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Ultimate Q&A
27:19 with Rand FishkinGet your questions answered by the amazing speakers. Unlike the traditional give-it-up, Ultimate Q&A gives you the opportunity to pinpoint what amazing tips you'd like to know and gives you the actionable and inspirational information you crave.
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[MozCon Ultimate Q & A]
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[? music ?]
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[Male Voice] What's up, brother?
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[? music ?]
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[Cyrus] The rule is you have to dance while you're answering your question.
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[Male Voice] Oh, geez!
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[? music ?]
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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.
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We'll start with Aleyda.
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So your question, and these were submitted previously, it's very trendy now to have really long pages—
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home pages, product tours, etc., the ones that just scroll.
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Ideally, these pages are a result of conversion testing, but you know most are just a result of design trends.
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What's the SEO impact of that?
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What are your thoughs?
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Yeah. The most important aspect to take into consideration here is the speed—that it doesn't actually hurt the speed of the page,
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and it can be still crawlable and effectively indexable.
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So it is important that you balance in this case what is good for the design—for the conversion,
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and at the same time, what is effective towards the search engine—that it is really accessible towards the search engine,
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and it works well both for users and for search in this case.
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So as long as it loads well, it is cacheable, the text is reachable—is in HTML, it's good.
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Just test the speed.
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Make sure that it loads well, that everything that can be cacheable, minimized, externalized from the HTML,
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so it loads fast, is implemented well.
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It's good.
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>> [Cyrus] So it's not necessarily a bad thing automatically?
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No, by default, it's not something that can hurt by default.
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The thing is you have to optimize it well—as always it depends.
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It needs to be always optimized.
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>> [Cyrus] Okay, great.
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Next we have Allison.
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Allison, your question.
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We have 3 doors—no.
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PDF integration—I have multiple sites that get thousands of visits from direct PDF files—
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PDF files downloads from the SERPS.
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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.
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I was wondering what the tactical, strategical way is to better incorporate PDF bills into our sites to get visitors to the site
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where they can navigate to the next steps, beyond embedding links.
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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
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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.
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Possibly a way that you could do that is maybe—if it's a resource—provide additional resources at the end.
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Just links to say, hey, if this was really helpful, go here next.
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Just provide a really structured experience, make sure that people are getting value from your work,
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and that by itself really will drive people back to your site.
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>> [Cyrus] I see a lot of people forget to put their branding in their PDFs.
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Yeah.
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>> [Cyrus] And next steps—at the end of the PDF—next steps—yeah.
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Okay. Next, we have Britton.
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There you are, okay.
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How can you help the in-house corporate legal teams understand that the Internet is really here—
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happening and not something we can hide from?
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How do you talk to lawyers?
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I want more details on this question.
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Context is really important, at least for me when I answer questions like this.
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I know a lot of us deal with really regulated industries, like finance, healthcare, and stuff like that.
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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
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your head on your desk—like, "Damn it. You guys don't understand me. How am I supposed to do my job?"
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Understand what the job of the lawyers are.
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Do you know why they're saying no to you?
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Have you tried to look it up?
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Do you understand what they're measured on?
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Lawyers don't get to be very popular—like they often tell you no and take away the fun stuff,
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and that really sucks.
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Instead of just being angry and kind of joining on that,
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take time to understand what the job of your legal team is, how they're measured, why they're doing what they're' doing,
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why that law exist, and make sure that you're communicating this with that team.
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Then, a lot of times if you make that effort, people might be inspired to try to better understand what you do.
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There isn't a lot of interaction usually between those kinds of teams in organizations,
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so maybe they don't understand what goes into your job.
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That would inspire the empathy that everybody has been talking about.
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The other thing that I would use to help drive that empathy home and turn it into more of a collaborative spirit
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is to use examples of what maybe some of your competitors are doing,
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if they have maybe more innovative legal perspective on things.
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Bring that in and get people fired up.
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Most people are competitive—like I guess these other people are more innovative than we are.
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Inspire that in people and maybe—how can we collaborate to get around this?
