Friday, July 31, 2015
5 Modern-Day Alternatives to Link Building
Google Given Right to Appeal in Safari Cookies Case
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Yelp Earnings Report Shows Strength In Mobile Search
See the world in your language with Google Translate
Today, we’re updating the Google Translate app again—expanding instant visual translation to 20 more languages (for a total of 27!), and making real-time voice translations a lot faster and smoother—so even more people can experience the world in their language.
We started out with seven languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish—and today we're adding 20 more. You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai. (Or, try snapping a pic of the text you’d like translated—we have a total of 37 languages in camera mode.)
To try out the new languages, go to the Google Translate app, set “English” along with the language you’d like to translate, and click the camera button; you'll be prompted to download a small (~2 MB) language pack for each.
Ready to see all of these languages in action?
And how exactly did we get so many new languages running on a device with no data connection? It’s all about convolutional neural networks (whew)—geek out on that over on our Research blog.
Have a natural, smoother conversation—even with a slower mobile network
In many emerging markets, slow mobile networks can make it challenging to access many online tools - so if you live in an area with unreliable mobile networks, our other update today is for you. In addition to instant visual translation, we’ve also improved our voice conversation mode (enabling real-time translation of conversations across 32 languages), so it’s even faster and more natural on slow networks.
Translate Community helps us get better every day
On top of today’s updates, we’re also continuously working to improve the quality of the translations themselves and to add new languages. A year ago this week, we launched Translate Community, a place for multilingual people from anywhere in the world to provide and correct translations. Thanks to the millions of language lovers who have already pitched in—more than 100 million words so far!—we've been updating our translations for over 90 language pairs, and plan to update many more as our community grows.
We’ve still got lots of work to do: more than half of the content on the Internet is in English, but only around 20% of the world’s population speaks English. Today’s updates knock down a few more language barriers, helping you communicate better and get the information you need.
Interview with Bing’s Duane Forrester: Looking Into the Future of Search & Tech
Interview with Bing’s Duane Forrester: Looking Into the Future of Search & Tech was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Anyone who knows Duane Forrester, Bing's head of search, knows he's a got a ton of SEO knowledge to share, plus personality to go with it (he is, after all, the U.S. Search Awards reigning Search Personality of the Year). Duane joined Bruce Clay in the studio for a special episode of digital marketing podcast SEM Synergy.
The podcast episode is 30 minutes filled with future-forward perspective on a lot of the search engine optimization industry’s favorite topics — from how and when wearable tech will really take off to the emergence of digital assistants like Cortana and Siri.
Read on for highlights from this exclusive interview with Duane Forrester. You don't want to miss it when he sounds off on:
- hat users really want from mobile search
- The growth of mobile-specific algorithms
- Why Google Glass actually matters
- How Duane uses technology to overcome human flaws
- Bing's approach to SEO wish lists
- Why search engines aren't as transparent as they'd like to be
Search Ads to Target App Downloaders
Fixing Other People's 404s for Link Building
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
YP Product Centralizes Advertising Experience
Google Gives Up On Google+
7 Reasons Your SEO Campaign Will Fail and What You Can Do About It
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
#NoHacked: How to avoid being the target of hackers
We’re kicking off the campaign with some basic tips on how to keep your site safe on the web.
1. Strengthen your account security
Creating a password that’s difficult to guess or crack is essential to protecting your site. For example, your password might contain a mixture of letters, numbers, symbols, or be a passphrase. Password length is important. The longer your password, the harder it will be to guess. There are many resources on the web that can test how strong your password is. Testing a similar password to yours (never enter your actual password on other sites) can give you an idea of how strong your password is.Also, it’s important to avoid reusing passwords across services. Attackers often try known username and password combinations obtained from leaked password lists or hacked services to compromise as many accounts as possible.
You should also turn on 2-Factor Authentication for accounts that offer this service. This can greatly increase your account’s security and protect you from a variety of account attacks. We’ll be talking more about the benefits of 2-Factor Authentication in two weeks.
2. Keep your site’s software updated
One of the most common ways for a hacker to compromise your site is through insecure software on your site. Be sure to periodically check your site for any outdated software, especially updates that patch security holes. If you use a web server like Apache, nginx or commercial web server software, make sure you keep your web server software patched. If you use a Content Management System (CMS) or any plug-ins or add-ons on your site, make sure to keep these tools updated with new releases. Also, sign up to the security announcement lists for your web server software and your CMS if you use one. Consider completely removing any add-ons or software that you don't need on your website -- aside from creating possible risks, they also might slow down the performance of your site.3. Research how your hosting provider handles security issues
Your hosting provider’s policy for security and cleaning up hacked sites is in an important factor to consider when choosing a hosting provider. If you use a hosting provider, contact them to see if they offer on-demand support to clean up site-specific problems. You can also check online reviews to see if they have a track record of helping users with compromised sites clean up their hacked content.If you control your own server or use Virtual Private Server (VPS) services, make sure that you’re prepared to handle any security issues that might arise. Server administration is very complex, and one of the core tasks of a server administrator is making sure your web server and content management software is patched and up to date. If you don't have a compelling reason to do your own server administration, you might find it well worth your while to see if your hosting provider offers a managed services option.
4. Use Google tools to stay informed of potential hacked content on your site
It’s important to have tools that can help you proactively monitor your site.The sooner you can find out about a compromise, the sooner you can work on fixing your site.We recommend you sign up for Search Console if you haven’t already. Search Console is Google’s way of communicating with you about issues on your site including if we have detected hacked content. You can also set up Google Alerts on your site to notify you if there are any suspicious results for your site. For example, if you run a site selling pet accessories called www.example.com, you can set up an alert for [site:example.com cheap software] to alert you if any hacked content about cheap software suddenly starts appearing on your site. You can set up multiple alerts for your site for different spammy terms. If you’re unsure what spammy terms to use, you can use Google to search for common spammy terms.
We hope these tips will keep your site safe on the web. Be sure to follow our social campaigns and share any tips or tricks you might have about staying safe on the web with the #NoHacked hashtag.
If you have any additional questions, you can post in the Webmaster Help Forums where a community of webmasters can help answer your questions. You can also join our Hangout on Air about Security on August 26.
Google to Stop Unofficial Autocomplete API
Everything in its right place
A more focused Google+ experience
Google+ is quickly becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them. In line with that focus, we’re continuing to add new features like Google+ Collections, where you can share and enjoy posts organized by the topics you care about. At the same time, we’ll also move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+. For example, many elements of Google+ Photos have been moved into the new Google Photos app, and we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts and other apps, where it really belongs. We think changes like these will lead to a more focused, more useful, more engaging Google+.
