5 Ways to Build a Video Culture at Your Company

Did you know that 52% of marketers worldwide name video as the type of content with the highest ROI?

If you were attracted to the title of this post, maybe you’re already sold on video. I mean, how could you not be? Video is everywhere – whether it be a competitor’s website or your Facebook feed. It’s now an unavoidable content type.

It can be easy to get video envy when you see so many companies doing video so well. Before working for a video hosting company, I viewed video as intriguing and useful, but also very intimidating. How could little old me make a video like the ones on Moz or MailChimp’s websites? They must pay a small fortune to hire professional video producers, right?

Not always. I’ve come to realize that as long as you have a pulse and a camera (or even a phone) that you too can do video for your business.

 

In order to scale your video efforts, it’s important to use it across teams. Whether it be to humanize your homepage, recruit new hires, or close more deals, video is a useful platform not just for marketers, but for sales, recruiters, support reps, and even engineers! The issue is, how do you get your colleagues to buy into video as well?

I’ve got you covered. Here are five actionable tips to help you build a video culture at your company.

Tip #1: Create a Physical Space for Video Creation

Do you have an in-house studio? For those of you who don’t, get on that! Having a designated space to shoot video that is accessible to the entire company will make it easy for everyone to have the opportunity to shoot videos for their teams.

I know this might seem like a daunting task. There’s a million things to take into consideration: What space can you use in your office building? What about lighting? Tripods? Backdrops?

Really, it’s not that hard! Wistia has put together a quick guide on how to turn any conference room into a video studio, in four simple steps:

• Set up a backdrop – A solid color background looks best, and ideally not just a white wall (which not only look boring but can cause glare). We recommend getting a roll of seamless paper from a photography supply store.
• Get some studio lights – Overhead lighting isn’t flattering, and with studio lights, you don’t have to worry about the sun going behind a cloud (or using a room with no windows). A larger bulb creates more flattering lighting. Try a ring light like the ones shown in this lighting guide.

• Control the sound – Get some sound dampening pads for the walls or, in a pinch, blankets, to avoid distracting echoes.
• Leave it all in place! – The key to making sure your video studio gets used it to have it ready to go anytime.

At Wistia, we’ve even set up smaller video stations for customer-facing employees to record quick, casual videos and shoot them over to prospects and customers. The first step to encouraging more video creation at your company is building the space to do it.

Tip #2: Build a Video Advocate on Every Team

It’s likely not the case that your colleagues aren’t sold on video. It’s more likely that they just haven’t had the bandwidth to think about it and execute it. Maybe they’re aware of the benefits, but feeling the intimidation factor of executing a well-produced video.

This landing page features WordStream’s own Jacob Coblenz in a green screen video

If you can break down the intimidation barrier blocking their video efforts by using your persuasive skills to show how video is not as hard as they think, then they can buy into the idea of video and expand it across their team. The key is figuring out the who, how, and what for each team. Let’s start with the who…

Who?

There might be teams where there’s a clear fit of who would be the best video advocate. There also might be teams that you feel clueless about. How do you figure out who to go after? Use your networking skills to network with your own colleagues! If the team is smaller, present to all of them. If the team is a bit larger, talk to someone on the team to get a sense of who would be most enthused to take video on and encourage others to do the same.

How?

Once you’ve identified the right people to talk to on each team, you should schedule a meeting with enough time to prepare your case. You must embrace your inner salesperson. Share compelling statistics about the effectiveness of video. For example, “Did you know that Bob closed 80% more deals when they started using video voicemails?”

Break the intimidation barrier of video by having resources on hand to train them. Take the following steps to complete the how:

• Prepare your case
• Pull together a polished presentation for each team
• Schedule a time to make an in-person pitch

What?

You need to highlight the unique ways their team can benefit. To do so, put yourself in the shoes of your colleagues. Ask questions like: What are their pain points? What are their goals? How can video help them accomplish these goals? What similar companies are doing this and seeing results? What internal resources will make this easier?

Don’t forget to follow-up like a true salesperson. Be persistent!

Tip #3: Make Video a Part of Customer-Facing Employee Workflows

Every customer-facing employee should be using video. Whether they’re in sales, service, or support, for colleagues interacting with people outside of your organization they need to be using video on a regular basis.

Video not only takes away the dryness of communicating via email and the distance felt when communicating over the phone rather than in person, but it can also lead to higher chances of turning a lead into a customer. It can also reduce the risk of customer churn.

If the person on the other end feels connected to you in a real, human way they’re going to have warmer feelings about your business. What better way to do this than video? Here are a few ways to start using video in customer interactions:

1) Create video email signatures for every customer-facing employee

What’s a video email signature? Well, instead of the boring line of text with your name, title, and a company logo, a video email signature brings your personality to life. What you’ll need to do is shoot some short videos of each employee, showcasing their personalities. Check out mine below:

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Ensure these videos are concise, entertaining, and most importantly, that they show off the employee’s genuine personality. Once you’ve shot the video all you need to do is paste the linked thumbnail image into the your email signature like so:

 

This linked thumbnail image should direct the individual to a simple landing page showcasing the video and providing some contact information. I built mine through HubSpot and kept it very simple so the viewer can just watch the video and go on with their day.

