Answers to 43 Questions About Search, Social, Content, Conversions and More

Posted by randfish

Earlier tonight, I sent out the following tweet:

Have any questions about search, social, content, conversion or analytics you want answered? I'm taking requests for the Moz blog tonight :)

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 24, 2012

I was clearly under-prepared for the amazing responses. In order to tackle such a magnitude of great questions, I'm giving myself some rules for replies.

1. If I don't have a good answer, I won't tackle the question. For example, Nathaniel Deal asked a good one on .NET viewstates impacting SEO, and while I'd love to reply, I don't know enough about them to provide solid suggestions.
2. No answer can be longer than two paragraphs (plus maybe an explanatory image/graphic).
3. Everyone who asked a great question gets their tweet embedded in this post (using Twitter's nice, new embed functionality), which also gives a spiffy followed link to their tweet.
4. Where possible, I'll provide links to content for more detail so those who are particularly interested can follow up.

Let's get started!

@randfish What single site on the web would you most want to see the analytics for?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Tough decision. It would probably be between YouTube and eHow, mostly for the putting-to-rest-conspiracy-theories value. But that's with my blogger/search news hat on. If I think more strategically and web-wide, I'd say Amazon's analytics would be fascinating to open-source ala Wikileaks. I suspect folks around the world could study the last decade of data and discover remarkable traits and trends about what we care about, buy and sell as a society.

@randfish not a lot of coverage on enterprise b2b content out there. What differences in strategy should these companies use?

— Jack Jones (@Mafuba) January 24, 2012

I think there's some pretty good stuff out there about Enterprise SEO (though, in all fairness, Moz hasn't been doing a great job on that topic lately - I'll try to fix that). Some recommendations:

• The columns at SELand on Enterprise SEO are often good (Ian Lurie's latest in particular)
• Tom Critchlow gave a solid delivery at Mozcation Peru on this topic, and his slide deck is on Slideshare.
• Speaking of Slideshare, Bill Hunt, who's a brilliant enterprise-level marketing tactician, also has a good deck there.
• A pair of good pieces from Aimclear and Raven covered enterprise sessions at conferences.

In terms of my personal recommendations - the key is to think at scale. Oftentimes, the "little stuff," like fixing title tags, getting URLs right, making it easier to use the CMS so more people at the company blog, etc. can have huge impacts at big organizations but would do little for SMBs. There's also larger strategies like content licensing and adding specific inbound marketing roles to a team. E.g. for a five-person team, you could have a content strategist, a full-time writer, an SEO/analytics data junky a, a marketing-focused graphic designer and a marketing-specific developer. That combination can often do AMAZING things, even in very large organizations.

@randfish Booh, the Filthy Linking Rich are getting some link Juice..? bit.ly/22IyMo

— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) January 24, 2012

I suppose linking to Twitter is giving a link-rich site more juice, but I'd worry about saying I'll link to everyone's individual domains, as that could create some more manipulative/non-authentic questions, especially considering the sphere we're in :-)

Oh, and BTW, if you haven't read the article Dennis links to in his tweet (from the brilliant Mike Grehan), I'd check it out. I wrote about it again a couple years ago, because it's a concept that every marketer should know and embrace.

@randfish conversion: how many people really click on related posts lists at the end of a post?

— Brankica U (@BrankicaU) January 24, 2012

It totally depends on how it's implemented and what you put there. I've seen/heard of CTRs on "related" as high as 10% of visits (usually on hyper-targeted blogs that include images/graphics in the related section) and under 0.1%. My advice is to test the formats you think will work best against one another, using some A/B testing software like Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce. Given the task you're aiming for has relatively higher conversions than a traditional purchase funnel, you can likely see results fairly quickly.

@randfish Do you think Google is using or will use 'author trust' as a highly relevant ranking factor?

— David Cohen (@explorionary) January 24, 2012

Right now, I'd say it's a strong factor for earning those amazing rel=author style rich snippets in the SERPs (as seen below):

In the future, I think it will depend on the degree to which the data format is embraced and used across the web, and whether they see a strong correlation with increased searcher happiness/relevancy when they test implementations. If you've not yet read the interview with a Google Search Quality Rater, check it out. To my mind, that clearly illustrates the process by which Google's Search Quality team determines whether an algorithmic shift is positive (and worth releasing) or negative (and thus, shut down).

@randfish been thinking of doing a crowdsourced post about the state of affiliate marketing this year (with GSPYW, Panda, social signals)...

— Jason Acidre (@jasonacidre) January 24, 2012

I think it's a great topic. Sadly, for a lot of affiliate marketers, I think Google's intent is to put them out of business, or at least make things much tougher for them in search/SEO. If I were doing any form of affiliate stuff, I'd be thinking extremely hard about how to build a unique value proposition, a recognizable, memorable, beloved brand and earn enough press and awareness, parti