Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by SimonPenson

Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly.

It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic.

With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the purse strings further in 2017) 92% admitted to not knowing exactly how they should execute.

To check out all the results from the survey, click below (opens up in a new tab):

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The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey?

"Producing engaging content, consistently."

I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks.

You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that.

Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem!

You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your campaigns are if your audience has no other content to come back to and engage with.

And this is where the constant content plan comes in...

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Constant content

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently.

To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

The best way to explain this is to visualize it in a different way. Below, you’ll see a simple diagram to throw light on my point.

Here we can see how a campaign-led strategy exposes holes in your plan. While we have plenty of activity going on in both our owned and earned channels, the issue is what goes on between large content launches. Where do those people go during those periods of inactivity? How do we keep them engaged when there's no central content hub to pull them into?

This kind of approach is something we see often, especially from larger brands where budgets allow for more creative content campaigns to be run regularly, and here’s why it doesn’t yield positive ROI.

As human beings, we like variety. To keep us hooked, content delivery needs to reflect this. Campaigns need to be designed as part of a whole, becoming a peak content moment rather than the only content moment, pulling new audiences back to the constant content activity going on at the center of brand activity.

You see it in the way magazines are organized, starting with an initial section of often short-form content before you then hit a four-plus-page feature. This is done to ensure we keep turning the pages, experiencing variation as we do so.

This is something I like to call content flow. It’s a great strategic "tool" to help ensure you design your overall strategy the right way.

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The approach to strategy

The key is actually very simple. It focuses the mind on the creation of a content framework that enables you to produce lots of high-quality regular content and the ideas that flow from it. I call it the "Constant Content Plan."

The right way to approach the content planning phase is to create a process that supports the building of layers of different content types, like we see below in our second diagram:

In this example, you can see how we intersperse the bigger campaigns with lots of owned content, creating a blog and resources section that gives the new visitor something to explore and come back to. Without it, they simply float back out into the content abyss and onto someone else’s radar.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

"Smaller" doesn’t mean lower-quality, however, and investing lots of time through the ideation phase for these pieces is critical to success.

Creating smaller ideas

To do this well and create that constant content strategy, a great place to start is by looking at the ideas magazines use. For example, these are the regular content types you often find in the best-crafted titles:

1. What I've learned
   Advice piece from a heavy-hitter. Can sometimes be expanded to what I've learned in my 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.
2. The dual interview
   Get two people together for an interview. Write an intro as to why they’re there, and then transcribe their chat. Bingo: unique content.
3. Have you ever/What do you think of?
   Pose a question and ask ten people for their responses. Good reactive content to a particular event that might pertain to one of our clients.
4. Cash for questions
   Get an interviewee/expert and pose them a series of questions gathered from real-life members of the public.
5. A day in the life
   What it says on the tin — an in-depth look at someone of interest's working day.
6. Person vs person debate
   Start with a question or subject matter, get two people, put it to them, and record the results.
7. Master xxxxxx in five minutes
   A short how-to — can be delivered in pictorial or video format.

This style of regular series content lends itself well to online strategy, too. By running these regularly, you create both variety and the critical stickiness required to keep the audience coming back.

Of course, with such variation it also then allows you to create better newsletters, social strategies, and even inbound marketing plans, maximizing that return on investment.

The strategy allows for informative content as well as entertaining pieces. In doing so, it gives your brand the opportunity to build subject trust and authority, as well as capturing key opportunities in the purchase funnel such as micro-moments and pain points.

This combination of informative and entertaining output ensures you're front and center when your customer eventually falls into the purchase funnel.

Some examples

One way of bringing this to life is to look at brands already executing well.

One of the best blog strategies I have seen in some time is the one by Scotts Menswear. One of the key reasons for its quality is the fact it's run by a very experienced print editor.

If we reverse-engineer what they’ve been doing on-page, we can clearly see that much thought has gone into creating variation, entertainment, and usefulness in a single well-rounded strategy.

Take the last ten posts, for instance. Here's what we have and how it flows:

• Seven Films We're Looking Forward to in 2017 – Video-based entertainment/lifestyle piece.
• Key Pieces for Your January Fitness Drive – Trending content with useful advice.
• Style Focus – A great regular piece that jumps on trending "news" to discuss the implications for fashion.
• Updated Classics from Puma – A news article on a new trainer release.
• Polo Shirts: A Wardrobe Staple – An in-depth guide to a key piece of clothing (part of a series).
• Our Guide to Valentine's Day – Lifestyle guide that helps convey brand positioning, tonality, and opinion.
• Nail Your Valentine's Day Outfit – Helpful guide to getting it right on a key seasonal event in the audience’s calendar. Clearly, they see Valentine's as a sales peak.
• Get Your Overhead Jacket Kicks – Guide to a fashion staple.
• 5 Brands and Acts Tipped for Greatness – Lifestyle piece tapping into the music/fashion brand positioning.
• Our 5 Favorite Trainers Online Right Now – Great list feature to help the consumer buy smarter.

You can clearly see how they're using structured thinking to create a blog of real variety and value. By combining this with a strong big-bang content plan that sucks in new visitors, you can build a hefty retained audience that improves critical metrics such as dwell time, returning visits, engagement, and sales.

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Building our own plan

I know what you're thinking. "Sounds great, for a brand in fashion. It’s cool and interesting. But I work in a 'boring' niche and this type of stuff just isn’t possible."

While it could be a little more difficult that doesn’t mean it is impossible by any stretch of the imagination.

To prove the point, let’s look at a fictional example for a company in the medical products sector.

Here’s the deal: A2Z Medical is a company built up in the '60s and '70s. They have a huge B2B footprint but want to bring their marketing strategy into the current decade, in part because they are launching a consumer-facing brand for the first time. The new venture will offer medical kits for the general public and as such requires a proactive, content-led strategy to promote trust, awareness, and engagement alongside the obvious requirement for sales.

Audience research

The first step in building a content strategy is to understand your audience.

We could go into the detail of that all day long, but for the sake of this example we already have detailed data that tells us there are two main groups of people interested in coming to and buying from the site.

I've also written about the process I go through to define personas, and would always recommend this post too for background.

James is an obsessive ailment Googler, worrying over every little thing that he or his family suffers. He’s a detail man and wants to be prepared for all eventualities.

Chloe, on the other hand, has very different needs. She's a mum, works part-time to help pay the bills, and then devotes herself to her family and children.

She's time-poor and takes a practical view on life to make it work. Her purchase behavior is based on distress or urgent need.

Different need states

It is abundantly clear from this very quick overview that each have very different purchase journeys and needs from a content perspective.

We'll look at what this means for our content strategy a little later. Before we dive into that, though, we must also look at our understanding of the market opportunity.

This data-dive helps us to understand what people are looking for now in the space, where they get it from currently, and where the gaps may be.

The data-dive

This work is carried out by one of our content strategists before any creative sessions take place. This ensures we can validate ideas back to what the data tells us.