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Sometimes you can talk about maybe instead of using specific words or focusing on keywords or certain tactics that you can't do,
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come to the table with creative ideas of things that you think you might be able to do.
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Instead of just saying, "Why can't I do this?"—say, "Can I try this? Can I try this? Can I try this?"
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Be relentless in recommendations, solutions, ideas, and creative work-arounds.
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That would be my recommendation.
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>> [Cyrus] Yeah, so you're saying don't ask the legal team for permission.
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Ask them for solutions—how can we make this work?
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Well, bring solutions to the table and keep bringing them and keep bringing them until maybe they start to join the club
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and start to help—understand what your goal is and maybe have some solutions or ways to help you drive that problem-solving forward.
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Maybe if you both understand what you're trying to achieve and what you both—what both of your reservations are—
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>> [Cyrus] Uh-hunh (affirmative).
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I mean it just—it makes—it's different perspectives, different ways of thinking,
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and it—sometimes you can come up with some really creative stuff.
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>> [Cyrus] All right, very good.
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Dana—all right.
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Thank you.
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>> [Cyrus] Very tough one here.
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What is your best advice for an in-house SEO versus agencies?
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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,
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you probably feel isolated from the rest of the team, and you hate your clients.
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I would say—I have been a freelancer.
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I have an agency now, but I have been a freelancer and it's really lonely sometimes.
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If you're in-house, make friends with other in-house SEOs, of course.
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That can be in your city or online.
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I used to have a regular coffee meetup with other freelancers just to get together and have—like a complaint session
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and just get it out of your system.
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If you can't do that, if you're somewhere where you don't know a lot of other in-house SEOs,
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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.
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It also makes you—if you talk to freelancers, it'll make you better at pitching ideas because as an in-house SEO,
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if you're the only one, often part of your job will be pitch your ideas to your boss or to non-marketing people,
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and it's just the same as having clients.
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>> [Cyrus] Good answer, thank you very much.
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Jen Lopez.
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Thank you.
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>> [Cyrus] I'm an SEO beginner.
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Newb.
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>> [Cyrus] Yes. Is there a specific and important concept or area to really learn—grasp and delve into over everything else?
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If so, why?
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Community—no, I'm just kidding.
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I'm just kidding!
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I'm kidding!
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Grumpy cats?
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As a former technical SEO consultant, I don't care what kind of awesome content you have or brilliant videos or all of that,
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if they can't crawl—if the box can't crawl your site, no one will actually ever find your site.
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So I have actually 2 things.
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1. It has to—your site has to be easily crawlable.
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2. Something that people forget a lot is in your on-page optimization, you're thinking about SEO only.
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But if you do, make sure that you have your title tags and your meta description, and everything, not only set for SEO purposes
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but, also, for social because those are used when sharing.
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That is super-important because you're killing 2 birds, which—really you shouldn't kill birds.
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But you're killing 2 birds with 1 stone.
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>> [Cyrus] So people don't always realize this about you.
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You weren't always a community manager.
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Before that, you were a technical SEO and, before that, you were a web developer.
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Yes.
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>> [Cyrus] And you hated SEO.
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I didn't hate SEO.
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I hated marketers.
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>> [Cyrus] You hated marketers.
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[Cyrus] Hug. >> [Jen] Hi, awww.
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>> [Cyrus] Thank you, Jen.
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Lena.
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Yes!
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And we're twinsies!
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Yeah.
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>> [Cyrus] How can I prove— >> [Lena] You guys didn't get the memo.
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>> [Cyrus] Here is your question.
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How can I prove that my company's celebrity spokesperson is worth what we pay them, i.e., Rand?
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How do we know if he's improved sales?
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Okay.
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So that's like a 2-part question.
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The first part I'll say and leave it to "The New Yorker" to rephrase the person's question.
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But I'm just going to keep hope alive that you actually have another goal
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besides a sales goal because you've got to have something else in there.
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But in terms of if is the person is worth—I don't know like what you're paying them.
