TRCREATIVE: September 2018

Friday 28 September 2018

Developing With Automad

Surprising SEO A/B Test Results - Whiteboard Friday

You can make all the tweaks and changes in the world, but how do you know they're the best choice for the site you're working on? Without data to support your hypotheses, it's hard to say. In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow explains a bit about what A/B testing for SEO entails and describes some of the surprising results he's seen that prove you can't always trust your instinct in our industry.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another British Whiteboard Friday. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder and CEO at Distilled. At Distilled, one of the things that we've been working on recently is building an SEO A/B testing platform. It's called the ODN, the Optimization Delivery Network. We're now deployed on a bunch of big sites, and we've been running these SEO A/B tests for a little while. I want to tell you about some of the surprising results that we've seen.

What is SEO A/B testing?

We're going to link to some resources that will show you more about what SEO A/B testing is. But very quickly, the general principle is that you take a site section, so a bunch of pages that have a similar structure and layout and template and so forth, and you split those pages into control and variant, so a group of A pages and a group of B pages.

Then you make the change that you're hypothesizing is going to make a difference just to one of those groups of pages, and you leave the other set unchanged. Then, using your analytics data, you build a forecast of what would have happened to the variant pages if you hadn't made any changes to them, and you compare what actually happens to the forecast. Out of that you get some statistical confidence intervals, and you get to say, yes, this is an uplift, or there was no difference, or no, this hurt the performance of your site.

This is data that we've never really had in SEO before, because this is very different to running a controlled experiment in a kind of lab environment or on a test domain. This is in the wild, on real, actual, live websites. So let's get to the material. The first surprising result I want to talk about is based off some of the most basic advice that you've ever seen.

Result #1: Targeting higher-volume keywords can actually result in traffic drops

I've stood on stage and given this advice. I have recommended this stuff to clients. Probably you have too. You know that process where you do some keyword research and you find that there's one particular way of searching for whatever it is that you offer that has more search volume than the way that you're talking about it on your website right now, so higher search volume for a particular way of phrasing?

You make the recommendation, "Let's talk about this stuff on our website the way that people are searching for it. Let's put this kind of phrasing in our title and elsewhere on our pages." I've made those recommendations. You've probably made those recommendations. They don't always work. We've seen a few times now actually of testing this kind of process and seeing what are actually dramatic drops.

We saw up to 20-plus-percent drops in organic traffic after updating meta information in titles and so forth to target the more commonly-searched-for variant. Various different reasons for this. Maybe you end up with a worse click-through rate from the search results. So maybe you rank where you used to, but get a worse click-through rate. Maybe you improve your ranking for the higher volume target term and you move up a little bit, but you move down for the other one and the new one is more competitive.

So yes, you've moved up a little bit, but you're still out of the running, and so it's a net loss. Or maybe you end up ranking for fewer variations of key phrases on these pages. However it happens, you can't be certain that just putting the higher-volume keyword phrasing on your pages is going to perform better. So that's surprising result number one. Surprising result number two is possibly not that surprising, but pretty important I think.

Result #2: 30–40% of common tech audit recommendations make no difference

So this is that we see as many as 30% or 40% of the common recommendations in a classic tech audit make no difference. You do all of this work auditing the website. You follow SEO best practices. You find a thing that, in theory, makes the website better. You go and make the change. You test it.

Nothing, flatlines. You get the same performance as the forecast, as if you had made no change. This is a big deal because it's making these kinds of recommendations that damages trust with engineers and product teams. You're constantly asking them to do stuff. They feel like it's pointless. They do all this stuff, and there's no difference. That is what burns authority with engineering teams too often.

This is one of the reasons why we built the platform is that we can then take our 20 recommendations and hypotheses, test them all, find the 5 or 6 that move the needle, only go to the engineering team to build those ones, and that builds so much trust and relationship over time, and they get to work on stuff that moves the needle on the product side.

So the big deal there is really be a bit skeptical about some of this stuff. The best practices, at the limit, probably make a difference. If everything else is equal and you make that one tiny, little tweak to the alt attribute or a particular image somewhere deep on the page, if everything else had been equal, maybe that would have made the difference.

But is it going to move you up in a competitive ranking environment? That's what we need to be skeptical about.

Result #3: Many lessons don't generalize

So surprising result number three is: How many lessons do not generalize? We've seen this broadly across different sections on the same website, even different industries. Some of this is about the competitive dynamics of the industry.

Some of it is probably just the complexity of the ranking algorithm these days. But we see this in particular with things like this. Who's seen SEO text on a category page? Those kind of you've got all of your products, and then somebody says, "You know what? We need 200 or 250 words that mention our key phrase a bunch of times down at the bottom of the page." Sometimes, helpfully, your engineers will even put this in an SEO-text div for you.

So we see this pretty often, and we've tested removing it. We said, "You know what? No users are looking at this. We know that overstuffing the keyword on the page can be a negative ranking signal. I wonder if we'll do better if we just cut that div." So we remove it, and the first time we did it, plus 6% result. This was a good thing.

The pages are better without it. They're now ranking better. We're getting better performance. So we say, "You know what? We've learnt this lesson. You should remove this really low-quality text from the bottom of your category pages." But then we tested it on another site, and we see there's a drop, a small one admittedly, but it was helping on these particular pages.

So I think what that's just telling us is we need to be testing these recommendations every time. We need to be trying to build testing into our core methodologies, and I think this trend is only going to increase and continue, because the more complex the ranking algorithms get, the more machine learning is baked into it and it's not as deterministic as it used to be, and the more competitive the markets get, so the narrower the gap between you and your competitors, the less stable all this stuff is, the smaller differences there will be, and the bigger opportunity there will be for something that works in one place to be null or negative in another.

So I hope I have inspired you to check out some SEO A/B testing. We're going to link to some of the resources that describe how you do it, how you can do it yourself, and how you can build a program around this as well as some other of our case studies and lessons that we've learnt. But I hope you enjoyed this journey on surprising results from SEO A/B tests.

Resources:

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Thursday 27 September 2018

Nested Links

Test out the cloud platform developers love for free with a $100 credit

(This is a sponsored post.)

DigitalOcean invites you to experience a better, faster and simpler cloud platform designed to scale based on your needs. Get started for free with a $100 credit toward your first project and discover why the most innovative companies are already hosting on DigitalOcean.

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Wednesday 26 September 2018

The E-Commerce Benchmark KPI Study: The Most Valuable Online Consumer Trend of 2018 Revealed

Posted by Alan_Coleman

The latest Wolfgang E-Commerce Report is now live. This study gives a comprehensive view of the state of digital marketing in retail and travel, allowing digital marketers to benchmark their 2018 performance and plan their 2019 strategy.

The study analyzes over 250 million website sessions and more than €500 million in online revenue. Google Analytics, new Facebook Analytics reports, and online surveys are used to glean insights.

Revenue volume correlations

One of the unique features of the study is its conversion correlation. All website metrics featured in the study are correlated with conversion success to reveal what the most successful websites do differently.

