Context is King: A Million Examples of Creative Ad Campaigns Getting it Right

Posted by Daniel_Marks

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

This was one of the first television commercials to ever air:

Talking to the camera on a mic was the obvious way to leverage television: after all, that's how radio commercials worked. Now, advertisers could just put radio commercials on television. What an exciting new advertising medium!

As it turns out, putting radio commercials on television wasn’t really the best use of this new medium. Sound familiar? This seems awfully similar to the current practice of turning your television commercial into a YouTube pre-roll ad. However, the difference this time isn’t the media format, which is largely similar (YouTube videos are still video, banner ads are still text + image, podcast sponsorships are still voice, etc.) Instead, the difference is how people are consuming the content; in other words, the context.

A television commercial is a relatively static experience: 30 seconds of video placed within a few appropriate time slots, reaching people in their living room (or possibly bedroom). A Facebook newsfeed ad is a little more dynamic: it can be seen anywhere (home, office, bus, etc.), at anytime, by anyone, in almost any format and next to almost any content. The digital age has basically exacerbated the "problem" of context by offering up a thousand different ways for consumers to interact with your marketing.

But, with great problems comes great opportunity — or something like that. So, what are some ways to leverage context in the digital age?

Intent context

Different channels have different user intents. On one end of the funnel are channels like Facebook and Snapchat that are great fillers of the empty space in our lives. This makes them well-suited for top-of-funnel brand advertising because you aren't looking for something specific and are therefore more receptive to brand messaging (though you can certainly use Facebook for direct marketing purposes).

BuzzFeed, for example, has done a great job of tailoring their Snapchat content to the intent of the channel — it’s about immediate gratification, not driving off-channel behaviors:

This feels like you’re watching your friend’s Snapchat story, not professionally produced branded content. However, it’s still the early days for Snapchat — all companies, including BuzzFeed, are trying to figure out what kind of content makes sense for their goals.

As for Facebook, there are plenty of examples of doing brand awareness right, but one of the more famous ones is by A1 Steak Sauce. It was both set and promoted (in part) on Facebook:

Critically, the video works with or without sound.

On the other end of the funnel is something like AdWords: great when you know what you’re looking for, not so great when you don’t. This subway ad for health insurance from Oscar feels pretty out of place when you use the same copy for AdWords:

Getting intent right means that you need to actually experience your ad as a user would. It’s not enough to put a bunch of marketers together in a conference room and watch the YouTube ad you created. You need to feel the ad as a user would. This means watching your ad when you’re in the living room and just clicked on a friend's YouTube link from Facebook to watch a soccer highlight (or whatever).

Situational context

Situational context (is that redundant?) can be leveraged with a whole range of strategies, but the overarching theme is the same: make users feel like the ad they’re seeing is uniquely built for their current situation. It’s putting a YouTube star in pre-roll ads on their own channel, or quickly tweeting something off the back of a current event:

Power out? No problem. http://pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

...or digital experiences that are relevant to the sporting event a user is watching:

There are thousands of examples of doing this right:

• Burger King tailors its pre-roll ads to the video you’re about to watch
• HubSpot plays off the fact that you just unsubscribed from their email list
• Netflix shows you a "Friends" clip related to the YouTube video you’re about to watch
• Coke triggers an app notification while watching a Coke commercial
• YouTube automatically adds links to purchase a movie to fan-uploaded movie scenes
• Shopify reaches you with a simple message just after logging out:

Behavioral context

You might want people on Facebook to watch your video with sound, but the reality is that 85% of Facebook video views are silent. You might want people to watch your brilliant one-minute YouTube ad, but the reality is that 94% of users skip an ad after 5 seconds You need to embrace user behaviors instead of railing against them, like these smart people:

• Wells Fargo creates a Facebook version of their television ad: http://ift.tt/1SThs0Z
  
  The important takeaways are making it short, having captions to make it understandable without sound, and putting the brand mention earlier in the video.

• Geico makes an “unskippable” 5 second YouTube ad:
  How do you reach people who skip your commercial after 5 seconds? Make the ad 5 seconds long!

Understanding channel behaviors means not using channel features for the sake of channel features while still taking advantage of behaviors that allow for richer ad experiences. It means using the channel yourself, looking up the relevant research, talking to experts, and making informed decisions about how people will actually engage with your creative work.

Location context

A user’s location can prompt geographic-specific advertising (for example, Facebook Local Awareness Ads or in-store Snapchat filters). It can feel gimmicky when used needlessly, but can provide a compelling marketing experience when done right.

AirBnB’s slogan is "belong anywhere." One of the ways to feel like a local in a new city is to have locals give you a personal tour — which is exactly what AirBnB provides by targeting people on mobile when they’re looking for directions:

Or you can just make use of location services in more straightforward ways, like how the Bernie Sanders campaign targeted his core demographics in New York before the important primary by using Snapchat Geofilters.

However, be careful about inferring location from device — only 17% of mobile searches are on the go.

Audience context

Audience targeting is likely the most powerful form of context provided by digital marketing. You can segment your audience in a thousand different ways — from Facebook Lookalikes to Google Customer Match — that a billboard could only dream of. The more you customize your ad copy to the audience you’re targeting, the better off you’ll be. (There seems to be a running theme here…)

You could directly speak to the audience of your competitors by targeting branded keywords:

Or better yet, target competitor customers that are about to change services:

Great tip: Target the keywords “Cancel [your competitor’s service]" w/ PPC ads. @wilreynolds #searchlove <— Brilliant strategy
— Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing) October 27, 2014

Retargeting is another powerful way to use audience context by changing your copy to reflect the actions a user has taken on your site (more great retargeting examples here):

Then, of course, there are all the obvious ways of leveraging audience, such as adjusting your value proposition, using a slightly different tone, or tweaking the offer you provide.

