Becoming an Industry Thought Leader: Advanced Techniques for Finding the Best Places to Pitch Guest Posts

Posted by KristinTynski

If you’re involved in any kind of digital PR — or pitching content to writers to expand your brand awareness and build strong links — then you know how hard it can be to find a good home for your content.

I’m about to share the process you can use to identify the best, highest ROI publishers for building consistent, mutually beneficial guest posting relationships with.

This knowledge has been invaluable in understanding which publications have the best reach and authority to other known vertical/niche experts, allowing you to share your own authority within these readership communities.

Before we get started, there’s a caveat: If you aren’t willing to develop true thought leadership, this process won’t work for you. The prerequisite for success here is having a piece of content that is new, newsworthy, and most likely data-driven.

Now let’s get to the good stuff.

Not all publications are equal

Guest posting can increase awareness of your brand, create link authority, and ultimately generate qualified leads. However, that only happens if you pick publishers that have:

• The trust of your target audience.
• Topical relevance and authority.
• Sufficiently large penetration in readership amongst existing authorities in your niche/vertical.

A big trap many fall into is not properly prioritizing their guest posting strategy along these three important metrics.

To put this strategy into context, I’ll provide a detailed methodology for understanding the “thought leadership” space of two different verticals. I’ll also include actionable tips for developing a prioritized list of targets for winning guest spots or columns with your killer content.

It all starts with BuzzSumo

We use BuzzSumo data as the starting point for developing these interactive elements. For this piece, the focus will be on looking at data pulled from their Influencer and Shared Links APIs.

Let’s begin by looking at the data we’re after in the regular user interface. On the Influencers tab, we start by selecting a keyword most representative of the overall niche/industry/vertical we want to understand. We’ll start with “SEO.”

The list of influencers here should already be sorted, but feel free to narrow it down by applying filters. I recommend making sure your final list has 250-500 influencers as a minimum to be comprehensive.

Next, and most importantly, we want to get the links’ shared data for each of these influencers. This will be the data we use to build our network visualizations to truly understand the publishers in the space that are likely to be the highest ROI places for guest posting.

Below you can see the visual readout for one influencer.

Note the distribution of websites Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) most often links to on Twitter. These sites (and their percentages) will be the data we use for our visualization.

Pulling our data programmatically

Thankfully, BuzzSumo has an excellent and intuitive API, so it’s relatively easy to pull and aggregate all of the data we need. I’ve included a link to my script in Github for those who would like to do it themselves.

In general, it does the following:

• Generates the first page of influencers for the given keyword, which is about 50. You can either update the script to iterate through pages or just update the page number it pulls from within the script and concatenate the output files after the fact.
• For each influencer, it makes another API call and gets all of the aggregated Top Domains shared data for each influencer, which is the same as the data you see in the above pie chart visualization.
• Aggregates all the data and exports to a CSV.

Learning from the data

Once we have our data in the format Gephi prefers for network visualizations (sample edge file), we are ready to start exploring. Let’s start with our data from the “SEO” search, for which I pulled the domain sharing data for the top 400 influencers.

A few notes:

• The circles are called nodes. All black nodes are the influencer’s Twitter accounts. All other colored nodes are the websites.
• The size of the nodes is based on Page Rank. This isn’t the Google Page Rank number, but instead the Page Rank within this graph alone. The larger the node, the more authoritative (and popular) that website is within the entire graph.
• The colors of the nodes are based on a modularity algorithm in Gephi. Nodes with similar link graphs typically have the same color.

What can we learn from the SEO influencer graph?

Well, the graph is relatively evenly distributed and cohesive. This indicates that the websites and blogs that are shared most frequently are well known by the entire community.

Additionally, there are a few examples of clusters outside the primary cluster (the middle of the graph). For instance, we see a Local SEO cluster at the 10 p.m. position on the left hand side. We can also see a National Press cluster at the 6-7 p.m. position on the bottom and a French Language cluster at the 1-2 p.m. position at the top right.

Ultimately, Moz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land are great bets when developing and fostering guest posting relationships.

Note that part of the complication with this data has to do with publishing volume. The three largest nodes are also some of the most prolific, meaning there are more overall chances for articles to earn Tweets and other social media mentions from industry influencers. You could refining of the data further by normalizing each site by content publishing volume to find publishers who publish much less frequently and still enjoy disproportionate visibility within the industry.

Webmasters.Googleblog.com is a good example of this. They publish 3 to 4 times per month, and yet because of their influence in the industry, they’re still one of the largest and most central nodes. Of course, this makes sense given it is the only public voice of Google for our industry.

Another important thing to notice is the prominence of both YouTube and SlideShare. If you haven’t yet realized the importance and reach of these platforms, perhaps this is the proof you need. Video content and slide decks are highly shared in the SEO community by top influencers.

Differences between SEO and content marketing influencer graphs

What can we learn from the Content Marketing influencer graph?

For starters, it looks somewhat different overall from the SEO influencer graph; it’s much less cohesive and seems to have many more separate clusters. This could indicate that the content publishing sphere for content marketing is perhaps less mature, with more fragmentation and fewer central sources for consuming content marketing related content. It could also be that content marketing is descriptive of more than SEO and that different clusters are publishers that focus more on one type of content marketing vs. another (similar to what we saw with the local SEO cluster in the previous example).

Instead of 3 to 5 similarly sized market leaders, here we see one behemoth, Content Marketing Institute, a testament to both the authority of that brand and the massive amount of content they publish.

We can also see several specific clusters. For instance, the “SEO blogs” cluster in blue at the 8-9 p.m. position and the more general marketing blogs like Hubspot, MarketingProfs, and Social Media Examiner in green and mauve at the 4-5 p.m. position.

The general business top-tier press sites appear quite influential in this space as well, including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Adweek, Tech Crunch, Business Insider, Inc., which we didn’t see as much in the SEO example.

