities. But if a nearby competitor is outranking you and you need to get ahead, earning high-quality mentions and links can be the best recipe for surpassing them. All of the following can be excellent sources of unstructured citations:

• Sponsoring or participating in local events, organizations, teams, and causes
• Hosting newsworthy happenings that get written up by local journalists
• Holding contests and challenges that earn public mention
• Joining local business organizations
• Cross promoting with related local businesses
• Getting featured/interviewed by online crafting magazines, fora, blogs, and videos

Read The Guide to Building Linked Unstructured Citations for Local SEO for more information.

Your social media presence

YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, crafting forums...choices abound! How much time and where you invest in social media should be determined by two things:

• What your local competition is doing
• Where your potential customers spend social time

If your shop is literally the only game in town, you may not need to win at social to win business, but if you have multiple competitors, strategic social media investments can set you apart as the most helpful, most popular local option.

In your social efforts, emphasize sharing, showing and telling — not just selling. If you keep this basic principle in mind, the DIY revolution is at your fingertips, waiting to be engaged. One thing I’ve learned about crafters is that they will travel. Quilting retreats, knitting tours, and major craft expos prove this.

If you or a staff member happen to create one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube for the three-needle bind off or crafting felt succulents, it could inspire travelers to put your shop on their bucket list. One of my favorite knitters in the world films the English/Swedish language Kammebornia podcast which is so idyllic, it would certainly inspire me to visit the island of Gotland if I were ever anywhere nearby. Think what you can do via social media to make your shop an aspirational destination for even non-local customers.

3. Abandon fear of ripping out mistakes (and negative reviews)

As the old adage goes, “Good knitters are good rippers.” When you drop a stitch in an important project, you have to know how to see it, patiently rip out stitches back to it, and correct the mistake as skillfully as you can. This exact same technique applies to managing the reviews customers leave you online. When your business “drops the ball” for a customer and disappoints them, you can often go back and correct the error.

Reviews = your business’ reputation. It’s as simple (and maybe scary) as that. Consider these statistics about the power of local business reviews:

• 87% of consumers read local business reviews (BrightLocal)
• 27% of people who look for local information are actually seeking reviews about a particular store. (Streetfight Mag)
• 30% of consumers say seeing business owners’ responses to reviews are key to them judging the company. (BrightLocal)
• 73.8 percent of customers are either likely or extremely likely to continue doing business with a brand that resolves their complaints. (GatherUp)

To be competitive, your craft store must earn reviews. Many business owners feel apprehensive about negative reviews, but the good news is:

• You can “rip out” some negative reviews simply by responding well to them. The owner response function actually makes reviews conversational, and a customer you’ve made things right with can edit their initial review to a more positive one.
• Most consumers expect a business to receive some negative reviews. Multiple surveys find that a perfect 5 star rating can look suspicious to shoppers.
• If you continuously monitor reviews, either manually or via convenient software like Moz Local that alerts you to incoming reviews, there is little to fear, because customers are more forgiving than you might have thought.

For a complete tutorial, read How to Get a Customer to Edit Their Negative Review. And be sure you are always doing what’s necessary to earn positive reviews by delivering excellent customer service, keeping your online listings accurate, and proactively asking customers to review you on Google and other eligible platforms.

4. Craft what online can’t — 5 senses engagement

Consider these three telling statistics:

• Over half of consumers prefer to shop in-store to interact with products. (Local Search Association)
• 80% of U.S. disposable income is spent within 20 miles of home (Access Development)
• By 2021, mobile devices alone will influence $1.4 trillion in local sales. (Forrester)

There may be no retailer left in American who hasn’t felt the Amazon effect, but as a craft shop owner, you have an amazing advantage so many other industries lack. Crafters want to touch textiles and fibers before buying, to hold fabrics up to their faces, to see true colors, and handle highly tactile merchandise like beads and wood. When it comes to fulfilling the five senses, online shopping is miles behind what you can provide face-to-face.

