10 Things I’ve Learned Recently About Hiring and Applying for SEO Roles

Posted by bridget.randolph

Here at Distilled NY we’ve been running a hiring cycle, and it’s really brought front and center for me the key elements that make a digital marketing (and specifically SEO) candidate stand out from the crowd. So I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned in the process.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to tackle this topic from two angles (with 5 points on each, in true “10 Things I’ve Learned…” style):

Part I: 5 attributes I now look for in any new analyst or consultant hire (and what you as an employer might want to think about before making someone an offer), and

Part II: 5 things to consider as a job seeker if you’re applying for a role at a company like Distilled.

I should also note that this post is based on my own personal approach and viewpoint, rather than representing any kind of official Distilled documentation.

What I look for in a new SEO hire

At Distilled, we hire for SEO consultants at two levels — analyst (entry-level) and consultant (3+ years experience). The core elements we look for are the same for each, but for consultants there’s obviously also an expected baseline of technical knowledge.

There are four key skillsets we look for when we evaluate a candidate throughout this process (based on our Distilled manifesto), in addition to their level of technical knowledge.

These are some questions that I’ve found useful to ask myself (not necessarily the candidate!) when identifying whether someone is a good fit in each of these areas. Note that no single one of these questions will necessarily make or break the outcome, but taken all together they can provide a relatively strong indicator of the level of the candidate in each area:

1. Communication skills

• How well do you express yourself?
• How professional do you seem (both on the phone and/or in person)?
• Are you engaging and enthusiastic?
• How clearly can you tell a story?
• How clearly can you explain a technical concept?
• How clearly can you explain a subject I don’t know anything about?
• Could I trust you to lead a client meeting with confidence? At the C-Suite level?

2. Getting things done

• Can you give me clear examples of being a self-motivated person?
• Do you have any side projects (I don’t really care what they are, but this indicates a self-motivated learner)?
• Can you give me examples of achieving goals or targets?
• Can you give me examples of when you took action that had an impact?

3. Raw smarts and curiosity

Note that what I call “smartness” is not necessarily academic achievement, book learning, etc.

• Teach me about a topic you geek out about. Why?
• Are you a curious person?
• Do you ask questions about ‘why’?
• Did you teach yourself at least part of your marketing skillset? (I have no issue with people learning marketing from a course or degree, but I want to know that you will keep teaching yourself new skills without a teacher grading you or giving you assignments. This question is really about assessing self-starter indicators).

For me, this “smartness” piece really comes down to the curiosity part. I want to work with people who are always asking why, and who get excited about discovering new ideas or learning new skills. These people make great consultants.

4. Culture fit

• Would I be excited to have this person on my team?
• For me, this usually means that they show enthusiasm for the topic of SEO/digital, and that they’re a self-motivated learner. Basically, I want to feel that this person is going to push me to up my game, push themselves to constantly get better, and in the process will bring the whole consulting team up with them.
• What sort of work environment are you looking for?
  • We have a relaxed environment at Distilled, but this only works because our employees are self-motivated. If you tell me you’re looking for a flexible work environment, I’ll want to understand why.
  • Is it because you know how you work best, and you want a job that supports your best work? Or is it because you’re lazy? Because I can tell the difference.

5. Technical knowledge

If you’re applying at the consultant level, I will also test your technical knowledge and experience.

Examples of the type of technical questions I’ll ask on the initial phone screen are:

• What’s the biggest site you’ve ever done a technical audit of, in terms of number of pages?
  • Many of our clients have sites with millions of pages, so I want to know that you can handle this scale.
  • If you haven’t worked with a site this size before, it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but in that case I want to see that you’re aware that you haven’t worked with a truly massive site, and get a sense that you’d at least have a thought on how to approach this type of site. I once had a candidate respond to this question with an answer along the lines of “Oh yes, I’ve worked with some really big sites, they had, like, thousands of pages.” That makes me think that you don’t truly understand the scale that some of our enterprise clients operate at.

• Talk me through your process for a technical SEO audit.
  • What tools do you use?
  • What questions will you ask?
  • What are the issues that you would prioritize?
  • I don’t necessarily expect you to answer the way I would, but I want to see that you understand basic technical SEO principles and that you have a process that is logical and thorough.
• What was your biggest technical win for a client?
  • This gives me insight into how you think about technical priorities and value.
• What is the most common problem that you come across with client websites?
  • This gives me a sense of the kind of experience that you have.
• What do you think the biggest difference will be in SEO in five years’ time?
  • The main things I look for with this question are whether you…
    • Get excited at the opportunity to talk about the future of search
    • Have thoughts on this topic already because you think about/talk about this stuff for fun (curiosity and self-learning, remember?!)
• Rapid-fire round:
  • I say a task, you tell me your preferred tool:
    • Information architecture audit?
    • Keyword research?
    • Site crawl?
    • Content gap analysis?
    • Backlink audit?

There aren’t necessarily any right answers for most of these tasks, but if you don’t mention any of the common tools that we use frequently in the SEO space, even just to tell me why they’re not your tool of choice, that’s a red flag for me that you’re not particularly experienced. Bonus points if you can also tell me why you do or don’t use certain tools.

If a candidate moves forward to an in-person interview, we’ll dig a little deeper on technical expertise. As part of this, we will provide some common client-based scenarios and ask for your process for how you might approach the scenario. There is usually no one right answer, but if it’s a diagnostic problem, there are certain steps or sense-checks I would expect every competent SEO consultant to take before making a recommendation.

For instance, if I give you a scenario around how to handle duplicate content from faceted navigation, where the client has asked for separate pages for 10 color variants of the product across thousands of products, I would expect you to at least mention the following:

• Keyword research
• Handling parameters and crawl budget
• Ideas for how to differentiate identical product description content
• And also being willing and able to challenge, or at least sense-check, client assumptions about what the correct approach might be! In this scenario, for instance, maybe they don’t actually need to have every color variant of the product indexed if the search volume isn’t there.