YouTube, again, is extremely important, even more so than in the SEO example.

Is it worth it?

If you’re already deep in an industry, the visualization results of this process are unlikely to shock you. As someone who’s been in the SEO/content marketing industry for 10 years, the graphs are roughly what I expected, but there certainly were some surprises.

This process will be most valuable to you when you are new to an industry or are working within a new vertical or niche. Using the python code I linked and BuzzSumo’s fantastic API and data offers the opportunity to gain a deep visual understanding of the favorite places of industry thought leaders. This knowledge acts as a basis for strategic planning toward identifying top publishers with your own guest content.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Becoming an Industry Thought Leader: Advanced Techniques for Finding the Best Places to Pitch Guest Posts
Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com
Becoming an Industry Thought Leader: Advanced Techniques for Finding the Best Places to Pitch Guest Posts posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com

How to Reclaim Lost Backlinks Easily and Effectively

Last updated on December 10, 2019 at 04:24 pm

Link building involves different tactics that involve the same thing – acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites to boost your own website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. However, there’s only one tactic for us to do when we experience lost or broken backlinks – Link Reclamation. It sounds intimidating but it’s one of the most effective tactics we do when we want to improve our backlink profile in the least amount of time. Before we get into the intricacies of link reclamation, what exactly is link reclamation?

What Is Link Reclamation?

Link reclamation is the act of finding lost & broken links and taking steps to fix and reclaim them. Links being lost or broken happens in a variety of ways. Some of them may include:

• The webmaster or author removes the link
• The webmaster removes the page linking to your website (404 error)

Those 2 are the major ways for links to become lost or broken, but there are also semi-common occurrences such as the webmaster redirect the linking page to a different page. 

These reasons are especially directed to external links that we need to reclaim. Meanwhile, internal links are a lot easier to fix and reclaim since we usually have direct access to the site it’s located in.

Our responsibility as SEOs is to properly monitor the status of our hard-earned backlinks and make sure they’re up and running. It’s also important for us to remember that before we even get to fixing the lost and broken links, we first need to understand why they were broken or lost in the first place. If we don’t understand the reason, fixing it will be a lot harder.

Before we get into reclaiming broken and lost links from other websites, let’s start first with internal link reclamation. 

Internal Link Reclamation

Aside from optimizing your website’s internal linking structure, reclaiming broken internal links allows you to better serve the users that enter your website. So you always have to be wary of the changes you make to the sites you handle since they could possibly affect your internal links. 

Looking for Broken Internal Links

Finding broken links is easy enough since there are a variety of tools that have this feature. Our go-to tool for finding broken links inside the site we handle is ScreamingFrog since we’ve already relied on this tool for many years and it’s still one of the best crawling tools we’ve tried. 

Here’s how you can do it:

• Crawl the website
• After the crawl is finished, click on “Client Error (4xx)” on the right sidebar
• Click on a 404 page in the list 
• Click the “Inlinks” tab at the lowest part of the ScreamingFrog client
• You can now see the pages linking to your 404 pages. The “From” contains the linking pages while the “To” contains the 404 page

Fix The Links

You can do one of three things to fix your broken link:

• Update the link
• Replace the link
• Remove the link

It’s up to your discretion which of the three you should do to fix the broken link.

External Link Reclamation

Finding and fixing broken external links is important for your site since you can reclaim the lost link value and consequently improve your backlink profile as well. Much like finding broken internal links, there are also a variety of tools available in the market that have the feature of finding broken and lost backlinks. The best tool we’ve used for this specific task is Ahrefs.

Looking for Broken and Lost Backlinks

Finding these broken backlinks is easy enough since this is one of the primary features of Ahrefs’ site explorer. You can also export it to a CSV file for easier organization and viewing.

Through tools like Ahrefs, you already have a list of lost and broken backlinks. The difficult part here is reaching out to the webmaster and asking them to fix the link. 

Fixing Lost and Broken Backlinks

Since you’ve collated your website’s broken backlinks, you now need to reach out to the webmaster of the specific website and ask them to fix the broken link. Since there’s a possibility that you’ve reached out to this webmaster before for link building purposes, you’ve already established a connection with them which you can use to your advantage. To get you started, here’s an email template I use. 

Hi [Webmaster Name],

I hope you’re doing well.

I’m reaching out again since I noticed that one of the links that you had in this blog post [link to blog post] that pointed to my website disappeared. I really think that my post that you previously linked to can be of immense help to your users, providing them with additional information and better understanding of [topic of the blog post]. 

Awesome blog post! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

That’s it. A short and sweet email that effectively communicates the problem and gives the webmaster everything they need. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’ll reply immediately, but it does get the ball rolling

Reclaiming broken and lost backlinks is one of the best ways for you to improve your website’s backlink profile it also helps you with your SEO and rankings. 

Key Takeaway

Link reclamation is one of the best ways my team provides high-quality links to our clients. This is especially true if the client’s domain age is relatively high already and has a history of having links from different domains. You can never underestimate the effects of link reclamation since it’s one of the easiest and (sometimes) fastest ways to get high-quality backlinks. Do you have any questions? Comment them down below!

How to Reclaim Lost Backlinks Easily and Effectively posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

The Local Algorithm: Relevance, Proximity, and Prominence

Posted by MaryBowling

How does Google decide what goes into the local pack? It doesn't have to be a black box — there's logic behind the order. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, renowned local SEO expert Mary Bowling lays out the three factors that drive Google's local algorithm and local rankings in a simple and concise way anyone can understand.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. This is Mary Bowling from Ignitor Digital, and today I want to talk to you about the local algorithm. I'd like to make this as simple as possible for people to understand, because I think it's a very confusing thing for a lot of SEOs who don't do this every day.

The local algorithm has always been based on relevance, prominence, and proximity. 

