Matter. How SEOs Can Help... Now - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by rjonesx.

As SEOs, we hold a surprising amount of influence over how the world gets its information. In times like these, when businesses of all stripes are facing uncertainty and we may be looking for ways to help, the skills you use in your day job can be your superpower. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones outlines five ways SEOs can make a difference amid the chaos of COVID-19 — just by doing your job and doing it well.

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Video Transcription

Hey, folks. This is Russ Jones here, Adjunct Search Scientist at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. Today is my first day giving a Whiteboard Friday from my home here in Cary, North Carolina.

Unfortunately, it's with a somber attitude as many of you are at home right now realizing what's going on in the world. Normally, at this time of night, I figured I'd be having a scotch, so maybe I'll start with that. You see, we all need to relax a bit because things are tough and difficult.

But at the same time one of the things that's been troubling me a lot lately through this whole crisis has been how much do I matter? How do I make myself matter? Now, sure, I've got kids and a wife, so I work and I do things that help them to thrive.

But in my day-to-day job, most of what I do is work on search engine optimization and trying to get sites to rank, which can sometimes be really good and sometimes be really bad, and most of the time it's just somewhere in the middle. You're helping businesses do better.

How can SEOs help now?

But in a time like this, it almost feels like there's a calling for us to do something more. Today I want to talk a little bit about some of the ideas I've had on how as search engine optimizers and web professionals in general we might be able to matter just a little bit more and make just a little bit more of a difference during this pressing time.

So let's start off. How can SEOs help now? 

1. Combat misinformation

Well, I think one of the first things that search engine optimizers have the ability to do obviously is to influence the search results. But we know right now that a serious problem that's plaguing social media and search engines and really just to all information in general is misinformation, information getting out there about what works and what doesn't to try and help stop the coronavirus.

Whether this information is well-intentioned or not is of no impact if it actually does cause harm. So as a search engine optimizer, one of the things that you have the ability to do is actually try and help out the sites that deserve to rank, the sites that are providing information.

I noticed if you were to search in Google for alternate cures for COVID, the first two things that would come up were colloidal silver and garlic. It seems like for some reason everything can be cured with the same stuff that kills vampires and werewolves. I'm not sure where this came from, but regardless it's there.

It's in the SERPs. In fact, you can search right now for how to cure COVID-19 with silver, and you'll find sites that rank that try and tell you this works, and we know it doesn't. So I'm not telling you that we should Google-bomb everybody out there who has a good website that's doing the right thing and providing good information.

But perhaps when you're writing your blog posts or presenting information online to your customers about COVID-19, you should take the time to think about: Who can I link to, what sites can I link to that are going to give information that will help my customers, and not just think of them as customers, but help their families?

So when you write an article about the discount that your business is offering, perhaps you might want to link to maybe the CDC's website, which will list off the different treatments available. Or if you run a local business, perhaps you can list off the various sites which are available for COVID testing. Now there are lots of different ways that we can go about this, and I'm not going to give you a list of sites that you should link to.

But there are probably sites that you visit almost every day, checking on the stats, seeing how things are going, and perhaps you should share those with the world and share them in a way that can make Google better. 

2. Hire the best writers

Now the second thing that I want to bring up right now is actually an interesting opportunity. You see, right now, a lot of professionals, a lot of experts are simply out of work.

You see, as much as it's nice to be a search engine optimizer and work on a computer where you could be on the beach or in the basement or in a cubicle if you have to, but where you can work from anywhere, that's just not the case for most people in America. In fact, a recent study came out and said that only 40% of jobs could possibly be completed remotely, and that's possibly.

That's not meaning that they will be or that it's easy to or efficient to or effective to, just possible. That number is staggering. But there is one thing that we can tap into in these times, and that thing we can tap into is expertise.

You see, we always talk about producing evergreen content for our clients. I just gave a Whiteboard Friday a couple of days back about how it's difficult, as an SEO, to write content about things you are not an expert in. Well, for once, it turns out that there are lots of experts who need work and who would be let's just say the best opportunity you will ever have to produce truly evergreen content.

I mean think about the various areas of experts that are available to you. Hospitality, think about calling your local hotel and asking whether or not they can put you in touch with any concierge staff, even just by email. They know more about your city and about what tourists or individuals want in that city than perhaps anybody else.

Or you could talk about travel agents, and the same sort of information could be available to your website. You can understand how that if you're an SEO that works with a lot of local businesses, works with say a couple of different restaurants, well, then this concierge can then help provide you with third-party, unbiased information about these types of restaurants.

Then you can assist in the process of helping these restaurants move to an online and delivery service during their time of need. The same thing is true with entertainment. Recently an old employee of mine offered to fix the jingle, to come up with a new intro for some video production that Moz had made in the past. He's an incredibly talented individual. Luckily, he's also an SEO, so he can work remotely. But at the same time, maybe there's an opportunity to work with a truly talented artist or a truly talented musician to make the kinds of changes to your brand that you've always wanted to but have never been able to get access to.

Maybe the same thing is true if you're an information website and you write about sports, for example. Just because games aren't going on doesn't mean that the history of the sport doesn't need to be reported on and that there isn't an opportunity to produce some of the best content, the most reflective content that's ever existed on the web.

3. Adwords SMB credits

Then third I think we can tap into almost any kind of sales representative out there. These people not only pride themselves on the knowledge, but the knowledge that they have of the products that they sell is what makes them able to sell it. These types of sales reps, whether they're in technology, whether they're selling who knows, audiovisual equipment, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is the fact that they are experts and they have the unique capability to write about content better than anybody else. For once, for this short period of time, they're looking for that opportunity. So that's one thing that I want you to really focus on is the opportunity here for you to serve yourself and your customers and those in need all at the same time.

It's possible if you only look in all of the right places. Now that's not all that we can do. Now one of the things that has been really interesting has been the response of a handful of the larger companies or organizations across the world. One of them — or two of them, for that matter — have been Google and Facebook.

