A certain group of consumers has been gaining attention from marketers recently, because of the strong role they play in the purchasing decision; these power purchasers are known as Generation Y. Whether they’re part of the target audience to which you sell or not, this group is worth considering as part of your inbound marketing strategy because there’s a strong likelihood they either will become part of your target audience in the future, or because they already influence your target audience now.

Let’s break down who these power purchasers are, some of the interesting demographics and inclinations research has uncovered about their role in the buying process, and see how we can align our marketing strategy to better leverage their influence.

Generation Y as a Power Purchaser

Also known as Millennials, this group refers to those born between 1977 and 1994, and it accounts for 25% of the US population. That may not seem like a lot (or maybe it does), but Generation Y is estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history. According to MarketingProfs via a Bazaarvoice survey, Millennials’ annual spending power of over $200 billion will eclipse Baby Boomers’ by 2017. With that kind of purchasing power, what should we as marketers know about this huge demographic of power purchasers, and how do we alter our marketing strategy to align with their purchasing habits?

Many marketers think the recommendation of a friend or family member is the ultimate green light for consumers, but it turns out that Gen Y cares about recommendations from strangers more. More than 8 in 10 say user-generated content from people they don’t know influences what they buy and indicates brand quality, while 51% say it is actually more important than the opinions of their friends and family, and far more trustworthy than website content.

So what are Millennials buying based off all this user-generated content? The top purchases they will not make without first consulting others’ opinions run the gamut:

How to Target the Largest Consumer Group Ever in the US

Knowing user-generated content is important to Millennials, what should marketers be doing to align our strategies with the way they prefer to research and execute purchases?

65% of users aged 18-24 considered information shared on social networks when making a purchasing decision (source: eMarketer). On top of that, 2/3 of consumers use search engines to help them research and make purchase decisions (source: eConsultancy). So if you haven’t already, get your brand visibility in the social sphere and in search engines, and get control over your online reputation.

When you consider how much more closely social media and search have been aligning over the past year, it makes sense that integrating them both in your marketing strategy will help you achieve more visibility with this crowd that cares what others have to say about you more than what you have to say about you. In fact, Socialnomics reports that if you take a look at the world’s largest brands, 25% of their search results return user-generated content from review sites, blogs, and social media updates. Millennials have integrated social media into their day to day lives, making access to the opinions of others easier than ever. With so much knowledge at their hands, you need to ensure information about your business is easy to find — whether from you, their network, or total strangers.

Getting Started With User-Generated Content

It’s strange to say you need to get started with user-generated content…it’s your users that need to get started, right? Well, you have to make it easy for them to do, and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction on top of ease of use doesn’t hurt, either. Here’s the secret sauce for getting your customers, fans, and followers to sing your praises online so you can get the kind of influence you need over Gen Y — whether they’re your target customer today or years down the road.

1.) Make reviews easy to give on your website. 73% of Millennials say that consumers care more about customer opinions than companies themselves do. They also think companies don’t offer enough ways to share feedback. Be the company that proves them wrong and gives them what they want. Enable comment functions, provide star rating systems for your products, and create forums for people to easily discuss what they love about your company. Moderate these areas of your site so when issues crop up, you’re able to provide a timely response to problems that might otherwise harm your reputation.

2.) Take control over your online reputation. Speaking of harming your reputation, people are probably talking about you online in places other than your website. Namely, their own blogs and online review sites. You can’t ask people to take down a negative blog post about you, but you can take control of online review sites that frequently rank in the top of search engine results pages anyway. Claim your listing on review sites, determine whether your presence is positive, negative, or absent, and become an active participant in guiding a positive conversation about your brand on those sites. Our next tip will tell you how.

3.) Solicit reviews from your best customers. You can make your presence on online review sites and your own website positive by soliciting positive reviews from your best customers. There’s nothing wrong with asking happy customers to write a review. Think about getting customer reviews like getting inbound links: you can’t pay for it, but there’s nothing wrong with asking for one from the appropriate people. Consider adding a request for reviews in the bottom of your email marketing messages targeted at current customers. Get your sales and support team in in the action, too — as the front lines of your organization, they are poised to identify those who are willing to evangelize your brand. Incentivize them to solicit positive reviews whenever they’re speaking to a happy customer, making their volume of positive reviews part of a bonus program.

4.) Create case studies. Case studies are an ideal content format to supplement user-generated content, because it highlights a customer’s opinion like Millennials love but gives you control over how the information is presented. This content can also take on multiple formats — video, PDF, slideshow, blog post — all of which are easy to share and disseminate online.

5.) Encourage social discussion. Social posts are showing up in search results, so use your social media presence to encourage discussion from your fans and followers. Ask for their opinion about your products and services, highlight customer success stories, and ask them to share their experiences using your products or services. Whether these posts are indexed or not, many Millennials will visit your social media accounts to assess how much they like and trust you while they make a purchasing decision. Seeing your social network engaging with you on those accounts will paint you in a very positive light.