There’s a cliché that the digital age has killed advertising creativity. Forget about clever copy or innovative work, It’s all about spreadsheets and algorithms now. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Internet didn’t kill advertising creativity — it just raised the bar. Content in all its forms (video ads, blog posts, tweets, etc.) will always be important. It might be harder to buy engaged eyeballs for your 30-second commercial online, but content done right can reach millions of people who are voluntarily consuming it. More importantly, though, the Internet lets you engage with your audience in a thousand innovative ways, providing a revamped arena for marketing creativity: context.

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Using Google Tag Manager to Dynamically Generate Schema.org/JSON-LD Tags

Posted by serpschris

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

One of the biggest takeaways from SearchFest in Portland earlier this year was the rapidly rising importance of semantic search and structured data — in particular Schema.org. And while implementing Schema used to require a lot of changes to your site's markup, the JSON-LD format has created a great alternative to adding microdata to a page with minimal code.

Check out Mike Arnesen's deck from his SearchFest talk, "Understanding & Facilitating Semantic Search," for a great overview on using structured data.

What was even more exciting was the idea that you could use Google Tag Manager to insert JSON-LD into a page, allowing you to add Schema markup to your site without having to touch the site's code directly (in other words, no back and forth with the IT department).

Trouble is, while it seemed like Tag Manager would let you insert a JSON-LD snippet on the page no problem, it didn't appear to be possible to use other Tag Manager features to dynamically generate that snippet. Tag Manager lets you create variables by extracting content from the page using either CSS selectors or some basic JavaScript. These variables can then be used dynamically in your tags (check out Mike's post on semantic analysis for a good example).

So if we wanted to grab that page URL and pass it dynamically to the JSON-LD snippet, we might have tried something like this:

But that doesn't work. Bummer.

Meaning that if you wanted to use GTM to add the the BlogPosting Schema type to each of your blog posts, you would have to create a different tag and trigger (based on the URL) for each post. Not exactly scalable.

But, with a bit of experimentation, I’ve figured out a little bit of JavaScript magic that makes it possible to extract data from the existing content on the page and dynamically create a valid JSON-LD snippet.

Dynamically generating JSON-LD

The reason why our first example doesn't work is because Tag Manager replaces each variable with a little piece of JavaScript that calls a function — returning the value of whatever variable is called.

We can see this error in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:

The error is the result of Tag Manager inserting JavaScript into what should be a JSON tag — this is invalid, and so the tag fails.

However, we can use Tag Manager to insert a JavaScript tag, and have that JavaScript tag insert our JSON-LD tag.

If you're not super familiar with JavaScript, this might look pretty complicated, but it actually works the exact same way as many other tags you’re probably already using (like Google Analytics, or Tag Manager itself).

Here, our Schema data is contained within the JavaScript "data" object, which we can dynamically populate with variables from Tag Manager. The snippet then creates a script tag on the page with the right type (application/ld+json), and populates the tag with our data, which we convert to JSON using the JSON.stringify function.

The purpose of this example is simply to demonstrate how the script works (dynamically swapping out the URL for the Organization Schema type wouldn't actually make much sense). So let's see how it could be used in the real world.

Dynamically generating Schema.org tags for blog posts

Start with a valid Schema template

First, build out a complete JSON/LD Schema snippet for a single post based on the http://ift.tt/KdiOY5 specification.

Identify the necessary dynamic variables

There are a number of variables that will be the same between articles; for example, the publisher information. Likewise, the main image for each article has a specific size generated by WordPress that will always be the same between posts, so we can keep the height and width variables constant.

In our case, we've identified 7 variables that change between posts that we'll want to populate dynamically:

Create the variables within Google Tag Manager

• Main Entity ID: The page URL.
• Headline: We'll keep this simple and use the page title.
• Date Published and Modified: Our blog is on WordPress, so we already have meta tags for "article:published_time" and "article:modified_time". The modified_time isn't always included (unless the post is modified after publishing), but the Schema specification recommends including it, so we should set dateModified to the published date if it there isn't already a modified date. In some circumstances, we may need to re-format the date — fortunately, in this case, it's already in the ISO 860 format, so we're good.
• Author Name: In some cases we're going to need to extract content from the page. Our blog lists the author and published date in the byline. We'll need to extract the name, but leave out the time stamp, trailing pipe, and spaces.

• Article Image: Our blog has Yoast installed, which has specified image tags for Twitter and Open Graph. Note: I'm using the meta twitter:image instead of the og:image tag value due to a small bug that existed with the open graph image on our blog when I wrote this.
• Article Description: We'll use the meta description.

Here is our insertion script, again, that we'll use in our tag, this time with the properties swapped out for the variables we'll need to create:

I'm leaving out dateModified right now — we'll cover than in a minute.

Extracting meta values

Fortunately, Tag Manager makes extracting values from DOM elements really easy — especially because, as is the case with meta properties, the exact value we need will be in one of the element's attributes. To extract the page title, we can get the value of the <title> tag. We don't need to specify an attribute name for this one:

For meta properties, we can extract the value from the content attribute:

Tag Manager also has some useful built-in variables that we can leverage — in this case, the Page URL:

Processing page elements

For extracting the author name, the markup of our site makes it so that just a straight selector won't work, meaning we’ll need to use some custom JavaScript to grab just the text we want (the text of the span element, not the time element), and strip off the last 3 characters (" | ") to get just the author's name.

In case there's a problem with this selector, I've also put in a fallback (just our company name), to make sure that if our selector fails a value is returned.

Testing

Tag Manager has a great feature that allows you to stage and test tags before you deploy them.

Once we have our variables in place, we can enter the Preview mode and head to one of our blog posts:

Here we can check the values of all of our variables to make sure that the correct values are coming through.