So, what does that process involve? Let’s look at each stage briefly now:

1. Long-tail research
2. Quora/Reddit/forum research
3. Magazine research
4. Pub beers!

It's a well-covered subject area, but also a very important one; it often yields ideas that convert fastest to traffic and revenue.

1. Long-tail research

Much has been written (including this piece I penned in 2015) on this subject area, and in much more detail than I aim to cover it here. Right now, let’s focus on some key tools and areas for opportunity.

It's easy to get lost in this process, so the key is to keep it simple. To do this, I stick to a small handful of tools:

• SerpStat – Has a useful long-tail tool based on Google Suggest to give you lists of questions by keyword phrase.
• Keywordtool.io – A similar tool, but free to use. Slightly more clunky.
• Bloomberry – A new tool by the makers of Buzzsumo. Does a great job of finding opportunities from other sources, such as other sites and forums. It also has a nice data visualization view that gives you volume and key competitor info, the latter of which can be helpful for a later stage in the process. Here’s an example of a search for "first aid":

• Storybase – A free tool that pulls long-tail phrases from a variety of sources for content ideas and also includes some demographic data. This can be helpful when it comes to matching ideas to personas.

For the sake of this process, we're not looking to build a full long-tail strategy, of course. This is solely about finding content ideas with search volume attached to them.

By downloading from a bunch of sources (such as those above), it's then relatively easy to de-dupe them in Excel and create a master list of ideas to pull into your overall plan.

It can make sense to segment or classify those ideas by persona, too. I do this via simple color coding, as you can see below. This allows you to create a shortlist of ideas that are on-brand and have the required level of opportunity attached.

Working this way makes sure you're thinking hard about serving the needs and pain points of the personas.

To further reinforce this point, it can work very well to include a mini-brainstorm as part of this stage, gathering a few people to talk specifically about the pain points experienced by each persona.

In this session, it's also useful to talk through the various micro-moment opportunities by asking what questions they ask in each of the following scenarios:

I want to go….
I want to do…
I want to know…
I want to buy…

You should end up with a list of content ideas per persona that covers pain points and interests.

2. Quora/Reddit/forum research

Another great source of information is the world of forums and aggregator sites. As you might expect, this starts with sub-Reddit research.

Within categories like those below lies a wealth of questions, the answers to which form brilliant article inspiration:

If we pop into the /AskDocs/ forum, we see a plethora of medical challenges from people looking for help — perfect real-world examples of everyday ailments that a site like ours could help to answer.

Q: I have a painful stomach when eating pork…?

Q: Will I need less sleep if I’m on a good diet and active?

Q: Swollen lymph nodes and nose bleeds. What could be going on?

The answers to these questions often require much research and professional advice, but by working through them for the less-serious everyday issues you could soon help Chloe out and become a useful ally.

The same is also true of Quora. You can play around with advanced search queries to drill into the juiciest boards by carrying out searches such as:

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what's being asked within your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example, we might type:

The search engine then delivers a list of super-relevant sites designed to answer medical questions and we can easily pick through them to extract ideas for popular content.

And as an extra tip search for your keyword and “vBulletin” – a popular software used for forum sites. This will often surface rarely found sites with some real insight into particularly the older demographic, who are more likely to use traditional forums.

3. Magazine research

Another very important area to explore is magazine research. They contain some of the most refined content strategies in existence; the level of expertise that goes into idea creation and headline writing is without equal.

It makes sense, therefore, to find titles relevant to your niche (in our case, health and medicine) and look for great content opportunities.

You can even do this online, to a degree. If you go to a site like magazines.com, greatmagazines.co.uk, other magazine subscription sites, or even perform a Google image search, you’ll find a myriad of headline ideas simply by looking at covers.

In the example below I've Googled "medical magazines" and found numerous cover lines that would form great digital content. Here’s an example from just one, 4Health Magazine:

4. Pub beers

And last but certainly not least, we have the tried and true "chat-in-a-pub" approach. It might sound like an excuse for a beer, but it’s actually very useful.

If you can find a handful of people aligned to your personas, offer to buy them a few drinks and chat through their experiences and challenges. You’ll be surprised what you find out!

Product range

Of course, it pays to add some level of alignment to the plan by understanding which products offer the best margin or are most important to the business.

This info should come out of your initial onboarding and overall strategy creation process, but it can also be found via Analytics (if set up correctly) by looking for the best-selling products and finding out their trade cost.

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The creative process

By this point, you’ll be overflowing with data and ideas for content. The challenge, however, is ensuring that you can add variation to that ideas mix. I call this stage the "Magazine and Hero Process."

Magazine ideas

To create that level of engagement and stickiness, we need ideas that are less practical and more entertaining. Any good content strategy should include a good mix of both informational and entertaining ideas; the first part of our creative brainstorm focuses on concepts that will achieve this balance.

We follow a structure that looks loosely like the below:

Stage one:

We start by asking "human" questions about each of our personas. While we may have completed all the keyword research in the world, it's important to take a real-world view on pain points and so forth.

From here we discuss the purchase funnel stage, ensuring that we have ideas not just for the top of the funnel but all the way through it, backed by a mix of content types to support that variation aim.

That conversation will then be followed by a look at the brand's wider marketing plan and seasonal events to ensure we plan key periods of activity thoroughly.

And the icing on the top is the quick look at our "swipe file," a treasure trove of old ideas we've seen, to see if we can borrow a concept or two for our plan.

Stage two:

The second and final stage of our ideation is a forensic exploration into what magazines can offer. I am a voracious devourer of specialist magazines; it can really pay dividends to look for clever ideas or content series to bring into your plan before the massive validation process begins. This will sort the possible from the impossible.

By following a set way of discussing ideas, you'll leave no stone unturned.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce.

To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it below:

The idea here is that it makes it easier to decide what content types fit with which parts of the funnel best and also the relative size of that content in terms of the man hours required to create it.

Working in this logical fashion will help with overall content mix.

Hero ideas

Once you've worked through that process, it's time to open up bigger ideas. These are important for one very simple reason: they help you find and reach new audiences to pull back into your sensational constant content plan.

We won’t go into detail here as to how to come up with consistently good big-bang ideas, as the point of this post is to look at the more regular content strategy, but if you want to read more about it click here.

For now, it's enough to note that you should also include time to think about campaigns and how they fit into your overall plan.

Pulling it together – process + example

By now, you should be swimming in great ideas of every kind imaginable, every one of which ties back nicely to your personas.

In our example, we've been focusing on Chloe and James. The next job is to lay those ideas out based on what you know can be delivered.

This process is broken into two parts:

• The laying out of the content based on ensuring variation and content flow.
• Fitting that plan into an operational format that's deliverable and based on available resources and/or budgets.

Getting that to work is little more than trial and error, but the result should be a content calendar that delivers on the promise of a great mix of regular content ideas, entertaining pieces, and helpful content that makes both James and Chloe want to come back to again and again.