 

2) Incorporate video into your sales process

Video and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly. Your typically prospect might be suspicious of your sales reps – they just want your money, right? Well, video can easily change this negative stigma by helping them create a more personalized and relatable experience.

When the lead on the other end realizes they’re not just working with a greedy robot, they’ll be much more likely to open their wallets. Take this example of a video voicemail from BambooHR:

http://ift.tt/2wesxcw

The above example is very polished and clearly well-produced. This is great for that type of voicemail because it’s not personalized, and she can use it at scale. However, more personalized videos don’t need to be overly produced. They can be a bit scruffier and have a truly substantial impact. Take this example from the marketing agency Blueleadz:

http://ift.tt/2xu8m93

Blueleadz has seen a 36.9% higher close rate when a personalized video is used!

3) Keep your customers informed with personal video outreach

Video is a powerful medium to keep engaged with your customers. Whether it be sending a quick Happy Holidays video or a longer video explaining some recent product updates, letting your customers know you’re thinking about them is best done via video.

Recently we came out with a new version of one of our integrations, so in order to inform my customers I made a video detailing the updates, and broke the video into chapters to ensure my customers could navigate to the sections of the video they’re most interested in.

 

Another way to do this is by having your product team make a product update video on a monthly basis, which you can then email out to your list of customers.

Tip #4: Hold Video Delight Competitions

In order to encourage more video creation across teams, it can help to make it a competition. At Wistia we did just that, and from personal experience I can tell you this works.

During the last two Februaries my colleague Sarah-Mei Estrada, a leader on the support team, has run a contest called “Delightuary” where she encourages all employees to make at least one video responding to a customer ticket that comes into our support inbox. These videos are typically shot with iPhones, and creativity is encouraged because there are trophies to be won at the awards ceremony held a month later.

 

“I realized that making videos for customers can seem like a big challenge, so turning it into a month-long holiday with an awards ceremony really helped get people excited about it,” said Sarah-Mei.

To do this successfully at your company take the following steps:

• Present the contest to your company.
• Send out a video email to get people hyped up.
• Tempt your colleagues with COOL prizes.
• Have the company vote on different Oscar-inspired categories (think best actor, breakout star, outstanding stunt coordination, etc.)
• Plan a fun after-work awards ceremony.

If you test out this strategy at your company, I guarantee you’ll see more video creation happening long after the month you choose for the competition.

Tip #5: Use Video to Communicate Internally

Last, but not least, in order to grow a video culture at your company you absolutely must be using video internally. There are several ways you can do this:

1) Using video for small announcements

Video is an easy way to communicate internal announcements, whether it’s announcing some new beverage options (like the email our office manager sent out below), informing your colleagues about an event (like movie night or an all-staff field day), or just sending out some housekeeping announcements. Making a quick video will actually get your colleagues’ attention, rather than sending a boring email that will immediately be ignored or archived.

 

2) Create a recurring series to keep everyone informed

What happened at the office this week? This is a question many employees may have if they’re remote, sick, or out of office. Communication is critical for business success, and many companies struggle with a lack of communication, especially between teams. Even when folks are in the office it can be easy to miss important things that occurred, especially if your company has multiple locations.

Form a cross-functional team (or a few teams that share the responsibilities) in charge of sharing weekly updates on office happenings – betas the product and engineering teams are working on, marketing campaigns running, social happenings, or even personal announcements (for instance, Sheila is having a baby!). Send out the video update each week to all employees, ensuring it’s sparked with personality to keep everyone watching.

3) Use video to build a remote culture

Meet Leah Knobler!

 

Leah works in People Operations at the support ticketing software company HelpScout, and was tasked with building a strong company culture where the majority of employees are remote. Sounds crazy, right? How do you build company culture when there is no physical office space?

When people think about company culture they usually think of an environment, but Leah has used video to prove that culture isn’t just about physical presence. You can read all about how Leah has managed to do this in her blog post on HelpScout’s website.

My favorite series she does is called “At home with HelpScout,” where each remote employee films some footage that Leah strung together into a fun montage. This allows for employees to get to know each other on a more personal level without having to leave their computers. Check it out below!

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While video can seem intimidating at first, once it becomes an integral part of your culture, your business will change for the better with a much more personalized way of connecting with others.

About the Author:

Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream and nutrition student at Framingham State. She loves all things digital, learning about nutrition, running, traveling, and cooking. Follow her on:

Twitter: @ChappyMargot

Instagram: @margotshealthhub   

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Relive MozCon with the 2017 Video Bundle

Posted by Danielle_Launders

MozCon may be over, but we just can’t get enough of it — and that’s why our team has worked hard to bring the magic back to you with our MozCon 2017 Video Bundle. You’ll have 26 sessions at your fingertips to watch over and over again — that’s over 14 hours of future-focused sessions aiming to level up your SEO and online marketing skills. Get ahead of Google and its biggest changes to organic search with Dr. Pete Meyers, prepare for the future of mobile-first indexing with Cindy Krum, and increase leads through strategic data-driven design with Oli Gardner.

