Advanced Content Analysis in Google Analytics

Posted by Jeffalytics

We analyze the performance of our content every day. Sometimes it's subconscious, like when we check the number of tweets we get from a new blog post. Other times, we make more conscious efforts, like reviewing performance metrics in Google Analytics.

This feedback—both formal and anecdotal—informs what we do next. It influences future blog posts and validates our strategies. Reviewing content performance on a regular basis has been key to the growth of many online publishers. We should all be taking note of these successes as we build our own content marketing efforts.

Paying attention to which of your content efforts are working well is the cornerstone to data-driven marketing. The companies that make these investments can produce tremendous results. For an in-depth analysis on the importance of being data driven, here are two recent articles that inspired me:

• How A Real Estate Blog Went From 2,000 To 18,000,000 Visits Per Month In Two Years
• Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles

These articles show how taking data-driven approach to producing content can produce great results. Exponential traffic and revenue in these cases.

I don't know about you, but exponential traffic sounds pretty great to me!

But we will never get there without taking a methodical and data-driven approach to our efforts. We will never get there if we are only counting page views.

It's time to take things to the next level!

Using Google Analytics Content Groupings and Dimensions to inform our content strategy

For many of us, Google Analytics is the tool of choice for analyzing website performance. It's free, easy to use, and extremely powerful. But because of the free and easy nature, most users do not explore the more advanced features of the product.

One of the more advanced features that you have at your disposal is content grouping. Content grouping allows you to gather your content into common themes to create a more meaningful analysis of your data.

For example, you can group your blog posts by the type of content that they represent. This grouping is helpful if you cover many topics on your website or sell many products.

This is something that I have been doing for years on my own site. It helps me understand which topics resonate the most with readers. It also helps understand which topics drive organic search visitors.

In the past, I would have to do this in a manual fashion. It involved exporting data into Excel and grouping content by the presence of certain words in the page URL. This was an ugly manual process that I would not wish on anyone.

With content grouping in Google Analytics, we can get a view of this data with little effort involved. Here is a screenshot of traffic performance by content groups, based on common topics that I cover on my blog.

This simple screenshot is quite revealing. It shows which topics resonate the most, as well as content deficiencies. And these reports get even more valuable once you start to segment your data. More on this shortly.

Configuring content groupings in Google Analytics

Before we can get into deep analysis of our content, it makes sense for us to talk about how we can configure this report in Google Analytics.

There are three ways to set up this feature. The easiest way to do it is by creating rules to define your groups. Rules work like advanced segments in Google Analytics. Set the criteria for your groupings and Google Analytics will do the rest of the work.

Note that these rules work only on the page URL, page title or screen name (for apps).

Here is an example of how to configure groupings matching words found in your page URLs.

The definitions work as a waterfall. If a page url/title fits in your first definition, we exclude it from each future definition. For this reason, we want to be specific with our first rules and then leave the more general and "catch all" rules for the end.

Notice how I used a regular expression to define what makes up a PPC Page. The pipe (|) symbol serving as an "or" statement in the expression. You can also use the "or" statement on the right, but this can get unwieldy fast.

For long regular expressions, use the extraction method for content grouping. This works wonders for complex regular expressions with several criteria to classify posts.

Using code to define your content groupings

The above options use the data that you already send to Google Analytics with each page view (page URL and page title). While this works well if we have search friendly URLs and titles, it is also limiting in our ability to perform analysis.

If you would like to analyze beyond words in your content, then you will need to use code to push this data into Google Analytics.

While this sounds daunting, it is not too bad. I was able to get this code working in less than 30 minutes to provide a proof of concept.

What are some groupings that you might want to use for measuring content performance?

How about the length of your content? Many of us have seen studies on the importance of the length of our content. Is it worthwhile to write longer articles, or is that just a "best practice" that does not apply to your site?

Let's measure it!

How about the date that you published your content? If you put the date of your post in the URL, you can use rules to build these content groupings. I don't include the publishing year in my URL, so I would need code to get this done.

Here is how I configured Google Analytics to track word counts and publishing year of articles.

