Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KaneJamison

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won’t do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch’s traffic and results. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we’re welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

http://ift.tt/2x0qDOL

http://ift.tt/1SsY8tZ

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

http://ift.tt/2fwfs5n

---

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I’m the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.

So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.

Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don’t have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it’s great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.

Social teaser content

So the first thing I want to start with is expanding a little bit beyond just your average image ad. A lot of social networks, especially Facebook, are promoting video heavily nowadays. You can use that to get a lot cheaper engagement than you can from a typical image ad. If you’ve logged in to your Facebook feed lately, you’ve probably noticed that aside from birth announcements, there’s a lot of videos filling up the feed. So as an advertiser, if you want to blend in well with that, using video as a teaser or a sampler for the content that you’re producing is a great way to kind of look natural and look like you belong in the user’s feed.

So different things you can do include:

• Short animated videos explaining what the project is and why you did it.
• Maybe doing talking head videos with some of your executives or staff or marketing team, just talking on screen with whatever in the background about the project you created and kind of drumming up interest to actually get people over to the site.

So that can be really great for team recognition if you’re trying to build thought leadership in your space. It’s a great way to introduce the face of your team members that might be speaking at industry conferences and events. It’s a great way to just get people recognizing their name or maybe just help them feel closer to your company because they recognize their voice and face.

So everybody’s instant reaction, of course, is, “I don’t have the budget for video.” That’s okay. You don’t need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There’s a lot of great tools out there.

• Soapbox by Wistia is a great one, that’s been released recently, that allows you to do kind of a webcam combined with your browser type of video. There are also tools like…
• Bigvu.tv
• Shakr
• Promo, which is a tool by a company called Slidely, I think.

All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you’re scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there’s a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it’s not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that’s a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it’s really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren’t spending the time to do that.

Lookalike audiences

Another really valuable tactic is to create lookalike audiences from your best customers. Now, you can track your best customers in a couple of ways:

• You could have a pixel, a Facebook pixel or another network pixel on your website that just tracks the people that have been to the site a number of times or that have been through the shopping cart at a certain dollar value.
• We can take our email list and use the emails of customers that have ordered from us or just the emails of customers that are on our newsletter that seem like they open up every newsletter and they really like our content.

We can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what’s called a lookalike audience. In this case, I’d recommend what’s called a “one percent lookalike audience.” So if you’re targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.

So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it’s great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you’re only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it’s probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that’s a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.

Influencers

The next thing I’d like you to test is getting your ads and your content in front of influencers in your space. That could mean…

• Bloggers
• Journalists
• Or it could just mean people like page managers in Facebook, people that have access to a Facebook page that can share updates. Those could be social media managers. That could be bloggers. That could even be somebody running the page for the local church or a PTA group. Regardless, those people are probably going to have a lot of contacts, be likely to share things with friends and family or followers on social media.

Higher cost but embedded value

When you start running ads to this type of group, you’re going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you’re used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That’s okay. There’s a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they’re likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.

Test share-focused CTAs

It’s worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.

Filters

So the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they’re a blogger, says they’re an editor-in-chief, that’s the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That’s another good example.

I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it’s great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we’re in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they’d likely be following for updates. If we’re in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.

Retarget non-subscribers

The fourth thing you can test is retargeting non-subscribers. So a big goal of content marketing is having those pop-ups or call to actions on the site to get people to download a bigger piece of content, download a checklist, whatever it might be so that we can get them on our email newsletter. There’s a lot of people that are going to click out of that. 90% to 95% of the people that visit your site or more probably aren’t going to take that call to action.

So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn’t sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That’s okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says “subscribe” or “download” instead of something that pops up on their screen.

Keep testing new messaging

The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn’t interesting to them because they don’t need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they’d just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn’t valuable doesn’t mean your other content isn’t interesting to them, and it doesn’t mean they’re not interested in your email list.

Redo split tests from your site

We can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it’s worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.

---

So that’s it for today. What I’d love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that’s worked for you, messaging that’s worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I’d love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we’d be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it’s targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we’d be happy to answer questions there as well.

So that’s it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We’ll see you next time.

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2wZpgQp

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2hBI8xV

10 Things You Need to Know About the EU General Data Protection Regulation

At some point during May 2017, the security systems of American credit monitoring agency Equifax were compromised.

 

The names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and in some cases credit card details of approximately 143 million Americans were accessed during the attack — almost half the American population. News reports would later reveal that the perpetrators of the attack managed to gain access to Equifax’s systems by exploiting a vulnerability that had in fact been identified in March, a flaw that Equifax could have easily secured. 

The true extent of the damage has yet to be fully determined as of this writing, and according to credit monitoring expert and former Equifax employee John Ulzheimer, “there may never be a way to know.”

Image via The Washington Post

At this point, it’s unclear whether Equifax will face any significant consequences for its utter failure to protect the digital identities of half the American population. (To add insult to injury, it appears that not only did Equifax wait six weeks to report the breach, but that it further delayed informing the public until it had successfully acquired an identity protection firm so it could later profit from the breach.)

Had this situation unfolded in Europe, things would likely be very different.

Europeans (and the European Union in particular) care a great deal about online privacy and data protection. From “controversial” laws that protect Europeans’ “right to be forgotten” to wider cultural attitudes about consumer protections, it’s much easier — and safer — to be a consumer in Europe than it is in the U.S. For American companies marketing to European consumers, however, life could soon become a lot more difficult thanks to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR (PDF of full text).