Ready to dive into all of the excitement? Feel free to jump ahead:

Buy the MozCon 2017 Video Bundle

For our friends that attended MozCon 2017, check your inbox: You should find an email from us that will navigate you to your videos. The same perk applies for next year — your ticket to MozCon 2018 includes the full video bundle. We do have a limited number of super early bird tickets (our best deal!) still available.

This year’s MozCon was truly special. We are honored to host some of the brightest minds in the industry and the passion and insights they bring to the stage. We know you’ll enjoy all the new tactics and innovative topics just as much as we did.

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But don’t just take our word for it…

Here’s a recap of one attendee’s experience:

“Attending MozCon is like a master’s course in digital marketing. With so many knowledgeable speakers sharing their insights, their methods, and their tools all in the hopes of making me a better digital marketer, it seems like a waste not to take advantage of it.”
– Sean D. Francis, Director of SEO at Blue Magnet Interactive

The video bundle

You’ll have access to 26 full video presentations from MozCon.

For $299, the MozCon 2017 video bundle gives you instant access to:

• 26 videos (that’s over 14 hours of content)
• Stream or download the videos to your computer, tablet, or phone. The videos are iOS, Windows, and Android-compatible
• Downloadable slide decks for presentations

Buy the MozCon 2017 Video Bundle

Want a free preview?

If you haven’t been to a MozCon before, you might be a little confused by all of the buzz and excitement. To convince you that we’re seriously excited, we’re sharing one of our highly-rated sessions with you for free! Check out “How to Get Big Links” with Lisa Myers in the full session straight from MozCon 2017. Lisa shares how her and her team were able to earn links and coverage from big sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and BBC.

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I want to thank the team behind the videos and for all the hours of editing, designing, coding, processing, and more. We love being able to share this knowledge and couldn’t do it without the crew’s efforts. And to the community, we wish you happy learning and hope to see you at MozCon 2018 in July!

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13 Super-Effective Ways to Use Behavioral Segmentation

Targeting consumers based on their preferences and behavior offers the promise of turning marketers into armchair psychologists. Get it right, can you can give people precisely what they want, precisely when they need it. And as devices and data proliferate, smart marketing segmentation and behavioral targeting are taking on many forms.

Here are 13 ways brands and marketers can use behavioral targeting and segmentation to build smarter, more cost-effective marketing campaigns, with examples and data to back it up.

1. Sell more (or upsell) with remarketing.

Perhaps the most basic form of behavioral targeting is remarketing, which allows marketers to capitalize on consumers’ prior behavior on your site.

In fact, Natalie Lesyk, marketing manager at Ning.com, called remarketing “the core and the greatest instrument” of behavioral marketing. You can build a remarketing audience tailored to specific behaviors, and then use remarketing ads to show users exactly what they viewed on your site or related popular products that other buyers also purchased.

This is the strategy used by Simon Thalmann, digital marketing manager at Kellogg Community College. The college targets users who have visited specific pages of its website with specific ads related to what they viewed.

“So, for example, if a user visits our registration page, they may later see registration-related messaging in ads served on various websites, in apps or social networks that they visit,” he said.

Dell is another good example. In a case study, the brand said its website had plenty of visitors, but many were leaving without buying anything. As a result, it wanted to find out which products each visitor was interested in so it could cater appropriate messaging to these specific consumers and encourage the sale.

Dell analyzed visit history and created remarketing ads featuring the products the customers viewed, searched for or put in their carts.

Dell said the result was higher click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI, including online ads with a 70% higher CTR and triple the conversion rate.

2. Serve segmented content based on income.

And then there’s the case of travel site Orbitz, which reportedly catered its search results based on whether consumers were using Macs or PCs. The bad news for Mac users is that Orbitz served more expensive hotels to them – as a result of research that showed Mac users spend up to 30% more on travel and are 40% more likely to book higher rated hotels! (Presumably, since Macs cost more than PCs, their user base is more affluent.)

An Orbitz rep confirmed the experiment, saying it wasn’t displaying different prices for the same rooms, and users can still rank hotels by price to see lower cost options.

An experiment by the Wall Street Journal determined hotel rooms were about 11% costlier on the first page of results for Mac users, but it’s unclear whether the move drove revenue for Orbitz and if this segmentation strategy is still in practice.

3. Target like a laser.

Naturally, learning more about your consumers themselves, in addition to their online behavior helps marketers achieve the holy grail of right person/right device/right moment. Some call this combined study of people’s attitudes and interests with demographic data psychographics, and it can be amazingly effective.

“Online behavior, especially when combined with other parameters like geography, can produce laser-focused targeting, thus better advertising campaign and content marketing results,” according to Stella Mikraki, head of marketing at email marketing service provider Moosend.

At international gift basket delivery company GiftBasketsOverseas.com, for example, this means targeting customers who have previously sent gifts to a specific country.