Sometimes marketers are reticent of pursuing user-generated content because it forces them to relinquish control. But remember that Millennials have spent the better part of their lives on the internet and were the first wave of blogging and social media adopters. As such, they are better at parsing through fluff on the web and can distinguish between critical content and that which is an unfounded rant or rave. That means content you publish, content you solicit from others, reviews posted to blogs and review sites, and social media comments all go through a sniff test that’s ingrained in how Gen Y consumes information online. If the content being published by you — or by others about you — isn’t quality, these folks are good at filtering it out of their purchase decision-making process.

How important is Gen Y to your marketing? Do you target them directly, or as influencers of your target audience?

Image credit: Lemsipmatt

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In marketing, offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads into a position that makes them more sales-ready. But gosh, isn’t the word ‘offer’ so utterly vague and abstract? What the heck is a marketing offer, and what are the qualities of a good one?

Because we see so many marketers get tripped up on this concept, let’s discuss exactly what a marketing offer can be, highlight the characteristics of an effective offer, and explain how you can start using them the right way.

What an Offer Isn’t

Sometimes the best way to explain what something is, is to first identify what it isn’t. Unfortunately, many of the things marketers sometimes consider to be marketing offers aren’t actually offers at all. First, let’s clarify. What marketers should classify as an offer is something of value that a website visitor must complete a form to get access to. And yeah, sure — you can put just about anything behind a form. But there are certain things that, when put behind a form, just won’t contribute much of anything for your lead gen or lead nurturing initiatives. We’re not saying you shouldn’t bother with these types of content. What we’re saying is that you shouldn’t put them behind forms or rely on them to effectively generate and nurture leads.

Here are some great examples of things you should never consider to be a marketing offer:

• ‘Contact Us!’ Okay, so you can put this one behind a form if it’s one that allows site visitors to email you. But this will never bring in leads as effectively as true offers will.
• Product-Centric Content: We’re talking brochures, product videos, etc. Yes, these can be great tools to introduce to leads who are close to making a purchasing decision, but there’s no reason they should be gated behind a form. You should want your site visitors to be able to access this type of content freely and frictionlessly. And if site visitors are looking at this type of content, they’re likely already in your sales funnel and much closer to making a purchasing decision.
• Customer Case Studies: Just like product-centric content, customer case studies are likely something you want to make it very easy for visitors to access. Making a visitor or lead fill out a form is unnecessary.
• Fact Sheets: Simply put, fact sheets and other company-focused content is not lead generation material. 

What an Offer Is 

The good news is, you have quite a few great options at your disposal in terms of the types of offers you can, well, offer your target audience…

• Ebooks
• Guides
• Webinars (Live & Archived)
• Slideshows
• Kits
• Industry Case Studies
• New Industry Research
• Templates
• Free Tools
• Free Trials
• Product Demos
• Consultations
• Coupons

What Makes an Offer a Good One?

While the types of offers we mentioned above are all great options for marketing offers, there are a number of qualities that an offer should possess in order for it to be effective for lead generation and nurturing. Here are our top three:

1. Is High Quality/Premium and Valuable to Your Target Audience

The important thing to remember is that, if you’re requiring a site visitor to complete a form in order to obtain your offer, the value of that offer needs to be compelling enough to convince those visitors to fill out the form. People don’t like to give up their contact information freely, and your lead-capture form will create some friction. So if you start putting mediocre, low-value offers behind your forms, your business will start to get known for bad offers that aren’t worth the form completion, seriously hurting your lead generation and nurturing goals.

In the simplest sense, an offer is valuable if it addresses the problems, needs, and interests of your target audience. This value could also mean different things for offers used in different stages of the sales process. For example, an offer you’re promoting to generate net new leads at the top of your funnel (like, say, an educational ebook or a webinar) is likely valuable because it educates your prospects and fulfills a need. A free product trial, on the other hand, may not be as educational in nature, but it’s still a very valuable offer for existing leads you’re trying to nurture and who are closer to making a purchasing decision.

2. Aligns With Your Business and the Products/Services You Offer

A great marketing offer complements the products and services your business sells. That educational ebook is probably not very focused on how awesome your products and services are, but it should address concepts that align with your paid offerings. For example, HubSpot sells inbound marketing software, so our offers focus on helping prospects with their marketing challenges. These offers help set HubSpot apart as an industry thought leader and educate prospects about the problems our software helps to solve.

3. Targeted to the Right Buyer Persona at the Right Time

As we hinted at before, a truly great marketing offer also takes into account a person’s point in the sales process as well as that buyer persona‘s specific interests and needs. How this really comes into play is in lead nurturing campaigns and how you decide which calls-to-action (CTAs) to place where on your website.

If you use lead management software, you can easily collect key pieces of information (AKA lead intelligence) about your prospects that will help you segment your leads into nurturing campaigns based on their buyer persona, their point in the sales process, and what you can determine their interests are based on their activity on your website. Sending them offers that appeal to those interests as well as how close they are to making a purchasing decision can help you better qualify a lead before he/she gets handed off to sales. For example, if your business is in plumbing and a first-time visitor comes to your site and downloads an ebook on how to unclog a minor plumbing backup, you might enter them into a lead nurturing campaign that then invites them to also attend a webinar about common plumbing problems and how to fix them. As they move further through the sales cycle, you could then offer them a coupon that discounts your services for that (apparently) not-so-minor drain problem they’re having.

