Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition

Posted by Dr-Pete

[Estimated read time: 5 minutes]

For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:

This naturally begs the question — how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we’ve got 9 more characters to work with?

Not so fast, my friend…

This is where things get messy. It’d be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We’ve got three complications to consider:

(1) Character widths vary

Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case ‘l’ is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case ‘W’. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you’re trying to say.

In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:

This title has 14 i’s and lowercase l’s, 10 lowercase t’s, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.

(2) Titles break at whole words

Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here’s a word that’s just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:

(3) Google is appending brands

In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 characters pre-cut:

The brand text “- The Homestead” was appended by Google and is not part of the sites <TITLE> tag. The next word in the title was “Accommodations”, so the combination of the brand add-on and long word made for a very truncated title.

Data from 10,000 searches

Examples can be misleading, so we wanted to take a deeper dive. We pulled all of the page-1 display titles from the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set, which ends up being just shy of 90,000 titles. Uncut titles don’t tell us much, since they can be very short in some cases. So, let’s focus on the titles that got cut. Here are the character lengths (not counting “ …”) of the cut titles:

We’ve got a fairly normal distribution (skewed a little to the left) with both a mean and median right around 63. So, is 63 our magic number? Not quite. Roughly half the cut titles in our data set had less than 63 characters, so that’s still a fairly risky length.

The trick is to pick a number where we feel fairly confident that the title won’t be cut off, on average (a guaranteed safe zone for all titles would be far too restrictive). Here are a few select percentages of truncated titles that were above a certain character length:

• 55% of cut titles >= 63 (+2) characters
• 91% of cut titles >= 57 (+2) characters
• 95% of cut titles >= 55 (+2) characters
• 99% of cut titles >= 48 (+2) characters

In research, we might stick to a 95% or 99% confidence level (note: this isn’t technically a confidence interval, but the rationale is similar), but I think 90% confidence is a decent practical level. If we factor in the “ …”, that gives us about +2 characters. So, my recommendation is to keep your titles under 60 characters (57+2 = 59).

Keep in mind, of course, that cut-offs aren’t always bad. A well placed “…” might actually increase click-through rates on some titles. A fortuitous cut-off could create suspense, if you trust your fortunes to Google:

Now that titles are cut at whole words, we also don’t have to worry about text getting cut off at confusing or unfortunate spots. Take, for example, the dangerous predicament of The International Association of Assemblages of Assassin Assets:

Prior to the redesign, their titles were a minefield. Yes, that contributed nothing to this post, but once I had started down that road, it was already too late.

So, that’s it then, right?

Well, no. As Google evolves and adapts to a wider range of devices, we can expect them to continue to adjust and test display titles. In fact, they’re currently test a new, card-style format for desktop SERPs where each result is boxed and looks like this:

We’re not even entirely sure that the current change is permanent. The narrower format is still appearing for some people under some conditions. If this design sticks, then I’m comfortable saying that keeping your title length under 60 characters will prevent the majority of cut-offs.

Note: People have been asking when we’ll update our title tag tool. We’re waiting to make sure that this design change is permanent, but will try to provide an update ASAP. Updates and a link to that tool will appear in this post when we make a final decision.

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7 Top Secret Ways To Connect With Influencers and A-Listers

One of the biggest mistakes we make with online marketing is relying on a single traffic source…

Where does all your website traffic come from?

Social media, search engines, ad campaigns, referral traffic…

Is your traffic evenly distributed across all of these mediums?

It’s dangerous to focus on one platform to promote your content and drive traffic. Look what happened when Google changed the game…

To this guy.

And this guy.

And this guy.

The same thing happened when Facebook decreased organic reach and decided to focus on “paying to play”.

It’s better to get even amounts of traffic from several different sources, than one huge source. It diversifies the risk and helps your traffic levels stay consistent.

Influencer marketing is a great way to build a diversified traffic portfolio, because influencers have an effect on multiple traffic channels.

The cool thing is that if you connect really well with influencers, you’ll get traffic from search engines and other platforms as well.

Instead of chasing traffic, you should let it chase you. How?

Don’t see influencers as an opportunity for backlinks, likes or re-tweets – see them as an opportunity to connect and become their friend!

Let’s dive into the tactics that will help.

To bring a little weight to this and show that I have experience, check out this video that was made about me by a legend in the social media field.

This guy has a email list of almost half a million people, he runs the largest social media conference in the world, and he’s making a video about me? Yup, he sure did, but how did I get this busy guy to do this for me?

Below are seven ways people don’t usually connect with influencers, that I used to get results exactly like this.

These are all methods I use to connect and stay connected with the best. The methods are working, but you must keep trying and never give up. Some of these methods are new and some are old, but the thing is that they’re hardly being used. That’s the path you want to take to stand out, do something different.

For more information on how I got results like this: Get My Free Short Email Course

Let’s start…

1. Build a connection spreadSheet

A great starting point is to list out your contacts, the people you think are important for building your brand. Do a “memory dump” into an excel sheet and start building from there.

I know this can be hard at first, but you want to type these down and keep track of everyone. These people need to stay in your loop.

This is greater than your email list, these are the people who help build your email list. Yes, your email list is your tribe, but without the power circles, influencers and networks, you wouldn’t have a tribe.

Staying in the loop with these guys helps keep the traffic, shares, and revenue coming. That’s why you keep coming back to this spreadsheet and keep up with these names. By not doing this, it could mean a lost connection, and you definitely don’t want that.

Within the list you should include:

1. Their name
2. Their email
3. Their website
4. Their Twitter handle
5. Last time you’ve contacted them
6. Your status with them. For example: Close, acquainted, cold, etc.