We will also ask technical questions which do have clear right and wrong answers, to ensure that you have the baseline of knowledge that we would expect an analyst to achieve before we would be able to promote him or her to consultant. These are not always particularly challenging questions, but surprisingly, a lot of candidates get them wrong. An example of this type of question would be something like “Can you explain how Google search works to someone with limited technical knowledge?,” “Can you draw an example of a SERP layout on the whiteboard?,” or “How would you set up a robots.txt file to block these pages and folders?”

How to be a great SEO candidate (agency-specific)

Of course, all of the above applies equally as an applicant in terms of things to think about in preparation for an SEO interview. In fact, if you’re preparing for an interview like this, you may want to think about how you would respond to each of the questions I’ve outlined above, and how you could tell stories that would demonstrate these 5 key attributes that we’re looking for. The four main criteria are pretty universally valuable attributes in any workplace — and they’re also key indicators in my experience of whether a candidate will succeed in this specific type of role, and especially in an agency environment.

But! I promised you 10 things in the title of this post, so here are 5 applicant-specific things I’ve learned recently from seeing the process from the other side:

1. Don’t bullshit.

Be honest if you don’t know something. Especially at the analyst level, we’re looking for people we can train, and honesty about where you’re at is essential to that process.

2. Stay on point.

I need to see that you can communicate clearly with a client and outline the 5 Ws of a recommendation or strategy, without getting lost in unnecessary detail or losing your train of thought.

3. Don’t try to guess what answer I’m looking for.

I want to understand your thought process. It’s obvious when you’re just trying to tell me what I want to hear — because you’re not speaking with authenticity or conviction.

This one ties into the first two, because when you try to guess what I’m looking for, it also makes it harder to stay on point. You end up waffling and um-ing and ah-ing because you’re trying to feel your way to my point of view instead of presenting your own opinion. It’s an easy mistake to make when you get nervous, so a tip for dealing with the nerves is to just take a quick second to breathe before you answer, and check in with yourself about how you really feel about the topic. And if the answer is “I don’t know the answer” — that’s ok. Feel free in that case to talk about how you might approach figuring out the answer, though — if we’re going to be working together I want to know that you’ll be proactive enough to find out the answer, or at least have an idea of where to start when you get stuck!

4. Don’t try to “win” the interview.

Don’t go in with the end game of getting the offer. Go in with a sense of what you’re looking for in your next position and approach this time we’re spending together as an opportunity for us to explore together whether the role and the company is a good fit for you. I’ve made this mistake in both directions, as an interviewee prior to my current role and more recently sometimes as an interviewer (because I want you to like me, too!).

Remember: I really want you to be the perfect fit for what I need! So I’m not out to trip you up — in fact, if I can help you perform well, I will. For instance, if you don’t quite seem to understand the question, or if I don’t quite hear what I was hoping for, I’ll rephrase the question differently to help you see what I’m getting at and see if we can get there together. If you still don’t manage to get there when we give you that support, though, at that point it’s pretty clear that we aren’t a good fit.

5. Do the research.

We once interviewed someone for a sales role, and we asked them if they knew what services Distilled offered. She clearly didn’t know but tried to answer anyway, and went on to guess a couple correctly but then threw in a third service which is not a specialty of ours and is not advertised publicly as a service we provide. To me this showed a basic lack of preparation which I would view as necessary in any sort of consulting or sales-based role, and it was one of the reasons I didn’t recommend moving her forward in the process (although not the only reason).

---

So there you have it — 10 things I’ve learned recently about hiring and applying for SEO jobs!

I hope that you’ve found this post helpful, regardless of which side of the table you’re currently finding yourself on. I’d love to hear your best tips and worst experiences in the comments and if you’re looking for a new opportunity, and this process sounds like something you’d like to explore further, check out our Jobs page for current openings!

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/2c5z9jU

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2cgMk05

10 Things I’ve Learned Recently About Hiring and Applying for SEO Roles

Posted by bridget.randolph

Here at Distilled NY we’ve been running a hiring cycle, and it’s really brought front and center for me the key elements that make a digital marketing (and specifically SEO) candidate stand out from the crowd. So I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned in the process.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to tackle this topic from two angles (with 5 points on each, in true “10 Things I’ve Learned…” style):

Part I: 5 attributes I now look for in any new analyst or consultant hire (and what you as an employer might want to think about before making someone an offer), and

Part II: 5 things to consider as a job seeker if you’re applying for a role at a company like Distilled.

I should also note that this post is based on my own personal approach and viewpoint, rather than representing any kind of official Distilled documentation.

What I look for in a new SEO hire

At Distilled, we hire for SEO consultants at two levels — analyst (entry-level) and consultant (3+ years experience). The core elements we look for are the same for each, but for consultants there’s obviously also an expected baseline of technical knowledge.

There are four key skillsets we look for when we evaluate a candidate throughout this process (based on our Distilled manifesto), in addition to their level of technical knowledge.

These are some questions that I’ve found useful to ask myself (not necessarily the candidate!) when identifying whether someone is a good fit in each of these areas. Note that no single one of these questions will necessarily make or break the outcome, but taken all together they can provide a relatively strong indicator of the level of the candidate in each area:

1. Communication skills

• How well do you express yourself?
• How professional do you seem (both on the phone and/or in person)?
• Are you engaging and enthusiastic?
• How clearly can you tell a story?
• How clearly can you explain a technical concept?
• How clearly can you explain a subject I don’t know anything about?
• Could I trust you to lead a client meeting with confidence? At the C-Suite level?

2. Getting things done

• Can you give me clear examples of being a self-motivated person?
• Do you have any side projects (I don’t really care what they are, but this indicates a self-motivated learner)?
• Can you give me examples of achieving goals or targets?
• Can you give me examples of when you took action that had an impact?

3. Raw smarts and curiosity

Note that what I call “smartness” is not necessarily academic achievement, book learning, etc.

• Teach me about a topic you geek out about. Why?
• Are you a curious person?
• Do you ask questions about ‘why’?
• Did you teach yourself at least part of your marketing skillset? (I have no issue with people learning marketing from a course or degree, but I want to know that you will keep teaching yourself new skills without a teacher grading you or giving you assignments. This question is really about assessing self-starter indicators).

For me, this “smartness” piece really comes down to the curiosity part. I want to work with people who are always asking why, and who get excited about discovering new ideas or learning new skills. These people make great consultants.

