Improving Search Rank by Optimizing Your Time to First Byte

Posted by Zoompf

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Back in August, Zoompf published newly uncovered research findings examining the effect of web performance on Google’s search rankings. Working with Matt Peters from Moz, we tested the performance of over 100,000 websites returned in the search results for 2000 different search queries. In that study, we found a clear correlation between a faster time to first byte (TTFB) and a higher search engine rank. While it could not be outright proven that decreasing TTFB directly caused an increasing search rank, there was enough of a correlation to at least warrant some further discussion of the topic.

The TTFB metric captures how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of a response from a web server when you request a particular website URL. In the graph captured below from our research results, you can see websites with a faster TTFB in general ranked more highly than websites with a slower one.

We found this to be true not only for general searches with one or two keywords, but also for “long tail” searches of four or five keywords. Clearly this data showed an interesting trend that we wanted to explore further. If you haven’t already checked out our prior article on Moz, we recommend you check it out now, as it provides useful background for this post: How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking.

In this article, we continue exploring the concept of Time to First Byte (TTFB), providing an overview of what TTFB is and steps you can take to improve this metric and (hopefully) improve your search ranking.

What affects TTFB?

The TTFB metric is affected by 3 components:

1. The time it takes for your request to propagate through the network to the web server


2. The time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response


3. The time it takes for the response to propagate back through the network to your browser.

To improve TTFB, you must decrease the amount of time for each of these components. To know where to start, you first need to know how to measure TTFB.

Measuring TTFB

While there are a number of tools to measure TTFB, we’re partial to an open source tool called WebPageTest.

Using WebPageTest is a great way to see where your site performance stands, and whether you even need to apply energy to optimizing your TTFB metric. To use, simply visit http://webpagetest.org, select a location that best fits your user profile, and run a test against your site. In about 30 seconds, WebPageTest will return you a “waterfall” chart showing all the resources your web page loads, with detailed measurements (including TTFB) on the response times of each.

If you look at the very first line of the waterfall chart, the “green” part of the line shows you your “Time to First Byte” for your root HTML page. You don’t want to see a chart that looks like this:

In the above example, a full six seconds is getting devoted to the TTFB of the root page! Ideally this should be under 500 ms.

So if you do have a “slow” TTFB, the next step is to determine what is making it slow and what you can do about it. But before we dive into that, we need to take a brief aside to talk about “Latency.”

Latency

Latency is a commonly misunderstood concept. Latency is the amount of time it takes to transmit a single piece of data from one location to another. A common misunderstanding is that if you have a fast internet connection, you should always have low latency.

A fast internet connection is only part of the story: the time it takes to load a page is not just dictated by how fast your connection is, but also how FAR that page is from your browser. The best analogy is to think of your internet connection as a pipe. The higher your connection bandwidth (aka “speed”), the fatter the pipe is. The fatter the pipe, the more data that can be downloaded in parallel. While this is helpful for overall throughput of data, you still have a minimum “distance” that needs to be covered by each specific connection your browser makes.

The figure below helps demonstrate the differences between bandwidth and latency.

As you can see above, the same JPG still has to travel the same “distance” in both the higher and lower bandwidth scenarios, where “distance” is defined by two primary of factors:

1. The physical distance from A to B. (For example, a user in Atlanta hitting a server in Sydney.)


2. The number of “hops” between A and B, since internet traffic redirects through an increasing number of routers and switches the further it has to travel.

So while higher bandwidth is most definitely beneficial for overall throughput, you still have to travel the initial “distance” of the connection to load your page, and that’s where latency comes in.

So how do you measure your latency?

Measuring latency and processing time

The best tool to separate latency from server processing time is surprisingly accessible: ping.

The ping tool is pre-installed by default on most Windows, Mac and Linux systems. What ping does is send a very small packet of information over the internet to your destination URL, measuring the amount of time it takes for that information to get there and back. Ping uses virtually no processing overhead on the server side, so measuring your ping response times gives you a good feel for the latency component of TTFB.

In this simple example I measure my ping time between my home computer in Roswell, GA and a nearby server at www.cs.gatech.edu in Atlanta, GA. You can see a screenshot of the ping command below:

Ping continued to test the average response time of the server, and summarized an average response time of 15.8 milliseconds. Ideally you want your ping times to be under 100ms, so this is a good result. (but admittedly the distance traveled here is very small, more about that later).

By subtracting the ping time from your overall TTFB time, you can then break out the network latency components (TTFB parts 1 and 3) from the server back-end processing component (part 2) to properly focus your optimization efforts.