This year we've uncovered our strongest success correlation ever at 0.67! Just to give that figure context: normally, 0.2 is worth talking about and 0.3 is noteworthy. Not only is this correlation with success very strong, the insight itself is highly actionable and can become a pillar of your digital marketing strategy.

These are the top factors that correlated with revenue volume. You can see the other correlations in the full study.

Click to see a bigger version

Average pages per session (.37)
Average session length (.49)
Conversion rate by users (.41)
Number of sessions per user (.67)
Percentage of sessions from paid search (.25)

Average website engagement metrics

	Number of sessions per user	Average pages per session	Average session duration	Bounce rate	Average page load time	Average server response time
Retail	1.58	6	3min 18sec	38.04%	6.84	1.02
Multi-channel	1.51	6	3min 17sec	35.27%	6.83	1.08
Online-only	1.52	5	3min 14sec	43.80%	6.84	0.89
Travel	1.57	3	2min 34sec	44.14%	6.76	0.94
Overall	1.58	5	3min 1sec	41.26%	6.80	0.97

Above are the average website engagement metrics. You can see the average number of sessions per user is very low at 1.5 over 12 months. Anything a digital marketer can do to get this to 2, to 3, and to 4 makes for about the best digital marketing they can do.

At Wolfgang Digital, we’ve been witnessing this phenomenon at a micro-level for some time now. Many of our most successful campaigns of late have been focused on presenting the user with an evolving message which matures with each interaction across multiple media touchpoints.

Click through to the Wolfgang E-Commerce KPI Report in full to uncover dozens more insights, including:

Is a social media engagement more valuable than a website visit?
What's the true value of a share?
What’s the average conversion rate for online-only vs multi-channel retailers?
What’s the average order value for a hotel vs. tour operator?

Video Transcript

Today I want to talk to you about the most important online consumer trend in 2018. The story starts in a client meeting about four years ago, and we were meeting with a travel client. We got into a discussion about bounce rate and its implication on conversion rate. The client was asking us, "could we optimize our search and social campaigns to reduce bounce rate?", which is a perfectly valid question.

But we were wondering: Will we lower the rate of conversions? Are all bounces bad? As a result of this meeting, we said, "You know, we need a really scientific answer to that question about any of the website engagement metrics or any of the website channels and their influence on conversion." Out of that conversation, our E-Commerce KPI Report was born. We're now four years into it. (See previous years on the Moz Blog: 2015, 2016, 2017.)

The metric with the strongest correlation to conversions: Number of sessions per user

We've just released the 2019 E-Commerce KPI Report, and we have a standout finding, probably the strongest correlation we've ever seen between a website engagement metric and a website conversion metric. This is beautiful because we're all always optimizing for conversion metrics. But if you can isolate the engagement metrics which deliver, which are the money-making metrics, then you can be much more intelligent about how you create digital marketing campaigns.

The strongest correlation we've ever seen in this study is number of sessions per user, and the metric simply tells us on average how many times did your users visit your website. What we're learning here is any digital marketing you can do which makes that number increase is going to dramatically increase your conversions, your revenue success.

Change the focus of your campaigns

It's a beautiful metric to plan campaigns with because it changes the focus. We're not looking for a campaign that's a one-click wonder campaign. We're not looking for a campaign that it's one message delivered multiple times to the same user. Much more so, we're trying to create a journey, multiple touchpoints which deliver a user from their initial interaction through the purchase funnel, right through to conversion.

Create an itinerary of touchpoints along the searcher's journey

1. Research via Google

Let me give you an example. We started this with a story about a travel company. I'm just back from a swimming holiday in the west of Ireland. So let's say I have a fictional travel company. We'll call them Wolfgang Wild Swimming. I'm going to be a person who's researching a swimming holiday. So I'm going to go to Google first, and I'm going to search for swimming holidays in Ireland.

2. E-book download via remarketing

I'm going to go to the Wolfgang Wild Swimming web page, where I'm going to read a little bit about their offering. In doing that, I'm going to enter their Facebook audience. The next time I go to Facebook, they're now remarketing to me, and they'll be encouraging me to download their e-book, which is a guide to the best swimming spots in the wild west of Ireland. I'm going to volunteer my email to them to get access to the book. Then I'm going to spend a bit more time consuming their content and reading their book.

3. Email about a local offline event

A week later, I get an email from them, and they're having an event in my area. They're going for a swim in Dublin, one of my local spots in The Forty Foot, for example. I'm saying, "Well, I was going to go for a swim this weekend anyway. I might as well go with this group." I go to the swim where I can meet the tour guides. I can meet people who have been on it before. I'm now really close to making a purchase.

4. YouTube video content consumed via remarketing

Again, a week later, they have my email address, so they're targeting me on YouTube with videos of previous holidays. Now I'm watching video content. All of a sudden, Wolfgang Wild Swimming comes up. I'm now watching a video of a previous holiday, and I'm recognizing the instructors and the participants in the previous holidays. I'm really, really close to pressing Purchase on a holiday here. I'm on the phone to my friend saying, "I found the one. Let's book this."

Each interaction moves the consumer closer to purchase

I hope what you're seeing there is with each interaction, the Google search, the Facebook ad which led to an e-book download, the offline event, back online to the YouTube video, with each interaction I'm getting closer to the purchase.

You can imagine the conversion rate and the return on ad spend on each interaction increasing as we go. This is a really powerful message for us as digital marketers. When we're planning a campaign, we think about ourselves as though we're in the travel business too, and we're actually creating an itinerary. We're simply trying to create an itinerary of touchpoints that guide a searcher through awareness, interest, right through to action and making that purchase.

I think it's not just our study that tells us this is the truth. A lot of the best-performing campaigns we've been running we've seen this anecdotally, that every extra touchpoint increases the conversion rate. Really powerful insight, really useful for digital marketers when planning campaigns. This is just one of the many insights from our E-Commerce KPI Report. If you found that interesting, I'd urge you to go read the full report today.

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A Minimal JavaScript Setup

The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch

Alex Russell describes his thoughts on the current state of JavaScript and how we might sometimes put a ton of focus on the ease-of-use of development at the expense of user experience. So, for example, we might pick a massive framework to make development easier and faster but then that might have an enormous impact on the user.

Alex describes it as substituting “developer value for user value.”

The “developer experience” bait-and-switch works by appealing to the listener’s parochial interests as developers or managers, claiming supremacy in one category in order to remove others from the conversation. The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.

Here’s the kicker, though:

JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.

By that standard, it could also stand to reason that the work we put into “design systems” falls into this trap. But there is something to be said about achieving ease of use on this front: a more consistent codebase is probably a very good thing for accessibility, UX consistency, etc. etc.

So, although I agree with Alex’s premise here, I’m not entirely sure I agree wholeheartedly on this subject.

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The post The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Tuesday 25 September 2018

Don’t use empty or low content for your design system grid examples

Dave and I had Jen Simmons on ShopTalk the other day. Jen was talking about Intrinsic Web Design and how one of the core tenets of it is grids with rows and columns that don't necessarily change at the same rate or ones that have essentially different rules for how they behave.