2. Leverage snapchat

There are over 100 million users on Snapchat according to this post. That’s 1/10 as saturated as Facebook, which gives you room to be seen. Less saturation means more engagement. More engagement means higher chances of connecting with influencers.

Here’s how…

I follow A-listers, watch them act crazy, then I send them a message and do it regularly.

They reply back at this point, because Snapchat isn’t flooded with noise (yet). From there you can build a connection.

Where else can you send a video to someone and actually be seen by a major influencer? Within minutes on top of that.

I’ve actually used this tool to help me build connections with some very influential people. However I understand this place will be flooded and won’t be as powerful very soon.

Platforms at their youngest stages do better when it comes to connecting.

So this is what this looks like in strategy mode:

1. Find bloggers/influencers who use Snapchat
2. Open your Snapchat and watch them
3. When you see something interesting, comment and tell them your thoughts
4. Do this regularly. That’s the secret, stay consistent
5. Then after a while go for the point of action and see how they react
6. The biggest thing is to become a familiar name

3. Mention them when you guest post on big blogs

I wanted to interview a legend (Neil Patel) on my marketing podcast. He’s not an easy guy to get a hold of and was looking for a way to persuade him to get on.

Me being a blogger, I naturally use his blog posts as resources within some big blog articles. I sent him an email and told him what I wanted, how I was a fan, and how I mentioned his articles in many places. Within a few minutes I had him scheduled for that weekend to do an interview.

At this point I realized how powerful this method was. It’s like a snowball effect, where one mention results in another mention and so on.

Doing this gives you something to email them about. It’s like presenting a gift to them, and they’ll definitely love you for it. It gives you a reason to connect and a way to build your power circle.

Mention 3-5 influencers per article and soon you’ll be connecting to so many at a swift rate.

So this is what this looks like in strategy mode:

1. Find major blogs to be featured on
2. Outreach to 10-20 major blogs
3. Land just one of those blogs
4. Write an epic article
5. Mention 3-5 bloggers within that article
6. Get published
7. Email those bloggers
8. Get featured on their blogs
9. Repeat steps 5-9

4. Create a SlideShare presentation all about them.

When you’re famous, rich, and at the top there’s nothing more important to know than to know you left your mark.

To know that you’ve inspired millions. It’s breathtaking really.

If you can demonstrate the impact influencers have made on Slideshare, Prezi or anything creative like this, be ready for them to share this and connect with you.

This is the “Bryan Harris” effect. It’s how he built Video Fruit, by writing, and sharing his success stories with those who inspired it. They bring him out as a trophy in front of thousands and see people come to love Bryan.

I’ve also used this to be featured on Smart Passive Income. However, in my situation, I wrote about how Pat’s style of email marketing increased his email rates (you can read that here). Then I based it on a case study I built and Pat loved it. He replied to my email within minutes.

So this is what this looks like in strategy mode:

1. Find one influencer who you really love
2. Make sure their audience is huge
3. Study their life and major accomplishments
4. Turn their story into a creative Slideshare, presentation, blogpost etc.
5. Make it really entertaining
6. Reach out with Twitter and email
7. Watch and see what happens

Here’s one done about Seth Godin:

15 Motivational Marketing Quotes from Seth Godin from InsightSquared

5. Send them a video

I did an interview with another legend and he said the #1 thing people didn’t do, that he liked, was send him a short video in an email.

Within the video you connect with the influencer and convince them to do XYZ.

Snapchat is great with this, however, not everyone has Snapchat. So uploading a video and sending the link to an influencer is the other best way. Within the video, make it creative, quick, and straight to the point. Also, how does this help the influencer? If it doesn’t, implement that before sending.

You must learn the deal process, why will this influencer help you, what do they get out of this? It’s called the art of the deal.

So this is what this looks like in strategy mode:

1. Figure out what you’re proposing. How does this benefit them?
2. Then think creatively. How can you keep their attention for 3-4 minutes?
3. Maybe do a song, a poem, an action clip, or just you talking
4. Tell them what they’ve done for you. Confirm their content is working
5. Offer your proposal at the end

6. Interview them

Connections bring swinging doors before us, introducing us to new galaxies we have never seen before. Connections are the hinges to new opportunities.

That’s why I started a podcast. If nothing else, I built connections and I make them look good. That’s all that matters to me. If you do this with a 100 legends a year and you’ll be growing like fire. That’s why I took this route and it’s definitely helped me build the network.

So this is what this looks like in strategy mode:

1. Look for an influencer you’d love to speak to
2. Use the above methods to connect with them
3. Get them on your podcast or interview them for some other reason
4. Build a stronger relationship (podcasts do that)
5. Publish and email the influencer when it’s out
6. Stay connected

7. Implement the “Saturation Effect”

After you do all these things and do them consistently, you’ll be achieving what I call the “Saturation Effect”.

Soon, you’ll be famous in their mind. They’ll be thinking about you because you’re a connecting ninja. You do something 99% of people don’t do. You follow up and you do it like a pro. You’re not annoying, but you’re giving.

Very few have this gift and you’re sticking out to these influencers. Many go hard for a few weeks (or days) and just give up. The “long-termers” keep going, and they give everything they’ve got. This is how you get planted deep within the minds of these legends, and that’s exactly what you want. And soon, you’ll be the very influencer you’ve always looked up to!

To Learn More About How To Connect With Influencers, Join My Free Email Course

Guest Author: Luke Guy is THE SEO guy who doesn’t focus on backlinks alone. Instead he focuses on connections and uses this ability to rank well among search engines while using his strategies. Luke also loves getting emails from his fans and looks forward to them everyday. Consider contacting him anytime.