And it’s not just customers’ desire to interact with products that sets you apart — it’s their desire to interact with experts. As pattern designer Amy Barickman of Indygo Junction perfectly sums it up:

“To survive and thrive, brick-and-mortar stores must now provide experiences that cannot be replicated online.”

The expertise of your staff, the classes you hold, and tie-in services you offer, the sensory appeal of your storefront, the time you take to build relationships with customers all contribute to creating valued interactions which the Internet just can’t replace.

This advantage ties in deeply with the quality of your staff hiring and training practices. One respected survey found that 57% of customer complaints stem from employee behavior and poor service. Specifically in the crafting industry, staff who are expert with the materials being sold are worth their weight in gold. Be prepared to assist both seasoned crafters and the new generations of customers who are just now embracing the creative industries.

Play to your strengths. In every way that you market your business, emphasize hands-on experiences to draw people off their computers and into your store. In every ad you run, blog post you write, phone call you answer, listing you build, invite people to come in to engage all five senses at your place of business. Soft lighting and music, a tea kiosk, fragrant fresh flowers, some comfy chairs, and plenty of tactile merchandise are all within your reach, making shopping a pleasure which customers will want to enjoy again and again.

5. Learn to read your competitors’ patterns

Need to know: there are no #1 rankings on Google. Google customizes the search engine results they show to each person, based on where that person is physically located at the time they look something up on their phone or computer. You can walk or drive around your city, performing the identical search, and watch the rankings change in the:

Local Packs

Maps

Organic results

If you’re doing business in an area with few competitors, you may only need to be aware of one or two other companies. But when competition is more dense and diverse, or you operate multiple locations, the need for competitive analysis can grow exponentially. And for each potential customer, the set of businesses you’re competing with changes, based on that customer’s location. 

How can you visualize and strategize for this? You have two options:

1. If competition is quite low, you can manually find your true local competitors with this tutorial. It includes a free spreadsheet for helping you figure out which businesses are ranking for your most desired searches for the customers nearest you. This is a basic, doable approach for very small businesses.
2. If your environment is competitive or you are marketing a large, enterprise craft store brand, you can automate analysis with software. Local Market Analytics from Moz, for example, is designed to do all the work of finding true competitors for you. This groundbreaking product multi-samples searchers’ locations and helps you analyze your strongest and weakest markets. Currently, Local Market Analytics focuses on organic results, and it will soon include data on local pack results, too.

Once you’ve completed this first task, you have one more step ahead if you find that some of your competitors are outranking you. You’ll want to stack up your metrics against theirs to analyze why they are surpassing you. Good news: we’ve got another tutorial and free spreadsheet for this project! What emerges from the work is a pattern of strengths and weaknesses that signal why Google is ranking some businesses ahead of others.

Knowing who your competitors are and gathering metrics about why they may be outranking you is what empowers you to create a winning local search marketing strategy. Whether you find you need more reviews, a stronger website, or some other improvement, you’ll be working from data instead of making random guesses about how to grow your business.

6. Open your grab bag

Every craft store and craft fair has its grab bags, and who can resist them? I’d like to close out this article by spilling a trove of marketing goodies into your hands. Sort through them and see if there’s a fresh idea in here that could really work for your business to take it to the next level.