Finally, we set up our tag, and configure it to fire where we want. In this case, we're just going to fire these tags on blog posts:

And here's the final version of our tag.

For our dateModified parameter, we added a few lines of code that check whether our modified variable is set, and if it’s not, sets the "dateModified" JSON-LD variable to the published date. You can find the raw code here.

Now we can save the tag, deploy the current version, and then use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to validate our work:

Success!!

---

This is just a first version of this code, which is serving to test the idea that we can use Google Tag Manager to dynamically insert JSON-LD/Schema.org tags. However after just a few days we checked in with Google Search Console and it confirmed the BlogPosting Schema was successfully found on all of our blog posts with no errors, so I think this is a viable method for implementing structured data.

Structured data is becoming an increasingly important part of an SEO's job, and with techniques like this we can dramatically improve our ability to implement structured data efficiently, and with minimal technical overhead.

I'm interested in hearing the community's experience with using Tag Manager with JSON-LD, and I'd love to hear if people have success using this method!

Happy tagging!

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Why Listing Accuracy is Important - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by George-Freitag

Whether you manage a single local listing or hundreds, the consistency of your NAP data across the web can either help grow your business, or serve as a barrier to customer discovery.

With answers for business owners, SEOs dabbling in local search, and those at enterprise-level searching for a broad solution, Moz Local's George Freitag stars in this week's Whiteboard Friday covering all the boons and secrets of listing accuracy (give him a warm welcome, folks!).

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

Video Transcription

Hi. My name is George Freitag with Moz Local, and today I wanted to talk about listing accuracy. The reason why I wanted to talk about it was because it's one of those topics that is brought up a lot in local search. If you work in local search directly or if you work with an agency or an SEO on local search, it's one of those things that you've probably heard a lot about, you understand it's something you have to do, you understand that it's very important because it is, but you might not understand exactly what it means, why it's important, how come you have to do it, or why it takes as much time as it does. So today, I wanted to spend the time to go over why listing accuracy is important, how it works and how you can do that.

So to start out, let's just look at an actual local search result. Let's say this is a search for what you do. This is a search for a burger restaurant, if you run a burger restaurant. You've got your three local results. It's on a phone, so that's pretty much all you get, is those three listings, and this is where you want to be, but you aren't.

So why aren't you? How come your clients, your competitors are on this search result, but you aren't? It has to do with trust.

A story about trust

So to demonstrate why trust is so important, I want to go over a quick story about me when I was looking for a bank a few years ago. I don't go to the bank that often. So when it came time, I got out my phone, punched out Google Maps, and then proceeded to walk for the next seven blocks with my face buried in my phone, checking my Twitter and email and whatever. When the little lady inside told me I'd arrived, I looked up and saw that the place was closed. Not even just closed for the day. It was closed altogether.

So that is Google's greatest fear, because if there's one reason why you, me, anyone will stop using Google is if that happens over and over again. If I repeatedly get sent to businesses that don't exist, if I try to call them and the call information is incorrect, then I'm going to stop using Google, and so Google takes that very seriously.

In fact, Google is putting itself even more on the line with additional business information. If you've done a local search lately, and I assume that you have if you've watched this video, you'll see that in this Knowledge Graph they're giving you all sorts of information. They're telling you whether or not the store is open. They're linking you to reviews. They are just giving a ton of information in their local search results. And if they're not confident on all the information they have, then they're not going to show it, because if they repeatedly show that a place is closed when it's not, then you're going to stop using Google. So Google takes trust very seriously.

Listing accuracy

So how does Google determine trust? That is where listing accuracy comes into play. Listing accuracy is Google's method for determining whether or not it can trust a local business search result.

So to show how that works, let's go over here and say this is your business and let's say that you've already set up your Google My Business page. You've already set up your name, address, phone, your NAP. If you haven't done anything along those lines, there's plenty of information on our website and on other places online about how to do that.

But let's say that you've already set up your Google My Business. It's absolutely perfect with your business name, all your hours, all the images are filled out, and it's still not showing up here. Well, one of the reasons may be because of this concept of listing accuracy.

So here's your listing, but what you might not know of or you might be kind of aware of are these other slight variations that exist elsewhere online, and these might just exist somewhere. So let's say you've got one variation where the address is slightly different, like it's a suite number that you don't want to have, but sometimes it mentions a suite number. Maybe it's an old phone number or an old cell phone number that somehow got indexed or an old tracking number. Maybe it's just some general bad information, just about specifically where you are or a website that's slightly different.

Then over here, you've got another variation. Maybe this is a different business name. Maybe this is a business that was in your location before you moved in. So these places just sort of exist out there on the web somewhere, and they might even be in a place that you don't even know about. They might be on an obscure website that you don't ever see, and you're not really that worried about because it's something that you know isn't really being seen by your customers.

So why should you worry about it? Why should you care about a website that's got bad information, that's on a source that you're never going to go to, you know your customers are never going to go to and probably isn't driving that much traffic your website instead? Well, it has to do with this concept of listing accuracy, because, again, this is how Google is measuring how much it can trust your information.

The local ecosystem

So over here we've got what we call the local ecosystem. You might've seen our graphic on our website, which sort of explains what the different data sources are. I just want to demonstrate how it works.

So for your listing, Google can get its information from a bunch of different places. One of them, of course, is you. So this is you providing your information directly to Google My Business. This can also be the "Report a problem" in Google Maps or Google Mapmaker.

But in addition to that, it's got all these other places that Google knows it can get business information from, and some of these places provide information directly to Google through feeds and some of them Google just knows about because it can crawl them (because basically it can just crawl anything on the web). These are places like:

• Phone directories
• Phone books
• Business directories for specific businesses like OpenTable or Healthgrades
• Review sites like Citysearch, Insider Pages
• News sites
• A restaurant review about your business
• Government websites

Each time one of these places mentions your business information, it increases the confidence that Google has in the information that you provided. So this place and this place both mention you; that works to increase the confidence that Google has in the business information that you provided, making it more likely for it to show your business in its search results. So the more times it mentions you, the greater confidence it has in your information.