Grading yourself

From the research shown earlier, we found that websites with the top search rankings had TTFB as low as 350 ms, with the higher ranking sites pushing up to 650 ms. We recommend a total TTFB of 500ms or less.

Of that 500ms, a roundtrip network latency of no more than 100ms is recommended. If you have a large number of users coming from another continent, network latency may be as high as 200ms, but if that traffic is important to you, there are additional measures you can take to help here which we’ll get to shortly.

To summarize, your ideal targets for your initial HTML page load should be:

1. Time to First Byte of 500 ms or less


2. Roundtrip network latency of 100 ms or less


3. Back-end processing of 400 ms or less

So if your numbers are higher than this, what can you do about it?

Improving latency with CDNs

The solution to improving latency is pretty simple: Reduce the “distance” between your content and your visitors. If your servers are in Atlanta, but your users are in Sydney, you don’t want your users to request content half way around the world. Instead, you want to move that content as close to your users as possible.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to do this: move your static content into a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs automatically replicate your content to multiple locations around the world, geographically closer to your users. So now if you publish content in Atlanta, it will automatically copy to a server in Syndey from which your Australian users will download it. As you can see in the diagram below, CDNs make a considerable difference in reducing the distance of your user requests, and hence reduce the latency component of TTFB:

To impact TTFB, make sure the CDN you choose can cache the static HTML of your website homepage, and not just dependent resources like images, javascript and CSS, since that is the initial resource the google bot will request and measure TTFB.

There are a number of great CDNs out there including Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, and many more.

Optimizing back-end infrastructure performance

The second factor in TTFB is the amount of time the server spends processing the request and generating the response. Essentially the back-end processing time is the performance of all the other “stuff” that makes up your website:

• The operating system and computer hardware which runs your website and how it is configured


• The application code that’s running on that hardware (like your CMS) as well as how it is configured


• Any database queries that the application makes to generate the page, how many queries it makes, the amount of data that is returned, and the configuration of the database

How to optimize the back-end of a website is a huge topic that would (and does) fill several books. I can hardly scratch the surface in this blog post. However, there are a few areas specific to TTFB that I will mention that you should investigate.

A good starting point is to make sure that you have the needed equipment to run your website. If possible, you should skip any form of “shared hosting” for your website. What we mean by shared hosting is utilizing a platform where your site shares the same server resources as other sites from other companies. While cheaper, shared hosting passes on considerable risk to your own website as your server processing speed is now at the mercy of the load and performance of other, unrelated websites. To best protect your server processing assets, insist on using dedicated hosting resources from your cloud provider.

Also, be wary of virtual or “on-demand” hosting systems. These systems will suspend or pause your virtual server if you have not received traffic for a certain period of time. Then, when a new user accesses your site, they will initiate a “resume” activity to spin that server back up for processing. Depending on the provider, this initial resume could take 10 or more seconds to complete. If that first user is the Google search bot, your TTFB metric from that request could be truly awful.

Optimize back-end software performance

Check the configuration of your application or CMS. Are there any features or logging settings that can be disabled? Is it in a “debugging mode?” You want to get rid of nonessential operations that are happening to improve how quickly the site can respond to a request.

If your application or CMS is using an interpreted language like PHP or Ruby, you should investigate ways to decrease execution time. Interpreted languages have a step to convert them into machine understandable code which what is actually executed by the server. Ideally you want the server to do this conversion once, instead of with each incoming request. This is often called “compiling” or “op-code caching” though those names can vary depending on the underline technology. For example, with PHP you can use software like APC to speed up execution. A more extreme example would be Hip Hop, a compiler created and used by Facebook that converts PHP into C code for faster execution.

When possible, utilizing server-side caching is a great way to generate dynamic pages quickly. If your page is loading content that changes infrequently, utilizing a local cache to return those resources is a highly effective way in improving the performance of your page load time.

Effective caching can be done at different levels by different tools and are highly dependent on the technology you are using for the back-end of your website. Some caching software only cache one kind of data, while others do caching at multiple levels. For example, W3 Total Cache is a WordPress plug-in that does both database query caching as well as page caching. Batcache is a WordPress plug-in created by Automattic that does whole page caching. Memcached is a great general object cache that can be used for pretty much anything, but requires more development setup. Regardless of what technology you use, finding ways to reduce the amount of work needed to create the page by reusing previously created fragments can be a big win.

As with any software changes you’d make, make sure to continually test the impact to your TTFB as you incrementally make each change. You can also use Zoompf’s free performance report to identify back-end issues which are effecting performance, such as not using chunked encoding and much more.