First, you set a new definition for your content grouping in the admin section. I selected indexes 4 & 5 to avoid any potential conflicts.

As soon as you have defined your grouping, Google will give you code snippets to use for tracking in Google Analytics. There is code for Classic and Universal Analytics.

I use Google Tag Manager on my website, so I pushed data into the system using the data layer functionality.

My code looked like this for tracking word count, word count range and year published:

We trigger this code on every page of my website using native functions from WordPress. If you are using Google Tag Manager and WordPress, I would be more than happy to provide you with the code that I used to build this data layer.

Next, I created a macro in Tag Manager to recognize these variables. I gave a default value of 0-200—in the event that a word count is unavailable from WordPress, it will list 0-200 words. Then in my Universal Analytics tag, I set content groups in the tag configuration options. My indexes correspond to the groups we set in the Google Analytics interface. The words in the {{}} brackets represent the macros we defined above. After publishing, every page load will send content grouping data into Google Analytics. Pretty awesome!

Once your definitions are in place, you will see your groups listed in the admin section of Google Analytics. You can define up to 5 unique content groups per view. For even more on the topic of setting up content groupings, here is an awesome article by Michael King on content groupings for the user journey.

Viewing this data in Google Analytics

Once your definitions are in place, Google Analytics will start to push this data into your account. Note that these definitions do not work retroactively—only on data moving forward. Unfortunately that means that you will need to wait a few days for meaningful analysis of this data.

But when the data starts to come in, it's beautiful!

Let's start with the content grouping definitions for post topic type. I have had these in place for a while, so this data is already providing meaningful insights. Here is what we start to see when looking at website visits by topic type.

While WordPress pages drive the most traffic, they have relatively low value per page view. This does not count any affiliate revenue, but it is indicative of the traffic brought in by this topic. High traffic volume/low value.

This high traffic volume, low page value metric helps me draw two conclusions:

1. I need a better call to action and offer for WordPress content. I can't write about this topic without having an action for visitors to take. I may need to invest in some sort of premium content for this topic.
2. As I plan my content strategy, it may not make a lot of sense to focus on WordPress if I cannot find a way to get more value out of the visits. It is clear that Google Analytics content is more valuable for me.

By grouping my content into themes, I now have a fresh perspective on the effectiveness of my content. Instead of choosing the topic on my mind on any given day, I may benefit by only writing about Google Analytics.

This level of insight is not possible without content grouping. Content grouping is incredible when you have this data tied into the goals you have already set up with Google Analytics.

Checking in on our code-driven content groupings

As you can see, content grouping provides excellent insights into your content strategy performance. If you have thousands of articles on your website, content groupings will help you sift through the noise and go right to the signal.

You can gain insight into other aspects of your content strategy through this same method. Let's check in on the groupings that we set up through code earlier in this article. Please note that this is a proof of concept with only a small amount of data to support the groupings. Over time, your picture will start to become more valuable as you see conversions rolling into your account.

How many page views are we getting for the content we produced over the past 4 years? This is easy to view with our content groupings. This is a traffic pattern that I had assumed in my mind (I wrote much more in 2013 than 2014). Now, I have the numbers to prove it.

What about by word count?

Not surprising, lower word count pages (like the homepage) are getting the most traffic.

This data will get even more interesting over time.

Applying segmentation to our content groupings

We have grouped our content by length of the article and when it was published. Now we can measure how these factors impact our organic search traffic. We can do this a few ways. My preferred method is to look at the medium of organic search and then use a secondary dimension of content group.

Again, we see that our shorter articles are driving the most search traffic. This is for two reasons. 1) The default content range is 0-200, so this includes articles with no word count defined by WordPress. 2) It includes our home page, which often ranks for branded search results.

If granular keyword data were still available in Google Analytics, we would be able to segment brand/non brand traffic. But alas.

We can do this same analysis by year as well.

Notice that the current year is receiving the most organic traffic. I can only assume that this is again due to branded traffic.

Content grouping makes everything better!

Where else does content grouping make Google Analytics data shine?

Many of your favorite Google Analytics reports get better with content groupings. The behavior flow report comes to life with your content groupings.