In this post, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the GDPR and how it could affect your business. We’ll be answering common questions about this unique legislation, as well as identifying potential pitfalls to avoid and urgent actions you should consider taking before the rules go into effect.

For the sake of simplicity, most of the points below are framed within the context of what the changes will mean for American, Canadian, and British companies (as that’s where the vast majority of our readers are), but the General Data Protection Regulation will apply equally to all businesses that market to or do business with European Union member states, regardless of where in the world that business is located.

1. What is the General Data Protection Regulation?

The GDPR is a package of new legislative rules being introduced by the European Union to make it easier for residents of EU countries to protect their personal data online. The regulation was officially approved on April 27, 2016, and will formally go into effect across the entirety of the EU by May 25, 2018. 

Unlike EU directives, which require further action on behalf of member nations’ governments in order to enact, the GDPR is (as its name states) a regulation, meaning that the rules will immediately become legally binding on May 25, 2018, with no further action or measures required from EU member states.

2. What Data is Covered by the General Data Protection Regulation?

Virtually all data pertaining to individuals residing in the European Union will be protected by the GDPR. This includes not only uniquely identifying information such as official identity documents similar to Social Security numbers in the U.S. and Social Insurance Numbers in Canada, but also information routinely requested by websites, including IP and email addresses, physical device information such as a computer’s MAC address, individuals’ home addresses, dates of birth, and online financial information including online transaction histories.

 

Image via Council of the European Union 

However, that’s not all the GDPR is intended to safeguard. The legislation also protects user-generated data such as social media posts (including individual tweets and Facebook updates), as well as personal images uploaded to any website, including those that do not feature the likeness of the person who uploaded the image. The GDPR also covers medical records and other uniquely personal information commonly transmitted online.

Essentially, the GDPR protects any and all personal user data across virtually every conceivable online platform.

3. Why is the General Data Protection Regulation Necessary?

Many European countries already have their own robust data collection and storage laws, but the GDPR’s purpose is to make safeguarding users’ data stronger, easier, and more uniform across the European Union, unifying existing data protection regulations across its 28 member states.

  

Image via UR

This makes it easier for European consumers to take a more proactive role in how data about themselves is shared and retained by private enterprises, and also offers businesses overseas a single regulatory framework to which they must adhere, rather than the patchwork of various laws and protections currently in law across the EU. This could be a considerable benefit to companies that market to several EU member states, as the GDPR will supersede any and all existing data privacy and protection laws currently upheld by the EU’s member states.

4. What Does the GDPR Mean for Overseas Businesses?

The GDPR means that companies all over the world, irrespective of where they are based, will have to comply with the legislation’s laws on how user data about EU nationals is processed, gathered, and stored.

Compliance with the GDPR means companies essentially have to switch from an “opt-out” approach to an “opt-in” approach; rather than forcing users to opt out of having their personal data collected and stored, users must instead give companies their express permission with regard to virtually all aspects of an individual’s data security. This applies to everything from something as seemingly innocuous as automatically signing up users to an email newsletter to more wide-scale efforts, such as the pseudonymization of user data. 

One of the more contentious elements of the GDPR is a section of the legislative package known as Article 22, which concerns algorithms and automated user profiling. Under the GDPR, European users have the legal right to question or appeal how their personal information is presented by algorithms such as those used by Google in its search business. This is an extension of the “right to be forgotten” laws that made headlines when the measures were first introduced in the EU and Argentina back in 2006.

Several legal experts and scholars have taken exception to the current phrasing and legal grounding of Article 22, but even if the current language is revised to be less legally ambiguous, we can realistically expect there to be some element of legislative oversight when it comes to algorithmically generated data.

What Effect Will Brexit Have on GDPR Compliance?

Great Britain’s forthcoming exit from the European Union will have absolutely no impact on the EU’s expectations for GDPR compliance whatsoever. Ironically, had Britain decided to remain in the EU, British consumers could have also looked forward to enjoying the kinds of robust protections offered by the GDPR alongside their counterparts on the Continent, instead of dealing with what could accurately be described as one of the most Orwellian domestic surveillance programs in the world.

Regardless of what Britain decides to do with its own privacy and data protection laws (such as they are), British companies will have to adhere to the exact same rules and regulations as companies located anywhere in the world. Given the utter chaos that has largely defined Britain’s Brexit “strategy,” which some might say is an extraordinarily generous term for what’s actually happening, it’s unlikely that GDPR compliance clauses will be negotiated as part of broader exit terms.

One thing that is practically guaranteed, however, is that British companies cannot (or should not) expect special treatment when it comes to the GDPR, and as such should prepare accordingly.

5. Do I Need to Hire a Data Protection Officer to Comply with the GDPR?

You may have a legal obligation to hire a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to ensure compliance with the GDPR. However, there are exceptions. You only have to hire a DPO if: 

• Your organization is a public authority (i.e. a company that exercises control over the maintenance of public infrastructure or has broad powers to regulate public property)
• Your organization is engaged in large-scale systematic monitoring of user data
• Your organization processes large volumes of personal user data

Unfortunately, the official text of the GDPR as it stands today is unclear regarding the definition of “large-scale” data processing. However, there is some guidance, albeit somewhat limited in its scope.

Many of the provisions of the GDPR legislative package could not be agreed upon immediately. Some of these clauses were deferred to the GDPR’s Recitals, which are legal texts that establish the reasoning behind certain acts within an item of legislation. One such recital — Recital 91 — states that, “The processing of personal data should not be considered to be on a large scale if the processing concerns personal data from patients or clients by an individual physician, other health care professional or lawyer.”