1. Relevance

For relevance, what the algorithm is asking is, "Does this business do or sell or have the attributes that the searcher is looking for?" That's pretty simple. So that gives us all these businesses over here that might be relevant. For prominence, the algorithm is asking, "Which businesses are the most popular and the most well regarded in their local market area?"

2. Proximity

For proximity, the question really is, "Is the business close enough to the searcher to be considered to be a good answer for this query?" This is what trips people up. This is what really defines the local algorithm — proximity. So I'm going to try to explain that in very simple terms here today.

Let's say we have a searcher in a particular location, and she's really hungry today and she wants some egg rolls. So her query is egg rolls. If she were to ask for egg rolls near me, these businesses are the ones that the algorithm would favor.

3. Prominence

They are the closest to her, and Google would rank them most likely by their prominence. If she were to ask for something in a particular place, let's say this is a downtown area and she asked for egg rolls downtown because she didn't want to be away from work too long, then the algorithm is actually going to favor the businesses that sell egg rolls in the downtown area even though that's further away from where the searcher is.

If she were to ask for egg rolls open now, there might be a business here and a business here and a business here that are open now, and they would be the ones that the algorithm would consider. So relevance is kicking in on the query. If she were to ask for the cheapest egg rolls, that might be here and here.

If she were to ask for the best egg rolls, that might be very, very far away, or it could be a combination of all kinds of locations. So you really need to think of proximity as a fluid thing. It's like a rubber band, and depending on... 

• the query, 
• the searcher's location, 
• the relevance to the query, 
• and the prominence of the business 

....is what Google is going to show in that local pack.

I hope that makes it much clearer to those of you who haven't understood the Local Algorithm. If you have some comments or suggestions, please make them below and thanks for listening.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Local Algorithm: Relevance, Proximity, and Prominence
Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com
The Local Algorithm: Relevance, Proximity, and Prominence posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com

How to Set Up UTM Tracking for Your Campaigns

Last updated on December 5, 2019 at 05:41 pm

Digital Marketers like us know that data is the main source of assurance that our campaigns are helping businesses take off in the digital space. Enter UTM tracking. With just a few simple steps, you can now have a measurement of the impact that your campaign is driving to your site. I am aware that driving traffic to your client’s site can be effectively measured by the standard tracking tools but you should also know that having a dedicated time to set up UTM tracking will make your campaigns more effective in return.

It’s easy to say that the site is raking in traffic but I suggest that you go ahead and set up a UTM tracking because it would be easier to defend the boost in online growth when you know where it’s coming from. You can rely on numbers to state the impact that your campaign is providing for the business but it is not a good enough basis on the user behavior and effectiveness of your content.

Here, we will illustrate the implementation of UTM for your campaigns. Read more about it below.

What is UTM?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Parameters. It was introduced by Google back when the web analytics software of the same name (Urchin Analytics), was on full swing. UTM is designed to track user behavior of site visitors but having custom tracking would make it a much more in-depth tool. The text strings found in the code will allow you to track URLs that are usually clicked on. This will help you pull up data from Google Analytics on what types of campaigns work out perfectly for you.

UTM Paramaters that You Should Know About

Creating a UTM tracking would require you to be knowledgeable about its elements specifically the parameters for each campaign. If you are unfamiliar with this, then this is your quick guide to the parameters that you would need to understand in order to ensure that you will have a successful tracking campaign.

Campaign Source

Simply put, this is where your traffic will come from. Adding this parameter to your links will ensure you where you are deriving visitors from. This way, you would know which type of source would work best for your campaign. Whether it is a LinkedIn page or Google, this will help you determine what type of source is most powerful and therefore helping you to see where else you can improve in.

Campaign Medium

The parameter pertaining to the medium is all about how the traffic goes into your site. Do you have a more organic approach as opposed to a paid campaign? Then, you would know what type of campaign you should start with your business. This also covers the medium of email or cost-per-click. If you are tracking social traffic, then it would be best to tag your medium for the most general term for it. Emails, blogs, or guest posts are also included in this parameter.

Campaign Name

The campaign name is technically a placeholder parameter but an integral part of your campaign tracking since this will help you identify which campaign you are measuring for this particular UTM. It would be best to name it for the specific campaign or product you would want to promote. According to Google, it is used for keyword analysis so it would be the best thing to make this as optimized as possible so you are well on your way to creating a clear and concise UTM.

Campaign Term

Campaign Term is an optional field in the campaign builder because you would only use this for paid search. This is important for those who are in the field of Search Engine Marketing and the like. Use the campaign term option to inject the keyword that you would want to be part of the UTM. If you are targeting a specific keyword, then check if it is a term that would drive better ROI for your site.

Campaign Content

When your campaign is generating enough traffic or not enough of it, the first step you can take is to perform an A/B test. This is where the campaign content field is most useful. This parameter tag can be used for your ads, a different version of the website, or even a specific demographic that you would want to target. Like the campaign term, it is also optional so check first if you are going to fill out this field.

Starting Your UTM Tracking

To start your UTM tracking, you must first follow the steps found here. I find it pretty easy thanks to Google’s Campaign Builder. Although, I can do it manually, it is more efficient to delegate this task to this software since it gives you the UTM code in a snap.

Step 1

If you haven’t created a custom report in Google Analytics for the particular campaign, you should begin with this. You can find this on the sidebar of Analytics, on the Customization tab. Click on the dropdown and select Custom Reports. From there, you will see the Custom Report Dashboard. Click on +Create a New Form.

Create a custom report by providing a name, the metrics that you would want to analyze, as well as the Dimension Drilldowns that you would help you track how the campaign went about from the user’s perspective. Creating a custom report is optional and you can opt not to do it but for a more organized tracking, the custom report would help you achieve your campaign goals.

Step 2

Next, open the Campaign URL Builder by clicking here. Once you landed on the page, you would be asked to input the required details that would allow you to add the campaign parameters you need. The UTM would be automatically generated for you and all you need to do is to use it for your campaign.