Both of them have announced just enormous sums of money that they are going to pour into free credits for small and medium businesses inside of their representative ad platforms. But here's the thing. They can't really distinguish between the small businesses that are going to suffer and the small businesses that are going to do well during these times.

They're not necessarily sure whether or not the local store that's advertising on their website is already set up for e-commerce or whether or not they're just trying to bring people to the front door. Well, here's a unique opportunity, and I normally give a lot of grief to people in the paid search space because I think search engine optimization is just so wonderful.

But this is really for you paid search folks out here. What kind of opportunities are there amongst your clientele where you can co-market, where you can work with your customers who are healthy in this time of need to co-market on behalf of the customers who are not? You see, people are going to wake up with credits in their account.

Some of them are going to need it, and some of them are not. You are in a unique position to put those people together. Right now, if you're thinking about how you can help, I bet most of your customers are wondering how they might be able to as well. By simply putting them together, maybe, just maybe you'll have an opportunity to do well by all of your customers and hopefully help some people out who really need it.

4. Healthy business? Help out by making your offer free

The fourth thing I want to bring up is something we've seen a lot, which is how healthy businesses of all sizes are responding. A lot of them are providing some sort of discounts or offers. I want to be really careful here because I don't want to say that providing discounts and offers in these times is in any way let's say taking advantage or not giving respect to what's going on.

It's actually really important that we seek out opportunities to help those in times of need. But I think that you really ought to be careful and be thoughtful and respectful of those who you will be helping in this manner. So one of the first things that I want to say is that if you are going to offer something, do your best to make it free.

You see, there aren't lots of businesses right now who are going through just a little bit of hurt. There aren't a lot of people out there who are just going through a little bit of hurt. We're talking about a lot of people going through really difficult times. The deeper you can dig, even if it's carved out specifically for the individuals or businesses that are in the most desperate of times, the better it's going to be for them in the long run.

Don't set time traps

Now one of the first tips I want to say is don't set time traps. I don't know what the word is for this, but I call them time traps. They're popping up left and right, which is, "Hey, we're going to give you the first X number of days free. Put in your credit card." It's a subtle but pretty obvious attempt that, over time, these individuals will forget about the credit card and hope that they end up just rolling into some payments that they otherwise wouldn't make.

Don't do that. If at all possible inside of your payment system, make some free trials or some free tools available to people that just don't require a credit card. That credit card right now is often meaning food for some of these people. So let's just be thoughtful. 

Do target those most affected

Now what you can do is target those who are most affected.

For example, a lot of businesses are offering services and discounts specifically for the families of first responders, doctors, and any kind of individual who's been identified as an employee or a place of business that must be open, like your pharmacy. Now the reason why you want to target these people is they're having to put their lives on the line literally every day, even though that's not something they really signed up for when they got into the business. So the least we can do is offer them our biggest discounts. 

Do target those most helpful

Third, we've got to be able to target those who are most helpful as well. You see, it's not just about the people who are in need. It's about the people who are helping those in need. I'll give you an example. Right now there's a serious crisis with domestic abuse in America.

You see, the quarantine has meant that people have had to stay home. It's, in that time, meant that the abused have had to spend more and more time with their abusers. Now there's probably a dozen domestic shelters within your area if you live in a larger city and certainly those across the state.

But how easy is it for those resources to be found? How much can they actually handle at this point? What do they need donations of? Do they need money? Do they need food? These are things you can find out and take advantage of.

But most importantly, as an SEO, you can help these organizations be easily discoverable, which is incredibly important right now, because people are in dire situations and need information fast. So there are opportunities here for you to offer services yourself, for the businesses that you support to offer services, and for you as an individual to simply contribute to all sorts of different individuals who are doing their best to get us through this crisis.

5. Online transition army

Now the fifth thing I'd like to think about is some sort of online transition army. Now most of us here are some sort of web professional or we own a business that has a website. But in all that we have done, there is some degree of experience that involves putting a business online or putting an organization online.



Whatever that skill is that you've developed — maybe it's e-commerce, maybe it's shipping, maybe it's paid search, who knows what it is — it's time to pick up the phone and start calling the organizations that don't have this kind of representation and help them make the transition.

We know that there are tens of thousands of talented SEOs across the country and even more search marketers and even more web designers and developers. We know that they've got free cycles. I know I do. I'm recording this right now at I think it's about 9:30 EST. It was either this or Netflix.

We have the opportunity to make a really big difference. So whether that's helping a local business create an e-commerce version or helping them with shipping or even more often than not helping nonprofits collect donations online, there are just tons of opportunities for you and your organization to get involved and help make a difference for the companies that aren't already online.

Now I know you could think about this from the other direction, which is to say my business and my clients are online, and now is our chance to win because our competitors just weren't prepared. This is one of those times where I think you've got to question whether or not you really want to bring that karma upon you.

Now is the opportunity to matter. 

The last thing I would recommend is to let your employees and your benefactors and your deeds speak for themselves. You don't need to go out touting left and right all of the things that you're doing.

Certainly you should advertise the offers that you're giving so that you actually extend the reach. Certainly you should advertise the fact that you're looking for nonprofit organizations to help out online. While you should do that, the question you should ask yourself before you put out any kind of information about what you've done, about how you've helped is whether or not the time you're spending putting together that information and the dollars that you're spending putting out that information is worth the cost of the good that you could have done with that time and money doing something else.

Share your ideas in the comments

Now I want to end on a positive note. These are difficult times. But if there's one thing that I've seen time and time again is that people in our industry care and they're trying to make a difference. Now these are just some of the ideas that I came up with, and I'm betting in the Moz audience and across the Twittersphere and Reddit and all of social media that there are people who have other excellent ideas.

I want you to fill the comments with those types of ideas, and we'll do our best to promote them. Thank you again for spending another Whiteboard Friday with me. God bless. Be healthy and I'll see you soon again. Bye.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Opting-Out of Google Featured Snippets Led to 12% Traffic Loss [SEO Experiment]

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Note: This post was co-authored by Cyrus Shepard and Rida Abidi.

Everyone wants to win Google featured snippets. Right?