So what can we infer from the maddeningly ambiguous Recital 91? Basically, if the data processing your company engages in as part of its day-to-day operations is beyond the realistically manageable workload of two professionals, it could be argued that this data processing is “large scale.” Unfortunately, as with much of the GDPR, context is crucial in determining whether a company is in compliance or not. If in doubt, it may be worth considering hiring a dedicated Data Protection Officer.

Cloud-Based Storage is NOT Exempt from the GDPR

While we’re on the topic of whether you need to hire a Data Protection Officer to comply with the GDPR, it’s worth mentioning that companies that rely upon cloud-based storage providers will not be exempt from the GDPR. This means that if your company uses Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, you will NOT be able to blame Amazon, Google, or Microsoft for failure to comply with the GDPR.

6. What Happens to Companies That Fail to Comply with the GDPR?

Failure to comply with the GDPR carries heavy penalties. 

 

The first step of the process is a formal written warning, which can be issued to a company even in cases of unwitting violations; ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse for breaking it. The next stage of punitive actions can force companies in violation of the GDPR to undergo regular periodic data integrity audits to ensure compliance, which also means surrendering access to potentially sensitive, confidential, or proprietary information to an auditor.

For companies that still haven’t taken the hint, firms that are found to have breached or violated any part of the legislative package after initial sanctions can be fined up to €20 million (approximately $23.5 million USD) or 4% of a company’s worldwide turnover, whichever is greater.

Image via USA Today

7. What Does the EU Expect from Overseas Companies Regarding Compliance with the GDPR?

It will be the responsibility of a company’s Data Protection Officers or data controllers to ensure that European users’ data is being sufficiently protected and/or anonymized, and it will be the data controllers who will be among the first to be held to account if breaches or violations are reported.

Under the GDPR, data controllers will be expected to report any and all possible data breaches to the relevant EU authorities within 72 hours of detection. Furthermore, users affected by data breaches must also be notified by a company’s data controllers, with the exception of compromised pseudonymized data, which is not subject to the same reporting requirements as non-anonymized data.

Something else companies dealing with the GDPR will have to reckon with is storing records of user consent. Although it’s difficult to say with any certainty, I’d wager most companies keep minimal (if any) records concerning users’ consent to have their data stored or processed, but this will be an expectation — and legal requirement — under the GDPR. Companies must be able to prove that a specific user not only gave their initial express consent to have their data stored, but also that the user’s consent records are accurate and up to date.

8. What Counts as ‘Pseudonymized Data’ Under the GDPR?

I’ve mentioned “pseudonymized data” several times, but what exactly is pseudonymous data?

Image via Tom “Marketoonist” Fishburne

According to Recital 26 of the GDPR, pseudonymized data is “data rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable.” Essentially, this means that any and all identifying information regarding an individual user must be removed entirely from all stored or processed data so that the identity of a specific user cannot be revealed — even to the company or authority responsible for anonymizing the data itself.

Remember earlier when we went over the kinds of identifying information protected by the GDPR? Well, it doesn’t end with dates of birth, Social Security numbers, or financial information. The GDPR also protects information such as a person’s religious, philosophical, or political beliefs, information about their sexuality or sexual orientation, records of membership to organizations such as labor unions, and genetic or biometric data including fingerprints and DNA. Since all this data is protected by the GDPR, the measures a company takes to pseudonymize its data must ensure these data points are also removed completely.

The primary reason that the text and Recitals of the GDPR uses the term “pseudonymized data” rather than “anonymized data” is largely one of pragmatism. It’s very difficult to completely remove all identifying information about a user. Truly anonymized data falls outside the jurisdiction of the GDPR, but given that it’s highly unlikely many data controllers would either be able or willing to truly and completely anonymize their users’ data, the GDPR uses the definition of pseudonymous data instead.

It’s also worth noting that, according to one particularly well-cited study, approximately 87% of American adults could be accurately and uniquely identified using just three data points — date of birth, gender, and a five-digit zip code — using publicly available census data, a sobering statistic that highlights why such robust pseudonymization measures are needed, particularly in light of large-scale data breaches such as the Equifax security incident.

9. What is ‘Affirmative Consent’ in the Context of the GDPR?

Many marketers will already be familiar with the concept of affirmative consent, a principle that states individuals must, for example, give their express permission to a company before it can add that person to a mailing list. This is the “opt-in” approach.

Image via Mailchimp

Under the GDPR, affirmative consent laws will be strengthened. This means that companies that conduct business with EU nationals will no longer be able to bury hidden clauses in lengthy, verbose terms of service agreements or otherwise obscure their intentions through legal trickery. The GDPR states that EU nationals must not only give their express permission before a company can process or store their data, but also that companies must provide EU nationals with clear, easily understood opt-in processes that expressly state how users’ data will be stored, processed, or used.

What About Affirmative Consent for Minors?

Many companies deal with minors during the course of their business operations. App developers, entertainment websites, and other kinds of businesses routinely handle data pertaining to minors, and the GDPR has specific guidelines on how this data should be handled. 

Affirmative parental consent is vital to collecting, storing, or processing the personal data of EU nationals under the age of 13. Data controllers must be able to demonstrate that affirmative parental consent was granted upon request, and it’s important to note that this consent can be withdrawn at any time – as is the case with consent to permit adults’ personal information to be processed.

10. How Stringently Will the GDPR Be Enforced?

“I only have a handful of email newsletter subscribers in Europe,” I can hear you say. “Surely I don’t need to worry about all this for just a handful of users?” 