As I mentioned earlier, there are parameters that you should follow. Go ahead and fill it out now. Your UTM would look like this:

Step 3

Once you have created your own custom UTM, then you can now use it for your ads or Call-to-Action sections of your content. Once you do this, you only need to wait for the data to be pulled from the visitors you garnered based on the metrics you have introduced for UTM. It will automatically generate data for you.

Step 4

Measure your success by looking at your Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns. Depending on the metrics you chose, you would be able to see how effective your campaigns are. You can measure the impact of UTM tracking by seeing how many users went into the campaign. For additional metrics, you can also enable conversions and it would help if you have multiple goals to track.

For an in-depth measurement of UTM campaign success, also look at the sources that helped in generating traffic for your campaign. This way, you can train your efforts for the specific channel that is giving you high traffic or low traffic, depending on your priority.

Knowing the sources of traffic in a more in-depth way would help you justify that your digital marketing process is a foolproof plan. Keep this in mind as you start your campaign tracking with UTM.

Key Takeaway

The main benefit of having UTM code is that you can test the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Shifting your focus to those who are underperforming would be easier since you can clearly see the data that would be presented to you. As for SEO, you can use this to predict and evaluate user behavior on your site or campaign. See what types of content are useful and effective for your audience and maximize that to your favor.

How to Set Up UTM Tracking for Your Campaigns posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Convince Your Boss to Send You to MozCon 2020 (Plus Bonus Letter Template!)

Posted by cheryldraper

It’s that time of year again. Professional development budgets are being distributed and you're daydreaming of Roger hugs and fist bumps. Well, this is a call to arms! It's time to get down to business and convince your boss that you HAVE to go to MozCon 2020.

You're already well acquainted with the benefits of MozCon. Maybe you're a MozCon alumnus. You may have lurked the hashtag once or twice for inside tips and you’ve likely followed the work of some of the speakers for a while. But how are you going to relay that to your boss in a way that sells? Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan.

(And if you want to skip ahead to the letter template, here it is!)

Copy the template

Step #1 - Gather evidence

Alright, so just going in and saying “Rand Fishkin is brilliant and have you seen any of Britney Muller’s Whiteboard Fridays lately?!” probably won’t do the trick — we need some cold hard facts that you can present.

MozCon delivers actionable insights

It’s easy to say that MozCon provides actionable insights, but how do you prove it? A quick scroll through our Facebook Group can prove to anyone that not only is MozCon a gathering of the greatest minds in search, but it also acts as an incubator and facilitator for SEO strategies.

If you can’t get your boss on Facebook, just direct them to the blog post written by Croud: Four things I changed immediately after MozCon. Talk about actionable! A quick Google (or LinkedIn) search will return dozens of similar recaps. Gather a few of these to have in your toolbelt just in case.

Or, if you have the time, pick out some of the event tweets from previous years that relate most to your company. The MozCon hashtag (#MozCon) has plenty of tweets to choose from — things like research findings, workflows, and useful tools are all covered. Some of our favorites from last year are listed below.

Attendees are often given access to exclusive tools and betas by the speakers, and that is something you don’t want to miss!

The networking is unbeatable

The potential knowledge gain doesn’t end with keynote speeches. Many of our speakers stick around for the entire conference and host niche- and vertical-specific Birds of a Feather tables over lunch, in addition to attending the networking events. If you find yourself with questions about their strategies, you'll often have the ability to ask them directly.

But the speakers aren’t the only folks worth networking with. We hand-select industry vendors to attend the conference and showcase their products. These vendors are also available for training and showcases throughout the entire conference.

Lastly, your peers! There's no better way to learn than from those who overcome the same obstacles as you. Opportunities for collaboration and peer-to-peer learning are often invaluable (especially those that happen over yummy snacks) and can lead to better workflows, new business, and even exciting partnerships.

Step #2 - Break down the costs

This is where the majority of the conversation will be focused, but fear not, Roger has already done most of the heavy lifting. So let’s cut to the chase. The goal of MozCon isn’t to make money — the goal is to break even and lift up our friends in search.

Top-of-the-line speakers

Every year we work with our speakers to bring cutting-edge content to the stage. You can be sure that the content you’ll be exposed to will set you up for a year of success.

Videos for everyone

While your coworkers won’t be able to enjoy Top Pot doughnuts or KuKuRuZa popcorn, they will be able to see all of the talks via professional video and audio. Your ticket to MozCon includes a professional video package which allows you (and your whole team) to watch every single talk post-conference, for free. (It's a $350 value for the videos alone!)

Good eats

MozCon doesn’t do anything on-par. We strive to go above and beyond in everything we do, and the food options are no exception. MozCon works with local vendors to ensure there are tasty, sustainable meals for everyone, including those with special diets. From breakfast to lunch and all the snacks in-between, MozCon has you covered (and saves your T&E budget a few bucks, as well).

Swag

Not to brag, but our swag is pretty great. Everyone gets their very own special MozCon memorabilia, in addition to other useful and fun items that vary from year to year. Previous gifts include “conference health” fanny packs (complete with Emergen-C!), moleskin notebooks, reusable water bottles, and phone chargers.

Discounts

This is probably the detail that'll make your boss's ears perk up. There are indeed discounts available for MozCon tickets! If you're buying now through January 31st 2020, Early Bird pricing is in effect, which saves you a cool $200 off regular ticket costs. If you've got a team interested in attending, we offer group discounts for parties of 5+ as well. And my final top-secret tip: if your company already subscribes to a Moz product, you can save even more —up to $700 off per regular-priced ticket if you snag Early Bird pricing, or $500 off after January 31st. That's a real chunk of change!

Step #3 - Be prepared to prove value

It’s important to go into the conference with a plan to bring back value. It’s easy to come to any conference and just enjoy the food and company (especially this one), but it’s harder to take the information gained and implement change.