Using Google without a Google+ profile
People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more on their blog. As always, your underlying Google Account won’t be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don’t plan to use Google+ itself, we’ll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.
You’ll see these changes roll out in stages over several months. While they won’t happen overnight, they’re right for Google’s users—both the people who are on Google+ every single day, and the people who aren’t.
Rising to the climate challenge
Public health experts recently warned that climate change threatens to “undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health,” through forces like extreme weather, drought, malnutrition, and disease. The U.S. government has asserted that climate change poses “immediate risks to U.S. national security,” as increased natural disasters and humanitarian crises fuel instability and violence. And many studies have revealed that critical infrastructure, like electricity and water, is vulnerable to rising sea levels and intensifying storms.
Climate change is one of the most significant global challenges of our time. Rising to that challenge involves a complex mix of policy, technology, and international cooperation. This won’t be easy, but Google is committed to doing its part.
Google has been carbon neutral since 2007. Our data centers, the physical infrastructure behind web services used by billions of people, now get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of electricity, as compared to five years ago. We are also the biggest corporate purchaser of renewable power on the planet. Just today at the White House, we pledged to triple those purchases over the next decade. In addition, we're a major climate-minded investor, so far committing more than $2 billion to clean energy projects, from America’s largest wind farm to Africa’s largest solar power plant.
We're serious about environmental sustainability not because it’s trendy, but because it’s core to our values and also makes good business sense. After all, the cheapest energy is the energy you don’t use in the first place. And in many places clean power is cost-competitive with conventional power.
We’re making progress, but averting catastrophic climate change will require significant investment and bold innovations. Google and our private-sector peers are ready to lead. But something fundamental is required: clear policy. The global business community needs certainty to bring climate solutions to scale. We need the world’s political leaders to confirm that investments in clean energy are sound, and that the laws and policies meant to enable such investment will be designed for the long term and rooted in what science tells us needs to be done.
It’s encouraging to see the world’s major economies set ambitious climate targets, but it’s time to get a strong international climate agreement on the books. This December in Paris, it’s imperative that policymakers reach a deal that moves us toward a zero-carbon economy. That’s the kind of future that we’re committed to helping build, and that future generations deserve.
How The Google Display Network Boosts Search PPC Performance: A Case Study
Sunday, July 26, 2015
How You May Be Helping Google Map Indoor Spaces
A couple of years ago, Google acquired the startup Behavio. One of the selling points behind Behavio was how it used behavior data from Phones to better understand human behavior. It’s likely that Google acquired the company Zipdash back in 2004 to learn about real-time traffic data.
Calsidyrose, Some rights reserved
A Google patent application published in the last week describes how Google might be using Mobile data from phones to map indoor spaces, combining the technologies behind Behavio, with traffic monitoring from Zipdash to better understand spaces that many people navigate through while carrying a mobile device that connects to the internet with wireless signals and carries sensor data that can indicate the location and movements of those devices.
The patent tells us that current approaches to determine indoor locations of mobile devices are based on interior scans of wireless access points. Theses scans could be used to build a database that can model an indoor space by determining locations of the access points and their corresponding signal strengths at those locations. To create a database like this, an indoor wireless location provider would have to conduct site surveys at selected locations.
An undertaking like this could require surveying tens of thousands of buildings and floors to determine the location of the wireless access points. And this database could might become stale and inaccurate overtime due to location changes in the access points after the surveys are complete.
This patent is aimed at providing a scalable method that could be used to conduct site surveys to construct wireless access point models of an indoor location. This would be done by crowd-sourcing the wireless and INS (Inertial navigation systems) signals from multiple devices moving through the indoor location. The end goal of this would be to provide a more accurate and up to date model database of access points.
The approach behind the patent is the following method.
(1) Identifying a map of an indoor space,
(2) Receiving inertial navigation signals (sensor signals from accelerometers, etc.) from a set of mobile devices moving through that indoor space and
(3) Calculating user trajectories based on the inertial navigation signals. This method provides direction and speed of movement of the mobile devices being tracked. Tracking these trajectories helps to identify walkable areas of the indoor space being targeted, and where turns take place among these paths. The inertial navigation signals (INS) may include: accelerometer data, gyroscope data, and compass data.
This is how large indoor spaces such as shopping malls transit stations, airports, and similar indoor places may be mapped by looking at sensor data and wireless access signals from those devices.
The patent is:
Crowd-Sourcing Indoor Locations
Invented by: Faen Zhang, Edward Y. Chang, Yongqiang Huang, Shuchang Zhou
Assigned to Google
US Patent Application 20150204676
Published July 23, 2015
Filed: August 15, 2012
Abstract
Aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for constructing a scalable model of an indoor space using crowd-sourced inertial navigation system (INS) signals from mobile devices. By tracking INS signals from a number of participating users, the user’s trajectories can be estimated as they move their mobile devices indoors. The estimated trajectories can be scored against similar routes taken by other users. Routes with the highest scores are then laid out over a map of the indoor space to identify areas most often traveled to and from landmarks and distances between the landmarks.
Locations within Indoor spaces may also be identified in other ways as well. The patent points out:
(1) Other signals to identify locations for an indoor space may also be used that could include radio frequency (RF) signals, light, sound image recognition signals, and other types of signals and/or environmental factors or any combination of these.
(2) The server building a database may look at map information, which could include floor plans representing an indoor space within a building.
(3) “Beacon” messages may also be used to send out information to identify wireless network access points. The beacon messages may also include additional network access information which also assists devices in accessing the network.
(4) The patent tells us that Personal Indentifiable Information need not be collected, and may actually be removed in order to protect the privacy of the wireless network’s users.
(5) A GPS receiver may be included in the mobile devices , that could be used to determine the geographic location of the client device, and could identify the device’s latitude, longitude and altitude position.
(6) Mapping of an indoor space may help identify interior constraints, such as walls, which people cannot walk through, as well as frequent landmarks within that indoor space, such as offices, conference rooms, bathrooms.
Take-Aways
Having people provide data about their locations can be essential for their use of such services. Information collected from the devices of people using those services help to provide such services. I can’t remember the last time I tried to navigate somewhere with the use of a paper map. I can remember visiting places, and using Google Maps to find walking directions to busy Urban spaces. This does seem to be a capability that helps make our lives easier.
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Saturday, July 25, 2015
Keep These Six Search Engine Optimization Tricks in Mind
There are lots of SEO techniquesand strategies you should think about using, no matter the kind of site you run. Your whole website and optimizing content is a wise move. That said, below are a couple of search engine optimizationtips and advice you will wish to keep in mind.1. Use Video Marketing- One of the greatest things you can certainly do in terms of SEO is use video marketingto your advantage because video promotion is also akind of link building. When video advertising is done the proper manner,you then can reap quite a number of advantages, with amongthose gains being that you could get a lot of traffic. If you have significantly more traffic, then it means more profits and much more exposure.
