Become Intelligent: Use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to your Advantage

Posted by Martijn_Scheijbeler

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important.

The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you're working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you're on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day.

So in addition to providing you with some useful insights into why it’s so important to write down everything you do, I’ll also give you some useful tips on how to get this started with the tools you likely already use. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of drastic changes in web traffic and user engagement.

How Meta Robots & XML Issues Impacted My Perception of Web Analytics

To give you an example of why it’s useful to keep track of what you and your team are working on, let me take you back to an incident I experienced roughly two years ago. My team tested an upgrade for functionally, but forgot to check the involved technical SEO elements. After a massive drop in keyword positions for all of our top (landing) pages, we did our best to retrace our steps. In the process, we discovered we had implemented the META robots noindex tag on all pages. I’d love to say I’m joking, but our drop in search traffic says otherwise.

I think you get the point—and that it’s probably best if I don't tell you about the time that we returned XML to Google instead of proper HTML—record everything. To this end, I’m going to share my insights into what I like to track on a daily and weekly basis via Google Intelligence Events, and share occurred events with our team, using the annotations of Google Analytics for our sites. I’m also hoping to hear your ideas on anything I'm missing so that we can learn from each other.

Rebecca Lehman made a great start back in 2011 with this, but in the past years a lot of new metrics and dimensions have been added to Google Analytics, making it easier to keep track of even more changes.

What are Google Intelligence Alerts?

Analytics monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then automatically generates alerts, or Intelligence Events, when those variations occur. - Google Analytics Help Guides

Google Analytics provides you with predefined alerts that guide you through certain changes in engagement, traffic or visitor data, but they are hard to notice if you're not looking at your web analytics on an hourly basis. However, you are able to add custom intelligence alerts that update you of any changes that are important to you (e.g., when your traffic increases by 10% day over a single day). The tool makes it possible for you to respond faster to changing data, and you can also use it to keep your colleagues up to date.

Google Intelligence Alerts enable you to monitor your web analytics in many different ways, but they’re not without their disadvantages. Let’s look at both sides of the argument:

Advantages	Disadvantages
You'll be notified within 24 hours.	You're not able to share intelligence alerts with your colleagues.
If you live in the US, you can get texts message alerts of important changes.	If you don't live in the US, you can't receive text messages.
You can keep track of almost every metric and dimension in Google Analytics.	Setting up a large number of alerts is a time-consuming process.
You can use your intelligence alerts in multiple properties as they belong to your personal Google Analytics account and data.

Note: The email reports from Intelligence Alerts have a certain delay. Hopfully Google Analytics will improve this delay in the future, but for now it's the best we have to work with.

Why is this useful for you?

I've provided you with just one example of how Intelligence Alerts can be useful. Now let me give you more insight into why it's easier for you to keep track of changes with Google Alerts. The average e-commerce store has thousands of products, each of which is likely to be impacted by seasonal preferences such as who's buying umbrellas in mid-summer. But what if it suddenly starts raining and your warehouse is running out of umbrellas? What if you could set up alerts to see if sudden product categories change in performance based on your data in Google Analytics?

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Overview

Image: personal screenshots

On the left side of your Google Analytics Reporting dashboard you have the ability to view the daily, weekly and monthly automatic alerts that Google has already triggered for you. This overview provides the most important metrics and dimensions for your site. For example, the screenshot below shows you the change in views throughout April 2014 for one of my accounts. Naturally, by clicking on details you are provided with more details on the period.

Image: personal screenshots

As you can see, the detailed view shows you the metrics again so that you can determine how importance each change is to you business. In this case, the graph tells you what the per-session goal value is, so you can see the weekly progress this metric made and why it triggered an automatic alert.

Daily, weekly, and monthly events

Image: personal screenshots

The daily, weekly and monthly events provide you with a detailed view on more specific intelligence alerts, as well as the alerts you've created yourself. (I’ll cover this in more detail in the next section.) On top of this, it enables you to change the importance of the alerts, as well as the alert category, including Custom Alerts, Automatic Web Alerts and, and Automatic Adwords Alerts.

The table contains an overview of the triggered alerts based on the settings you select. The links on the right side will guide you directly to the right report, where you can take a deeper look at each metric/dimension.

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Image: personal screenshots

Overview: In the Admin of your Google Analytics View you're able to see an overview of current intelligence alerts. Click the New Alert button at the top.

Image: personal screenshots

Now you have the opportunity to add a name to the alert and select the profiles you would like this intelligence event to apply to. By selecting the time period, you will be able to compare the current day, week or month to its previous variant. By setting the alert conditions, you have the opportunity to select the metrics and dimensions that must change in order to trigger a notification.

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To save you some time, I've created a couple dozen intelligence alerts. The only things you need to do are log into your Google Analytics account and make sure you're ready to get overwhelmed with weekly or daily alerts. Seriously, though, don't feel compelled to add all of the alerts. Select only those that have the most value for you and your business.

