Mozcon 2013 Roundup of Day 1: Awesome Actionable Inbound Marketing Tips

MozCon is the worlds #1 inbound marketing conference with 1300 attendees from around the globe and thousands more checking in to hear the latest trends and advice on inbound marketing. With so much change in the online marketing industry recently its essential to keep up to date and share the amazing facts, figures, processes and tools that are being discussed and recommended.

Below you will find summaries of each presentation which are packed with actionable tips and valuable information to keep you cutting edge. Enjoy!

Intro: The Year in SEO, Marketing, and Moz

by Rand Fishkin (@randfish); slideshare: download

• If you want to win on the web you need to become a brand people know, trust, and share
• Take a multi-disciplined approach to succeed in the long term as it takes longer for new sites to earn the signals they need to compete, fewer short term tactics work at scale
• Desktop is not declining, mobile and tablets are increasing; 1 out of 3 people in US have a mobile device
• Apps are not eating away at existing channels, they are becoming their own channel
• Data hoarding is on the increase (Google allow us to see less and less while they see more and more). It is becoming more and more difficult to identify the data we have become used to having at our finger tips
• Opportunities for embracing real multi-channel marketing are massively on the increase. Don’t be disheartened, it has just got bigger than purely SEO.

Really Targeted Outreach

by Richard Baxter (@richardbaxter); slideshare: download

• Find out where your target market is; what they are sharing and who to contact by collecting data, analysing it and being smart
• To do this you need to find the influencer intersect and to do that you need these tools: TAGS,followerwonk and SEO Tools for Excel
• Use regex in followerwonk to find the influencers e.g. (CMO|Chief Marketing Officer)
• Build a filter query (see slideshare for details) so you can extract influencer tweets that have links in them
• Clean up and analyse the data extracted from this using SEO Tools for Excel and pivot tables so you end up with a graph of the most popular sites they share and their domain authorities along with oodles of other useful data
• This actionable data shows you the sites you want to get your client on. You can even extract the contact details of the sites you want to target!
• Interrogating the data to get the actionable info is not for the faint hearted. It’s all logical but there are many steps involved but the result is really valuable data so stick with it
• Use Rapportive to verify email addresses – it’s awesome

International SEO and the Future of Your ROI

by Aleyda Solis (@aleyda); slideshare: download

• Native support to help with international SEO language is invaluable
• Research all the same things you would (keywords, competitors, markets etc) but do it for each of the international markets in the local language
• Read this: SEO ROI Analysis – How to do ROI calculations for SEO
• Dig deeper: what are your international audience’s demographic, cultural trends and what are your local competitors’s weaknesses/strengths/USPs?
• Localise everything. When going international it’s about providing the complete international experience
• Don’t redirect users when they haven’t asked to go somewhere else on your site. When relevant suggest the international version
• Translate everything, even the URLs
• Build assets, content and popularity specifically for your international audiences, just like you are doing for your current local clients right?
• Watch these two slideshares on international analytics: this and this

Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI

by Avinash Kaushik (@avinash)

• SEOs are really good at performance marketing, which relates to conversions at the final stage of the buying process, but they suck at branding and the earlier stages of the process
  
• Think about people who will use the products and who might buy so you can make brand connections and drive people to your site
• Good mobile performance marketing considers what people want when they’re on the move: maps, quick info, etc. So create the experience they want and help them find what they need
• Centre your page content around merchandising – not adverts – but suggested and related products
• Give users opportunities to form a relationship with your brand via social and email marketing, then measure success by the relationships formed
• Optimise your portfolios for relationship-building. It means you can own the relationship instead of having to rebuild it every time
• Use Google Analytics to visualise multi-channel conversions, consider the overlap between organic, PPC, search, etc. and learn which channels drive traffic to the different stages of the buying process
• check this out: Data-Driven Documents

Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes

by Lena West (@lenawest); slideshare: download

• 90% of people over 18 own smartphones, 40% of Twitter users share photos and photos get 53% more Facebook likes than text
• People love images. Why? Because people are busy, photos are easy to share and images transcend the limitations of text
• Check out KnowYourMeme.com to see which memes are generating interest, clicks, eyeballs, etc.
• Infographics still work but do them well. Use these tools to create infographics: Infogr.am, Visua.ly, InfoActive.co, Piktochart, Easel.ly and Many Eyes from IBM
• Use Pinwords, Pinstamatic, Quozio, ReciteThis to build quote graphics which are a very effective way to humanise your brand and help to build know/like/trust factors
• To get metrics for Pinterest use Curalate, Piqora, Ahalogy and Moz

Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content

by Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens); slideshare: download

• Links still count (it’s a myth that they don’t), but central stage now is content. Check out link building vs. content marketing on Google trends
• Today’s link building that makes sense is sustainable. This means bridging the gap between content and web masters who need it
• Tip: use 1password for remembering passwords across multiple accounts
• Use greenlaneseo.com/outdated-conte… by @billsebald’s outdated content finder to findlink outreach and content opportunities
• Use Boomerang for Gmail for speeding up emailing outreach and customise it with siegemedia.com/meet-auto-boom…
• Use bananatag to track opens and see what happens after you press send
• Use LinkClump siege.cm/linkclump to open or copy multiple links at same time (plugin)
• Send StumbleUpon traffic to your content on sites with “most popular” sections to get more visibility. You can also send paid traffic to get more visibility
• Get your team to like non-owned Facebook posts to improve Edgerank
• Target newsletters for traffic. Search “newsletter” in your Twitter network to find targets
• Use Topsy to share articles you find yourself and give credit to influencers even if that’s not how you found it
• Engage with the people you influence personally on a corporate account to get a second social hook
• Write great articles, add links from influencers after the fact and then let them know you linked so they can share
• Link drop clients images in guest posts on sites that are not related. Your image might be related even if your content isn’t
• Start ignoring guest posting unless it’s going to drive traffic
• Encourage writers to use anchor text by how you describe your own links. e.g. “our business card guide is here”
• Filter blogs for links pages using Screaming Frog. Use it to see which of your targets link out, add good comments and track
• Two Googlers quoted as saying guest post author bios are something you should nofollow: hiswebmarketing.com/yes-high-quali
• google.com/insights/consu… Google consumer surveys. Get nice data for link bait
• SUCCESS framework for content: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, Stories
• Create embeddable slideshows with huge markets as targets, then reach out to targets in that markets to get shares. Local news sites are desperate for content
• Use HARO + Gmail filters for your target keywords to save time filtering through HARO emails – helpareporter.com
• Create great short-form text that gets stolen. Then use Fresh Web Explorer to find stolen content and ask for a link
• Run a 404 test on your link prospect list to find broken links
• Build links WITH your content to win. Build links WITHOUT your content to get penalised
• Do the research: Which people WANT to link to you? What is the market for your content, link-wise?

Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors

by Matt Peters (@mattthemathman); slideshare: download

• First of all remember that “correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint” – Edward Tufte. The @Moz study is based both on tests and surveying SEO professionals
• To get the 2013 Ranking Factors, Moz surveyed 120 SEOs and looked at correlation data for 14,000 keywords. All categories and search volumes were included. Top 50 results for Google US. Neutral searches
• Page Authority is a machine learning model that predicts ranking based on links – it’s built for high correlation
• Link diversity is still very important
• Linking domains to a subdomain is now a higher correlation factor to rank than linking domains to root domain
• SEOs think links from domains are most important, followed by the relevance of the linking page which is consistent with correlations. Links from domains are most important with the relevance of page domain being next in importance
• Partial & exact match have the same correlation to rank. Internal anchor text correlates much less
• Moz partnered with Zoompf to measure site speed data. Response time has a negative correlation to rank – total load time does not
• Recommended slideshare.net/jcolman/seo-si… @jcolman’s awesome deck on site speed and UX
• 40% of users will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• Keyword in title, meta description and H1 tag all correlate highly to rankings. Make sure your pages have metas if you want them to rank! Make sure meta descriptions are unique to every page
• Document length had relatively high correlation of 0.23. Structured data and G+ mark ups were still very low. But don’t ignore authorship. Even if it doesn’t impact rankings (yet) it can still improve CTR
• Correlations for exact and partial match domains are similar to how they were 2 years ago, even after EMD update
• URL length negatively correlates with rank. Watch those long URLs!
• Other than search volume, SEOs thought brand mentions were relatively unimportant
• Google +1s were our second highest correlation metric (0.30) to ranking (behind Page Authority). Don’t ignore G+!
• SEOs don’t think social is as important as links or keywords, but Moz found very high correlation to rank
• @Searchmetrics and Netmark both put out great ranking correlation studies recently – check out comparative studies to validate data.
• The biggest difference between 2011-2013 Ranking Studies: SEOs think EMDs decreased. Fewer EMDs rank (because many have been cleaned?), but their ability to rank is still good
• Predictions: quality, authorship, markup, social will all increase, EMD, anchor text, paid links will decrease
• There’s going to be a shift in ranking factors to some of these newer signals pic.twitter.com/5LBupwt10P

