Building Skeleton Components with React

How to Get More Keyword Metrics for Your Target Keywords

Posted by Bill.Sebald

If you’re old in SEO years, you remember the day [not provided] was introduced. It was a dark, dark day. SEOs lost a vast amount of trusty information. Click data. Conversion data. This was incredibly valuable, allowing SEOs to prioritize their targets.

Google said the info was removed for security purposes, while suspicious SEOs thought this was a push towards spending more on AdWords (now Google Ads). I get it — since AdWords would give you the keyword data SEOs cherished, the “controversy” was warranted, in my opinion. The truth is out there.

But we’ve moved on, and learned to live with the situation. Then a few years later, Google Webmaster Tools (now Search Console) started providing some of the keyword data in the Search Analytics report. Through the years, the report got better and better.

But there’s still a finite set of keywords in the interface. You can’t get more than 999 in your report.

Guess what? Google has more data for you!

The Google Search Console API is your friend. This summer it became even friendlier, providing 16 months worth of data. What you may not know is this API can give you more than 999 keywords. By way of example, the API provides more than 45,000 for our Greenlane site. And we’re not even a very large site. That’s right — the API can give you keywords, clicks, average position, impressions, and CTR %.

Salivating yet?

How to easily leverage the API

If you’re not very technical and the thought of an API frightens you, I promise there’s nothing to fear. I’m going to show you a way to leverage the data using Google Sheets.

Here is what you will need:

1. Google Sheets (free)
2. Supermetrics Add-On (free trial, but a paid tool)

If you haven’t heard of Google Sheets, it’s one of several tools Google provides for free. This directly competes with Microsoft Excel. It's a cloud-based spreadsheet that works exceptionally well.

If you aren’t familiar with Supermetrics, it’s an add-on for Google Sheets that allows data to be pulled in from other sources. In this case, one of the sources will be Google Search Console. Now, while Supermetrics has a free trial, paid is the way to go. It’s worth it!

Installation of Supermetrics:

1. Open Google Sheets and click the Add-On option
2. Click Get Add-Ons
3. A window will open where you can search for Supermetrics. It will look like this:

From there, just follow the steps. It will immediately ask to connect to your Google account. I’m sure you’ve seen this kind of dialog box before:

You’ll be greeted with a message for launching the newly installed add-on. Just follow the prompts to launch. Next you’ll see a new window to the right of your Google Sheet.

At this point, you should see the following note:

Great, you’re logged into Google Search Console! Now let’s run your first query. Pick an account from the list below.

Next, all you have to do is work down the list in Supermetrics. Data Source, Select Sites, and Select Dates are pretty self-explanatory. When you reach the “Select metrics” toggle, choose Impressions, Clicks, CTR (%), and Average Position.

When you reach “Split by,” choose Search Query as the Split to rows option. And pick a large number for number of rows to fetch. If you also want the page URLs (perhaps you’d like your data divided by the page level), you just need to add Full URL as well.

You can play with the other Filter and Options if you’d like, but you’re ready to click Apply Changes and receive the data. It should compile like this:

Got the data. Now what?

Sometimes optimization is about taking something that's working, and making it work better. This data can show you which keywords and topics are important to your audience. It’s also a clue towards what Google thinks you’re important for (thus, rewarding you with clicks).

SEMrush and Ahrefs can provide ranking keyword data with their estimated clicks, but impressions is an interesting metric here. High impression and low clicks? Maybe your title and description tags aren’t compelling enough. It’s also fun to VLOOKUP their data against this, to see just how accurate they are (or are not). Or you can use a tool like PowerBI to append other customer or paid search metrics to paint a bigger picture of your visitors’ mindset.

Conclusion

Sometimes the littlest hacks are the most fun. Google commonly holds some data back through their free products (the Greenlane Indexation Tester is a good example with the old interface). We know Search Planner and Google Analytics have more than they share. But in those cases, where directional information can sometimes be enough, digging out even more of your impactful keyword data is pure gold.

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8 Tips for Great Code Reviews

Kelly Sutton with good advice on code reviews. Hard to pick a favorite. I like all the stuff about minding your tone and getting everyone involved, but I also think the computerization stuff is important:

If a computer can decide and enforce a rule, let the computer do it. Arguing spaces vs. tabs is not a productive use of human time.

Re: Tip #6: it's pretty cool when the tools you use can help with that, like this new GitHub feature where code suggestions can turn into a commit.

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Why Do You Use Frameworks?

Nicole Sullivan asked. People said:

• 🐦... for the same reason that I buy ingredients rather than growing/raising all of my own food.
• 🐦 I write too many bugs without them.
• 🐦 Avoiding bikeshedding.
• 🐦 ... to solve problems that are adjacent to, but distinct from, the problem I'm trying to solve at hand.
• 🐦 Because to create the same functionality would require a much larger team
• 🐦 I want to be able to focus on building the product rather than the tools.
• 🐦 it’s easier to pick a framework and point to docs than teach and document your own solution.
• 🐦 faster development
• 🐦 They have typically solved the problems and in a better way than my first version or even fifth version will be.