Here’s an example of a two-week window to give you an idea of how just a portion of that regular content might play out:

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Free downloads

Fancy giving it a go? You can use this free brand-as-publisher download to make the process easier. It contains all the tools and templates you need to ensure your output joins up the dots to maximize engagement and ‘stickiness’ from your regular content and to critically fix your issues with content marketing effectiveness.

And for those of you that want to see the Content Marketing Survey results in full click on the banner above to claim your free results ebook, complete with commentary, or scroll below for the highlights...

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Do We Still Need to Disavow in the Era of Penguin 4.0?

Posted by MarieHaynes

It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you'd engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. It was not uncommon to see situations like this:

I saw many businesses that had looooooong periods of time of suppression — even years!

According to Google spokesperson Gary Illyes, the new version of Penguin that was released in September of 2016 no longer suppresses sites:

Now, instead of causing a sitewide demotion when Penguin detects spam, they’ll simply devalue that spam so that it can’t help improve a site’s rankings.

I’m guessing that it took a lot of brainpower to figure out how to do this. Google now has enough trust in their ability to find and devalue spam that they are comfortable removing the punitive aspect of Penguin. That’s impressive.

This change brings up a question that I am asked several times a week now:

If Penguin is able to devalue spam, is there any reason to disavow links any more?

I've been asked this enough times now that I figured it was a good idea to write an article on my answer to this question.

A brief refresher: What is the disavow tool?

The disavow tool was given to us in October of 2012.

You can use it by uploading a file to Google that contains a list of either URLs or domains. Then, as Google crawls the web, if they come across a URL or domain that is in your disavow file, they won’t use links from that page in their calculations of PageRank for your site. Those links also won’t be used by the Penguin algorithm when it decides whether your site has been involved in webspam.

For sites that were affected by Penguin in the past, the disavow tool was an integral part of getting the suppression lifted off the site. It was essentially a way of saying to Google, “Hey... in the past we made some bad links to our site. But we don’t want you to use those links in your calculations.” Ideally, it would be best to remove bad links from the web, but that’s not always possible. The disavow tool was, in my opinion, super important for any site that was hit by Penguin.

For more in-depth information on using the disavow tool, see this Moz post: http://ift.tt/1LmoM7S

What does Google say about using the disavow tool now?

It wasn’t long after the release of Penguin 4.0 before people starting asking Google whether the disavow tool was still necessary. After all, if Google can just devalue spam links on their own, why should I have to disavow them?

Here are some replies from Google employees:

Now, the conspiracy theorists out there will say, “Of course Google wants you to disavow! They need that data to machine-learn for Penguin!”

Google has said that Penguin is not a machine learning algorithm:

And even if they ARE using disavow data for some kind of machine learning training set, really, does it matter? In my opinion, if Google is saying that we should be still using the disavow tool, I don’t think they're trying to trick us. I think it still has a real purpose.

Three reasons why I still recommend using the disavow tool

There are three main reasons why I still recommend disavowing. However, I don’t recommend it in as many cases as I used to.

1) Manual actions still exist

You do NOT want to risk getting a manual unnatural links penalty. I have documented on Moz before about the many cases I've seen where a manual unnatural links penalty was devastating to the long-term health of a site.

Google employee Gary Illyes commented during a podcast that, when a Google webspam team member looks at your site’s links, they can often see labels next to the links. He said the following:

“If the manual actions team is reviewing a site for whatever reason, and they see that most of the links are labeled as Penguin Real-Time affected, then they might decide to take a much deeper look on the site... and then maybe apply a manual action on the site because of the links. ”

In other words, if you have an unnatural link profile and you leave it up to Penguin to devalue your links rather than disavowing, then you’re at risk for getting a manual action.

Of course, if you actually do have a manual action, then you’ll need to use the disavow tool as part of your cleanup efforts along with manual link removal.

2) There are other algorithms that use links

Link quality has always been important to Google. I believe that Penguin is just one way in which Google fights against unnatural links algorithmically. One example of another algorithm that likely uses links is the Payday Loans algorithm. This algorithm isn’t just for payday loans sites; it also affects sites in many high-competition verticals.

Bill Slawski recently posted this interesting article on his thoughts about a recent patent filed by Google. In one place, the patent talks about a situation where a resource may have a large number of links pointing to it but there is a disproportionate amount of traffic. In cases like that, the page being linked to might actually be demoted in rankings.

Now, that’s just a patent, so it doesn’t mean for sure that there's actually an algorithm behind this... but there could be! Makes you think, right?

Google is always trying to fight against link spam and Penguin is just one of the ways in which they do this. If there are links that are potentially causing my link profile to look spammy to Google, then I don’t want them to count in any calculations that Google is making.

3) Can we trust that Penguin is able to devalue all spam pointing to our site?

The official announcement from Google on Penguin is here. Here's what it says about devaluing as opposed to demoting:

"Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site."

This statement is not clear to me. I have questions:

• When Google says they are “adjusting ranking,” could that also be negative adjustments?
• Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain pages rather than affecting the whole site?
• Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain keywords rather than affecting the whole site?

As posted above, we received some clarification on this from Google employees in a Facebook post (and again via tweets) to tell us that Penguin 4.0 doesn’t penalize, but rather devalues spam. However, these are not official statements from Google. These statements may mean that we never have to worry about any link pointing to our site ever again. Perhaps? Or they could mean that there's less need to worry than there was previously.

Personally, if my business relies on Google organic rankings in order to succeed, I'm a little leery about putting all of my trust in this algorithm’s ability to ignore unnatural links and not let them hurt me.

Who should be disavowing?

While I do still recommend use of the disavow tool, I only recommend it in the following situations:

1. For sites that have made links for SEO purposes on a large scale – If you or an SEO company on your behalf made links in low-quality directories, low-quality article sites, bookmark sites, or as comment spam, then these need to be cleaned up. Here's more information on what makes a link a low-quality link. You can also run links past my disavow blacklist if you're not sure whether it’s a good one or not. Low-quality links like this are probably being devalued by Penguin, but they're the type of link that could lead to a manual unnatural links penalty if you happen to get a manual review by the webspam team and they haven’t been disavowed.
2. For sites that previously had a manual action for unnatural links – I've found that if a site has enough of a spam problem to get an unnatural links penalty, then that site usually ends up collecting more spam links over the years. Sometimes this is because low-quality directories pop up and scrape info from other low-quality directories. Sometimes it's because old automated link-generating processes keep on running. And sometimes I don’t have an explanation, but spammy links just keep appearing. In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action.
3. For sites under obvious negative SEO attacks – The key here is the word "obvious." I do believe that in most cases, Google is able to figure out that spam links pointed at a site are links to be ignored. However, at SMX West this year, Gary Illyes said that the algorithm can potentially make mistakes: If you have a bunch of pharma and porn links pointing at your site, it’s not a bad idea to disavow them, but actually in most cases I just ignore these. Where I do recommend disavowing for negative SEO attacks is when the links pointing at your site contain anchors for keywords for which you want to rank. If it’s possible that a webspam team member could look at your link profile and think that there are a lot of links there that exist just for SEO reasons, then you want to be sure that those are cleaned up.