Make a plan

Before approaching your boss, make sure you have a plan on how you're going to show off all of the insights you gather at MozCon! Obviously, you'll be taking notes — whether it’s to the tune of live tweets, bullet journals, or doodles, those notes are most valuable when they're backed up by action.

Putting it into action

Set expectations with your boss. "After each day, I'll select three takeaways and create a plan on how to execute them." Who could turn down nine potential business-changing strategies?!

And it really isn’t that hard! Especially not with the content that you'll have access to. At the close of each day, we recommend you look back over your notes and do a brain-dump. 

• How did today's content relate to your business? 
• Which sessions resonated and would bring the most value to your team? 
• Which strategies can easily be executed? 
• Which would make the biggest impact?

After you identify those strategies, create a plan of action that will get you on track for implementing change.

(Fun fact — if you're traveling, this can actually be done on the plane ride home!)

Client briefs

If you have clients on retainer, ongoing training for employees is something those clients should appreciate — it ensures you’re staying ahead of the game. Offer to not only debrief your in-house SEO team, but to also present to your clients. This sort of presentation is a value add that many clients don’t get and can set your business apart.

These presentations can be short blurbs at the beginning of a regular meeting or a chance to gather up all of your clients and enjoy a bit of networking and education.

Still not enough?

Give the boss a taste of MozCon by having them check out some videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers. And if you're wanting to break into the speaking circuit, you can also take your shot at securing a community speaker spot onstage. Most years, the call for community speakers opens up in early springtime — keep an eye on the Moz Blog for your chance to pitch!

Lastly, the reviews speak for themselves. MozCon is perfect for SEOs of any level and we even factor in time for you to get a little work done in-between sessions — Vaneese can tell you!

Our fingers are crossed!

Alright friend, now is your time to shine. We've equipped you with some super-persuasive tools and we'll be crossing our fingers that the boss gives you the "okay!" Be sure to grab the letter template and make your case the easy way:

Copy the template

If you can make it, we promise to spoil you to the tune of endless Starbucks coffee, tons of new friends, and an experience that will change your perspective on search. We hope to see your smiling face at MozCon 2020!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Convince Your Boss to Send You to MozCon 2020 (Plus Bonus Letter Template!)
Theo dõi các thông tin khác tại: https://foogleseo.blogspot.com
Convince Your Boss to Send You to MozCon 2020 (Plus Bonus Letter Template!) posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com

The Ultimate HARO Guide for Brands and SEO

Last updated on December 3, 2019 at 03:51 pm

Help a Reporter Out or HARO is an online PR platform that is used by journalists and bloggers from popular websites to connect with sources to help out with their content. This, in turn, allows sources to get valuable media coverage from high traffic websites that are great for branding and SEO.

HARO first started out as a small Facebook group back in 2008 and has now grown to more than 800,000 sources and 55,000 verified journalists and bloggers.

For a journalist or blogger to use HARO, their website must have an Alexa ranking of one million or less. This ensures that all websites are all high-quality which means for us sources, a gold mine of opportunities.

Using HARO to build your authority online is not rocket science, or that’s what you think. The first few steps are fairly easy but it gets a lot more difficult.

• How to Create a HARO Account
• Responding to HARO queries
• How to Write the Perfect HARO pitch
• Sample HARO Pitch Template
• How do you know your answer in HARO is accepted?
• How much does HARO cost?
• SEO Benefits of HARO
• Key Takeaway

How to Create a HARO Account

1. Register as a Source

Creating an account on HARO is easy and can be done in a few steps. All you need to do is go to helpareporter.com and click on the I’m a Source button. It will redirect you to a page where you could see an overview of how HARO works. Click on “Sign Up” on the navigation bar and fill-up the form with the required details. You should receive an email a few minutes after you register to verify your account.

2. Select your HARO preferences

After verifying your account, you can now log-in. HARO’s user interface is really simple and easy to navigate. In the dashboard, you will see your account details and fill up some missing information or update your account.

If you scroll down you will see the HARO Preferences. This is where you select from what industry you want to receive queries from. If you select Master HARO, you will receive all queries from all industries. I usually select Master HARO so I could look for opportunities not only for SEO Hacker but also for our clients.

3. Receive HARO Queries Daily

Once you’ve set up your account, you will start receiving emails from HARO the next day. HARO will send you three emails: one for the morning, afternoon, and evening edition. HARO sends out these emails at 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time respectively. 

Each email contains different queries so be sure to check each of them for opportunities.

A HARO query would look like this:

Responding to HARO Queries

Once you’ve found the perfect HARO query you can answer, here’s what you need to do.

There are two ways to send your answer to a journalist. 

First is through the HARO dashboard under “My Pitches”.

The second is by sending a direct email to the Reporter email.

You can do either way but I prefer sending an email directly. The process is pretty similar. You copy and paste the Reporter’s anonymous email indicated in the query. And send your pitch! Whether you sent your pitch through direct email or the HARO dashboard, you could see all your pass pitches in your account.

 

How to Write the Perfect HARO Pitch

Now that we got the easy part out of the way, let’s now go to the difficult part: writing the perfect HARO pitch. Here are some tips:

1. Be concise and straight-forward

The reason why reporters and bloggers use this platform is to save time and if you waste their time by fluffing to give a long answer, your pitch will most likely go to the trash.

The key to answering HARO queries is to give as much information in the shortest answer possible. The safest length would be one to three paragraphs per pitch. Answer the question directly.

Journalists don’t have the time to read a 500-word answer. But of course, it would depend on the query. There will be some queries that have a minimum word count for the answer or the other way around. Try to mix and match your style of answering and see what would work best for you.

Here’s another tip: some of the HARO queries will have the website of the reporter shown. So if you want to know what’s the best way to answer a query, you could check out their site first and take a look at the previous posts that may come from HARO. An easy way to find them is by looking for roundup posts.