There are tons more replies. Jeremy notes "exactly zero mention end users." I said: Sometimes I just wanna be told what to do.

Nicole stubbed out the responses:

Why do you use frameworks? Almost 100 of you answered. Here are the results. pic.twitter.com/jdcTpA0kf5

— Nicole Sullivan 💎 (@stubbornella) October 16, 2018

If you can't get enough of the answers here, Rachel asked the same thing a few days later, this time scoped to CSS frameworks.

The post Why Do You Use Frameworks? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Using Feature Detection, Conditionals, and Groups with Selectors

Dealing with Dependencies Inside Design Systems

Dependencies in JavaScript are pretty straightforward. I can't write library.doThing() unless library exists. If library changes in some fundamental way, things break and hopefully our tests catch it.

Dependencies in CSS can be a bit more abstract. Robin just wrote in our newsletter how the styling from certain classes (e.g. position: absolute) can depend on the styling from other classes (e.g. position: relative) and how that can be — at best — obtuse sometimes.

Design has dependencies too, especially in design systems. Nathan Curtis:

You release icon first, and then other components that depend on it later. Then, icon adds minor features or suffers a breaking change. If you update icon, you can’t stop there. You must ripple that change through all of icon’s dependent in the library too.

“If we upgrade and break a component, we have to go through and fix all the dependent components.” — Jony Cheung, Software Engineering Manager, Atlassian’s Atlaskit

The biggest changes happen with the smallest components.

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Overcoming Blockers: How to Build Your Red Tape Toolkit - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by HeatherPhysioc

Have you ever made SEO recommendations that just don't go anywhere? Maybe you run into a lack of budget, or you can't get buy-in from your boss or colleagues. Maybe your work just keeps getting deprioritized in favor of other initiatives. Whatever the case, it's important to set yourself up for success when it comes to the tangled web of red tape that's part and parcel of most organizations.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Heather Physioc shares her tried-and-true methods for building yourself a toolkit that'll help you tear through roadblocks and bureaucracy to get your work implemented.

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

Video Transcription

What up, Moz fans? This is Heather Physioc. I'm the Director of the Discoverability Group at VML, headquartered in Kansas City. So today we're going to talk about how to build your red tape toolkit to overcome obstacles to getting your search work implemented. So do you ever feel like your recommendations are overlooked, ignored, forgotten, deprioritized, or otherwise just not getting implemented?

Common roadblocks to implementing SEO recommendations

If so, you're not alone. So I asked 140-plus of our industry colleagues the blockers that they run into and how they overcome them.

• Low knowledge. So if you're anything like every other SEO ever, you might be running into low knowledge and understanding of search, either on the client side or within your own agency.
• Low buy-in. You may be running into low buy-in. People don't care about SEO as much as you do.
• Poor prioritization. So other things frequently come to the top of the list while SEO keeps falling further behind.
• High bureaucracy. So a lot of red tape or slow approvals or no advocacy within the organization.
• Not enough budget. A lot of times it's not enough budget, not enough resources to get the work done.
• Unclear and overcomplicated process. So people don't know where they fit or even how to get started implementing your SEO work.
• Bottlenecks. And finally bottlenecks where you're just hitting blockers at every step along the way.

So if you're in-house, you probably said that not enough budget and resources was your biggest problem. But on the agency side or individual practitioners, they said low understanding or knowledge of search on the client side was their biggest blocker.

So a lot of the time when we run into these blockers and it seems like nothing is getting done, we start to play the blame game. We start to complain that it's the client who hung up the project or if the client had only listened or it's something wrong with the client's business.

Build out your red tape toolkit

But I don't buy it. So we're going to not do that. We're going to build out our red tape toolkit. So here are some of the suggestions that came out of that survey.

1. Assess client maturity

First is to assess your client's maturity. This could include their knowledge and capabilities for doing SEO, but also their organizational search program, the people, process, ability to plan, knowledge, capacity.

These are the problems that tend to stand in the way of getting our best work done. So I'm not going to go in-depth here because we've actually put out a full-length article on the Moz blog and another Whiteboard Friday. So if you need to pause, watch that and come back, no problem.

2. Speak your client's language

So the next thing to put in your toolkit is to speak your client's language. I think a lot of times we're guilty of talking to fellow SEOs instead of the CMOs and CEOs who buy into our work. So unless your client is a super technical mind or they have a strong search background, it's in our best interests to lift up and stay at 30,000 feet. Let's talk about things that they care about, and I promise you that is not canonicalization or SSL encryption and HTTPS.

They're thinking about ROI and their customers and operational costs. Let's translate and speak their language. Now this could also mean using analogies that they can relate to or visual examples and data visualizations that tell the story of search better than words ever could. Help them understand. Meet them in the middle.