The same concept applies to how you choose which calls-to-action should be placed on different pages of your website. For example, if you conduct analysis that shows that your blog is typically how new visitors find you (whether through social media, search engines, or another referrer), you can infer that many people who land on your blog are first-time visitors to your website. Therefore, on your blog, you should probably place CTAs for offers that appeal to people who are just entering the top of your funnel and know little about your company (like an educational webinar, ebook, or kit, for example). On the other hand, a visitor on something like a product page probably indicates someone who is much closer to a purchasing decision. What might be more valuable to those types of visitors is a CTA for something like a free product trial, or a demo if you’re a software vendor.

How to Leverage Your Offers Effectively

Now that you have a much clearer understanding of what makes a good marketing offer (and what doesn’t), let’s dive into some offer best practices. After all, you can create a ton of great offers, but if you’re not using them to your best advantage, they’re not going to do much good to generate and nurture leads.

1. Create a lot of targeted offers. First things first. With all that talk about targeting and segmenting the right offers to the right buyer persona (at the right time), you can probably guess that what all that translates to is a need for a variety of offers. Building up an arsenal of offers is the toughest part of the whole process, but it can mean the difference between good results and awesome results. Create a spreadsheet that allows you to list the offers you currently have, highlight the holes in your group of offers (for what topic are you missing an offer that your audience would appreciate?), and map offers to the various points in your business’ sales process. Then slowly work through your offer to-do list, gradually filling in those gaps.

2. Put offers behind lead-capture forms. If offers are the gateways to lead generation, lead-capture forms (AKA conversion forms) are the gateways to your offers. Always place your offers on landing pages, gated by forms. This allows you to collect information that helps you qualify a new or reconverting lead and track what they’ve downloaded from you throughout the sales cycle.

3. Create calls-to-action, and place them appropriately. We mentioned this above, but it’s an important one. Create CTAs for each of your offers, and align them with the pages on your website. In other words, if you’re that plumber we mentioned above and you just wrote a blog post about the best and worst products to unclog a drain, you might place a CTA for your free guide to the best plumbing products of 2012. Once you have created awesome-looking CTA buttons for your site and you’re moving onto ninja status, you can also test different versions of your CTAs to determine which ones generate the best click-through rate.

4. Create blog content around your offers. Take that last best practice one step further, and create content specifically around your new offers to help launch and promote them. So if you just created that ‘Best Plumbing Products of 2012′ guide, why not write a blog article that highlights the top 5 products mentioned in the guide and couple that with your CTA, explaining that readers can learn more by downloading the new guide? Excerpts make for easy blog content, so you’ll be killing two birds with one stone!

5. Promote your offers in social media. The promotion of your offers shouldn’t have to remain on your website. Use social media as a promotional vehicle by sharing links to the landing pages for your offers and briefly explaining their value in your tweets, Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn posts. Spend some time to build your social media reach so you can expose your offers to as large an audience as possible.

6. Use them in email marketing and lead nurturing. As we mentioned above, offers are critical to a business’ lead nurturing efforts, but you can also promote them using general email marketing as dedicated sends. Promote your new offer in a dedicated email send that only highlights that one offer and conveys its value. If it’s a very general offer that every buyer persona in your audience would enjoy regardless of their point in the sales cycle, send it to your entire list. If it’s a more targeted offer, segment your list, and send it only to the people to whom it will appeal.

7. Align offers with prospects’ point in the sales process. This is another one we’ve already talked about, but it’s worth emphasizing. Aligning the offers you use in your lead nurturing campaigns and in the CTAs on your website with a prospect’s likely position in the sales cycle will not only help to better qualify a lead, but it may also shorten the sales cycle, as a prospect will be much closer to a purchasing decision with a ton of knowledge about your business before he/she even talks to a sales person.

8. Track performance with your analytics software. Measure the performance of your offers. This will help you identify which types and topics of offers are successful in generating leads and customers so you can create more offers around those topics or in those formats, helping you become a much more effective marketer. Do your prospects prefer webinars to ebooks? Do they only care about certain topics that your offers are addressing? Use what you know to improve your lead generation and lead nurturing efforts in the future.

How many offers are in your back pocket? How much do they factor into your business’ lead generation and nurturing efforts?

Image Credit: Paul Tomlin

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Posted by Stephanie Chang

One of the biggest challenges many of my clients face is building the right  SEO processes in place, so that any problems are quickly accounted for before they lead to bigger issues. Below are three things you should consider when trying to create a more streamlined process for making sure the technical foundation of the site is solid. Though none are considered "quick" or necessarily easy wins and can initially take a significant amount of time, ultimately in the long-run, they will help make monitoring the SEO on your site more efficient. This means less time spent identifying and fixing site issues and more time focusing on other aspects of SEO, like linkbuilding, developing a content strategy, etc… Overtime, the impact this will have on your site can result in high rewards. 