Conclusions

As we discussed, TTFB has 3 components: the time it takes for your request to propagate to the web server; the time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response; and the time it takes for the response to propagate back to your browser. Latency captures the first and third components of TTFB, and can be measured effectively through tools like WebPageTest and ping. Server processing time is simply the overall TTFB time minus the latency.

We recommend a TTFB time of 500 ms or less. Of that TTFB, no more than 100 ms should be spent on network latency, and no more than 400 ms on back-end processing.

You can improve your latency by moving your content geographically closer to your visitors. A CDN is a great way to accomplish this as long as it can be used to serve your dynamic base HTML page. You can improve the performance of the back-end of your website in a number of ways, usually through better server configuration and caching expensive operations like database calls and code execution that occur when generating the content. We provide a free web performance scanner that can help you identify the root causes of slow TTFB, as well as other performance-impacting areas of your website code, at http://zoompf.com/free.

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Kill It on Facebook by Being TAGFEE

Posted by quietcorey

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Last month, I presented a Mozinar on Deconstructing a Niche Market. Much to my surprise, the Q&A session focused almost entirely on my experience using Facebook as a niche marketing channel.

It’s true that Facebook is a dynamic and oft-misunderstood creature, especially in marketing. When building a strategy with long-term sustainability in mind, it’s important to avoid relying on any one source of traffic. Any channel can be fickle, and Facebook has certainly proven to be no exception.

That being said, Facebook still represents the largest share of the social space, and is at least worth considering for businesses looking to diversify their channel marketing portfolio, be it niche-targeted or otherwise.

Just 9 months after we decided to give the platform the old college try, Facebook has become a substantial traffic source for our B2B business.

As I mentioned in the Mozinar, our business has spent the last nine months developing our Facebook channel. As a result, we’ve seen traffic from Facebook increase to the point where it is roughly equal to 30% of our organic traffic.

In this post, I’ll be going through the philosophy we use to maximize engagement and traffic.

Marketing like it’s 2013

In a recent post on LinkedIn, marketing wizard Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this gem: “It’s 2013 and 99 percent of people are marketing their products like It’s 2004.”

His assessment is spot on.

Successfully building social media channels that drive converting traffic is about more than a content schedule. On Facebook, you have a built-in audience of anywhere from hundreds to millions of people who have opted in to your message. Remind you of another platform you use? Email, perhaps?

Social media, of course, adds engagement into the mix. This means that you not only have the opportunity to push your message out to your droves of fans, but a responsibility to have conversations, contribute, and be a member of the community.

If you want to market like it’s 2013, you have to learn how to engage your audience, not just talk at them.

The (not so) curious case of Sue Bryce

Sue Bryce is an award-winning professional photographer that teaches photography through workshops on CreativeLIVE. If you take a look at her Facebook page, you’ll see that her engagement is off the charts. 43,000 likes with 8,870 talking about her page.

How does she do it?

First things first, she’s not even remotely shy about promoting herself or her work. As you progress down her page, you’ll definitely see the occasional post promoting her events or cross-promoting her partners.

But therein lies the rub. The occasional post. The promotional posts are woven into a cloth of intensely personal, fun, and sometimes catty quips about life, the photography business, and people that she meets along her journey.

Among her most engaged-with recent posts? Sharing a story about getting dental work done, and how happy it makes her feel. I guarantee that each person who liked and/or commented on this post feels closer to Sue because of it.

In addition to sharing elements of her personal life, Sue communicates with her Facebook community in her own voice. There is nothing that feels remotely fake or forced about her posts. This makes it extremely easy for her fans to feel a connection to her, and to respond to her posts, which they do quite regularly.

Finally, Sue takes advantage of the fact that visual media performs exceptionally well on Facebook. In fact, a 2012 HubSpot study found that photos on Facebook generated 53% more likes than the average post. As possibly one of the world’s best photographers, of course, Sue has an unfair advantage in this arena.

Even still, one of her recent photo shares depicting her and fellow photography guru Kelly Brown in newborn poses garnered 2,174 likes, 156 shares, and 262 comments. Why? Because it was fun, relevant to the audience, and (let’s be honest) darn cute.

Despite the fact that you’re probably not a world-renowned photographer, it’s still extremely important to engage your audience with relevant visual media. Behind-the-scenes photos, product photos, and event photos are all a good place to start, and will work for most businesses.

Obviously, as a sole proprietor, Sue Bryce has a much easier time incorporating her personal voice into her brand, and this type of strategy won’t necessarily work for all types of businesses. If nothing else, this case exemplifies the possibilities of incorporating personality into your brand to achieve outlandish levels of engagement.

Channeling your inner Sue by harnessing the power of TAGFEE

Seeing success is great, but this article isn’t here to tell you how awesome Sue is.