The post 7 Top Secret Ways To Connect With Influencers and A-Listers appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

Strategize & Implement a Marketing Plan to Enhance the Online Presence of a Website.

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6 Simple Tricks To Make More Money From Your Blog

Are you getting traffic to your blog, but still struggling to make a good income?

Blogging is a great career option but only if you do it the right way. Of course, everything starts with providing great content to your readers and steadily growing your traffic. Once you have decent traffic to your blog and a loyal audience, it’s time to focus on the revenue.

You may have heard a lot of people say that your blog revenue is directly proportional to the traffic coming in, but that’s not really true. It’s all about executing the money-making ideas in the right way.

So here are six marketing tips to make more money from your blog:

1. Place your ads better

Placing ads on your website is not enough, you have to place ads where your readers are more likely to click on them.

Before placing an advertisement, ask yourself why the readers are here and where exactly you should place the ads so that they don’t hamper the user experience and yet, are starkly visible.

Here are a few ideas for ad placement for a better click-through-rate:

• Sidebar banner
• Above a blog post title
• Right below the post title
• Between different sections of your post
• At the end of your post, above the author bio

But, of course, every website is different, and that is why I would recommend checking your website’s heat map which could tell you where exactly your users tend to click more, and that is where you should place the majority of your ads.

I also recommend checking Google’s ad placement policies at regular intervals so you can stay on top of any changes. Also, it’s in Google’s best interests to make sure the user experience isn’t affected, so you won’t have to worry about bothering your readers either if you follow their guidelines.

Here is an image that depicts the best places to put ads, the darker the orange the better the placement;

Image Source: Shout Me Loud

2. Go beyond AdSense

Yes, Google AdSense generates the most intuitive ads for your readers, since Google already knows what the readers have been searching and surfing. But, with a minimum payout threshold of $100 and a difficult approval process, it doesn’t hurt to look at some other options as well.

Here a few ad platforms you should definitely consider (all of them work alongside AdSense):

Infolinks

With in-text and in-frame ads, Infolinks can monetize your blog in a completely different way. Getting approval on Infolinks is extremely easy and there is a minimum payout of $50 through PayPal.

BuySellAds

This is one of the premier ad platforms which gets you direct advertisements from clients and takes a 25% commission charge. With a minimum payout of $20, the only downside to BuySellAds is that it’s not that easy to get approved.

Viglink

What Viglink does is, it monetizes your outbound links. It turns your ordinary links into affiliate links, so when a reader clicks on your link and buys something, you get a commission through it. This brings the power of affiliate marketing to natural link building.

3. Explore native languages

With so many languages in the world, why should you only focus on English? Google AdSense now supports over 35 languages, and this gives you no reason to ignore native languages.

While English might be one of the most popular languages on the internet, there is an array of readers looking for blogs in their regional languages and you can be the first few to exploit that market.

I launched my blog’s Hindi version, ShoutMeHindi, back in June 2015 and I’ve been getting great feedback ever since.

You don’t need to make it exclusively in your local language – you can mix and match English terms, as people tend to be familiar with the digital marketing terminology in English.

4. Collaborate with brands for sponsored posts and reviews

This is the quickest way to earn some good cash, but at the same time, you have to be very cautious about it.

Sponsored posts are where you talk about a product in general, or you try to incorporate something associated with the product naturally into your content. Sponsored reviews are when the company pays you to write reviews about their products.

Sponsored posts should only be done when you can talk about products or brands that your readers would be interested in. I don’t need to tell you that when you attempt blatant advertising, readers’ trust evaporates.

Now, sponsored reviews are a very sensitive ground. You might be getting paid by the company, but you don’t have to completely sell the product. It’s important to be unbiased and write your honest thoughts about the products.

Test the product extensively, and then list down all the pros and cons. Be sure to let the company know beforehand that you would be writing an honest review.

To connect with brands, you can create a media kit explaining what advertisers can expect from sponsored posts and reviews and how much you would be charging them.

Suggested networks;

• Famebit (Popular among Youtubers but not limited to it)
• Tapinfluence
• Fango.me
• Blogmint (Popular brand to get sponsored posts for blogs & social media channels.)

5. Implement affiliate programs

Affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, is where you refer your readers a product and when they buy it through your recommendation, you get a commission out of it.

Our very own Jeff described affiliate marketing as one of the top ways to make money by blogging in 2016. Every affiliate program has a different commission rate and minimum payout. But the reason why it’s so popular among bloggers is because you only have to set it up once and you can get paid from all your posts, whether they are old or new.

Even the traffic doesn’t matter so much, because it all depends upon the readers buying products through your recommendation.

There are many different kinds of affiliate programs available, and you can select the ones that relate the most to your blog niche.

6. Write an impressive Ebook

One of the best ways to get revenue from your blog is by developing premium content for your readers. Creating ebooks are cheap, and they also make you a niche expert, which can drive in more business later.

You can also build up your subscriber list with an ebook by providing the book – or the first few chapters, depending on your inclination and the worth of the information – free of charge for every subscriber.

But, there is a burning question plaguing every blogger who creates an ebook – should you sell it on your blog or Amazon?

Well, the answer is not as simple as you would want it to be. To make the right decision, you should definitely check out this post by Jeff.

Your turn

Now that you have some amazing tips for how to make more money from your blog, it’s your turn to implement them. Remember that what might not work for some, might work for you. You need to be patient, monitor your analytics and keep a track of all the revenue being generated by every method.

What are the techniques you currently use to increase blog revenue? Please share in the comments.