1) Technical Annotations in Google Analytics

Currently, many of my clients with Google Analytics accounts either don't include any annotations in Google Analytics, annotate only their email, PPC, social campaigns or use it to keep track of search engine algorithm changes (like Panda updates). However, the value of annotating any technical changes made to the site in Google Analytics creates a more efficient internal process. 

Scenario 1: Let's say that you have set up Google Alerts to alert you of any spikes and drops in traffic. Then, having technical changes annotated in Google Analytics makes it quicker and easier for you to specifically determine the cause of this spike or drop, instead of investing hours later on trying to determine the cause of these changes in traffic. In addition, any major technical issue runs the risk of being implemented improperly (in terms of SEO considerations), simply because there are so many issues to take into account. 

Here is more information on how to setup a Google Alert. 

Scenario 2: Often times SEO is not a technical priority for the development team, mostly because it is difficult to measure the ROI of what is often times, a significant amount of invested time and effort. Creating annotations in Google Analytics could help with this process- for example, if a spike in traffic were to occur and the team was somehow able to attribute this to a technical implementation on the site, the technical team could be properly recognized as being the cause of this change. 

2) Sitemaps- Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

SEOs should create an internal process where Google Webmaster Tools is checked at least once a month to ensure there are no major issues with the sitemaps or with bots crawling the site. Sitemaps are only useful if they are kept up to date and well-maintained.

Why is this important? Duane Forrester of Bing has stated that "Your Sitemap must be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a sitemap." His definition of dirt includes 404 or 500 status code errors and redirects. He continues by saying "If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap."

Best practices include submitting a new Sitemap regularly, depending on how often new content is generated on the site. A publishing site might need to update every few hours, an e-commerce site every week, and a relatively static site every month. 

Sitemaps should be checked at least on a monthly basis in Webmaster Tools to ensure there are no issues with the Sitemap.

These include:

• Checking for error messages
• Checking number of pages submitted versus indexed
• Checking for malware (and address these immediately!)
• Checking for crawl errors (like 4xx and 5xx issues)

Using Screaming Frog

If you do have a Screaming Frog account, you can also use it to verify Google Webmaster Tools errors, especially because Google Webmaster Tools do not always update their errors. Thus, you don't want to be looking for 404s that have already been fixed. You can also use it to check your sitemap for errors. To do so, simply upload the XML sitemap into Screaming Frog and crawl it. Craig Bradford of Distliled work a fantastic blog post on how to use Screaming Frog to accomplish these tasks and more. 

If Google Webmaster Tools is not periodically checked, the number of errors can seem overwhelming. Joe Robison wrote a fantastic SEOmoz post on fixing an overwhelming number of errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

3) Creating Automated Scripts 

404 Pages Returning Status 200 Codes:

Barry Schwartz wrote a blog post on how 404 pages should not return status 200 codes. The reasoning being that it could be confusing to spiders as they see a page that exists technically have no content. This can affect rankings over time because it is creates massive duplicate content as bots are crawling through the same content over and over again across several URLs. 

He also suggests creating automated scripts to check for this type of issue.

However, to initially help you determine the extent of this problem on your site and provide an estimation of the number of 404 pages that return status 200 codes, plug a site search query into Google. See example below:  

site:example.com/ "page not found"

If the query returns results, you know your site is returning status 200 codes for 404 pages and that this issue needs to be fixed. 

SEO Score Card:

I've talked about creating an SEO score card before. I've also recently recommended another version of this to another client who had hundreds of thousands of URLs. In this specific instance, they had difficulty making sure that only high-quality, non-duplicate content would be indexed. Being an e-commerce client, the site also had tons of products that were very similar (resulting in identical product descriptions and content on the site). 

I suggested creating an internal score sheet that would automatically be re-run every month to make sure that all currently indexed pages are still considered high-quality, while also offer an opportunity for pages that were once deemed low-quality to reviewed regularly. Once those low-quality pages became high-quality, they will become automatically indexed. 

This process could be used to generate the sitemaps – but the goal is to future-proof the site against future search engine algorithmic changes while improving the overall domain authority of the site. 

There are caveats that need to be addressed when creating an SEO score sheet- we want to be careful about noindexing pages, especially as overtime, this could result in less and less of the site being indexed. Once the initial script is written, check the results and see if these are actually pages that you want noindexed. If not, the script might have to be rewritten. 

The ultimate goal is to make sure that only quality pages are indexed, while also keeping tabs on how many more pages on the site need unique content. This type of knowledge can prove useful when creating the site's linkbuilding/content strategy. 

Conclusion

The overall goal is to build a streamlined process for technically auditing a site that can be described and thus, communicated internally. Creating a more efficient process means more time invested in other important elements- compiling quality content, building an online community, and social media to name a few. 

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.

That’s why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you’re not discussing the operations of content creation — like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content — nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks.

By putting in time up front to writing this editorial style guide, you’ll save time spent answering the same questions over and over; get new hires and guest contributors on the same page more quickly; and publish content that is consistent in tone, quality, and presentation, reflecting a more professional brand experience. Now let’s break down, page by page, exactly what information to include in a comprehensive editorial style guide so you can go create one for your company.