Wrong.

When the GDPR goes into effect in 2018, it will become one of the most robust consumer data protection initiatives in the world – if not the most. As a result, companies should expect the regulation to be rigidly enforced.

Although you may not be legally required to hire a dedicated Data Protection Officer, you absolutely MUST comply with the GDPR regulation if you collect, store, or process data from ANY EU nationals, regardless of how many. Failure to do so may result in the kind of stunning financial penalties I detailed earlier.

User Rights > User Experience

The GDPR promises to be one of the most far-reaching and ambitious consumer protection programs ever devised. However, although the implementation of the GDPR is likely to cause some businesses more difficulty than others (such as enterprise firms that offer “big data” products), it’s important to remember that this legislation is being introduced to protect users’ rights in a time at which almost every conceivable aspect of our lives is stored online – and is highly vulnerable to exposure and exploitation. 

Just as there was when Canada implemented its CASL legislation, there has already been a great deal of hand-wringing about the new regulation, as well as the predictably vocal opposition from many American businesses that see consumer protections as little more than inconvenient obstacles to even greater profits.

To me, the real question isn’t whether the GDPR will be good or bad for American businesses, but rather why the U.S. isn’t developing robust consumer protection laws of its own. As one of the 143 million people who were affected by the recent – and completely preventable – Equifax breach, I know I’d love to see legislation like this passed (or even discussed) in the States. How about you?

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2wYknH6

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2fUyQcJ

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the “owner” of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

• Contact form submission
• Quote request form submission
• Phone call
• Text message
• Chat
• Appointment booking
• Newsletter signup
• E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

1. Navigate to the Admin screen.
2. Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.
3. You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.
4. Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Pro tip: Analytics allows you to associate a dollar value to your goal conversions. If you can tie your goals to their actual value, it can be a powerful metric to measure performance with. A common way to determine the value of a goal is to take the average value of a sale and multiply it by the average closing rate of Internet leads. For example, if your average sale is worth $1,000, and you typically close 1/10 of leads, your goal value would be $100.

Form tracking

The simplest way to track form fills is to have the form redirect to a “Thank You” page upon submission. This is usually my preferred setup; it’s easy to configure, and I can use the Thank You page to recommend other services, articles, etc. on the site and potentially keep the user around. I also find a dedicated Thank You page to provide the best affirmation that the form submission actually went through.

Different forms can all use the same Thank You page, and pass along variables in the URL to distinguish themselves from each other so you don’t have to create a hundred different Thank You pages to track different forms or goals. Most decent form plugins for WordPress are capable of this. My favorite is Gravityforms. Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms are also very popular (and free).

Another option is using event tracking. Event tracking allows you to track the click of a button or link (the submit button, in the case of a web form). This would circumvent the need for a thank you page if you don’t want to (or can’t) send the user elsewhere when they submit a form. It’s also handy for other, more advanced forms of tracking.

Here’s a handy plugin for Gravityforms that makes setting up event tracking a snap.

Once you’ve got your form redirecting to a Thank You page or generating an event, you just need to create a goal in Analytics with the corresponding value.

You can use Thank You pages or events in a similar manner to track appointment booking, web chats, newsletter signups, etc.

Call tracking

Many businesses and marketers have adopted form tracking, since it’s easy and free. That’s great. But for most businesses, it leaves a huge volume of web conversions untracked.

If you’re spending cash to generate traffic to your site, you could be hemorrhaging budget if you’re not collecting and attributing the phone call conversions from your website.

There are several solutions and approaches to call tracking. I use and recommend CallRail, which also seems to have emerged as the darling of the digital marketing community over the past few years thanks to its ease of use, great support, fair pricing, and focus on integration. Another option (so I don’t come across as completely biased) is CallTrackingMetrics.

You’ll want to make sure your call tracking platform allows for integration with Google Analytics and offers something called “dynamic number insertion.”

Dynamic number insertion uses JavaScript to detect your actual local phone number on your website and replace it with a tracking number when a user loads your page.

Dynamic insertion is especially important in the context of local SEO, since it allows you to keep your real, local number on your site, and maintain NAP consistency with the rest of your business’s citations. Assuming it’s implemented properly, Google will still see your real number when it crawls your site, but users will get a tracked number.

Basically, magic.

There are a few ways to implement dynamic number insertion. For most businesses, one of these two approaches should fit the bill.

Number per source

With this approach, you’ll create a tracking number for each source you wish to track calls for. These sources might be:

• Organic search traffic
• Paid search traffic
• Facebook referral traffic
• Yelp referral traffic
• Direct traffic
• Vanity URL traffic (for visitors coming from an offline TV or radio ad, for example)

When someone arrives at your website from one of these predefined sources, the corresponding number will show in place of your real number, wherever it’s visible. If someone calls that number, an event will be passed to Analytics along with the source.

This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid solution if your site gets large amounts of traffic (5k+ visits/day) and you want to keep call tracking costs low. It will do a solid job of answering the basic questions of how many calls your site generates and where they came from, but it comes with a few minor caveats:

• Calls originating from sources you didn’t predefine will be missed.
• Events sent to Analytics will create artificial sessions not tied to actual user sessions.
• Call conversions coming from Adwords clicks won’t be attached to campaigns, ad groups, or keywords.

Some of these issues have more advanced workarounds. None of them are deal breakers… but you can avoid them completely with number pools — the awesomest call tracking method.

Number pools

“Keyword Pools,” as CallRail refers to them, are the killer app for call tracking. As long as your traffic doesn’t make this option prohibitively expensive (which won’t be a problem for most local business websites), this is the way to go.