What you need to dois develop a video related to what your primary website offers, with that above said,along with the video only needs to be 2- 5 minutes long. After you have finished creating a video, you will wish tocompose a brief description for it and add a link back to your ownmain site and drop a few important key words(2-3) in the description as well as add a link to your own website insidethe video (at first or the ending).
2. Facility Site Around One Principal keyword- of course your content shouldcontain a number of keywords, and Everybody knows that as it pertains to internet search engine optimization, then key words issues. However, your web site around one main keyword should try and focus, and use that main key word innearly all content you publish to your own web site. In the event you do so, then Google and other search engines like googlemight index your content and give your website a great place in theirsearch results for the principal keyword that you use in all yourarticles. Do your best to contain it in all your content and try to think about what keyword you need tomainly focus on hard you put in your website and you might be taken aback at the traffic you will generate.
3. Use These Link Building Tips- Link building is vital to search engineoptimization, but you can easily mess this up and then you may possess a very hard time getting found by the search engines, in case you do mess it up. Sure, this link construction strategy may take toget results from, but it is worth the delay because building links this way is a goodmanner to do it and could end up generating some great results.
4. Research Key Words With Google Minute- Go to Google and be sure to have Google Prompt on. Let Google Instant finish the searchphrase, and begin typing in phrases you think people would use to locate yourweb site. You will get a broad concept of what phrasesyou should consider using during your web site and whatpeople are typing when you do this. This is a great way to research keywords, and youought to start doing it as soon as possiblebecause the sooner you do this, the earlier you could wind up gettingtraffic by utilizing certain keywords and phrases.
5. Make Certain Website Is Mobile Friendly- Believe it or not, but a lot ofwebsite owners would not have mobile websites thatare friendly, and then you definitely should have mobile websites that are friendly if you're serious about Search Engine Optimization. It may seem it's really rather simple, although this is not easy to do and there's a possibility your website may already bemobile friendly and all you've got to do is double check, which you can use online.
6. Write - The final search engine optimization suggestion to remember is to ensure that you simply write and not like you are writing for a search engine. It is liked by searchengines when you talk just like a person and so does the visitors ofyour website's.
There are a couple of SEOhints that you must take into account as you can observe. Guidance and the abovetips should assist you. Start implementing thosehints as soon as possible that said and you might wind up appreciating getting a lot oftraffic from a few of the top search engines.
For More Info Check out CraigTuttleMarketing.com
Update on the Autocomplete API
There have been multiple times in which the developer community’s reverse-engineering of a Google service via an unpublished API has led to great things. The Google Maps API, for example, became a formal supported API months after seeing what creative engineers could do combining map data with other data sources. We currently support more than 80 APIs that developers can use to integrate Google services and data into their applications.
However, there are some times when using an unsupported, unpublished API also carries the risk that the API will stop being be available. This is one of those situations.
We built autocomplete as a complement to Search, and never intended that it would exist disconnected from the purpose of anticipating user search queries. Over time we’ve realized that while we can conceive of uses for an autocomplete data feed outside of search results that may be valuable, overall the content of our automatic completions are optimized and intended to be used in conjunction with web search results, and outside of the context of a web search don’t provide a meaningful user benefit.
In the interest of maintaining the integrity of autocomplete as part of Search, we will be restricting unauthorized access to the unpublished autocomplete API as of August 10th, 2015. We want to ensure that users experience autocomplete as it was designed to be used -- as a service closely tied to Search. We believe this provides the best user experience for both services.
For publishers and developers who still want to use the autocomplete service for their site, we have an alternative. Google Custom Search Engine allows sites to maintain autocomplete functionality in connection with Search functionality. Any partner already using Google CSE will be unaffected by this change. For others, if you want autocomplete functionality after August 10th, 2015, please see our CSE sign-up page.
Through the Google lens: Search trends July 17-24
Bad Blood
Phew, where to start with this one. Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj had a spat over VMA nominations (Taylor was nominated for Video of the Year; Nicki was not), worked through it and made up -- all on Twitter. It was a good lesson in the art of the subtweet, as well as the “sincere apology after responding to a subtweet that wasn’t directly about you” tweet. Searches about the incident topped 500,000.
But Minaj v. Swift wasn’t the only music-related drama to make the list of Trending Searches. Meek Mill, hip hop artist and Nicki Minaj’s significant other, started a Twitter rant of his own, alleging that rapper Drake doesn’t write his own material and inspiring more than a million searches. The two artists haven’t settled up yet, so stay tuned for more on that front.
Last but not least, country stars Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert are calling it quits after four years of marriage and guess what — they both had stuff to say about it on Twitter. More than 1 million searchers took to Google to find out more.
But wait, there’s more
It was the week of the sequel. (The weequel?) James Bond is back -- the trailer for the upcoming “Spectre” was released this week, which got more than 100,000 people searching for the movie. And nearly as surprising as the idea of a shark-filled tornado itself, the Sharknado is back. “Sharknado 3” -- featuring 90s all-stars Tara Reid and Ian Ziering -- aired on Wednesday night and pulled in a cool 500,000 searches.
Speaking of all-stars (and also of the 90s) remember the days when an NBA superstar could star in a wide-release film with his Looney Tunes pals? Well, it’s happening again. This time, it’s not Michael Jordan, but Lebron James who inked a deal with Warner Bros. The company announced the partnership on Wednesday, leading to 200,000 searches. Reports suggest that while Michael Jordan will be replaced, Bugs Bunny will play himself, though there has been speculation about a case of cartoon patellar tendonitis he’s been coping with quietly for years.
Posted by Megan Slack, who searched this week for [public pools in San Francisco].
Mobile Testing: Case Studies and Findings
Five ways we’re celebrating the Special Olympics and #ADA25
Standing in Soldier Field in Chicago, 47 years ago, Eunice Shriver kicked off the first Special Olympics in history--1,000 people with intellectual disabilities from the U.S. and Canada competed in track & field, swimming and diving. Even though it was a small inaugural event, its historical impact--giving a platform to the civil rights struggles of people with disabilities that were so often overlooked-- was massive. The Games were meant to give children with cognitive disabilities, in Eunice’s words, “the chance to play, the chance to compete and the chance to grow.”