Who does NOT need to disavow?

If you look at your links and notice some "weird" links that you can’t explain, don’t panic!

Every site gets strange links, and often quite a few of them. If you haven’t been involved in manipulative SEO, you probably do not need to be disavowing links.

When Google takes action either manually or algorithmically against a site for unnatural linking, it's because the site has been actively trying to manipulate Google rankings on a large scale. If you made a couple of directory links in the past, you’re not going to get a penalty.

You also don’t need to disavow just because you notice sitewide links pointing to you. It can look scary to see in Google Search Console that one site is linking to you thousands of times, especially if that link is keyword-anchored. However, Google knows that this is a sitewide link and not thousands of individual links. If you made the link yourself in order to help your rankings, then sure, go ahead and disavow it. But if it just appeared, it’s probably nothing to worry about.

Borderline cases

There are some cases where it can be difficult to decide whether or not to disavow. I sometimes have trouble advising on cases where a company has hired a medium- to high-quality SEO firm that's done a lot of link building — rather than link earning — for them.

Here's an example of a case that would be difficult:

Let’s say you've been getting most of your links by guest posting. These guest posts are not on low-quality sites that exist just to post articles, but rather on sites that real humans read. Are those good links?

According to Google, if you're guest posting primarily for the sake of getting links, then these are unnatural links. Here's a quote from Google employee John Mueller:

"Think about whether or not this is a link that would be on your site if it weren’t for your actions…When it comes to guest blogging it’s a situation where you are placing links on other people’s sites together with this content, so that’s something I kind of shy away from purely from a link building point of view. It can make sense to guest blog on other people’s sites to drive some traffic to your site… but you should use a nofollow."

If you have a small number of guest posts, Google is unlikely to go after you. But what if a webspam team member looks at your links and sees that you have a very large number of links built via guest posting efforts? That makes me uncomfortable.

You could consider disavowing those links to avoid getting a manual action. It’s quite possible, though, that those links are actually helping your site. Disavowing them could cause you to drop in rankings.

This article could easily turn into a discussion on the benefits and risks of guest posting if we had the space and time. My point in mentioning this is to say that some disavow decisions are tough.

In general, my rule of thumb is that you should use the disavow file if you have a good number of links that look like you made them with SEO as your primary goal.

Should you be auditing your disavow file?

I do believe that some sites could benefit from pruning their disavow file. However, I have yet to see any reports from anyone who has claimed to have done this and seen benefit that we can reasonably attribute to the recovery of PageRank that flows through those links.

If you have used your disavow file in the past in an effort to remove a manual action or recover from a Penguin hit, then there's a good possibility that you were overly aggressive in your disavow efforts. I know I've had some manual penalties that were really difficult to remove and we likely disavowed more links than were necessary. In cases like those, we could go through our disavow files and remove the domains that were questionable disavow decisions.

It’s not always easy to do this, though, especially if you've done the correct thing and have disavowed on the domain level. If this is the case, you won’t have actual URLs in your disavow file to review. It’s hard to make reavowing decisions without seeing the actual link in question.

Here's a process you can use to audit your disavow file. It gets a little technical, but if you want to give it a try, here it is:

(Note: Many of these steps are explained in greater detail and with pictures here.)

• Download your disavow file from Google: http://ift.tt/U0eJtA
• Get a list of your links from Google Search Console. (It’s not a bad idea to also get links from other sources, as well.)
• On your CSV of links, make a column for domains. You can extract the domain by using this formula, assuming your URLs are in Column B:
  
  =LEFT(B1,FIND(“/”,B1,9)-1)
  
  You can then use Find and Replace to replace the http, https, and www. with blanks. Now you have a list of domains.
• On your disavow file, get a list of domains you've disavowed by replacing domain: with blanks. (This is assuming you have disavowed on the domain level and not the URL level.)
• Put your new list of disavowed domains on the second sheet of your links spreadsheet and fill Column B down with "disavowed".
• Now, on the links list, we’re going to use a VLOOKUP to figure out which of our current live links are ones that we've previously disavowed. In this formula, your domains are in the first column of each spreadsheet and I've used 1000 as the total number of domains in my disavow list. Here goes:
  
  =VLOOKUP(A1,sheet2!$A$1:$B$1000,2,FALSE)
• Now you can take the domains that are in your disavow file and audit those URLs.

What we’re looking for here are URLs where we had disavowed them just to be safe, but in reality, they are probably OK links.

Note: Just as in regular link auditing work, do not make decisions based on blanket metrics. While some of these metrics can help us make decisions, you do not want to base your decision for reavowing solely on Domain Authority, spam score, or some other metric. Rather, you want to look at each domain and think, “If a webspam team member looked at this link, would they think it only exists for SEO reasons, or does it have a valid purpose outside of SEO?”

Let’s say we've gone through the links in our disavow file and have found 20 links that we'd like to reavow. We would then go back to the disavow file that we downloaded from Google and remove the lines that say "domain:example.com" for each of those domains which we want to reavow.

Upload your disavow file to Google again. This will overwrite your old file. At some point in the future Google should start counting the links that you've removed from the file again. However, there are a few things to note:

• Matt Cutts from Google mentioned in a video that reavowing a link takes "a lot longer" than disavowing. They built a lag function into the tool to try to stop spammers from reverse-engineering the algorithm.
• Matt Cutts also said in the same video that a reavowed link may not carry the same weight it once did.

If this whole process of reavowing sounds too complicated, you can hire me to do the work for you. I might be willing to do the work at a discount if you allow me to use your site (anonymously) as a case study to show whether reavowing had any discernible benefit.

Conclusions

Should we still be using the disavow tool? In some cases, the answer to this is yes. If you have links that are obviously there for mostly SEO reasons, then it's best to disavow these so that they don’t cause you to get a manual action in the future. Also, we want to be sure that Google isn't using these links in any sort of algorithmic calculations that take link quality into account. Remember, it’s not just Penguin that uses links.

I think that it is unlikely that filing a disavow will cause a site to see a big improvement in rankings, unless the site is using it to recover from a sitewide manual action. Others will disagree with me, however. In fact, a recent Moz blog post showed a possible recovery from an algorithmic suppression shortly after a site filed a disavow. I think that, in this case, the recovery may have been due to a big algorithm change that SEOs call Fred that happened at the same time, rather than the filing of a disavow file.

In reality, though, no one outside of Google knows for sure how effective the disavow tool is now. We know that Google says we should still use it if we find unnatural links pointing to our site. As such, my advice is that if you have unnatural links, you should still be disavowing.

I’d love to hear what you think. Please do leave a comment below!