For example, take this (contrived) grid setup:

.grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 1fr minmax(50px, 100px) 20% auto;
}

Each of those columns will behave differently.

I'm just wrapping my head about this, and definitely don't fully understand it. Here's what it seems like to me, numbered 1-4 based on the "strength" (I guess?) of the width.

.grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: 
    1fr                  /* #4 - Weakest, will fill remaining space */
    minmax(50px, 100px)  /* #3 - Will only start changing when other columns force it */
    20%                  /* #1 - Definite size, steady */
    auto                 /* #2 - Indefinite size, entirely based on content, pushy */
  ;
}

This is much different from quite a long history of how we've set up grid columns in the past. Float-based grids typically use percentages (a definite size) to set columns. Same with inline-block-based grids, typically.

Even with grid, if you set up all your columns with all percentages or all fractional units, you'd likely have a steady grid in which the content inside won't mess with sizing. But Jen is saying that it's interesting to have a grids where the content has a say in how they size. Embrace it. Sounds fun to me.

But anyway, say you're setting up a grid that uses mixed values for column widths like this. Don't do that with totally empty columns, otherwise, you'll get a false sense of how those columns will behave.

Just look at this demo where these four grids have the exact same setup and all that is different is the amount of text in each column.

See the Pen Different Collapse Rates of Different Column Width Values by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Cool'n'weird.

The post Don’t use empty or low content for your design system grid examples appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Putting things on top of other things

A plain-language romp through the trials and tribulations of z-indexby Isabel Brison. On the surface, z-index seems simple. It's a number and it represents what is on top of what... assuming it is positioned... and assuming it is within the same stacking context as the other things.

... that is the gist of it: stacking contexts are caused by a variety of properties and the main reasons for their existence are performance concerns and ease of implementation by browsers. They are not always related to z-index or ordering; they pop up wherever it makes sense to have several elements all on the same layer for rendering purposes.

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The Complete Guide to Lazy Loading Images

Monday 24 September 2018

Control the Internet With Chrome Extensions!

Friday 21 September 2018

Having fun with link hover effects

Spectator to Partner: Turn Your Clients into SEO Allies - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Are your clients your allies in SEO, or are they passive spectators? Could they even be inadvertently working against you? A better understanding of expectations, goals, and strategy by everyone involved can improve your client relations, provide extra clarity, and reduce the number of times you're asked to "just SEO a site." In today's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins outlines tactics you should know for getting clients and bosses excited about the SEO journey, as well as the risks involved in passivity.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Kameron Jenkins, and I'm the SEO Wordsmith here at Moz. Today I'm going to be talking with you about how to turn your clients from spectators, passive spectators to someone who is proactively interested and an ally in your SEO journey.

So if you've ever heard someone come to you, maybe it's a client or maybe you're in-house and this is your boss saying this, and they say, "Just SEO my site," then this is definitely for you. A lot of times it can be really hard as an SEO to work on a site if you really aren't familiar with the business, what that client is doing, what they're all about, what their goals are. So I'm going to share with you some tactics for getting your clients and your boss excited about SEO and excited about the work that you're doing and some risks that can happen when you don't do that.

Tactics

So let's dive right in. All right, first we're going to talk about tactics.

1. Share news

The first tactic is to share news. In the SEO industry, things are changing all the time, so it's actually a really great tactic to keep yourself informed, but also to share that news with the client. So here's an example. Google My Business is now experimenting with a new video format for their post feature. So one thing that you can do is say, "Hey, client, I hear that Google is experimenting with this new format. They're using videos now. Would you like to try it?"

So that's really cool because it shows them that you're on top of things. It shows them that you're the expert and you're keeping your finger on the pulse of the industry. It also tells them that they're going to be a part of this new, cutting-edge technology, and that can get them really, really excited about the SEO work you're doing. So make sure to share news. I think that can be really, really valuable.

2. Outline your work

The next tip is to outline your work. This one seems really simple, but there is so much to say for telling a client what you're going to do, doing it, and then telling them that you did it. It's amazing what can happen when you just communicate with a client more. There have been plenty of situations where maybe I did less tangible work for a client one week, but because I talk to them more, they were more inclined to be happy with me and excited about the work I was doing.

It's also cool because when you tell a client ahead of time what you're going to do, it gives them time to get excited about, "Ooh, I can't wait to see what he or she is going to do next." So that's a really good tip for getting your clients excited about SEO.

3. Report results

Another thing is to report on your results. So, as SEOs, it can be really easy to say, hey, I added this page or I fixed these things or I updated this.

But if we detach it from the actual results, it doesn't really matter how much a client likes you or how much your boss likes you, there's always a risk that they could pull the plug on SEO because they just don't see the value that's coming from it. So that's an unfortunate reality, but there are tons of ways that you can show the value of SEO. One example is, "Hey, client, remember that page that we identified that was ranking on page two. We improved it. We made all of those updates we talked about, and now it's ranking on page one. So that's really exciting. We're seeing a lot of new traffic come from it.I'm wondering, are you seeing new calls, new leads, an uptick in any of those things as a result of that?"

So that's really good because it shows them what you did, the results from that, and then it kind of connects it to, "Hey, are you seeing any revenue, are you seeing new clients, new customers," things like that. So they're more inclined to see that what you're doing is making a real, tangible impact on actual revenue and their actual business goals.

4. Acknowledge and guide their ideas

This one is really, really important. It can be hard sometimes to marry best practices and customer service. So what I mean by that is there's one end of the pendulum where you are really focused on best practices. This is right. This is wrong. I know my SEO stuff. So when a client comes to you and they say, "Hey, can we try this?" and you go, "No, that's not best practices,"it can kind of shut them down. It doesn't get them involved in the SEO process. In fact, it just kind of makes them recoil and maybe they don't want to talk to you, and that's the exact opposite of what we want here. On the other end of that spectrum though, you have clients who say, "Hey, I really want to try this.I saw this article. I'm interested in this thing. Can you do it for my website?"

Maybe it's not the greatest idea SEO-wise. You're the SEO expert, and you see that and you go, "Mm, that's actually kind of scary. I don't think I want to do that." But because you're so focused on pleasing your client, you maybe do it anyway. So that's the opposite of what we want as well. We want to have a "no, but" mentality. So an example of that could be your client emails in and says, "Hey, I want to try this new thing."

You go, "Hey, I really like where your head is at. I like that you're thinking about things this way. I'm so glad you shared this with me. I tried this related thing before, and I think that would be actually a really good idea to employ on your website." So kind of shifting the conversation, but still bringing them along with you for that journey and guiding them to the correct conclusions. So that's another way to get them invested without shying them away from the SEO process.

Risks

So now that we've talked about those tactics, we're going to move on to the risks. These are things that could happen if you don't get your clients excited and invested in the SEO journey.