Ambitious, inclusive thinking like Eunice’s is contagious, and has inspired us to support this year’s Special Olympics World Games as part of the Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities. Launched in May, this effort is focused on supporting the development of assistive technologies for people with disabilities around the world with $20 million in Google.org grants. This weekend, to mark the Games as well as the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark legislation that advanced the civil rights of people with disabilities when it was signed into law in 1990, we’re honoring the community in the following ways:
Google Doodle. We’ve created a homepage Doodle that shows a track inspired by the Special Olympics World Games’ "circle of inclusion,” featuring athletes of all backgrounds. In the spirit of getting moving, since we've heard from users that they love seeing doodles on the go, we're now starting to make them easier to see and share on our mobile search results in addition to desktop and the Google app.
Special Olympics World Games. Over the next nine days, the Special Olympics World Games will draw more than half a million spectators to cheer on 7,000 athletes from 177 countries in events from judo to powerlifting to kayaking and more. We’re powering the World Games’ social media nerve center, contributing as a financial supporter and are packing more than 300 Googlers into the stands.
Cheer an athlete. If you’re in Los Angeles, come visit us from July 25 until August 2 at the World Games Festival Space at USC’s Alumni Park to support the athletes. For those who can’t make it in person, you can visit g.co/WorldGames2015 to send a cheer to the athletes. Every day during the competition, we’ll decorate the dorm walls of the athletes with your cheers to encourage them to “be brave in the attempt.”
 |
| Portraits, like these at the National Portrait Gallery featuring leaders Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts, who have campaigned tirelessly for the rights of people with disabilities and Tatyana McFadden, who inspires athletes today, will decorate Washington, D.C. this weekend. See the photo gallery |
| Audio description available here |
Fallout From Panda Update Already Starting to Show
Is Google Testing a Knowledge Vault Update?
Bing to Prohibit Multiple Display URL Domains Under the Same Ad Group
5 Ways to Make Your Small Business Rock the Web
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Google+: A case study on App Download Interstitials
Despite our intuition that we should remove the interstitial, we prefer to let data guide our decisions, so we set out to learn how the interstitial affected our users. Our analysis found that:
- 9% of the visits to our interstitial page resulted in the ‘Get App’ button being pressed. (Note that some percentage of these users already have the app installed or may never follow through with the app store download.)
- 69% of the visits abandoned our page. These users neither went to the app store nor continued to our mobile website.
- 1-day active users on our mobile website increased by 17%.
- G+ iOS native app installs were mostly unaffected (-2%). (We’re not reporting install numbers from Android devices since most come with Google+ installed.)
Posted by David Morell, Software Engineer, Google+
Neon prescription... or rather, New transcription for Google Voice
So, we asked users if they would kindly share some of their voicemails for research and system improvements. Thanks to those who participated, we are happy to announce an improved voicemail system in Google Voice and Project Fi that delivers more accurate transcriptions. Using a (deep breath) long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network (whew!), we cut our transcription errors by 49%.
To start receiving improved voicemail transcriptions, you don't need to do a thing -- just continue to use Google Voice as you have been. For those not using Google Voice but want to give it a try, sign up for a Google Voice (or Google Voice Lite) account here, it’s quick and easy to get started.
Many thanks to the Google Voice users who shared their voicemails, they really helped us make the product better. While this is a big improvement, it is just the beginning and with your input, we will continue improving voicemail transcriptions over time. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to hearing what you link—er, think!
Are You Tracking the Most Important PPC Stats?
A Storm of Change: Business Resilience, Rebuilding and Recovery
August 29, 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In many ways, Katrina was a blessing to New Orleans. How many times does a city get the chance to re-brand itself? In essence, New Orleans was given a blank slate. The result? New Orleans 2015 is very different from New Orleans 2005. In fact, for New Orleanians, time is characterized by either "pre- or post Katrina."
While New Orleans is still rebuilding, perhaps it is time to say that we have recovered-at least from a business perspective. No longer does Louisiana occupy the space at the bottom of national business lists; rather, we find ourselves moving to the top of these "good" lists. Given our clouded past, some may be surprised to see that recent rankings, courtesy of GNO, Inc., include:
- #1 Business Climate (Business Facilities)
- #1 Brain Magnet in America (Forbes)
- #1 Most Economical City-New Orleans (KPMG)
- #2 State in the U.S. for Business Climate (Site Selection)
- #3 Winning the IT Jobs Battle (Forbes)
- #3 City in the World -New Orleans (Rough Guides)
- #6 Overall Top State for Doing Business (Area Development)
- #9 State for Business (Business Executive)
- #14 Best City to Start a Business (WalletHub)
And the list goes on. This is just a sampling of pretty awesome results for a city that 10 years ago made national news for complete devastation causing businesses to either shut down or reinvent themselves.
New Orleans has long been known as a city that embraces diversity and fosters creativity, and it is a community that is both generous and resilient. Some say the city survived because of these attributes, in spite of the government. And perhaps it is these attributes that have enticed an estimated 10,000 young professionals to make New Orleans home after Katrina. And why it has come to be known as the city for entrepreneurs.
Having worked in public relations for more than 20 years, I had always dreamed of opening my own agency, yet I was happy working as part of a bigger team that large agencies afforded. Then Katrina hit. Tourism and hospitality came to a screeching halt. Agency leaders and employees lost their jobs or scattered to other cities. The outlook for a full service marketing agency was bleak. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..." Charles Dickens said it best over 150 years ago in his opening line of
A Tale of Two Cities.
Because normal channels of communication were thwarted, public relations reigned. It was back to the basics of "front porch" and grassroots communication, yard signs and community relations. With every major national media outlet in town to cover the storm, PR professionals had the chance to work with media heroes like Anderson Cooper, and to carry the message of what was happening in New Orleans to the world.
This is where opportunity comes in. Working in concert with another communications firm and a coalition of business, political and community leaders, we took our story of recovery on the road. These Fleur de Lis Ambassadors traveled to major media markets across the United States telling firsthand stories of the storm while correcting misconceptions of the city's recovery. No, we are not still underwater. Yes, we are open for business. We met with editorial boards, rocked the airwaves of radio and TV, created partnerships with community foundations and even met with professional sports teams, exploring how each could participate and support us as we recovered.
New Orleanians were rebuilding their lives. With a backdrop of a shifted population yielding separated families; physical destruction requiring rebuilding; distress and desperation begging for emotional support; and limited supplies and resources requiring financial assistance, to name a few hardships, New Orleanians were rewriting their "life scripts." While local businesses identified new needs for rebuilding the city, companies outside of our footprint became a vital part of the city's recovery. Now, 10 years later, the economic success New Orleans enjoys reflects its commitment to a stronger city.