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But if they're generating sales, I would say the first thing that you want to do is, depending upon how many different campains
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you're going to run with that particular celebrity spokesperson,
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get some vanity URLs that you can actually track that make sense based on whatever it is that your company is selling
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so that you can track traffic back to and maybe building some micro sites, etc., so that you can actually track the traffic back.
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So if they're doing TV commercials or print or whatever,
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you want to have actual URLs where you can track traffic back and, then, using different analytic tools,
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you can figure that—you can plug in your revenue goals and that sort of thing into most analytic tools.
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>> [Cyrus] I read a study recently—a "New York Times" study that the celebrity notoriety of an author can boost conversion
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by like 15 percent if you publish that content.
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Yeah.
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I'm like—we're going to hire Alex Trebek next week so—
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>> [Cyrus] Yeah, yeah—awesome!
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Thank you, Lena.
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Thanks.
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>> [Cyrus] MacKenzie!
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Mack!
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That's me!
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>> [Cyrus] I've got to say I love that dress.
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Thank you.
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You can borrow it.
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>> [Cyrus] Thank you.
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Next MozCon!
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Next year.
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Okay—your question.
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In light of recent industry trends, including Moz's re-brand,
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should in-house SEOs, with titles such as SEO specialist or SEO strategist, work to change their titles to in-bound marketers,
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in-bound traffic specialists or even organic search specialists?
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Could this improve their future job opportunities?
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Well, I think the answer to this probably goes to whether you're in-house or not.
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I remember having this conversation with Ian Lurie from Portent a while ago when the in-bound marketing topic was coming up.
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Let's change all the language on our websites.
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We don't sell SEO.
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We sell in-bound marketing.
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Ian made a really great point that whatever language you use is what people understand at that time.
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Certainly, there is a balance there to where the early—you know—adopters of terms and things like that
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and where you want to take the industry.
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But for most of us, we have to use what people are generally using in the mainstream.
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That's one part of it, but then the other part is your title really doesn't matter.
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What matter is if you're getting shit done.
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I would think about 3 things, and this goes for brands, as well as people working in SEO in-house,
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is who are you, what do you do, and who do you do it for?
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If you can really focus on answering those 3 questions, that will help you determine what your role needs to be,
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what you're really good at, who you need to connect with.
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That would be my advice.
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>> [Cyrus] What are the roles that you have for your team?
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Well, we have a designer.
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Is that what you're asking?
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>> [Cyrus] Yeah, like the SEO people, what are they called?
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Well, we have strategists. >> [Cyus] Uh-hunh (affirmative).
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I think Distilled uses consultants.
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We use web marketing a lot— >> [Cyrus] Yeah.
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—is the term that we use.
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Our team is very un-siloed, so really everybody does whatever they need to do to get it done.
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>> [Cyrus] Yeah, yeah—exactly.
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All right, thank you.
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Yeah.
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>> [Cyrus] Nataleigh.
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How do you go about finding interesting content for boring industry, such as CFO services?
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I don't even know what CFO services are.
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I don't either.
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>> [Cyrus] Okay. Let's just assume it's really freaking boring.
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So let's say finance and law—apologies if you're in finance or law.
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I think with any of these things,
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as we saw actually in one of Rand's slides earlier when you were looking at the cartoons and how to bring stuff alive,
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it's all about emotional connection.
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Whatever you do you're solving someone's pain.
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Figure out how that pain affects them emotionally, and you'll find out the best way to communicate what you do.
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So storytelling, use emotive words, find a way to characterize what it is that you do and make it concrete and contrasting.
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Great example is the Allstate Insurance ads—the episodes.
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Have you seen those—protecting you from mayhem like me.
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Okay.
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Maybe not—sorry—bad accent.
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>> [Cyrus] That's a great accent.
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But that's a really good example.
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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.
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That's what I would recommend.
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>> [Cyrus] All right. Thank you very much.
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When we make a commercial, I'm going to have you use that voice.
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>> [Cyrus] Pete Myers.
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Dr. Pete.
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Dr. Pete, curious minds want to know.
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Besides your work with MozCast and being Moz's canary in the coalmine for Google algo changes,
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what's another part of in-bound marketing that you're super-excited about right now?