1. SEO becomes a checklist

When you don't know your client well enough to know what they're doing in the real world, what they're all about, the risk becomes you have to kind of just do site health stuff, so fiddling with meta tags, maybe you're changing some paragraphs around, maybe you're changing H1s, fixing 404s, things like that, things that are just objectively, "I can make this change, and I know it's good for site health."

But it's not proactive. It's not actually doing any SEO strategies. It's just cleanup work. If you just focus on cleanup work, that's really not an SEO strategy. That's just making sure your site isn't broken. As we all know, you need so much more than that to make sure that your client's site is ranking. So that's a risk.

If you don't know your clients, if they're not talking to you, or they're not excited about SEO, then really all you're left to do is fiddle with kind of technical stuff. As good as that can be to do, our jobs are way more fun than that. So communicate with your clients. Get them on board so that you can do proactive stuff and not just fiddling with little stuff.

2. SEO conflicts with business goals

So another risk is that SEO can conflict with business goals.

So say that you're an SEO. Your client is not talking to you. They're not really excited about stuff that you're doing. But you decide to move forward with proactive strategies anyway. So say I'm an SEO, and I identify this keyword. My client has this keyword. This is a related keyword. It can bring in a lot of good traffic. I've identified this good opportunity. All of the pages that are ranking on page one, they're not even that good. I could totally do better. So I'm going to proactively go, I'm going to build this page of content and put it on my client's site. Then what happens when they see that page of content and they go, "We don't even do that. We don't offer that product. We don't offer that service."

Oops. So that's really bad. What can happen is that, yes, you're being proactive, and that's great. But if you don't actually know what your client is doing, because they're not communicating with you, they're not really excited, you risk misaligning with their business goals and misrepresenting them. So that's a definite risk.

3. You miss out on PR opportunities

Another thing, you miss out on PR opportunities. So again, if your client is not talking to you, they're not excited enough to share what they're doing in the real world with you, you miss out on news like, "Hey, we're sponsoring this event,"or, "Hey, I was the featured expert on last night's news."

Those are all really, really good things that SEOs look for. We crave that information. We can totally use that to capitalize on it for SEO value. If we're not getting that from our clients, then we miss out on all those really, really cool PR opportunities. So a definite risk. We want those PR opportunities. We want to be able to use them.

4. Client controls the conversation

Next up, client controls the conversation. That's a definite risk that can happen. So if a client is not talking to you, a reason could be they don't really trust you yet. When they don't trust you, they tend to start to dictate. So maybe our client emails in.

A good example of this is, "Hey, add these 10 backlinks to my website." Or, "Hey, I need these five pages, and I need them now." Maybe they're not even actually bad suggestions. It's just the fact that the client is asking you to do that. So this is kind of tricky, because you want to communicate with your client. It's good that they're emailing in, but they're the ones at that point that are dictating the strategy. Whereas they should be communicating their vision, so hey, as a business owner, as a website owner, "This is my vision. This is my goal, and this is what I want."

As the SEO professional, you're receiving that information and taking it and making it into an SEO strategy that can actually be really, really beneficial for the client. So there's a huge difference between just being a task monkey and kind of transforming their vision into an SEO strategy that can really, really work for them. So that's a definite risk that can happen.

Excitement + partnership = better SEO campaigns

There's a lot of different things that can happen. These are just some examples of tactics that you can use and risks. If you have any examples of things that have worked for you in the past, I would love to hear about them. It's really good to information share. Success stories where maybe you got your client or your boss really bought into SEO, more so than just, "Hey, I'm spending money on it."

But, "Hey, I'm your partner in this. I'm your ally, and I'm going to give you all the information because I know that it's going to be mutually beneficial for us." So at the end here, excitement, partner, better SEO campaigns. This is going to be I believe a recipe for success to get your clients and your boss on board. Thanks again so much for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and come back next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Thursday 20 September 2018

Safari Ripper ☠️

Security researcher Sabri posted a bit of code that will "force restart any iOS device." It's interesting to see HTML & CSS have this kind of dangerous power. It's essentially a ton of <div>s scaled to be pretty huge and then set over a repeating JPG image with each <div> blurring the background via backdrop-filter. It must cause such extreme and unhandled memory usage that it wreaks havoc on the browser as well as the entire operating system.

I was trying to test it out myself and be really careful not to execute it... but of course I did, and it crashed my Chrome 68 on a MacBook Pro. Not the whole operating system, but I had to force quit the browser. Then again, I suppose even while(true) {} can do that!

The comment thread on the gist hast more interesting details, like how it crashes iOS Safari 9+ (including the new version 12!) and weird behavior on the PlayStation 3 native browser.

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All Fired Up About Specificity

You never know where the next Grand Debate™ in front-end is going to come from! Case in point: we just saw one recently based on a little Twitter poll by Max Stoiber in which 57% of people got it wrong. There were reactions ranging from the innocuous hey fun a little brain teaser! to the state of web education is in shambles and beyond.

I heard from a number of folks that they just felt sad that so many people don't know the answer to a fairly simple question. To be fair, it was (intentionally, I'm sure) rather tricky! It wasn't really a question about CSS — it was more about the idea that the order of HTML attributes doesn't matter. It's the order of CSS that does.

One extreme response I saw said that front-end stuff like this is needlessly complicated and getting it wrong is almost a point of pride. This sentiment was so strong that I heard it suggested that people who know the answer have filled their brains with unless information and that somehow makes them a worse developer. Equally extreme were suggestions that writing HTML and CSS raw like that should always be avoided in favor of tooling abstractions to "fix" these "problems."

(Excuse the quotes there, I'm not trying to pick a side so much as to emphasize that not everyone considers these problems that need to be fixed.)

Another take was that the vibe would be different if something similar happened in JavaScript-land. The perception is that it's embarrassing or bad not to know JavaScript basics, but not knowing HTML and CSS basics is the fault of the language, or that the value of knowing it is not worth bothering to understand.

At the same time, this poll became the perfect mirror to see the strong opinions people have about front-end practices. Fascinating, really.

Here are a few more takes from folks who chimed from their own blogs:

Keith Grant:

I hate that this has somehow become some “old guard” vs. “new guard” thing.

The problem with drawing lines like this: whichever side you find yourself on, there are some whackos out there throwing ridiculous arguments into the mix. And now people on the other side associate that viewpoint with you.

Tim Kadlec:

It doesn’t bother me too much that people are getting the question wrong. Everyone is at different stages in their career and everyone has different problems they’re facing in their daily tasks, so sure, not everyone is going to know this yet.

I do find it a bit alarming just how many folks got it wrong though.

John Allsopp:

One the one hand (and this will somewhat simplify each ‘side’, for the sake of brevity, not disrespect to either), we have those, and I’d on balance probably include myself in this camp, who’d argue that the core technologies of the Web are precisely that–foundational, and a deep understanding of them conceptually (not necessarily an encyclopedic knowledge of every syntactic aspect) is fundamental working knowledge for professional Web developers.