To that end, two business development organizations have risen to prominence since Katrina: GNO, Inc. and JEDCO, both of which work strategically and cooperatively to bring businesses-both large and small-to the region. Homeruns have been the likes of GE Capital and Smoothie King, along with the return of Chiquita which has been on hiatus for four decades and International Shipholding which relocated to Mobile, Alabama, after Katrina.
The 10 year anniversary of one of the worst storms of the century is certainly a time to take stock-what has worked and what has not. The city has much to be proud of as evidenced by high rankings on various lists. As someone who began her business post Katrina, I offer these lessons of the storm:
Identify opportunities.
Is there a product or service that is not being fulfilled or can be provided in a new way? My dear friend Simone Bruni, who had been in the hospitality industry until Katrina, founded her company, Demo Diva, when she realized the city was in dire need of demolition and hauling services.
Be a part of your community.
Network; attend civic, business and social gatherings; get involved. Don't think of these meetings as a "nice to do," but rather as a necessity to grow your business. At these, you will discover what your competition is doing, best practices, new companies in town, potential partners and much more.
Sustain relationships.
Reconnect with your past contacts while developing and fostering new ones. Reaching out with a systematic approach will help you grow your business.
Market your business.
Be proactive in letting people know what your business is and what it does; use traditional and non- traditional marketing tools. From special events to speaking opportunities to leveraging a national or local trend, make it count.
Tell your story.
Potential clients and customers may not remember an ad, but they will remember your story; make who you are and what you do part of your brand. And show an interest in your client or customer's story.
Help others.
Whether it is a courtesy interview, volunteering for a homeless shelter or assuming a leadership role in a professional organization, you will receive more than you give. Our city would not be where it is today had we not joined hands for the greater good.
Remember the basics.
It was never more evident than after Katrina, when technology was at a standstill, that we had to remember how we used to carry on business and resort to the roots of our profession. With unreliable internet capabilities, little broadcast or outdoor advertising, unpredictable phone service or faxes, we learned to communicate through yard signs, coffee shop meetings, fliers and personal visits-- reminiscent of how the early PR professionals communicated.
Take risks.
The Chinese word for "crisis" is commonly referred to as "opportunity." The lesson here is to do things differently in order to attain different results. I opened my public relations firm after Katrina, in the midst of a recession and as a cancer survivor, diagnosed shortly after Katrina. I have never looked back.
Be thankful.
New Orleans is a city filled with gratitude; on this 10th anniversary of Katrina, we say thank you to every person who helped us rebuild, housed us when we evacuated or lost our homes, visited us, told our story, bought our products, taught our children and even relocated here. The list is endless, and our cup runneth over. Do the same with your business. You can never say thank you enough.
Celebrate
New Orleans celebrates life through its fairs, festivals and parades, and even celebrates death with its jazz funerals. Take time to celebrate, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Whether you celebrate your company's anniversary, employee milestones or some recognition of the company, shout it out!
This blogger graduated from Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program. Goldman Sachs is a partner of the What Is Working: Small Businesses section.
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5 Content Marketing Myths To Correct Now
Avoid the 5 Biggest Management Mistakes
1. Micromanagement.
We've all seen it, the business leader who hovers over his or her direct reports smothering them with a real time barrage of corrections and "suggestions." The result is a frustrated and impotent team who grow to become dependent on that leader to direct their daily actions.
When you hand off a task, project, or ongoing responsibility to a team member, I suggest you give them:
a) A clear picture of what success looks like, and why it matters to your company.
b) The resources they'll need to get the job done (budget, team, and/or tools).
c) A clear picture of how and when you want them to report on progress and results to you (including what status would require you to get involved again).
d) And the authority and responsibility to get the necessary job done.
If you've done this, then you have to let them get on with the job.
Remember, while you may have a suggestion that could improve things by 10 percent, you'll lower their sense of ownership and learning by 50 percent or more if you aren't careful how you share it. There is a time and a place to direct or coach your team. Pick your moments wisely. When in doubt, let the "suggestion" go, it likely won't help.
2. Abdication.
This is the opposite of micromanagement. Abdication is when you dump a task or project on a team member's plate then walk away, leaving them to figure it out by themselves. While many times a talented team member will be able to handle this, the real problem is that most business leaders who abdicate don't give their staff member a clean handoff.
Often they don't clarify expectations (of outcome, of reporting, of authority, etc.) and then they rush in when they job isn't done right to ZAP the staff member.
I've met many business leaders who actually want their team members to fail (although they don't see this about themselves) because it allows them to feel better about themselves as they step in to "correct" the behavior. They would rather be proven right then to give the help to their team member and help them succeed.
3. Trust violations.
With our business coaching clients we call these "Integrity Fouls".
Integrity Fouls include a business leader acting in contravention of the company's best interests (e.g. letting poor performance of a well-liked team member slide; giving self-preferential treatment; etc.)
They also include the business leader not honoring his or her word (e.g. consistently being late for meetings; not meeting deadlines or commitments; etc.)
As a leader of a business your actions (and mis-actions) have an oversized impact. Your team watches you very closely. Over the long run they see everything. Make sure you are modeling the values and behaviors you want them to take on. Ask yourself, "How would I feel if every member of my team acted this way?"
4. Not Taking the Time to Know Your Team.
Your team is made of individuals, each with their own dreams, ambitions, hopes, likes, and dislikes. As a leader you need to learn from them what matters most to them. How do they want to be managed? What do they consider an emotional bank account deposit? What do they consider withdrawal? What inspires them? What degrades or deadens them?
I personally keep a 4x6 index card listing the key insights I've learned about managing my key team members, and I review these index cards each week. Does this take time and effort? Of course, by your team is worth it, and the return on investment is high.
5. Rushing with Your Team.
There is an old cliché with a lot of truth to it: With people, fast is slow and slow is fast.
Be careful that in your rush for efficiency you don't hurt your relationship with your key team.
Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is to slow down and spend a little more time with your team instead of rushing them out the door so they can get back to work.
For a free business owner tool kit with 21 detailed training videos to help you grow your business and get your life back, click here.
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Moz Local Officially Launches in the UK
Posted by David-Mihm
To all Moz Local fans in the UK, I'm excited to announce that your wait is over. As the sun rises "across the pond" this morning, Moz Local is officially live in the United Kingdom!
A bit of background
As many of you know, we released the US version of Moz Local in March 2014. After 12 months of terrific growth in the US, and a boatload of technical improvements and feature releases--especially for Enterprise customers--we released the Check Listing feature for a limited set of partner search engines and directories in the UK in April of this year.
Over 20,000 of you have checked your listings (or your clients' listings) in the last 3-1/2 months. Those lookups have helped us refine and improve the background technology immensely (more on that below). We've been just as eager to release the fully-featured product as you've been to use it, and the technical pieces have finally fallen into place for us to do so.
