Wondering what advantages Twitter offers social media marketers? Looking for tips on interacting with customers? To explore the opportunities marketers have on Twitter, I interview Mark Schaefer. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
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In an industry where knowing exactly how to get ranked on Google is murky at best, SEO ranking factors studies can be incredibly alluring. But there's danger in believing every correlation you read, and wisdom in looking at it with a critical eye. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the myths and realities of correlations, then shares a few smart ways to use and understand the data at hand.
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Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are chatting about SEO ranking factors and the challenge around understanding correlation, what correlation means when it comes to SEO factors.
So you have likely seen, over the course of your career in the SEO world, lots of studies like this. They're usually called something like ranking factors or ranking elements study or the 2017 ranking factors, and a number of companies put them out. Years ago, Moz started to do this work with correlation stuff, and now many, many companies put these out. So people from Searchmetrics and I think Ahrefs puts something out, and SEMrush puts one out, and of course Moz has one.
These usually follow a pretty similar format, which is they take a large number of search results from Google, from a specific country or sometimes from multiple countries, and they'll say, "We analyzed 100,000 or 50,000 Google search results, and in our set of results, we looked at the following ranking factors to see how well correlated they were with higher rankings." That is to say how much they predicted that, on average, a page with this factor would outrank a page without the factor, or a page with more of this factor would outrank a page with less of this factor.
So, basically, in an SEO study, they usually mean something like this. They do like a scatter plot. They don't have to specifically do a scatter plot, but visualization of the results. Then they'll say, "Okay, linking root domains had better correlation or correlation with higher organic rankings than the 10 blue link-style results to the degree of 0.39." They'll usually use either Spearman or Pearson correlation. We won't get into that here. It doesn't matter too much.
Across this many searches, the metric predicted higher or lower rankings with this level of consistency. 1.0, by the way, would be perfect correlation. So, for example, if you were looking at days that end in Y and days that follow each other, well, there's a perfect correlation because every day's name ends in Y, at least in English.
So search visits, let's walk down this path just a little bit. So search visits, saying that that 0.47 correlated with higher rankings, if that sounds misleading to you, it sounds misleading to me too. The problem here is that's not necessarily a ranking factor. At least I don't think it is. I don't think that the more visits you get from search from Google, the higher Google ranks you. I think it's probably that the correlation runs the other way around — the higher you rank in search results, the more visits on average you get from Google search.
So these ranking factors, I'll run through a bunch of these myths, but these ranking factors may not be factors at all. They're just metrics or elements where the study has looked at the correlation and is trying to show you the relationship on average. But you have to understand and intuit this information properly, otherwise you can be very misled.
So let's walk through a few of these.
1. Correlation doesn't tell us which way the connection runs.So it does not say whether factor X influences the rankings or whether higher rankings influences factor X. Let's take another example — number of Facebook shares. Could it be the case that search results that rank higher in Google oftentimes get people sharing them more on Facebook because they've been seen by more people who searched for them? I think that's totally possible. I don't know whether it's the case. We can't prove it right here and now, but we can certainly say, "You know what? This number does not necessarily mean that Facebook shares influence Google results." It could be the case that Google results influence Facebook searches. It could be the case that there's a third factor that's causing both of them. Or it could be the case that there's, in fact, no relationship and this is merely a coincidental result, probably unlikely given that there is some relationship there, but possible.
2. Correlation does not imply causation.This is a famous quote, but let's continue with the famous quote. But it sure is a hint. It sure is a hint. That's exactly what we like to use correlation for is as a hint of things we might investigate further. We'll talk about that in a second.
3. In an algorithm like Google's, with thousands of potential ranking inputs, if you see any single metric at 0.1 or higher, I tend to think that, in general, that is an interesting result.Not prove something, not means that there's a direct correlation, just it is interesting. It's worthy of further exploration. It's worthy of understanding. It's worthy of forming hypotheses and then trying to prove those wrong. It is interesting.
4. Correlation does tell us what more successful pages and sites do that less successful sites and pages don't do.Sometimes, in my opinion, that is just as interesting as what is actually causing rankings in Google. So you might say, "Oh, this doesn't prove anything." What it proves to me is pages that are getting more Facebook shares tend to do a good bit better than pages that are not getting as many Facebook shares.
I don't really care, to be honest, whether that is a direct Google ranking factor or whether that's just something that's happening. If it's happening in my space, if it's happening in the world of SERPs that I care about, that is useful information for me to know and information that I should be applying, because it suggests that my competitors are doing this and that if I don't do it, I probably won't be as successful, or I may not be as successful as the ones who are. Certainly, I want to understand how they're doing it and why they're doing it.