Kevin Ball:

With the growth of the importance of front-end development, we're seeing the story play out again.

The systematic devaluation of CSS, and more, the people who use CSS.

The constant "mansplaining" of CSS features to women who literally are the reason it exists.

Conference speakers asked questions about whether "there is any value in people who cannot write JavaScript?".

All of this at a time when CSS is improving faster than ever and enabling dramatic changes in web design.

This isn't about better technology, it's about exclusion.

Have you seen any other takes or have any of your own?

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Introducing the YOOtheme Pro Page Builder

Wednesday 19 September 2018

How to Improve Your Link Building Outreach Pipeline

Posted by John.Michael123

Link building is probably one of the most challenging pieces of your SEO efforts. Add multiple clients to the mix, and managing the link outreach process gets even tricker. When you’re in the thick of several outreach campaigns, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts and which tactics will bring you the most return on your time and resources.

Three common questions are critical to understand at any point in your link campaign:

Do you need more link prospects?
Do you need to revise your email templates?
Do you need to follow up with prospects?

Without a proven way to analyze these questions, your link building efforts won’t be as efficient as they could be.

We put together a Google Sheets template to help you better manage your link building campaigns. The beauty of this template is that it allows for customization to better fit your workflow. You'll want to make a copy to get started with your own version.

Our link building workflow

We've been able to improve our efficiency via this template by following a simple workflow around acquiring new guest posts on industry-relevant websites. The first step is to actually go out and find prospects that could be potentially interested in a guest blog post. We will then record those opportunities into our template so that we can track our efforts and identify any area that isn’t performing well.

The next step is to make sure to update the status of the prospect when anything changes like sending an outreach email to the prospect or getting a reply from them. It’s critical to keep the spreadsheet as up to date as possible so that we have an accurate picture of our performance.

Once you've used this template for enough time and you've gathered enough data, you'll be able to predict how many link prospects you'll need to find in order to acquire each link based on your own response and conversion rates. This can be useful if you have specific goals around acquiring a certain number of links per month, as you'll get a better feel for how much prospecting you need to do to meet that link target number.

Using the link outreach template

The main purpose of this template is to give you a systematic way to analyze your outreach process so you can drill down into the biggest opportunities for improvement. There are several key features, starting with the Prospects tab.

The Prospects tab is the only one you will need to manually edit, and it houses all the potential link prospects uncovered in your researched. You'll want to fill in the cells for your prospect’s website URL;, and you can also add the Domain Authority of the website for outreach prioritization. For the website URL, I typically put in an example of a guest post that was done on that site or just the homepage if I can’t find a better page.

There’s also a corresponding status column, with the following five stages so you can keep track of where each prospect is in the outreach process.

Status 1: Need to Reach Out. Use this for when you initially find a prospect but have not taken any action yet.

Status 2: Email Sent. This is used as soon as you send your first outreach email.

Status 3: Received Response

Status 4: Topic Approved. Select this status after you get a response and your guest post topic has been approved (this may take a few emails). Whenever I see this status, I know to reach out to my content team so they can start writing.

Status 5: Link Acquired. Selecting this status will automatically add the website to your Won Link Opportunities Report.

The final thing to do here is record the date that a particular link was acquired and add the URL where the link resides. Filling in these columns automatically populates the “Won Link Opportunities” report so you can track all of the links you acquire throughout the lifetime of your campaign.

Link building progress reports

This template automatically creates two reports that I share with my clients on a monthly basis. These reports help us dial in our efforts and maximize the performance of our overall link building campaign.

Link Pipeline report

The Link Pipeline report is a snapshot of our overall link outreach campaign. It shows us how many prospects we have in our pipeline and what the conversion/response rates are of each stage of our outreach funnel.

How to analyze the Link Pipeline report

This report allows us to understand where we need to focus our efforts to maximize our campaign’s performance. If there aren't enough prospects at the top of the funnel, we know that we need to start looking for new link opportunities. If our contact vs. response rate is low, we know we need to test new email copy or email subject lines.

Won Link Opportunities

The Won Link Opportunities report lists out all the websites where a link has been officially landed. This is a great way to keep track of overall progress over time and to gauge performance against your link building goals.

Getting the most out of your link building campaigns

Organization is critical for maximizing your link building efforts and the return on the time you're spending. By knowing exactly which stage of your link building process is your lowest performing, you can dramatically increase your overall efficiency by targeting those areas that need the most improvement.

Make a copy of the template

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Using Scoped Slots in Vue.js to Abstract Functionality

Tuesday 18 September 2018

Twenty Years as a Freelance Web Developer: Wisdom Gained and Lessons Learned

Monday 17 September 2018

What makes a good front-end developer?

Defining what a front-end developer is and what they do is tough as it is. So, how do we set the bar for what makes for a good front-end developer?

Here's what a few folks have to say on the topic.

I’ll argue that front-end developers need to master four different skills.

Empathy

Code

Design

Communication

Zell Liew

Front-End Developers, having learnt HTML, CSS and JS, are forced to take functionality into account when creating user experiences or making sure that the two disciplines work as one from a development perspective. They become all-rounders, having to understand what is actually happening between the AJAX data and the PHP file that’s sending off a mail or returning errors.

Daine Mawer

In my opinion, what defines a good front-end developer is one that has skilled knowledge of HTML, CSS, JS with a vast understanding of User design thinking as they'll be building web interfaces with accessibility in mind. They should also be excited to learn, as the world of Front-End Development keeps evolving. The ability to stay in the loop is critical.

Egwuenu Gift

After I started to feel more comfortable with my responsibilities ... I soon found my next challenge: to help build a stronger connection between the design and development teams. Though we regularly collaborated to produce high-quality work, these teams didn’t always speak the same language.

Ronald Méndez

I think that front-end developers need to have a holistic view of the architecture of the software that they and their team are creating. They can't silo themselves on the Front-End, but need to have an appreciation for the complexities of the Back-End as well in order to create the best user experience for their customers. In the end, it's about continual learning and team communication, as well as listening to the customer to create a great experience.

Jen Looper

The longer I work on the web, the more I realize that what separates the good people from the really good people isn’t what they know; it’s how they think. Obviously knowledge is important—critical in some cases—but in a field that changes so quickly, how you go about acquiring that knowledge is always going to be more important (at least in the long term) than what you know at any given time. And perhaps most important of all: how you use that knowledge to solve everyday problems.

Philip Walton

Having a working understanding of HTML, CSS and JS is certainly a no-brainer, but it's only one part of the equation. I believe a good front-ender connects the dots between user experiences and business goals while closing any gaps that would prevent holistic user flows. That requires good communication, creative problem solving, empathy and, perhaps above all, an willingness to listen to and accept criticism.

Geoff Graham

It's a difficult question in some ways because the nature of Front-end Development is constantly expanding. The types of things we build as front ends become increasingly complex and varied.

For that reason, I think a good Front-end Developer understands the scope, requirements, and technical restraints of the project they are currently working on. This can invariably mean: what their teams expect from them, what their users need, and because things are changing- curiosity!