4. Culture fit

• Would I be excited to have this person on my team?
• For me, this usually means that they show enthusiasm for the topic of SEO/digital, and that they’re a self-motivated learner. Basically, I want to feel that this person is going to push me to up my game, push themselves to constantly get better, and in the process will bring the whole consulting team up with them.
• What sort of work environment are you looking for?
  • We have a relaxed environment at Distilled, but this only works because our employees are self-motivated. If you tell me you’re looking for a flexible work environment, I’ll want to understand why.
  • Is it because you know how you work best, and you want a job that supports your best work? Or is it because you’re lazy? Because I can tell the difference.

5. Technical knowledge

If you’re applying at the consultant level, I will also test your technical knowledge and experience.

Examples of the type of technical questions I’ll ask on the initial phone screen are:

• What’s the biggest site you’ve ever done a technical audit of, in terms of number of pages?
  • Many of our clients have sites with millions of pages, so I want to know that you can handle this scale.
  • If you haven’t worked with a site this size before, it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but in that case I want to see that you’re aware that you haven’t worked with a truly massive site, and get a sense that you’d at least have a thought on how to approach this type of site. I once had a candidate respond to this question with an answer along the lines of “Oh yes, I’ve worked with some really big sites, they had, like, thousands of pages.” That makes me think that you don’t truly understand the scale that some of our enterprise clients operate at.

• Talk me through your process for a technical SEO audit.
  • What tools do you use?
  • What questions will you ask?
  • What are the issues that you would prioritize?
  • I don’t necessarily expect you to answer the way I would, but I want to see that you understand basic technical SEO principles and that you have a process that is logical and thorough.
• What was your biggest technical win for a client?
  • This gives me insight into how you think about technical priorities and value.
• What is the most common problem that you come across with client websites?
  • This gives me a sense of the kind of experience that you have.
• What do you think the biggest difference will be in SEO in five years’ time?
  • The main things I look for with this question are whether you…
    • Get excited at the opportunity to talk about the future of search
    • Have thoughts on this topic already because you think about/talk about this stuff for fun (curiosity and self-learning, remember?!)
• Rapid-fire round:
  • I say a task, you tell me your preferred tool:
    • Information architecture audit?
    • Keyword research?
    • Site crawl?
    • Content gap analysis?
    • Backlink audit?

There aren’t necessarily any right answers for most of these tasks, but if you don’t mention any of the common tools that we use frequently in the SEO space, even just to tell me why they’re not your tool of choice, that’s a red flag for me that you’re not particularly experienced. Bonus points if you can also tell me why you do or don’t use certain tools.

If a candidate moves forward to an in-person interview, we’ll dig a little deeper on technical expertise. As part of this, we will provide some common client-based scenarios and ask for your process for how you might approach the scenario. There is usually no one right answer, but if it’s a diagnostic problem, there are certain steps or sense-checks I would expect every competent SEO consultant to take before making a recommendation.

For instance, if I give you a scenario around how to handle duplicate content from faceted navigation, where the client has asked for separate pages for 10 color variants of the product across thousands of products, I would expect you to at least mention the following:

• Keyword research
• Handling parameters and crawl budget
• Ideas for how to differentiate identical product description content
• And also being willing and able to challenge, or at least sense-check, client assumptions about what the correct approach might be! In this scenario, for instance, maybe they don’t actually need to have every color variant of the product indexed if the search volume isn’t there.

We will also ask technical questions which do have clear right and wrong answers, to ensure that you have the baseline of knowledge that we would expect an analyst to achieve before we would be able to promote him or her to consultant. These are not always particularly challenging questions, but surprisingly, a lot of candidates get them wrong. An example of this type of question would be something like “Can you explain how Google search works to someone with limited technical knowledge?,” “Can you draw an example of a SERP layout on the whiteboard?,” or “How would you set up a robots.txt file to block these pages and folders?”

How to be a great SEO candidate (agency-specific)

Of course, all of the above applies equally as an applicant in terms of things to think about in preparation for an SEO interview. In fact, if you’re preparing for an interview like this, you may want to think about how you would respond to each of the questions I’ve outlined above, and how you could tell stories that would demonstrate these 5 key attributes that we’re looking for. The four main criteria are pretty universally valuable attributes in any workplace — and they’re also key indicators in my experience of whether a candidate will succeed in this specific type of role, and especially in an agency environment.

But! I promised you 10 things in the title of this post, so here are 5 applicant-specific things I’ve learned recently from seeing the process from the other side:

1. Don’t bullshit.

Be honest if you don’t know something. Especially at the analyst level, we’re looking for people we can train, and honesty about where you’re at is essential to that process.

2. Stay on point.

I need to see that you can communicate clearly with a client and outline the 5 Ws of a recommendation or strategy, without getting lost in unnecessary detail or losing your train of thought.

3. Don’t try to guess what answer I’m looking for.

I want to understand your thought process. It’s obvious when you’re just trying to tell me what I want to hear — because you’re not speaking with authenticity or conviction.

This one ties into the first two, because when you try to guess what I’m looking for, it also makes it harder to stay on point. You end up waffling and um-ing and ah-ing because you’re trying to feel your way to my point of view instead of presenting your own opinion. It’s an easy mistake to make when you get nervous, so a tip for dealing with the nerves is to just take a quick second to breathe before you answer, and check in with yourself about how you really feel about the topic. And if the answer is “I don’t know the answer” — that’s ok. Feel free in that case to talk about how you might approach figuring out the answer, though — if we’re going to be working together I want to know that you’ll be proactive enough to find out the answer, or at least have an idea of where to start when you get stuck!

4. Don’t try to “win” the interview.

Don’t go in with the end game of getting the offer. Go in with a sense of what you’re looking for in your next position and approach this time we’re spending together as an opportunity for us to explore together whether the role and the company is a good fit for you. I’ve made this mistake in both directions, as an interviewee prior to my current role and more recently sometimes as an interviewer (because I want you to like me, too!).