Error/panic

A couple of alerts could help you monitor the status of your site and the Google Analytics integration into the site itself. You'll likely want to know when certain tracking codes are removed and pages trigger errors:

• No traffic
• No goal completions
• No e-commerce conversions
• 404 Tracking (based on this great blog post)
• Revenue drop of XX% or no revenue
• Referrals from your own domain (this alert tells you that a tracking code is missing on certain pages)

Engagement

These alerts are ideal for publishers with lots of traffic:

• Increase / Decrease in bounce rate
• Increase / Decrease in time onsite

Traffic sources

If you suddenly have more traffic, but don't know where the traffic is coming from, the alerts for traffic sources could come in very handy:

• Increase / Decrease in direct traffic
• Increase / Decrease in organic traffic
• Increase / Decrease in paid traffic
• Increase / Decrease in referral traffic from a specific source

E-commerce

Monitoring the conversion rate for different browsers will make you aware of any problems your site has playing nice with certain browsers:

• Changes in conversion rate
• Changes in nr transactions
• Changes in conversion rate per browser

Google AdWords

If you're running Google AdWords, you undoubtedly have alerts set up. But it would be handy to know the performance onsite and to see the corresponding spend associated with it if your spend goes up or down.

• Increase / Decrease in AdWords campaign spend
• Increase / Decrease in AdWords CTR

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In the long term, Google Analytics Annotations will really help you review statistics year-over-year. If something noteworthy happens, add an annotation to the date in Google Analytics. It's fairly simple to do, and will provide you, your colleagues, your manager, etc. with an idea of what's going on with your site and why.

My favorite annotations are reports of bugs, new website features, and UX/ CRO improvements to popular pages.

Image: personal screenshots

P.S. Dear Google Analytics product managers, if one of you is reading this, please make adding annotations available via the Google Analytics Management API. It would make it so much cooler if, for example, we could add a new annotation to our data for every new post in WordPress.

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TL;DR: Intelligence Alerts automatically keep you up to date on pre-configured changes in your data. With a daily email updates, you'll never miss important changes associated with your website's data, traffic or engagement.

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Please let me know in the comments what your favorite intelligence alerts are and how you use them to your advantage. If you have any other tools that you use to keep yourself informed, don't hesitate to share them.

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Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Investing in advertising might feel like we're simply buying people's time and attention, but there's far more to it than that. Done right, advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about advertising investments and how paying for advertising can actually yield positive results for SEO, for links, for social shares, for content investments, for email marketing, for all of these organic channels.

I know this seems weird, but it actually can work. Google has some guidelines around this. They say, "Look, if you're over here and you're saying like, "Hey, man, I'll give you 500 bucks for a link on your site, a live, followed back link directly,' that is not okay." Even if the person on the other side says, "Sure, I'll take your 500 bucks and add that link."

Google doesn't want to count those links. They treat those as web spam. They're going to find ways to avoid that type of manipulation. They can, in fact, penalize you for it, and lots of times they do.

However, Google is totally fine with and they even support, endorse, and run systems, a whole advertising network around this to say, "Hey, I'd love to buy some ad spots from this website." Sure. My sidebar ads are no followed, and they cost $150 a month. This is totally 100% okay by Google.

In fact, this is okay by any form of things. So social networks are fine with this. Email things are fine with this. The FCC, the Federal Communications folks here in the U.S. are totally fine with this. The EU is fine with this. It's totally okay. As long as it's disclosed that this is an advertising relationship on the website, you're in the clear. In fact, very often it's the case that there's a correlation, a strong correlation between advertising and organic types of relationships and returns.

Tactics that are worth trying (depending on your business goals)

Blogs, forums, niche websites, or news/media sites

So a lot of times you'll see an ad buy is the first step to a deeper relationship between a website or a blogger or a media source and an advertiser, and that will lead to some forms of content sharing. Maybe some of the content will be promoted on the advertiser's site or the other way around. That might lead to some business development of some kind. That could lead to guest contributions of content or guest posting of some kind. It can lead to social sharing where the advertiser shares something that they've sponsored on the media sites or the other way around. It can lead to email inclusions and email sponsorships.

It can even lead directly to links and brand mentions. People will say, "Hey, I want to thank my advertiser," or "Hey, one of my advertisers came out with this cool product that, in fact, they didn't pay me to endorse, but I am organically endorsing it because I really like it. By the way, they happen to be top of mind for me because they're an advertiser." Sometimes you don't even realize those relationships are happening, but they do.

This is why often there is a very strong connection between advertising dollars and those kinds of more organic forms of relationships. While Google certainly is smart enough to realize that those relationships exist, they don't say, "No, it's not okay that you bought an advertising format from this person, and that eventually led to a more organic kind of relationship and now they're endorsing you without a followed link, without payment in an editorial kind of way." That's actually totally fine.

This is why advertising can be so powerful, not just for search and for links, although that's certainly a big one. So I've actually got a few suggestions, some places where we've seen over the course of time, and I've seen certainly in some of the companies that I occasionally help out informally, where they've benefited from these types of things. On the other side, I've seen from bloggers, journalists, and media sites and niche websites and forums, how they have also benefited from these forms of advertising.

Some of these tactics may be worth trying. It's really going to depend on your business goals and who your audience is. But the first and most obvious one is really what's reflected over here, and that is reaching out to these bloggers, forums, niche websites, news and media sites. They often offer direct forms of sponsorship or display or text ads on their site. They are going to be no followed, or they're going to use some sort of JavaScript redirect.

What you want to do, though, is you want to go direct. So I want to buy from NicheBloggerABC.com, not from Google Ads or Federated Media, which happens to power advertising on their site. So you want those direct advertising inquiries, where you have the relationship personally, and that's what you're building. Don't use that generic ad provider.

By the way, if you're going direct, make sure those links are no followed. You don't want to buy followed links, or you'll get into the problem that we had over here. You're trying to build a relationship, not a followed link. Hopefully, all those other positive organic things, those will come later if you buy these no followed links, if you start that relationship with advertising.