5. None of these studies that I have ever seen so far have looked specifically at SERP features.So one of the things that you have to remember, when you're looking at these, is think organic, 10 blue link-style results. We're not talking about AdWords, the paid results. We're not talking about Knowledge Graph or featured snippets or image results or video results or any of these other, the news boxes, the Twitter results, anything else that goes in there. So this is kind of old-school, classic organic SEO.
6. Correlation is not a best practice.So it does not mean that because this list descends and goes down in this order that those are the things you should do in that particular order. Don't use this as a roadmap.
7. Low correlation does not mean that a metric or a tactic doesn't workExample, a high percent of sites using a page or a tactic will result in a very low correlation. So, for example, when we first did this study in I think it was 2005 that Moz ran its first one of these, maybe it was '07, we saw that keyword use in the title element was strongly correlated. I think it was probably around 0.2, 0.15, something like that. Then over time, it's gone way, way down. Now, it's something like 0.03, extremely small, infinitesimally small.
What does that mean? Well, it could mean one of two things. It could mean Google is using it less as a ranking factor. It could mean that it was never connected, and it's just total speculation, total coincidence. Or three, it could mean that a lot more people who rank in the top 20 or 30 results, which is what these studies usually look at, top 10 to top 50 sometimes, a lot more of them are putting the keyword in the title, and therefore, there's just no difference between result number 31 and result number 1, because they both have them in the title. So you're seeing a much lower correlation between pages that don't have them and do have them and higher rankings. So be careful about how you intuit that.
Oh, one final note. I did put -0.02 here. A negative correlation means that as you see less of this thing, you tend to see higher rankings. Again, unless there is a strong negative correlation, I tend to watch out for these, or I tend to not pay too much attention. For example, the keyword in the meta description, it could just be that, well, it turns out pretty much everyone has the keyword in the meta description now, so this is just not a big differentiating factor.
What is correlation good for?All right. What's correlation actually good for? We talked about a bunch of myths, ways not to use it.
A. IDing the elements that more successful pages tend to haveSo if I look across a correlation and I see that lots of pages are twice as likely to have X and rank highly as the ones that don't rank highly, well, that is a good piece of data for me.
B. Watching elements over time to see if they rise or lower in correlation.For example, we watch links very closely over time to see if they rise or lower so that we can say: "Gosh, does it look like links are getting more or less influential in Google's rankings? Are they more or less correlated than they were last year or two years ago?" And if we see that drop dramatically, we might intuit, "Hey, we should test the power of links again. Time for another experiment to see if links still move the needle, or if they're becoming less powerful, or if it's merely that the correlation is dropping."
C. Comparing sets of search results against one another we can identify unique attributes that might be trueSo, for example, in a vertical like news, we might see that domain authority is much more important than it is in fitness, where smaller sites potentially have much more opportunity or dominate. Or we might see that something like https is not a great way to stand out in news, because everybody has it, but in fitness, it is a way to stand out and, in fact, the folks who do have it tend to do much better. Maybe they've invested more in their sites.
D. Judging metrics as a predictive ranking abilityEssentially, when I'm looking at a metric like domain authority, how good is that at telling me on average how much better one domain will rank in Google versus another? I can see that this number is a good indication of that. If that number goes down, domain authority is less predictive, less sort of useful for me. If it goes up, it's more useful. I did this a couple years ago with Alexa Rank and SimilarWeb, looking at traffic metrics and which ones are best correlated with actual traffic, and found Alexa Rank is awful and SimilarWeb is quite excellent. So there you go.
E. Finding elements to testSo if I see that large images embedded on a page that's already ranking on page 1 of search results has a 0.61 correlation with the image from that page ranking in the image results in the first few, wow, that's really interesting. You know what? I'm going to go test that and take big images and embed them on my pages that are ranking and see if I can get the image results that I care about. That's great information for testing.
This is all stuff that correlation is useful for. Correlation in SEO, especially when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements, can be very misleading. I hope that this will help you to better understand how to use and not use that data.
Thanks. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
The image used to promote this post was adapted with gratitude from the hilarious webcomic, xkcd.
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Carmen Collins, manager of Cisco’s talent brand social media team globally, says 2018 will be the year of live video for the many @WeAreCisco social media accounts she leads, specifically live video employee takeovers, a ballsy move for a brand manager (if I do say so myself). However, over the last year, employee takeovers have not only entered Carmen’s wheelhouse but her comfort zone.