At least, it used to be that way. Winning the featured snippet typically meant extra traffic, in part because Google showed your URL twice: once in the featured snippet and again in regular search results. For publishers, this was known as "double-dipping."

All that changed in January when Google announced they would de-duplicate search results to show the featured snippet URL only once on the first page of results. No more double-dips.

Publishers worried because older studies suggested winning featured snippets drove less actual traffic than the "natural" top ranking result. With the new change, winning the featured snippet might actually now lead to less traffic, not more.

This led many SEOs to speculate: should you opt-out of featured snippets altogether? Are featured snippets causing publishers to lose more traffic than they potentially gain? 

Here's how we found the answer.

The experiment

Working with the team at SearchPilot, we devised an A/B split test experiment to remove Moz Blog posts from Google featured snippets, and measure the impact on traffic.

Using Google's data-nosnippet tag, we identified blog pages with winning featured snippets and applied the tag to the main content of the page.

Our working hypothesis was that these pages would lose their featured snippets and return to the "regular" search results below. A majority of us also expected to see a negative impact on traffic, but wanted to measure exactly how much, and identify whether the featured snippets would return after we removed the tag. 

In this example, Moz lost the featured snippet almost immediately. The snippet was instead awarded to Content King and Moz returned to the top "natural" position.

Here is another example of what happened in search results. After launching the test, the featured snippet was awarded to Backlinko and we returned to the top of the natural results.

One important thing to keep in mind is that, while these keywords triggered a featured snippet, pages can rank for hundreds or thousands of different keywords in different positions. So the impact of losing a single featured snippet can be somewhat softened when your URL ranks for many different keywords — some which earn featured snippets and some which don't.

The results

After adding the data-nosnippet tag, our variant URLs quickly lost their featured snippets.

How did this impact traffic? Instead of gaining traffic by opting-out of featured snippets, we found we actually lost a significant amount of traffic quite quickly.

Overall, we measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets (95% confidence level).

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

What did we learn?

With the addition of the “data-nosnippet” attribute, the test had a significantly negative impact on organic traffic. In this experiment, owning the featured snippet and not ranking in the top results provides more value to these pages in terms of clicks than not owning the featured snippet and ranking in the top results.

Adding in the “data-nosnippet” attribute, not only were we able to stop Google from pulling data in that section of the HTML page to use as a snippet, but we were also able to confirm that we would rank again in the SERP, whether that is ranking in position one or lower.

As an additional tool, we were also tracking keywords using STAT Search Analytics. We were able to monitor changes in ranking for pages that had featured snippets, and noticed that it took about seven days or more from the time of launching the test for Google to cache the changes we made and for the featured snippets to be overtaken by another ranking page, if another page was awarded a featured snippet spot at all. The turnaround was quicker after we ended the test, though, as some of these featured snippets returned as quickly as the next day.

However, a negative aspect of running this test was that, although some pages were crawled and indexed with the most recent changes, the featured snippet did not return and has now either been officially given to competing pages or never returned at all.

To summarize the significant findings of this test:

1. Google's nosnippet tags can effectively opt-out publishers from featured snippets.
2. In this test, we measured an estimated 12% drop in traffic for all affected pages after losing featured snippets.
3. After ending the test, we failed to win back a portion of the featured snippets we previously ranked for.

For the vast majority of publishers winning the featured snippet likely remains the smart strategy. There are undoubtedly exceptions but as a general "best practice" if a keyword triggers a featured snippet, it's typically in your best interest to rank for it.

What are your experiences with winning featured snippets? Let us know in the comments below.

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Join Moz SEO Scientist, Dr. Pete Meyers, Wednesdays in April at 1:30 p.m. PT on Twitter and ask your most pressing questions about how to navigate SEO changes and challenges in a COVID-19 world. Tweet your questions all week long to @Moz using the hashtag #AskMoz. 

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The SEO Elevator Pitch - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

This week, we're revisiting an important topic for SEOs everywhere: how to show your value. In the wake of everything that's happened recently with COVID-19, being able to describe your worth to potential clients or stakeholders is an integral skill. In this favorite episode of Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins shares how to effectively and succinctly build an SEO elevator pitch that highlights the value you bring to a business and three warnings on what not to do.

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Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How Your Local Business Can Be a Helper

Posted by MiriamEllis

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.” — Fred Rogers

This quote is one I find myself turning to frequently these days as a local SEO. It calls to mind my irreplaceable neighborhood grocer. On my last essential run to their store, they not only shared a stashed 4-pack of bath tissue with me, but also stocked their market with local distillery-produced hand sanitizer which I was warned will reek of bourbon, but will get the job done.

When times are hard, finding helpers comes as such a relief. Even the smallest acts that a local business does to support physical and mental health can be events customers remember for years to come.

While none of us gets to live in Mister Rogers’ idealized neighborhood, the adaptations I’m seeing local businesses and organizations make to sustain communities during COVID-19 are a meaningful expression of caring worthy of his humanitarian vision. Almost any brand, large or small, has the chance to be a good neighbor. Please use the following industry and platform examples to spark local business creativity when it’s needed most so that brands you care about can stay helpfully productive during the public health emergency.

Inspirational local business pivots and plans

Everyone at Moz is full of admiration for the way different industries are responding in a time that’s not business-as-usual. My thanks to the many teammates who contributed to this roundup of examples we’ve been personally encountering, and we hope you’ll find an actionable path for your business here.

Food and hospitality

1. From fancy to fundamental, famed Seattle restaurant Canlis quickly transitioned from fine dining to offering drive-thru bagels, family meal delivery, and community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes from local farms.

2. From pizza place to pantry, multiple restaurants and caterers are putting their supply chain to work for their customers. California Pizza Kitchen is delivering meal kits and pantry staples as a pop-up market.

3. Caterers with big hearts like Kay Catering asked parents whose schoolchildren she normally feeds whether they’d be willing to donate unused lunch fees so her company could cook for families in need. Through the generosity of these parents, Kay Kim is now serving dinner to the residents at the Sand Point Public Housing Center at Magnuson Park as part of Seattle Public Schools’ overall effort to feed its students.