We no longer need to look at this report with several branches of data hidden from view. Now you can see how people visit your site based on your pre-defined content groupings.

Custom Reports

You can also use custom reports to combine several fields together. For example, try to view organic visits by the year you wrote the content and the topics into a single report.

You can also start to add your conversion data in place and understand the value of the content that you have produced over the years.

Several years ago I wrote a post about investing in SEO for YouMoz. The basic premise is that SEO investment does not fit into normal budget constraints. For example, you may budget for all your SEO efforts in 2015, but there is a revenue impact of these efforts for years to come.

A custom report by post year can help you better understand the continued return on your SEO investment over the years.

What other content groupings make sense to explore?

Once we start grouping our content for analysis, many possibilities become available. Here are a few more ideas for what we can measure for content groupings:

• Grouping by social share counts. How do share counts affect traffic and conversions? I have done a proof of concept with social shares in the past and the data is revealing.
• Grouping by external links using the Mozscape API. Push this into your data layer and you can start to analyze how links may be impacting your content performance.
• Grouping by any on page metadata for your post. We included word count here, but we can also include title length, keyword usage, etc.
• Grouping by targeted keyword. Use a custom field from WordPress (or your CMS) to push this into your data layer for content grouping.
• More specific date based grouping. Instead of grouping by year, group by month or week to see how strategies take hold more quickly.
• Grouping by author of content. Which authors drive the most traffic and revenue?
• Grouping by department of company. Are certain departments producing better content?

You can measure pretty much anything with content grouping. The only real limitation being your imagination AND Google's current limit of 5 content groups in each view. You can even get around that by using multiple views if you want.

What type of questions can we answer with content groupings?

With content groupings in place, we can answer more business questions than standard content reports. Here are a few business questions I can start to answer with the content groupings we have already discussed.

• Is our content marketing hitting the mark?
• Are we making progress toward our goals with our recent content marketing?
• Did our SEO investment mature like we thought it would?
• Has our new focus on converting visitors affected overall revenue significantly?

Through content grouping, we can find answers within our pre-defined points of analysis. We no longer have to look at individual posts and pages to find answers.

We provide the taxonomy that works for our business. Then we use this taxonomy to show how visitors reached our website through acquisition reports. We see how they performed on the site through conversion reports.

Now Google Analytics starts to think a lot more like our business. It uses our own words to describe content within a structure we define. Plus, we have the tremendous processing power of Google Analytics to handle our queries.

Bonus: Use custom dimensions to make these reports even more useful

If you were paying close attention to the data layer variables I showed earlier in the post, you will see a third variable. This third variable is the exact word count for each page. This variable was added to the data layer as I was starting to do analysis on the content groupings. I found that some analysis may become easier if I have the exact word count available in Google Analytics.

In Google Tag Manager, I set a custom dimension of Word Count using my third data layer variable. Now, I can view post topic by word count of the article in Google Analytics.

Useful? Definitely! There are many times when you need an exact number available to conduct analysis.

You can add up to 20 custom dimensions per web property in Google Analytics. It only works with the Universal Analytics version.

What type of content analysis are you going to do now?

Groupings are like a cheat-code for content marketers to take their analysis to the next level. You get to push your own data into Google Analytics. You get to use your own definitions within the tool.

There are really no limits to what you can measure. What is it going to be? I would love to hear your ideas in the comments section.

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!

Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When writing headlines and title tags, we're often conflicted in what we're trying to say and (more to the point) how we're trying to say it. Do we want it to help the page rank in SERPs? Do we want people to be intrigued enough to click through? Or are we trying to best satisfy the searcher's intent? We'd like all three, but a headline that achieves them all is incredibly difficult to write.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand illustrates just how small the intersection of those goals is, and offers a process you can use to find the best way forward.

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 writing titles and headlines, both for SEO and in this new click-bait, Facebook social world. This is kind of a challenge, because I think many folks are seeing and observing that a lot of the ranking signals that can help a page perform well are often preceded or well correlated with social activity, which would kind of bias us towards saying, "Hey, how can I do these click-baity, link-baity sorts of social viral pieces," versus we're also a challenge with, "Gosh, those things aren't as traditionally well performing in search results from a perhaps click-through rate and certainly from a search conversion perspective. So how do we balance out these two and make them work together for us based on our marketing goals?" So I want to try and help with that.