Section 1: Grammar

Decide which established style manual you will follow. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook, or the Chicago Manual of Style. You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function, instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

These style guides provide a good basis for basic grammar rules, but you’ll also probably want to make some exceptions to the rules therein for the sake of branding and style. This is the section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also highlight some of the most rules that commonly arise when writing for your company that people should commit to memory (regardless of whether it is aligned with or against AP or Chicago style). For example:

• What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product, for example? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your style book’s recommendations?
• What do you abbreviate? Would you type “a.k.a.” or “aka”?
• Do you use an Oxford comma?
• How do you spell words in your industry that don’t have a definitive spelling? Is it “ebook”, “Ebook”, or “e-book”? What about “website” versus “web site”?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that saves you time and encourages consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process. You’re creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

Section 2: Style and Tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably the most important content in your editorial style guide: how your content should sound to the reader. Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which of these adjectives do you want your content to evoke?

• Conversational
• Educational
• Academic
• Funny
• Controversial
• Irreverent
• Artistic
• Objective
• Sophisticated

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few, explain why it’s important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so. If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, this is the section in which to include that information, too. When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? Which brings us to our next page…

Section 3: Personas

This section occurs after the Style and Tone section of the editorial style guide, because understanding your target audience helps clarify for the writer the style and tone for which you’re striving. The two are so intertwined that it would also be acceptable to place this as the second section in your editorial style guide, and move Style and Tone to page 3.

Whichever way you choose, know that the personas in your editorial style guide don’t need to go as in depth as the personas you hand to your sales and marketing team. Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, and tips on identifying these personas “in the wild” or when you get them on the phone. These personas should be more brief, pulling out the highlights from your in-depth marketing personas that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, the value your company provides, how they like to be communicated with, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

If your writers understand your target audience, many questions that would normally arise during content creation are easily answered with common sense based on their knowledge of your readers.

Section 4: Content Structure

Content can come in many structures, not all of which may be right for your audience; your editorial style guide should outline which are appropriate and encouraged for your website. This will be particularly important if you outsource content creation or rely on many contributors to keep your business blog running. Consider these possible content structures when deciding the acceptable forms your content can take:

• How-To Guides
• Top Lists
• Debates Over Controversial Topics
• Serialized Content
• Data
• News
• Interviews
• Infographics
• Product, Service, or Content Reviews
• Pro/Con lists
• Video Content
• Audio Content
• Comics

As with the common grammatical errors and exceptions in the first section of your editorial style guide, you will probably encounter new content formats that you want to include on this list. Continue to edit this section as you understand which content formats perform well (or underperform) and are an important (or harmful) part of your content strategy.

Section 5: Graphics and Formatting

Like your personas, this section should be light in the editorial style guide; you can create a separate brand style guide that goes into more detail on the visual elements associated with your brand. You should, however, delineate visual details that are common to the content creation process.

• Outline from where writers can source images and how to attribute that source within the content — should they link to it at the bottom of their content, include an image caption, or work in the artist credit within the copy?
• When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
• Should text wrap around images?
• What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
• What typeface should be used?
• Can writers use italics, bolding, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headings and hyperlinks?
• What kind of bullets should be used — square, round, or other — and how do they align with the rest of your text?
• How should numbered lists appear — “1″, “1.” or “1.)”?

Many of these graphical elements can be preset in your content management system (CMS), but they can also be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these core expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

Section 6: Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer’s job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw, and even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and “do not mentions.”

The information in the “do not mention” section should include competitors and unreliable resources, but it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable and how to frame the discussion. This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

Section 7: Sourcing

With great research comes great responsibility…and unfortunately a lot of choices, too. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external cites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company. This section of your editorial style guide doesn’t need to be long; just write down the rules, and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

Illustrating the Difference Between Right and Wrong

Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you’re explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide. For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with call-outs that detail why the elements therein are successful. Or if you’re discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide. Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you’ve laid out.

Do you have an editorial style guide for your company? What else do you include in yours?

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Which is better? 50 qualified social media followers, or 1,000 followers, many of whom will never buy from you? The answer may surprise you.

In social media, reach is of critical importance. It directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared, it increases your business’ ability to get found and generate leads, it can help extend your online footprint as a thought leader, and the list goes on. In other words, in an online world, social reach shouldn’t be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing. So, have you figured out what the right answer to our first question is yet? If the title of this article wasn’t enough of a hint, yes, more followers is always better.

It may seem obvious (more is always better….right?), but a lot of businesses fall into the trap of thinking fewer and more qualified is better. In this case, here’s why it’s not…

1. More followers means access to more followers’ followers.

This concept, albeit simple, is pivotal to understanding the overall importance of reach, so here goes. Think about it: Every one of your fans/followers also has his/her own followers, be it 5, 500, or 5,000. Let’s say that a follower who has 5,000 Twitter followers of his own shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets. Now, that content is getting exposed to 5,000 additional people who weren’t directly following you. If you can understand that every one of your fans/followers might share your content with their friends and followers, now you can start understanding the awesome impact of reach. So even if that original follower of yours never becomes a customer himself, that doesn’t mean one of his followers who saw your content because of him won’t. Now that’s some powerful stuff.