2. Mind the deadline

A lot of the people I see doing HARO is that they overlook the deadline journalists set. There is not really the best time to answer a query. Some reporters are active while some will check queries after the deadline.I usually send my pitches a few hours before the deadline but as I mentioned, it’s really a mix and match to look for what would work for you.

3. Do your research

If you’re answering HARO queries for the field you are expert in, that’s great and it’s much easier for you. But for others who are doing it for SEO for their clients or PR of their company, you would need to do your research to give a well-thought answer.

4. Make your background short and sweet

When sending a HARO pitch, make sure you give reporters a good idea of who you are and your expertise by providing a brief background of your experience and what you do. You could either add this at the beginning of your pitch or add a short bio at the end.

5. Include personal details and links

This is the reward that we get by helping these journalists and bloggers with their content. Reporters will most likely include a mention of your name, company, and link to your website if your answer is accepted. Make sure that you place your personal details such as your full name, email address, company name, website link, and social media links preferably Linkedin.

6. Include a link to your professional photo

Some websites will require this but some will not. It is always a good idea to include a link to your photo that they could use to display in the article. Take note that adding a photo as an attachment will not work on HARO so you have to use image hosting sites or a google drive link.

7. Don’t Sell

Unless the query is specifically about your story or your company, do not sell. HARO pitches are not sales pitches. Reporters are looking for information, not to hire your company or promote it on their website.

Sample HARO Pitch Template

Here’s a sample of a pitch I sent to a query asking for the best website auditing tools:

To: query-a4vr@helpareporter.net

Subject: Re: Best Website Audit Tool

There are a lot of website audit tools out in the market,  but we’ve consistently used a single website auditing (crawling) tool for a few years now. ScreamingFrog is mainly a crawling tool, but with its capability to display all the missing facets of my site’s pages, it’s at the top of my list of best website auditing tools.

ScreamingFrog’s feature of displaying what all SEOs need to see with regards to their site’s technical and onsite (sometimes off-site). Server status, missing meta tags, duplicate meta tags, missing alt text, and every little detail that we need to see is inside ScreamingFrog. I strongly recommend that SEOs or any webmasters that want to see a more holistic and technical view of their website and its specific points of improvement try out ScreamingFrog since it’s that useful of a tool.

Sean Si

Founder and CEO of SEO Hacker

https://seo-hacker.net/

https://twitter.com/SEO_Hacker

Photo link: https://i.postimg.cc/pV0w6GCb/Sean-Si.png

How do you know your answer in HARO is accepted?

After answering a query, most HARO answers would take weeks or months before it gets published. Some webmasters would send you emails that your answer has been accepted and ask you to promote the post when the post gets live. While some webmasters will not notify you at all. Here are two other ways to track your HARO answers.

1. My Pitches tab in HARO

This is the least reliable one as rarely use this to confirm that an answer will be used. Inside the HARO dashboard, go to the “My Pitches” tab and you will see the list of the previous pitches you’ve sent and their status is indicated beside it.

2. Google Alerts

As mentioned, there will be times you won’t be notified at all and another way to monitor your HARO pitches would be to set up Google Alerts. Journalists will always use your name or company’s name to credit you for the answer. All you have to do is open up Google Alerts and create an alert on your name and company. Google will send you updates once it sees that a website has a mention of your name.

How much does HARO cost?

The basic use of HARO is free for both Journalists and Sources. However, HARO offers three paid plans for additional features:

Free Plan

• Media opportunities sent to inbox three times a day
• Email Support

Standard Plan $19 per month

• Everything in the Basic Plan
• One keyword alert that allows you to filter queries
• One profile to be inserted in the pitches
• Text Alerts
• Online Search

Advanced Plan $49 per month

• Everything in the basic and standard plan
• Three keywords to filter queries
• Three profiles
• Head start: get HARO alerts as soon as they get approved by the HARO editorial team

Premium Plan $149 per month

• Everything in basic, standard, and advanced plan
• Unlimited keywords
• Unlimited profiles
• Phone and email support

SEO Benefits of HARO

Since HARO allows you to connect with webmasters from high-authority websites, this is a gold mine of opportunity for getting high-quality links and referral traffic. This is arguably one of the best ways to get natural backlinks. But do take note that not all websites will give out dofollow links and some won’t even give links and just mention your name.

The sample pitch template that I showed above was my answer to a query by Blurbpoint regarding the Best SEO Auditing Tools. Not only was my name mentioned but I also got a link back to the SEO-Hacker website and Twitter account.

It might take a long time to get your answers published but SEO is a long game anyway. I highly recommend that you take at least 30 minutes a day to sift through HARO emails and look for queries you can answer. While your answers are not guaranteed to be accepted, it is always a win when your answers get approved. You get a link from a website that is ranked at least 1 million in the Alexa Rankings. That’s really the only reward you need. And knowing these websites have good traffic flow, referral traffic is just a bonus.

Key Takeaway

What I love the most about HARO is the thought that instead of reaching out to these high authority websites, they are the ones who lay down the questions for us to answer. You get all these opportunities every day without having to pay. All you have to do is send out the best pitch that you can. But, you have to remember that these journalists and bloggers receive thousands of answers daily so you have to make each answer count.

Needless to say, it is a great way to get online publicity boosting your branding, authority, and of course SEO. It doesn’t matter whether your company is just starting out. The person with the best pitch wins.

 

The Ultimate HARO Guide for Brands and SEO posted first on https://seo-hacker.com

Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn

Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Visit Lakeland

Reporting fake and duplicate listings to Google sounds hard. Sometimes it can be. But very often, it’s as easy as falling off a log, takes only a modest session of spam fighting and can yield significant local ranking improvements.

If your local business/the local brands your agency markets aren’t using spam fighting as a ranking tactic because you feel you lack the time or skills, please sit down with me for a sec.