• Be more! This year, Michaels has partnered with UPS at 1,100 locations in a convenience experiment. You run a craft store, but could it be more? Is there something lacking in your local market that your shop could double as? A meeting house, a lending library, an adult classroom, a tea shop, a Wi-Fi spot, a holiday boutique, a place for live music?
• Tie in! Your quilt shop can support apparel sewers with a few extra solids, textiles, and some fun patterns. Your yarn shop can find a nook for needle arts. Your woodshop could offer wooden needles for knitting and crochet, wooden hoops for embroidery, wood buttons, stamps, and a variety of wood boxes for crafters. You may sell everything needed for beading jewelry, but do you have the necessary supplies to bead clothing? Crafters are hungry for local resources for every kind of project, especially in rural areas, suburbs, and other communities where there are few businesses.
• Teach! There are so many arts and crafts that are incredibly challenging to learn without being shown, face-to-face. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a grandparent or parent to demo exactly how you do a long tail cast on or master the dovetail joint. If you want to sell merchandise, show how to use it. Look at JOANN, which just unveiled its new concept store in Columbus, Ohio, centered on a “Creators Studio”. One independent fabric shop near me devotes half its floorspace to classes for children — the next generation of customers!
• Email! Don’t make the mistake of thinking email is old school. Statistics say that 47% of marketers point to email marketing as delivering the highest ROI and 69% of consumers prefer to receive local business communications via email. If you’re one of the 50% of small business owners who hasn’t yet taken the leap of creating an email newsletter, do it!
• Survey! Don’t guess what to stock or how to do business. Directly ask your customers via email, social media, and in-store surveys what they really want. I’ve seen businesses abandon scented products because they found they were deterring migraine-prone shoppers. I’ve seen others implement special ordering services to source hard-to-access items in-store instead of letting consumer drift away to the online world. Giving the customer what they want is the absolute key to your store’s success.
• Go green! Whether it’s powering your shop with solar, supporting upcycling crafts, or stocking organic and sustainable inventory, embrace and promote every green practice you can engage in. Numerous studies cite the younger generations as being particularly defined by responsible consumption. Demonstrate solidarity with their aspirations in the way you operate and market.

Doers, makers, creators, crafters, artisans, artists… your business exists to support their drive to embellish personal and public life. When you need to grow your business, you’ll be drawing from the same source of inspiration that all creative people do: the ability to imagine, to envision a plan, to color outside the lines, to gather the materials you need to make something great.

Local search marketing is a template for ensuring that your business is ready to serve every crafter at every stage of their journey, from the first spark of an idea, to discovery of local resources, to transaction, and beyond. I hope you’ll take the template I’ve sketched out for you today and make it your own for a truly rewarding 2020.

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Spectator to Partner: Turn Your Clients into SEO Allies - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Are your clients your allies in SEO, or are they passive spectators? Could they even be inadvertently working against you? A better understanding of expectations, goals, and strategy by everyone involved can improve your client relations, provide extra clarity, and reduce the number of times you're asked to "just SEO a site." 

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins outlines tactics you should know for getting clients and bosses excited about the SEO journey, as well as the risks involved in passivity.

(We were inspired to revisit this classic Whiteboard Friday by our brand-new Mini Guide to SEO Reporting! These two resources go together like a fine La Croix and a well-aged cheese.)

Hop to the Mini Guide

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Kameron Jenkins, and I'm the SEO Wordsmith here at Moz. Today I'm going to be talking with you about how to turn your clients from spectators, passive spectators to someone who is proactively interested and an ally in your SEO journey.

So if you've ever heard someone come to you, maybe it's a client or maybe you're in-house and this is your boss saying this, and they say, "Just SEO my site," then this is definitely for you. A lot of times it can be really hard as an SEO to work on a site if you really aren't familiar with the business, what that client is doing, what they're all about, what their goals are. So I'm going to share with you some tactics for getting your clients and your boss excited about SEO and excited about the work that you're doing and some risks that can happen when you don't do that.

Tactics

So let's dive right in. All right, first we're going to talk about tactics.

1. Share news

The first tactic is to share news. In the SEO industry, things are changing all the time, so it's actually a really great tactic to keep yourself informed, but also to share that news with the client. So here's an example. Google My Business is now experimenting with a new video format for their post feature. So one thing that you can do is say, "Hey, client, I hear that Google is experimenting with this new format. They're using videos now. Would you like to try it?"