2. Influencers have, well, influence.

If you can build up a large following for your business in social media, you probably have a few influencers among the bunch. While these influencers may follow but never buy from you, remember that these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships, put in a good word with investors, and provide introductions to other influencers, bloggers, and experts in your industry. For example, if you can solicit an introduction from an influencer to another industry blogger that you can contribute a guest blog post to, you’ll probably benefit from a couple of inbound links. That follower may not have contributed any direct revenue to your business, but those inbound links are very valuable.   

3. Followers who won’t ever buy can still refer your business.

Indirect exposure to your followers’ personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. Okay, so Frank the Facebook fan may never actually purchase your industrial vacuum cleaner for his teeny tiny small business office. But when his buddy, landlord Lenny, is searching for a new one for the apartment building he owns, Facebook fan Frank might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn’t the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Frank is. Need I say more?

4. Social shares impact SEO.

The impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when they’re ranking your content, which means the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.

Let’s say you own a dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of your dog’s coat in between visits to the groomer. But let’s also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you and his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+, too. All of a sudden, your competitor has quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in search ahead of yours. In other words, because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking your content, it behooves you to build up your following and encourage those social shares. If you tweeted your article and you have 1,000 followers compared to your competitors’ 50 followers, you have a much better chance of generating social shares and a much better chance of ranking in search. Those people who shared your content may never become customers of your dog grooming business themselves, but someone who finds your article in search because of them might.

5. Your followers might surprise you.

If you’ve been doing your research and spending time developing buyer personas, you likely have a pretty solid grasp on who your ideal customers are. That’s all well and good, but if you have a very narrow-minded idea of who exactly will buy your products and services, you could actually miss out on a completely different set of people who might also buy from you.

To use a classic example, the makers of baking soda had a very specific use case in mind for their product: baking. But we all know that the uses for baking soda extend way beyond baking –  it can also be used to extinguish small electrical fires, for personal hygiene, and as a cleaning agent, to name a few. And you can bet that some people who buy baking soda never even use it for baking.

The lesson here is that building up a large following in social media could expose your brand and products to a group — or groups — of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you sell. Your product or service may not have completely different, original uses like baking soda does, but your followers could still surprise you. Just because a social media follower doesn’t fall neatly into one of your cookie cutter buyer personas, doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t buy from you.

Always Be Working to Build Social Reach

The ultimate takeaway here is this: just because followers may not directly turn into customers doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the ones who understand this know that continuing to build reach is a smart social media tactic.

If building reach isn’t something you’re consciously doing, you may want to start working to attract more fans and followers for your social media accounts. In this article, we’ve got some great tips for building reach that can help get you going. Doing so can greatly increase the impact and ROI of your social media efforts. And if you’re having a tough time convincing your boss that building reach is important, share this article with them

In what ways are you working to regularly increase your business’ social reach?

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Posted by Dave Sottimano

I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly.

I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes.

I'm specifically going to look for crawling, indexing and potential Panda threatening issues like:

1. Architecture (unnecessary redirection, orphaned pages, nofollow)
2. Indexing & Crawling (canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, redirects, robots.txt, server errors)
3. Duplicate content & On page SEO (repeated text, pagination, parameter based, dupe/missing titles, h1s, etc..)

Don't worry if you're not technical, most of the tools and methods I'm going to use are very well documented around the web.

Let's meet our volunteers!

• http://cvcsports.com/
• http://www.webrevolve.com
• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/

Here's what I'll be using to do this job:

1. SEOmoz toolbar – Make sure highlight nofollow links is turned on – so you can visibly diagnose crawl path restrictions
2. Screaming Frog Crawler - Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot) – Full user guide here
3. Chrome, and Firefox (FF will have Javascript, CSS disabled and User Agent as Googlebot) – To look for usability problems caused by CSS or Javascript
4. Google search queries – to check the index for issues like content duplication, dupe subdomains, penalties etc..

Here are other checks I've done, but left out in the interest of keeping it short:

1. Open Site Explorer - Download a back link report to see if you're missing out on links pointing to orphaned, 302 or incorrect URLs on your site. If you find people linking incorrectly, add some 301 rules on your site to harness that link juice
2. http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/bulk-http-header-compare/ - Check if the site is redirecting Googlebot specifically 
3. http://spyonweb.com/ - Any other domains connected you should know about? Mainly for duplicate content
4. http://builtwith.com/ - Find out if the site is using Apache, IIS, PHP and you'll know which vulnerabilities to look for automatically
5. Check for hidden text, CSS display:none funniness, robots.txt blocked external JS files, hacked / orphaned pages

My essential reports before I dive in:

1. Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot)
2. A report of everything in Google's index using the site: (1000 results per query unfortunately – this is how I do it)

Down to business…

Architecture Issues

1) Important broken links

We'll always have broken links here and there, and in an ideal world they would all work. Just make sure for SEO & usability that important links (homepage) are always in good shape. The following broken link is on webrevolve homepage that should be pointing to their blog, but returns a 404. This is an important link because it's a great feature and I definitely do want to read more of their content.

