[MozCon Ultimate Q & A]

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[Male Voice] What's up, brother?

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[Cyrus] The rule is you have to dance while you're answering your question.

[Male Voice] Oh, geez!

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[Cyrus] Okay, I'm going to call your name and if you want to come up—up here with me, and we'll get started.

We'll start with Aleyda.

So your question, and these were submitted previously, it's very trendy now to have really long pages—

home pages, product tours, etc., the ones that just scroll.

Ideally, these pages are a result of conversion testing, but you know most are just a result of design trends.

What's the SEO impact of that?

What are your thoughs?

Yeah. The most important aspect to take into consideration here is the speed—that it doesn't actually hurt the speed of the page,

and it can be still crawlable and effectively indexable.

So it is important that you balance in this case what is good for the design—for the conversion,

and at the same time, what is effective towards the search engine—that it is really accessible towards the search engine,

and it works well both for users and for search in this case.

So as long as it loads well, it is cacheable, the text is reachable—is in HTML, it's good.

Just test the speed.

Make sure that it loads well, that everything that can be cacheable, minimized, externalized from the HTML,

so it loads fast, is implemented well.

It's good.

>> [Cyrus] So it's not necessarily a bad thing automatically?

No, by default, it's not something that can hurt by default.

The thing is you have to optimize it well—as always it depends.

It needs to be always optimized.

>> [Cyrus] Okay, great.

Next we have Allison.

Allison, your question.

We have 3 doors—no.

PDF integration—I have multiple sites that get thousands of visits from direct PDF files—

PDF files downloads from the SERPS.

This is great, except for the fact they are never getting to our website, so they download PDF—they don't get to the website.

I was wondering what the tactical, strategical way is to better incorporate PDF bills into our sites to get visitors to the site

where they can navigate to the next steps, beyond embedding links.

Yeah, really—I mean someone else here might have an opinion, but I think the best thing that you can really do when you want

to get people back to your site is just really provide a lot of value—like really convince them why they should come back to your site.

Possibly a way that you could do that is maybe—if it's a resource—provide additional resources at the end.

Just links to say, hey, if this was really helpful, go here next.

Just provide a really structured experience, make sure that people are getting value from your work,

and that by itself really will drive people back to your site.

>> [Cyrus] I see a lot of people forget to put their branding in their PDFs.

Yeah.

>> [Cyrus] And next steps—at the end of the PDF—next steps—yeah.

Okay. Next, we have Britton.

There you are, okay.

How can you help the in-house corporate legal teams understand that the Internet is really here—

happening and not something we can hide from?

How do you talk to lawyers?

I want more details on this question.

Context is really important, at least for me when I answer questions like this.

I know a lot of us deal with really regulated industries, like finance, healthcare, and stuff like that.

There's maybe a little bit of a different answer for that, but the most general response I can give is to instead of just putting

your head on your desk—like, "Damn it. You guys don't understand me. How am I supposed to do my job?"

Understand what the job of the lawyers are.

Do you know why they're saying no to you?

Have you tried to look it up?

Do you understand what they're measured on?

Lawyers don't get to be very popular—like they often tell you no and take away the fun stuff,

and that really sucks.

Instead of just being angry and kind of joining on that,

take time to understand what the job of your legal team is, how they're measured, why they're doing what they're' doing,

why that law exist, and make sure that you're communicating this with that team.

Then, a lot of times if you make that effort, people might be inspired to try to better understand what you do.

There isn't a lot of interaction usually between those kinds of teams in organizations,

so maybe they don't understand what goes into your job.

That would inspire the empathy that everybody has been talking about.

The other thing that I would use to help drive that empathy home and turn it into more of a collaborative spirit

is to use examples of what maybe some of your competitors are doing,

if they have maybe more innovative legal perspective on things.

Bring that in and get people fired up.

Most people are competitive—like I guess these other people are more innovative than we are.