Remember: I really want you to be the perfect fit for what I need! So I’m not out to trip you up — in fact, if I can help you perform well, I will. For instance, if you don’t quite seem to understand the question, or if I don’t quite hear what I was hoping for, I’ll rephrase the question differently to help you see what I’m getting at and see if we can get there together. If you still don’t manage to get there when we give you that support, though, at that point it’s pretty clear that we aren’t a good fit.

5. Do the research.

We once interviewed someone for a sales role, and we asked them if they knew what services Distilled offered. She clearly didn’t know but tried to answer anyway, and went on to guess a couple correctly but then threw in a third service which is not a specialty of ours and is not advertised publicly as a service we provide. To me this showed a basic lack of preparation which I would view as necessary in any sort of consulting or sales-based role, and it was one of the reasons I didn’t recommend moving her forward in the process (although not the only reason).

---

So there you have it — 10 things I’ve learned recently about hiring and applying for SEO jobs!

I hope that you’ve found this post helpful, regardless of which side of the table you’re currently finding yourself on. I’d love to hear your best tips and worst experiences in the comments and if you’re looking for a new opportunity, and this process sounds like something you’d like to explore further, check out our Jobs page for current openings!

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/2c5z9jU

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Hotel Advertising & Marketing Best Practices [Infographic]

Search marketers in hotel advertising have to work hard for their conversions. As we learned in our epic Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks study earlier this year, travel & hospitality advertisers can expect to convert at rates slightly lower than the average across industries, at 2.57% (compared to 2.70% CVR in general).

Of course, those are just the average conversion rates and you know that the best advertisers can achieve CVRs 2x, 3x or even 5x better than average!

How can you hit that unicorn status in your hotel marketing and advertising campaigns? New search marketing insights based on internal Google data reveal hotel advertising trends that can help you improve campaign performance, increase the average click through rate on your ads, and boost your average conversion rate.

Top Hotel Marketing Queries: What Are People Actually Searching For?

The top hotel industry search queries offer a revealing peek into the mindset of searchers. Two of the top three queried terms are the names of popular hotel/travel research and booking engines TripAdvisor and Trivago.

Also in the top ten: popular hotel brands Marriott, W, Hilton and Holiday Inn Express. With all of those branded searches, where’s the opportunity for individual hotels or smaller regional booking engines using PPC? As you can see in the infographic below, the seventh most searched query related to hotels is “hotels near me.”

Google revealed recently that mobile hotel queries on Google.com increased 49% in 2015. These on-the-go local searches for hotels in a person’s immediate vicinity are a great opportunity to tap into high-intent searches with hotel advertising that targets specific locations, particularly at certain times of day.

Check out our ad scheduling tutorial to see how to put dayparting to work across your hotel ad campaigns. It enables you to increase your bids for those valuable times of day when people are most likely to be looking for a place to rest their head for a night.

Improve CTR and Lower Costs with AdWords Hotel Ads

If you’ve been reading the WordStream Blog for a while, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say that super engaging, compelling ads are the key to raising your average CTRs, which lowers your costs per click by way of a better Quality Score.

If you’re new around here, you’ll want to check out our “What is Quality Score” lesson in PPC University.

The gist of it is this: Google rewards its best advertisers by giving them discounts on their costs per click. How does Google decide which ads are best? Consumers tell them which ones are awesome and which ones suck simply by clicking on the ads or choosing to pass them over. Crappy ads don’t get clicks, and Google will show them less often as a result.

Worse, they’ll make you pay more for the clicks you do get.

Thankfully, Google actually wants you to succeed – both of you make more money when your ads are great. So over the last year, they’ve really ramped up their industry-specific offerings with AdWords products like Hotel Ads.

Basically, this ad format offers a way better user experience by surfacing richer content in search ads when people are looking for a hotel, including prices, reviews and ratings, photos and more. It allows consumers to comparison shop right on the SERP.

Hilton had early access to the ad format and saw a 45% increase in conversion as a result of using it. You can learn all about AdWords Hotel Ads here.

More Search Marketing & Advertising Insights for the Hotel Industry

This new infographic from Google shares insights and tips to help you get in front of those 75% of consumers who use Google Search when they’re looking for hotels. The proliferation of mobile and rise of last-minute, near-me searches presents an incredible opportunity for advertisers to connect without blowing the budget.

Use AdWords targeting features and tools to up your hotel marketing game in a big way this year. Check out the infographic below, then head over to WordStream’s PPC University for lessons in mastering AdWords extensions, deploying geotargeting, and using dayparting for maximum effect across your hotel advertising campaigns.

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Q&A with Search Legend Danny Sullivan on Industry Change, SMX East, RankBrain & More

Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land and Chief Content Officer of Third Door Media, recently celebrated a major career milestone – 20 years as a search journalist. If there’s anyone else on the planet as well-versed in the nuances of Google’s search algorithm and the various players in SEO software and agencies, I’ve yet to meet them!

Danny Sullivan, left, interviewing Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google,
at SMX Advanced earlier this year.

The WordStream team is super excited to attend SMX East again this year, and I had a chance to catch up with Danny ahead of the conference. He generously agreed to take some time to answer a few search questions for us.

WS: The industry has grown and evolved so much, but what one development in search really took you by surprise and why?

Danny: The growth of mobile is probably the biggest surprise. I certainly wouldn’t have thought I’d have easy, 24/7 access to the internet while on the move. Search is indeed an ‘always on’ experience now.

WS: You wrote a great piece at Search Engine Land recently on Google’s new ‘Critic Reviews’ for local businesses that highlighted some opportunities Google has to make this feature more useful (and fair). How do you think we’ll see Critic Reviews change in the coming months and what does it mean right now for local businesses?

Danny: I think the bigger picture isn’t how ‘Critic Reviews’ will change, but how Google itself is changing. I’m sure people are tired of hearing about the death of 10 blue links, and yet, people will still fixate on those 10 blue links.

Critic reviews are yet more content that pushes those down. Smart people will get this and figure out how they can tap into the new and higher area. Other people can be rightfully concerned that they might not have the opportunity — and Google should be heeding such concerns.

A bigger issue is how Google is increasing the reasons and types of ‘Google Posts’ content it displays, content that leads back to Google’s own site. Are we going to increasingly see Google try to pull publishers into its own form of a walled garden? If so, that raises many alarm bells.