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What Makes Mozzers Tick? (An April Fools' Day Alternative)

Posted by Nick_Sayers

After five years at Moz, I’ve found that I work with some of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever met. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for an April Fools video this year, rather than tricking people like every other company does, we decided instead to showcase a few of the talented folks around the Mozplex. Alongside Kristina Keyser, we shot and edited this video so you can see what makes us Mozzers tick when we aren’t building sweet SEO software.

We know a lot of you, in the community, have random hobbies like us — we’d love to hear about them! Please share them with us in the comments.

Looking for more information on all the cool stuff you just saw? We have that for you, too!

Check out my movie, The Last Buck Hunt, on Amazon Prime.

If you want to sing Teenage Dirtbag like Chiaryn, start with this karaoke wiki.

David would like for you to check out his Seatlle-based band, Your Favorite Friend.

The Modern Quilt Guild is a great place to meet other quilters and find meet-ups to show off your work.

If you're looking for a great community around knitting, Alex recommends Ravelry.

In the mood for some pop punk? Check out Kevin's old band, Miracle Max. (But we also secretly think you should check out this article as well.)

Abe would like for you to know more about making old-school gaming beats by checking out Chip Music’s forum.

It's really cool to see that Katie does martial arts at Seven Star Women's Kung Fu, because it's rare to see schools like this just for ladies.

Looking for beautiful pictures from around the world? Peep Kristina's photography.

Looking to get super duper ripped like Lucas? Learn more about Bodypump.

Looking to adopt a dog in the Seattle area? Janisha recommends starting your adoption search now.

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Schema.org Just Released New Restaurant Menu Markup — Here's How to Get Started

Posted by TouchPointDigital

By now, most people who follow SEO are familiar with structured data, the Schema.org vocabulary, and rich snippets. Even those who know very little about SEO appreciate the benefits of adding structured data to their websites, namely that they might be able to get rich snippets in search results.

Of course, the main benefit of structured data is that it helps search engines better understand your content, which in turn helps them rank it more appropriately in search results. But we’re not here to discuss the what and why about structured data; there are plenty of other articles online that have covered that topic nicely.

Now, while Schema.org is not a comprehensive vocabulary that specifically covers every type of business — and it’s not meant to be — any business can use it to mark up their website’s content. But there’s one industry that so far has been rather limited as to what they could do with schema: restaurants.

Sure, it’s true that restaurants could always mark up the usual information such as their name, address, phone number, hours and so on. But when it came to marking up the most important information on their website — their menu — the only thing available to restaurants was one lonely menu property. That property could either point to the URL where their menu could be found, or they could mark up their entire menu simply as text. There was no way of truly marking up individual menu items and their prices, let alone specifying different types of menus such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and so on.

Well, restaurant owners (and those who do SEO for restaurants) — rejoice! With their latest release, Schema.org has added several new properties and types that will allow marked-up menus to truly be "structured" data. And while this article is addressed particularly to restaurants, any business that serves food or drinks (such as coffee shops, bakeries, cafes, bars, and so on) can use these new properties and types to mark up their menu(s).

The new menu properties & types

The first thing you'll notice when you visit the http://ift.tt/WlfUpY page is that the menu property has been replaced with the hasMenu property. But if your current markups are still using the old menu property, don’t worry — everything will still work until you get around to updating things.

Here’s what else has been added for restaurant menus:

• A new menu type. Menus officially become entities in Schema.org with their own properties and subtypes.

• The new Menu type includes a hasMenuItem property. This property would be used to point to the (also new) MenuItem schema type, which is what would be used to mark up individual menu items.

• Since most restaurants feature a few menus such as one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner, there is a new hasMenuSection property and a MenuSection type that can be used to mark up the various menus. And you can also use it to mark up the different sections of each particular menu such as the appetizers, salads, main courses, and desserts on a dinner menu.

• For each MenuItem, we’re able to mark up the name, description, price, and nutritional information. And while it’s not new to schema, you can also use the suitableForDiet property to denote if the menu item is low calorie, low fat, low salt, vegan, gluten-free, or suitable for various other restricted diets.

How to mark up restaurant menus with Schema.org

As you can see, our ability to mark up menus has become much more robust. So let’s put it all together now with some examples. We’ll be using JSON-LD, since that’s what Google prefers, and we’ll be marking up the menu of an Italian restaurant.

On the home page

On every page of the website, especially the home page, we want to point search engines in the right direction as to where the menu can be found. Keeping in mind that Google’s guidelines state that we should only mark up content that’s visible on the page, we can’t exactly include the entire menu in our home page markup unless the entire menu is published there. Instead, we’ll simply use the hasMenu property on the home page to point to the menu page, like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebSite",
  "name": "Your Restaurant's Name",
  "url": "http://ift.tt/2nNix4b",
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Restaurant",
     "name": "Your Restaurant's Name",
     "hasMenu": "http://ift.tt/2os18RM",
     "logo": "http://.....

In fact, on any page of your website that includes some schema markup, you could use the hasMenu property to point to the URL of the menu page.

When you have more than one menu

Now, in our example, the restaurant only serves dinner and has only one menu. But sometimes restaurants are open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and of course have separate menus for each. In that case, we would do this on the home page:

"hasMenu": [
  {
   "@type": "Menu",
   "name": "Breakfast",
   "url": "http://ift.tt/2nNj99N"
  },
  {
   "@type": "Menu",
   "name": "Lunch",
   "url": "http://ift.tt/2oshF86"
  },
  {
   "@type": "Menu",
   "name": "Dinner",
   "url": "http://ift.tt/2nNhJw1"
  }
  ],

Starting the menu page markup

Switching our attention to the actual menu page, let’s say that the menu was only served between 5:00pm and 11:00pm. So, on the menu page, our markup would begin like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
   "@context": "http://schema.org",
   "@type": "Menu",
   "name": "Our Menu",
   "mainEntityOfPage": "http://ift.tt/2os18RM",
   "inLanguage": "English",
   "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "availabilityStarts": "T17:00",
    "availabilityEnds": "T23:00"
   },

Marking up sections of the menu

Next, we can begin marking up the various sections of the menu and the individual menu items. First, we’ll start with the appetizers. For the first appetizer, we’ll include in our markup the name, a brief description, and the price, which should be the minimum for any menu item. In our second appetizer markup example, we’ll also include an image, the nutritional information, and the fact that it’s gluten-free:

"hasMenuSection": [
   {
    "@type": "MenuSection",
    "name": "Appetizers",
    "hasMenuItem": [
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Fried Eggplant",
     "description": "Served with Italian red gravy.",
     "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
                 "price": "7.95",
                 "priceCurrency": "USD"
     }
    },
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Fried Calamari",
     "description": "Served with Italian red gravy or honey mustard.",
   "image": "http://ift.tt/2os9Rn3",
     "suitableForDiet": "http://ift.tt/2nNa5lC",
     "nutrition": {
   "@type": "NutritionInformation",
                "calories": "573 calories",
                 "fatContent": "25 grams",
                 "carbohydrateContent": "26 grams",
                 "proteinContent": "61 grams"
               },
     "offers": {
   "@type": "Offer",
                 "price": "7.95",
                 "priceCurrency": "USD"
   }
    }
    ]
   },

By the way, schema dietary restriction enumerations also include DiabeticDiet, HalalDiet, HinduDiet, KosherDiet, LowCalorieDiet, LowFatDiet, LowLactoseDiet, LowSaltDiet, VeganDiet, and VegetarianDiet. Feel free to use one or more of these enumerations when they apply.