Guest Author: Harsh Agrawal, a blog scientist and CEO of ShoutDreams Media, started blogging in 2008 and since then has written numerous posts on Blogging, SEO, Social media, Technology, Affiliate Marketing and more. He has also partnered with various international companies, helping them promote their online businesses. His blog ShoutMeLoud has more than 832K subscribers and receives 1 million Pageviews per month.

The post 6 Simple Tricks To Make More Money From Your Blog appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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Will Intelligent Personal Assistants Replace Websites?

Posted by Tom-Anthony

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn’t account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn’t need a website in the early 2000s.

Your website is an API to your business

If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they’d be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your “API” — the way people interacted with your business.

As the Internet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new “API” for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn’t necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn’t have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).

Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.

The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant

Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M — as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware — are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.

New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.

In the last couple of years we’ve discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.

Trend 1: More complex searches

The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine learning, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.

Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Implicit Signals
• Natural Language
• Conversational Search
• Hummingbird & RankBrain

Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.

Trend 2: More complex results

Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we’ve seen a search interface that doesn’t even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would turn up a card right there in the app.

Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Entities / Direct Answers
• Faceted search
• Data driven answers

You may like Distilled’s Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.

Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs

More recently, with the increased interest in bots (especially since Facebook’s F8 announcement), we can see a rise in the number of companies investing in various forms of conversational UI (see this article and this one).

Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.

Note that a conversational UI isn’t limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an “on demand” UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Conversational UI
• Bots
• On-demand UIs within the IPA interface

Trend 4: 3rd-party integration

Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.

However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.

Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite — but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.

This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.

What’s the impact of all this?

More searches as friction reduces

Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they’re trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.

The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of “always listening” search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously “too much work” means we’ll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn’t have happened previously. So rather than cannibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.

Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top

As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we’ll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. “where can I buy The Martian?,” “flights to Berlin,” or “order a pepperoni pizza”).

This is a massive opportunity — it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in “classical SEO” if you’ve integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.

The classic funnel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs

This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it’ll have on users and businesses. People have modeled “the funnel” in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:

The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn’t been a big part.

However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the funnel being compressed:

In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?

Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself — the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.

Summary

Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.

People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.

IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you’ve been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.

What do you think? I’d love to have a discussion in the comments about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.

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Smart Money: Financial Considerations For Online Advertising

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7 Content Marketing Tools You Need To Be Successful

Did you know that 59% of B2C marketers and 55% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend this year?

Content marketing has become an extremely competitive arena now. Businesses are vying to develop their strategies with an eye on engaging their audience with interesting content, that encourages profitable behaviors of the target clientele.

In today’s competitive market, you have to invest wisely to make your brand hog the limelight. It’s equally important to judge how well your content marketing strategies are performing against the industry standards. That makes planning your content marketing strategy a vital element in your business success.

Ideally, your strategy should have one simple tenet at its heart – to deliver unique, fresh and informative content that entices your target audience, taps into their interests and drives them to engage with your brand.

For this, you need to understand the buyer’s journey. It’s interesting to note that 70% of the buyer’s journey gets complete before they even reach out to a sales rep.

So focusing just on sales would make you miss out on a major part of the buyer’s journey.

With marketing automation tools, you can influence this journey at different stages:

• Awareness: This is the start of the buyer’s journey, where your buyer is probably unaware of your business and that they have a need. At this stage, you should focus on creating awareness for your business and offerings so that your buyers start to understand what you do, and how you can help them address their needs/overcome their pain points.
• Consideration: Buyers now have already shortlisted a few companies and start to do deeper research to arrive at a decision. You should use your marketing automation tools to keep track of their growing interest and adjust your content so that they see what can influence their decision in your favor.
• Decision: Buyers are ready to make a purchase and start thinking and comparing about implementation, costs, customer support etc, which will decide the company they’ll finally buy from. This is the time to get brand-specific with your content. You can use customer testimonials and case studies to brag about how others have had a positive experience with your offerings.

Let’s have a look at some tools that will help you experience content marketing success, and nurture buyer’s all the way along this journey:

1. BuzzSumo for research

This tool lets you find what works in your niche, for the competition and who to promote your content to for optimal exposure.

From finding hot and trending content around a topic, viral pages on competitor sites, content to share and curate, quality guest posting targets and influencers in a niche. To locating target placements for your infographics and promoting your content on Twitter, you can do it all with this tool.

Without a doubt you can boost your content marketing ROI with BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo’s available plans are:

• Pro at $99/month – the starter plan for small teams and bloggers.
• Agency at $299/month – Agency teams can opt for it where they will get the Facebook Analyzer along with all Pro features.
• Enterprise at $999/month – This the best bet for brands and publishers that need advanced functionality for large teams.

Where is it used?

When referred to a number of instances where business owners and webmasters use this tool, it is seen that most of them use it either to find influencers within their industry, or writers who can contribute to their blogs.

Richard Moynihan, Social Media Editor at the Telegraph, and Jimi Smoot, an entrepreneur, use BuzzSumo to search influencers in their respective fields. Whereas, AJ Ghergich, of Ghergich & Co. uses BuzzSumo to track which content is performing well and then outreach and contact bloggers and writers to write for their website.

2. CoSchedule for organization

Managing the content on your website or blog is a breeze with this editorial calendar. With Co-Schedule, you can now keep your content as fresh, consistent and engaging as possible. This will help you fortify your web presence and grow your readership.

Thanks to its great layout, CoSchedule lays out all your scheduled posts with ease. You can even see all your scheduled social media posts in one place. It’s drag-and-drop feature, seamless integration with WordPress, easy scheduling of social media posts, rescheduling an old post (after checking from the dashboard how many times it has been shared and from where it has received the most traffic) are other features that make your content marketing job that much easier.