But if you have these other variations sort of floating around out there, then all of a sudden Google's got some conflicting sources about your business information. So let's say that all these places are mentioning you the way that you want to be mentioned, but these places are giving slight variations. So all of a sudden Google's getting two different addresses, and so it's becoming a little bit less confident in the information that you've provided. Maybe now this place is giving a completely different phone number. So now it doesn't really want to show you because it doesn't want to have that call button on your search result.

Each time it mentions one of these, it decreases the amount of confidence, and you also lose the opportunity to build confidence in your website. In fact, if there's enough sources out here saying one thing that are contradictory to what you're saying in your own Google My Business page, these places can actually override what you're providing and Google will deem them more trustworthy than the information that you're directly providing to them. So if all these places are saying that you're open 'til six and you're telling Google you're open 'til eight, all of a sudden Google is telling everyone that you're closed when you're not, which can be absolutely detrimental to your business.

So how do you fix this and what you do about it? Well, it should be pretty clear from this graph. You want to find all these instances of Google locating business information that is not consistent with you and making it consistent. You're going to go out and find the source that's pointing at one of these variations, fix it so it's pointing at your own place. Then all of a sudden, instead of taking away from the confidence and trust Google has in your listing, it's building towards it.

Finding NAP variations

The way that you find this variation, it can just be through doing some pretty straightforward Google search. So let's go down here to some examples. You're going to use a quoted search to look for different types of information.

If you already know about some bad information out there, you already know that there's like an old business name that you used to go under or a variation of your address, you can just do a quoted search for that information directly, find all the sources that bring up that bad information, go to the website, fix it, and then move on. All along you're building the trust that Google has in your business listing.

For those places that you're not yet sure about, like I said, there might be some directories that you don't even know about or there might be some variations of your business information that you might not be aware of, so you can't search for it directly, the best way to do that is to search for your phone number in different formats.

Darren Shaw of Whitespark did a great Whiteboard Friday just a few weeks ago about exactly this, about how to find all of your NAP variations in Google. I recommend reading it if you want to follow through with this.

There are also some tools you can use. Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide has a Chrome plug-in, called Local Citation Finder*, that will just open up a whole bunch of different variations of your business information in different Chrome tabs and can really, really help with that.

*Editor's note: The tool mentioned here is actually called the NAP Hunter Chrome Extension, but Whitespark's Local Citation Finder tool is another fantastic resource to keep in your local SEO toolkit. ;-)

Enterprise-level solutions for cleaning up NAP consistency

So this might work if you've got one, a couple dozen, or maybe a hundred or so businesses. You can probably do this by hand and find all these places yourself. But if you have a ton of businesses — a few hundred or even a few thousand businesses — then this is not that scalable all of a sudden, and then it's time to move to one of these solutions where you're working with some of the primary data sources.

So these are the sources that provide the information to all of these places. The big ones are Localeze, Neustar, Infogroup, Acxiom, and Factual. We're getting into the paid options right now. But basically, some of these places have been around for decades. They're the ones who provided the phone books with their information. You might have gone to Yelp and tried to sign up and saw that you're already on there and wondered why. This is why. They're getting their information from these places, and they push out all the information to these other places.

So if you go to one or more of these, either directly or through a service like Moz Local or Yext, you can correct your information on one of these platforms. It'll push it out to every place on its network. That will correct the information here and, again, which in turn will make its way over to building Google's confidence in your Google My Business, which will increase the likelihood of it putting your business in its search results.

If one of these places finds an inaccurate listing, it will correct it. So let's say that this phone book is in Infogroup's network and it encounters the inaccurate data, it will hit it, fix it, and then all of a sudden instead of hurting you, this is again building confidence in your Google My Business listing.

Another benefit of working with these places is that they'll get you into places that you probably weren't even aware of. So, in addition to fixing points of bad data, it's also creating new points of accurate data that didn't even exist in the first place, which again build the confidence in your business listing and then increase the likelihood to show up in those local search results.

The last step for this is related to maintenance. This is not a one-time thing. Over time this information can be corrupted because these places not only get their information from a primary data provider, but they also get their information from each other. In some cases, a primary data source might be crawling these sites, that it indirectly provides information to, and so if you ever played a game of a telephone, you kind of know how this will end up. So you do need to go back and revisit these exercises from time to time, looking for business inaccuracies through Google manually or keeping up a relationship with one of these top-level data providers.

So in summary, what you want to do is start here, make sure you...

1. Have got your Google My Business listing set up,
2. Find all the variations and inaccuracies in your data,
3. Fix them, and
4. Work with a primary data provider to push out the correct information.

And then all of these places will build up the confidence that you're already providing Google in your Google My Business listing, making it more and more likely for Google to show you in its search results.

Thanks for watching. If you want to keep up with the latest in local search news, you can follow us on our brand-new social accounts @MozLocal both on Twitter and Facebook. Once again, my name is George Freitag with Moz Local and thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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"A Complete Failure": What Tech Businesses Can Learn from a Sports Blog's Scandal

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

[Estimated read time: 16 minutes]

On February 17th, sports news and opinion blog SB Nation posted a longform story titled “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” The story, which took a sympathetic viewpoint on convicted rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, sparked a huge amount of controversy among SB Nation readers and garnered the blog a great deal of media attention. It took less than 24 hours for SB Nation to pull the piece, calling it “a complete failure.”