“We target them with an email campaign to remind them that the major national holiday is coming soon and that they have exactly enough time to send greetings,” said Natasha Kvitka, digital marketing strategist.

4. Create persona-specific campaigns.

Behavioral targeting can also help brands and marketers hone their customer profiles.

“Marketers can use behavioral targeting to create a pool of tailored audiences,” said Tom Caulton, digital marketing executive and SEO consultant at digital growth agency Dijitul. “Doing this allows you to create multiple campaigns with different personas in mind. From my experience, brands often succeed where others don’t when they give customers branded content they believe is just for them.”

Kristie Forsman, director of digital marketing at real estate brokerage franchise network Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, agrees. She says combining behavioral targeting with interest and demographic targeting to create audiences can help brands design the most effective creative for each audience.

For example, new homeowners are not likely to be interested in selling the homes they just purchased. Armed with that knowledge, a real estate firm can exclude these homeowners when looking for targets for a campaign promoting home sales.

“This will help increase the relevancy of your ads, which will result in higher click-through rates and engagements,” she added.

5. Move budget to more conversion-ready audiences.

In another case study, online travel agency Zuji said it, like Dell above, had plenty of visitors who did not convert, and its display ads were not as effective as it wanted them to be. That’s why Zuji decided to try out dynamic content optimization and remarketing to encourage consumers to return with personalized recommendations based on previous searches.

Zuji actually bid higher on those ads in order to show content to consumers who were more likely to make purchases. As a result of this budget allocation, Zuji saw online bookings go up 14%, and ROI was up 100X.

6. Find new customers.

Behavioral targeting can also help brands find entirely new customers. For example, you can target consumers who have openly declared themselves fans of competitors.

But it’s not just, say, Burger King appealing to fans of McDonald’s or Pepsi to Coke’s. Marketers can also introduce alternative brands by targeting consumers who purchase products related to yours, said Jacqueline Ryan, manager of integrated marketing at organic candy company YumEarth.

For example, a brand that sells milk can target people who love cookies, she added.

Think about cohorts when determining your targeting strategy. People who are into fitness might also be into healthy food

Some of Facebook’s many, many targeting options

7. Segment your video ad audiences.

When low-cost airline AirAsia wanted to restore consumer confidence after a 2014 crash, it turned to Facebook.

AirAsia used short videos, but it split its audience into segments and targeted each with custom video creative. These segments included:

• people who had bought a ticket after the crash,
• people who had not bought a ticket since the crash, and
• high-value customers.

The airline used Facebook’s reach and frequency tool to control the number of times consumers saw the ads over a four-week period. AirAsia also used its own customer data along with Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool to target frequent fliers and consumers who had searched for particular cities but did not buy tickets and to deliver custom ads. This alone yielded a 30X return on ad spend.

AirAsia also used Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find people similar to existing customers and to deliver ads that promoted its values as well as its destinations. This resulted in a 58X return on ad spend.

8. Save money by narrowing your segmentation.

On the other side of the coin, segmentation means brands can avoid wasting money on personas who have expressed opinions indicating they will never buy their products.

“You are not going to want to target vegans with a product that tests on animals,” YumEarth’s Ryan said.

Forsman agreed behavioral targeting gives brands the opportunity to not only find new customers, but to omit people who may not benefit from their offering. Why waste money on people that won’t convert?

9. Create more effective promotions.

On-site behavior can also inform promotions.

According to Dimira Teneva, content manager of e-commerce analytics platform Metrilo, brands can use information like the products or categories consumers like, browse and shop from to create custom offers for individuals and segments with similar behavior.

“What products people looked at while browsing a store and what they ended up buying is a goldmine of info for bundle offers and category arrangement,” Teneva said. “It tells the sellers what products are similar in the customer’s mind, what goes well together, what serves them the same purpose and so on.”

10. Find out where customers are coming from.

Examining the customer journey to a given website can also help marketers find new advertising opportunities.

“Where is your web traffic coming from? If there’s a certain social media platform that regularly drives traffic to a certain page, maybe you should consider advertising there, or maybe create a custom landing page optimized to greet visitors from that site,” Thalmann said.

“Do visitors from some sites convert or purchase more than visitors from another site? Do they spend more time on your site than others? All of these insights can help marketers optimize their user experiences to help them achieve their goals.”

11. Optimize your site navigation.

Similarly, Thalmann said looking into how consumers leave your website can also be valuable.

“How much time do users spend on your website or landing pages? Do they visit just one page and leave, or do they visit many? What does their page path indicate they may be looking for on your site? Were they able to find it?” he asked.

“Even small changes to your website – changing the size or color of a purchase button, moving a contact form higher to make it more visible, etc. – can have a big impact on how users behave on your site and whether or not they convert in the way you want them to…It doesn’t matter how high your click-through rate is or how low your cost-per-click is if users can’t navigate the page on the other end of the click well enough to actually make a purchase.”

Doreen Brown, head of digital at digital marketing agency Digital Visibility Group agreed that analyzing dwell time allows brands to see whether users are finding what they need or if they are bouncing off and going elsewhere.