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Yeah.
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I'm really really into the data and content intersection.
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Unfortunately, right now, I feel like data plus content equals infographic, and that's what we have.
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I'm not bashing infographics.
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There are some great ones.
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But it just—it feels like we're stuck in that mode.
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Just a personal insight—you may not think of these projects this way.
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But if you look at—for me, the algo history kind of sparked a lot of things.
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It's been incredibly successful and really shocking to me.
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But it's a piece of curated content ultimately.
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It's something I go in and I update,
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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.
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It still is a piece of human-created content, and it's data.
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But when I built MozCast, one of the ideas was that this was a piece of content that would go and run itself.
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There's 11 crawlers that run every night, and they do their thing.
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Then in the morning they process their data.
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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,
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I don't do anything.
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It's a piece of data-driven content that's udpating.
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But if you want to hear my dream, it would look something like this.
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I would like to be much more rich.
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Right now, it's a graph.
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It's a graph and a number and it's cool and it's useful.
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But I'd like it to be visually rich.
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I'd like it to be—think of an infographic that updates itself everyday with new information.
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Then think of an infographic that updates itself in real time.
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Then let's imagine that it's interactive.
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I don't mean interactive in this way of you click on a bar graph and something moves or it zooms and things.
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Interactive in a way that everybody who visits it changes it somehow.
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By visiting it, they add data to the project, and it's personal experience.
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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,
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and everybody who visited it was changing it,
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and it was learning from them, and it was evolving,
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and no experience with this piece of content was every the same for any 2 people or even for 1 person over time.
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Then it builds a killer army of robots, and they take over the world.
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That's my dream.
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>> [Cyrus] And the software company to produce some tools to make this easy is going to clean up.
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Yeah. All right.
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Thank you, Pete.
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There'll be room for other people.
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>> [Cyrus] Phil.
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>> [male speaker] Hi.
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>> [Cyrus] Or Rand—is that—I get— >> [Phil] Howdy! Hi!
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Two microphones.
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>> [Cyrus] Phil, I work for an enterprise level ecommerce company.
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I'm looking to scale unique content.
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What are some of the top strategies you would recommend?
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Sure.
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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,
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whether you have millions and millions of dollars or whether right boot-strapping it.
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I want you just to imagine a Venn diagram and just a simple 3 circle Venn.
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On the top, it says budget.
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Bottom left, it says talent, and then in the bottom right, it says time.
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I think you need 1 of those.
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In fact, I think you probably need 2 of those to be able to create content properly.
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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,
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and you can make great things.
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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
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the more menial stuff, etc., then you can do something great.
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If you don't have any talent, well, it's going to take you a lot longer to get things right,
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and you're going to need to bring in some outside support.
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I think you need probably 2 of those things no matter what you're doing,
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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,
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then you are going to struggle.
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It's a tough thing to say, but you are.
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However, I want to give you a few really, really quick, actionable things that you can do.
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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—
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of all your products, then you can kind of string those into product videos just by employing an editor to deal the library content.
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Then if you transcribe that content, you can also get a lot of unique text for the product pages.
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So you can hit 2 birds with 1 stone.
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If you want to go and hire a photographer—a great photographer,
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if you've got physical product or if your software has a service or whatever, go and spend that money on a great photographer
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to go in—come in for a couple of days, take loads and loads of photos of all your products.
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It's really about the process of finding a way of getting loads of stuff.
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Then the complicated bit is just rolling it out across all your products.
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Then if you wanted to do—like text content,
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hire a really good writer to do lots of small, really good things.
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I don't think, actually, for most ecommerce sites you need loads and loads and loads of written content.
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I think you just need a couple of really, really good bits.
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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.
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Lastly, go check out a site called blackmilkclothing.com.
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What they've done really nicely is they've got user-generated submissions.
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So they've got people who are wearing their clothes to submit photos of themselves wearing the clothes.
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Then they have tons and tons of really, really great product images.
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If you have that community framework and you have those engaged users, you can leverage that, as well.
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That's my—kind of few tips.