In the aftermath, SB Nation’s parent company, Vox Media, convened a panel of editors and journalists to investigate how a piece taking such a controversial stance on such a sensitive topic could have been published on the site without anyone saying “Hang on, is this a good idea?”

What does this have to do with digital marketing?

When I read the peer review report, I was expecting a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of a very popular media site. What I wasn’t expecting was how many of the review’s findings were exactly the kinds of struggles, missteps, and roadblocks I’ve seen at my and my friends’ workplaces over the years. If you’re a startup, a rapidly growing business, or a company that relies heavily on technology for communication, chances are you have or will run into many of the same pitfalls that plagued SB Nation.

Regardless of your feelings about the case itself or SB Nation’s coverage of it, the Vox peer review has some valuable lessons on how a business can avoid inadvertently launching a product (or website, or piece of content) it’s not proud of. The entire peer review is worth a read, but I’ve pulled out the biggest lessons for businesses here.

Realistic production schedules

The Longform blog was publishing one longform piece of content every week, a pace that the peer review called “...a furious rate of output that’s not conducive to consistently excellent reporting and editing.”

In the tech world, there’s enormous pressure to ship and keep shipping. For content creators, there is often a quota of pieces per week or per month to be met. An environment that stresses pressure to consistently produce over pressure to do excellent work is one that is ultimately going to result in some inferior products getting pushed out there. Taking shortcuts in the name of speed also results in technical debt that can take a business years to catch up with.

Photo via Pixabay

“Done is better than perfect” is a common mantra at tech companies, and there’s a lot of value in not sweating the small stuff. Scope creep is a real problem that can bog a project down inevitably. Still, it’s important to make sure that your organization isn’t encouraging a breakneck pace at the expense of quality.

Encourage your team to be honest about how long a project might take, and then build in some squish time to handle the unforeseen (more on that next). Recognize that not all product updates (blog posts, ad campaigns) are created equal, and some will take more time than others. If your team is constantly in “crunch mode” trying to get things out the door, that’s a big clue that your pace is too fast and mistakes are going to be missed.

Build in time for Quality Assurance

This is one I’ve seen time and again around a new website launch. As delays are almost unavoidable when building a new site, the “final product” often isn’t ready for review until a day or two before launch is scheduled to happen. It certainly can be possible to test and review a site in that amount of time, but only if everything is actually ready to go. If the QA review finds any major problems, there’s no time to fix them before the launch deadline.

At SB Nation, editors and reviewers had between two and four days to turn a longform piece around for publishing before it was slated to go live. This meant heavy revisions were out of the question without pushing back the timeline to publish. Furthermore, the peer review discovered that many pieces were being published with only one other person having reviewed them — and then only from a copy-editing perspective, not for content.

Even if your team are all geniuses who consistently do a dynamite job, any writer will tell you that it’s impossible to proofread your own work. An outside perspective is absolutely vital to finding and fixing the problems any project might have; the person who built it is just going to be too close to the work to do it themselves.

Say it with me: a QA process is meaningless without a strategy to fix the problems it uncovers. Do not expect that your projects will just need a quick review-and-polish before they’re ready to go live. Instead, make sure that you’ve budgeted enough time both thoroughly test and review, and assume that the QA process will uncover at least one major issue that you’ll need to build in time to fix. In order to do that, you’ll have to make sure you:

Don’t get married to your deadlines

There are occasions where a hard deadline is unavoidable. You need the new website to be built before your major trade show event, or your blog post is responding to a developing news situation that won’t be as relevant tomorrow. There are plenty of situations, however, when deadlines are more malleable than you might think. Sometimes, the cost of launching something that’s not fully ready to go is much higher than the cost of pushing back a deadline by a week or two.

As a leader, one thing you can do is build in internal deadlines throughout the life of a project, so as each deadline approaches you’re checking in regularly about whether or not it’s realistic. This can mean saying things like “We will need two weeks for QA, so all work on the product will need to be completed by June 15th to launch on July 1st.” “The blue widget team will need 3 weeks to complete their portion of the project, so if it’s not handed off to them by May 25th, we are jeopardizing the launch date.” By setting these internal deadlines, you’re building in an early warning system for yourself so you have plenty of time to plan and manage expectations. You’ll also set a precedent for treating QA time as sacred, instead of cutting into it when other portions of the project overrun.

You should also decide ahead of time what you do and don’t need in order to launch something. This is commonly referred to as defining the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. If you have to sacrifice a few bells and whistles to hit your deadline, it may be worth it — but make sure you don’t get so focused on “done” that you lose sight of what you’re trying to do with this project in the first place.

Be clear about roles and responsibilities

Vox uncovered a problem at SB Nation that is so, so typical at companies that have undergone a period of fast growth: their internal leadership structure had not grown to scale with their increased numbers. The result was confusion about who was responsible for what, and who had the power to say “No” to whom.

This type of problem can be especially insidious at an organization with a “flat” org chart, where there aren’t a ton of pre-defined internal hierarchies. Too much middle management does run the risk of turning your business into the company from Office Space — but too little oversight can be just as dangerous. A clearly-defined org chart can help your employees figure out who they need to contact in a crisis, and make sure that everyone’s in the loop who needs to be.

Photo via Pixabay

Taking the time to build some internal structure, define roles and responsibilities, and have a clear process to escalate problems as needed might sound unbearably stuffy for your hip young tech business. You may feel that “everyone knows” who’s responsible for what because you’re such a tight-knit bunch. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt an unpleasant shiver of recognition when I read this quote from the peer review, though:

“Asked why he thought senior staffers felt they couldn’t overrule Stout, Hall told us, “I think people didn’t know how...We have a very tight, personality-based workplace. And I think sometimes if you don’t know that person — people didn’t feel like there was a formal way to do it.”