Conference and event sponsorships

Especially, in particular, more creative and more audience relevant forms of advertising can create much greater engagement. So if you buy a booth at a conference, well that can help. Maybe you've got a trade show booth and people come by and that kind of thing, and that does work for some folks, especially if they're looking for leads.

We've done a few things with conference and events, even here at Moz, where we've done forms of sponsorship that are more creative. We give out swag. We share some content. We do something that's very special for the audience, that happens to be relevant to their interests, usually along the lines of SEO stuff. That works much better. That often will get pickup and coverage by press and media, by bloggers who attend events, by people on social media who go to these events.

Weirdly, almost ironically, the less promotional you are in your advertising, which seems counterintuitive, the better this works for all of the organic kinds of things you're seeking. It might not work quite as well for that direct lead capture or sales capture. But by saying, "Hey, we're going to provide free Wi-Fi to the entire conference, and all you have to do is enter a repetition of our brand name three times as the password." Well, guess what? That builds a lot of brand equity, and it is much more appreciated than, "Hey, we're going to need you to take this free demo" or "You need to give us your email address and be promoted to," and these kinds of things. That less promotional can often have greater returns.

Outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising

Then the last one I'll mention here, even though this list could go on and on and you can use your imagination, is outdoor TV, radio, print, those old school forms of advertising. I think one of the most interesting studies I saw was a couple of years ago showing the correlation between these forms of advertising and search volume. The team from SEER Interactive put up a case study about some outdoor advertising.

Now, it could have been SEER. It might have been Distilled. I'm going to make sure, and I'm going to put it in the blog post itself. I'll link over to that study for you guys, showing that when one of their clients had invested in these forms of advertising, they saw a direct bump in search traffic.

Editor's note: Rand offered up a couple of other relevant links for more information about the relationship between offline ads and search traffic:
Mercedes-Benz: Quantifying how online and offline marketing work together to drive sales volume
Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?

Essentially more people were searching for their brand name, for their products, and those people went to their website. Now that's a beautiful thing, especially if you are trying to increase search demand and search click-through rate.

So if you perceive that you have a weakness in terms of, "Hey, we're just not getting as much branded search. We're not getting as high a click-through rate. Our brand recognition is low. That's hurting us in search results. People are getting better engagement than us, and as a result they are getting higher rankings and better links and all this other kind of stuff." This is a great way to potentially combat this.

With any form of tactic that you're trying like this, you're going to want to think really carefully about audience makeup. So many of the times when you're doing more traditional kinds of advertising, what you're seeking is an audience that's made up of people who are going to buy your product, people who have a high potential to be a customer.

That's actually not necessarily what you're seeking when you do these forms of advertising. You are really seeking, yes, people who might become customers, but also people who might influence customers. Customer influencers is often a very different group than direct customers themselves. It might be that you're reaching a much smaller audience, but it is more targeted to that flow.

For conferences and events, you really want those press and media types of people. For these blog, forums, and niche websites, you might be targeting influencers and journalists and other bloggers and social media mavens and that kind of stuff, who consume this type of content online far more than your regular customers do.

So you want to be careful about that when you're choosing advertising that is supposed to be helping you with organic channels. This is a really interesting topic. It's one of the newer kinds of forms and ways that people are leveraging paid advertising. It can run the risk, if you get too aggressive with it, that you actually step on some of these FCC guidelines or Google's guidelines. So you've got to be very careful. But if you walk this line well, you can experience great benefit to your SEO, your social, your content, your email, your brand by paying for it and getting those indirect benefits as a second order effect.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments. Hopefully, you all have some stories to share about this, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Death to Wishy-Washy Reports: Simple Edits to Put the Authority Back in Your Writing

Posted by Isla_McKetta

True life confession: Although I've worked with some of the smartest SEOs, architects, and CPAs in the business, you couldn't always tell from their writing. Which is a problem. Because while some of them are client-facing (so the client gets to know their smarts firsthand—either in person or on the phone), some are only known by the lackluster reports they turn in.

This is a post about how anyone (whether you're an expert in SEO, PPC, social media, or even... content marketing) can write a clearer, more persuasive report. And the lessons contained herein can help you with any form of corporate communication, whether you're writing for a client or your boss.

Get ready to sound smarter.

Be assertive

Being assertive doesn't mean you should stand on your desk and shout your opinions like you're auditioning to be the next Hulk. Instead, have confidence in the data and recommendations you're reporting and convey that confidence in your writing. Because if you're not confident, you might not be ready to write the report. So go double-check your research and then use the following tactics to sound like the authority you are:

Ditch "I think"

I think there are a lot of things you could possibly say to show a client what they might or might not do depending on how they interpret your recommendations.

Notice how that sentence had no spine? That's because it's filled with empty phrases—words that do nothing for the sentence but convey how unwilling its author is to make a point.

Phrases like "I think," "I feel," and "might" are couching words—things you say when you're trying to leave yourself an out, and they make you sound passive and unsure. Go through your report and check for couching words. Ask yourself if you need them (in case of actual uncertainty like "Google might…") or if you can cut them out and strengthen your points.

Dump the passive voice

Mistakes are often made as we try to get around to a point with our writing.

One of those mistakes is in failing to use the active voice. Every sentence has an actor (subject) and an action (verb). While it's nice to vary your sentence structure sometimes, stick to "actor commits action" when you have something important to say (especially when you have bad news to break).