So that's really cool because it shows them that you're on top of things. It shows them that you're the expert and you're keeping your finger on the pulse of the industry. It also tells them that they're going to be a part of this new, cutting-edge technology, and that can get them really, really excited about the SEO work you're doing. So make sure to share news. I think that can be really, really valuable.

2. Outline your work

The next tip is to outline your work. This one seems really simple, but there is so much to say for telling a client what you're going to do, doing it, and then telling them that you did it. It's amazing what can happen when you just communicate with a client more. There have been plenty of situations where maybe I did less tangible work for a client one week, but because I talk to them more, they were more inclined to be happy with me and excited about the work I was doing.

It's also cool because when you tell a client ahead of time what you're going to do, it gives them time to get excited about, "Ooh, I can't wait to see what he or she is going to do next." So that's a really good tip for getting your clients excited about SEO.

3. Report results

Another thing is to report on your results. So, as SEOs, it can be really easy to say, hey, I added this page or I fixed these things or I updated this.

But if we detach it from the actual results, it doesn't really matter how much a client likes you or how much your boss likes you, there's always a risk that they could pull the plug on SEO because they just don't see the value that's coming from it. So that's an unfortunate reality, but there are tons of ways that you can show the value of SEO. One example is, "Hey, client, remember that page that we identified that was ranking on page two. We improved it. We made all of those updates we talked about, and now it's ranking on page one. So that's really exciting. We're seeing a lot of new traffic come from it.I'm wondering, are you seeing new calls, new leads, an uptick in any of those things as a result of that?"

So that's really good because it shows them what you did, the results from that, and then it kind of connects it to, "Hey, are you seeing any revenue, are you seeing new clients, new customers," things like that. So they're more inclined to see that what you're doing is making a real, tangible impact on actual revenue and their actual business goals.

4. Acknowledge and guide their ideas

This one is really, really important. It can be hard sometimes to marry best practices and customer service. So what I mean by that is there's one end of the pendulum where you are really focused on best practices. This is right. This is wrong. I know my SEO stuff. So when a client comes to you and they say, "Hey, can we try this?" and you go, "No, that's not best practices,"it can kind of shut them down. It doesn't get them involved in the SEO process. In fact, it just kind of makes them recoil and maybe they don't want to talk to you, and that's the exact opposite of what we want here. On the other end of that spectrum though, you have clients who say, "Hey, I really want to try this.I saw this article. I'm interested in this thing. Can you do it for my website?"

Maybe it's not the greatest idea SEO-wise. You're the SEO expert, and you see that and you go, "Mm, that's actually kind of scary. I don't think I want to do that." But because you're so focused on pleasing your client, you maybe do it anyway. So that's the opposite of what we want as well. We want to have a "no, but" mentality. So an example of that could be your client emails in and says, "Hey, I want to try this new thing."

You go, "Hey, I really like where your head is at. I like that you're thinking about things this way. I'm so glad you shared this with me. I tried this related thing before, and I think that would be actually a really good idea to employ on your website." So kind of shifting the conversation, but still bringing them along with you for that journey and guiding them to the correct conclusions. So that's another way to get them invested without shying them away from the SEO process.

Risks

So now that we've talked about those tactics, we're going to move on to the risks. These are things that could happen if you don't get your clients excited and invested in the SEO journey.

1. SEO becomes a checklist

When you don't know your client well enough to know what they're doing in the real world, what they're all about, the risk becomes you have to kind of just do site health stuff, so fiddling with meta tags, maybe you're changing some paragraphs around, maybe you're changing H1s, fixing 404s, things like that, things that are just objectively, "I can make this change, and I know it's good for site health."

But it's not proactive. It's not actually doing any SEO strategies. It's just cleanup work. If you just focus on cleanup work, that's really not an SEO strategy. That's just making sure your site isn't broken. As we all know, you need so much more than that to make sure that your client's site is ranking. So that's a risk.