Image credit: Nicholas L., from Minneapolis

Interestingly, what makes her such a great example for the Moz audience is that her Facebook page is a ridiculously great example of being TAGFEE. How can you incorporate this attitude into your own social endeavors?

Be transparent and authentic

While transparency can get bogged down with organizational hurdles, the lesson is to be yourself. Decide who your company is, and talk about things that reflect that, even if they’re uncomfortable. For example, if you sell industrial supplies, don’t be afraid to talk about the downsides of certain products. Modern customers know better than to trust claims that everything you sell is made out of sunshine, rainbows, and Adamantium.

Be generous

Offer special benefits to your fans that follow you on Facebook. Offer free trials and products, highlight their success stories on your page, and intentionally seek to add as much value to them as possible. This means thinking critically about what you’re adding to the conversation, not just extracting from the platform.

Be fun

Again, being fun is relative, and dependent on company culture. But, as can be seen in the example of Sue Bryce, fun drives engagement. The same goes for Moz. It never hurts to take a lighthearted approach, and a good brand personality will make your fans more engaged.

Be empathetic

On one level, empathy is about following the golden rule. Facebook manners are no exception. Strive to be professional and respectful on social media at all times. Additionally, I would argue that empathy is about continually seeking to understand how your audience feels, what challenges they face, and working hard to provide a product and resources that help them address those needs and challenges.

Be exceptional

There is no shortcut to being exceptional. Always seek to try new things, test new ideas, and be fresh and relevant. This is not only a healthy practice for your business, but a way for you to add unique value for your fans. Being exceptional lets you tell exceptional, unique, and fresh stories in a way that other brands in your industry may not be able to. It’s all about setting yourself apart.

Being exceptional includes making the most of the platform. Use well designed, cohesive image posts. Not only do you want each post to be interesting from a visual perspective, but you want your page as a whole to have a sense of visual flow. Doing this will not only boost your engagement, but also make your Facebook page look more professional and put together.

The same goes for copy. Choose a voice that fits your brand, remember to edit, and deliver your message exceptionally well. Know how you plan to format your posts, and how formatting works on Facebook. If you mention one of your fans, tag their name with @Username. Create a style guide and stick to it.

Paying to play

The problem of “pay to play” on Facebook is worth mentioning, as past and future changes have and will alter your brand’s visibility on the platform. As it stands, our brand’s data shows that we can expect to reach between 7% to 32% of our built-in audience when posting without advertisements.

Facebook indicated in early 2012 that the average reach of an “organic” post was 16%.

Considering that open rates of between 15% and 25% are, in general, considered good in email marketing, we can say that non-boosted Facebook posts boast respectable performance as they are.

The counter-intuitive twist is that paying to play isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Much like a Google SERP in the dark ages of Internet marketing, a Facebook feed inundated with an uncomfortable slurry of poorly written brand messages and uninteresting posts isn’t really a worthwhile place for your brand to be.

A realignment in the signal-to-noise ratio is a serious come-up for a brand that uses Facebook responsibly and thoughtfully, and raises the bar to entry in a way that benefits brands that have their house in order.

Considering that Facebook advertising is relatively affordable, and allows you to target a ridiculously granular audience outside of your normal fan base, it is definitely worth a go. Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce gave an outstanding primer on Facebook advertising in a recent WBF, and there’s an excellent crash course on YouMoz. I recommend checking out both of them if you think Facebook advertising is a good fit for your business.

Additional resources

The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and Facebook is no exception. Over time, citizens of the Facebook empire will likely grow more and more desensitized to advertising. While some best practices are bound to remain exactly the same, it’s important to keep an eye out for developments in the ecosystem.

That said, you can cover most of the basics with the following resources:

• 6 Facebook Marketing Best Practices


• Facebook Timeline: 9 Best Practices for Brands


• 7 Key Ways to Optimize Facebook Fan Page SEO

And that’s a wrap. Enjoy building an outstanding Facebook presence, and remember—keep it TAGFEE!

Have you had great success driving traffic with Facebook? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

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!

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When Keyword (not provided) is 100 Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? – Whiteboard Tuesday

Posted by randfish

For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those numbers soaring. The site Not Provided Count now reports an average of nearly 74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds that it won’t be long before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as Internet marketers become far more difficult—but not impossible.

In this special Whiteboard Tuesday, Rand covers what marketers can do to make up for this drastic change, finding data from other sources to stay on top of their SEO efforts.

For reference, here’s a still image of today’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today I’m going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that Google has expanded “keyword (not provided)” potentially to 100% of all organic referrals. This isn’t necessarily that they’ve flipped the entire switch, and everyone’s going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several months, it’s been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you’re a web marketer.