Be careful with dependent clauses

If you want to sound confident and decisive, lead with an independent clause instead of a dependent one (like I did here).

Time for a (mercifully quick) jump back to elementary school grammar. Independent clauses are the ones that can stand on their own as a complete sentence. They have a subject, verb, and usually an object. Dependent clauses don't.

Dependent clauses are often added to an independent clause to increase the level of information in a sentence. Let's flip that last sentence so you can watch the dependent clause move from the end to the front:

To increase the level of information in a sentence, dependent clauses are often added to an independent clause.

Dependent clauses are very useful, but some writers fall into a pattern of starting most of their sentences with them. That delay of the independent clause can make you sound like you're hesitating to get to the point. It can also make you seem passive or like there's something you're trying to hide. That's not how you want to come off in a report.

Choose a point of view (and stick to it)

Some companies prefer to write from a formal (and somewhat) distant third person perspective where "I" is never used; I prefer the more conversational first person.

You can write your report from any point of view you want, but be careful with those pronouns.

The most common mistake I see is for the writer to get indecisive with the pronouns and start throwing around the word "we" as in "we need to fix your title tags." Which could mean that the consultant is taking responsibility for the title tags, or it could be a general suggestion that the title tags need fixing.

Try instead, "your title tags need to be updated; we plan to start work on those during the second month of our engagement." Still uses the word "we," but now it's more obvious who's doing what (and will save you some embarrassing followup conversations).

Write for your audience

Industries with a high degree of fiduciary responsibility are often more accustomed to the use of a formal tone. Meanwhile, writers in other industries, like fashion, automotive, and anything related to the Internet, can get away with a much more casual voice.

You may have noticed by now that I start a lot of sentences with conjunctions like "and" and "but." I also use contractions. Both are part of a conversational tone that's "Mozzy," but if I was writing for a different audience, I would button the top button on my style (and maybe even add a tie).

You know your clients and their style of communication. It's reflected in everything from their RFP to the latest call. Try to mirror their tone (unless you think they came to you for a big shakeup) and your audience will feel like you understand their culture and needs. That means your work is more likely to be accepted.

Explain things

Remember that you were hired because of your unique expertise. That means that you know things the person reading the report doesn't.

When you're introducing a concept your client or boss likely hasn't encountered (or might be a little rusty on), give a short refresher to keep them engaged.

Don't over-explain things

No one likes to feel like an idiot. Going step by step through all the things anyone could ever want to know about a concept (whether foreign or not) has the potential to not only annoy your audience, but also distract from your main point.

If you come across a concept in writing your report that requires extensive education of your reader, either create an addendum where they can read as much as they need to, or schedule a phone call, training, or other way to get them all the info they need.

Use numbers (wisely)

Ninety-nine percent of SEOs have more data than they can ever reasonably convey to the client.

That's because clients (at least sane ones) don't want to know what every single keyword ranked on every day last month. They want to know if their overall rankings are up or down, what that means for their business, and how to push rankings upward in general in the future.

Numbers are very useful (and can be very powerful) if you're using graphs and tables that tell a story, but without your interpretation, they’re all kind of meaningless.

So although you have access to all the numbers in the world, the real magic of your report is in getting inside your reader's head and figuring out what they need to understand about the numbers. Then use the analysis portion of your report to translate that data into answers.

Write fewer words

Concision is an art. Redundancy is annoying. Write as few words as you can to convey your point.

Don't let big words interfere with meaning

An immense vocabulary can obfuscate significance.

This is true of using big words to sound smart and also if you're spouting jargon at people who don't understand it. You might notice from reading this post that I use very little jargon. That's because the vocab words I learned in creative writing won't mean anything to most of you and I can usually find a clearer way to express marketing jargon.

So if your clients (and all the people who will read the report) regularly use words like "earned media," "freemium," and "EPV," you can use them too. But if you have any doubt, try to find a way to use a more accessible word or add some context so everyone can follow you.

Think about general scanability

Your clients are busy. You want them to get the most out of a report they might only ever scan.

All the things you've learned about writing for the Internet apply to writing reports:

• Short sentences (that aren't choppy) are easier to read.
• Keeping each paragraph to one topic with a topic sentence makes it easier to scan.
• Using bullet points (when appropriate) will help your reader digest all that information you've created for them.

Help your reader out by making all your great information intelligible.

Employ an executive summary

Keep the person who signs your checks in the loop with a few words.

To write an effective executive summary, give the highlights:

• Why was the work undertaken?
• What problems were found?
• Next steps

The summary should run between a paragraph and a page (depending on how long your report is). That means you want to save all that delicious analysis you've slaved over for the report itself.

Use templates at your own risk

I know, a lot of the things you're saying to one client are 90% the same as what you're saying to the next client, and creating a template just makes your job more efficient. But if you aren't carefully reading the resulting document, you might be making a mistake (like using the wrong client name or giving them instructions for Omniture when they use GA) that takes much longer to clean up than writing an original report would have.

Trust me, about the third time you're reading over the same words in the same order (even if for different clients), you are too far inside the template to see the mistakes. But your client is reading this report for the first time ever and they won't miss a thing :/. Speaking of which...

Proofreading isn't optional

You aren't qualified to proofread you're [sic] own work.