You can even use asks and comments on posts to create workflows for your team without emails. Some other features of CoSchedule are:

• Manage Google Docs Content
• Convert Google Docs & Evernote Content to WordPress
• Manage Evernote Content
• Several integrations to simplify your content marketing tasks

CoSchedule plans available are:

• “Solo Standard” at $15/month (per calendar billed annually) or $19 month-to-month for a single user, 5 social profiles; it’s suitable when you start building your audience.
• When you plan to use premium integrations and custom workflows to save time and publish even faster, “Solo Marketing” for a single user, 10 social profiles is suitable. It’s available at $39 month-to-month or $30/month (per calendar billed annually).
• “Solo Automation” is fit for those aiming to work smarter with auto-pilot publishing, robust social automation and data driven intelligence. This plan is available at $79 month-to-month or $60/month (per calendar billed annually).

Where is it used?

CoSchedule is a widely used editorial calendar that helps keep content fresh, consistent and engaging. Webmasters and site owners have claimed that they have seen a considerable growth in readership after they started using CoSchedule.

Arienne Holland, the Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at Raven said that their marketing team had to send about 75 fewer emails than before.

3. Crazy Egg for optimization

Apart from a heat map, Crazy Egg offers scroll maps, overlay maps and the confetti report. All these together help you get valuable insight into how your content is performing.

The heat map report displays actual clicks of your visitors to let you know how they engage with your website. Scroll maps gives you insight into time spent by visitors in viewing particular sections of your page.

You can use Crazy Egg to re-prioritize your vital content to areas of your more popular pages. The overlay displays a bunch of little colored markers, attached to every section that has been clicked.

To get more information about a particular section, you just need to open the relevant marker attached to it. Extensive information about each click is given by the confetti report. So, you can categorize clicks by country, browser, referrals and devices used to check how your content is doing and make adjustments where needed.

Available plans for Crazy Egg are:

• The Basic plan at $9/month for starting out. This plan provides daily reports for 10 active pages and 10,000 visits per month.
• Growing businesses should use the Standard plan at an annual fee of $19/month. This plan provides daily reports for 20 active pages and 25,000 visits per month.
• Plus at $49/month is Crazy Egg’s most popular plan. It offers hourly reports for 50 active pages and 100,000 visits per month. It also comes with mobile heat maps, advanced filtering and priority email support.
• To get all that you need, Pro at $99/month is your best bet. It offers hourly reports for 100 active pages and 250,000 visits per month. Other features are same as the Plus plan.

Where is it used?

When researched about the areas and reasons people used Crazy Egg for, it is seen that many use it to increase conversions, a few use it for improving their website design, while others use it for Local SEO.

Softmedia and Conversion Rate Experts saw a rise in conversion by about 51% and 25.9% respectively. Pagely used this tool to identify Design Flaws, while Local Visibility System used it for improving their Local SEO.

4. ConvertPlug for increasing email subscriptions

This is touted as the best WordPress subscription plugin currently available. Apart from bringing back your abandoning visitors, this tool can help you gain more leads and subscribers. So, if you are struggling to get subscribers for your newsletter, whitepapers or other content, ConvertPlug can help.

With it, you can;

• Build a robust email list
• Promote videos
• Drive traffic to your site/blog
• Share updates with your subscribers
• Get useful insight from analytics to fine tune your content to boost visitor engagement
• Offer coupons and special deals to bring back those visitors that were previously abandoning your web pages.
• Capture more leads and boost ROI

You can start using ConvertPlug at an unbelievable price of $21. This price tag includes QC by Envato, lifetime future updates and 6 months support. You can also pay just an additional amount of $6.30 to extend the support period to 12 months.

Where is it used?

ConvertPlug is being widely used to build effective email lists and hold back abandoning visitors. Ivailo Durmonski, in his case study posted on http://www.narrowem.com recently, said he experienced about 412% rise in email subscribers within a week of using ConvertPlug.

5. MailChimp for email marketing

Email marketing plays a key role in a business’s overall content marketing strategy. You can use MailChimp to automate your emails and send them to different audiences.

This tool lets you:

• Create your own newsletter or leverage one of its several elegant templates.
• Target different audiences by segmenting your mailing list based on preferences, behavior and previous sales.
• Send out your newsletter every time you update your blog, thanks to its RSS-to-email option.
• Know how well your marketing campaigns are doing by sending reports detailing who’s opening your newsletters or sharing them on social networks. With hundreds of app integrations for apps you already use, importing content from other sources and tracking your campaigns’ performance is made easy.

MailChimp also has apps that facilitate work on the move from iPhones and Androids.

Pricing plans for MailChimp:

• Free: If you have less than 2,000 subscribers, you can send a maximum of 12,000 emails every month for free.
• Growing businesses: Businesses with varying subscribers (from 1,001 – 1,500; 1,501 – 2,000; 2,001 to 2,500 and 2,501 – 2,600) can take their pick from plans costing $20, $25, $30 and $35 respectively.
• Pro Marketer: This enterprise-level package is suitable for 1,001 – 1,500 subscribers to 2,501 – 2,600 subscribers. Pricing varies from $20 to $35.

Where is it used?

The average open rate for emails is usually seen to hover around 20%. But, with the use of the automation feature of MailChimp, it was seen that the open rate was doubled instantly.

6. Buffer for social media scheduling

For busy business owners, managing their social media accounts and keeping them updated with fresh posts is an ordeal. Buffer brings a great solution by automating the process.