Inspire that in people and maybe—how can we collaborate to get around this?

Sometimes you can talk about maybe instead of using specific words or focusing on keywords or certain tactics that you can't do,

come to the table with creative ideas of things that you think you might be able to do.

Instead of just saying, "Why can't I do this?"—say, "Can I try this? Can I try this? Can I try this?"

Be relentless in recommendations, solutions, ideas, and creative work-arounds.

That would be my recommendation.

>> [Cyrus] Yeah, so you're saying don't ask the legal team for permission.

Ask them for solutions—how can we make this work?

Well, bring solutions to the table and keep bringing them and keep bringing them until maybe they start to join the club

and start to help—understand what your goal is and maybe have some solutions or ways to help you drive that problem-solving forward.

Maybe if you both understand what you're trying to achieve and what you both—what both of your reservations are—

>> [Cyrus] Uh-hunh (affirmative).

I mean it just—it makes—it's different perspectives, different ways of thinking,

and it—sometimes you can come up with some really creative stuff.

>> [Cyrus] All right, very good.

Dana—all right.

Thank you.

>> [Cyrus] Very tough one here.

What is your best advice for an in-house SEO versus agencies?

Uh-hunh (affirmative). Well, I feel that in-house SEOs are kind of like freelancers in the sense that you're on your own in many cases,

you probably feel isolated from the rest of the team, and you hate your clients.

I would say—I have been a freelancer.

I have an agency now, but I have been a freelancer and it's really lonely sometimes.

If you're in-house, make friends with other in-house SEOs, of course.

That can be in your city or online.

I used to have a regular coffee meetup with other freelancers just to get together and have—like a complaint session

and just get it out of your system.

If you can't do that, if you're somewhere where you don't know a lot of other in-house SEOs,

meet a bunch of web freelancers and just hang out because I think it's good to have that support system to bounce ideas off of.

It also makes you—if you talk to freelancers, it'll make you better at pitching ideas because as an in-house SEO,

if you're the only one, often part of your job will be pitch your ideas to your boss or to non-marketing people,

and it's just the same as having clients.

>> [Cyrus] Good answer, thank you very much.

Jen Lopez.

Thank you.

>> [Cyrus] I'm an SEO beginner.

Newb.

>> [Cyrus] Yes. Is there a specific and important concept or area to really learn—grasp and delve into over everything else?

If so, why?

Community—no, I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding!

I'm kidding!

Grumpy cats?

As a former technical SEO consultant, I don't care what kind of awesome content you have or brilliant videos or all of that,

if they can't crawl—if the box can't crawl your site, no one will actually ever find your site.

So I have actually 2 things.

1. It has to—your site has to be easily crawlable.

2. Something that people forget a lot is in your on-page optimization, you're thinking about SEO only.

But if you do, make sure that you have your title tags and your meta description, and everything, not only set for SEO purposes

but, also, for social because those are used when sharing.

That is super-important because you're killing 2 birds, which—really you shouldn't kill birds.

But you're killing 2 birds with 1 stone.

>> [Cyrus] So people don't always realize this about you.

You weren't always a community manager.

Before that, you were a technical SEO and, before that, you were a web developer.

Yes.

>> [Cyrus] And you hated SEO.

I didn't hate SEO.

I hated marketers.

>> [Cyrus] You hated marketers.

[Cyrus] Hug. >> [Jen] Hi, awww.

>> [Cyrus] Thank you, Jen.

Lena.

Yes!

And we're twinsies!

Yeah.

>> [Cyrus] How can I prove— >> [Lena] You guys didn't get the memo.

>> [Cyrus] Here is your question.

How can I prove that my company's celebrity spokesperson is worth what we pay them, i.e., Rand?

How do we know if he's improved sales?

Okay.

So that's like a 2-part question.

The first part I'll say and leave it to "The New Yorker" to rephrase the person's question.

But I'm just going to keep hope alive that you actually have another goal

besides a sales goal because you've got to have something else in there.