4. Pike Place Market on your doorstep is the offering of Savor Seattle, which has shifted from offering tasting tours to aggregating the iconic products of an entire marketplace for home delivery and curbside pickup.

5. To keep grocery shelves stocked, Santa Rosa, California food manufacturer Amy’s Kitchen has ramped up production by erecting tent kitchens with social distancing so that the company’s canned soups can be produced in greater quantities. Meanwhile, distilleries across the country have converted operations to manufacture of hand sanitizer.

6. Community-support agriculture may well see a boom with the appeal of boxes of fresh, local foods delivered to your door, allowing customers to entirely forego trips to grocery stores. Farm stands have become extra precious community resources. Role models like Heron Pond Farm in New Hampshire are accepting SNAP payments and providing discounts to SNAP shoppers.

7. Caring for our most vulnerable community members, grocery stores large and small are setting senior shopping hours. Raley’s is offering curbside pickup of $20 “Senior Essential Bags” filled with fresh and dry goods. Kroger-owned stores are donating $3 million to deploy groceries to food-insecure communities via their Zero Hunger/Zero Waste program.

8. Looking to the future, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieg has launched SaveOurFaves.com, a San Francisco Bay Area directory of restaurants hosting the purchase of gift cards to keep cherished eating spots afloat. These gift cards, meant to be used later, are in the nature of a small business loan.

9. Serving up support for displaced restaurant workers, Food Network star and restaurateur Guy Fieri has created a relief fund. This Bay Area celebrity has repeatedly come to the rescue in disasters, cooking for impacted communities, and now, offering $500 in cash to unemployed restaurant employees on a first-come, first-served basis.

10. Hotels are housing health care workers in need of lodging, with some 6,500 properties participating in the Hotels for Hope initiative nationwide. Meanwhile, in San Francisco alone, more than 30 hotels have offered housing for homeless Americans in response to local and state government requests.

Home services

1. Contractors put safety first by implementing new sanitary protocols when making home visits. Roto-Rooter is doing an outstanding job of explaining how plumbers will wear protective equipment, practice social distancing, and use disinfectant. They are also publishing how-to videos for simple home plumbing and offering advice regarding sanitary products. HVAC brand Vaughan Comfort Services created this section of their website to explain their enhanced safety measures.

2. Cleaning services are making tough decisions about whether to remain operational. Some, like Molly Maid, are still cleaning residences while implementing increased safety practices, but others are diversifying into the commercial cleaning space, cleaning offices that are temporarily empty. Meanwhile, professional biohazard cleaning services like Aftermath are creating new pages on their websites to describe their in-demand practices for disinfecting impacted properties.

3. Computer repair services are adapting, where state regulations allow, to 100% mobile operations and are fixing issues over the phone where possible. One independent shop, DreamNet Computers, created this page to explain how they are sanitizing devices being picked up or dropped off, and how they can repair some computers remotely if they can connect to the Internet.

4. The landscaping services market is haphazard at the moment, with some professionals concerned that state-by-state regulations are not clear enough for their industry, while others are embracing virtual meetings and 3D modeling with the thought that people working from home will now be more invested in having livable outdoor spaces.

Professional and instructional services

1. Much of medicine has become telemedicine and therapy has become teletherapy, barring cases which require direct one-on-one contact. Practitioners able to navigate privacy regulations can still provide vital patient support. Bridges Therapy & Wellness Center of Fairfax, Virginia is just one example of a practice putting online appointment availability front and center on its website. Check out how the telehealth platform PatientPop has quickly pivoted their roll out for medical clients.

2. Movement, meditation, and multiple forms of self-care have made a quick transition online. Religious institutions are putting their services on the web, from Pope Francis celebrating Mass at the Vatican, to Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth observing virtual Shabbat and the Imams of the Islamic Center of America broadcasting live, daily lectures from Dearborn, Michigan. I’ve found Indigenous invitations to prayer for healing especially moving in these times. Meanwhile, dance studio Dance Church has thousands of folks boogying to their livestreams, and yoga, martial arts, fine arts, and music instructors have shifted to both public and private online sessions. Check out the business support being offered by Your Yoga Alliance to instructors needing to transition operations.

3. Banks and financial institutions are responding by offering various forms of relief including deferring or waiving fees, and providing some forms of mortgage assistance. With concerns over ATM contamination, some advisors in the financial industry are suggesting customers bring their own sanitizer, gloves, and a stylus to transactions.

4. Realtors can manage most meetings virtually, and thanks to technology like Kleard and Immoviewer, buyers can get a very good idea of what properties look like and even handle closings online. However, it’s vital to follow state and local regulations regarding home showings.

5. The National Association of Bar Executives offers abundant guidance for legal professionals via their pandemic preparedness resource. They are hosting roundtables, publishing lists of tech vendors appropriate to the industry, and highlighting government and philanthropic news.

6. Personal care professionals may be struggling most, with hair stylists, manicurists, massage therapists, and related practitioners having no way to replicate their work via the Internet. Kaleidoscope Salon in Chattanooga, Tennessee held a fundraiser offering a prize of a full year of hair services in order to meet its payroll during its closure. Professionals seeking to maintain client relationships during this pause in business can head to YouTube, like R’s Just Hair Salon’s chief hairstylist Ruchi Sawhney, to demo do-it-yourself beauty tips. Stay-at-home orders are making it harder for people to access personal care products. If your salon has inventory, consider curbside pick-up of health and beauty supply kits, as is being offered by Sally Beauty.

Retail

1. Retail is taking a hard hit, and there’s no gainsaying this, but vendors who can transition at least part of their operations to e-commerce selling may be able to remain operational simply because the demand is so high now for home delivery. If you are sitting on unsold inventory and are having trouble imagining how to sell it, check out eBay, which recently announced that it is waiving seller fees to help retailers get their products onto the web for sale.