“If there is a gap in what is being described on your site, you can use behavioral targeting to develop a content strategy, providing both search engines and users the information they require,” she added.

That means tapping into Google Analytics to look at page views, average time on page and bounce rate. Brown said the pages with a bounce rate over 50% should be reviewed.

“By doing this, users are able to find more of the information they need,” which naturally reduces the chance of them going elsewhere, she added.

12. Better time your messaging.

Brands should also consider when exactly traffic is highest and time their messaging accordingly to maximize visibility, Thalmann said.

“Analyze the visiting/buying time of your customers and you’ll get the pattern of their online activity during the day,” Kvitka added. “Chances are high that the open rate of your email campaigns sent in that timeframe will be higher, too, and social media updates will experience more engagement.”

13. Customize messaging by location.

In another example, lifecycle engagement platform Appboy recently partnered with location data company PlaceIQ to increase mobile engagement for youth-focused retail brand Urban Outfitters by using real-world behavior to support smarter delivery of in-app messages.

Appboy and PlaceIQ said they were able to help Urban Outfitters better contextualize its marketing messaging and, as a result, Urban Outfitters boosted conversions by 75% and increased related revenue by 146%.

“Location-aware insights have become a great enabler of decisions across media, marketing and business functions, as well as a core component in driving benefits like significant visitation lift and purchases at brick and mortar locations,” said Duncan McCall, CEO of PlaceIQ, in a statement. “Insights from location data can also be a powerful driver for online retail sales as well. By using location data for audience insights, Urban Outfitters was able to craft and deliver a resonant campaign that resulted in tangible sales results.”

In a release, the platforms said the rise of mobile has made it easier to deliver campaigns to customers based on in-app and web preferences, allowing marketers to better understand and engage users. And by partnering with Appboy and PlaceIQ, Urban Outfitters was able to develop a full-scale campaign that included:

• Dynamic audience filters that delivered messages based on visitation and behavior outside the app, such as using push notifications to promote party dresses to female consumers who frequent bars
• Emoji messaging to resonate with the targeted demographic
• Deep linking to send users directly to the relevant page within the app when they tapped a message
• Conversion events to track when push notifications resulted in purchases

According to Andrew Rauch, senior director of global digital marketing at Urban Outfitters, in a statement. “Effectively communicating with users through this location-specific marketing led to a 146% increase in campaign revenue.”

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How to Determine if a Page is “Low Quality” in Google’s Eyes – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What are the factors Google considers when weighing whether a page is high or low quality, and how can you identify those pages yourself? There’s a laundry list of things to examine to determine which pages make the grade and which don’t, from searcher behavior to page load times to spelling mistakes. Rand covers it all in this episode of Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about how to figure out if Google thinks a page on a website is potentially low quality and if that could lead us to some optimization options.

So as we’ve talked about previously here on Whiteboard Friday, and I’m sure many of you have been following along with experiments that Britney Muller from Moz has been conducting about removing low-quality pages, you saw Roy Hinkis from SimilarWeb talk about how they had removed low-quality pages from their site and seen an increase in rankings on a bunch of stuff. So many people have been trying this tactic. The challenge is figuring out which pages are actually low quality. What does that constitute?

What constitutes “quality” for Google?

So Google has some ideas about what’s high quality versus low quality, and a few of those are pretty obvious and we’re familiar with, and some of them may be more intriguing. So…

• Google wants unique content.
• They want to make sure that the value to searchers from that content is actually unique, not that it’s just different words and phrases on the page, but the value provided is actually different. You can check out the Whiteboard Friday on unique value if you have more questions on that.
• They like to see lots of external sources linking editorially to a page. That tells them that the page is probably high quality because it’s reference-worthy.
• They also like to see high-quality pages, not just sources, domains but high-quality pages linking to this. That can be internal and external links. So it tends to be the case that if your high-quality pages on your website link to another page on your site, Google often interprets that that way.
• The page successfully answers the searcher’s query.

This is an intriguing one. So if someone performs a search, let’s say here I type in a search on Google for “pressure washing.” I’ll just write “pressure wash.” This page comes up. Someone clicks on that page, and they stay here and maybe they do go back to Google, but then they perform a completely different search, or they go to a different task, they visit a different website, they go back to their email, whatever it is. That tells Google, great, this page solved the query.

If instead someone searches for this and they go, they perform the search, they click on a link, and they get a low-quality mumbo-jumbo page and they click back and they choose a different result instead, that tells Google that page did not successfully answer that searcher’s query. If this happens a lot, Google calls this activity pogo-sticking, where you visit this one, it didn’t answer your query, so you go visit another one that does. It’s very likely that this result will be moved down and be perceived as low quality in Google.