But in terms of if is the person is worth—I don't know like what you're paying them.

But if they're generating sales, I would say the first thing that you want to do is, depending upon how many different campains

you're going to run with that particular celebrity spokesperson,

get some vanity URLs that you can actually track that make sense based on whatever it is that your company is selling

so that you can track traffic back to and maybe building some micro sites, etc., so that you can actually track the traffic back.

So if they're doing TV commercials or print or whatever,

you want to have actual URLs where you can track traffic back and, then, using different analytic tools,

you can figure that—you can plug in your revenue goals and that sort of thing into most analytic tools.

>> [Cyrus] I read a study recently—a "New York Times" study that the celebrity notoriety of an author can boost conversion

by like 15 percent if you publish that content.

Yeah.

I'm like—we're going to hire Alex Trebek next week so—

>> [Cyrus] Yeah, yeah—awesome!

Thank you, Lena.

Thanks.

>> [Cyrus] MacKenzie!

Mack!

That's me!

>> [Cyrus] I've got to say I love that dress.

Thank you.

You can borrow it.

>> [Cyrus] Thank you.

Next MozCon!

Next year.

Okay—your question.

In light of recent industry trends, including Moz's re-brand,

should in-house SEOs, with titles such as SEO specialist or SEO strategist, work to change their titles to in-bound marketers,

in-bound traffic specialists or even organic search specialists?

Could this improve their future job opportunities?

Well, I think the answer to this probably goes to whether you're in-house or not.

I remember having this conversation with Ian Lurie from Portent a while ago when the in-bound marketing topic was coming up.

Let's change all the language on our websites.

We don't sell SEO.

We sell in-bound marketing.

Ian made a really great point that whatever language you use is what people understand at that time.

Certainly, there is a balance there to where the early—you know—adopters of terms and things like that

and where you want to take the industry.

But for most of us, we have to use what people are generally using in the mainstream.

That's one part of it, but then the other part is your title really doesn't matter.

What matter is if you're getting shit done.

I would think about 3 things, and this goes for brands, as well as people working in SEO in-house,

is who are you, what do you do, and who do you do it for?

If you can really focus on answering those 3 questions, that will help you determine what your role needs to be,

what you're really good at, who you need to connect with.

That would be my advice.

>> [Cyrus] What are the roles that you have for your team?

Well, we have a designer.

Is that what you're asking?

>> [Cyrus] Yeah, like the SEO people, what are they called?

Well, we have strategists. >> [Cyus] Uh-hunh (affirmative).

I think Distilled uses consultants.

We use web marketing a lot— >> [Cyrus] Yeah.

—is the term that we use.

Our team is very un-siloed, so really everybody does whatever they need to do to get it done.

>> [Cyrus] Yeah, yeah—exactly.

All right, thank you.

Yeah.

>> [Cyrus] Nataleigh.

How do you go about finding interesting content for boring industry, such as CFO services?

I don't even know what CFO services are.

I don't either.

>> [Cyrus] Okay. Let's just assume it's really freaking boring.

So let's say finance and law—apologies if you're in finance or law.

I think with any of these things,

as we saw actually in one of Rand's slides earlier when you were looking at the cartoons and how to bring stuff alive,

it's all about emotional connection.

Whatever you do you're solving someone's pain.

Figure out how that pain affects them emotionally, and you'll find out the best way to communicate what you do.

So storytelling, use emotive words, find a way to characterize what it is that you do and make it concrete and contrasting.

Great example is the Allstate Insurance ads—the episodes.

Have you seen those—protecting you from mayhem like me.

Okay.

Maybe not—sorry—bad accent.

>> [Cyrus] That's a great accent.

But that's a really good example.

It's insurance, and there's a character who typifies all the stuff that you're going to be suffering from if you don't buy insurance.

That's what I would recommend.

>> [Cyrus] All right. Thank you very much.