Let's look at a search query for Viking battles, in Google. These are the top two results. One is from Wikipedia. It's a category page -- Battles Involving the Vikings. That's pretty darn straightforward. But then our second result -- actually this might be a third result, I think there's a indented second Wikipedia result -- is the seven most bad ass last stands in the history of battles. It turns out that there happen to be a number of Viking related battles in there, and you can see that in the meta description that Google pulls. This one's from Crack.com.

These are pretty representative of the two different kinds of results or of content pieces that I'm talking about. One is very, very viral, very social focused, clearly designed to sort of do well in the Facebook world. One is much more classic search focused, clearly designed to help answer the user query -- here's a list of Viking battles and their prominence and importance in history, and structure, and all those kinds of things.

Okay. Here's another query -- Viking jewelry. Going to stick with my Viking theme, because why not? We can see a website from Viking jewelry. This one's on JellDragon.com. It's an eCommerce site. They're selling sterling silver and bronze Viking jewelry. They've actually done very classic SEO focus. Not only do they have Viking jewelry mentioned twice, in the second instance of Viking jewelry, I think they've intentionally -- I hope it was intentionally -- misspelled the word "jewelry" to hopefully catch misspellings. That's some old-school SEO. I would actually not recommend this for any purpose.

But I thought it was interesting to highlight versus in this search result it takes until page three until I could really find a viral, social, targeted, more link-baity, click-baity type of article, this one from io9 -- 1,000 Year-old Viking Jewelry Found On Danish Farm. You know what the interesting part is? In this case, both of these are on powerful domains. They both have quite a few links to them from many external sources. They're pretty well SEO'd pages.

In this case, the first two pages of results are all kind of small jewelry website stores and a few results from like Etsy and Amazon, more powerful authoritative domains. But it really takes a long time before you get these, what I'd consider, very powerful, very strong attempts at ranking for Viking jewelry from more of your click-bait, social, headline, viral sites. io9 certainly, I would kind of expect them to perform higher, except that this doesn't serve the searcher intent.

I think Google knows that when people look for Viking jewelry, they're not looking for the history of Viking jewelry or where recent archeological finds of Viking jewelry happened. They're looking specifically for eCommerce sites. They're trying to transact and buy, or at least view and see what Viking jewelry looks like. So they're looking for photo heavy, visual heavy, potentially places where they might buy stuff. Maybe it's some people looking for artifacts as well, to view the images of those, but less of the click-bait focus kind of stuff.

This one I think it's very likely that this does indeed perform well for this search query, and lots of people do click on that as a positive result for what they're looking for from Viking battles, because they'd like to see, "Okay, what were the coolest, most amazing Viking battles that happened in history?"

You can kind of see what's happened here with two things. One is with Hummingbird and Google's focus on topic modeling, and the other with searcher intent and how Google has gotten so incredibly good at pattern matching to serve user intent. This is really important from an SEO perspective to understand as well, and I like how these two examples highlight it. One is saying, "Hey, just because you have the most links, the strongest domain, the best keyword targeting, doesn't necessarily mean you'll rank if you're not serving searcher intent."

Now, when we think about doing this for ourselves, that click-bait versus searched optimized experience for our content, what is it about? It's really about choosing. It's about choosing searcher intent, our website and marketing goals, or click-bait types of goals. I've visualized the intersection here with a Venn diagram. So these in pink here, the click-bait pieces that are going to resonate in social media -- Facebook, Twitter, etc. Blue is the intent of searchers, and purple is your marketing goals, what you want to achieve when visitors get to your site, the reason you're trying to attract this traffic in the first place.