Strings to Things: Entities and SEO

by Matthew Brown (@MatthewJBrown); slideshare: download

• Use the power of the semantic web to pull in awesome content
• Check out: slidesha.re/11aymBx Mary Meeker’s State of the Union slides
• Mobile traffic as % of internet traffic is growing 1.5x/year and likely to maintain trajectory or accelerate
• Links aren’t going anywhere – structured data is linked together with URIs just like URLs link web data together
• A ridiculously low % of domains have structured data in place. That means NOW is the time to do it
• Search engines are trying to extract entities from the web. It’s easy with DBpedia, but a lot harder at web scale
• Check out:bit.ly/17WMS1G Structured data and knowledge graph presentation from Google I/O
• Use Schema.org Itemprop=”sameAs” tag linking to trusted data source page on that entity – it allows you to disambiguate and build trust
• User intent is based on WAY more than keywords – it’s based on who and where you are
• bit.ly/LxwYgh Bing Research: see when they do/don’t show entity search
• Check out: slidesha.re/17mS0OM CTR on Yahoo before and after Yahoo Spark
• Check out Google tool Freebase (Google used it to build knowledge graph) bit.ly/12aetM0 Using the freebase API to get ranked entities; bit.ly/13sg2aW roll your own Knowledge Graph with the Freebase API
• explicit.bing.net/entities/searc… (or any other q=): get an entity-disambiguated search result
• glimmer.research.yahoo.com: See how Yahoo Knowledge Base semantically relates results
• What Google means by a brand mention is a disambiguated entity. Use Fresh Web Explorer to disambiguate/get links
• Check out: RelFinder for DBpedia: visualdataweb.org/relfinder.php See co-referenced entities; Pick up entities from DBpedia graph to build out content models for related entities
• Use Bottlenose to find longer-tail entity-based queries to target
• Entity keyword stuffing won’t look natural. Google wants marked up data that’s disambiguated by links
• bit.ly/11drfnY Creating a semantic content model

The Mobile Content Mandate

by Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane); slideshare: download

• The digital divide in the USA is real
• 20% of americans have no internet access at all and 35% have no internet access at home
• 38% of low income americans have no internet at all and 59% have no broadband at home
• 57% of americans without a high school diploma have no internet access and 88% have no broadband access at home
• Although not everyone has internet, everyone has a phone and eventually will have a smartphone and so everyone will be able to go online
• 31% of Americans who use their mobile phones to go online say they only or mostly use their phones to go online. A mobile device IS the internet for many people!
• Think about your content for mobile and try not to have 2 places to have to update it when you make changes, but remember that there is not ‘writing for mobile’ there is just good writing
• Don’t create content for a specific context – create one flexible web content strategy
• Everyone will expect to use mobile devices for everything they do and long form content is ok on mobile, people will read it

Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing

by Mackenzie Fogelson (@mackfogelson); slideshare: download

• Build a community and you’ll build your business – listen to what your customers want and need
• Set goals for the whole business, not just SEO or social and focus on those goals as this will drive strategy and direction
• Find the right KPIs for your company, get creative, many can be tracked in GA
• Set your roadmap up, do the work, evaluate results and learn so you can decide where to put your efforts next time
• Building diverse content is #RCS. Build content that provides an experience for your customers
• Creating spaces for your community to interact also provides the opportunity for lots of awesome user generated content
• You can’t compromise when it comes to focusing on goals and strategies. You have to work together – will the client work for change? If not consider firing them!

The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers

by Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh); slideshare: download

• Choosing a brand/domain isn’t about keywords, it’s about processing fluency. The simpler the stickier
• Instead of trying to beat other brands, why not BECOME the brand?
• Strive to be amazing. Humanise the whole marketing experience!
• We are obsessed with tactics and forget about strategy and culture. Pay attention
• YES! “we can make marketing an honourable profession”

This should keep you busy for a while! Thanks to all the live tweeters and people sharing this awesome information. Massive shout out to the incredible Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) who has ironclad wifi and the fastest fingers in the west, and Gianluca (@gfiorelli1) who I love to follow at conferences (not in a stalking fashion, honestly!).

Day 2 and Day 3 summaries to follow.

Does anything in here shock or surprise you in a good or bad way? Comment below and join the conversation, we’d love to hear from you.