2. Major clothing retailers like Macy’s and Kohl’s have closed their stores, but continue to sell online. Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette has stated that the fewest employee furloughs have been in their digital operations, and that they hope to start bringing workers back on through a staggered process in the future. Meanwhile, smaller basic clothing retailers like the Vermont Country Store have temporarily shuttered their premises, but are continuing to ship with the proviso that an overload of orders has slowed down shipping speeds.

3. Electronics retailers are finding their product lines in high demand as all of us seek ways to conduct more of life online. T-Mobile stores may be closed, but they are offering free two-day shipping and have published a whole new section of service resources during the health emergency. Best Buy is offering contactless curbside pickup and delivery. Batteries Plus Bulbs has remained largely operational and is supplying the medical field with essential technology, while also offering curbside pickup to retail customers.

4. Plant nurseries are finding themselves inundated with customers eager to plant food crops in any gardening space they have. In my state of California, agricultural businesses are considered essential. Many nurseries and garden supply shops remain open, but — like the San Francisco Bay Area Sloat Nursery chain — are taking steps to limit the number of customers allowed in at a time, and also offer curbside pickup and delivery. Nurseries should be growing as many veggie starts and stocking as much vegetable seed as possible right now.

5. Home Improvement and hardware stores offering free delivery, like Home Depot, and free curbside pickup, like Ace Hardware, have a good chance of weathering this storm so long as customers can afford to improve their dwellings, in which they are now spending so much more of their time. In a related category, large home furnishings brands like Crate & Barrel are selling online and have their design consultants working from home with clients via phone and web chat.

6. Auto dealers have embraced tech to keep car sales moving. Toyota’s SmartPath tool takes customers from inventory search, to applying for a line of credit, to the point where a vehicle can be delivered to your home. I’ve noticed several dealerships deferring first-month payments to stimulate purchases. Meanwhile, General Motors has begun producing ventilators at its Kokomo, Indiana facility and face masks at its plant in Warren, Michigan.

Where to publicize what you’re doing

Once you’ve determined how your business can best pivot to continue serving the public, you’ll want to update your website to ensure you’re communicating your offerings. You should also update your local business listings, as described in the last edition of my column. Beyond this, here is an example-filled list of resources for maximizing publicity:

Blogs

About a decade ago, local SEO experts were strongly promoting the idea of creating hyperlocal blogs to engage communities. Bloggers who were up to the challenge now have platforms in place through which the most recent and useful information can be quickly communicated to neighbors, as in this excellent example of the West Seattle Blog. If your community lacks a hyperlocal resource like this, your business could be of great help in creating one now. If such a blog is already in place, see if your business can contribute content.

Hyperlocal business association sites

If you don’t want to go it alone in creating a blog, joining with others in a local business association like the West Seattle Junction or Chamber of Commerce will enable many hands to lighten the work. Community hubs like this one are publishing vital information including PSAs, updates on which businesses offer delivery and pickup, and highlighting local merchants. If your neighborhood has platforms like these, contact them to see how you can contribute content. If no such resources exist, contact your neighboring business owners to discuss what you can create together.

Facebook

If you aren’t in a position to build a hyperlocal website or blog right now, Facebook may be your next best option. The Yurok Tribe of California is inspiring in their use of Facebook for continuous dialog with their community. Many tribes are role-modeling how to support one another, and particularly the most vulnerable, in these times. The above example shows how one tribe is phoning its elders and has created a hotline to ensure they’re receiving vital services. I came across another example in which a tribe’s Facebook post instructed elders to hang something red in their windows if they needed any help from younger members of the community. Now is a good time to double down on Facebook with any supportive information your local business can broadcast. Of note, Facebook is offering $100 million in small business cash grants and ad credits.

Nextdoor

Nextdoor is a particularly lively community hub and this is a very good time to join it as a business. It should go without saying that publishing anything that could seem self-serving would be a poor choice. Instead, take inspiration from the spirit demonstrated in the above example of a neighborhood converting their Little Free Library into a mini dry goods pantry, or this independent restaurant using Nextdoor to offer a discount to anyone in their industry who may have lost their local job. This is a good, ready-do-go platform for outreach to your community.

Twitter

Check out how the Downtown Business Association of Edmonton is using Twitter to promote virtual local events and a new directory they’re building on their website specifically highlighting operational local businesses. The instantaneous communication capacity of Twitter is a resource your company should consider right now, even if you haven’t done much tweeting in the past. Follow and share the content of other local businesses to create a stronger community with timely messaging for the public.

Instagram

Instagram is proving extremely helpful in alerting communities to offerings and changes, as in this example of a Richland, Washington cookie cutter manufacturer transitioning operations to produce face shields for medical personnel, and providing DIY instructions for anyone with access to a 3D printer.

Radio

This excellent Los Angeles Times article by Randy Lewis reminds us of how radio remains a strong resource even for those in our community who lack Internet access. People are tuning the dials for hyperlocal information about the availability of resources, for comfort, and hope. If your business is doing something that would help local customers, consider calling into the nearest radio station to share your story. Obviously, avoid being overly-promotional, and do consider whether this might be a good time to invest a little more in formal radio advertising.

Newspapers

Almost any town with a newspaper is printing abundant information about community resources right now, including lists of operational companies like this one in the Marin Independent Journal. Reach out with your news and volunteer to be interviewed to spread the word about how your business is serving the community. These unstructured citations from trusted online news outlets can help local searchers find your business and even boost your rankings. Consider paid news ad spots as well, if it’s in your budget.

Local television and video media

I thought this multi-location appliance company, Airport Home Appliances, did an excellent job with their local TV ad spot regarding their current operations, which they also posted to YouTube. Your audience is mainly homebound now, and Nielsen finds that local TV is becoming the preferred choice for accessing news and information in the United States. If it’s in your budget, even a basic local television ad could reach many customers at this time. If now isn’t a good time for your brand to invest, get something up on YouTube and embed it on your website.

Local, regional, or industry podcasts

If your area or business category is lucky enough to have a good podcast, reaching out to the podcaster to share what your business is doing could help you broadcast your offering to a wider audience. Check out this episode of the Tennessee Farm Table (theme song guaranteed to get stuck in your head), in which podcaster Amy Campbell gives a running list of Appalachian businesses providing local food to residents. Whether you simply get mentioned or take the next step of being interviewed by a podcaster, this medium is one to embrace. And, if your area has no local podcast, think about launching one to create a more connected community.