Sarah Drasner

I admire how good front-end developers answer questions. If they’re super dogmatic about this one particular approach to something being the only one true way then I start to worry. Take SVG illustrations. Or image optimization. Or how to markup navigation. There’s a lot of different ways to tackle each of those things and none of them are perfect. On this note, Chris wrote a wonderful post all about dogmatism a while back and I think about it all the time. That’s the mark of a great front-end developer right there: someone who’s okay with not having the perfect answers all the time.

Robin Rendle

A good front-end developer is flexible, eager to learn, eager to share and has a pragmatic approach to the ever-changing landscape

Oh yeah, and something something cascade.

Andy Bell

What do you think?

This is an open conversation. No right answers. No wrong answers. How would you grade a "good" front-end developer?

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Aspect Ratio Media Elements and intrinsicsize

If you need an aspect-ratio sized <div> (or any element that can have children), you can do it. Perhaps the cleanest way is a custom-property-sized pseudo-element that pushes the correct minimum height through padding-based-on-width.

But media elements like <img> don't have children. The <video> tag isn't self-closing, but when it is supported (almost always), the content of it is replaced with a shadow DOM you don't control. Besides, these are the only two elements that "size to an external resource." So, how do you enforce aspect ratio on them when using a variable width like 100% or 75vw? Well, once they load, they will have their natural aspect ratio, so that's nice. But it also means they don't know the height while they are loading and it may cause performance jank-ening reflow.

One solution is to put them into a container with an aspect ratio, forcing them to the corners with absolute positioning. But, all by themselves, they are incapable of sizing to the aspect ratio correctly until they load.

Hence, the intrinsicsize attribute for "all image element types (including SVG images) and videos" that is now under development.

<img intrinsicsize="400x300" style="width: 100%">

The explainer document is helpful. The reason it is intrinsicsize and not aspectratio is because an aspect ratio doesn't provide as much useful or usable information. I'd love to see it work on any element and be brought to CSS as well.

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Follow the Local SEO Leaders: A Guide to Our Industry’s Best Publications

Posted by MiriamEllis

Change is the only constant in local SEO. As your local brand or local search marketing agency grows, you’ll be onboarding new hires. Whether they’re novices or adepts, they’ll need to keep up with continuous industry developments in order to make agile contributions to team strategy. Particularly if local SEO is new to someone, it saves training time if you can fast-track them on who to follow for the best news and analysis. This guide serves as a blueprint for that very purpose.

And even if you’re an old hand in the local SEM industry, you may find some sources here you’ve been overlooking that could add richness and depth to your ongoing education.

Two quick notes on what and how I’ve chosen:

As the author of both of Moz’s newsletters (the Moz Top 10 and the Moz Local Top 7), I read an inordinate amount of SEO and local SEO content, but I could have missed your work. The list that follows represents my own, personal slate of the resources that have taught me the most. If you publish great local SEO information but you’re not on this list, my apologies, and if you write something truly awesome in future, you’re welcome to tweet at me. I’m always on the lookout for fresh and enlightening voices. My personal criteria for the publications I trust is that they are typically groundbreaking, thoughtful, investigative, and respectful of readers and subjects.
Following the leaders is a useful practice, but not a stopping point. Even experts aren’t infallible. Rather than take industry advice at face value, do your own testing. Some of the most interesting local SEO discussions I’ve ever participated in have stemmed from people questioning standard best practices. So, while it’s smart to absorb the wisdom of experts, it’s even smarter to do your own experiments.

The best of local SEO news

Who reports fastest on Google updates, Knowledge Panel tweaks, and industry business?

Sterling Sky’s Timeline of Local SEO Changes is the industry’s premiere log of developments that impact local businesses and is continuously updated by Joy Hawkins + team.

Search Engine Roundtable has a proven track record of being among the first to report news that affects both local and digital businesses, thanks to the ongoing dedication of Barry Schwartz.

Street Fight is the best place on the web to read about mergers, acquisitions, the release of new technology, and other major happenings on the business side of local. I’m categorizing Street Fight under news, but they also offer good commentary, particularly the joint contributions of David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal.

LocalU’s Last Week in Local video and podcast series highlights Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling’s top picks of industry coverage most worthy of your attention. Comes with the bonus of expert commentary as they share their list.

TechCrunch also keeps a finger on the pulse of technology and business dealings that point to the future of local.

Search Engine Land’s local category is consistently swift in getting the word out about breaking industry news, with the help of multiple authors.

Adweek is a good source for reportage on retail and brand news, but there’s a limit to the number of articles you can read without a subscription. I often find them covering quirky stories that are absent from other publications I read.

The SEMPost’s local tab is another good place to check for local developments, chiefly covered by Jennifer Slegg.

Search Engine Journal’s local column also gets my vote for speedy delivery of breaking local stories.

Google’s main blog and the ThinkWithGoogle blog are musts to keep tabs on the search engine’s own developments, bearing in mind, of course, that these publications can be highly promotional of their products and worldview.

The best of local search marketing analysis

Who can you trust most to analyze the present and predict the future?

LocalU’s Deep Dive video series features what I consider to be the our industry’s most consistently insightful analysis of a variety of local marketing topics, discussed by learned faculty and guests.

The Moz Blog’s local category hosts a slate of gifted bloggers and professional editorial standards that result in truly in-depth treatment of local topics, presented with care and attention. As a veteran contributor to this publication, I can attest to how Moz inspires authors to aim high, and one of the nicest things that happened to our team in 2018 was being voted the #2 local SEO blog by BrightLocal’s survey respondents.

The Local Search Association’s Insider blog is one I turn to again and again, particularly for their excellent studies and quotable statistics.

Mike Blumenthal’s blog has earned a place of honor over many years as a key destination for breaking local developments and one-of-a-kind analysis. When Blumenthal talks, local people listen. One of the things I’ve prized for well over a decade in Mike’s writing is his ability to see things from a small business perspective, as opposed to simply standing in awe of big business and technology.

BrightLocal’s surveys and studies are some of the industry’s most cited and I look eagerly forward to their annual publication.

Whitespark’s blog doesn’t publish as frequently as I wish it did, but their posts by Darren Shaw and crew are always on extremely relevant topics and of high quality.

Sterling Sky’s blog is a relative newcomer, but the expertise Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen bring to their agency’s publication is making it a go-to resource for advice on some of the toughest aspects of local SEO.

Local Visibility System’s blog continues to please, with the thoughtful voice of Phil Rozek exploring themes you likely encounter in your day-to-day work as a local SEO.

The Local Search Forum is, hands down, the best free forum on the web to take your local mysteries and musings to. Founded by Linda Buquet, the ethos of the platform is approachable, friendly, and often fun, and high-level local SEOs frequently weigh in on hot topics.

Pro tip: In addition to the above tried-and-true resources, I frequently scan the online versions of city newspapers across the country for interesting local stories that add perspective to my vision of the challenges and successes of local businesses. Sometimes, too, publications like The Atlantic, Forbes, or Business Insider will publish pieces of a high journalistic quality with relevance to our industry. Check them out!