Fix: Get in there and point that link to the correct page which is http://www.webrevolve.com/our-blog/

How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report

2) Unnecessary Redirection

This happens a lot more than people like to believe. The problem is that when we 301 a page to a new home we often forget to correct the internal links pointing to the old page (the one with the 301 redirect). 

This page http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure.html 301 redirects to http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html

However, they still have internal links pointing to the old page.

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?linkid=bankruptcy

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/category/credit-repair/page/10

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/collections.html

Fix: Get in that CMS and change the internal links to point to http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html

How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report

3) Multiple subdomains – Canonicalizing the www or non-www version

One of the first basic principles of SEO, and there are still tons of legacy sites that are tragically splitting their link authority by not using redirecting the www to non-www or vice versa.

Sorry to pick on you CVSports :S

• http://cvcsports.com/

• http://www.cvcsports.com/

Oh, and a couple more have got their way into Google's index that you should remove too:

• http://smtp.cvcsports.com/

• http://pop.cvcsports.com/

• http://mx1.cvcsports.com/

• http://ww.cvcsports.com/

• http://www.buildyourjacket.com/

• http://buildyourjacket.com/

Basically, you have 7 copies of your site in the index..

Fix: I recommend using www.cvcsports.com as the main page, and you should use your htaccess file to create 301 redirects for all of these subdomains to the main www site.

How did I find it? Google query "site:cvcsports.com -www" (I also set my results number to 100 for check through the index quicker)

4) Keeping URL structure consistent 

It's important to note that this only becomes a problem when external links are pointing to the wrong URLs. *Almost* every back link is precious, and we want to ensure that we get maximum value from each one. Except we can control how we get linked to; without www, with capitals, or trailing slashes for example. Short of contacting the webmaster to change it, we can always employ 301 redirects to harness as much value as possible. The one place this shouldn't happen is on your own site.

We all know that www.example.com/CAPITALS is different to www.example.com/captials when it comes to external link juice. As good SEOs we typically combat human error by having permanent redirect rules to enforce only one version of a URL (ex. forcing lowercase), which may cause unnecessary redirects if someone links in contradiction to redirects.

Here are some examples from our sites:

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/rebuild-credit 301's to trailing slash version
• http://webrevolve.com/web-design-development/conversion-rate-optimisation/ Redirects to the www version

Fix: Determine your URL structure, should they all have trailing slashes, www, lowercase? Whatever you decide, be consistent and you can avoid future problems. Crawl your site, and fix these 

Indexing & Crawling

1) Check for Penalties

None of our volunteers have any immediately noticeable penalties, so we can just move on. This is a 2 second check that you must do before trying to nitpick at other issues.

How did I do it? Google search queries for exact homepage URL and brand name. If it doesn't show up, you'll have to investigate further.

2) Canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, robots.txt

I always do this so I understand how clued up SEO-wise the developers are, and to gain more insight into the site. You wouldn't check for these tags in detail unless you had just cause (ex. A page that should be ranking isn't

I'm going to combine this section as it requires much more than just a quick look, especially on bigger sites. First and foremost check robots.txt and look through some of the blocked directories, try and determine why they are being blocked and which bots they are blocking them from. Next, get Screaming Frog in the mix as it's internal crawl report will automatically check each URL for Meta Data (noindex, header level nofollow & follow) and give you the canonical URL if there happens to be one.

If you're spot checking a site, the first thing you should do is understand what tags are in use and why they're using them.

Take Webrevolve for instance, they've chosen to NOINDEX,FOLLOW all of their blog author pages.

• http://www.webrevolve.com/author/tom/ 

• http://www.webrevolve.com/author/paul/

This is a guess but I think these pages don't provide much value, and are generally not worth seeing in search results. If these were valuable, traffic driving pages, I would suggest they remove NOINDEX but in this case I believe they've made the right choice.

They also implement self-serving canonical tags (yes I just made that up), basically each page will have a canonical tag that points to itself. I generally have no problem with this practice as it usually makes it easier for developers.

Example: http://www.webrevolve.com/our-work/websites/ecommerce/

3) Number of pages VS Number of pages indexed by Google

What we really want to know here is how many pages Google has indexed. There's 2 ways of doing this, using Google Webmaster Tools by submitting a sitemap you'll get stats back on how many URLs are actually in the index.

OR you can do it without having access but it's much less efficient. This is how I would check…

1. Run a Screaming Frog Crawl (make sure you obey robots.txt)
2. Do a site: query
3. Get the *almost never accurate* results number and compare them to total pages in crawl

If the numbers aren't close, like CVCSports (206 pages vs 469 in the index) you probably want to look into it further.

I can tell you right now that CVCSports has 206 pages (not counting those that have been blocked by robots.txt). Just by doing this quickly I can tell there's something funny going on and I need to look deeper.

Just to cut to the chase, CVCsports has multiple copies of the domain on subdomains which is causing this.