Not saying anything about your reading or grammar skills, but I'm 99% certain that you've spent so long staring at that report that you are beyond spotting your own typos. Find a second reader. If you're in absolute dire straits and can't find a buddy, read the report aloud to yourself.

Feel smarter already? I hope so. Because you've worked too hard to pull all that information together just to have it fall flat because of a bad report. Tell me about your report writing disasters (and things you'd like help with) in the comments.

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The Content Marketing Challenges Businesses Face Today

It is budget time for your company and each line item must be analyzed. The advertising budget and the website budget are two separate line items. You know website is advertising and that content marketing is extremely important. Now it's time to convince others on how important the content you produce is the new advertising.A […]

Hope the information was helpful for more stuff just like this you can go to
Orlando Seo

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Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

There are some basic questions about SEO that come up really frequently, and it's often easy to assume an answer that isn't exactly right. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles three of them:

1. Should I put subsections of my site on subdomains or in subfolders?
2. Should I use a rel canonical or a 301 redirect to move content on a separate site over to my main domain?
3. If I have multiple websites all linking back to my main site, does that help or hurt my SEO?

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about structuring content, placing content, and placing links, specifically with regards to some things that have come up over and over again in the SEO world, but still seem to be a challenge for many of us who play in the field.

One of the questions that I'm going to start with is around subdomains and subfolders, because this just comes up again and again and again. I think one of the reasons it's emerged in the last few years is, unfortunately, some statements by Googlers themselves -- a statement a few years ago from Matt Cutts, and one, I think last year or two years ago, from John Mueller basically saying, "Hey, Google has gotten much better at identifying and associating content that's on a subdomain with the main domain, and you don't need to worry about placing content on two separate subdomains anymore."

I am sure that Google has actually made strides in this area, but this question still has the same answer that it did years ago. I'll show you some examples.

You're asking, "Should I put my content on a subdomain, or should I put it in a subfolder?" Subdomains can be kind of interesting sometimes because there's a lot less technical hurdles a lot of the time. You don't need to get your engineering staff or development staff involved in putting those on there. From a technical operations perspective, some things might be easier, but from an SEO perspective this can be very dangerous. I'll show you what I mean.

So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."

I can't tell you how many times we've seen and we've actually tested ourselves by first putting content on a subdomain and then moving it back over to the main domain with Moz. We've done that three times over that past two years. Each time we've seen a considerable boost in rankings and in search traffic, both long tail and head of the demand curve to these, and we're not alone. Many others have seen it, particularly in the startup world, where it's very popular to put blog.yourwebsite.com, and then eventually people move it over to a subfolder, and they see ranking benefits.

But even more telling was a recent example from just a few months ago on the iwantmyname blog. Timo Reitnauer wrote on the iwantmyname blog a piece about how he had moved their content actually from the main domain to a subdomain, which is not usually the way we see things going. But, man, when that happened, ugly, super, super ugly. You can see his traffic graph. He graphed his Google search traffic and showed, from his Google Analytics, a nice snapshot of when they made the move, what happened to their search traffic, how long it took to recover. It actually still hasn't recovered. It's been five or six months now. So very, very frustrating for them, and they're going to move it back over. I think maybe they already have moved it back over.

But this was great in that this piece went to the front of Hacker News. Lots of folks from around the startup and technology worlds commented on it, shared their experiences and opinions as well.

Bottom line is it's really dangerous to put content on a subdomain still. I believe John and I believe Matt when they say that Google has made strides in this direction. The problem is they're not good enough or perfect enough to rely on that factor, and so I'd really urge everyone to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders. That's how you're going to maximize your potential SEO benefit. This is one of those technical SEO things that just hasn't changed for many years now.

Next up, a question around rel=canonical, and 301s, especially cross-domain rel=canonical, meaning people are pretty comfortable with the rel=canonical that sits on your own website on your pages and maybe says, "Hey, the print version of this page should actually be considered the same as the web version of this page. Or the mobile version of this page should be considered the same as the regular version." That's fine.

But folks have more questions when it comes to cross-domain rel=canonicals and content that perhaps they own because they own multiple websites, or they have licensing agreements across those, or they have business development or partnerships, those kind of things. So they're wondering, "Hey, I've got content on multiple websites, and I want to move some of that content, or I want engines to interpret it all as coming from my site. Should I put it on the other website and use a 301 to redirect it, or should I use a cross-domain rel=canonical to say the old page is now the new page?"

Well, actually this is one where, from a technical perspective, the engines are doing a pretty darn solid job. Google is doing a very good job. We've seen Bing make strides here with cross-domain rel=canonical. They seem to be doing a pretty good job as well. I haven't tested them as intensely though recently.

Basic story is with the 301, other site.com/a can redirect to your site.com/a, and both visitors and engines, anyone requesting the old page, get the new page. The only difference with the rel=canonical is that when a visitor requests the old page, they're still going to get it. They're still going to get that othersite.com/b. Search engines, however, are going to get the new version of the page, or they're essentially going to consider these to be one and the same.

What we've seen is that, in both of these cases, the ranking signals seem to be passed very similarly, if not perfectly similarly, very similarly. It's hard to detect any difference there. But the rel=canonical can give you an option whereby you say, "Hey, I want to maintain the branding or some unique aspect of something that happens around othersite.com, and so I wish that I could have visitors be able to still go to that page, but have search engines know, hey this is actually just a copied version of this one, and if you're going to rank one of these two, I'd prefer you to rank this one."