If you don't know your clients, if they're not talking to you, or they're not excited about SEO, then really all you're left to do is fiddle with kind of technical stuff. As good as that can be to do, our jobs are way more fun than that. So communicate with your clients. Get them on board so that you can do proactive stuff and not just fiddling with little stuff.

2. SEO conflicts with business goals

So another risk is that SEO can conflict with business goals.

So say that you're an SEO. Your client is not talking to you. They're not really excited about stuff that you're doing. But you decide to move forward with proactive strategies anyway. So say I'm an SEO, and I identify this keyword. My client has this keyword. This is a related keyword. It can bring in a lot of good traffic. I've identified this good opportunity. All of the pages that are ranking on page one, they're not even that good. I could totally do better. So I'm going to proactively go, I'm going to build this page of content and put it on my client's site. Then what happens when they see that page of content and they go, "We don't even do that. We don't offer that product. We don't offer that service."

Oops. So that's really bad. What can happen is that, yes, you're being proactive, and that's great. But if you don't actually know what your client is doing, because they're not communicating with you, they're not really excited, you risk misaligning with their business goals and misrepresenting them. So that's a definite risk.

3. You miss out on PR opportunities

Another thing, you miss out on PR opportunities. So again, if your client is not talking to you, they're not excited enough to share what they're doing in the real world with you, you miss out on news like, "Hey, we're sponsoring this event,"or, "Hey, I was the featured expert on last night's news."

Those are all really, really good things that SEOs look for. We crave that information. We can totally use that to capitalize on it for SEO value. If we're not getting that from our clients, then we miss out on all those really, really cool PR opportunities. So a definite risk. We want those PR opportunities. We want to be able to use them.

4. Client controls the conversation

Next up, client controls the conversation. That's a definite risk that can happen. So if a client is not talking to you, a reason could be they don't really trust you yet. When they don't trust you, they tend to start to dictate. So maybe our client emails in.

A good example of this is, "Hey, add these 10 backlinks to my website." Or, "Hey, I need these five pages, and I need them now." Maybe they're not even actually bad suggestions. It's just the fact that the client is asking you to do that. So this is kind of tricky, because you want to communicate with your client. It's good that they're emailing in, but they're the ones at that point that are dictating the strategy. Whereas they should be communicating their vision, so hey, as a business owner, as a website owner, "This is my vision. This is my goal, and this is what I want."

As the SEO professional, you're receiving that information and taking it and making it into an SEO strategy that can actually be really, really beneficial for the client. So there's a huge difference between just being a task monkey and kind of transforming their vision into an SEO strategy that can really, really work for them. So that's a definite risk that can happen.

Excitement + partnership = better SEO campaigns

There's a lot of different things that can happen. These are just some examples of tactics that you can use and risks. If you have any examples of things that have worked for you in the past, I would love to hear about them. It's really good to information share. Success stories where maybe you got your client or your boss really bought into SEO, more so than just, "Hey, I'm spending money on it."

But, "Hey, I'm your partner in this. I'm your ally, and I'm going to give you all the information because I know that it's going to be mutually beneficial for us." So at the end here, excitement, partner, better SEO campaigns. This is going to be I believe a recipe for success to get your clients and your boss on board. Thanks again so much for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and come back next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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‘Tis the Season for Reporting (And a New Mini Guide)

Posted by Roger-MozBot

How is it already reporting season again? Time to generate those dreaded end-of-year SEO reports that take hours to create and mere seconds for your client to skim through and toss to the side. We’ve all been there. But here's the thing: it’s absolutely necessary! Not only for you and your team to track progress, but to prove value to your clients as well.

Reporting for SEO can feel like a time-black-hole. You have an infinite amount of data that you have to sort through and piece together to tell a story. You know that you saw something, somewhere at some point that proved a strategy worked, but of course, now that you need it you can’t find it and now you’ve been looking for it for an hour and you just want to get back to the SEO part of your job.