Marking up the menu items

Let’s say we’ve marked up all of the appetizers and we’re ready to begin marking up the next menu section, which in our case are the soups. Sometimes menu items such as soups are available in two or more sizes. We can mark up the available options by using a separate offer markup for each along with the eligibleQuantity property, like this:

{
    "@type": "MenuSection",
    "name": "Soups",
    "hasMenuItem": [
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Lobster Bisque",
     "offers": [
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "6.75",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity": {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Cup"
       }
     },
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "9.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity" : {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Bowl"
       }
     }
     ]
    },
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Creole Seafood Gumbo",
     "offers": [
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "6.75",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity": {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Cup"
       }
     },
     {
      "@type": "Offer", 
      "name": "Bowl",
      "price": "9.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity" : {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Bowl"
       }
     }
     ]
    }
    ]
   },

Putting it all together

After we’ve marked up all of the soup items, we can move on to marking up the other menu sections and items using the same format. And that’s it. Putting it all together, our JSON-LD menu markup would look something like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
   "@context":"http://schema.org",
   "@type":"Menu",
   "name": "Our Menu",
   "url": "http://ift.tt/2os18RM",
   "mainEntityOfPage": "http://ift.tt/2os18RM",
   "inLanguage":"English",
   "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "availabilityStarts": "T17:00",
    "availabilityEnds": "T23:00"
   },
  "hasMenuSection": [
   {
    "@type": "MenuSection",
    "name": "Appetizers",
    "hasMenuItem": [
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Fried Eggplant",
     "description": "Served with Italian red gravy.",
     "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
                 "price": "7.95",
                 "priceCurrency": "USD"
     }
    },
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Fried Calamari",
     "description": "Served with Italian red gravy or honey mustard.",
        "image": "http://ift.tt/2os9Rn3",
     "suitableForDiet": "http://ift.tt/2nNa5lC",
     "nutrition": {
   "@type": "NutritionInformation",
                "calories": "573 calories",
                 "fatContent": "25 grams",
                 "carbohydrateContent": "26 grams",
                 "proteinContent": "61 grams"
               },
     "offers": {
   "@type": "Offer",
                 "price": "7.95",
                 "priceCurrency": "USD"
   }
    }
    ]
   },
   {
    "@type": "MenuSection",
    "name": "Soups",
    "hasMenuItem": [
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Lobster Bisque",
     "offers": [
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "6.75",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity": {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Cup"
       }
     },
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "9.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity" : {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Bowl"
       }
     }
     ]
    },
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Creole Seafood Gumbo",
     "offers": [
     {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "6.75",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity": {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Cup"
       }
     },
     {
      "@type": "Offer", 
      "name": "Bowl",
      "price": "9.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD",
      "eligibleQuantity" : {
       "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
       "name": "Bowl"
       }
     }
     ]
    }
    ]
   },
   {
    "@type": "MenuSection",
    "name": "Pastas",
    "description": "Entrées served with dinner salad or a cup of soup of the day.",
    "hasMenuItem": [
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Veal Parmigiana",
     "description": "Tender cuts of paneed veal crowned with golden fried eggplant, Italian red gravy, mozzarella, and parmesan; served with spaghetti.",
     "offers": {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "17.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD"
     }
    },
    {
     "@type": "MenuItem",
     "name": "Eggplant Parmigiana",
     "description": "Pan fried eggplant layered and topped with Italian red gravy, mozzarella, and parmesan baked until bubbly; served with spaghetti.",
     "offers": {
      "@type": "Offer",
      "price": "14.95",
      "priceCurrency": "USD"
     }
    }
    ]
   }
   ]
}
</script>

Of course, this is just an abbreviated example of a marked-up menu; we would certainly include more information about the restaurant as well. But hopefully you now understand how to mark up the various menu sections and items.

So, after all of that, what you’re probably wondering about now is…

Will Google use this?

Good question. To be honest, providing a definitive answer to that question right now is impossible. But if pressed, I would say, "Yes, it’s very likely."

Consider what Google already knows and does with restaurant menu content. If a restaurant has published their menu on a third-party site like SinglePlatform, Google can pull the data and display it in search results:

Fortunately, SinglePlatform marks up restaurant menus with structured data, albeit the "old way" by using the ItemList and ItemListElement schema types. But the fact that Google uses SinglePlatform’s structured data bodes well for these new menu types and properties, since they were specifically created for menus and are much more robust than what we previously had. Restaurants can do things now that they couldn’t do before with structured data.

We also know that Google’s goal is to display search results that are as accurate as possible. The problem with menus that are published on third-party sites is that they’re usually not kept up-to-date. Restaurant menus constantly change; which restaurant owner or manager has the time to update the menu on their website, on SinglePlatform, on Yelp, and on any other website that their menu is published on? I’m not telling restaurants to stop publishing their menus on those sites; they definitely still should. But by using the structured data markups that have become available, restaurant websites can now become the primary source that Google uses to gather data regarding what they serve.

And perhaps Google will begin implementing new rich snippets for restaurant menus and menu items — who knows? But at least we can now provide them with everything they need if they wanted to.

Let’s also not forget about how much voice search is growing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if, say, a pizza restaurant could attract new customers immediately because someone said, “Hey Google, which restaurants in New Orleans serve gluten-free pizza?” and Google knew exactly which restaurants did and what kinds of gluten-free pizzas they offered, all because of their thoroughly marked-up menus? That’s a situation that I could foresee happening.

The future of restaurant and menu markups

I realize that not every restaurant menu scenario is perfectly covered with these new menu properties and types, but hopefully you now at least have plenty to get started with. Keep in mind, too, that the Schema.org vocabulary continues to evolve and so will this particular area of schema. You're welcome to participate in the evolution of Schema.org through the discussions on Github. If you think that you have a great suggestion, please feel free to join the conversation.

And if you have any questions about the above, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comment section and I’ll do my best to help.

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Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week... Do This! - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it's hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there's still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, Minimum Viable SEO. So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week to do some SEO, and I know many of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators, clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is provide a path for you of "do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO."

So let's say here's my calendar. It's February, so 28 days. Start of the month, you have an hour to give me, sometime in the first week of the month. It doesn't have to be, but that's a great way to go. At the start of each week, I'm going to ask for 10 minutes just to do a little bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time, just 3 minutes.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work. Especially if you're in an industry that is not hyper-competitive or if you're going after the right kinds of keywords, that aren't super competitive, you can really make a difference. If you're building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.