Before we dive right into Carmen’s seemingly effortless employee takeovers across multiple channels, let’s get a little background on @WeAreCisco.
Who Is Cisco?Originally Cisco Jobs, then Cisco Careers, We Are Cisco was created to boost recruitment. Armed with the knowledge that employee voices are still more credible than those of CEOs, Carmen sought to boost Cisco’s workplace reputation by telling the uplifting stories Cisco’s employees readily and enthusiastically share.
Despite the numerous employee stories shared, this is not an employee channel. Yes, the majority of the audience may be current Cisco employees, but KPIs (key performance indicators) for the accounts include the number of qualified candidates who find Cisco positions through engagement with their social media channels. Currently, Carmen estimates that 10% to 15% of their audience are people who want to work at Cisco.
A post shared by We Are Cisco (@wearecisco) on Dec 19, 2017 at 6:43am PST
Through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, We Are Cisco encourages employees to “be you, with us.” Takeovers are carefully chosen from a group of employee advocates hand-selected by Carmen and her team.
How to Find Employee Brand AdvocatesHow does an organization of nearly 75,000 employees find their advocates? Perhaps surprisingly, without a tool. The grassroots process relies heavily on the team keying into Cisco’s engagement campaigns, which use the hashtags #wearecisco and #lovewhereyouwork abundantly.
Social listening enables the team to discover highly-engaged employees. An introduction and a request to use the employee’s UGC (user-generated content) opens communication. With an outlet to be heard, employees eagerly share stories that often lead to compelling blogs.
This process has been so fruitful for the talent team that blogs are scheduled months in advance, up to four months in advance. However, Carmen explains that they remain flexible enough to stay on-demand, able to tackle relevant current topics.
A post shared by We Are Cisco (@wearecisco) on Dec 14, 2017 at 6:12am PST
Through their manual discovery process, Carmen and her team have built up their global Snapchat ambassador group to nearly 70 people. Weekly, Carmen invites a member of this group to take over the WeAreCisco Snapchat account. By sharing 3 to 10 Snaps from their day, the ambassadors share their passion for their careers with prospective employees.
Additionally, as Cisco gives employees days off specifically for volunteer opportunities, their social media channels have been key in covering their employees’ acts of service. Through Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and soon Facebook Live takeovers, Cisco employees stay true-to-brand all while showing tons of heart.
Employee-Created Content Doesn’t Have to Be ScaryBrand managers everywhere are wary to give advocates the “keys to the kingdom” by way of social media takeovers but We Are Cisco proves how valuable this type of content can be. The team has earned Cisco numerous awards and earned media, such as KRT Media’s “10 Companies Slaying the Social Media Recruitment Game,” Potential Park’s “Top 25 Talent Brands in the US,” and “LinkedIn Top Companies 2017: Where the world wants to work now.”
As we all know, the content has to come before the awards roll in, so how did Carmen earn C-Suite support in the first place? Metrics help, however, Carmen will tell you she simply has amazing leadership. By trusting Carmen’s intuition and recommendations, leadership empowered Carmen to get the ball rolling.
Assigning a trustworthy leader to own the employee-generated content team means upper management can feel…
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With the support of upper management and the success We Are Cisco has seen in the last year, it’s no surprise the team is bravely leaping into Live video takeovers. Employee takeovers through Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and perhaps YouTube Live will be served up in the following months. Keep a close eye on We Are Cisco social Media accounts for some live video inspiration.
A post shared by We Are Cisco (@wearecisco) on Jan 2, 2018 at 6:30am PST
What award-winning social media strategies will you be implementing in 2018 (or already have implemented, you over-achiever, you)? Hit me up in the comments—I’d love to hear, and potentially write, about what plans you have in have brewing this new year.
The Journey, a Social Media Examiner production, is an episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjZgNQyY2Zo Watch The Journey: Episode 11 Episode 11 of The Journey follows Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, as he continues to pursue what many will see as an impossible goal: to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Want to produce algorithm-friendly YouTube content? Wondering how to attract viewers and keep them watching? In this article, you’ll find 15 tips and tactics for optimizing your YouTube video content at every stage of the video production process. #1: Commit to Posting to YouTube Multiple Times Per Week Recent reports have shown that YouTube channels
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Timing is everything.
This is more true than ever today, as the atomic half life of brand communication continues to shrink, victimized by algorithmic masters that dole out attention like Pez.
The massive flood of content created every second of every day about every topic and happening results in overwhelming competition for attention, as has been well-documented by Mark Schaefer, and others.