When we make a commercial, I'm going to have you use that voice.

>> [Cyrus] Pete Myers.

Dr. Pete.

Dr. Pete, curious minds want to know.

Besides your work with MozCast and being Moz's canary in the coalmine for Google algo changes,

what's another part of in-bound marketing that you're super-excited about right now?

Yeah.

I'm really really into the data and content intersection.

Unfortunately, right now, I feel like data plus content equals infographic, and that's what we have.

I'm not bashing infographics.

There are some great ones.

But it just—it feels like we're stuck in that mode.

Just a personal insight—you may not think of these projects this way.

But if you look at—for me, the algo history kind of sparked a lot of things.

It's been incredibly successful and really shocking to me.

But it's a piece of curated content ultimately.

It's something I go in and I update,

and the amount of traffic we'll get for it for the amount of work I put into is shockingly—it's embarrassing almost how little I'll do this year.

It still is a piece of human-created content, and it's data.

But when I built MozCast, one of the ideas was that this was a piece of content that would go and run itself.

There's 11 crawlers that run every night, and they do their thing.

Then in the morning they process their data.

Then there's an auto-tweet that goes out and, if it doesn't break and I don't have to analyze something big that happens,

I don't do anything.

It's a piece of data-driven content that's udpating.

But if you want to hear my dream, it would look something like this.

I would like to be much more rich.

Right now, it's a graph.

It's a graph and a number and it's cool and it's useful.

But I'd like it to be visually rich.

I'd like it to be—think of an infographic that updates itself everyday with new information.

Then think of an infographic that updates itself in real time.

Then let's imagine that it's interactive.

I don't mean interactive in this way of you click on a bar graph and something moves or it zooms and things.

Interactive in a way that everybody who visits it changes it somehow.

By visiting it, they add data to the project, and it's personal experience.

Then on top of that, what if it could learn and evolve, and you had something that was collecting data in real time from these sources,

and everybody who visited it was changing it,

and it was learning from them, and it was evolving,

and no experience with this piece of content was every the same for any 2 people or even for 1 person over time.

Then it builds a killer army of robots, and they take over the world.

That's my dream.

>> [Cyrus] And the software company to produce some tools to make this easy is going to clean up.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you, Pete.

There'll be room for other people.

>> [Cyrus] Phil.

>> [male speaker] Hi.

>> [Cyrus] Or Rand—is that—I get— >> [Phil] Howdy! Hi!

Two microphones.

>> [Cyrus] Phil, I work for an enterprise level ecommerce company.

I'm looking to scale unique content.

What are some of the top strategies you would recommend?

Sure.

So I just want—if I may—take the enterprise out of that for a second because I think, actually, the strategies are the same,

whether you have millions and millions of dollars or whether right boot-strapping it.

I want you just to imagine a Venn diagram and just a simple 3 circle Venn.

On the top, it says budget.

Bottom left, it says talent, and then in the bottom right, it says time.

I think you need 1 of those.

In fact, I think you probably need 2 of those to be able to create content properly.

So if you don't have budget, that's okay because you can—of you're good, you can take your time, you can do it slower,

and you can make great things.

If you don't have much time, if you're smart and you're talented and you can plow some money into it and outsource some of

the more menial stuff, etc., then you can do something great.

If you don't have any talent, well, it's going to take you a lot longer to get things right,

and you're going to need to bring in some outside support.

I think you need probably 2 of those things no matter what you're doing,

and if you're trying to do unique, great content scalably for an ecommerce site and you don't have that kind of foundation of skills and resource,

then you are going to struggle.

It's a tough thing to say, but you are.

However, I want to give you a few really, really quick, actionable things that you can do.

So I mentioned yesterday, if you go and get a videographer to go and take sort of loads and loads of footage of all your product videos—

of all your products, then you can kind of string those into product videos just by employing an editor to deal the library content.