I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you’re a web user as well, because marketers don’t use this data to do evil things or invade people’s privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement that marketers have always had—that website creators have always had—with search engines, since their inception was, “sure, we’ll let you crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in the United States. Unfortunately, I don’t really see a way out of it. I don’t think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.

But in any case, let’s deal with the reality that we’re faced with today, which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword data is essentially gone. We don’t know when Google sends a visit—Bing, to their credit, and to Microsoft’s credit, enduringly has kept that data accessible—but we don’t know when Google sends a visit to our sites and pages, what that person searched for. Previously, we could do some sampling—now we can’t even do that.

There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very important ones as I perceive them—there are certainly many more.

Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page’s performance or its ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic, or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by improving that page’s ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search traffic. That’s a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, “hey, I’m not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page addresses that.” That’s one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.

Secondarily: connecting rank improvement efforts—things that we do in the SEO world to move up our rankings—to the traffic growth that we receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our clients—it’s really, really tough to have this data taken away.

C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content. When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things like “oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this product I launched, or thinking about this content that I’ve put out.” Really challenging to do that nowadays.

And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, “this is sending a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff, hey—let’s turn this into a broader piece of content. Let’s try and optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we’re barely ranking on.” Or, we have a page that’s not really addressing that keyword phrase that we’re ranking on. We can address that. We can improve that.

So I’m going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I’m not going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and months to come.

Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page’s ranking or its performance with users when I can’t see keyword referral data? How do I know which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connection—the intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughout—instead of looking at keyword-level data, we’re going to be looking at page-level data. Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that’s still data that we do get, and that’ll likely stay with us, because we can always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider would step in.

Pages receiving search visits plus rank-tracking data can get us a little close to this, because we can essentially say, “hey, we know this page is ranking well for these five or ten keywords that we have some reasonable expectation that they have keyword search volume. They’re receiving search visits, and yet they’re not performing well, or they’re not ranking particularly well, so improving them should be able to drive up our search traffic, improving their performance with users should be able to drive up our conversion rate optimization.

Optionally, we could also add in things like Google Webmaster Tools or AdWords data; AdWords data being used on they keyword side to fill in for, “hey, what’s the volume that a keyword is getting,” and Google Webmaster Tools data to be able to see a list of some keywords that maybe are sending us traffic. Dr. Pete wrote a good post recently about the relative accuracy of Google Webmaster Tools, and while unfortunately it’s not as good as any of the other methods, it’s still not awful, and so that data is potentially usable.

This will give us a list of pages that get search visits, or are targeting important search terms, that rank, and that have the potential to improve. So this gets us to the answer to this question. This used to be really simple to get at, now it’s more difficult, but still possible.

B. Connecting our SEO efforts to traffic growth from search. I know this is going to be tremendously hard, and this is probably one of the biggest tolls that this change is taking on SEO folks. Because as SEOs, as marketers, we’ve shown our value by saying, “look, we’re driving up search visits, some of it’s branded, some of it’s unbranded, some of it’s not provided—but you get a rough sense of this. And you really need that percentage: “What percent of the traffic is actually you going and getting us new visitors that never would have found us, versus branded stuff that’s just sort of rising on its own.” Maybe it’s rising because of efforts that marketers are making: investments in content, and in social media, and in email and all these other wonderful things, but it’s hard to know— it’s hard to directly map that.

So here’s one of the ways. Optionally, we can use AdWords to bid on branded terms and phrases. When we do that, you might want to have a relatively broad match on your branded terms and phrases so that you can see keyword volume that is branded from impression data. That gives you a sense of, “what’s the trajectory, here?” If we’re seeing it grow, we can identify “oh, that’s not us driving a bunch of new non-branded new keyword terms and phrases; that’s our brand search increasing.” So we can sort of discount that, or apply that in our reporting effectively. If we see, on the other hand, that it’s staying flat, but that search traffic overall is going up and to the right, then we know that’s unbranded.

Optionally, if we don’t want to be bidding and spending a lot of money with Google AdWords and trying to keep our impression counts high, we can use things like Google Insights or even downloading AdWords volume data estimates month-over-month to be able to track those sorts of things.

Certainly one of the things I would recommend doing even prior to this change is tracking rankings on buckets. Buckets of head terms, versus chunky middle, versus long-tail; so phrases that are getting lots of search volume, a good amount of search volume, and very little search volume. You want to have different buckets of those, so you can see, “oh hey, my rankings are generally improving in this bucket, or that bucket.” Same with branded vs. non-branded; you want to be able to identify and track those separately. Then, compare against visits that you’re seeing to pages that are ranking for those terms. We need to look at the pages that are receiving search traffic from those different buckets.