What if I told you I spent about an hour yesterday doing something that moved a Home Depot location up 3 spots in a competitive market in Google’s local rankings less than 24 hours later? What if, for you, moving up a spot or two would get you out of Google’s local finder limbo and into the actual local pack limelight?

Today I’m going to show you exactly what I did to fight spam, how fast and easy it was to sweep out junk listings, and how rewarding it can be to see results transform in favor of the legitimate businesses you market.

Washing up the shady world of window blinds

Image credit: Aqua Mechanical

Who knew that shopping for window coverings would lead me into a den of spammers throwing shade all over Google?

The story of Google My Business spam is now more than a decade in the making, with scandalous examples like fake listings for locksmiths and addiction treatment centers proving how unsafe and unacceptable local business platforms can become when left unguarded.

But even in non-YMYL industries, spam listings deceive the public, waste consumers’ time, inhibit legitimate businesses from being discovered, and erode trust in the spam-hosting platform. I saw all of this in action when I was shopping to replace some broken blinds in my home, and it was such a hassle trying to find an actual vendor amid the chaff of broken, duplicate, and lead gen listings, I decided to do something about it.

I selected an SF Bay area branch of Home Depot as my hypothetical “client.” I knew they had a legitimate location in the city of Vallejo, CA — a place I don’t live but sometimes travel to, thereby excluding the influence of proximity from my study. I knew that they were only earning an 8th place ranking in Google’s Local Finder, pushed down by spam. I wanted to see how quickly I could impact Home Depot’s surprisingly bad ranking.

I took the following steps, and encourage you to take them for any local business you’re marketing, too:

Step 1: Search

While located at the place of business you’re marketing, perform a Google search (or have your client perform it) for the keyword phrase for which you most desire improved local rankings. Of course, if you’re already ranking well as you want to for the searchers nearest you, you can still follow this process for investigating somewhat more distant areas within your potential reach where you want to increase visibility.

In the results from your search, click on the “more businesses” link at the bottom of the local pack, and you’ll be taken to the interface commonly called the “Local Finder.”

The Local Finder isn’t typically 100% identical to the local pack in exact ranking order, but it’s the best place I know of to see how things stand beyond the first 3 results that make up Google’s local packs, telling a business which companies they need to surpass to move up towards local pack inclusion.

Step 2: Copy my spreadsheet

Find yourself in the local finder. In my case, the Home Depot location was at position 8. I hope you’re somewhere within the first set of 20 results Google typically gives, but if you’re not, keep paging through until you locate your listing. If you don’t find yourself at all, you may need to troubleshoot whether an eligibility issue, suspension, or filter is at play. But, hopefully that’s not you today.

Next, create a custom spreadsheet to record your findings. Or, much easier, just make a copy of mine!

Populate the spreadsheet by cutting and pasting the basic NAP (name, address, phone) for every competitor ranking above you, and include your own listing, too, of course! If you work for an agency, you’ll need to get the client to help you with this step by filling the spreadsheet out based on their search from their place of business.

In my case, I recorded everything in the first 20 results of the Local Finder, because I saw spam both above and below my “client,” and wanted to see the total movement resulting from my work in that result set.

Step 3: Identify obvious spam

We want to catch the easy fish today. You can go down rabbit holes another day, trying to ferret out weirdly woven webs of lead gen sites spanning the nation, but today, we’re just looking to weed out listings that clearly, blatantly don’t belong in the Local Finder. 

Go through these five easy steps:

1. Look at the Google Streetview image for each business outranking you.
   Do you see a business with signage that matches the name on the listing? Move on. But if you see a house, an empty parking lot, or Google is marking the listing as “location approximate”, jot that down in the Notes section of your spreadsheet. For example, I saw a supposed window coverings showroom that Streetview was locating in an empty lot on a military base. Big red flag there.
2. Make note of any businesses that share an address, phone number, or very similar name.
   Make note of anything with an overly long name that seems more like a string of keywords than a brand. For example, a listing in my set was called: Custom Window Treatments in Fairfield, CA Hunter Douglas Dealer.
3. For every business you noted down in steps one and two, get on the phone.
   Is the number a working number? If someone answers, do they answer with the name of the business? Note it down. Say, “Hi, where is your shop located?” If the answer is that it’s not a shop, it’s a mobile business, note that down. Finally, If anything seems off, check the Guidelines for representing your business on Google to see what’s allowed in the industry you’re investigating. For example, it’s perfectly okay for a window blinds dealer to operate out of their home, but if they’re operating out of 5 homes in the same city, it’s likely a violation. In my case, just a couple of minutes on the phone identified multiple listings with phone numbers that were no longer in service.
4. Visit the iffy websites. 
   Now that you’re narrowing your spreadsheet down to a set of businesses that are either obviously legitimate or “iffy,” visit the websites of the iffy ones. Does the name on the listing match the name on the website? Does anything else look odd? Note it down.
5. Highlight businesses that are clearly spammy.
   Your dive hasn’t been deep, but by now, it may have identified one or more listings that you strongly believe don’t belong because they have spammy names, fake addresses, or out-of-service phone numbers. My lightning-quick pass through my data set showed that six of the twenty listings were clearly junk. That’s 30% of Google’s info being worthless! I suggest marking these in red text in your spreadsheet to make the next step fast and easy.

Step 4: Report it!

If you want to become a spam-fighting ace later, you’ll need to become familiar with Google’s Business Redressal Complaint Form which gives you lots of room for sharing your documentation of why a listing should be removed. In fact, if an aggravating spammer remains in the Local Finder despite what we’re doing in this session, this form is where you’d head next for a more concerted effort.

But, today, I promised the easiness of falling off a log, so our first effort at impacting the results will simply focus on the “suggest an edit” function you’ll see on each listing you’re trying to get rid of. This is how you do it:

After you click the “suggest an edit” button on the listing, a popup will appear. If you’re reporting something like a spammy name, click the “change name or other details” option and fill out the form. If you’ve determined a listing represents a non-existent, closed, unreachable, or duplicate entity, choose the “remove this place” option and then select the dropdown entry that most closely matches the problem. You can add a screenshot or other image if you like, but in my quick pass through the data, I didn’t bother.