Then if you transcribe that content, you can also get a lot of unique text for the product pages.

So you can hit 2 birds with 1 stone.

If you want to go and hire a photographer—a great photographer,

if you've got physical product or if your software has a service or whatever, go and spend that money on a great photographer

to go in—come in for a couple of days, take loads and loads of photos of all your products.

It's really about the process of finding a way of getting loads of stuff.

Then the complicated bit is just rolling it out across all your products.

Then if you wanted to do—like text content,

hire a really good writer to do lots of small, really good things.

I don't think, actually, for most ecommerce sites you need loads and loads and loads of written content.

I think you just need a couple of really, really good bits.

I advise you just to spend wisely on a writer that's high-quality that does a little bit, rather than trying to do loads.

Lastly, go check out a site called blackmilkclothing.com.

What they've done really nicely is they've got user-generated submissions.

So they've got people who are wearing their clothes to submit photos of themselves wearing the clothes.

Then they have tons and tons of really, really great product images.

If you have that community framework and you have those engaged users, you can leverage that, as well.

That's my—kind of few tips.

>> [Cyrus] You said something there that I can't believe hasn't been said this entire MozCon.

Uh-hunh (affirmative).

>> [Cyrus] We say it all the time at Moz.

We don't need more content.

We need better content.

Better—yeah. >> [Cyrus] Yeah.

It's kind of a mantra.

We almost have it up on the walls.

Absolutely.

>> [Cyrus] I'm glad you hit on that.

I would actually like—I think we get too caught up in unique content,

like if a page has a little bit of duplication across—because the products are similar, that's not a big deal.

It's not going to be hit by Panda or anything like that.

I think—forget unique content.

Good—better content—really, really high quality.

That's what matters.

>> [Cyrus] Excellent lesson.

Thank you, Phil.

Richard.

Hi!

>> [Cyrus] Richard—Richard.

Hi, Cyrus.

>> [Cyrus] Hi.

How are you?

>> [Cyrus] Good. I'm good.

Cool.

>> [Cyrus] I would like to get some insight about debugging why page rank wouldn't be carrying over to any sub pages.

I have seen these in many sites and not just my own.

Only the home page has page rank and high-page rank,

and none of the other pages are getting ranked but doing well in the SERPS.

I don't give a shit about that question.

I'm sorry.

Your pages rank—so you're getting traffic to those pages.

You've got a choice, right?

So you could spend ages debugging why page rank isn't appearing in the toolbar, which—by the way—

there's a whole bunch of different page rank servers.

You query them all and you just look at which ones are giving the most consistent answers, and there's your answer.

But in the time it took you to learn how to do that,

you could have looked at those pages.

You could have asked the people who are using those pages whether or not they're finding what they're looking for.

You can have a look at your search query data—when people are searching for things on your website, when they've landed on that page,

and you can work out whether or not they found what they were looking for and whether or not those pages were

assisting conversions and helping you sale, whether or not people are sharing those pages, whether or not people or linking to them.

While you're on that, you can optimize those pages for page load—like speed them up.

You can A/B split test on them.

You can work with video content.

You can improve the messaging on these pages, like with—like in Carl's presentation yesterday.

You can—you know—you can use schema markup to get rich snippets,

which means that when you're ranking in these search results more people are going to click your stuff

because you look beautiful compared to everybody else.

While you're looking at these search results,

go and check out what everybody else is doing and be different to them.

So you saw our interactive infographic.

The reason why we chose that format was simply because there were too many articles on that topic,

and there was nothing that was visual.

Then when you're getting the clicks back to the site,

track everything that's going on on that page,

work out the links that people are clicking,

the interactions that they're assisting, whatever they're doing,

because people on that page are telling you what you should do next.

Like if people are interested in what to do or how to flag a taxi in Bulgaria when they arrive,

why not write an article about that because it's the most popular thing that's happening on that page.

Obviously, real people really want to know that that's what they should be doing.