The antidote—at least in some circles—is newsjacking. Coined by David Meerman Scott in his book of the same name, where he defines the concept thusly:
“Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed.”
The important part of this definition is “breaking news story.” The intent of newsjacking as originally conceived is that your brand’s angle is the second paragraph in traditional media coverage of whatever is happening. The actual story is paragraph one.
Newsjacking was published in late 2011, and became deservedly popular, especially among public relations practitioners who saw it as a reliable recipe for merging long-lead story pitching with real-time earned media.
Oreo Killed NewsjackingJust fifteen months later, however, the now-legendary Oreo Dunk in the Dark tweet was sent. With one tweet, Oreo and their agencies ushered in the era of “real-time marketing,” and “RTM” disciples rushed to set up Twitter war rooms to capitalized on every trending hashtag.
This shifted the notion of newsjacking from a way to get earned media coverage to a way to get more likes and shares on owned social media outlets. In short, Oreo’s Dunk stunt moved newsjacking from a PR tactic to a social media tactic.
Oreo's Dunk in the Dark tweet shifted newsjacking from a PR tactic to a social media tactic…
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This post from the Get Spokal blog illustrates the outcome. Nearly every one of their 15 newsjacking examples is a tweet, and essentially none show evidence of earned media coverage whatsoever (other than perhaps trade press talking about the clever tweet, thereby earning ego points among marketing peers, but not creating any real business value).
I am not a fan, and have never been a fan, of this kind of marketing. (In fact, my post “17 Mostly Failed Brand Tweets from The Oscars” is still one of the most-read posts in the history of this site.) For more, here’s a short video rant on why most brands are trying to hard to be clever, in real-time.
My three biggest problems with real-time marketing are:
But all is not lost for the newsjacking premise. Today, it is easier than ever to create on-trend content in nearly real-time. With everyone carrying around a mobile production studio in their pants at all times, there’s not much excuse for not being able to produce content on the fly, beyond inertia and corporate process obstacles.
Further, with the one-click availability of live video, creating reaction content that inserts your angle into a breaking news story is as easy as making a sandwich (maybe easier if you insist on using a panini press).
4 ways using #contentmarketing for #newsjacking is better than #socialmedia http://bit.ly/2EPLhRW
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This approach—using content marketing for newsjacking rather than social media—has multiple advantages:
You do not need to be a big brand with an in-house video studio to engage in this form of content marketing as newsjacking. In fact, from a nimbleness perspective, I might argue that you’re better off being a small and scrappy business that can turn on a camera and record without sign-offs and hand wringing.
Dr. Tim Wood of Mission Family Chiropractic in Kelowna, British Columbia is a terrific small business example of content marketing newsjacking.
This year, the Kelowna area—the major city in Canada’s Okanagan region—has received a tremendous blanket of snow, far more than is typical for this area. Local media scrambled to cover the storms, with advice and counsel for local residents and visitors.
The last time this happened was in 2015, which was when Dr. Wood created his content marketing newsjacking: a video showing local residents how to shovel snow without injuring their backs:
It’s a useful, safe, three-shovel approach that I’m going to try next time we get a lot of snow here in Indiana!
KelownaNow.com is a large digital media platform for the region, and when this year’s snows rolled in, they discovered Dr. Wood’s video and promoted it on their site, and in their social media.
Newsjack accomplished!
Lessons from This NewsjackNewsjacking was originally about earned media through real-time public relations. It was co-opted by social media to become more about “riding the hashtag” but that has limited upside and potentially large downside, in my estimation.
Instead, since we now have the ability to make credible content marketing (especially video) instantly, use that opportunity to pursue a newsjacking strategy that is rooted in content marketing, with social media as the amplification layer.
Big hat tip to my friend Jan Enns for bringing this case study to my attention, via a Linkedin post.
Noticed any change in how search engines behave? How social networks behave? If you did and wondered what caused it, the answer is semantic web.
Semantic web is characterized by algorithms, capable of learning from interaction touchpoints taking place online. When an ad suddenly pops up and urges you to buy from a store you visited a few minutes ago, be sure semantic algorithms are at work.
The touchpoint was generated immediately after you landed on the e-commerce page. Invisible to you but not to the algorithms deployed by search and social sites. They are smart enough to assume you lay interest in the products, listed in the store’s catalogue.
Semantic marketing
Don’t pay heed to semantic trends when designing promotional strategies and you risk losing marketing dollars. Follow the trends and finetune your digital marketing plans accordingly and you place yourself ahead of countless other marketers competing for a small share of the pie.
@randysilver09
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