This intersection, as you will notice, is super, uber tiny. It is miniscule. It is molecule sized, and it's a very, very hard intersection to hit. In fact, for the vast majority of content pieces, I'm going to say that it's going to be close to, not always, but close to impossible to get that perfect mix of click-bait, intent of searchers, and your marketing goals. The times when it works best is really when you're trying to educate your audience or provide them with informational value, and that's also something that's going to resonate in the social web and something searchers are going to be looking for. It works pretty well in B2B types of things, particularly in spaces where there's lots of influencers and amplifiers who also care about educating their followers. It doesn't work so well when you're trying to target Viking battles or Viking jewelry. What can I say, the historians of the Viking world simply aren't that huge on Twitter yet. I hope they will be one day.

This is kind of the process that I would use to think about the structure of these and how to choose between them. First off, I think you need to ask, "Should I create a single piece of content to target all of these, or should I instead be thinking about individual pieces that hit one or two at a time?"

So it could be the case that maybe you've got an intersection of intent for searchers and your marketing goals. This happens quite a bit, and oftentimes for these folks, for the Jell Dragon Viking Jewelry, the intent of searchers and what they're trying to accomplish on their site, perfectly in harmony, but definitely not with click-bait pieces that are going to resonate on the web. More challenging for io9 with this kind of a thing, because searchers just aren't looking for that around Viking jewelry. They might instead be thinking about, "Hey, we're trying to target the specific news item. We want anyone who looks for Viking jewelry in Danish farm, or Viking jewelry found, or those kind of things to be finding our site."

Then, I would ask, "How can I best serve my own marketing goals, the marketing goals of my website through the pages that are targeted at search or social?" Sometimes that's going to be very direct, like it is over here with JellDagon.com trying to convert folks and folks looking for Viking jewelry to buy.

Sometimes it's going to be indirect,. A Moz Whiteboard Friday, for example, is a very indirect example. We're trying to serve the intent of searchers and in the long term eventually, maybe sometime in the future some folks who watch this video might be interested in Moz' tools or going to MozCon or signing up for an email list, or whatever it is. But our marketing goals are secondary and they're further in the future. You could also think about that happening at the very end of a funnel, coming in if someone searches for say Moz versus Searchmetrics and maybe Searchmetrics has a great page comparing what's better about their service versus Moz' service and those types of things, and getting right in at the end of the funnel. So that should be a consideration as well. Same thing with social.

Then lastly, where are you going to focus that keyword targeting and the content foci efforts? What kind of content are you going to build? How are you going to keyword target them best to achieve this, and how much you interlink between those pages?

I'll give you a quick example over here, but this can be expanded upon. So for my conversion page, I may try and target the same keywords or a slightly more commercial variation on the search terms I'm targeting with my more informational style content versus entertainment social style content. Then, conversion page might be separate, depending on how I'm structuring things and what the intent of searchers is. My click-bait piece may be not very keyword focused at all. I might write that headline and say, "I don't care about the keywords at all. I don't need to rank here. I'm trying to go viral on social media. I'm trying to achieve my click-bait goals. My goal is to drive traffic, get some links, get some topical authority around this subject matter, and later hopefully rank with this page or maybe even this page in search engines." That's a viable goal as well.

When you do that, what you want to do then is have a link structure that optimizes around this. So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting."

What plays well in search, however, is something that let's someone accomplish their tasks. So it's fine to have information and then a call to action, and that call to action can point to the conversion page. The click-bait pieces content can do a great job of helping to send link equity, ranking signals, and maybe some visitor traffic who's interested in truly learning more over to the informational page that you want ranking for search. This is kind of a beautiful way to think about the interaction between the three of these when you have these different levels of foci, when you have these different searcher versus click-bait intents, and how to bring them all together.

All right everyone, hope to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

The Art of Concision: How to Effectively Make Your Point in Fewer Words

Posted by Isla_McKetta

You and your readers are being bombarded with information. Too often that's in the shape of long-winded emails, blog posts, and reports that say very little or assume that because digital space is (virtually) free and unlimited, so is your time.

But time and attention are valuable. If you learn to practice concision in all your writing (from emails and reports to blog posts, whitepapers, and product copy), you'll not only get your point across, you might also earn your readers' trust, gratitude, and repeat traffic. Plus, concise copy converts better.