Make sure there is a formal way to do it. Believe me, you will be so happy that you got these things in place before you needed them, instead of waiting until you have a huge, public, embarrassing incident to make you realize you need them.

Empower feedback at a cultural level

There were multiple people within the SB Nation organization that were concerned about the Holtzclaw piece, but most of them felt like it was not their job, or their place, to give feedback. The copy editor who was the first to review the piece specifically said he thought sharing his concerns was “above his pay grade.”

It can be difficult to know whether or not criticism or raising concerns is appropriate in a given situation, especially for less-experienced team members who may not be familiar with workplace etiquette. This is exacerbated when decisions are made via email chains — a given observer may not want to derail the thread with their concerns, or risk looking foolish or overstepping their bounds in front of their colleagues.

As a leader in your organization, pay attention to decision-making processes and make sure that you are creating a space to actively solicit and encourage feedback from the people involved, regardless of their pay grade. You need to pay attention to the “unwritten rules” of your workplace, too — what happens when someone voices a critique? Are they listened to? Taken seriously? Dismissed? Ridiculed? Does change ever come out of it? It won’t matter if you ask for feedback if you’re not taking the time to support it culturally.

This is one of many instances in which defining and living by a set of company values can be so important. At UpBuild, two of our values are transparency and integrity, so creating a culture where feedback is warmly encouraged fits right in with what we’ve said we want to do. Knowing that they're taking an action that's supported by the company’s core values can encourage someone to risk speaking up when they otherwise might not have.

Avoid isolation and concentration of power

Most startups have that one person. They’ve been there for a while, maybe since the beginning, and since the business started out lean and mean, they’ve worn a lot of hats while they’re there. Maybe they helped build some of the systems the company runs on. At any rate, they’ve got one product, or one area, that is “theirs” alone — nobody else really touches it, and in some cases nobody else really knows exactly what they do with it. What people do know is they have to stay on this person’s good side, because any time their work intersects with this person’s individual fiefdom within the company, they’ll need their cooperation to get it done. In the case of SB Nation’s Longform blog, even people who were ostensibly editor Glenn Stout’s peers didn’t feel empowered to kill a piece he’d championed, because it was “his” blog.

Photo via Pixabay

Additionally, the team was distributed across the country, which means they used a combination of email and Slack to communicate. According to Stout, “When I first started hearing about Slack, I had no idea even what it was. And then the edict came down that we have to go on Slack. And I had to find out what it was. And I would use it occasionally, but I’m just much more comfortable with emails.”

What I found so fascinating about this portion of the report was that not only did Stout’s non-participation in Slack distance him from his co-workers, giving them less of a sense of what he was working on, it also created the impression that he was exempt from the rules and expectations that governed much of the rest of the organization.

If you recognize an internal fiefdom forming (or know of one that’s already there), break it up by building in some redundancies — there should be no one person who holds so much exclusive knowledge about an area of your business that it wouldn’t be able to continue if they were to leave. Get other people involved in the project, emphasize cross-team collaboration and information sharing, and make it a requirement for everyone. Even your top performers shouldn’t be exempt from the policies and procedures laid out for your organization.

Building in redundancies can also help guard against another contributing factor to the SB Nation debacle: the one person who would usually dictate whether or not a piece would be published, the editorial director, was on vacation. Two other editors were meant to be taking on his work in his absence, but neither was sure if they had the power to kill the article. If a core decision-maker is on vacation, there should be other team members conversant enough with his or her work to step in, and everyone should be on the same page about their power to make decisions in his or her absence.

To combat isolation, be consistent in setting and reinforcing expectations for communication and collaboration. Don’t just let everyone use communication tools to whatever extent they prefer; figure out which conversations need to be happening in which channel, and then nudge your team to make sure information is being communicated in the right way/place.

The informality and high interruption factor of a tool like Slack can turn people off, and it’s easy to see participation as voluntary, but if important discussions are happening there, everyone needs to be using it. Set the expectation with your direct reports: “You don’t have to look at it constantly, but I expect you to be checking Slack (x) times per day, participating in discussions that concern you, and responding promptly to direct messages.”

Speaking of tools:

Pick a project management solution and stick with it

Growing companies tend to leave a trail of discarded project management systems in their wake. It can be difficult to get a whole team to fully adopt a new tool, and when you’re small, it’s pretty easy to keep track of everything that’s going on. The challenge comes, once again, with growth — sooner or later a company gets big enough for things to start falling through the cracks. Finding the next new shiny project management tool and rolling it out to great fanfare are easy; getting your team to actually use it is the hard part.

Adoption of a new tool or process has to be set at a cultural level. Build use of the new tool into existing processes in an explicit way, and then reinforce that that’s how you expect them to be done from now on. I’ve found it helpful to structure touch-base meetings about a given project around the project management tool (we use Trello); that gives the people working on the project incentive to make sure everything’s up-to-date before our meeting.

Prioritize empathy

When you’re spending all your time thinking about and making something, it can be really hard to think about it in any different way. Most SEOs have encountered this with our clients; people get so used to industry terminology or niche product descriptions that they have a hard time taking a step back and asking, “What are our customers really looking for? What problems are they trying to solve?”

Empathy can come into play at many points during the marketing process — user testing, focus groups, persona building, user experience, accessibility concerns, etc. — but is of particular importance when dealing with sensitive subjects. There are countless examples of businesses who have, for example, tried to take an “edgy” tone on social media and wound up in a media firestorm. Empathy should be a required skill and consideration for anyone who is going to be communicating on behalf of your business.

As with empowering feedback, prioritizing empathy is something that can be best done at a cultural level. You may decide you want to make empathy part of your core values, but even if you don’t, you should clearly define your company’s stance on addressing sensitive topics — and the tone and brand voice you’ve defined as part of your overall brand strategy should reflect that as well. Make empathy part of the training and onboarding process for anyone who will be communicating about your brand, and for all higher-up and senior staff, and you’ll start to see the cultural shift.