That's a great use for the cross-domain rel=canonical. But this is much more a user experience and a branding experience issue than it is a technical SEO one, because both of these work pretty darn well.

Then the last issue I'll cover today are around some of this content and link optimization stuff is: What if you've got multiple websites all linking back to your main site, and you're wondering does that or would that help my SEO? I can't tell you how many folks, surprisingly even folks who are very savvy, who have done lots of other stuff in the technical and web development worlds, are thinking about this from a SEO perspective.

I can understand where it comes from. Basically, you have this understanding that more links is a good thing and that more link diversity is a good thing. So you think to yourself, "Hey, maybe I can capture more links and more link diversity by having more slightly different websites. I want to keep my main site all about one particular topic or one particular niche of that topic, and I want to have these other niche sites that maybe I have some great domain names in my portfolio or some really brandable ones. Maybe I've picked up some old domain names that I've bought, or I've bought entire properties outright. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to add a site-wide link or many links from these pages all back over to my main site."

What you're hoping is that this will amplify your ranking signals and amplify your opportunity. The opposite is true. In fact, what's happening is you're creating a barrier for the full link equity for brand, user and usage data signals, and any potential social signals. You're creating a barrier that's stopping some of those things from passing fully here.

Let's just imagine that you've got four links over here, and they are all pointing to mysubsite1.com, which you're then thinking, "That's great. That's exactly what I wanted to have happen, and now mysubsite1 is pointing to my main site." You're actually losing most of the link equity, the value, the ranking power that would be passed if only two or three of these links had linked directly over to your main site.

As we talked about with the subdomain/subfolder issue, by collecting all of the ranking signals on one sub and root domain, you create the best possible benefit. This concept of domain authority -- I don't necessarily mean the number in Moz's Mozscape Index -- the concept of domain authority is that basically as a domain becomes more popular, as it inherits all of these ranking signals, could come from links, from visibility, from branding, user and usage data, all the kinds of signals that a domain inherits, it passes those on to all of its different pages. But it doesn't pass them on to other sites.

That's true for each of these as well. They're inheriting signals that they're not fully passing on here. I'd recommend that you 301 redirect all of these and have one main site. It simplifies a bunch of your work and streamlines it. It lets you focus on building this one brand. Branding is so powerful today and online visibility as a whole, not to mention SEO, that this is really a best practice.

I would get rid of those subsites as best you can. There are still reasons sometimes to have a microsite or a different website for branding purposes, or if you're going to sell that site separately, or if it's a completely different team working on it. But from an SEO perspective, everything on one sub and root is really ideal.

All right everyone, look forward to the comments, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Google's Sitelinks Search Box: What You Need to Know

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Several months ago, Google announced a new sitelinks search box. Almost immediately, the sitelinks search box markup became one of the fastest growing Schema implementations on the web.

According to the folks at SimilarTech (part of the SimilarWeb family) the SearchAction markup now dominates all other Schema types on the top 1 million sites that they monitor.

Moving beyond the top million sites to the entire Internet, the SearchAction Schema is the 12th most popular Schema out of the 49 types that SimilarTech measures.

Despite such strong adoption, until now we have had very little evidence to understand the effects of the sitelinks search box. After Google dropped support for authorship photos in search results, many webmasters are weary of investing in each new initiative Google announces.

Sitelinks search box basics

The box appears in Google's search results for certain branded and navigation queries such as:

• adobe
• apple website
• nytimes dot com

The box all allows users to refine searches to within a particular site, as in this example below when a user searches for "Moz" and refines their search to "keyword research".

By default, searches performed in the sitelinks box sends users to a second set of Google results, refined to include to results from the target website (using Google's site: operator.) The second page also typically includes additional Google ads, giving the searcher a chance to click on an ad instead of visiting your website.

At the same time, Google also gives webmasters a chance to bypass this second page of results and send searchers directly to their own internal search results if they implemented special Schema code on their homepage.

Not every site qualifies. Typically, Google reserves sitelinks search box for those sites with a high volume of branded queries. To see if your site is eligible, check Google Webmaster Tools. Google typically sends messages to eligible site owners.

If you qualify, and Google finds the correct code on your homepage, Google directs visitors to your website's internal search results.

The advantage is obvious: by directing visitors to your own search results instead of another Google page filled with ads from third party websites, you potentially gain more clicks and visits and better control the visitor experience.

How to implement the sitelinks markup

Compared to other types of markup, implementing the sitelinks code is easy and straightforward.

1. Leverage your own internal search engine

Most internal search engines work perfectly fine, including the default WordPress search function. If your website doesn't have internal search, it's easy to get started with a free Google Custom Search engine.

For websites that use Google's default Custom Search engine, Google also has the chance to make money on ad clicks, because the free version of the Customer Search engine includes Google ads. Google offers a paid version known as Site Search that allows an ad-free experience.

2. Add SearchAction Schema to your homepage

Place the following snippet in the source code of your homepage, editing the "url" and "target" fields to match your website information.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
   "@context": "http://schema.org",
   "@type": "WebSite",
   "url": "https://www.example-petstore.com/",
   "potentialAction": {
     "@type": "SearchAction",
     "target": "https://query.example-petstore.com/search?q={search_term_string}",
     "query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
   }
}
</script>

Source: Google Developers.

3. Opting out

Google doesn't advertise it well, but there is a way for you to prevent Google from displaying the sitelinks search box altogether if you'd like to opt out. Menashe Avramov first noticed an additional Google meta tag that prevents the search box from displaying.