The best for specific local marketing disciplines

Here, I’ll break this down by subject or industry for easy scanning:

Reviews

GetFiveStars can’t be beat for insight into online reputation management, with Aaron Weiche and team delivering amazing case studies and memorable statistics. I literally have a document of quotes from their work that I refer to on a regular basis in my own writing.
Grade.us is my other ORM favorite for bright and lively coverage from authors like Garrett Sussman and Andrew McDermott.

Email marketing

Tidings' vault contains a tiny but growing treasure trove of email marketing wisdom from David Mihm, whose former glory days spent in the trenches of local SEO make him especially attuned to our industry.

SABs

Tom Waddington’s blog is the must-read publication for service area businesses whose livelihoods are being impacted by Google’s Local Service Ads program in an increasing number of categories and cities.

Automotive marketing

DealerOn’s blog is the real deal when it comes to automotive local SEO, with Greg Gifford teaching memorable lessons in an enjoyable way.

Legal marketing

JurisDigital brings the the educated voices of Casey Meraz and team to the highly-specialized field of attorney marketing.

Hospitality marketing

Acorn Internet Services’ blog speaks directly to those in the competitive hospitality field, offering blog posts, webinars and more.

Independent businesses

The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes great videos, reports, and podcasts for independently owned businesses and their marketers.
American Independent Business Alliance runs a Twitter profile I follow for its highlights of Main Street revitalization and the Buy Local movement. Inspiring for independent businesses and their marketers.

Link building

Nifty Marketing’s blog has earned my trust for its nifty local link building ideas and case studies.
ZipSprout belongs here, too, because of their focus on local sponsorships, which are a favorite local link building methodology. Check them out for blog posts and podcasts.

Schema + other markup

Touchpoint Digital Marketing doesn’t publish much on their own website, but look anywhere you can for David Deering’s writings on markup. LocalU and Moz are good places to search for his expertise.

Patents

SEO by the Sea has proffered years to matchless analysis of Google patents that frequently impact local businesses or point to future possible developments.

Best local search industry newsletters

Get the latest news and tips delivered right to your inbox by signing up for these fine free newsletters:

Follow the local SEO leaders on Twitter

What an easy way to track what industry adepts are thinking and sharing, up-to-the-minute! Following this list of professionals (alphabetized by first name) will fill up your social calendar with juicy local tidbits. Keep in mind that many of these folks either own or work for agencies or publishers you can follow, too.

Aaron Weiche
Adam Dorfman
Andrew Shotland
Ben Fisher
Bernadette Coleman
Bill Slawski
Brian Barwig
Carrie Hill
Casey Meraz
Cindy Krum
Colan Nielsen
DJ Baxter
Dan Leibson
Dana DiTomaso
Dani Owens
Darren Shaw
Dave DiGreggorio
David Mihm
Don Campbell
Garrett Sussman
Glenn Gabe
Greg Gifford
Greg Sterling
Jennifer Slegg
Joel Headley
Joy Hawkins
Mary Bowling
Mike Blumenthal
Mike Ramsey
Miriam Ellis
Phil Rozek
Sherry Bonelli
Thibault Adda
Tim Capper
Tom Waddington

Share what you learn

How about your voice? How do you get it heard in the local SEO industry? The answer is simple: share what you learn with others. Each of the people and publications on my list has earned a place there because, at one time or another, they have taught me something they learned from their own work. Some tips:

Our industry has become a sizeable niche, but there is always room for new, interesting voices
Experiment and publish — consistent publication of your findings is the best way I know of to become a trusted source of information
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, so long as you are willing to own them
Socialize — attend events, amplify the work of colleagues you admire, reach out in real ways to others to share your common work interest while also respecting busy schedules

Local SEO is a little bit like jazz, in which we’re all riffing off the same chord progressions created by Google, Facebook, Yelp, other major platforms, and the needs of clients. Mike Blumenthal plays a note about a jeweler whose WOMM is driving the majority of her customers. You take that note and turn it around for someone in the auto industry, yielding an unexpected insight. Someone else takes your insight and creates a print handout to bolster a loyalty program.

Everyone ends up learning in this virtuous, democratic cycle, so go ahead — start sharing! A zest for contribution is a step towards leadership and your observations could be music to the industry’s ears.

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Friday 14 September 2018

Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend

Here’s how and why the team at GitHub has slowly been deprecating jQuery from their codebase:

We have recently completed a milestone where we were able to drop jQuery as a dependency of the frontend code for GitHub.com. This marks the end of a gradual, years-long transition of increasingly decoupling from jQuery until we were able to completely remove the library. In this post, we will explain a bit of history of how we started depending on jQuery in the first place, how we realized when it was no longer needed, and point out that—instead of replacing it with another library or framework—we were able to achieve everything that we needed using standard browser APIs.

The team explores how using tools like eslint-plugin-jquery discourages developers at GitHub from using jQuery, but the team also notes that they decided to remove certain design behaviors altogether to help them achieve this goal:

As part of our refined approach to building frontend features on GitHub.com, we focused on getting away with regular HTML foundation as much as we could, and only adding JavaScript behaviors as progressive enhancement. As a result, even those web forms and other UI elements that were enhanced using JS would usually also work with JavaScript disabled in the browser. In some cases, we were able to delete certain legacy behaviors altogether instead of having to rewrite them in vanilla JS.

I think all of this is wonderful news. It’s good for jQuery, it’s good for developers, and it’s good for the web. But it also shows just how far browsers have come since the first release of jQuery back in 2006. What will browsers be capable of 12 years from now, I wonder.

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HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements.

Why Designers Don’t Want to Think When They Read

We've all seen articles like "The Top 5 Ways To Fix Your Sign Up Flow and Get On With Your Life." Articles like this aren't wrong or bad, they are just shallow and a bit junk food-y and BuzzFeed-y. Of course, a designer's actual job is complicated, nuanced, and difficult. But deep dives into all that are far less common.

Khoi Vinh has been writing about this and points to some heavy self-reflection from Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, publishers of the very popular UX Collective.

It’s clear that the currency of design discourse is really concerned with the “how” of design, not the “why” of it. As Teixeira and Braga write:

While designers tend to be skeptical of magic formulas—we’re decidedly suspicious of self-help gurus, magic diets, or miraculous career advice—we have a surprisingly high tolerance for formulaic solutions when it comes to design.

That’s a pointed criticism but, from my perspective, it’s also quite accurate.

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SEO Maturity: Evaluating Client Capabilities - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by HeatherPhysioc

Clients aren't always knowledgeable about SEO. That lack of understanding can result in roadblocks and delay the work you're trying to accomplish, but knowing your client's level of SEO maturity can help. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome the brilliant Heather Physioc to expound upon the maturity models she's developed to help you diagnose your client's search maturity and remove blockers to your success.