How does it work?
The concept is the same as the US version of Moz Local: show you how accurately and completely your business is listed on the most important local search platforms and directories, and optimize and perfect as many of those business listings as we can on your behalf.
For customers specifically looking for you, accurate business listings are obviously important. For customers who might not know about you yet, they're also among the most important factors for ranking in local searches on Google. Basically, the more times Google sees your name, address, phone, and website listed the same way on quality local websites, the more trust they have in your business, and the higher you're likely to rank.
Moz Local is designed to help on both these fronts.
To use the product, you simply need to type a name and postcode at moz.com/local. We'll then show you a list of the closest matching listings we found. We prioritize verified listing information that we find on Google or Facebook, and selecting one of those verified listings means we'll be able to distribute it on your behalf.
Clicking on a result brings you to a full details report for that listing. We'll show you how accurate and complete your listings are now, and where they could be after using our product.
For customers with hundreds or thousands of locations, bulk upload is also available using a modified version of your data from Google My Business--feel free to e-mail enterpriselocal@moz.com for more details.
Where do we distribute your data?
We've prioritized the most important commercial sites in the UK local search ecosystem, and made them the centerpieces of Moz Local. We'll update your data directly on globally-important players Factual and Foursquare, and the UK-specific players CentralIndex, Thomson Local, and the Scoot network--which includes key directories like TouchLocal, The Independent, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Scotsman, and Wales Online.
We'll be adding two more major destinations shortly, and for those of you who sign up before that time, your listings will be automatically distributed to the additional destinations when the integrations are complete.
How much does it cost?
The cost per listing is £84/year, which includes distribution to the sites mentioned above with unlimited updates throughout the year, monitoring of your progress over time, geographically- focused reporting, and the ability to find and close duplicate listings right from your Moz Local dashboard--all the great upgrades that my colleague Noam Chitayat blogged about here.
What's next?
Well, as I mentioned just a couple paragraphs ago, we've got two additional destinations to which we'll be sending your data in very short order. Once those integrations are complete, we'll be just a few weeks away from releasing our biggest set of features since we launched. I look forward to sharing more about these features at BrightonSEO at the end of the summer!
For those of you around the world in Canada, Australia, and other countries, we know there's plenty of demand for Moz Local overseas, and we're working as quickly as we can to build additional relationships abroad. And to our friends in the UK, please let us know how we can continue to make the product even better!
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360 Degree Video Ads on YouTube Let Advertisers Deliver Richer Experience
8 Tips to Control Your Staffing Costs
1. Tie compensation to value created, not time served.
Too many businesses reward staff with raises, bonuses, and perks (e.g. vacation time, etc.) based on years of service. I strongly encourage you to shift the conversation to be about value created.
2. Bonuses and benefits are not "rights" but tied to performance (both individual and company).
Any bonus that is regular and expected soon becomes "base". How do you frame your bonuses? Are they are "right" or are they a reward for value created?
3. For creative and interesting work let intrinsic rewards rule.
This means don't try to find financial incentive systems to overly control or encourage behavior, but instead, for interesting, creative work, let the work itself (and the feedback your team gets) be the driving force.
4. Consider cuts to your admin team, or at the very least, grow this part of your team slower than your sales.
Most service and administrative departments can be cut by 1 in 4 with no impact on quality of work. Many can handle 1 in 3 cut with no significant negative impact. Remember, work expands to fill the time, and not all this expanded work creates value.
5. Stop all "make work".
This is a follow up to suggestion four. The best way to cut "make work" is for your staff to have full plates that force them to prioritize and leave lower level items undone, or done good enough. Also consider your company culture. Is it encouraged and championed in your company for lower level team members to powerful champion cutting low value legacy "make work"?
6. Cut wasteful meetings (or at least cut time in half).
Do you really need all the meetings you have each week or month? Couldn't you cut the attendance list or meeting time by half and still get the same or perhaps a better result? Clear agendas and firm facilitation make the meetings you do have more productive.
7. Twice a year issue a "full benefits report" to every employee.
On that report lay out the full financial value of all benefits your company pays to them -directly and indirectly. This includes the dollar value of their salary, bonuses, medical, vacation time, FICA taxes, etc. The reason to do this is to keep everyone clear that the money they receive twice a month in their take home pay check is just part of what the company pays to them.
8. Cut your low performing team members now.
Get over your fear of firing people (low performers cost too much to carry.) As soon as you know that you have a team member who just isn't going to cut it, make the decision to help them move on to their next career position versus just staying in limbo with you. It's better for them and it's better for your company too.
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3 Static Content Hacks to Supercharge Your Search Traffic
Content Marketing: Big Publicized Events Or Continuous Engagement?
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Raising the Bar: A Publishing Volume Experiment on the Moz Blog
Posted by Trevor-Klein
Content marketers hear regularly about how quality is far more important than quantity. You can publish a thousand blog posts in a year, but if only three of them are truly noteworthy, valuable, and share-worthy content—what Rand would call 10x content—then you've wasted quite a bit of time.
Here at Moz, we've published blog posts on a daily cadence since before almost any of us can remember. If you didn't already know, Moz began as SEOmoz in 2004, and was little more than a blog where Rand fostered one of the earliest SEO communities. He offered a bit more background in a recent interview with Contently:
"It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities."
We've taken occasional days off for major holidays when we knew the traffic volume wouldn't be there, but the guiding philosophy was that we published every day because that's what our audience expected. If we stepped back from that schedule, we'd lose our street cred, our reliability, and a sizeable chunk of our audience, not to mention the opportunities for increased traffic.
It's now quite easy to have those discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and other networks, making our old approach an outdated philosophy that was based more on fear of the unknown and a misguided assumption than on actual data.
This May and June, we decided to change that. We're raising the bar, and we want to show you why.
It started with a tweet:
This week, Hubspot published 49 unique blogposts (or ~10/weekday). I wonder if they've tested various quantities and found that to be ideal?
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 9, 2015
The ensuing discussion piqued the interest of Joe Chernov and Ginny Soskey at HubSpot, as they wondered what effects it might have to publish more or less frequently. We decided to collaborate on a pair of experiments to find out.
The setup
The experiments were simple: Set a benchmark of two "normal" weeks, then adjust the publishing volumes on each blog to (roughly) half the normal cadence for two weeks and double the normal cadence for two weeks.
One thing we should note from the get-go: We were always sure that Whiteboard Friday would continue to be a weekly tradition, so we didn't alter the publishing schedule for those. This experiment altered the schedule from Monday-Thursday.