Record the exact action you took for each spam listing in the “Actions” column of the spreadsheet. In my case, I was reporting a mixture or non-existent buildings, out-of-service phone numbers, and one duplicate listing with a spammy name.

Finally, hit the “send” button and you’re done.

Step 5: Record the results

Within an hour of filing my reports with Google, I received an email like this for 5 of the 6 entries I had flagged:

The only entry I received no email for was the duplicate listing with the spammy name. But I didn’t let this worry me. I went about the rest of my day and checked back in the morning.

I’m not fond of calling out businesses in public. Sometimes, there are good folks who are honestly confused about what’s allowed and what isn’t. Also, I sometimes find screenshots of the local finder overwhelmingly cluttered and endlessly long to look at. Instead, I created a bare-bones representational schematic of the total outcome of my hour of spam-fighting work.

The red markers are legit businesses. The grey ones are spam. The green one is the Home Depot I was trying to positively impact. I attributed a letter of the alphabet to each listing, to better help me see how the order changed from day one to day two. The lines show the movement over the course of the 24 hours.

The results were that:

• A stayed the same, and B and C swapping positions was unlikely due to my work; local rankings can fluctuate like this from hour to hour.
• Five out of six spam listings I reported disappeared. The keyword-stuffed duplicate listing which was initially at position K was replaced by the brand’s legitimate listing one spot lower than it had been.
• The majority of the legitimate businesses enjoyed upward movement, with the exception of position I which went down, and M and R which disappeared. Perhaps new businesses moving into the Local Finder triggered a filter, or perhaps it was just the endless tide of position changes and they’ll be back tomorrow.
• Seven new listings made it into the top 20. Unfortunately, at a glance, it looked to me like 3 of these new listings were new spam. Dang, Google!
• Most rewardingly, my hypothetical client, Home Depot, moved up 3 spots. What a super easy win!

Fill out the final column in your spreadsheet with your results.

What we’ve learned

You battle upstream every day for your business or clients. You twist yourself like a paperclip complying with Google’s guidelines, seeking new link and unstructured citation opportunities, straining your brain to shake out new content, monitoring reviews like a chef trying to keep a cream sauce from separating. You do all this in the struggle for better, broader visibility, hoping that each effort will incrementally improve reputation, rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Catch your breath. Not everything in life has to be so hard. The river of work ahead is always wide, but don’t overlook the simplest stepping stones. Saunter past the spam listings without breaking a sweat and enjoy the easy upward progress!

I’d like to close today with three meditations:

1. Google is in over their heads with spam

Google is in over their heads with spam. My single local search for a single keyword phrase yielded 30% worthless data in their top local results. Google says they process 63,000 searches per second and that as much as 50% of mobile queries have a local intent. I don’t know any other way to look at Google than as having become an under-regulated public utility at this point.

Expert local SEOs can spot spam listings in query after query, industry after industry, but Google has yet to staff a workforce or design an algorithm sufficient to address bad data that has direct, real-world impacts on businesses and customers. I don’t know if they lack the skills or the will to take responsibility for this enormous problem they’ve created, but the problem is plain. Until Google steps up, my best advice is to do the smart and civic work of watchdogging the results that most affect the local community you serve. It’s a positive not just for your brand, but for every legitimate business and every neighbor near you.

2. You may get in over your head with spam

You may get in over your head with spam. Today’s session was as simple as possible, but GMB spam can stem from complex, global networks. The Home Depot location I randomly rewarded with a 3-place jump in Local Finder rankings clearly isn’t dedicating sufficient resources to spam fighting or they would’ve done this work themselves.

But the extent of spam is severe. If your market is one that’s heavily spammed, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the problem. In such cases, I recommend that you:

• Read this excellent recent article by Jessie Low on the many forms spam can take, plus some great tips for more strenuous fighting than we’ve covered today.
• Follow Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, and Jason Brown, all of whom publish ongoing information on this subject. If you wade into a spam network, I recommend reporting it to one or more of these experts on Twitter, and, if you wish to become a skilled spam fighter yourself, you will learn a lot from what these three have published.
• If you don’t want to fight spam yourself, hire an agency that has the smarts to be offering this as a service.
• You can also report listing spam to the Google My Business Community Forum, but it’s a crowded place and it can sometimes be hard to get your issue seen.
• Finally, if the effect of spam in your market is egregious enough, your ability to publicize it may be your greatest hope. Major media have now repeatedly featured broadcasts and stories on this topic, and shame will sometimes move Google to action when no other motivation appears to.

3. Try to build a local anti-spam movement

What if you built a local movement? What if you and your friendlier competitors joined forces to knock spam out of Google together? Imagine all of the florists, hair salons, or medical practitioners in a town coming together to watch the local SERPs in shifts so that everyone in their market could benefit from bad actors being reported.

Maybe you’re already in a local business association with many hands that could lighten the work of protecting a whole community from unethical business practices. Maybe your town could then join up with the nearest major city, and that city could begin putting pressure on legislators. Maybe legislators would begin to realize the extent of the impacts when legitimate businesses face competition from fake entities and illegal practices. Maybe new anti-trust and communications regulations would ensue.

Now, I promised you “simple,” and this isn’t it, is it? But every time I see a fake listing, I know I’m looking at a single pebble and I’m beginning to think it may take an avalanche to bring about change great enough to protect both local brands and consumers. Google is now 15 years into this dynamic with no serious commitment in sight to resolve it.

At least in your own backyard, in your own community, you can be one small part of the solution with the easy tactics I’ve shared today, but maybe it’s time for local commerce to begin both doing more and expecting more in the way of protections. 

I’m ready for that. And you?

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Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn
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Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn posted first on https://foogleseo.blogspot.com