WS: RankBrain: What’s the most important thing you think marketers absolutely need to know about it?

Danny: That they can’t really do anything about it. I’m pretty sick of the ‘how to rank for RankBrain’ articles, at this point. Google’s own engineers tell me and others they don’t even really understand how it works. So, good luck wasting time thinking you’re going to deconstruct it.

RankBrain still seems primarily a query refinement tool, a way that Google tries to better understand what someone wants when they enter a complex query and link that back to results for less complex but related ones. They want to do that because the less complex queries happen more, so they see more of those searches and thus can have better confidence about the results they show, by looking at things like click rates.

That means, ultimately, the best way to ‘rank’ for RankBrain remains that same boring thing no one wants to hear despite it being true. Have really good, descriptive content.

WS: Is there one Google update or new feature you wish you could just roll back the clock on, preventing it from ever happening in the first place?

Danny: I don’t have any particular update I’d roll back. I just wish if Google’s going to have periodic updates, such as Penguin, they actually update them more often than Mars orbits the sun.

WS: How do you personally feel about the “right to be forgotten” and do you think it has business implications marketers should be aware of?

Danny: I think there are some really compelling reasons why people should have a right to be forgotten. I think it’s been fairly a mess how it has rolled out in Europe. It’s potentially too broad, with some really compelling reasons why it shouldn’t be allowed. But it’s also something Google should consider extending outside Europe.

WS: I read that you believe predictive search and bots are two highly disruptive areas of search we should keep an eye on. Can you explain what a “robust meta-bot” would look like and how it could be a game changer in marketing?

Danny: I suppose a robust meta-bot would be something that you could really ask a question to and have it not only come back with an answer but take an action. Right now, Siri, Alexa and Google Now can answer lots of questions. They can also perform a fairly limited number of actions (like, say, book a ticket or order a product). But those generally involve separate actions rather than being linked. That linkage and ability to do a wide range of actions would be key, especially for marketers who understand how to ensure they’re among the actors that can be involved in the acting.

WS: What would you say to someone who suggests search is boring or unimportant?

Danny: It’s not. Every day, people are expressing overtly exactly what they want. Search marketers understand how to tap into this new and exciting medium that is unmatched by other advertising and marketing options. Yes, Super Bowl ads get the millions and the glitz. But in the end, they’re still only guessing at hoping to help make a sale. Search isn’t a guess. Search delivers.

WS: 20 years in the industry is an incredible milestone, especially in an age where people often change jobs and even careers many times throughout their life. What should we expect from Danny Sullivan over the next five to ten years?

Danny: I hope to keep educating and enlightening people to the degree I can about search topics.

WS: SMX is now taking place all over the world – should we expect any major changes like new shows in emerging international markets, or smaller regional shows?

Danny: No major changes. We like to stay focused on what we think works and provide the best that we can, rather than spread out too thin. I would say those who like SMX should also be looking at our MarTech conference, which covers a broader range of marketing and which is experiencing phenomenal growth.

WS: It sounds like the Landy Awards grew a great deal this year, with over 200 entries to judge! What should attendees expect out of the awards gala this year?

Danny: Last year’s event was a dream come true, that we finally had the bandwidth as a publication for Search Engine Land to offer quality, meaningful awards. We were thrilled with the reception. This year has blown us away with even more entries than we expected — a ones that are incredibly hard to pick winners from, because there are so many good ones.

For this year, we’ve got more categories plus we’re moving to a new venue — watch for the red carpet for search to be rolled out at the Edison Ballroom. It’s great to see everyone out celebrating a night about search, all dressed up — and yes, I’ll be back in my tux again!

This year, SMX promises the best content yet for their massive New York show, with over 50 new sessions. Join WordStream for SMX East and save $100 on your All-Access ticket and workshops by registering now with the code SMX16WS.

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6 Perfect Playlists For PPC Account Management

Music makes millennials more productive. Fact, not opinion. Our hips wouldn’t even dream of lying.

WordStream, like any business brimming with twentysomethings, is a workplace where music matters.

Now, I can’t speak for our sensational engineers or unrivaled sales team (we’re hiring!), but on the fifteenth floor, the home of our customer success and managed services teams, if people aren’t on the phone or chatting in a communal area, they’re wearing headphones.

Personally, without auditory stimulation my productivity slows to a crawl. The snippets of friendly banter and one-sided client conversations of co-workers cannot be drowned out by willpower and keystrokes alone.

To my fellow account managers’ chagrin, I’m the person who draws sideways glances and weekly “hey, could ya turn that down a little” from two rows of cubes away (yes, while wearing headphones. I have a problem, let’s move on). Sometimes it’s a twangy banjo inciting their wrath. Others, a bit of boom-bap.

That being said, not all tunes are created equal.

For tasks that require the utmost attention, lyrics can pose a problem. Conversely, when I’m doing something, shall we say, uninspiring – scaffolding an account from scratch or adding negatives – without words I’d go insane.

This post, for example, is brought to you by the best plunderphonics album on the planet.

To help my fellow PPC account managers stay focused during the workday, I’ve made hour(ish) long playlists for each of the following sets of tasks:

1. Tracking & Reporting
2. Qualitative Account Optimization
3. Quantitative Account Optimization
4. Data Entry & Rote Tasks
5. Pre-Client Call

But before I get to the goods (all of which include Spotify links!), a philosophical debate…

To Podcast or Not To Podcast: That Is The Question.

Big ol’ stack of repetitive tasks to complete? Staring down a day of data-entry doldrums? Tuning in to the dulcet tones of Terry Gross could be your life raft.

But for anything that requires more than a modicum of thought? No way.

I used to finish between three and five audiobooks at work every week. When I blew through the BPL’s online collection, I switched to podcasts. Then I got my first client.

As I began taking on more and more accounts, learning about 17th century peacock recipes or the rise and fall of Steve-O at work became impossible.