<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox" />

Can you guess which major publisher opts out of Google's Sitelinks Search Box? Amazon.

Interestingly, Google displays no sitelinks search box for the most popular website on the planet, Facebook, even though no such meta tag is apparent on Facebook's site.

Results: How the sitelinks search box impacts traffic

Below are landing page visits to Moz's search results page before and after adding the sitelinks markup.

While it looks like a significant jump, the increase only equaled 150 visits per week. This represents just 0.05% of all organic search sessions Moz sees on a weekly basis (around 300,000 sessions).

Several SEOs who manage large sites reported similar results when we spoke with them. Although the search results page sees a small rise in sessions, it's always nearly impossible to identify a statistically significant increase in overall search traffic.

I'm glad we implemented this because I think it provides a better user experience, but I would not say that it has sent much traffic our way.

- Rob Leslie, Website Usability & SEO Administrator at George Fox University

In other words, implementing the SearchAction Schema is "optimized" and may result in a small boost in traffic and an improved experience for users. Based on the evidence, most publishers shouldn't expect big traffic gains.

Our best advice is to add the SearchAction Schema if it is easy to implement, but keep your expectations in check.

As for opting out, like Amazon, it's likely best to experiment on your own site before committing to a course of action. Keep in mind that many SERP features such as review stars and breadcrumbs have been associated with higher click-through rates, and having a giant search box next to your result may help you stand out.

Have you implemented the code for Google's sitelinks search box? Share your experience in the comments below.

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How to Approach Owned and Earned Media

Posted by SamuelScott

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Image: Flickr user nickrate

We all know content is king, but if your content marketing plan consists of blindly publishing daily blog posts on your website or submitting countless bylined articles (i.e., guest posts) to random outlets, your king will turn into the court jester.

Marketing must have a sound strategy behind it to be successful. To help the Moz community maximize the return on investment of their content, I want to share a strategy I used in my prior position as a senior director at a global agency, and continue to use as a digital marketing and communications consultant.

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What is content, exactly?

First, it is important to know that content is not simply something used to get links. As I explained in a Mozinar and a subsequent blog post on integrating digital marketing and public relations, content is essential to any business's overall marketing and communications strategy. Its functions include:

• Goal Identification
• Audience Research
• Messaging and Positioning
• Channel Research
• Content Creation
• Campaign Execution
• Measuring Results

To use an example from the earlier post:

A sender decides upon a message. The message is packaged into a piece of content. The content is transmitted via a desired channel. The channel delivers the content to the receiver. Marketing is essentially sending a message that is packaged as a piece of content to a receiver via a channel.

Content is merely the vehicle that contains a desired marketing message that is then transmitted via a channel to an audience.

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The big idea

In case you haven't heard, the newest thing is for brands to become publishers that create content.

While I was visiting SMX West in 2014, I heard this wonderful talk from Brian Clark of Copyblogger (see the SlideShare here):

The core message: Brands that become online media companies will dominate the Internet Age. One of Clark's examples: Netflix went from merely distributing content (in the form of TV shows and movies) to creating content.

The strategy makes sense because the more content brands produce, the more likely it is that their content will be shared on social media, the more brand awareness they will generate and the more chances there are for the content to garner links. In the end, the act of becoming a media company is a way to increase overall online engagement, which is an important ranking factor many SEOs are neglecting.

As more and more brands become publishers, marketers have more and more places to publish. However, we cannot effectively target all of these places, especially when our own websites need content.

The key is to develop a strategic approach to content marketing.

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The different types of content

In general, there is owned media and earned media. (There is also paid media, but that mainly refers to paying to get earned content placement on a website.)

• Owned media is content you publish on outlets you own (e.g., your website)
• Earned media is content other outlets freely give you (e.g., bylined articles and news coverage)

Here is the central question I wish to address: When should you use owned versus owned media? In other words: Say you create a great piece of content. When should you publish it on your website and when should you publish it somewhere else? Owned and earned media have their benefits and drawbacks.

For an in-depth look on online branding and the different types of media, I invite you to read this detailed essay by Will Critchlow on Moz.

Why you should use owned media

1. You will own the content forever. If you publish, say, a blog post on your company website, then you will own and have access to that document for as long as you own your website. However, you have no guarantee of how long your content will remain on another website.
2. Your website can rank in the search engines. Why should another website receive the search benefits of your hard work? If I write an e-book that targets a keyword theme addressing informational queries, I want my website to rank for those search terms for the foreseeable future to generate top-of-the-funnel awareness.
3. It enhances brand building. The more you pub­lish (and promote), the more your brand authority will grow over time as the content gets traf­fic, news coverage, men­tions, and ­links.

Why you should use earned media

1. You can use someone else's audience. A bylined article or news coverage about you on a website or publication read by 100,000 people provides invaluable exposure.
2. You can earn links. As Jen Lopez explained here, you should not be submitting countless, short guest posts to random websites to get links. A targeted post on a respected website can gain numerous links for your brand.
3. You can likely build brand awareness more quickly. Building a brand on your own can take a long time, especially if you are a new business or startup with few readers and social followers. At my prior agency, we got an unknown CEO interviewed or published in what the public relations industry refers to as "Tier 3 outlets." Then, we took those interviews to "Tier 2 outlets" as proof that he was an influencer worthy to quote or be published in their outlets. From there we went to "Tier 1 outlets" for coverage. This had a tremendous positive impact for the business overall.