Fail fast, apologize faster

The peer review covered a lot of “what went wrong,” but let’s close on what went right. It took SB Nation less than 24 hours to realize their mistake, take down the piece, and issue an apology — not a “we’re sorry if you were offended” apology, but a real, honest-to-goodness, “this was a mistake and we are heartily sorry” apology.

It would have been easy to beat a hasty retreat, engage in some quick and public firings, and sweep the whole thing under the rug. Instead, SB Nation and parent company Vox Media proved that their apology was sincere by taking concrete steps to figure out what had happened and how they could prevent it from happening again.

If you take nothing else away from this, learn from this master class in public apology. The rules are simple, and you probably learned them in elementary school: 1.) Say you’re sorry. 2.) Show you understand why what you did was wrong or hurt somebody. 3.) Don’t do it again.

What lessons did you take away from this peer review? In addition to everything I’ve outlined above, it also served as an important reminder for me that there are many places to find lessons to be learned, and that they’re often outside the tech bubble we so often find ourselves in.

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Web 2.0 Management- From FCS to RankerX

After a pretty good run and only minor frustrations I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get into my FCS networker with many problems. I also had some issues when all my articles I loaded in were wiped out mysteriously. I also had an issue of being down for a week because I assumed ... Read more

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Why We Only Accept 1 Out of Every 10 Guest Blog Pitches

Posted by BopDesign

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 Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

We’ve been pitched a blog post about hoverboards.

While hoverboards are pretty cool and I’d like to own one, our business and our blog have absolutely nothing to do with hoverboards.

Why did we get pitched a post about hoverboards? Most likely because the person pitching the post saw we have a decent domain authority and they wanted to get a piece of it by getting a backlink from us. I’m sure their blog post on hoverboards would have been very interesting, but it likely would have caused our audience of B2B marketing professionals to scratch their heads in confusion.

We know who we are, and who we are not

We are a boutique digital marketing firm that focuses on creating websites and providing content marketing services.

Writing about anything else doesn’t provide value for our brand.

Over the past eight years, we’ve built up the blog on our website writing (mostly) weekly posts about all aspects of web design and digital marketing. This blogging strategy has enabled us to add two to four new blog posts to our website each month. Our main goal has always been to provide our clients and prospects with helpful, actionable information that helps them do their jobs better or aids them in making a decision about digital marketing.

Potential clients get helpful tips and can do their jobs better.

We get great content that may help us rank better and attract more potential clients.

We hate rejection, too

While we love adding insightful information to our blog, we hate having to reject guest post submissions.

Below is an actual pitch we received (sender’s information not included to protect their privacy).

Any smart website owner should be excited to get a guest post pitch. Not only is it flattering (you really like us and want to write for us?), but you get free, hopefully useful content for your website. You can use someone else’s writing to drive traffic to your website.

It's not us; it's you

So, why the heck do we end up rejecting nine out of ten pitches we receive?

Simply stated, many of the guest post pitches we receive "aren’t a good fit," which can mean a variety of things.

Here are the top reasons we reject a guest blog (and why you should, too):

• The topic is irrelevant
• The company pitching the blog isn’t related to our industry
• The writing is terrible
• The blog is tailored to the wrong audience (B2C vs B2B or CTO vs CMO)
• The website they want us to link to is sketchy
• We’ve published a blog post from them recently
• The writing in the email is terrible and full of grammar issues
• The person hasn’t researched our business or even looked at our website
• The topic is too inflammatory
• The topic is relevant but not inline with our firm’s philosophy
• The topic is tired and overused
• There is no value for our audience

When I read a guest blog pitch, I evaluate it for all of these things.

Don't make me hate helping you

Recently, I made the mistake of tentatively accepting a guest post pitch even though the grammar in the email wasn’t up to our standards. We work with CEOs, founders, and marketing directors in a variety of industries, including biotech and finance, all who tend to have advanced educations and expect quality writing.

As such, we require all the content on our website to be grammatically correct, to flow well, and to be coherent.

I ignored my instinct because the proposed topic was really interesting and I felt it would be a great blog post for our current clients. I ended up paying for it. The draft that the guest writer sent over was subpar, to put it nicely. A blog post will undergo revisions, but this post was grammatically challenged and incoherent, jumping from point to point and back again.

I Tracked Changes during the revision process, then returned the post to the writer, who I didn’t hear back from.

The winning 10%

We’ve noticed that winning guest pitches — whether ours or others who pitch to our blog — have a few things in common, in that the pitchers seem to realize the following:

• It’s not easy and it does take time
• Always be professional and respectful
• Know your audience (both the person you're emailing and the folks who are reading their website/blog)
• Read their existing blog posts
• Pitch a relevant topic
• Follow-up is key to getting a response (rejection or approval)
• Don’t push it
• Don’t get discouraged

We don’t anticipate this 90/10 rule for the blog pitches we accept to change. It’s unfortunate, but we know that many digital marketers will never fully understand guest blog pitches and will continue the machine-gun pitching strategy.

7 tips for a successful guest blog pitch

Based on our experience pitching guest blogs and accepting guest blogs, we have several insights to share with writers, marketers, and website owners.

1. Steer clear of paying for guest post opportunities

This one always surprises me. It’s only a matter of time before sites that sell space on their blog are nixed from the SERPs. We always decline when a website we pitch tells us they will publish it for a fee.

2. Do your own research

We always perform our own research to vet a website, ensure it’s relevant, and make sure it actually has a blog we’d like to write for.

3. Don’t always go after 60+ DA websites

It’s great to land a guest blog on a high DA site, but these are often very tough. It's often better to start with the "low-hanging fruit," relevant sites that might have low domain authority.