In this approach, you create a pool with several numbers (8+ with CallRail). Each concurrent visitor on your site is assigned a different number, and if they call it, the conversion is attached to their session in Analytics, as well as their click in Adwords (if applicable). No more artificial sessions or disconnected conversions, and as long as you have enough numbers in your pool to cover your site’s traffic, you’ll capture all calls from your site, regardless of source. It’s also much quicker to set up than a number per source, and will even make you more attractive and better at sports!

You generally have to pay your call tracking provider for additional numbers, and you’ll need a number for each concurrent visitor to keep things running smoothly, so this is where massive amounts of traffic can start to get expensive. CallRail recommends you look at your average hourly traffic during peak times and include ¼ the tally as numbers in your pool. So if you have 30 visitors per hour on average, you might want ~8 numbers.

Implementation

Once you’ve got your call tracking platform configured, you’ll need to implement some code on your site to allow the dynamic number insertion to work its magic. Most platforms will provide you with a code snippet and instructions for installation. If you use CallRail and WordPress, there’s a handy plugin to make things even simpler. Just install, connect, and go.

To get your calls recorded in Analytics, you’ll just need to enable that option from your call tracking service. With CallRail you simply enable the integration, add your domain, and calls will be sent to your Analytics account as Events. Just like with your form submissions, you can add these events as a goal. Usually it makes sense to add a single goal called “Phone Calls” and set your event conditions according to the output from your call tracking service. If you’re using CallRail, it will look like this:

Google Search Console

It’s easy to forget to set up Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools), because most of the time it plays a backseat role in your digital marketing measurement. But miss it, and you’ll forego some fundamental technical SEO basics (country setting, XML sitemaps, robots.txt verification, crawl reports, etc.), and you’ll miss out on some handy keyword click data in the Search Analytics section. Search Console data can also be indispensable for diagnosing penalties and other problems down the road, should they ever pop up.

Make sure to connect your Search Console with your Analytics property, as well as your Adwords account.

With all the basics of your tracking setup in place, the next step is to bring your paid advertising data into the mix.

Google Adwords

Adwords is probably the single most convincing reason to get proper tracking in place. Without it, you can spend a lot of money on clicks without really knowing what you get out of it. Conversion data in Adwords is also absolutely critical in making informed optimizations to your campaign settings, ad text, keywords, and so on.

If you’d like some more of my rantings on conversions in Adwords and some other ways to get more out of your campaigns, check out this recent article

Getting your data flowing in all the right directions is simple, but often overlooked.

Linking with Analytics

First, make sure your Adwords and Analytics accounts are linked. Always make sure you have auto-tagging enabled on your Adwords account. Now all your Adwords data will show up in the Acquisition > Adwords area of Analytics. This is a good time to double-check that you have the currency correctly set in Analytics (Admin > View Settings); otherwise, your Adwords spend will be converted to the currency set in Analytics and record the wrong dollar values (and you can’t change data that’s already been imported).

Next, you’ll want to get those call and form conversions from Analytics into Adwords.

Importing conversions in Adwords

Some Adwords management companies/consultants might disagree, but I strongly advocate an Analytics-first approach to conversion tracking. You can get call and form conversions pulled directly into Adwords by installing a tracking code on your site. But don’t.

Instead, make sure all your conversions are set up as goals in Analytics, and then import them into Adwords. This allows Analytics to act as your one-stop-shop for reviewing your conversion data, while providing all the same access to that data inside Adwords.

Call extensions & call-only ads

This can throw some folks off. You will want to track call extensions natively within Adwords. These conversions are set up automatically when you create a call extension in Adwords and elect to use a Google call forwarding number with the default settings.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google
Medium: organic
Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

Google My Business Insights

Your GMB listing is a foundational piece of your local SEO infrastructure, and GMB Insights offer some meaningful data (impressions and clicks for your listing, mostly). It also tries to tell you how many calls your listing generates for you, but it comes up a bit short since it relies on “tel:” links instead of tracking numbers. It will tell you how many people clicked on your phone number, but not how many actually made the call. It also won’t give you any insights into calls coming from desktop users.

There’s a great workaround though! It just might freak you out a bit…

Fire up your call tracking platform once more, create an “offline” number, and use it as your “primary number” on your GMB listing. Don’t panic. You can preserve your NAP consistency by demoting your real local number to an “additional number” slot on your GMB listing.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

• How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?
• How does that compare to the month before? Last year?
• How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?
• Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?
• Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium can be equally interesting, especially if you’ve made good use of tracking URLs.

Make some sweet SEO reports

I can populate almost my entire standard SEO client report from the Acquisition section of Analytics. Making conversions the star of the show really helps to keep clients engaged in their monthly reporting.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product…

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is performing really well

Supermetrics

If you want to get really fancy, and build your own fully custom dashboard, develop some truly bespoke analysis tools, or automate your reporting regimen, check out Supermetrics. It allows you to pull data from just about any source into Google Sheets or Excel. From there, your only limitation is your mastery of spreadsheet-fu and your imagination.