With Buffer, you can:

• Manage multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Accounts
• Set up your own updating schedule
• Add/Change/Delete updates Easily
• Use Buffer with different browsers, leveraging its many extensions, apps and extras

Pricing for individuals:

• Individual for Free: For 1 user, 1 social profile per platform and 10 scheduled posts.
• Awesome at $10: For 1 user, 10 social profiles per platform and 100 scheduled posts.

Teams and agencies can choose from three plans namely Small ($99), Medium ($199) and Large ($399).

Where is it used?

When you think of promoting your business on social media – time, consistency, statistics and analysis are among a few things you need to think of. Buffer is an effective tool that has been helping a number of companies and businesses spread across social media. In a case study that speaks about Campaign Monitor using Buffer, it is seen that using the right features for the right purpose will help triple social media shares.

7. Google Analytics for tracking traffic

Gaining insight into which content your users are engaging with the most, as well as what works and what doesn’t, can help your content marketing strategy significantly.

With Google Analytics, you can:

• Find out your most popular web pages
• Find out your most popular/most shared blog posts
• Spot the type of content users are looking for on your website (with the site search functionality)
• See the clickable page elements your visitors interact with the most (using In-Page Analytics Reports within the Google Analytics’ Behavior section)
• Leverage UTM parameters to attach additional information to links that point to your website, thus collecting more in-depth data about the clicks leading visitors to your website
• Determine the location of visitors who make up the major chunk of your web traffic
• Detect the online campaigns that bring the most traffic and conversions.

Where is it used?

Google Analytics is a trusted tool that can be used to track the performance of all your marketing efforts.

Companies like Panasonic have used Google Analytics to improve the Return on Investment (ROI) obtained through their digital marketing campaigns. While tracking the performance and sharing it with various media tools, they managed to increase ROI by about 30%.

Wrap

Content marketing isn’t just about framing what to write and how to write. It’s much more than that. You not only need to create interesting, precise and engaging content, but have to ensure that it reaches your target audience and is shared by them across various social networking platforms.

It’s an uphill task but with the tools mentioned above, you can automate a sizable chunk of the job and get useful insights to fine tune your content to make it work.

Wooing your visitors and keeping your existing and potential customers happy with tailor-made content was never this easy!

Guest Author: Soumya Nair. Dedication, timely efforts and passion are the key protocols that keep me succeeding as an outstanding Digital Marketer, blogger and trainer. I love what I do. My main target is to get conversions. Believe in learning and exploring digital marketing.  Thanks for reading  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Soumya_M_Nair

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How to Research the Path to Customer Purchase - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Moving your customers down the funnel from awareness to conversion can make for a winding and treacherous road. Until you fully research and understand the buying process inside and out, it’s far too easy to make a misstep. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand steps back to take a higher-level look at the path to customer purchase, recommending workflows and tools to help you forge your own way.

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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 the path to customer purchase and how to research that path. The reason this is so critical is because we have to understand a few things like our content and conversion strategy around where do we need to be, what content we need to create, how to position ourselves, our product, our brand, and how to convert people. We can’t know this stuff until we truly understand the buying process.

We’ve done a lot of Whiteboard Fridays that involve very, very tactically specific items in one of the steps in these, like: how to understand the awareness funnel and how to build your social media audience; or how to get into the consideration process and understand how you compare against your competition; or how to convert people at the very end of the buying cycle on a landing page.

But I want to take a step back because, as I’ve talked to a lot of you out there and heard comments from you, I think that this bigger picture of, “How do I understand this research process,” is something we need to address.

Buyers: Who are they?

So let’s start with: How do we understand who our buyers actually are, and what’s the research process we can use for that? My general sense is that we need to start with interviews with a few people, with salespeople if you’re working with a team that has sales, with customer service, especially if you’re working with a team that has customer service folks who talk to lots of their audience, and potentially with your target demographic and psychographic audience. Demographic audience would be like: Where are they, what gender are they, and what age group are they? Psychographics would be things around their interest levels in certain things and what they consume and how they behave, all of that type of stuff.

For example, let’s say we’re going to go target Scotch whisky drinkers. Now, I am personally among that set of Scotch whisky drinkers. I’m big fan of a number of scotches, as are many Mozzers. In fact, I have a bottle of Ardbeg — I think it’s the Uigeadail — in my office here at Moz.

So I might go, “Well, let’s see. Let’s talk to the people who sell whisky at stores. Let’s talk to the people who sell it online. Let’s talk to the customer service folks. Let’s do interviews with people who are likely Scotch buyers, which are both male and female, perhaps slightly more demographically skewed male, tend to be in a slightly wealthier, maybe middle income and up income bracket, tend to be people who live in cities more than people who live in urban and rural areas, tend to also have interests around things like fashion and maybe automobiles and maybe beer and other forms of alcohol.” So we can figure out all that stuff and then we can do those interviews.

What we’re trying to get to is a customer profile or several customer profiles.

A lot of folks call this a “customer persona,” and they’ll name the persona. I think that’s a fine approach, but you can have a more abstract customer profile as well.

Then once you have that, you can use a tool like Facebook, through their advertising audience system, to research the quantity of people who have the particular attributes or affiliations that you’re seeking out. From there, you can expand again by using Facebook and Twitter. You could use Followerwonk, for example in Twitter specifically, to figure out: What are these people following? Who are their influencers? What are the brands they pay attention to? What are the media outlets? What are the individuals? What are the blogs or content creators that they follow?

You can also do this with a few other tools. For example, if you’re searching out just content in general, you might use Google Search. You could do this on Instagram or Pinterest or LinkedIn for additional networks.

There’s a very cool tool called FullContact, which has an API that essentially let’s you plug in let’s say you have a set of email addresses from your interview process. You can plug that into FullContact and you can see the profiles that all of those email addresses have across all these social networks.