We closely monitored our blog traffic and engagement metrics, as well as subscriptions to our emailed blog newsletter. HubSpot ran their experiment first, allowing Moz to learn a few lessons from their experience before starting our own.
The results from HubSpot's experiment were also published today; make sure you take a look.
The results
We had several central questions going into this experiment, and hypotheses for how each one would come out. There are six parts, and they're laid out below as follows:
- Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic
- Engagement thins as volume grows
- Subscription slowdown
- Community complaints/backlash
- Trading quantity for quality
Important note: We know this is non-scientific. These results are intended to be directional, not definitive, and our takeaways—while they represent our best attempts at progress—are by no means perfect. We want this to be an ongoing discussion, so please chime in with your ideas in the comments!
1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic
Hypothesis
Publishing fewer posts each week will lead to a significant decrease in overall traffic to the blog. Publishing more posts each week will lead to a significant increase in overall traffic to the blog. These changes will be proportional to the decrease/increase in publishing volume.
Results
Let's get the high-level overview before we dive into details. Traffic on the Moz Blog can obviously vary quite a bit depending on the content, but all things considered, it's remarkably steady. Here are total daily unique pageviews to all pages on the blog so far in 2015:
Spikes and dips here and there, but we're able to pull a pretty good benchmark from that data. Here's what that benchmark looks like:
Average weekday uniques: |
38,620 |
Average weekly uniques: |
227,450 |
Now, here's the traffic from the four weeks leading up to the reduced/increased publishing frequency, as well as the two weeks at half-cadence and the two weeks at double-cadence (I've also included a line for the average of 38,620):
There's a bit of a difference. You can tell the traffic during half-cadence weeks was a little lower, and the traffic during double-cadence weeks appears a little higher. I'd take the numbers highlighted above in green over the ones in red any day of the week, but those curves show far smaller variation than we'd anticipated.
Here's a look at weekly numbers:
That makes the dip a little clearer, but it's hard to tell from that chart whether the loss in traffic is anything to be worried about.
Let's dive a bit deeper into the two testing periods and see if we can't pick apart something more interesting. You might notice from the above daily charts that the blog traffic follows a regular weekly pattern. It peaks on Tuesday and falls gradually throughout the rest of the week. That's characteristic of our audience, which finds less and less time to read the blog as the week goes on. We wanted to take that variability into account when looking at each day during the testing period, and the following chart does just that.
It plots the traffic during the tests as a percent deviation from the average traffic on any given day of the week. So, the four Tuesdays that passed during the test are compared to our average Tuesday traffic, the four Wednesdays to the average Wednesday, and so on. Let's take a look:
This is a more noteworthy difference. Dropping the publishing volume to half our normal cadence resulted in, on average, a 5.6% drop in unique pageviews from those daily averages.
That actually makes perfect sense when it's put in context. Somewhere around 10-15% of our blog traffic comes from the most recent week's worth of posts (the rest is to older posts). If we publish half as many posts in a given week, there are half as many new pages to view, so we might expect half as many unique pageviews to those newer posts.
That's pageviews, though. What about sessions? Are fewer people visiting the blog in the first place due to our reduced publishing volume? Let's find out:
That's a bit more palatable. We lost 2.9% of our sessions that included visits to the blog during a two-week period when we cut our publishing volume in half. That's close enough that, for a non-scientific study, we can pretty well call it negligible. The shift could easily have been caused by the particular pieces of content we published, not by the schedule on which we published them.
Another interesting thing to note about the chart showing deviations from daily averages: Doubling the publishing volume did, on average, absolutely nothing to the number of unique pageviews. The average increase in uniques from daily averages during the double-cadence period is just a bit over 3%. That suggests relative saturation; people don't have time to invest in reading more than one Moz Blog post each day. (I'm not surprised; I barely have time to read more than one Moz Blog post each day!) ;-)
It also emphasizes something we've known all along: Content marketing is a form of flywheel marketing. It takes quite a while to get it up to speed, but once it's spinning, its massive inertia means that it isn't easily affected by relatively small changes. It'll keep going even if you step back and just watch for a short while.
2. Engagement thins as volume grows
Hypothesis
The amount of total on-page engagement, in the form of thumbs up and comments on posts, will remain somewhat static, since people only have so much time. Reducing the blog frequency will cause engagement to approach saturation, and increasing the blog frequency will spread engagement more thinly.
Results
Moz's primary two engagement metrics are built into each page on our blog: thumbs up and comments. This one played out more or less to our expectations.
We can get a good sense for engagement with these posts by looking at our internal 1Metric data. We've iterated on this metric since we talked about it in this post, but the basic concept is still the same—it's a two-digit score calculated from several "ingredients," including metrics for traffic, on-page engagement, and social engagement.
Here's a peek at the data for the two testing periods, with the double-cadence period highlighted in green, and the half-cadence period highlighted in red.
| Publish Date | Post Title | 1Metric Score | Unique Pageviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25-Jun | How Google May Use Searcher, Usage, & Clickstream Behavior to Impact Rankings - Whiteboard Friday | 81 | 12,315 |
| 25-Jun | How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches | 56 | 7,445 |
| 25-Jun | How to Build Links in Person | 36 | 5,045 |
| 24-Jun | What to See, Do, and More at MozCon 2015 in Seattle | 9 | 2,585 |
| 24-Jun | The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics | 80 | 15,152 |
| 23-Jun | Why ccTLDs Should Not Be an Automatic Choice for International Websites | 11 | 2,259 |
| 23-Jun | Brainstorm and Execute Killer Content Ideas Your Audience Will Love | 38 | 5,365 |
| 22-Jun | The Alleged $7.5 Billion Fraud in Online Advertising | 85 | 44,212 |
| 19-Jun | How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche - Whiteboard Friday | 78 | 15,258 |
| 18-Jun | The Colossus Update: Waking The Giant | 62 | 14,687 |
| 17-Jun | New Features in OSE's Spam Score & the Mozscape API | 10 | 1,901 |
| 17-Jun | How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy | 44 | 7,312 |
| 16-Jun | Dissecting and Surviving Google's Local Snack Pack Results | 15 | 2,663 |
| 15-Jun | Can You Rank in Google Without Links? New Data Says Slim Chance | 81 | 15,909 |
| 15-Jun | Study: 300 Google Sitelinks Search Boxes - Triggers and Trip-Ups Analyzed | 23 | 3,207 |
| 14-Jun | How to Choose a PPC Agency | 14 | 2,947 |
| 12-Jun | Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 - Whiteboard Friday | 90 | 22,010 |
| 11-Jun | Eliminate Duplicate Content in Faceted Navigation with Ajax/JSON/JQuery | 38 | 5,753 |
| 9-Jun | 5 Spreadsheet Tips for Manual Link Audits | 50 | 6,331 |
| 5-Jun | Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday | 79 | 15,225 |
| 3-Jun | How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs) | 50 | 10,486 |
| 1-Jun | Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked | 51 | 9,847 |
The 1Metric scores for the half-cadence period (in red) average almost 60, suggesting those posts performed better overall than those during the double-cadence period, which averaged a 1Metric score of 45. We know the traffic was lower during the half-cadence weeks, which suggests engagement must have been significantly higher to result in those scores, and vice-versa for the double-cadence weeks.