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>> [Cyrus] You said something there that I can't believe hasn't been said this entire MozCon.
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Uh-hunh (affirmative).
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>> [Cyrus] We say it all the time at Moz.
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We don't need more content.
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We need better content.
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Better—yeah. >> [Cyrus] Yeah.
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It's kind of a mantra.
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We almost have it up on the walls.
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Absolutely.
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>> [Cyrus] I'm glad you hit on that.
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I would actually like—I think we get too caught up in unique content,
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19:40
like if a page has a little bit of duplication across—because the products are similar, that's not a big deal.
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19:45
It's not going to be hit by Panda or anything like that.
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19:46
I think—forget unique content.
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19:48
Good—better content—really, really high quality.
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19:51
That's what matters.
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19:52
>> [Cyrus] Excellent lesson.
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19:53
Thank you, Phil.
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19:54
Richard.
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19:59
Hi!
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19:59
>> [Cyrus] Richard—Richard.
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20:01
Hi, Cyrus.
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20:01
>> [Cyrus] Hi.
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20:02
How are you?
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20:03
>> [Cyrus] Good. I'm good.
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20:04
Cool.
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20:07
>> [Cyrus] I would like to get some insight about debugging why page rank wouldn't be carrying over to any sub pages.
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20:13
I have seen these in many sites and not just my own.
-
20:16
Only the home page has page rank and high-page rank,
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20:18
and none of the other pages are getting ranked but doing well in the SERPS.
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20:27
I don't give a shit about that question.
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20:32
I'm sorry.
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20:37
Your pages rank—so you're getting traffic to those pages.
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20:43
You've got a choice, right?
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20:44
So you could spend ages debugging why page rank isn't appearing in the toolbar, which—by the way—
-
20:49
there's a whole bunch of different page rank servers.
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20:51
You query them all and you just look at which ones are giving the most consistent answers, and there's your answer.
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20:55
But in the time it took you to learn how to do that,
-
20:58
you could have looked at those pages.
-
21:01
You could have asked the people who are using those pages whether or not they're finding what they're looking for.
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21:07
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,
-
21:14
and you can work out whether or not they found what they were looking for and whether or not those pages were
-
21:20
assisting conversions and helping you sale, whether or not people are sharing those pages, whether or not people or linking to them.
-
21:27
While you're on that, you can optimize those pages for page load—like speed them up.
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21:33
You can A/B split test on them.
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21:35
You can work with video content.
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21:37
You can improve the messaging on these pages, like with—like in Carl's presentation yesterday.
-
21:45
You can—you know—you can use schema markup to get rich snippets,
-
21:49
which means that when you're ranking in these search results more people are going to click your stuff
-
21:54
because you look beautiful compared to everybody else.
-
21:58
While you're looking at these search results,
-
22:00
go and check out what everybody else is doing and be different to them.
-
22:04
So you saw our interactive infographic.
-
22:08
The reason why we chose that format was simply because there were too many articles on that topic,
-
22:13
and there was nothing that was visual.
-
22:15
Then when you're getting the clicks back to the site,
-
22:17
track everything that's going on on that page,
-
22:19
work out the links that people are clicking,
-
22:22
the interactions that they're assisting, whatever they're doing,
-
22:26
because people on that page are telling you what you should do next.
-
22:30
Like if people are interested in what to do or how to flag a taxi in Bulgaria when they arrive,
-
22:35
why not write an article about that because it's the most popular thing that's happening on that page.
-
22:39
Obviously, real people really want to know that that's what they should be doing.
-
22:43
Yeah, the page rank answer—I mean—look, it's a classic SEO question.
-
22:47
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.
-
22:52
But don't waste your time on that stuff.
-
22:54
It's heartbreaking to see you guys do that.
-
22:56
>> [Cyrus] Better marketing means looking at smarter metrics.
-
22:59
Yeah.
-
22:59
>> [Cyrus] Thank you, Richard.
-
23:00
Will.
-
23:02
Hi.
-
23:02
>> [Cyrus] Hi, Will.
-
23:04
I'm only a year out of college and somehow landed this marketing managing position at a startup.