Now I can start to do this type of work, and I can go plug things into Followerwonk. I can go plug them into Facebook, and I can actually see specifically who those groups follow. Now I can start to build a true idea of who these people are and who they follow.

What needs do they have?

Now that I’ve researched that, I need to know what needs those folks actually have. I understand my audience at least a little bit, but now I need to understand what they want. Again, I go back to that interview process. It’s very, very powerful. It is time-intensive. It will not be a time-saving activity. Interviews take a long time and a lot of effort and require a tremendous amount of resources, but you also get deep, deep empathy and understanding from an interview process.

Surveys are another good way to go, but you get much less deep information from them. You can however get good broad information, and I’ve really enjoyed those. If you don’t already have an audience, you can start with something like SurveyMonkey Audience or Google Surveys, which let you target a broad group, and both of those are reasonable if you’re targeting the right sorts of broad enough demographics or psychographics.

The other thing I want to do here is some awareness stage keyword research. I want to understand that this awareness phase. As people are just understanding they have a problem, what do they search for? Keyword research on this can start from the highest level.

So if I’m targeting Scotch, I might search for just Scotch by itself. If I plug that into a tool like Keyword Explorer or Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io, I can see suggestions like, “What’s the best Scotch under $50?” When I see that, I start to gain an understanding of, “Oh, wait a minute. People are looking for quality. They also care about price.” Then I might see other things like, “Gosh, a lot of people search for ‘Islay versus Speyside.’ Oh, that’s interesting. They want to know which regions are different.” Or they search for “Japanese whisky versus Scotch whisky.” Aha, another interesting point at the awareness stage.

From there, I can determine the search terms that are getting used at awareness stage. I can go to consideration. I can go to comparison. I can go to conversion points. That really helps me understand the journey that searchers are taking down this path.

It’s not just search, though. Any time I have a search term or phase, I want to go plug that into places like Facebook. I want to plug it into something like Twitter search. I want to understand the influencers on the networks that I know my audience is in. That could be Instagram. It could be Pinterest. It could be LinkedIn. It could be any variety of networks. It could be Google News, maybe, if I’m seeing that they pay attention to a lot of media.

Then once I have these search terms and awareness through the funnel, now I’ve got to understand: How do they get to that conversation point?

Once I get there, what I’m really seeking out is: What are the reasons people bought? What are the things they considered? What are the objections that kept some of them from buying?

Creating a content & conversion strategy.

If I have this, what I essentially have now is the who and the what they’re seeking out at each phase of this journey. That’s an incredibly powerful thing that I can then go apply to…

Where do I need to be?

“Where do I need to be” means things like: What keywords do I need to target? What social platforms do I need to be on? Where do I need to be in media? Who do I need to influence who’s influencing my audience?

It tells me what content I need to create.

I know what articles or videos or visuals or podcasts or data my audience is interested in and what helps compel them further and further down that funnel.

It tells me a little bit about how to position myself in terms of things like style and UI/UX.

It also tells me about benefits versus features and some of the prototypical users. Who are the prototypical users? Who should I showcase? What kinds of testimonials are going to be valuable because people say, “Ah, this person, who is like me, liked this product and uses it. Therefore it must be a good product for me.”

Lastly, it tells me about how we can convert our target audience.

Then it also tells us lastly, finally, through those objections and the reasons people bought, the landing page content, the testimonials to feature and what should be in those. It tells me about the conversion path and how I should expect people to flow through that: whether they have to come back many times or they make the purchase right away. Who they’re going to compare me against in terms of competitors. And finally the purchase dynamics: How do I want to sell? Do I need a refund policy? Do I need to have things like free shipping? Should this be on a subscription basis? Should I have a high upfront payment or a low upfront payment with ballooning costs over time, and all that type of stuff?

This research process is not super simple. I certainly haven’t dived deep on every one of these aspects. But you can use this as a fundamental architecture to shape how you answer these questions in all of the web marketing channels you might pursue. Before you go pursue any one given channel, you might want to try and identify some of the holes you have in this.

If you have questions about how to do this, go through and do this research first. You’ll have far better results at the end.

All right, everyone. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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​Preview the MozCon 2016 Agenda (and Other Exciting News!)

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Like the talking mice to Cinderella, we’re already working hard on MozCon and crafting Roger one heck of a ball gown. (And letting our metaphors get out of control in the meantime.) Which means I’m here to share with all of you the current MozCon 2016 Agenda and a ton of other preview goodies.

If you’re suddenly like “Oh snap, I haven’t bought my ticket(s)!”, I’ll pause while you:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

New emcees: we’re mixing it up!

As some of you know, Cyrus won’t be emceeing MozCon this year. (We still adore him, and I’m sure his face will make it into a few slide decks.) So we decided to take this opportunity to shake it up.

Emceeing MozCon is a hard job. We want each and every speaker to feel supported by our stage and have the emcee warm up the audience for their talk. Instead of having one emcee for three days, we’re having three different emcees, one each day.

Please congratulate them!

Jen Sable Lopez

Sr. Director of Community and Audience Development at Moz
@jennita

Leading our community and audience development efforts here at Moz, Jen Sable Lopez’s the biggest fan of you: our community. She’s deeply invested in being TAGFEE and bringing educational content and community love to you. Jen also does a great Grumpy Cat impression, serves as Moz gif maker, and loves traveling and her family.

Ronell Smith

Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith

Ronell Smith is a business strategist with a passion for helping brands create a user experience their customers will recognize, appreciate, and reward them for with their business.