Quick advice on writing concisely

The best advice I ever received about writing concisely came from former newspaperman (and current Moz associate) Ronell Smith. He said that in order to clearly get your point across in the fewest possible words it's essential to:

• Write a one-sentence description of the post you wish to write (this is basically the headline)
• Think of the number one thing you'd like readers to take away from the post
• Highlight at least three facts (authoritative, supportive evidence) that support this main point
• Jot down notes that help you tell the story using these facts
• Spend a few days letting the elements "breathe"

Now if I were writing the most concise blog post ever, I'd stop right there, because Ronell already said the most important things. But sometimes it's helpful to see how someone else puts advice into action. So here's how I'm putting Ronell's advice to work to write a post about concision.

Write a one-sentence description of the post

Learning how to make your point in as few words as possible will help you capture your audience's attention.

I could (and should) stop there. But I want to make a couple of points about why this is important:

• Your brain does a lot of work as it's trying to condense that amazing idea in your head down into one sentence—as much work as creating a whole first draft.
• Once you have a one-sentence description of where you're going, it's easy to toss aside all those other exciting ideas that try to plant themselves on the page and focus on what you wanted to say in the first place.

Think of the number one thing you'd like readers to take away from the post

Fewer words often makes for clearer, more impactful communication. Once I know exactly what it is that I want you to take away from this post, I can make a promise that everything will contribute to that number one goal. This is good because:

• It helps you focus on one audience. When you're writing amazing tips on keyword research, it can be really easy to want to also remind readers why keyword research is important. That's the moment when you lose the interest of people who get the whys of keyword research. They are now bored and done with you (even though you were just about to blow their minds with really revolutionary information).
• You know what to lead with. Even if you're writing a crucial email, you can bet not everyone will read every word (or paragraph). By leading with the most important part, your message is more likely to be understood.

Highlight at least three facts that support this main point

Technically, I've been cheating so far and adding in facts along the way. This step will help you:

• Build an outline of what you want to say. It's easier to write to outlines and you'll be sure to include all the points you wanted to see.
• Preview the quality of your argument. If you're writing an article about how content is king and your first fact is "because everyone says so" and the second is "readers share stuff" and you're struggling for a third fact, go back and find a stronger argument.
• Stay on topic.

Jot down notes that help you tell the story using those three facts

Hooray! You finally get to elaborate. I'll start my elaboration by telling you that I've deleted about 500 words from this post already just because I was thinking so hard about concision. Do I miss a little of my standard whimsy and storytelling style? Yes (although I'm making up for it in this paragraph).

Because you've already honed in tight on your subject, you can let your creative self a little loose now. Enjoy embellishing your evidence with relevant examples and case studies. Relish the chance to make your points more memorable and engage your audience by sharing pertinent stories.

Spend a few days letting the elements "breathe"

Once you've pulled together your main point with supporting facts and illustrated those with stories, you need to step away from your writing. If you're writing an email, you might not have a few days, but at least go to lunch or grab a coffee. Giving your writing room to breathe allows you to:

• Spot gaps. Everything makes perfect sense in your head, but a breath of fresh air might help you see where you forgot to actually write down a crucial piece of your argument.
• See redundancies. Sometimes you're so passionate about something you say it twice (although usually in slightly different ways). A second, later read can show you where you're repeating yourself.
• Be rational. Speaking of passion, sometimes we write things we'd never actually want to see out in the world. Allowing your writing to rest can help you make your point without saying anything you wouldn't want repeated. This makes you easier to listen to as well.

The rest of the story

Now that we've seen Ronell's points in action, there are a few more things I want to add.

Concision usually happens in editing

If you've been following Ronell's advice, your writing is going to be a lot clearer, shorter, and more impactful. But don't count on your first draft to be the best draft. You can usually clean up a lot of extra words (and random errors) with a second draft.

Why concision?

You're busy. Your boss is busy. Your reader is busy. We're all reading less and less of the information presented to us. But reading is still a critical way that we share information. By learning to say more with fewer words, you'll get your point across and come out on top.