TL;DR

So that’s a lot of stuff. If you’d like to skip the more nuanced explanations, pro tips, and bad jokes, here’s the gist in point form:

• Tracking your digital marketing is super important.
• Don’t just track traffic. Tracking conversions is critical.
• Use Google Analytics. Don’t let your agency use their own account.
• Set up goals for every type of lead (forms, calls, chats, bookings, etc).
• Track forms with destinations (thank you pages) or events.
• Track your calls, probably using CallRail.
• Use “number per source” if you have a huge volume of traffic; otherwise, use number pools (AKA keyword pools). Pools are better.
• Set up Search Console and link it to your Analytics and Adwords accounts.
• Link Adwords with Analytics.
• Import Analytics conversions into Adwords instead of using Adwords’ native conversion tracking snippet…
• …except for call extensions. Track those within and Adwords AND in Analytics (if you want to) by using an “offline” tracking number as the destination for your Google forwarding numbers.
• Use Google Tag Manager if you have more than a couple third-party scripts to run on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Facebook Pixels etc).
• Use Google Campaign URL Builder to create tracked URLs for tracking visitors from various sources like offline advertising, email signatures, etc.
• Use a tracked URL on your GMB listing.
• Use a tracked number as your “primary” GMB listing number (if you do this, make sure you put your real local number as a “secondary” number). Note: We think this is safe, but we don’t have quite enough data to say so unequivocally. YMMV.
• Use vanity domains or short URLs that point to your tracking URLs to put on print materials, TV spots, etc.
• Track your rankings like a boss.
• Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels is your new Analytics home base.
• Consider making some Google Analytics Dashboards… and then don’t, because Google Data Studio is way better. So use that.
• Check out Supermetrics if you want to get really hardcore.
• Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

If you’re new to tracking your digital marketing, I hope this provides a helpful starting point, and helps cut through some of the confusion and uncertainty about how to best get set up.

If you’re a conversion veteran, I hope there are a few new or alternative ideas here that you can use to improve your setup.

If you’ve got anything to add, correct, or ask, leave a comment!

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2hwyH2T

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2xL10k9

How to Win New PPC Accounts: 5 Approaches for Agencies

A few years back, I took an evening class to study up on fundraising for non-profits I support. The classes were at the end of the day … the time when you’re really tired and only thinking about going to bed.

One night the instructor, contrasting non-profits and their for-profit counterparts, made a comment that I never forgot. It was so simple that I felt stupid: For-profit companies exist to make money.

It seems like a simple idea, but it’s a revelation that can have serious implications for your marketing agency.

If you Google “wealth strategies,” you’ll quickly find the concept of multiple revenue streams. Usually, these articles recommend buying property and generating rental income. But for the modern marketing agency, there’s a simpler way.

Your agency has an advantage over most other companies in that you can, and likely do, offer multiple services. And PPC advertising can be your next revenue stream … if you ask the right questions.

Today, I’ll outline five things you should say to your prospects as well as your agency’s new and existing clients to introduce them to PPC. Importantly, these questions will also help you overcome some of the most common objections to adopting paid search as a channel. 

With a little extra work, you can add boost your agency’s profits without having to become a landlord.

1. “Let’s revisit your growth strategies.”

This question is for your existing clients, and there’s a reason it comes first. In business as in fundraising, the most important clients are the ones you already have.  

Selling your existing clients on PPC is easier because you already have a relationship. Plus, if you’re new to paid search advertising yourself, you’ll have an easier time with their accounts since you are already familiar with them. For your first few, you can easily offer your PPC services free of charge in exchange for a testimonial. (Check out my tips for pricing a new PPC offering.)

And if you’re already a seasoned PPC manager, not connecting with your existing clients is like leaving money on the table.

Regardless, it’s good business practices to engage your clients regularly as a check-in. They’re every bit as concerned about growth as you are, and this is a great way to open a conversation about new marketing channels that will help them grow. 

2. “My other auto dealer had this problem – what about you?”

This isn’t about auto dealers. That’s just an example. The point is, two things happen when you use anecdotal stories about other clients: First, you build credibility. Second, you learn.

By building industry knowledge and listening to your specific client needs, you become an expert.

This question will get your clients listening because we’re naturally interested in what our competitors are doing and how we can learn from them. If you have multiple clients in the same industry, you should be using your learnings from one account to influence how you manage the others.

3. “You’re looking for phone calls, right?”

Too often, we assume that everyone speaks marketing. Most of us working in the agency world came from marketing. We drop marketing-bombs like “conversion.” Most of your prospects will think you’re trying to save their soul.

Do your research before the call and make some assumptions. We know that most lawyers and contractors want phone calls. We know most retailers want foot-traffic. We know that online-retailers want an ecommerce purchase. Always ask, but don’t hesitate to assume and make that assumption part of the opener.

Once you get that “of course” you’re expecting, you can explain how your clients are using PPC to drive calls.

So what do you say when you get the inevitable pushback? The “We’re doing just fine”?

4. “You said you were doing fine, but…”

Most likely, if you hear “We’re doing just fine,” you’re not talking to a decision-maker. This is when we should go back to their website or LinkedIn and find someone with more authority.

But what if this is the owner? Then we should assume they’re just busy. Turn the “no” into a “maybe” and ask for a follow-up date…or just call back later. But when you do, arm yourself with research. What are they doing to generate business? Are they using AdWords? Are their competitors using AdWords? Lead with this:

“You mentioned last time we talked that you’re doing fine, but I noticed that your competitor popped up when I Googled ‘St. Louis roof repair.’ Does that mean you’re not doing PPC?”

So what do you say if their response is, “PPC is expensive, so we do SEO…”

5. “What’s been your experience with PPC?”

This is actually a great objection. It means they’re somewhat savvy and have a marketing budget.

This leads to a great follow-up: “Have you ever tried PPC and if so, what happened?”