4. Write a thoughtful article that adds value

Don’t write crap. Consider every guest blog you write to be a graded assignment. Your professional reputation still matters in a digital world. If you write crap, you will be judged for it.

5. Provide options.

People, including editors, like to have options. You might have a great topic, but it’s always best to present several great topics. You never know, the editor may have previously accepted a similar topic.

6. Be genuine.

Ditch your generic email pitch. You may start with a template, but spend 15 minutes or so tailoring it to your pitch.

If you can, find the person’s name and personalize the message. Keep in mind that many of the people you pitch receive lots of unsolicited pitches every day. Stand out from the rest by being genuine and unique.

7. Don’t spam or waste people’s time.

If the website you're pitching isn’t relevant to your industry, don’t pitch them. If they take the time to send you a rejection notice, be gracious and respectful. Take it as a learning experience and thank them for their time.

The last thing I’ve learned about rejecting and submitting guest blog posts is a success comes from creating a partnership between the person doing the pitching and the person being pitched. Our approach is always to offer something of value, be respectful, and, hopefully, create a connection beneficial for everyone.

Have you been successful in pitching guest posts? What’s worked for you?

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Keyword Explorer Upgrades: New Features, More Lists, and Better Metrics

Posted by randfish

It's been 5 weeks since Keyword Explorer's launch and in that time, more than 75,000 folks have tried out what is, in my opinion, the best keyword research tool on the market. And I'm not alone:

And that's just a sampling of the many, many kind pieces of feedback we've received the last few weeks (OK, there's even more than that... just keeps going).

But today, we're upgrading it further with three of the most requested features since launch.

Keyword volume is now international

Since launch day, KW Explorer has only had support for US volume, but as of today, that's no longer the case. Russ Jones has been working with the team to support a larger capacity for international volume data, and we've got significant coverage for UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those. Over time, we'll be refining and adding to the keyword volume corpus so we can continue to improve.

Note that volume data in the US is still our most accurate, as we're able to apply our clickstream dataset (which is currently US-only) to those metrics. Outside the US, our data will be more similar to what you find in Google AdWords, though our volume buckets still have greater accuracy overall and less spikiness month to month. For temporal fluctuation data, I'd still recommend Google Trends, whose accuracy seems much better than in years past.

Suggestions filters now include questions

Many users of KW Explorer have noted a fondness for specifically finding keyword searches in the form of questions. We've heard from fans of AnswerThePublic (which visualizes Google Suggest data), who were hoping we could add that type of data/filtering. Today, it's here!

The questions filter goes across all the types of suggestions data we pull, and uses a fairly comprehensive set of question formats (who, what, where, when, why — and also: is, does, can, how, etc). In testing this feature, I've been pretty impressed; there are a ton of great content ideas in these, even on the ones without a lot of search volume.

Keyword grouping at the click of a button

Another of our most-requested features since our private beta was a way to group similar keywords together so they could all be added to a list or quickly filtered through together. I love the way the team put this feature together: not just offering one way to do it, but providing three different groupings based on how closely vs. distantly related you want to see those terms grouped.

Lexical similarity, the spelling-and-phrase-based closeness of the words to each other, is how KW Explorer does grouping. As you can see, *low* lexical similarity provides fewer groups with more keywords in each, while *high* lexical similarity gives more groups and fewer keywords.

Grouping makes scanning easier, but we've also added a slick, "one click to add all keywords in a group" button to the feature.

For those of you who like keywords in groups, this will make the process of identifying and adding them to lists (either en masse or individually) vastly more streamlined.

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In addition to those features, we've also made two other substantive changes to Keyword Explorer:

Improved Keyword Difficulty scores

The model used for Keyword Difficulty in KW Explorer was a significant upgrade from the old Keyword Difficulty tool. We addressed a lot of the bunching and overly simplistic handling, and produced what I felt was a vastly superior set of numbers. However, not all scores felt right, and in doing some research with the team, Dr. Pete discovered a great deal of bunching at the bottom of the score set, wherein far too many terms were getting a 0–10 score than should. He made a fix that we've now pushed to production and you should see better KW Difficulty scores across the board.

It's a small change, but one that improves the model, and we'll continue to watch for outliers and issues so we can keep improving. Dr. Pete keeps collecting feedback for analysis, so if you find terms and phrases that don't seem to match, drop him a line over Twitter or get in touch with us through any of our support channels. Difficulty isn't designed to be an absolute, though. When using it, we strongly recommend looking at similar keywords in a sector based on their relative differences in KW Difficulty, not as a perfect number in the abstract (similar to DA/PA).

More lists for everyone

Lists are one of the most useful parts of Keyword Explorer. They've saved me hours upon hours of tedious Excel imports, cutting, pasting, fetching metrics, etc. But we noticed that many folks were filling up their lists fast, so we've tripled the limits for both tiers of Keyword Explorer on its own, and bundled as part of Moz Pro.

If you had 10 lists, you now have 30. If you had 30 lists, you've now got 100.

So go to town! I've loved creating lists for friends, my own projects, folks I'm helping with SEO, and observing what data and insights shake out.

It's pretty satisfying to see how fast KW Explorer gets data, how clean the exports are, and how obvious the right keywords to target become once you've got all the right metrics to compare.

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One of my big frustrations over the years has been when we (or other software companies) release a product, and then let it languish. Great products get better through iteration, feedback, and upgrades. I'm hopeful that this is just the first of many updates I'll have to share about Keyword Explorer's progress, and to make that a reality, I need your help.

Check out the new Keyword Explorer updates in action!

Please, if you haven't yet given KW Explorer a spin, now's a great time to do so. You can feel free to send me feedback directly — rand at moz dot com — or via our customer support, Q+A forum, Twitter, or the comments on this post.

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