Concision ain't easy

In fact, you might spend more time crafting your message. Making your point makes that time and effort worth the extra work. Take the Moz Top 10 for example: over the last six editions, the ones with the fewest number of words have had the highest click-through rates.

Shortening the Moz Top 10 often takes me an extra draft, but that kind of increase in CTR is worth one more pass.

How this works at Moz

I was shocked when Trevor and I found that the most popular Moz blog posts (usually) come in at 1,200-1,800 words. That seemed long to me (especially for the Internet), but then I realized how much advice and education are usually packed into one post.

Compare that with what we sometimes see in YouMoz, which are initial drafts of 4,000-8,000 words. I am certain that a few of those authors have that much valuable information to share about one topic. But my guess is that most of those articles are trying to do too much in one post or are repeating themselves unnecessarily. I'd also be really surprised if most readers manage to reach the end of a post that long. That's the real tragedy of overly wordy writing: No matter how brilliant you are, unless you are the most engaging writer ever, no one is reading what you're writing. And according to one study, visitors only read 18% of content beyond the 1,250 word mark.

Do you have tips for stripping the bloat from your writing? Or do you truly love (and actually read) long-form writing on the web? Write me a novel in the comments ☺

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!

How Google Pulls Structured Snippets from Websites' Tables

Posted by billslawski

An article that came out at the beginning of 2015 was intended to (quietly) let people know about what Google had been doing to offer a new form of search results called Table Search. The article was titled Applying WebTables in Practice (pdf).

It tells us about an initiative that Google's structured data team embarked upon, when they started the WebTables project in the second half of the 2000s, which involved them releasing the following paper:

WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web (pdf)

It got some nice press in the paper Structured Data on the Web (pdf).

What is Table Search?

There are many pages on the Web that are filled with data in the form of tables. It's possible that if you weren't paying attention you may have missed Google Table Search entirely—it hasn't gotten a lot of press as far as I can tell. If you include tabular data on the pages of your site, though, you may be able to find tables from your site included in the results from a query in Google Table Search.

Imagine that I am looking to buy a new camera lens, except I'm not sure which one to purchase. I've heard good things about Nikon lenses, so I go to Table Search and look for [ single lens dslr nikon]. The first table returned gives me some choices to compare different lenses:

Table Search and structured snippets

One of the interesting things to grow out of Table Search capability from Google is the structured snippet, a search result that is a combination of query results and tabular data results, as described by Google in their blog post Introducing Structured Snippets, now a part of Google Web Search.

For example, this result involving a search for [superman] includes facts from a Wikipedia table about the character:

Those extra facts come from the table associated with a query on Superman that shows tabular data about the character:

We can see Google working in structured snippets elsewhere, e.g., in presenting snippets from Twitter, like from the following profile:

A search for Rand shows the following (h/t to Barbara Starr for this example of a structured snippet):

Note how Google is taking structured data (highlighted in yellow) from the Twitter profile and including it in the Google search result from the Twitter profile "about Rand". That data may also be from Twitter's API of data that they feed to Google. I have noticed that when there are multiple Twitter accounts for the same name, this kind of table data doesn't appear in the Google snippet.

Getting your structured snippets

The Applying Webtables in Practice paper has some suggestions on how to create tables that might be sources of structured data that Google might use:

1. Limit the amount of boilerplate content that appears in a table
2. Use table headings <th> to add labels to the columns they head—this tells Google that they are filled with important data
3. Use meaningful attribute names in table headings that make it more likely the tables might appear and rank for a relevant query
4. Use meaningful titles, captions and semantically related text surrounding the table. These can help the search engine better understand what the table is about.
5. The ranking of tables in Table Search can be influenced by Web ranking features such as The PageRank of a page a table is on and links pointed to that page.

If you decide to use tables on your pages, following these hints from the "Applying WebTables in Practice" paper may help lead to structured snippets showing up in your search results. The inclusion of that data may convince searchers to click through to your pages. A data-rich search result that addresses their informational and situational needs may be persuasive enough to get them to visit you. And the snippet is attached to a link to your page, so your page gets credit for the data.

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!

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?

---

---

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.

---

---

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.

---

---

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

---

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

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!

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

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!

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.

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!