---

How to decide?

Image: Flickr user ralphpaglia

Obviously, there are benefits to using both owned and earned media. But a lot of the time, a single piece of content can only be used in one or the other channel. (See the last part of this article for important exceptions!)

Here is the rule I use for both clients and for myself:

Owned media is used for your long-term mar­ket­ing goals. Earned media is used for your short-term mar­ket­ing goals.

Now, graphic design is not one of my strong points (I'm personally more of a writer), but I've created a simple guide to illustrate that rule:

Here are some specific examples I've seen and used:

Owned media

• Is it an attempt to rank highly in search results for a certain keyword theme over time? An example would be an essay that addresses a pain point your target customers have, one they would attempt to address by searching Google. At my prior agency, I wrote a guide to international SEO a few years ago. Last I checked, the agency still ranked in the top four for searches relating to "international SEO strategy" because of that document.
• Is it part of your sales funnel? Perhaps the sidebar of your website includes a call-to-action to download an e-book. Of course, people would have to provide an e-mail address, and the e-book could contain links to product pages and sales representatives.

Earned media

• Is it meant to introduce and/or brand yourself to a targeted audience? A client at my prior agency was a mobile advertising network. We had gotten bylined opinion articles for the CEO on major websites that are all about mobile devices and Internet advertising. Over time, the CEO received more and more attention from larger and larger publications, which helped his personal brand and that of the company's as well. (This is the real reason for so-called guest posting.)
• Is it meant to generate more immediate sales and/or social media followers? If your company is in a B2B industry, for example, then LinkedIn is an obvious platform on which to publish. By posting on LinkedIn Pulse, you can get more followers of the author's profile (see an important thought below on company versus individual branding) business connections, leads, and thought leadership.

---

Internal content strategy for companies

Image: Flickr user fletcherprince

With LinkedIn, internal branding decisions need to be made because the platform allows only individuals to publish content. So, if your business has a great piece of content for a B2B audience for LinkedIn Pulse or another similar outlet, you must decide who publishes it.

Here's a brief outline of the strategy I recommend:

• Determine who can or should represent the company in some public capacity
• Decide what specific area each person will focus on based on his or her interests and expertise
• Determine who should produce the content

As a hypothetical example, imagine a startup has a mobile app that helps companies create and manage online communities. Here is how duties could be divided up:

• The CEO would discuss topics that relate to founding and running a high-tech startup
• The vice president of products would focus on technology and cater his discussions to such matters
• The vice president of marketing would write and speak about community management

It's crucial that your business divides content and PR duties among the senior staff. Plus, if multiple people are representing the company, there's greater potential for coverage and exposure.

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How to combine owned and earned media

Of course, a lot of your content might not fit neatly into one of the two buckets above. You don't always have to choose one or the other.

The important point to understand is every third-party publisher is different and has its own rules. It's crucial to know them so that you do not violate their policies and thereby risk losing the resulting exposure.

When you cannot republish earned media

Moz has a rule that contributors cannot republish posts on their own websites. So, whenever I publish an article here, I do the following:

• Publish a post on my blog with an excerpt (usually the first paragraph or two) with a call-to-action to visit Moz for the full article
• Set the post on my blog to no-index and the canonical URL to that of the Moz post
• If someone clicks the Twitter share widget on the specific post on my website, the share dialogue uses the canonical URL (to Moz)

This way, we both benefit. Moz gets the due credit (from Google and more), and my blog's subscribers see that I have published the article (on Moz). I would use this strategy when publishing content on third-party networks that do not allow republishing.

When you can republish earned media

LinkedIn Pulse, for example, allows anyone to publish a lengthy essay, and the website seems to use a combination of algorithms and human editors to decide which essays to promote on specific channels (such as Marketing Strategy or Social Media) and on the website's homepage.

While LinkedIn does allow you to publish content that has already been published elsewhere, the brand tends to more actively promote original content.

Here's what I do to maximize the benefits from LinkedIn Pulse:

• I publish the content on my personal blog
• Then I immediately post the content to Google+
• Both of those actions "tell" Google that my website was the original publisher (see this post by Cyrus Shepard on how quickly Google indexes content that is posted to Google+)
• After about 15 to 30 minutes, I post the content to LinkedIn Pulse
• LinkedIn is more likely to promote the content then because it is not yet detectable in Google's SERPs

Here is just one example of an essay I published on my website and on LinkedIn—my website gets the credit in Google search and Google News. LinkedIn also promoted the post to thousands of users:

Images: Personal screenshots

This strategy can be used to your advantage. If you publish content on a third-party website, you might be able to convince them to set a canonical tag to your original post on your website.

Note: the rel=canonical tag is only a suggestion to Google. If another website publishes a post with a canonical tag to your website, the search engine may still choose to make that website the authoritative copy. I would also add a text link somewhere in the body of the post with wording such as "Originally published...". Matt Cutts has also recommended that the tag be placed as close to the top of <head> section of code as possible.

But even in cases where the canonical tag is not an option, you can still publish the same content in multiple locations, provided one of several provisions is in place.

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The main takeaway

The content marketing strategy for your own website (owned media) should focus on organic search and your sales funnel. The content marketing strategy for publishing and getting coverage elsewhere (earned media) should focus on your public relations and publicity goals (see my Moz essay on the basic principles of PR).

Both inbound and outbound marketing are crucial in any overall marketing strategy. Strategic deployment is the key.

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