Being the helpers

Fred Rogers Memorial Statue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Image Credit: Wally Gobetz.

I hope you’ve seen something in this article that could help support your local brand’s goals to sustain itself in the coming months. A commonality across all the examples I’ve reviewed of COVID-19 business adjustments is that regular, open communication with customers to understand and meet their needs is simply essential right now. Your customers’ stated requests are your best playbook for this unscripted moment.

It’s my heartfelt wish that you’ll see the fruits of today’s extraordinary efforts in tomorrow’s customer loyalty. My teammate, Dr. Pete, recently shared an article with me in which the author described how Marks & Spencer’s provision of clothing during Great Britain's World War II textile rationing earned decades of devoted patronage because customers felt the retailer had “been there” for them when it mattered.

Being there at the present may mean transitioning some operations online, onto street curbs and parking lots, or into delivery vans, and how you communicate availability matters more than ever before. I’m inspired by seeing the ingenuity and kindness of the “helpers” Fred Rogers spoke of, in community after community.

There’s no denying that this is a challenging time for local search marketing, and yet, at the same time, local promotional skills have never been more critical. Take a second to imagine our communities if we were still limited to once-a-year phone book updates of business information, and I think you’ll quickly see just how vital a resource the local Internet has become.

Can you be a helper today? Please, comment about your own business, your clients’ brands, or any company in your town that you’re seeing make a special endeavor to serve communities. Your story could spark a new idea for a local business owner to keep a neighborhood or even an entire city afloat. Thanks for being a helper.

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Why and How to Bring Empathy Into Your Content

Posted by DaisyQ

Creating content can feel incredibly difficult right now. If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last few weeks oscillating between a can-do approach and hours of staring into space. Here’s how to tap into those very real emotions and channel them into more impactful content.

What empathy is and isn’t

We commonly confuse sympathy with empathy. Sympathy is understanding and perhaps feeling bad for the struggles that someone may be experiencing. Empathy means understanding the person’s feelings and thoughts from their point of view. Sympathy is when you feel compassion, sorrow, or pity for what the other person is going through. Empathy is about putting yourself in their shoes.

In this post, I focus on cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand how another person may be thinking or feeling. Cognitive empathy helps communication by helping us convey information in a way that resonates with the other person.

Feelings, who needs ’em?

I’ve always struggled with how to deal with my emotions. For much of my life, I thought that I needed to keep how I felt under wraps, especially at work. I recall tough days when I Googled reasons to get out of bed, and when I reached my desk, I would try to leave my emotions at home and just focus on working. Sometimes, the office felt like an escape. But usually, pretending to be unfeeling was a difficult if not impossible task. When this strategy backfires, our feelings overrule us. I’ve come to embrace the fact that emotions are what make me whole and human.

There’s a lot going on, and we’re all grappling with it

Creating marketing content can be incredibly hard right now because there is just so much going on — not only in your mind but in your readers’ minds, too. Rather than shy away from the current emotional challenge, embrace it to transform your work and get more joy out of the content creation process.

People are looking for information, and depending on your industry, there may be several content opportunities for you to dig into. Or maybe you are in an industry where it’s business as (un)usual, and you have to create email newsletters or blog content like you always have.

Whether you sell industrial components to obscure parts of machines or homemade broths, there’s room in your content for empathy. For example, are you creating a blog post on how to work from home? Think about the parent who’s never had to juggle homeschooling their kids while holding conference calls. Are you writing about cyber threats and the need to protect firmware? Think about how the risk of a cyberattack is the last thing a dispersed IT team wants to deal with right now.

Your readers are all grappling with different issues. The ability to convey empathy in your writing will make your work much more captivating, impactful, shareable, and just plain better — whether we’re dealing with a pandemic or not.

Do I have to pretend to be a mom now?

No, you don’t. In fact, pretending can come off as disingenuous. You are not required to have the same lived-in experiences or circumstances that your reader does. Instead, just try to understand their perspective.

See if you can tell the difference between these messages:

“Chin up! It’s hard, but I’m sure it will get better.”

“I know everything looks bleak right now, but you will get through this.”

While there is nothing wrong with the first sentence in the above example, the second sentence comes across as more caring and compassionate.

Done well, empathizing can make it easier to understand the challenges, frustrations, fears, anxieties, or worries your readers might be experiencing.

How to infuse content marketing with empathy

Empathy is a skill. Those who master it gain the ability to create content that not only addresses a surface problem or issue, but also hits a deeper level by accessing the perspectives and emotions involved.

Picture the person reading

Want your readers to take action? Try to understand them.

Take your health, for example. Pretty much any advice given by your doctor would be critical, right? Yet we often struggle to implement it. Why is that? One reason could be empathy. Studies show that better health outcomes result when a physician shows empathy towards their patient.

Are you trying to incite action with your post? Maybe you want your readers to do more than just read your blog and carry on with their lives, then seek to understand where they are coming from first. Whether you’re creating a blog post or a video, picture the person who will read or watch what you are sharing, and speak directly to them. Better yet, find an image of someone that represents your intended audience online and pull it up while creating. Make your audience real. In turn, your content will become more productive because a reader who feels understood is more likely to apply what they read.

This tactic works for me when I have to create a how-to video or break something down. I pick an image from the web and ask, “Would they get it?”

Set a goal for your content

Creating content can be a slog. Setting an intention is one of my favorite ways to give purpose to my process. It helps me push through the mornings when I don’t care about finishing that first draft. I like to think about where I want to take the audience, then revisit that goal again and again until the project is complete.

For example, the goal of this blog post is:

To help business owners and marketers who need to send out emails or write blog posts while we’re dealing with a pandemic. It’s not business as usual, and empathy is what we need now more than ever. I will share why empathy works, and give practical tips on how writing in a more relatable, humane, and approachable way can help get the point across.