• The page has got to load fast on any connection.
• They want to see high-quality accessibility with intuitive user experience and design on any device, so mobile, desktop, tablet, laptop.
• They want to see actually grammatically correct and well-spelled content. I know this may come as a surprise, but we’ve actually done some tests and seen that by having poor spelling or bad grammar, we can get featured snippets removed from Google. So you can have a featured snippet, it’s doing great in the SERPs, you change something in there, you mess it up, and Google says, “Wait, no, that no longer qualifies. You are no longer a high-quality answer.” So that tells us that they are analyzing pages for that type of information.
• Non-text content needs to have text alternatives. This is why Google encourages use of the alt attribute. This is why on videos they like transcripts. Here on Whiteboard Friday, as I’m speaking, there’s a transcript down below this video that you can read and get all the content without having to listen to me if you don’t want to or if you don’t have the ability to for whatever technical or accessibility, handicapped reasons.
• They also like to see content that is well-organized and easy to consume and understand. They interpret that through a bunch of different things, but some of their machine learning systems can certainly pick that up.
• Then they like to see content that points to additional sources for more information or for follow-up on tasks or to cite sources. So links externally from a page will do that.

This is not an exhaustive list. But these are some of the things that can tell Google high quality versus low quality and start to get them filtering things.

How can SEOs & marketers filter pages on sites to ID high vs. low quality?

As a marketer, as an SEO, there’s a process that we can use. We don’t have access to every single one of these components that Google can measure, but we can look at some things that will help us determine this is high quality, this is low quality, maybe I should try deleting or removing this from my site or recreating it if it is low quality.

In general, I’m going to urge you NOT to use things like:

A. Time on site, raw time on site

B. Raw bounce rate

C. Organic visits

D. Assisted conversions

Why not? Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.

So a long time on your website could be because someone’s very engaged with your content. It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they need. So they’re going to return to the search result and click something else that quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion. Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it’s hard to find the x-button and they have to scroll down far in your content. So they’re very unhappy with your result.

Bounce rate works similarly. A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you’re answering a very simple query or if the next step is to go somewhere else or if there is no next step. If I’m just trying to get, “Hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated wood, and I need to know whether I’ll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood at this level of pressure,” and it turns out no, I’m good. Great. Thank you. I’m all done. I don’t need to visit your website anymore. My bounce rate was very, very high. Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you’ve answered the searcher’s query. You’ve done what Google wants. So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.

Same with organic visits. You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it’s still ranking for something or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers. This one is a little bit better in the longer term. If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can generally get a better sense, but still, by itself, I don’t love it.

Assisted conversions is a great example. This page might not convert anyone. It may be an opportunity to drop cookies. It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you’ve got. That doesn’t mean it’s low-quality content.

THESE can be a good start:

So what I’m going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics. Any time you’re analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach that you’re applying.

1. That could be a combination of engagement metrics. I’m going to look at…

• Total visits
• External and internal
• I’m going to look at the pages per visit after landing. So if someone gets to the page and then they browse through other pages on the site, that is a good sign. If they browse through very few, not as good a sign, but not to be taken by itself. It needs to be combined with things like time on site and bounce rate and total visits and external visits.

2. You can combine some offsite metrics. So things like…

• External links
• Number of linking root domains
• PA and your social shares like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn share counts, those can also be applicable here. If you see something that’s getting social shares, well, maybe it doesn’t match up with searchers’ needs, but it could still be high-quality content.

3. Search engine metrics. You can look at…

• Indexation by typing a URL directly into the search bar or the browser bar and seeing whether the page is indexed.
• You can also look at things that rank for their own title.
• You can look in Google Search Console and see click-through rates.
• You can look at unique versus duplicate content. So if I type in a URL here and I see multiple pages come back from my site, or if I type in the title of a page that I’ve created and I see multiple URLs come back from my own website, I know that there’s some uniqueness problems there.

4. You are almost definitely going to want to do an actual hand review of a handful of pages.

• Pages from subsections or subfolders or subdomains, if you have them, and say, “Oh, hang on. Does this actually help searchers? Is this content current and up to date? Is it meeting our organization’s standards?”

Make 3 buckets:

Using these combinations of metrics, you can build some buckets. You can do this in a pretty easy way by exporting all your URLs. You could use something like Screaming Frog or Moz’s crawler or DeepCrawl, and you can export all your pages into a spreadsheet with metrics like these, and then you can start to sort and filter. You can create some sort of algorithm, some combination of the metrics that you determine is pretty good at ID’ing things, and you double-check that with your hand review. I’m going to urge you to put them into three kinds of buckets.

I. High importance. So high importance, high-quality content, you’re going to keep that stuff.

II. Needs work. second is actually stuff that needs work but is still good enough to stay in the search engines. It’s not awful. It’s not harming your brand, and it’s certainly not what search engines would call low quality and be penalizing you for. It’s just not living up to your expectations or your hopes. That means you can republish it or work on it and improve it.

III. Low quality. It really doesn’t meet the standards that you’ve got here, but don’t just delete them outright. Do some testing. Take a sample set of the worst junk that you put in the low bucket, remove it from your site, make sure you keep a copy, and see if by removing a few hundred or a few thousand of those pages, you see an increase in crawl budget and indexation and rankings and search traffic. If so, you can start to be more or less judicious and more liberal with what you’re cutting out of that low-quality bucket and a lot of times see some great results from Google.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

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How I Achieved a 48% Success Rate Using Twitter for Link Building

The gripes among link builders are plentiful, but they’re also deserved. There’s the pitifully low success rate. The hours logged crafting personalized outreach. The potential brand damage from an unrequited link ask.