Zeph Snapp

CEO at Altura Interactive
@zephsnapp

A bilingual, bicultural marketer, Zeph Snapp helps international companies reach Spanish speakers in the US and Latin America. If you want him to go on a rant, ask him about machine learning as it relates to translation and content.

The sneak peek MozCon 2016 Agenda

Because we’re releasing this earlier than ever, there’s still a few TBD spots and topics. I can’t thank our speakers enough for being so gracious and super hard-working to settle on their topics.

You’ll also notice that community speakers are still forthcoming. That’s right — they’re coming soon (keep an eye out for the submission post!), and we wanted to give you a head start to noodle on your potential topic.

Monday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2016! with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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09:25–10:10am
Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills with Cara Harshman

Content Marketing Manager at Optimizely
@caraharshman

A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise.

Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year anniversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings.

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10:10–10:30am
AM Break

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10:35–11:05am
TBD with Lauren Vaccarello

VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv

Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box.

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11:05–11:35am
TBD

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11:35am–12:05pm
TBD

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:10pm
Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing with Joe Hall

SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC
@joehall

Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets.

Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits.

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02:10–02:40pm
Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization with Talia Wolf

CMO at Banana Splash
@Taliagw

Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to turn more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior.

As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan.

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02:40–03:10pm
TBD

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03:10–03:30pm
PM Break

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03:35–04:05pm
TBD with Ross Simmonds

Co-Founder at Crate
@TheCoolestCool

Ross Simmonds is a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He’s worked with both startups and Fortune 500 companies and is the co-founder of two startups: Crate and Hustle & Grind.

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04:05–4:50pm
TBD with Dana DiTomaso

Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso

Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients’ businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget).

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Tuesday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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09:05–09:50am
You Can’t Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter with Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist at Moz
@dr_pete

Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are beginning to understand concepts?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project.

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09:50–10:20am
How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy with Joanna Wiebe

Creator and Copywriter at Wiebe Marketing Ltd
@copyhackers

Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joanna shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act.

The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She’s optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software… and now MozCon.

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10:20–10:40am
AM Break

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10:45am–12:05pm
Community Speakers

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:25pm
Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career with Mike Ramsey

President at Nifty Marketing
@mikeramsey

Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between.

Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about running agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot.

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02:25–02:55pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft

Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty

As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia’s partner community, building connections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard.

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02:55–03:15pm
PM Break

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03:25–03:55pm
TBD with Rebekah Cancino

Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino

Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO.

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03:55–04:40pm
TBD with Wil Reynolds

CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds

Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

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Wednesday

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09:00–10:00am
Breakfast

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10:05–10:35am
The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling with Kindra Hall

Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall
@kindramhall

Whoever tells the best story, wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight.

Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories.

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10:35–11:20am
29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know with Mike Arnesen

Founder and CEO at UpBuild
@mike_arnesen

Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you’re likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that’ll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more.

Mike Arnesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO.

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11:20–11:40am
AM Break

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11:45am–12:15pm
Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers with Tara Reed

CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com
@TaraReed_

Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code.

Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code.

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12:15–12:45pm
TBD

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12:45–02:15pm
Lunch

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02:20–03:05pm
Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing with Cindy Krum

CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks

In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

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03:05–03:35pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise

UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah

Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to connect with customers and build experiences that matter.

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03:35–03:55pm
PM Break

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04:00–04:45pm
Earning, Nudging, and (Indirectly) Buying the Links You Still Need to Rank with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we “create great content,” links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016.

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Don’t worry, we’ve got your MozCon evenings covered!

After a day of learning and possibly discovering a brand-new city, I know I sometimes struggle with what to do after the conference closes for the day. At MozCon, we work to bring you three evening events where you can chill, network, make new friends, and grab some food and drinks. (We will also have a post in late August or early September with a ton of great recommendations for things to do and food to eat in Seattle!)

Monday’s MozCrawl from 7–10pm

The best part of our MozCrawl is being able to explore a neighborhood in Seattle. Bring your walking shoes (or load your favorite rideshare app), and get to know a little about the flavor of Seattle. While the locations are still TBD, Moz and our MozCon partners will each host a bar with light appetizers and drinks.

To ensure you see as much of Seattle as possible, each bar will have a scavenger hunt element. Our sweet, bar-hosting partners:

• Buffer
• BuzzStream
• SimilarWeb
• Unbounce
• Whitespark
• Wordstream

(We also have two other partners, STAT and Wistia, who will be keeping a low profile that night.)

Tuesday’s MozCon Ignite from 7–10pm

In my completely biased opinion, this is my favorite MozCon evening event. For those who’ve never been to an Ignite-style talk, they are 5 minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Because we’re learning all day at MozCon about online marketing, our Ignite talks are 100% not about marketing or business. They are passion projects, hobbies, and interests.

Last year, our 16 talks ranged from a touching tale about helping a terminally ill child musician record an album, to how to love opera, to how to make frosting. You can sit back, relax, laugh, and cry. Plus, beforehand, there are networking opportunities to chat with your fellow attendees.

If this sounds like something you’d want to speak at, we’ll be opening up pitches in early July. Our venue is currently TBD.

Wednesday’s MozCon Bash at the Garage from 7pm–12am

Make sure to book your flight home the day after MozCon so you can join us at our annual MozCon Bash to celebrate another great year of learning. Put on your bowling shoes and see if you can out-turkey your new friends! Or play a round of pool, or sing your heart out with some karaoke. Food and drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are on us. You’ll take home even more memories and some photobooth mementos to look back on.

Grab your ticket today — we’ve sold out for the last 5 years.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

If you have any questions about MozCon programming, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.

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