Fix: It varies. You could have complicated problems, or it might just be as easy as using canonical, noindex, or 301 redirects. Don't be tempted to block the unwanted pages by robots.txt as this will not remove pages from the index, and will only prevent these pages from being crawled.

Duplicate Content & On Page SEO

Google's Panda update was definitely a game changer, and it caused massive losses for some sites. One of the easiest ways of avoiding at least part of Panda's destructive path is to avoid all duplicate content on your site.

1) Parameter based duplication

URL parameters like search= or keyword= often cause duplication unintentionally. Here's some examples:

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

Fix: Again, it varies. If I was giving general advice I would say use clean links in the first place – depending on the complexity of the site you might consider 301s, canonical tags or even NOINDEX. Either way, just get rid of them !

How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal Crawl > Hash tag column

Basically, Screaming Frog will create a unique hexadecimal number based on source code. If you have matching hash tags, you have duplicate source code (exact dupe content). Once you have your crawl ready, use excel to filter it out (complete instructions here).

2) Duplicate Text content

Having the same text on multiple pages shouldn't be a crime, but post Panda it's better to avoid it completely. I hate to disappoint here, but there's no exact science to finding duplicate text content.

Sorry CVCSports, you're up again

http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwwww.cvcsports.com%2F

Don't worry, we've already addressed your issues above, just use 301 redirects to get rid of these copies

Fix: Write unique content as much as possible. Or be cheap and stick it in an image, that works too. 

How did I find it? I used http://www.copyscape.com, but you can also copy & paste text into Google search

3) Duplication caused by pagination

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3… You get the picture. Over time, sites can accumulate thousands if not millions of duplicate pages because of those nifty page links. I swear I've seen a site with 300 pages for one product page.

Our examples:

• http://cvcsports.com/blog?page=1

• http://cvcsports.com/blog?page=2

Are they being indexed? Yes.

Another example?

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/23

• http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/22

Are they being indexed? Yes.

Fix: General advice is to use the NOINDEX, FOLLOW directive. (This tells Google not to add this page to the index, but crawl through the page). An alternative might be to use the canonical tag but this all depends on the reason why pagination exists. For example, if you had a story that was separated across 3 pages, you definitely would want them all indexed. However, these example pages are pretty thin and *could* be considered as low quality for Google.

How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal links > Check for pagination parameters 

Open up the pages and you'll quickly determine if they are auto generated, thin pages. Once you know the pagination parameter or structure of the URL you can check Google's index like so: site:example.com inurl:page=

Time's up! There's so much more I wish I could do, but I was strict about the 1 hour time limit. A big thank you to the brave volunteers who put their sites forward for this post. There was one site that just didn't make the cut, mainly because they've done a great job technically, and, um, I couldn't find any technical faults.

Now it's time for the community to take some shots at me! 

• How did I do?
• What could I have done better? 
• Any super awesome tools I forgot?
• Any additional tips for the volunteer sites?

Thanks for reading, you can reach me on Twitter @dsottimano if want to chat and share your secrets

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Posted by Dan Peskin

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

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A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can’t even fathom what you’d do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they’re running this year!), we’ve come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you’re thinking you’d spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.

25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial

1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!

2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!

3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!

4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!

5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!

6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!

7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!

8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!

11.) Repair your company’s spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!

12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company’s celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!

13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!

14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let’s hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!

15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!

16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!

17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!

18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College’s Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!

19.) Or, if you’re happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!

20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you’ll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!

21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing “Happy Birthday” on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!

22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren’t good enough. Tweet This!

23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!

24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, “best company in the world” for 11,666 years. Tweet This!

25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!

Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you’d spend actually producing the commercial…

If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?

Image credit: Images_of_Money

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As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to “the way it was,” and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let’s learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.

This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.

As a marketer, you should be cheering.

Amazon’s Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry

Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. “What’s that?” you ask? “Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them.” That’s right — Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.

But Amazon doesn’t care.

As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn’t matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.

Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon’s published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.

The Third Wave of Media

Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”

Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube’s new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”

User Experience and the Third Wave of Media

Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress. 

It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, “The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”

Niche AND Quality

The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That’s why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.

The idea of remarkable content isn’t anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn’t happen. Online video providers and ebook authors’ best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.

Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn’t Already Happened

The fact that the world is constantly changing isn’t news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it’s not that we as people or as a society don’t want to change. It’s the simple fact that change is exhausting.

Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: “Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”

The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won’t blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.

Marketing in a Transitional Media World

It’s time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can’t wake up years from now and decide that it’s time to change. It’d be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.

Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.

1. Find Your Niche – Your niche isn’t the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don’t have products to sell.

2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content – The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it’s published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content. 

3. Have a Personality – Don’t be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don’t be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.

4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen – For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn’t just about their size, but it’s also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.

Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.

Change is here.

Image Credit: Ariane Middel

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Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.

The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.

Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.

‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.

Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems

In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.

Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.

The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.

Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.

A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.

In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.

Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene

Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.

In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.

Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.

To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.

Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers

Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.

Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.

Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.

Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.

Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?

Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing

The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.

Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?

Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.

Solution: Nurture Your Leads

Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.

If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.

Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.

What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?

This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.

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