When I start a new post, I print a paragraph like this right at the top of my word doc. I revisit it multiple times while I’m writing and reviewing the draft. Then, I delete it right before I submit the post. Moment of truth: Does the post stand on its own? Does it express what I need to say? If so, I know it’s ready.

Share personal stories or anecdotes

I read a story by Leo Tolstoy recently that really stuck with me— in fact, the ending haunted me for a while. It was a story about greed titled, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

Tolstoy could have written an essay on how greed is wrong, but I probably wouldn’t have remembered it. Instead, I can vividly recall the farmer who dies during the struggle to get one more foot of land even though he has more than enough already.

Personal stories give meaning to your work, and you don’t need to travel to a Russian prairie to find examples. There is material in your everyday life that you can put onto paper. Think of childhood memories, past events, relationships — heck, your favorite passage from a book. How can you weave these into your narrative in a way that will connect with the reader? How can you share a tidbit from your personal life that will pull your readers in?

The ultimate question is: Who’s your audience? Once you know that, you’ll know what to share.

If you have to write about budgeting tips, put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Think back to a time when you had to watch where every dollar went. How did you cope? What resources did you use? Relate that to what your reader’s budget struggles may be today. How can your experiences help you empathize with a mom in a single-income household who now has to file for unemployment? Or the business owner who needs to re-shuffle a budget and maybe cut ancillary services? You don’t have to be in their position to appreciate what they are going through.

Think less self-promotional and more educational

Have you ever gotten to the end of a blog post and wondered why you bothered reading at all? That writer probably made an impression on you, and it wasn’t great.

Reward the reader by giving them something actionable. Help them achieve a goal they have, or include something worth retelling that’ll impress their boss, friends, or spouse. Look beyond what you’re immediately selling and appreciate how it relates to the bigger picture. Even an external hard drive or a peppercorn grinder can take on new meaning when you look at it from this perspective.

Perhaps that external hard drive is not just gigabytes but a way to digitize a family album to share with distant relatives. Or for the budding YouTuber, it may be a way to store all their outtakes without slowing down their computer. Show them how they can get more storage space or pick the best product for their needs. How can they use your advice to live their best life?

Learn from the masters

Put down the business book and try fiction.

As marketers, we can get stuck in a cycle of reading marketing content. I have at least 12 books that I could (and should) be reading instead of a Hemingway classic. But reading non-marketing materials will improve your empathetic skills by demonstrating how storytelling works.

I’m halfway through “A Farewell to Arms”, and I think the point of the story is that wars are long and pointless. I could be wrong, but I haven’t stopped reading it yet. That’s the key — the narrative is carrying me along. I’m invested in the characters and their endings. I want to find out what happens to Catherine Barkley because I empathize with her.

If you want to kick it up a notch, learn from works like Stephen King’s “On Writing” or Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. These classics pinpoint principles of narrative that work consistently across time and space. They’re as relevant and essential as ever, and they can inform, strengthen, and enliven your content. Bonus: maybe they’ll inspire you to write that novel someday.

Creating content with empathy helps you and your readers

Really good content makes us feel something. It’s a feeling that sticks with us long, long after the words have escaped our minds. That’s the kind of impression you can leave in your readers’ minds, but not without getting to know where they are coming from. Simply stating numbers and stats and figures won’t cut it. We don’t operate in a vacuum. Our relationships with people, our shared experiences, and our connections are what drive us, and in times like this, that doesn’t change. Let it be the glue that helps you bond with your audience.

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Marketing in Times of Uncertainty - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Our work as marketers has transformed drastically in the space of a month. Today, we're grateful to welcome our good friend Rand to talk about a topic that's been on the forefront of our minds lately: how to do our jobs empathetically and effectively through one of the most difficult trials in modern memory.

We hope you've got a cozy seat in your home office, a hot mug of coffee from your own kitchen Keurig, and your cat in your lap as you join us for this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.

Video Transcription

Howdy, folks. I'm Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and co-founder of Sparktoro. And I'm here today with a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday. 

I think that now is the right time to talk about marketing in uncertain epochs like the one we're living through. We obviously have a global crisis. It's very serious. But most of you watch Whiteboard Friday. Know that here at Moz, right, they're trying to help. They want to help people through this crisis. And that means doing marketing. And I don't think that now is the right time for us to stop our marketing activities. In fact, I think it's time to probably crunch down and do some hard work. 

So let's talk about what's going on. And then I'll give some tactics that I hope will be helpful to you and your teams, your clients, your bosses, everyone at your organizations as we're going through this together. 

The business world is experiencing widespread repercussions

First off, we are in this cycle of trying to prevent massive amounts of death, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But because of that, I think a lot of us in the business world, in the marketing world, are experiencing pain, particularly in certain industries. In some industries obviously demand is spiking, it's skyrocketing for, you know, coronavirus-related reasons. And in other cases, demand is down. That's because we sort of have this inability to go out.

We can't go to bars and restaurants and movies and bowling alleys and go do all the things we would normally do. So we don't need fancy clothes to go do it and we don't need haircuts — this is probably the last Whiteboard Friday I would want to record before needing a cut. And all of that spending, right, that consumer spending affects business-to-business spending as well. 

Lower spending → cost-cutting → lower investment/layoffs → environment of fear...

It leads to cost cutting by businesses because they know there's not as much demand. It leads to lower investment and oftentimes layoffs as we saw in the United States, where nearly 10 million workers are are out of work, according to the latest stats from the federal government. And that builds this environment of fear, right. None of us have faced anything like this. This is much bigger and worse, at least this spike of it is, than the Great Recession of 2008. And, of course, all of these things contribute to lower spending across the board. 

However, what's interesting about this moment in time is that it is a compressed moment. Right. It's not a long-term fear of of what will happen. I think there's fears about whether the recession will take a long time to recover from. But we know that eventually, sometime between 3 and 18 months from now, spending will resume and there will be this new normal. I think of now as a time when marketing needs to change its tone and attitude.

Businesses need to change their tone and attitude and in three ways. And that's what I want to talk through. 