Start of the month: 1 hour

So, all right, let's say we're at the start of our month. We have our hour. I want you to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if you're technical SEO, meaning if your website is using WordPress and it's pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you've signed up for Google Search Console, you don't see a lot of errors, there's not a lot of issues, you haven't created a bunch of technical data on your website in the past, great, fine, then you're going to be focused on keywords and content. A keyword to content map, which is something we've discussed here on Whiteboard Friday — I'd urge you to check that video out if you haven't yet — but I'm going to make an MVP version, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.

Keyword → content map MVP

Create a spreadsheet with valuable keywords...

That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really. The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you're targeting or that you care about right now for your business. You think that people are searching for these keywords. Maybe you've done a little bit of keyword research. It could be for free, through Google's AdWords tool, or you could pay for something like Keyword Explorer for Moz, but, really, just 50 to 100 keywords in there.

...current rank and SERP features...

I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear. You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top search SERP feature, so if it has a featured snippet, or if it has videos, or if it shows maps or news, whatever that is, tweets.

...and the URL targeting it (or a note to create content).

Then I want the URL that's targeting it. Or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you haven't yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, "Okay, that's a 'needs to be created.' I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it."

You're going to update this weekly. You can do that totally manually. Fifty keywords, you can look them up in an hour. You can check the rankings. You can see where you're going. That's fine. It's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done. Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics. There are all sorts of tools out there that'll track rankings and show you which features appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.

Okay, this is our keyword to content map. If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I'm going to urge you, before you focus on keywords and content, to make sure your technical SEO, your crawl is set. That means, step one, just a basic, simple crawl analysis. So for free, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you, most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and 500s and things that Google thought we're duplicate content and that kind of stuff.

If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things. Moz Pro is fine for that. Screaming Frog is good, OnPage.org. All of these are popular in the SEO field.

Crawl/technical SEO review

Step two, you don't need to worry about every single crawl issue. I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour. Those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems, duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect, broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that's not broken, missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings or that just don't exist, bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title, and thin content or no crawlable content. Those are really the worst of the bunch. There's a number more that you could take care of. But if you only have that limited time, take care of this. If you've already done this, then we can move on here.

Every time you publish a piece of content: 3 minutes

Finally, last thing, but not the least, every time you publish a piece of content, I'm going to ask for just three minutes of your time, and that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.

The minimum viable pre-publish checklist

So does the content have a keyword target? Yes, no, maybe? If it doesn't, you're going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list and make sure that it does. So if you're publishing something, I'm assuming you're not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit. Make sure everyone has a keyword target. Make sure, if you can, that it's targeting two to three additional keywords, related keywords. So let's say I'm going after something like Faberge eggs. I probably also want to target Carl Faberge, or I want to target Faberge eggs museums, or I want to target Faberge eggs replicas, so these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the same or similar keyword intent, that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.

Is that keyword in the title, the main one you're targeting? Do you have a compelling meta description? Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searchers' queries? So if they've searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?

Then, have you used related topics? You can get those from places like the MozBar or MarketMuse or SEO Zone or Moz Pro. Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, "Hey, this is really about this topic." We've seen some nice bumps from that.

You're doing this every time you publish content. It only takes three minutes.

Start of the week: 10 minutes

And the last thing, at the start of the week, I'm also asking you for these 10 minutes to do one or two actions. I just want you to plan one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO. It could include some publication stuff. But let's assume you're just doing these three minutes every time you do that.

Take a few actions to boost your SEO

Link outreach and targeting keywords with content

At the start of the week, the last thing you're doing is just choosing one of these, maybe two. I don't need more. I want you to do something like link outreach. Reach out to a couple of high-potential targets. Maybe you use like a LinkedIn or SecTool to figure out people who are linking to two of your competitors. Or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little thing to get one or two links. Or maybe create some content that's targeting a missed keyword. When you do that, of course, you go through your pre-publish checklist.

Upgrade ranking content

Maybe you are upgrading some content that's already ranking, like number 5 through 20. That's where there's a lot of opportunity for a high-value keyword to get bumped up. You could just do little things, like make sure that it's serving all of these items, try and get it a featured snippet, identify content that might be old, that needs a refresh, that's not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in there is old.

Contribute off-site content

Or you could try contributing some offsite content. That could be to places like YouTube, maybe you've seen videos show up for something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute, answers some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than what's already coming to your site.

You do these things, right, you start the month with an hour. Every time you publish content, you put in 3 minutes, and at the start of the week, you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning, this will take you a long way. Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure. But this can be a great start, a great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.

I look forward to your thoughts. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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​Feast Your Eyes on the MozCon 2017 Initial Agenda

Posted by ronell-smith

According to our calculations, MozCon 2017 is a mere 158,000 minutes away. (But who’s counting, right?) As you might have guessed, we’re quite excited about our latest event, in large part because we have some new tricks up our sleeves. (More on that at a later date. We promise.)

Aside from a few tweaks here and there, though, the next MozCon won’t be much different from those in years past.

That is, it'll be unique and awesome in equal amounts.

MozCon 2017: July 17–19 in Seattle

You can still expect world-class speakers sharing original information in a one-of-a-kind, charged atmosphere. Plus great food, plenty of snacks, and conversations that’ll have your mind humming for days.

And for you last-minuters who haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, now’s the time to... um... grab that ticket you’ll be crying over if you wait too long:

Grab your tickets now

We've kept you waiting long enough, so take a look at some of what's in store for you at MozCon 2017.

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Emcee

Last year, we tried a format that included three emcees — Rob Ousbey, Zeph Snapp, and Ronell Smith.
The test was a success, with each doing an amazing job.

However, this year we’re returning to a single-emcee format, with Ronell Smith, a Moz Associate, taking the reins.

Ronell Smith
Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith

Ronell Smith is a content nerd who loves nothing more than seeing brands help themselves by recognizing content as more than mere words on a page.

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The MozCon 2017 Agenda (Sneak Peek Edition)

With more than three months to go until the event, many of the details are still being finalized. Therefore, you should see this agenda as an appetizer for, say, a five-course meal. There’s plenty more where this came from.

For example, several speaking spots are yet to be finalized, and we’ve yet to send out the call for community speakers.

We’ll share those details in later posts.

However, we'd like to showcase our awesome lineup of speakers, many of whom will be familiar to you for the great work they do and share with the Moz community.

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TBD
Dawn Anderson
Move It Marketing/Manchester Metropolitan University

Dawn Anderson is an International and Technical SEO Consultant, Director of Move It Marketing, and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue
Matthew Barby
HubSpot

So many of the case studies that document how a company has grown from 0 to X forget to mention that solutions that they found are applicable to their specific scenario and won't work for everyone. This falls into the dangerous category of bad advice for generic problems. Instead of building up a list of other companies' tactics, marketers need to understand how to diagnose and solve problems across their entire funnel. Illustrated with real-world examples, I'll be talking you through the process that I take to come up with ideas that none of my competitors are thinking of.