PPC complements SEO so well that you have a great opportunity with them. Most likely, they got burned on PPC in the past or their current agency just doesn’t offer it. Either way, you can offer to set up their account for a fee and then manage it for a few months at a discount or offer a free month. Then prove to them that AdWords works if done right.

However, don’t feel obligated to do too much for free. At my first sales job, they said to never use the word “free.” It leads people to undervalue what you’re offering.

In conclusion

Adding a new revenue stream is a highly effective way to grow your agency. Armed with these questions for prospects and clients, you’re well on your way.

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2k0r8Ca

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2xzTk1P

How and Why to Do a Mobile/Desktop Parity Audit

Posted by Everett

Google still ranks webpages based on the content, code, and links they find with a desktop crawler. They’re working to update this old-school approach in favor of what their mobile crawlers find instead. Although the rollout will probably happen in phases over time, I’m calling the day this change goes live worldwide “D-day” in the post below. Mobilegeddon was already taken.

You don’t want to be in a situation on D-day where your mobile site has broken meta tags, unoptimized titles and headers, missing content, or is serving the wrong HTTP status code. This post will help you prepare so you can sleep well between now then.

What is a mobile parity audit?

When two or more versions of a website are available on the same URL, a “parity audit” will crawl each version, compare the differences, and look for errors.

When do you need one?

You should do a parity audit if content is added, removed, hidden, or changed between devices without sending the user to a new URL.

This type of analysis is also useful for mobile sites on a separate URL, but that’s another post.

What will it tell you? How will it help?

Is the mobile version of the website “optimized” and crawlable? Are all of the header response codes and tags set up properly, and in the same way, on both versions? Is important textual content missing from, or hidden, on the mobile version?

Why parity audits could save your butt

The last thing you want to do is scramble to diagnose a major traffic drop on D-day when things go mobile-first. Even if you don’t change anything now, cataloging the differences between site versions will help diagnose issues if/when the time comes.

It may also help you improve rankings right now.

I know an excellent team of SEOs for a major brand who, for severals months, had missed the fact that the entire mobile site (millions of pages) had title tags that all read the same: “BrandName – Mobile Site.” They found this error and contacted us to take a more complete look at the differences between the two sites. Here are some other things we found:

1. One page type on the mobile site had an error at the template level that was causing rel=canonical tags to break, but only on mobile, and in a way that gave Google conflicting instructions, depending on whether they rendered the page as mobile or desktop. The same thing could have happened with any tag on the page, including robots meta directives. It could also happen with HTTP header responses.
2. The mobile site has fewer than half the amount of navigation links in the footer. How will this affect the flow of PageRank to key pages in a mobile-first world?
3. The mobile site has far more related products on product detail pages. Again, how will this affect the flow of PageRank, or even crawl depth, when Google goes mobile-first?
4. Important content was hidden on the mobile version. Google says this is OK as long as the user can drop down or tab over to read the content. But in this case, there was no way to do that. The content was in the code but hidden to mobile viewers, and there was no way of making it visible.

How to get started with a mobile/desktop parity audit

It sounds complicated, but really it boils down to a few simple steps:

1. Crawl the site as a desktop user.
2. Crawl the site as a mobile user.
3. Combine the outputs (e.g. Mobile Title1, Desktop Title1, Mobile Canonical1, Desktop Canonical1)
4. Look for errors and differences.

Screaming Frog provides the option to crawl the site as the Googlebot Mobile user-agent with a smartphone device. You may or may not need to render JavaScript.

You can run two crawls (mobile and desktop) with DeepCrawl as well. However, reports like “Mobile Word Count Mismatch” do not currently work on dynamic sites, even after two crawls.

The hack to get at the data you want is the same as with Screaming Frog: namely, running two crawls, exporting two reports, and using Vlookups in Excel to compare the columns side-by-side with URL being the unique identifier.

Here’s a simplified example using an export from DeepCrawl:

As you can see in the screenshot above, blog category pages, like /category/cro/, are bigly different between devices types, not just in how they appear, but also in what code and content gets delivered and rendered as source code. The bigliest difference is that post teasers disappear on mobile, which accounts for the word count disparity.

Word count is only one data point. You would want to look at many different things, discussed below, when performing a mobile/desktop parity audit.

For now, there does NOT appear to be an SEO tool on the market that crawls a dynamic site as both a desktop and mobile crawler, and then generates helpful reports about the differences between them.

But there’s hope!

Our industry toolmakers are hot on the trail, and at this point I’d expect features to release in time for D-day.

Deep Crawl

We are working on Changed Metrics reports, which will automatically show you pages where the titles and descriptions have changed between crawls. This would serve to identify differences on dynamic sites when the user agent is changed. But for now, this can be done manually by downloading and merging the data from the two crawls and calculating the differences.

Moz Pro

Dr. Pete says they’ve talked about comparing desktop and mobile rankings to look for warning signs so Moz could alert customers of any potential issues. This would be a very helpful feature to augment the other analysis of on-page differences.

Sitebulb

When you select “mobile-friendly,” Sitebulb is already crawling the whole site first, then choosing a sample of (up to) 100 pages, and then recrawling these with the JavaScript rendering crawler. This is what produces their “mobile-friendly” report.

They’re thinking about doing the same to run these parity audit reports (mobile/desktop difference checker), which would be a big step forward for us SEOs. Because most of these disparity issues happen at the template/page type level, taking URLs from different crawl depths and sections of the site should allow this tool to alert SEOs of potential mismatches between content and page elements on those two versions of the single URL.

Screaming Frog

Aside from the oversensitive hash values, SF has no major advantage over DeepCrawl at the moment. In fact, DeepCrawl has some mobile difference finding features that, if they were to work on dynamic sites, would be leaps and bounds ahead of SF.