3. Seek greater perspective

Now let's seek greater perspective. So what this means is SEO does not or should not operate in a silo. We're one small piece of your client's much larger marketing mix. They have to think about the big picture. A lot of times our clients aren't just dedicated to SEO. They're not even dedicated to just digital sometimes. A lot of times they have to think about how all the pieces fit together. So we need to have the humility to understand where search fits into that and ladder our SEO goals up to the brand goals, campaign goals, business and revenue goals. We also need to understand that every SEO project we recommend comes with a time and a cost associated with it.

Everything we recommend to a CMO is an opportunity cost as well for something else that they could be working on. So we need to show them where search fits into that and how to make those hard choices. Sometimes SEO doesn't need to be the leader. Sometimes we're the follower, and that's okay.

4. Get buy-in

The next tool in your toolkit is to get buy-in. So there are two kinds of buy-in you can get.

Horizontal buy-in

One is horizontal buy-in. So a lot of times search is dependent on other disciplines to get our work implemented. We need copywriters. We need developers. So the number-one complaint SEOs have is not being brought in early. That's the same complaint all your teammates on development and copywriting and everywhere else have.

Respect the expertise and the value that they bring to this project and bring them to the table early. Let them weigh in on how this project can get done. Build mockups together. Put together a plan together. Estimate the level of effort together.

Vertical buy-in

Which leads us to vertical buy-in. Vertical is up and down. When you do this horizontal buy-in first, you're able to go to the client with a much smarter, better vetted recommendation. So a lot of times your day-to-day client isn't the final decision maker. They have to sell this opportunity internally. So give them the tools and the voice that they need to do that by the really strong recommendation you put together with your peers and make it easy for them to take it up to their boss and their CMO and their CEO. Then you really increase the likelihood that you're going to get that work done.

5. Build a bulletproof plan

Next, build a bulletproof plan.

Case studies

So the number-one recommendation that came out of this survey was case studies. Case studies are great. They talk about the challenge that you tried to overcome, the solution, how you actually tackled it, and the results you got out of that.

Clients love case studies. They show that you have the chops to do the work. They better explain the outcomes and the benefits of doing this kind of work, and you took the risk on that kind of project with someone else's money first. So that's going to reduce the perceived risk in the client's mind and increase the likelihood that they're going to do the work.

Make your plan simple and clear, with timelines

Another thing that helps here is building a really simple, clear plan so it's stupid-easy for everybody who needs to be a part of it to know where they fit in and what they're responsible for. So do the due diligence to put together a step-by-step plan and assign ownership to each step and put timelines to it so they know what pace they should be following.

Forecast ROI

Finally, forecast ROI. This is not optional. So a lot of times I think SEOs are hesitant to forecast the potential outcomes or ROI of a project because of the sheer volume of unknowns.

We live in a world of theory, and it's very hard to commit to something that we can't be certain about. But we have to give the client some sense of return. We have to know why we are recommending this project over others. There's a wealth of resources out there to do that for even heavily caveated and conservative estimate, including case studies that others have published online.

Show the cost of inaction

Now sometimes forecasting the opportunity of ROI isn't enough to light a fire for clients. Sometimes we need to show them the cost of inaction. I find that with clients the risk is not so much that they're going to make the wrong move. It's that they'll make no move at all. So a lot of times we will visualize what that might look like. So we'll show them this is the kind of growth we think that you can get if you invest and you follow this plan we put together.

Here's what it will look like if you invest just a little to monitor and maintain, but you're not aggressively investing in search. Oh, and here, dropping down and to the right, is what happens when you don't invest at all. You stagnate and you get surpassed by your competitors. That can be really helpful for clients to contrast those different levels of investment and convince them to do the work that you're recommending.

6. Use headlines & soundbites

Next use headlines, taglines, and sound bites. What we recommend is really complicated to some clients. So let's help translate that into simple, usable language that's memorable so they can go repeat those lines to their colleagues and their bosses and get that work sold internally. We also need to help them prioritize.

So if you're anything like me, you love it when the list of SEO action items is about a mile long. But when we dump that in their laps, it's too much. They get overwhelmed and bombarded, and they tune out. So instead, you are the expert consultant. Use what you know about search and know about your client to help them prioritize the single most important thing that they should be focusing on.

7. Patience, persistence, and parallel paths

Last in your toolkit, patience, persistence, and parallel paths. So getting this work done is a combination of communication, follow-up, patience, and persistence. While you've got your client working on this one big thing that you recommended, you can be building parallel paths, things that have fewer obstacles that you can own and run with.

They may not be as high impact as the one big thing, but you can start to get small wins that get your client excited and build momentum for more of the big stuff. But the number one thing out of all of the responses in the survey that our colleagues recommended to you is to stay strong. Have empathy and understanding for the hard decisions that your client has to make. But come with a strong, confident point of view on where to go next.

All right, gang, these are a lot of great tips to start your red tape toolkit and overcome obstacles to get your best search work done. Try these out. Let us know what you think. If you have other great ideas on how you overcome obstacles to get your best work done with clients, let us know down in the comments. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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