Yeah, the page rank answer—I mean—look, it's a classic SEO question.

I think that you need to collect lots of data and have a look at which answer is the most convincing from page rank servers.

But don't waste your time on that stuff.

It's heartbreaking to see you guys do that.

>> [Cyrus] Better marketing means looking at smarter metrics.

Yeah.

>> [Cyrus] Thank you, Richard.

Will.

Hi.

>> [Cyrus] Hi, Will.

I'm only a year out of college and somehow landed this marketing managing position at a startup.

Whew!

>> [Cyrus] I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed—and there's actually a lot of people out here like this.

With all this information I'm finding on in-bound marketing,

I've been charged with basically getting as many valuable customers to the site as possible.

Can you give me 3 basic starting points of what I should be prioritizing—

SEO, social media blogs, how-to videos, direct mail?

What should I be doing?

I'm going to try to get to the specific tips, but I want some general principles.

The things you need to—a startup, right?

So we're—by definition, it's early-stage.

You don't have the momentum.

You don't have the assets.

You don't have the audience, yet.

You're starting from nowhere, and you're starting without the experience.

So 2 things you need to be focusing on, I think.

One is practice for the organization as much as for yourself.

So start writing now because we all sucked when we started.

Many of us still suck.

We're getting better.

The organization needs to learn how to do those things, and organizations suck, as well.

They also need to learn how to get better.

The second thing is the flywheels—the things that are going to be hugely valuable to you down the line—

that everybody wishes they started sooner.

Just like the best hangover cure is drinking a little bit less the night before,

the—essentially, start building your email list and all those kinds of things.

Email, email, email—build the email list, build your audience, build your assets.

That would be the priority.

But, also, in those early stages, don't be afraid to do the stuff that isn't scaleable.

Much like the premature optimization on the engineering front of worrying about—that Dharmesh was talking about—I think—

where he was saying don't worry about whether this is going to scale up to 100,000 users because you don't have 100,000 users.

It's exactly the same on the marketing front.

There's loads of stuff that you can do that you won't be able to do forever—

like those handwritten notes that you were talking about, I think—

like sending out t-shirts—all of those kinds of things—

real world stuff that doesn't necessarily scale that you may not do forever.

Do those things.

Final thing—start investing in some big content that's going to put your name on the map because—even start-ups can do this

straight out of the bat.

It could be—it doesn't have to be—when I say big content,

I don't necessarily mean MozCast style—huge investment over a massive period of time—

stuff like—all these ??? (inaudible) posts on Moz—huge amounts of effort—ridiculous amounts of effort for a guest post but great return.

>> [Cyrus] Yeah. There is no just.

It's execution.

Basically, yeah.

>> [Cyrus] Thank you very much.

Finally, Rand Fishkin.

>> [male speaker] Who?

>> [Cyrus] Rand, earlier this year, you did a whiteboard Friday about SEOs being more marketers now, not just focusing on the website,

but everything that encompasses a brand's image.

Do you feel that this makes the community more widespread, making companies that will handle many niches or smaller companies

providing a niche, or will it bring more knowledgeable individuals into the field of Internet marketing?

Hmm.

We'll probably see both.

Then I hope the other thing that we see is the evolution of all of us into that broader marketing game.

I have this—I have this hope that we can take the unique skills and talents that are in this room,

which is—I actually know how to get a website ranked, I know how to get links, I know how to make it accessible,

I know how to put the right kinds of social sharing buttons,

I know how to use Twitter cards so that it shows up with a nice snippet inside of Twitter and use a meta description that works both

inside search engines and Google+.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on.

A lot of marketers—a lot of great marketers—don't know how to do any of those things.

So my—in my imagination, it's sort of like the SEO evolves and because of these unique skills and talents that we have that others don't,

we win at everything else, too.

That's how I see it.

>> [Cyrus] Excellent.

Let's give a round of applause for all of our speakers today.

[applause]