Again, much more challenging to do these days. But, any time we see the complexity of our practice is increasing, we also have an opportunity, because it means that those of us who are savvy, sophisticated, able to track this data, are far more useful and employable and important. Those organizations that use great marketers are going to receive outsized benefits from doing so.

C: How do I understand and analyze how searchers perceive my brand? What are they searching for that’s leading them to my site? How are they searching for terms related to my brand? Again, we can bid on AdWords terms, like I talked about. You can use keyword suggestion sources like Google Suggest, Ubersuggest, certainly AdWords’s own volume data, SEMRush, etc. to see the keyword expansions related to your brand or the content that’s very closely tied to your brand. And internal site search data. You’ve got a search box up in the top-right hand corner, people are typing in stuff, and you want to see what that “XYZ” is that they’re typing in. Those can help as well, and can provide you some opportunities that lead to D.

D: How do I uncover new keyword opportunities to target? Of course, there’s the classic methodology that we’ve all employed, which is keyword research, but usually we compare that to the terms that are already sending us traffic, and we go look and say, “oh, okay, we’re doing fine for these—we don’t need to worry.” Now, we need to take keyword research tools and add some form of rank-tracking data. That could be from Google Webmaster Tools despite its mediocrity in terms of accuracy. We can use manual rank data—we can search for it ourselves—or we can use automated data.

One of the criticisms for all rank-tracking data is always, “but there’s lots of personalization and geographic localization—these kinds of things that are biasing searches—how do I see all of that?” And the answer is, well, you can’t really. Personalization is going to fluctuate things. It may be sort of included in the Google Webmaster Tools data, but as Dr. Pete showed in his post, it looks a little funky right now.

For localization, you can add the geo in the string to be able to see where you rank in different geographies if you want to track those. That’s something you’ll be able to do in Moz Analytics and probably many of the other keyword tracking tools out there, too.

Optionally—and this is expensive, and I hate to say this is Google being evil, but this is probably what Google wants you to do when they give you “(not provided)”—which is run AdWords campaigns targeting those keywords, so that you can see new expansion opportunities. Areas where, “oh hey, we bid on this, it sent impressions, it sent some traffic, it looks like it’s worthwhile, we’re not ranking for it organically,” and again, you can see that through your rank-tracking data or through pages receiving visits from search, and then targeting those terms.

So, a lot of this data, and a lot of these opportunities are retrievable—they’re just a lot harder. I will say—this is somewhat self-promotional, but I think one of Moz’s missions and obligations as a company to the search marketing world is to try and help replace, repair, and make these processes easier. So, you can guess that over the next 6-12 months that’s going to be a big part of our roadmap: trying to help you folks—and all marketers—get to this data.

For now, these methodologies can and should be helpful to you, and I expect to see lots of great discussion about other ways to go about this in the comments.

Thanks, everyone—take care.

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The Ultimate Moment of Truth: Moving Toward Shared Experiences

Posted by briansolis

Search is a natural step in the discovery process. In a web-based world, search engines offer a lens into a qualified and structured view to help online consumers focus and make informed decisions. With Google dominating search, marketers concentrated on improving search ranking through tried and true techniques to ensure that what they were marketing earned a coveted position in the likely search results a customer might consider clicking.

Search is only part of the story now.

The experiences that people have, and in turn share, have created a powerful collective repository that is indexed and tapped every minute of every day—mostly outside of Google.

The importance of search engine marketing is fundamental to the discovery process. And, this is a world that still thrives today even though popular conversations among businesses and marketers center on social and mobile media as the “next big thing.” There’s notable truth in the hype surrounding social and mobile of course. With over one billion users, for example, many tout Facebook as its own Internet. And with Graph Search now available, a new era of interest and relationship-based content optimization will become a reality for the majority of its users.

This isn’t a debate about the merits of SEO versus social media optimization (SMO), nor is this a discussion about social media. This is a discussion about behavior and the importance of discovery among an increasingly connected customer and the need to optimize and unite their journeys, whether it’s on the traditional web, in social networks, or via mobile.

The zero moment of truth (ZMOT)

In 2011, Google released an ebook written by Jim Lecinski, Winning in the Zero Moment of Truth . The premise of the book introduces us to instances when shopping decisions break down into a series of moments of truth, each requiring a special understanding to help nudge customers along their journey. For example, when a customer is considering a purchase, whether driven by a stimulus or need, in the zero moment of truth customers are essentially going to “Google it.” Anyone involved in the art and science of search wins in this moment by ensuring that web pages are optimized to outperform competitive pages as people search.