Three crucial points

1. Cut with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw

First off, as you are looking to save money and if you're an agency, if you're a consultant, your clients are almost certainly saying, "Hey, where can we pull back and still get returns on investment?" And I think one of the important points is not to cut with a chainsaw. Right. Not to take a big whack to, "Oh, let's just look at all of our Google and Facebook ad spending and cut it out entirely." Or "Let's look at all of our content marketing investments and drop them completely." That's not probably not the right way to go. 

Instead, we should be looking to cut with a scalpel, and that means examining each channel and the individual contributors inside channels as individuals and looking at whether they are ROI-positive. I would urge against looking at a say, one-week, two-week, three-week trend. The last three weeks spending is very frozen and I believe that it will open up more again. I think most economists agree. You can see that's why the the public stock markets have not crashed nearly as hard. We've had some bouncing around.

And I think that's because people know that we will get to this point where people are ordering online. They are using businesses online. They are getting deliveries. They are doing activities through the Internet over the course of however long we're quarantined or there is fear about going out and then it will return to a new normal. 

And so because of that, you should probably be looking something like six to twelve weeks in the past and trying to sort out, OK, where are the trends, where are their lifelines and opportunities and points of light? And let's look at those ROI-positive channels and not cut them too soon. 

Likewise, you can look inside a channel. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend Seer Interactive's guide to cutting with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and they look at how you can analyze your Google Ads accounts to find keywords that are probably still sending you valuable traffic that you should not pull back on. I would also caution — I've talked to a bunch of folks recently who's seen Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube and Google ad inventory at historically low prices. So if you have ROI-positive channels right now or your clients do, now is an awesome time to be to potentially be putting some dollars into that. 

2. Invest now for the second & third waves in the future

Second thing, I would invest now for the second and third waves. I think that's a really smart way to go. You can look at Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg and a bunch of folks have written about investing during times of recession, times of fear, and seeing how. Basically when we when we go through wave one, which I think will be still another two to six weeks, of sort of nothing but virus-related news, nothing but COVID-19, and get to a point where we're transitioning to this life online. It's becoming our new every day. And then getting to a post-crisis new normal, you know, after we have robust testing and quarantining has hopefully worked out well. The hospital systems aren't overwhelmed and maybe a vaccine as is near development or done.

When those things start to come, we will want to have now messaging and content and keyword demands serving. Right. And ads and webinars. Anything that is in our marketing inventory that can be helpful to people, not just during this time, but over the course of these, because if we make these investments now, we will be better set up than our competitors who are pulling back to execute on this. And that is what that research shows, right, that essentially folks who invest in marketing, in sales during a recession tend to outperform and more quickly outperform their competition as markets resume. You don't even have to wait for them to get good — just as they start to pick up. 

3. Read the room

The third and possibly most important thing right now is, I think, to read the room. People are paying attention online like never before. And if you're doing web marketing, they're paying attention to your work. To our work. That means we need to be more empathetic than we have been historically, right? They are. Our audiences are not thinking about the same things they were weeks ago. They're in a very new mindset. It doesn't matter if they're business-to-business or business-to-consumer. You are dealing with everyone on the planet basically obsessed with the conditions that we're all in right now. That means assuming that everyone is thinking about this.



I really think the best type of content you create, the best type of marketing you can create right now across any channel, any platform is stuff that helps first. Helps other people. It could be in big ways. It could be in small ways. 

The Getty Museum, I don't know if you saw Avinash Kaushik's great post about the Getty Museum. They did this fun thing where they took pictures from their museum, famous paintings and they put them online and said, "Hey, go around your home and try and recreate these and we'll post them." Is it helping health care workers get masks? No. But is it helping people at home with their kids, with their families, with their loved ones have a little fun, take their mind off the crisis, engage with art in a way that maybe they can't because they can't go to museums right now? Yeah, that's awesome. That's fine. It's okay to help in little ways, too, but help first. 

I also think it's okay to talk about content or subjects that are not necessarily related to the virus. Look, web marketing right now is not directly related to the coronavirus. It's not even directly related to some of the follow-on effects of that. But I'm hoping that it's helpful. And I'm hoping that we can talk about it in empathetic and thoughtful ways. We'd just have to have to read the room. 

It is okay to recognize that this crisis is affecting your customers and to talk about things that aren't directly related but are still useful to them. 

And if you can, I would try not to ignore this, right? Not not to create things that are completely unrelated, that feel like, "Gosh, this could have been launched at any time in the last six months, sort of feels tone deaf." I think everything that we do is viewed through the lens of what's happening right now. And certainly I have that experience as I go through online content. 

Do not dismiss the scenario. I think that that history will reflect very poorly. History is moving so fast right now that it is already reflecting poorly on people who are doing this. 

Don't exploit the crisis in a shameless way. I've seen a few marketing companies and agencies. I won't point them out because I don't think shaming is the right thing to do right now, but show how you're helping. Don't exploit by saying "It's coronavirus times. We have a sale." All right? Say, "Oh, we are offering a discount on our products because we know that money is tight right now and we are helping this crisis by donating 10 percent of whatever." Or, "We are helping by offering you something that you can do at home with your family or something that will help you with remote work or something that will help you through whatever you're going through," whatever your customers are going through. 

Don't keep your tone and tactics the same right now. Oh, yes, I think that's kind of madness as well. I would urge you, as you're creating all this potentially good stuff, new stuff, stuff that plans for the future and that speaks to right now, go ahead and audit your marketing. Look at the e-mail newsletters you're sending out. Look at the sequential emails that are in your site onboarding cycles. Look at the overlay messaging, look at your home page, look at your About page. 

Make sure that you're either not ignoring the crisis or speaking effectively to it. Right. I don't think every page on a website needs to change right now. I don't think every marketing message has to change. But I think that in many cases it's the right thing to do to conduct an audit and to make sure that you are not being insensitive or perceived as insincere. 

All right, everyone, I hope that you are staying safe, that you're staying at home, that you're washing your hands. And I promise you, together, we're going to get through this.

Thanks. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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