Part of the problem is leverage. The majority of outreach takes place from a position of weakness. When our success rate is low, we try to compensate with sheer quantity. And if quantity is a fundamental part of your strategy, your outreach can end up looking a lot like this:

Brand scarring en masse

Intuition might tell you that Twitter offers little relief in this vein. If you’re tweeting under your company’s account, you’re no longer merely a brand representative with an email signature. You have the added clout of your brand to strengthen your success rate, sure; but you also take on all the responsibility that goes with it—each tweet, highly visible, carries with it the stigma of effort. And there is nothing quite so unsexy as effort.

As a dual fire SEO/Social Media Specialist here at WordStream, with the keys to both our social accounts and our link building tools, I was in a position to run a unique experiment—just how powerful a link building tool would Twitter make? Would our followers condemn our efforts? Would I be annexed back to the thankless, gif-less terrain of email?

With a goal of scoring 10+ quality links, I entered the Twittersphere, gripped it, and ripped it. Here’s how I fared.

Methodology: Finding Link Outreach Targets

Before getting into the results, I should explain how I went about prospecting for link opportunities. My weapon of choice was Ahrefs, a comprehensive SEO tool with tons of firepower.

The method itself wasn’t all that complex. The name of the game was unlinked mentions—the “low hanging fruit” of the link building game. Basically: who on the web had mentioned WordStream without linking to us? Ahrefs’ Content Explorer did nicely for this kind of excavating:  

Sort for domain rating, highlight unlinked mentions, set a time segment, and saddle up. Unlinked mentions are “low-hanging” because the writer has likely used one of your site’s resources without linking to it. So while you’re not offering the writer data that their post might benefit from, you’re actually offering them something far more in demand:

Authority. You’re policing your unlinked mentions, but you’re being polite about it. Your outreach copy reflects this: you’re expectant, but you’re expectant under the pretense of gratitude. That’s how I did it, anyway.

Here are the 12 methods I used to maximize my link-building success rate.

1. Include a Link AND an Image in Your Outreach Tweet

If I was wary of Twitter before my first outreach attempt, I was hooked after it. It was like betting on a football team Week 1, winning, then thinking you have the inside track on that team the rest of the season. Invariably, you don’t. But maybe, false confidence be damned, you’re on to something.

The blog was from vWriter. A Domain Authority of 42. Still honing my Twitter outreach copy, I tweeted this:

A couple of Twitter’s benefits immediately unveil themselves here. For one, Steve Shaw (the writer of the post) has a little over 1k Twitter followers. He gets, typically, one to two engagements per tweet. I’m willing to bet Steve is far more likely to engage meaningfully with a Twitter mention than he is an email. Especially one with the subject line, “Great post, Steve; Mind Linking?”

In terms of ease of use, Twitter has a clear edge. Mr. Shaw needed merely to click anywhere on the tweet to access the post, then edit it.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking link outreach isn’t advertising—it is. A link is far more clickable with an image, even if your target audience generated it.

2. Offer Something in Return (And Listen to Your Targets)

Mr. Shaw was nice enough to not only give me a link, but give me the benefit I’d offer in exchange for a link (a social share from our own account) moving forward.

Laziness is among the few reasons a person would refuse exchanging a link for a social share from an account with a lot of followers. I’d incorporate this offer into my next two tweets. 

3. Mix Outreach in with Organic Tweets

My excitement with Twitter as a link building tool, and with social shares as an offer, was quickly tempered by my next two (failed) attempts:

One thing to mention here: so long as you start your tweet “at” someone, it will not show up in your followers’ feeds (unless they follow you and the other account). There’s little danger, therefore, in appearing spammy if you conduct a bunch of outreach in a short amount of time. I do recommend keeping it within reason, though, and wedging outreach tweets between organic tweets—the “Tweets and Replies” section of your profile houses all your activity, and can be viewed by anybody.

4. Share the Hell Out of High-Quality Link Acquisitions

My fourth tweet put me back in the money, and back on pace (about) for what would ultimately be my success rate: 

The added bonus of bagging a big fish like BigCommerce—which has a domain authority of 88—is that when you ultimately share their post, you’re likely to get a fair bit of engagement. Don’t be afraid to share these posts multiple times.

5. The Last Thing Your Target Reads Should Be Your Offer

(Forgive me if that sounded formidable.)

My fifth tweet was yet another success, and while the haul was considerably smaller—a Domain Authority of 22—I was beginning to feel as if I’d found a groove:

No white whale, but again—I felt like master of my domain (a silly and ill-advised pun):

A suggestion: always end your tweets with an offer. I realized after the above tweet that the last thing my targets were reading was the link ask. Ideally, your targets should leave the tweet feeling as if they’re receiving something, not being asked for something.