What if we told you we could help you create reports that matter to your team and your clients in less time with better output? Today we launched our newest brainchild, the Mini Guide to SEO Reporting, our free guide to help you create the most effective SEO reports for your business.

Give it a read!

Okay, so maybe it's not the MOST mini mini-guide that ever did mini. But in comparison to the Beginner's Guide to SEO, it's definitely a munchkin! We like to think it's chock full of easy-to-read chapters and plenty of actionable-insights, a few of which we’d like to share with you now.

1. More data, more problems

The idea for the mini guide was born after we noticed a trend in SEO reporting — they're often cobbled together and extremely time intensive. Many SEOs rely on multiple platforms to gather all of the data needed to make recommendations and track progress. So, when they want to report back to their clients, they have to go to all of the different platforms to collect the necessary data. This makes everything ten times more complicated because many of the platforms use differing jargon and have different data exporting processes, and when it comes time to piece it all together, it’s extremely difficult to maintain a consistent tone or a clear story to follow.

That leads us right into the first actionable insight: your reports need to be KonMaried. Well, kind of. In reporting, you can’t quite ask if a data point brings you joy, but you can ask if a data point is meaningful. You need to ask yourself, your team, and most importantly your client which data points are meaningful to your SEO campaign. Once you nail down the must-haves, stick to them! You can always reassess later, but filling up your report with irrelevant data makes it less appealing to the client and easier for them to gloss over. Plus, narrowing down some of the data you have to report on will allow you to spend more time on SEO and less time on reporting.

To get the conversation started with your client, we created a downloadable one sheet with thirty must-ask questions about reporting.

2. The TL;DR report

We know that most people who get their hands on our reports don’t read them front to back, but we want to make sure that they get all of the important insights — that’s where the TLDR, or wins/losses, report comes in.

In the mini guide, we recommend an “at-a-glance” type report that is simply a bullet list of insights like:

• What goals were met
• What goals weren’t meant
• Any discrepancies that need to be considered while reading the rest of the report
• One-sentence explanations of the most important findings for the reporting period

This easy to read format will ensure that all of the information you need to get across, gets across. You can think of this section as a summary or a table of contents. The rest of the report will simply go over the data that backs the claims you make in the TLDR report.

A very important note to be made here is that there will be losses, and you need to be upfront about that with your clients. Don’t fudge the data because that will set you up for an inevitable break in your relationship with the client (maybe bring fudge with the data instead — a client with chocolate is a happy client). It's much better to be transparent about the strategies that are simply not working or the goals that aren’t being met.

Likewise, if you are having trouble with setting or achieving goals, we also go through a step-by-step process on goal setting for clients. It takes into account everything from the client’s SWOT and competitive analyses to what it means to create a SMART goal.

3. Simplify the complex

Keeping things easy-breezy when reporting is especially tough when it comes to technical SEO. Though technical SEO is extremely important, it can seem rather bland to clients (especially when they are not up to scuff on the terminology). In the mini guide, we go through some of the ways you can simplify and improve the reporting you do on technical SEO.

First things first: you need to make sure your clients know what you're talking about, so use their language! It may be slightly different for each client, but having this foundation set is critical for keeping clients engaged and eager about the improvements you are making.

Once the foundation is set, we suggest covering what you’ve done and what you’re planning on doing in context of their respective impacts. When listing these action items, be sure to explain the benefits that can be expected. Just because someone understands what a meta description is doesn’t mean they’re going to understand than an optimized meta description can increase click-through rates. Some of the things you do in a reporting period may be expected or something you’re checking off of a list, but other things may be the result of running into an unforeseen issue — be sure to address both! This helps to establish trust and show your client that you're staying on top of their SEO, even if they aren’t 100% sure what to expect.

Give it a read

That’s it, no more spoilers. To get the rest of the juicy details you're going to have to read it for yourself!

See how mini this guide really is

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!