Taking a look at our on-page engagement metrics, we see that play out quite clearly:
The number of thumbs up and comments stayed relatively level during the half-cadence period, and fell sharply when there were twice as many posts as usual.
We're incredibly lucky to have such an actively engaged community at Moz. The conversations that regularly happen in the comments—65 of them, on average—are easily one of my favorite parts of our site. We definitely have a "core" subset of our community that regularly takes the time to join in those discussions, and while the right post will tempt a far greater number of people to chime in, you can easily see patterns in the users who spend time in the comments. Those users, of course, only have a limited amount of time.This is reflected in the data. When we published half as many posts, they still had time to comment on every one they wanted, so the number of comments left didn't diminish. Then, when we published twice the number of posts we normally do, they didn't spend twice as much time leaving comments; they were just pickier about which posts they commented on. The number of comments on each post stayed roughly the same.
The same goes for the thumbs.
3. Subscription slowdown
The Moz Blog is available via an email subscription through FeedPress, linked to from a few different places on the site:
Hypothesis
With fewer opportunities to impress people with the quality of the blog's content and earn a spot in their inboxes, subscriptions to the blog posts will drop significantly during the half-cadence period.
Results
As it turns out, there was minimal (if any) effect on email subscriptions. Check out the numbers for both periods below:
On the whole, this is a very uninteresting (and for that reason interesting!) result. Our subscription rate showed no noteworthy fluctuations during either of the two testing periods.
These numbers are based on the total number of subscribers, and with half as many emails going out during the half-cadence period, we can fairly confidently say that (since the total subscriber rate didn't change) we didn't get a decrease in unsubscribes during the half-cadence week, as we'd have seen an increase in the subscription rate. That's a good sign: If people were fatigued by our rate of new emails already, we'd likely see a reduction in that fatigue during the half-cadence weeks, leading to less churn. No such reduction happened, so we're comfortable continuing to send daily emails.
One important note is that we don't send multiple emails each day, so during the double-cadence period we were sending daily digests of multiple posts. (Were we to send more than one each day, we might have expected a significant rise in unsubscribes. That's something HubSpot was better able to track in their version of this experiment.)
4. Community complaints / backlash
This was another primary concern of ours: If we skipped days on the editorial calendar, and didn't publish a new post, would our community cry foul? Would we be failing to meet the expectations we'd developed among our readers?
Hypothesis
Having multiple days with no new post published in a relatively short period of time will lead to disappointment and outcry among the readership, which has grown to expect a new post every day.
Results
While we didn't proactively ask our community if they noticed, we were watching social traffic specifically for word of there not being a blog post on one or more of the days we skipped during the half-cadence period. We figured we'd find a bunch of "hey, what gives?" Our community team is great at monitoring social media for mentions—even those that don't specifically ping us with @Moz—and this is what we found:
A single post.
I guess @Moz is looking into only posting 3 blogs a week. It's the most depressing A/B test I've ever come across.
— Ben Starling (@BeenStarling) June 4, 2015
That's really it. Other than this one tweet—one that elicited a heartfelt "Awww!" from Roger—there wasn't a single peep from anyone. Crickets. This hypothesis couldn't be more busted.
We asked in our most recent reader survey how often people generally read the Moz Blog, and 17% of readers reported that they read it every day.
5. Trading quantity for quality
This is a far more subjective hypothesis—we can't even measure the results beyond our own opinions—but we found it quite interesting nonetheless.
Hypothesis
If we post fewer times per week, we'll have more time and be better able to focus on the quality of the posts we do publish. If we publish more frequently, the quality of each post will suffer.
Results
As nice an idea as this was, it turned out to be a bit backwards. Publishing fewer posts did leave us with more time, but we didn't end up using it to dive deeper into revisions of other posts or come up with additional feedback for our scheduled authors. The Moz Blog is written largely by authors outside our own company, and even though we had more time we could have used to recommend edits, the authors didn't have any more time than they otherwise would have, and it wouldn't have been fair for us to ask them for it anyway.
What we did do is spend more time on bigger, more innovative projects, and ended the two half-cadence weeks feeling significantly more productive.
We also noticed that part of the stress of an editorial calendar comes from the fact that an artificial schedule exists in the first place. Even with the reduction in volume, we felt significant pressure when a scheduled post wasn't quite where we wanted it to be by the time it was supposed to be finished.
Because we ended up spending our time elsewhere, our experiment didn't focus nearly as much on the comprehensiveness of the posts as the HubSpot experiment did. It ended up just being about volume and maintaining the quality bar for all the posts we published, regardless of their frequency.
Our productivity gains, though, made us begin to think even more carefully about where we were spending our time.
Wrapping up
With some basic data clearly showing us that a day without a blog post isn't the calamity we feared it may be, we've decided it's time to raise the bar.
When a post that's scheduled to be published on our blog just isn't quite where we think it ought to be, we'll no longer rush it through the editing process simply because of an artificial deadline. When a post falls through (that's just the life of an editorial calendar), we'll no longer scramble to find an option that's "good enough" to fill the spot. If we don't have a great replacement, we'll simply take the day off.
It's got us thinking hard about posts that provide truly great value—those 10x pieces of content that Rand mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday. Take a look at the traffic for Dr. Pete's post on title tags since it was published in March of 2014:
See all those tiny bumps of long-tail traffic? The post still consistently sees 3-4,000 uniques every week, and has just crossed over 300,000 all-time. That's somewhere between 60-100x a post we'd call just fine.
60-100x.
Now, there's just no way we can make every post garner that kind of traffic, but we can certainly take steps in that direction. If we published half as many posts, but they all performed more than twice as well, that's a net win for us even despite the fact that the better posts will generally continue bringing traffic for a while to come.
Does this mean you'll see fewer posts from Moz going forward? No. We might skip a day now and then, but rest assured that if we do, it'll just be because we didn't want to ask for your time until we thought we had something that was really worth it. =)
I'd love to hear what you all have to say in the comments, whether about methodology, takeaways, or suggestions for the future.
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