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Slide into Your Leads’ DMs

After a Blog Which Shall Not Be Named proved a non-starter (you were busy, I understand), I stumbled back into success with Cloudways. This one proved interesting, as it took a bit of jiggering:

What happened here was either a miscommunication, or a deft catfishing. The “You’re Welcome” was a response to our display of gratitude for Cloudways mentioning us in their post. They seemed perfectly alright with leaving things at that, until we hit them with the animated gif (the club of choice in nobody’s outreach golf bag). Once they had us in their DMs, they succinctly moved the discussion to email, where, after assuring a link-for-share exchange, we discussed other potential ways to collaborate. We chose not to move forward, but with the right suitor there could have been ample opportunity for guest posting, social sharing, etc.

7. Be Meticulous

The Cloudways exchange had me riding on cloud nine. In cruise control. An unfortunate ghosting by another Blog Which Shall Not Be Named did nothing to dampen the mood. I was still 4 for 8. Then this happened:

Mr. Lolk wrote a guest column for Search Engine Journal, and was mentioned (with SEJ) in my outreach tweet. One of the many benefits of building links on Twitter is that you can (attempt to) get the attention of the writer and the website in one succinct message. Unfortunately, before I sent this tweet, I had a lapse in page scanning. Two things to remember when scanning a page for an unlinked mention:

1. Make sure the post hasn’t already linked to you in anchor text other than your brand name.

“The 25 Most Expensive Keywords in AdWords via WordStream,” for instance, would still show up as an unlinked mention for the content search, “WordStream.” An easy way to get around this is to use a browser plugin like SEOquake to scan a post’s external link profile. If your site doesn’t appear there, you can safely ask for a link.

2. Make sure the writer of the post either still has a role at the publication, or still has access to the post.

In this case, Mr. Lolk was never on SEJ’s staff in the first place. But it’s good practice to check out a writer’s Linkedin page, or do a staff search on the website to make sure the above “effective outreach” criteria are met. 

8. Explore other Mediums

Another non-reply after the misstep with SEJ had me feeling a bit discouraged. The link that got me back on track came from an unlikely source: 

The world of podcasts. Podcasts are a great place to acquire links—those on SoundCloud come juiced with a powerhouse Domain Authority (95), and as you can see, they are incredibly popular in the Twittersphere. 

9. Get Personal

Not too much to say here:

When your founder is Larry Kim, unlinked mentions abound! One small thing: when you’re dealing with 140 characters, there’s no reason to skimp on personalization (i.e., addressing a writer by his first name). Twitter is really the ideal medium for tiny, personal touches.

10. Go After Outdated Posts with Fervor

Using our name in the title and not even a courtesy link. For shame, Optimizely!

Kidding. Takeshi Young was nice enough to trade a link for a share, and he is an example of an author whose LinkedIn page required a quick scan before link outreach could safely begin. This blog was written back in 2015, so he very well could have moved on from Optimizely. This acquisition should also be a reminder not to sleep on outdated posts: the older they are, the more link equity they stand to contain.

11. Live in Your Mentions

Yet another advantage of leveraging Twitter for link building is that you’re fully immersed in your social community while you’re trying to acquire links. So while the theory that higher visibility equals higher potential for brand damage is not invalid, I’d say that, if you’re smart, it’s much more likely something like this happens:

The more active you are in your social community—the more you live in your mentions, liking and retweeting and commenting—the less likely you are to miss a link opportunity like Mr. Gudema’s, and the more likely you are to get mentioned in the future. Louis mentioned that we got “shoutouts” in his post. If that was an attempt at getting us to engage, it’s bait we happily took.  

12. Link-for-Link Exchanges Come with a Bonus Social Share

Our race to 10 links—and our grand Twitter experiment—came to a close with somewhat of a social bang: 

Because this exchange was link-for-link, ProofHub’s marketing manager took it on herself to share our updated post on her personal LinkedIn page—a page which has a massive following, and which, consequently, earned our post 38 likes, and thousands of eyeballs.

Concluding Thoughts

From an efficiency standpoint, this experiment was a success: a 48% success rate is pretty damn good. Building links from posts where our site was not mentioned—a process which would have required an offer of, say, a social share and a relevant resource/piece of content—would have obviously presented more difficulty, and reduced the success rate. I ran one such outreach campaign in May, via email. It resulted in a 4% success rate. Ew.

But to say that the results here were watered down because the links targeted were “low-hanging” would, I think, be missing the point.

If you’re going to forego sheer quantity as a strategy—which, I think, anyone should—building links becomes more about maximizing opportunity. Success rates are painfully low. No opportunity should be wasted to build leverage on your side of the interaction. Combining the power of Twitter with unlinked mentions seems like a good place to start.

About the Author

Gordon Donnelly is a college hockey washout, failed poet, and all-around oxford comma enthusiast. He’s a sucker for: fly fishing, mudslides, well-structured SEO podcasts, and the dwindling half-light of Clery’s basement.

Twitter: @gord_donnelly 

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