I switched to music and haven’t looked back.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the music…

Daily Tracking & Reporting

Genre

Hip-Hop Meets Goldilocks

Why it does the job

The all-too-familiar Monday morning routine. You roll into the office, fetch coffee, dawdle back to the ol’ cube and begin the ritual of account temperature-taking: checking key KPIs, ensuring metrics for the weekend weren’t out of whack.

If everything looks kosher, it’s time to start slaving over client reports (or your own figures). Now, this isn’t a mindless task. You need to have your wits about you: music (and a few cups of dark roast) can make that happen.

Not something TOO mellow. Not TOO hype. It’s gotta be just right.

The tracks I’ve cobbled together are the greatest hits greatest hits. They represent a trimmed down version of my favorite playlist on the planet (used by more WordStream account managers than you can count on one hand).

It’s got your classics (Regulate, It Was A Good Day, Halftime). It’s got deep cuts (Daytona 500, Madd Skillz).

Regardless of how the numbers look, this is the perfect way to kick off your workweek.

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Qualitative Account Optimization

Genre

Creative Writing Workshop In A Speakeasy

Why it does the job

First thing’s first: what on Earth does “qualitative account optimization” mean?

Short answer: anything involving words.

When it comes to writing copy for paid search ads, lyrics can be a major distraction. You aren’t looking to start a one-person club at your desk, either (fret not: we’ve got plenty of that coming up). This leaves your aural options somewhat limited.

I can’t do classical. It puts me right to sleep. Sometimes, hip-hop instrumentals do the trick, but then I just want rhymes, too.

Jazz, on the other hand, is the perfect writing music.

With something as brief and potentially uninspiring as a PPC ad, it’s easy to stagnate and crank out the same dull copy as your competitors. The rapid changes in tempo and volume present in this playlist offer the perfect jolt of creativity.

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Listen and subscribe here!

Quantitative Optimization

Genre

The coolest music you’ve never heard (of)

Why it does the job

When it comes to budgets, bids, and scripts, I’ve got a bit of cognitive dissonance.

Numbers aren’t my thing. When I got to WordStream I barely knew how to use Excel. And while my spreadsheeting skills have certainly improved, my disdain for digits hasn’t wavered.

Luckily, this playlist is excellent for two things: a sleepy morning commute, and any task involving numbers.

As an added bonus, in many cases the lyrics are indiscernible: you won’t find yourself singing along when you should be maximizing ROI. Watch out for head bobbing and foot tapping, though.

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Listen and subscribe here!

Data Entry & Rote Tasks (Choose Your Own Adventure)

We’re going to switch it up a bit with this one. This category represents the least exciting facets of PPC account work. I’m talkin’ feed building, account imports, UTM parameters, adding negatives, labeling: anything that makes you wish your office had a nap room.

To keep from falling asleep after lunch and during monotonous tasks, you need a wall of high-BPM, weapons-grade sound. We’ve got you covered.

Because fracas comes in many flavors, here are two options. Choose wisely (or try both!)

Genre

Pitchfork-Conscious Frat House

Why it does the job

It would be physically impossible to fall asleep listening to any of these songs. Turn your headphones up and try to be anything but too productive. I dare you.

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Genre

METAL

Why it does the job

A word of warning: apologize to everyone around you before and after you listen to this playlist. Sorry, Mark, but sometimes the only thing that can get me through building a 40,000 product shopping campaign is METAL. And who listens to Slayer at a respective decibel?

The only thing faster than these songs will be your fingertips while listening to them.

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Listen and subscribe here!

Pre Client Call

Genre

Fence paintin’

Why it does the job

Something about toiling outside in the muggy New England summertime, painting fences and lopping down trees, with nothing but a crackling radio for entertainment, puts me at ease.

As a kid, I used to do yard work with my dad every weekend. It was rarely fun, but at the end of every day, there was tangible evidence that you accomplished something. This is how I approach conversations with clients.

About thirty minutes before a weekly client meeting, I throw on some classic rock and survey the work done and account performance since we last spoke.

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Listen and subscribe here!

***

Is your favorite song missing? Did we skip over a genre that incites your productivity like no other? Let us know what you like to listen to when you’re working!

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Using the Barnacle SEO Method to Prove Local Community Awareness

Posted by MiriamEllis

‘Barnacle SEO’ was a term first popularized by Will Scott in 2011 to describe the process of attaching your business to existing high-ranking entities (like major directories) and then promoting them as a means of dominating search engine results for desired terms.

Today, we’re going to take that novel concept in a different direction, with the goal of increasing brand awareness for single, multi-location, and enterprise local businesses by latching onto existing influences in any given community. Up ahead: simple tips for interpreting your city, a downloadable community awareness spreadsheet, and real-world examples for your inspiration!

Before we dive in, take a look at these two eye-opening statistics:

“73% of people care about the company, not just the product, when they’re making purchasing decisions.”
– BBMG

“63% of global consumers would buy from a company they consider to be authentic, over and above competitors.”
– Cohn & Wolfe

The Cohn & Wolfe survey of 12,000 participants included these definitions of authenticity consumers care about: the business stands for more than just making money (74%), has a relevant and engaging story (43%), and is well-known in its region or field (63%). The combination of these three statistics should ring bells with any local search marketing expert or department.

Today is the last day you’ll ever worry over what to write about

Independently owned businesses hit roadblocks when they fear they have nothing real to say. Multi-location businesses fret over meaningful differentiation of one location from another. Large enterprises struggle with fostering local authenticity because the distance between the CEO and the clerk behind the checkout counter is sometimes too great, and brand-wide initiatives may result in generic, rather than truly local, messaging.

How to overcome these challenges? The solution lies in realizing that almost any given community is already writing your local story; you just have to discover how to latch onto it.

A significant portion of your blog posts, social outreach, and even paid advertising can be based on the fact that there are local, national, and global influences already firmly established in the minds of your consumers, almost every day of the year. Whether it’s the small-town 4th of July BBQ or the big-city Earth Day celebration, there are events, holidays, weather patterns, long-standing customs, and emerging news items of which your customers are already aware. Your barnacle local awareness marketing simply involves tying your business into pre-existing conditions, proving that you, too, are aware.