That said, the process shared below uses Screaming Frog because it’s what I’m most familiar with.

Customizing the diff finders

One of my SEO heroes, David Sottimano, whipped out a customization of John Resig’s Javascript Diff Algorithm to help automate some of the hard work involved in these desktop/mobile parity audits.

You can make a copy of it here. Follow the instructions in the Readme tab. Note: This is a work in progress and is an experimental tool, so have fun!

On using the hash values to quickly find disparities between crawls

As Lunametrics puts it in their excellent guide to Screaming Frog Tab Definitions, the hash value “is a count of the number of URLs that potentially contain duplicate content. This count filters for all duplicate pages found via the hash value. If two hash values match, the pages are exactly the same in content.”

I tried doing this, but found it didn’t work very well for my needs for two reasons: because I was unable to adjust the sensitivity, and if even only one minor client-side JavaScript element changed, the page would get a new hash value.

When I asked DeepCrawl about it, I found out why:

The problem with using a hash to flag different content is that a lot of pages would be flagged as different, when they are essentially the same. A hash will be completely different if a single character changes.

Mobile parity audit process using Screaming Frog and Excel

Run two crawls

First, run two separate crawls. Settings for each are below. If you don’t see a window or setting option, assume it was set to default.

1. Crawl 1: Desktop settings

Configurations —> Spider

Your settings may vary (no pun intended), but here I was just looking for very basic things and wanted a fast crawl.

Configurations —> HTTP Header —> User-Agent

2. Start the first crawl

3. Save the crawl and run the exports

When finished, save it as desktop-crawl.seospider and run the Export All URLs report (big Export button, top left). Save the export as desktop-internal_all.csv.

4. Update user-agent settings for the second crawl

Hit the “Clear” button in Screaming Frog and change the User-Agent configuration to the following:

5. Start the second crawl

6. Save the crawl and run the exports

When finished, save it as mobile-crawl.seospider and run the Export All URLs report. Save the export as mobile-internal_all.csv.

Combine the exports in Excel

Import each CSV into a separate tab within a new Excel spreadsheet.

Create another tab and bring in the URLs from the Address column of each crawl tab. De-duplicate them.

Use Vlookups or other methods to pull in the respective data from each of the other tabs.

You’ll end up with something like this:

A tab with a single row per URL, but with mobile and desktop columns for each datapoint. It helps with analysis if you can conditionally format/highlight instances where the desktop and mobile data does not match.

Errors & differences to look out for

Does the mobile site offer similar navigation options?

Believe it or not, you can usually fit the same amounts of navigation links onto a mobile site without ruining the user experience when done right. Here are a ton of examples of major retail brands approaching it in different ways, from mega navs to sliders and hamburger menus (side note: now I’m craving White Castle).

HTTP Vary User-Agent response headers

This is one of those things that seems like it could produce more caching problems and headaches than solutions, but Google says to use it in cases where the content changes significantly between mobile and desktop versions on the same URL. My advice is to avoid using Vary User-Agent if the variations between versions of the site are minimal (e.g. simplified navigation, optimized images, streamlined layout, a few bells and whistles hidden). Only use it if entire paragraphs of content and other important elements are removed.

Internal linking disparities

If your desktop site has twenty footer links to top-selling products and categories using optimized anchor text, and your mobile site has five links going to pages like “Contact Us” and “About” it would be good to document this so you know what to test should rankings drop after a mobile-first ranking algorithm shift.

Meta tags and directives

Do things like title tags, meta descriptions, robots meta directives, rel=canonical tags, and rel=next/prev tags match on both versions of the URL? Discovering this stuff now could avert disaster down the line.

Content length

There is no magic formula to how much content you should provide to each type of device, just as there is no magic formula for how much content you need to rank highly on Google (because all other things are never equal).

Imagine it’s eight months from now and you’re trying to diagnose what specific reasons are behind a post-mobile-first algorithm update traffic drop. Do the pages with less content on mobile correlate with lower rankings? Maybe. Maybe not, but I’d want to check on it.

Speed

Chances are, your mobile site will load faster. However, if this is not the case you definitely need to look into the issue. Lots of big client-side JavaScript changes could be the culprit.

Rendering

Sometimes JavaScript and other files necessary for the mobile render may be different from those needed for the desktop render. Thus, it’s possible that one set of resources may be blocked in the robots.txt file while another is not. Make sure both versions fully render without any blocked resources.

Here’s what you need to do to be ready for a mobile-first world:

1. Know IF there are major content, tag, and linking differences between the mobile and desktop versions of the site.
2. If so, know WHAT those differences are, and spend time thinking about how that might affect rankings if mobile was the only version Google ever looked at.
3. Fix any differences that need to be fixed immediately, such as broken or missing rel=canonicals, robots meta, or title tags.
4. Keep everything else in mind for things to test after mobile-first arrives. If rankings drop, at least you’ll be prepared.

And here are some tools & links to help you get there:

• Mobile/Desktop Mismatch Reports by DeepCrawl
• Mobile-First Index Prep Tool by Merkle (Build on this please Merkle! Great start, but we need more!)
• Mobile-First Indexing, Google Webmaster Central
• Varvy Mobile Friendliness Tool

I suspect it won’t be long before this type of audit is made unnecessary because we’ll ONLY be worried about the mobile site. Until then, please comment below to share which differences you found, and how you chose to address them so we can all learn from each other.

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2xCAzgb

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2wUG3PB