Without awareness, there can be no consideration.

What happens, though, when your customers naturally start their discovery process in communities other than Google or traditional search?

Trust

This is an important question, as the pervasiveness of social and mobile media is conditioning a new generation of connected consumers to rely on their networks of relevance, not just search engines, as an alternative and efficient means of guiding decision-making.

Think about it for a moment. Study after study shows that everyday consumers trust others like them. They don’t trust executives. They don’t trust ads. But, they do trust peers. Global marketing agency Edelman also revealed in its annual Trust Barometer, that customers trust employees of companies. Why is that a significant finding? When people are searching for information in a social ecosystem, they wish to find qualified information that informs and guides them quickly and efficiently. Landing pages are just the beginning. Employees-as-experts are also part of the content and discovery equation, allowing customers to find answers that help rather than sell.

This is just the beginning. The future of search is tied to the experiences shared by your employees and your customers across the web, social networks, communities, and mobile apps.

If you think about traditional search for a moment, what comes back as someone types in a keyword or question into the search bar? That’s right, websites. And websites are often the last thing a connected customer is looking for in a moment when trusted impressions and experiences outweigh pages ranked by inbound links and keywords. After all, many of these connected customers are mobile, and as a result are looking for content that’s organic to the context of their state of mind and the device they’re using in each moment of truth.

In the zero moment of truth it is shared experiences—those that are passed on through social networks, communities, and apps—that serve as the ultimate PageRank. In addition to promoting designated landing pages, how do you optimize experiences to be shared and also appear in each moment of truth?

What’s beyond the zero moment of truth?

You’ve all heard the stat shared by search and social media experts that YouTube is the second largest search engine. Many skeptics will of course argue that YouTube is merely a network for funny cat videos, wannabe celebrities, movie trailers, and music videos. But you and I know that YouTube is indeed a notable alternative to Google for processing more search queries than any other search engine.

Connected customers don’t just seek information, they’re searching for input, validation, and direction in a way that they can appreciate and use. This isn’t a surprise. As consumers, we too have searched on YouTube for content to help us accomplish tasks, learn, or conduct research. We’re not alone in the hunt for product-related videos to see them in action and also gauge the impressions of others.

YouTube becomes a search engine not for web pages but for shared experiences.

It’s a good thing Google also owns YouTube. According to a research study published by Ask Your Target Market in Q3 2012, 95% of consumers use both YouTube and Google when searching for relevant content. And it’s not just YouTube either; connected customers are fragmenting search through every social network, community, forum, and app where shared experiences become a currency in decision-making.

Shared experiences become a critical part of marketing, as discussions around them contribute to a more conversational approach to branding and decision-making among digital consumers. Google’s new Hummingbird search algorithm further demonstrates the significance of shared experiences by building them into search results. In a conversational web, people are asking questions rather than plugging in keywords. This changes everything from SEO to tracking search behavior and corresponding results, learning how to spark the creation and exchange of experiences in order to guide a connected and informed customer journey.

We now need to optimize search results for shared experiences in every network that’s significant to our connected customers.

The ultimate moment of truth (UMOT)

Our work starts with uncovering what comes back about our brand when we use keywords or questions, as our customers do, to search each network.

The zero moment of truth is matched in significance by the ultimate moment of truth, a critical bookend to search introduced in my recent book, What’s the Future of Business (WTF). The ultimate moment of truth represents the future of discoverability, branding, and influence, and it is directly tied to the zero moment of truth.

The UMOT signifies the instant when a customer creates content based on an experience with your product or service and publishes it in their community or network of preference for others to find. The intention of doing so is a combination of self expression and the desire to inform others. This experience then becomes discoverable for anyone who searches each network. And in many cases, these experiences also populate Google’s search results. Said another way, the Ultimate Moment of Truth becomes the next person’s zero moment of truth.

Every day, customers are sharing experiences in the form of videos, blog posts, reviews, Tweets, status updates, etc. This content doesn’t self-destruct like SnapChat images. Shared experiences build upon one another, forming a collective repository in the cloud that’s indexable, searchable, and influential. SEO, branding, and sales compete with this content and at some point, without address and optimization, shared experiences can eclipse traditional marketing no matter how creative or aggressive.

Without defining and promoting desired shared experiences, businesses will become victim to whatever people create and share.

Optimizing shared experiences

Social and mobile bring to light the importance of shared experiences and why organizations must first design them rather than just react. Certainly great experiences start with vision and purpose enlivened by the product or service design and its intentions. For marketers who may have little or no control over business affairs, the ability to shape and steer experiences is made possible by promoting every nuance tied to your value proposition and also the unique advantage customers discover on their own. I refer to this as the experience gap.