Barnacle example #1

To put it another way, you don’t have to tell a customer that summer has arrived. He already sees the sunshine and feels the heat. But if one of the branches of your home improvement franchise is located in a steaming hot, asphalt-topped shopping center, you can:

• Set up a big, friendly, self-serve cooler of iced tea and invite customers to pop in for a free drink.
• Erect a doggy drinking station under a shady overhang and let customers know they can stop by anytime.
• Set up a few quality lawn chairs next to your big display of high-powered fans and invite customers to take a seat and enjoy the breeze.
• Blog, tweet, post, hang up signage, and otherwise share your call for neighbors to come cool off while they’re making their usual shopping rounds.
• Hold a summer contest with a prize of vouchers for the local swim center or other refreshing retreat.
• Sponsor the swim center and earn a sponsorship listing on their website

All of this says you’ve noticed it’s summer, too, that your customers are perspiring, and that you’d like to help. Your outreach establishes your goodwill and an extra reason to visit your business.

Barnacle example #2

Or maybe yours is a large natural foods store enterprise, and you’ve got a location in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every October, the city hosts the famed week-long Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Your customers are already aware of this event, already talking about it, and making plans surrounding it. Your proofs of local awareness could include:

• Sponsorships
• Donations of money or supplies
• A food booth at the event
• An event photo contest with a nice prize
• In-store specials on picnic items to take to the event
• Fun tips for planning a great picnic meal
• ‘Secret’ insider info on great parking spots near the event grounds
• Staff photos of the fiesta
• Sharing all of the above on your website and social profiles

Your outreach will put this branch of your enterprise right in the middle of a major community happening, establishing your local awareness.

With even a modest application of research and brainstorming, chances are, your community is literally overflowing with inspiration for barnacle local marketing opportunities. For efficiency’s sake, organization will play a key role in planning your schedule of timely outreach. Read on!

4 simple steps to becoming a seaworthy Barnacle Marketer

1. Start with a spreadsheet

There’s nothing quite so organized as a good old spreadsheet, and to save you trouble, we’ve created this one for you, pre-filled in with major holidays and a few influences and fields we think will help you get started. Some holidays are on fixed dates, of course, but you’ll want to edit the dates of others each year.

Here’s an example of what a completed spreadsheet might look like for the month of September for a hypothetical major medical center in the city of Boise, Idaho:

Access your complimentary spreadsheet here.

To make a copy for your own use, simply select “File” from the main menu, then “Make a copy.” You can then add in your own events, change up the formatting, translate it to Swahili, whatever you’d like.

2. Do local, national, and global research

Almost every local Chamber of Commerce website has an events calendar which will detail most significant community happenings. You can also use sites like Eventbrite for further inspiration. And, indeed, there are paid opportunity-finding services like ZipSprout that can do the work for you and hook you up with with relevant sponsorship matches. Remember, you’re looking for well-known happenings that are already part of your customers’ consciousness — events that they are seeing advertised around town, promoted on the web, local TV, and radio.

On the national/global side, major news sites will be your best bet. Some events (like international summits or sports championships) are publicized well in advance. Others will require-up-to the minute awareness of items in the ‘15 minutes news cycle’ that could impact your customers in some relevant way.

Gather links as you do your research and enter them in the spreadsheet.

3. Identify opportunities for participation & promotion

In our hypothetical example, the medical center has identified 2 holidays, 1 national/global influence and 3 local events in September. Their participation in these 6 existing circumstances might be broken down like this:

Image via Pixabay

Labor Day (9/5)

Given that this national holiday honors workers, the medical center has an opportunity for outreach about preventing common work-related injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain from computer use, or back problems caused by heavy lifting or improper footwear.

Promotional Opportunities: The doctors could hold a free work-safety seminar for local start-up owners and blog about it. They could also post simple preventative health tips for workers on Facebook and Twitter. They could run an Instagram campaign with photos of optimal vs. risky postures for sitting, standing, and lifting at work, engaging the audience to check whether they are practicing good habits.

Image via Jeremy Noble

Local Labor Day Picnic (9/5)

Local traditions like this are a natural opportunity for sponsorships. New to sponsorships for local businesses? This excellent guide will give you a crash course. The medical center could simply help provide funds for the seating, food, and entertainment in exchange for being listed as a sponsor on promotional materials, or they could take a more active role. They could set up a booth at the picnic, offering refreshments high in electrolytes to rehydrate picnic-goers, or maybe free 5-minute therapeutic foot massages, or UV-protective sunscreen.

Promotional Opportunities: To truly ‘barnacle’ onto this event, the medical center should promote both it and their participation in it on their website and social profiles. Posts, tweets, and images to the tune of “Treat tired feet to a free massage by a licensed practitioner at the Labor Day Picnic, courtesy Green of Tree Medical Center,” with links to the event website would all be good. Promote the event, promote yourself.

Image via Clemens v. Vogelsang

Art in the Park (9/9–9/11)

Billed as one of the premiere art events in the Northwest, this annual Boise exhibit is another sponsorship no-brainer. These days, most event committees clearly post calls for sponsorship on their websites, and the really savvy ones detail exactly what sponsors can expect in return in terms of brand promotion including signage, blog posts, and social mentions. So, that’s one option. Another is to barnacle onto the idea that art serves many purposes in the human community and is, in fact, used as a form of therapy. If the medical center is full-service, there’s a clear opportunity to connect health and art.

Promotional Opportunities: If the medical center is an event sponsor, they could promote the event on the clinic’s website, and tie the theme into the practice of art therapy. This would be an excellent month to raise awareness of the center’s group art therapy sessions, or to offer a series of social media tips about the ways in which many art forms are believed to have a positive impact on everything from depression to stroke recovery. Or, perhaps some of the doctors’ or patients’ artwork will be featured in the event. What a great chance for some Pinterest marketing and an invitation to come see more of this work hanging in the medical center’s reception area!

Image via bark

First Day of Fall (9/22)

At first glance, many businesses may struggle to see how they can tie in with community awareness of leaves changing color or pumpkins ripening, but it just takes a little ideation. The medical center might launch a Healthier Boise campaign, with free flu shots, reminders to get asthma inhaler prescriptions refilled against the coming onslaught of woodstove smoke, and healthy recipes for using all those butternut squashes and greens in the market for optimum vitamin intake.