-
23:09
Whew!
-
23:10
>> [Cyrus] I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed—and there's actually a lot of people out here like this.
-
23:13
With all this information I'm finding on in-bound marketing,
-
23:16
I've been charged with basically getting as many valuable customers to the site as possible.
-
23:20
Can you give me 3 basic starting points of what I should be prioritizing—
-
23:23
SEO, social media blogs, how-to videos, direct mail?
-
23:26
What should I be doing?
-
23:30
I'm going to try to get to the specific tips, but I want some general principles.
-
23:33
The things you need to—a startup, right?
-
23:35
So we're—by definition, it's early-stage.
-
23:38
You don't have the momentum.
-
23:40
You don't have the assets.
-
23:41
You don't have the audience, yet.
-
23:44
You're starting from nowhere, and you're starting without the experience.
-
23:47
So 2 things you need to be focusing on, I think.
-
23:49
One is practice for the organization as much as for yourself.
-
23:53
So start writing now because we all sucked when we started.
-
23:57
Many of us still suck.
-
24:01
We're getting better.
-
24:03
The organization needs to learn how to do those things, and organizations suck, as well.
-
24:07
They also need to learn how to get better.
-
24:09
The second thing is the flywheels—the things that are going to be hugely valuable to you down the line—
-
24:13
that everybody wishes they started sooner.
-
24:15
Just like the best hangover cure is drinking a little bit less the night before,
-
24:19
the—essentially, start building your email list and all those kinds of things.
-
24:24
Email, email, email—build the email list, build your audience, build your assets.
-
24:27
That would be the priority.
-
24:30
But, also, in those early stages, don't be afraid to do the stuff that isn't scaleable.
-
24:35
Much like the premature optimization on the engineering front of worrying about—that Dharmesh was talking about—I think—
-
24:41
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.
-
24:48
It's exactly the same on the marketing front.
-
24:49
There's loads of stuff that you can do that you won't be able to do forever—
-
24:54
like those handwritten notes that you were talking about, I think—
-
24:58
like sending out t-shirts—all of those kinds of things—
-
25:02
real world stuff that doesn't necessarily scale that you may not do forever.
-
25:07
Do those things.
-
25:10
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
-
25:17
straight out of the bat.
-
25:18
It could be—it doesn't have to be—when I say big content,
-
25:23
I don't necessarily mean MozCast style—huge investment over a massive period of time—
-
25:27
stuff like—all these ??? (inaudible) posts on Moz—huge amounts of effort—ridiculous amounts of effort for a guest post but great return.
-
25:38
>> [Cyrus] Yeah. There is no just.
-
25:40
It's execution.
-
25:42
Basically, yeah.
-
25:43
>> [Cyrus] Thank you very much.
-
25:44
Finally, Rand Fishkin.
-
25:46
>> [male speaker] Who?
-
25:50
>> [Cyrus] Rand, earlier this year, you did a whiteboard Friday about SEOs being more marketers now, not just focusing on the website,
-
25:57
but everything that encompasses a brand's image.
-
26:01
Do you feel that this makes the community more widespread, making companies that will handle many niches or smaller companies
-
26:07
providing a niche, or will it bring more knowledgeable individuals into the field of Internet marketing?
-
26:12
Hmm.
-
26:14
We'll probably see both.
-
26:16
Then I hope the other thing that we see is the evolution of all of us into that broader marketing game.
-
26:24
I have this—I have this hope that we can take the unique skills and talents that are in this room,
-
26:29
which is—I actually know how to get a website ranked, I know how to get links, I know how to make it accessible,
-
26:35
I know how to put the right kinds of social sharing buttons,
-
26:38
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
-
26:46
inside search engines and Google+.
-
26:48
The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
-
26:50
A lot of marketers—a lot of great marketers—don't know how to do any of those things.
-
26:57
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,
-
27:08
we win at everything else, too.
-
27:11
That's how I see it.
-
27:14
>> [Cyrus] Excellent.
-
27:14
Let's give a round of applause for all of our speakers today.
-
27:16
[applause]
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