In the experience gap, there’s the experience we want people to have, which is reinforced by our marketing messages and strategies. Then, there’s the experience people have and share, which usually demonstrates that what “they” say about us is frequently different than what we say.

A key question for you to answer is, “are you facing an experience gap?”

Driving shared experiences is a form of customer journey optimization that literally closes the gap. This is where search works for us beyond traditional SEO. With a little keyword anthropology, we can better understand the questions, not just key words, that customers are asking and answering. This research also reveals the following key attributes to develop a UMOT optimization strategy:

• Searching beyond keywords: The questions that people ask over and over again.


• What comes back in the zero moment of truth: Patterns and context of questions, what customers find that helps them make decisions, and also why customers err to locate or value traditional content.


• The communities and people of value: Where people are finding and sharing experiences outside of Google or other traditional search engines (this introduces new touch points in the customer journey).


• Helpful content that actually answers customer questions: Discover valuable content, additional links, reactions, and a rabbit hole of ambient experiences that further guide customers to or away from you.


• Real world impressions as told through expressions: What product opinions, tips and tricks, cautionary tales and how these shared experiences influence the impressions of others.


• New marketing opportunities : Hidden gems and new product usage scenarios not originally considered.


• A clear picture of your connected customer’s journey: All touch points and related information that shows exactly how UMOT connects to ZMOT and where your customers click to continue their journey.

Once you’ve identified the state of shared experiences, it’s time to develop a strategy to close the experience gap. Start by defining…

• What is it that you want people to experience?


• What is it that you want them to feel and share?


• What are people sharing today, where (networks/apps) and how (content)?

The relationship between keyword anthropology and content creation will guide your strategy development so that you can understand how to influence the relationship between what’s shared in the ultimate moment of truth as customers begin the discovery process in the zero moment of truth.

Truth can often be a painful surprise. And we all know that perception is reality. There’s no need to be placed on the defensive in reacting to shared experiences. It’s our job to optimize positive experiences and promote beneficial content and stories to enhance the zero moment of truth wherever customers go to learn and explore.

The future lies in the mixing of experience design, content marketing, UGC, and SEO.

Positive conditioning promotes a collaborative effort to solve the experience gap. By activating and rewarding customers and influencers, marketers can rally content that promotes desired experiences at every touch point that customers uncover in their journey or lifecycle. By coordinating these efforts, what appears in new channels in each zero moment of truth is no longer a surprise; it’s strategically optimized to walk people through each moment of truth. It also loops together, to create a value cycle that keeps on giving to the next person who enters the journey.

User and employee-generated content must then become part of an integrated SEO program to optimize the right content in the right context for each moment of truth.

When balanced with a premier SEO program, optimized shared experiences will complement the customer journey wherever your customers search and share. What we soon realize is that moments of truth aren’t just moments in time, they become an experience fueled continuum.

The future of shared experiences and your brand isn’t just created, it’s co-created.

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Video: Expanding your site to more languages

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

We filmed a video providing more details about expanding your site to more languages or country-based language variations. The video covers details about rel=”alternate” hreflang and potential implementation on your multilingual and/or multinational site.

Video and slides on expanding your site to more languages

You can watch the entire video or skip to the relevant sections:

• Potential search issues with international sites


• Questions to ask within your company before beginning international expansion


• International site use cases


• rel=”alternate” hreflang and hreflang=”x-default”: details and implementation


• Best practices

Additional resources on hreflang include:

• Webmaster Help Center article on rel=”alternate” hreflang and hreflang=”x-default”


• More blog posts


• 
  
  
  
  • Working with multilingual sites
  
  
  • Working with multiregional sites
  
  
  • New markup for multilingual content
  
  
  • Introducing “x-default hreflang” for international landing pages”
  
  
  
  


• Webmaster discussion forum FAQ on internationalization


• Webmaster discussion forum for internationalization (review answers or post your own question!)

Good luck as you expand your site to more languages!







Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

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Historic Index Update

We have now updated our Historic Index with data for start of August 2013. Here are the new stats: Historic Index – Unique Pages crawled: 543,749,939,589 Unique URLs: 2,116,030,214,824 Date range: 09 Jan 2008 to 10 Aug 2013 We do apologise for the delay in releasing this update – it was due to growth in […]

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Keywords… Provided! By Majestic SEO

Don’t panic. By now, most SEOs will know that Google has moved entirely over to HTTPS, in the process removing all keyword data for analytics systems. Fortunately, this does not affect Majestic SEO as we have never sought to use data gleaned from Google. Majestic Already Has Keyword Data If you put a keyword or […]

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