Promotional Opportunities: The campaign can be promoted on all of the medical center’s social profiles, as well as on the homepage of the company website, supported by additional pages or posts of useful content. This would be a smart time to interview some of the clinic’s doctors on general preventative medicine tips to strengthen the community for the coming cold season.

Image via Susumu Komatsu

Walk to End Alzheimer’s (9/17)

A renowned event like this offers remarkable, diverse opportunities for advocacy, sponsorships, and donations. Doubtless, numerous staff members will be participating in the walk and the medical center can tell the story of this while also tying this into ongoing research and services relating to Alzheimer’s at their facility.

Promotional Opportunities: Event booths, individual sponsorships, staff photos, patient photos, fundraising goals, and education can all be socially promoted. Participation in a large event like this deserves top billing on the website homepage, too, backed up with blog posts.

Image via Pixabay

Global Obesity Summit Los Angeles (9/26 – 9/28)

Most industries have summits, conferences, and events that will be attended by staff members and, often, consumers as well. Given how often America’s obesity epidemic is mentioned in mainstream media, the medical center can see in this important global event an opportunity for education and outreach on a very current topic. Sponsorship opportunities are easily apparent. Or, if one or more of the doctors will present at the summit or even just attend, their research and discoveries can then be shared with the city of Boise.

Promotional Opportunities: Staff participants can be interviewed for the blog, offering new suggestions for maintaining a healthy weight based on summit presentations. If the medical center offers exercise classes or dietary counseling, here’s a perfect opportunity to reach out socially with a free first session offer to the community. Could be a fun time to experiment with Snapchat. Be as generous as possible in sharing tips that could improve patients’ lives.

Even at a glance, it’s easy to see that a local business can quickly fill every calendar month of the year with community outreach and promotion of the company’s involvement. Don’t forget that to be a good barnacle, you’ve got to promote awareness of community happenings as well as promoting your own participation in them. Put up in-store flyers and posters, tweet, share, and chat!

I’d further recommend tracking the outcomes of each campaign so that you learn, over the course of the next couple of years, which events and which forms of participation resonate most with a given community and result in the greatest ROI for the business.

My question for our readers: Which forms of tracking do you use to measure success from these types of activities? Please, share your expertise to benefit the community!

4. Designate a Local Expert at each business location

Hopefully the above three steps will already have the wheels turning about how your brand can discover and participate in the influences your potential consumers are already aware of, but doubtless, this questions arises:

“Who’s going to do all of this work?”

The answer is, you’re going to need to give an existing employee or a new hire the nifty title of ‘Local Expert.’ If you’re the owner and your business is very small, the Local Expert may have to be you until you grow the company a bit more, but for most small-to-large local businesses, local marketing is vital enough to be a genuine job.

Multi-location companies and large enterprises should expect to appoint a Local Expert for each branch, or at least for each city in which the business operates. In the interview process, here are 5 things you want to look for in an existing or new staff member that should spell success:

1. Has lived in the target city for some years. A born-and-bred local would be my ideal, because she may be aware of cherished history and customs beyond the ken of newcomers, but let’s stipulate that the Local Expert has lived in the region for at least a couple of years.
2. Has above-average communication skills, both in person and on the web. Your expert will not only be socially promoting your company’s participation in events (necessitating interaction with the community), they will also likely be on the phone with event holders and attending some events in person. Be sure you feel confident about this person representing your business and that they have the real-world social skills necessary to foster excellent interactions.
3. They must know or be willing to learn the basics of Local SEO. Even if this staff member has nothing to do with optimizing your website or managing your citations, they must understand that the core goal of all of their work will be increasing the local visibility of your brand. They need to understand how local search works to comprehend why this is such a big deal.
4. They must know or be willing to learn local/social media marketing. If the candidate for the job can reel off the things they’re already doing on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, smartphone apps, and their personal blog, you’ve got a winner on your hands. Better still if they tend to be ahead of the social technology curve and are able to identify trends in the popularity of various platforms that could spell out innovative opportunities for your local marketing.
5. They should bring a sense of excitement and fun to the work. Based on the barnacle principle, your Local Expert should be energized by the task of promoting both his city and his workplace, enriching the community with useful information. This is one job in which enthusiasm will really shine through in the final product.

Would some real-world inspiration really get you going?

I always find it easier to conceptualize tasks when I take a look at what others have done. If that goes for you, too, here are some real-world examples of local awareness proofs.

1. Here’s an inspiring story about a NYC-based organization called New Women New Yorkers which helps immigrant women gain access to resources that will make their lives safer, more profitable, and more interesting in their new country. A local Lebanese restaurant called Manousheh answered the organization’s call for sponsorships and donations for an event, and was thanked on an events page and mentioned on events sites like this one. To close the barnacle loop, all the restaurant needs to do is start a page on their own site mentioning that they support this organization and that they participated in an event. It would be nice, too, if the organization would make sponsor logos link to their websites. Everybody is off to a good start here and just needs to go one step further.
2. 2016 marked the 41st anniversary of a Santa Fe event called Pancakes on The Plaza. Local bank First National of Santa Fe comes out as a winner with a featured logo on this sponsors page and with a barnacle shout out on their own website, promoting both their participation and the event, plus proud mentions on their Facebook page. The deal is further sweetened by blog mentions like this one, this one, this one… and the list goes on!
3. And here’s a delightful example of just how grateful a really motivated business can be to its sponsors. In this case, the Prince Edward Island Potato Board is getting all kinds of Twitter love from a local restaurant and live theater venue:

And PEI Potato barnacles on like pros, holding a contest for tickets to a summer musical performance at the sponsored theater:

If restaurants, banks, & potato growers can do it, so can you!

Your community is already alive to the influences surrounding it: businesses, events, organizations, seasonal traditions, and relevant news. You don’t have to write a new story from scratch; you just need to discover where you fit into the existing storyline. Generosity, creativity, and a genuine desire to contribute to community well-being are what it takes to become a visible player in local life.

Has your business been using the barnacle method all along to prove local awareness? Our Moz community would benefit from your inspirational stories. Please share them in the comments!

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