Matt, who heads up user acquisition at HubSpot, is an award-winning blogger, startup advisor, and a lecturer.

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Reverse-Engineering Google's Research Into What People Want
Rob Bucci
STAT Search Analytics

The SERP is the front-end to Google's multi-billion dollar consumer research machine. They know what searchers want. In this data-heavy talk, Rob will teach you how to uncover what Google already knows about what searchers are looking for. Using this knowledge, you can deliver the right content to the right searchers at the right time, every time.

Rob loves the challenge of staying ahead of the changes Google makes to their SERPs. When not working, you can usually find him hiking up a mountain, falling down a ski slope, or splashing around in the ocean.

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TBD
Stephanie Chang
Etsy

Stephanie currently leads the Global Acquisition & Retention Marketing teams at Etsy. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at Distilled.

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Inside the Googling Mind: An SEO's Guide to Winning Clicks, Hearts, & Rankings in the Years Ahead
Rand Fishkin
Founder of Moz, doer of SEO, feminist.

Searcher behavior, intent, and satisfaction are on the verge of overtaking classic SEO inputs (keywords, links, on-page, etc). In this presentation, Rand will examine the shift that behavioral signals have caused, and list the step-by-step process to build a strategy that can thrive long-term in Google's new reality.

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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Data-Driven Design
Oli Gardner
Unbounce

Data-Driven Design (3D) is an actionable, evidence-based framework for creating websites & landing pages that will increase your leads, sales, and customers. In this session you’ll learn how to use the latest industry conversion data to inform copywriting and design decisions that impact conversions. Additionally, I’ll share a new methodology for prioritizing your marketing optimization that will show you which pages are awesome (leave them alone), which pages aren’t (massive ROI potential here), and help you develop a common language that your teams of marketers, designers, and copywriters can use to work better together to collectively increase your conversion rates.

Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike

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The Tie That Binds: Why Email is Key to Maximizing Marketing ROI
Justine Jordan
Litmus

If nailing the "omnichannel" experience (whatever that means!) is key to getting more traffic and converting more leads, what happens if we have our channel priorities out of order? Justine will show you how email — far from being an old-school afterthought — is core to hitting marketing goals, building lifetime value, and making customers happy.

Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named 2015 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

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The Truth About Mobile-First Indexing
Cindy Krum
CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC

Mobile-first design has been a best practice for a while, and Google is finally about to support it with mobile-first indexing. But mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing are not the same thing. Mobile-first indexing is about cross-device accessibility of information, to help integrate digital assistants and web-enabled devices that don’t even have browsers, to achieve Google’s larger goals. Learn how mobile-first indexing will give digital marketers their first real swing at influencing Google’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape! Marketers who embrace an accurate understanding of mobile-first indexing could see a huge first-mover advantage, similar to the early days of the web, and we all need to be prepared.

Cindy Krum, the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

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TBD
Joanna Lord
ClassPass

Joanna Lord is the CMO of ClassPass, the world's leading fitness membership. Prior to that she was VP of Marketing at Porch and CMO of BigDoor. She is a global keynote and digital evangelist. Joanna is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing and a startup mentor.

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TBD
Ian Lurie
Portent, Inc.

Ian Lurie is founder, CEO, and nerdiest marketing nerd at Portent, a digital marketing agency he started in the Cretaceous era, aka 1995. Ian's meandering career includes marketing copywriting, expert dungeon master, bike messenger-ing, and office temp worker.

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Facing the Future: 5 Simple Tactics for 5 Scary Changes
Dr. Pete Meyers
Moz

We've seen big changes to SEO recently, from an explosion in SERP features to RankBrain to voice search. These fundamental changes to organic search marketing can be daunting, and it's hard to know where to get started. Dr. Pete will walk you through five big changes and five tactics for coping with those changes today.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (aka "Dr. Pete") is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.

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TBD
Britney Muller
Moz

Britney is a MN native who moved to Colorado to fulfill a dream of being a snowboard bum! After 50+ days on the mountain her first season, she got stir-crazy and taught herself how to program, then found her way into SEO while writing for a local realtor.

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How to Get Big Links
Lisa Myers
Verve Search

Everyone wants links and coverage from sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but very few achieve it. This is how we cracked it. Over and over.

Lisa is the founder and CEO of award-winning SEO agency Verve Search and founder of Womeninsearch.net. Feminist, mother of two, and modern-day shield maiden.

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How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer’s Transformational Journey
Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Transformational Consumer Insights

Branded content is way up, but customer engagement with that content is plummeting. This whole scene makes it hard to get up in the morning, as a marketer. But there's a new path beyond the epidemic of disengagement and, at the end of it, your brand and your content become regular stops along your customer's everyday journey.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, the former VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, and author of the Transformational Consumer.

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Thinking Smaller: Optimizing for the New Wave of Social Video Platforms
Phil Nottingham
Wistia

SnapChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, Periscope... the list goes on. All social networks are now video platforms, but it's hard to know where to invest. In this session, Phil will be giving you all the tips and tricks for what to make, how to get your content in front of the right audiences, and how get the most value from the investment you're making in social video.

Phil Nottingham is a strategist who believes in the power of creative video content to improve the way companies speak to their customers, and regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, SEO, and technical marketing.

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Powerful Brands Have Communities
Tara Reed
Apps Without Code

You are laser focused on user growth. Meanwhile, you're neglecting a gold mine of existing customers who desperately want to be part of your brand's community. Tara Reed shares how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to grow your revenue.

Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur & marketer. After running marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft, Tara branched out to launch her own apps & startups. Today, Tara helps businesses implement cutting-edge marketing into their businesses.

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I'd Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked
Wil Reynolds
Seer Interactive

Ego and assumptions led me to chose the wrong keywords for my own site — yeah, me, Wil Reynolds, Mr. RCS. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, I'll show you the mistakes I made and share with you to approaches that can help you to build content that gets you thanked.

A former teacher with a knack for advising, he’s been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO strategies since 1999. Today, Seer is home to over 100 employees across Philadelphia and San Diego.

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Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers, and Earn the Conversion
Purna Virji
Microsoft

Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It's just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we're stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Come to this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.

Named by PPC Hero as the #1 most influential PPC expert in the world, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO, and future search trends. She is a popular global keynote speaker and columnist, an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and amateur knitter.

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Stay tuned

Again, consider this morsel of information as simply the first of many courses to follow. In upcoming posts we'll share details regarding after-hours activities, including MozCrawl.

Don't forget your tickets!

Also, you didn't hear this from us, but there may even be a few exciting, totally new changes for 2017. Mum's the word.

We'll be back soon.

Tell us — who are you most excited to see and hear speak this year?

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!