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

Video Transcription

What up, Moz fans? My name is Heather Physioc. I'm Director of the Discoverability Group at VML. We are in Kansas City. Global ad agency headquartered right in the middle of the map.

Today we're going to talk about how to diagnose the maturity of your SEO client. I don't mean emotional maturity. I mean maturity as it pertains to SEO capabilities, their ability to do the work, as well as their organizational search program maturity. Now a lot of times when a client signs a contract with us, we make the assumption that they're knowledgeable, they're motivated, they're bought in to do the search work.

So we go dumping all these recommendations in their lap, and we're trucking full speed ahead. But then we're surprised when we start hitting blockers and the work doesn't go live. I actually surveyed over 140 of our colleagues in the search industry, and they reported running into blockers, like low prioritization and buy-in for the work, limited technical resources for developers or budgeting for copywriters, low advocacy, high turnover, and any number of different things that stand in the way.

I didn't just ask about the problems. I asked about the solutions, and one of the tools that came out of that was the ability to diagnose the client's maturity. So a maturity model is intended to evaluate an organization's capability to continuously evolve in a practice. The point, the purpose of this is to understand where they stand today, where they want to go, and the steps it's going to take to get there.

The SEO Capabilities matrix

Let's talk about the SEO capabilities first, the technical ability to do the job.

Harmful

On the low end of the scale, a client may be engaging in spammy, outdated, or harmful SEO practices that are doing more harm than good.

Tactical

From there, they may be tactical. They're doing some super basic SEO, think title tags and meta description tags, but nothing earth-shattering is happening here, and it's not very strategic or aligned to brand goals.

Strategic

From there, the brand moves into the strategic phase. They're starting to align the work to goals. They're starting to become a little more search savvy. They're getting beyond the titles and metas, and they're more thorough with the work. While good stuff is happening here, it's not too advanced, and it still tends to be pretty siloed from the other disciplines.

Practice

From there, the organization might move into a practice. Search is starting to become a way of life here. They're getting significantly more advanced in their work. They're starting to connect the dots between those different channels. They're using data in smarter ways to drive their search strategy.

Culture

Then from there, maybe they're at a level of culture for their SEO capabilities. So search here is starting to become a part of their marketing DNA. They're integrating across practices. They're doing cutting edge. They're testing and innovating and improving their SEO implementation, and they're looking for the next big thing. But these groups know that they have to continually evolve as the industry evolves. So we don't just look at their whole SEO program and figure out where the client goes on the map.

✓ Data-driven

We actually break it down into a few pieces. First, data-driven. Is the organization using information and analytics and combining it with other sources even to make really smart marketing decisions?

✓ SEO for content

Next is content. Are they doing any SEO for content at all? Are they implementing some SEO basics, but only during and after publication? Or are they using search data to actually drive their editorial calendar alongside other data inputs, like social listening or web analytics?

✓ Mobility

From there, mobility. Do they have no mobile experience at all, or do they have a fully responsive and technically mobile friendly site, but they're not investing any more in that mobile optimization? Or are they a completely mobile-first mindset? Are they continuously iterating and improving in usability, speed, and content for their mobile users?

✓ Technical ability

Beyond that, we could look at how technically savvy they are. Do they have a lot of broken stuff, or are they on top of monitoring and maintaining their technical health and accessibility?

✓ On-page/off-page SEO

Then some standard SEO best practices here. Are they limited or advanced in on-page SEO, off-page SEO?

✓ Integrating across channels

Are they integrating across channels and not having search live in a silo?

✓ Adopting new technology

Are they adopting new technology as it pertains to search? Some clients have a very high appetite for this, but they chase after the shiny object.

Others have a high appetite and a high tolerance for risk, and they're making hard choices about which new technology to invest in as it pertains to their search program. You may also want to customize this maturity model and include things like local search or international search or e-commerce. But this is a great place to start. So this does a very good job of choosing which projects to begin with for a client, but it doesn't really get to the heart of why our work isn't getting implemented.

The Organizational Search Maturity matrix

I developed a second maturity model, and this one is more traditional and you see it across other industries as well. But this one focuses on the search program inside the organization. This is the squishy organizational stuff.

✓ People

This is people. Do they have the necessary talent within the organization or within their scope? That might not just mean SEOs. That means are they scoping appropriately for content and development needs?

✓ Process

What about process? Are they actually using a defined and continuously improving process for the inclusion of search? Now I don't mean step-by-step best practices for implementing a title tag. This isn't instructions or a tutorial. This is a process for including organic search experts at the right moments in the right projects.

✓ Planning

What about planning? A lot of times we find that clients are doing search very reactively and after the fact. We want to reach a point with an organization where it's preplanned, it's proactively included, and it's always aligned to brand, business, or campaign goals.

✓ Knowledge

Next is knowledge. We know that this industry is complicated. There are a lot of moving pieces. We want to know how knowledgeable is the organization about search. That doesn't necessarily mean how to do SEO, but perhaps the importance or the impact or the outcomes of it. How committed are they to learning more through reading or trainings or conferences? At the very least, the organization they're hiring to do search needs to be extraordinarily knowledgeable about it.

✓ Capacity

Then capacity. Do they have the prioritization within the organization? Are they budgeting appropriately? Do they have the resources and the means and the capacity to get the work done?

Initial

When we've evaluated a client against these criteria, we could find them in an initial phase where the program is very new, they're not doing any search at all...

Repeatable

...to repeatable, meaning they're starting to include it, but it's not super cohesive yet. They're not enforcing the process. They don't have super dedicated resources just yet.

Defined

Up into defined, where they actually are documenting their process. It's continuing to iterate and improve. They're becoming more knowledgeable. They're dedicating more resources. They're prioritizing it better.

Managed

We can move up into managed, where that's continuing to improve even further...

Optimized

...and into optimized. So again, this is where search programs are part of the organization's DNA. It's always included. They are always improving their process. They are maintaining or even increasing the talent that they have dedicated to the work. They're planning it smarter and better than ever before, and they have adequate capacity to keep iterating and growing in their search program.

With that, the steps to complete this process and figure out where your client falls on either of these maturity models, I want to be clear is not a one-sided exercise. This is not a situation where you're just punching numbers into a spreadsheet and the agency is grading the client and our job is done. This needs to be a conversation.

We need to invite stakeholders at multiple levels, both on the client side and on the agency side, or if you're in-house, just multiple levels within the organization, and we should ask for opinions from multiple perspectives to paint a more accurate picture of where the client stands today and agree on the steps that we need to take to move forward. When you do these maturity assessments, this isn't enough.

This is step one. This isn't a finish line. We need to be using this as a springboard for a dialogue to uncover their pain points or the obstacles that they run into, inside their organization, that are going to keep you from getting that work done. We need to have honest and frank conversations about the things we need to clear out of the way to do our best work. With that, I hope that you can try this out.

We've got a great article that we published on the Moz blog to get into more detail about how to implement this. But try it out in your organization or with your client and let us know. Peer review this and help us make it better, because this is intended to be a living process that evolves as our industry does.

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