Posted by Todd_McDonald

A steady rise in content-related marketing disciplines and an increasing connection between effective SEO and content has made the benefits of harnessing strategic content clearer than ever. However, success isn’t always easy. It’s often quite difficult, as I’m sure many of you know.

A number of challenges must be overcome for success to be realized from end-to-end, and finding quick ways to keep your content ideas fresh and relevant is invaluable. To help with this facet of developing strategic content, I’ve laid out a process below that shows how a few SEO tools and a little creativity can help you identify content ideas based on actual conversations your audience is having online.

What you’ll need

Screaming Frog: The first thing you’ll need is a copy of Screaming Frog (SF) and a license. Fortunately, it isn’t expensive (around $150/USD for a year) and there are a number of tutorials if you aren’t familiar with the program. After you’ve downloaded and set it up, you’re ready to get to work.

Google AdWords Account: Most of you will have access to an AdWords account due to actually running ads through it. If you aren’t active with the AdWords system, you can still create an account and use the tools for free, although the process has gotten more annoying over the years.

Excel/Google Drive (Sheets): Either one will do. You’ll need something to work with the data outside of SF.

Browser: We walk through the examples below utilizing Chrome.

The concept

One way to gather ideas for content is to aggregate data on what your target audience is talking about. There are a number of ways to do this, including utilizing search data, but it lags behind real-time social discussions, and the various tools we have at our disposal as SEOs rarely show the full picture without A LOT of monkey business. In some situations, determining intent can be tricky and require further digging and research. On the flipside, gathering information on social conversations isn’t necessarily that quick either (Twitter threads, Facebook discussion, etc.), and many tools that have been built to enhance this process are cost-prohibitive.

But what if you could efficiently uncover hundreds of specific topics, long-tail queries, questions, and more that your audience is talking about, and you could do it in around 20 minutes of focused work? That would be sweet, right? Well, it can be done by using SF to crawl discussions that your audience is having online in forums, on blogs, Q&A sites, and more.

Still here? Good, let’s do this.

The process

Step 1 – Identifying targets

The first thing you’ll need to do is identify locations where your ideal audience is discussing topics related to your industry. While you may already have a good sense of where these places are, expanding your list or identifying sites that match well with specific segments of your audience can be very valuable. In order to complete this task, I’ll utilize Google’s Display Planner. For the purposes of this article, I’ll walk through this process for a pretend content-driven site in the Home and Garden vertical.

Please note, searches within Google or other search engines can also be a helpful part of this process, especially if you’re familiar with advanced operators and can identify platforms with obvious signatures that sites in your vertical often use for community areas. WordPress and vBulletin are examples of that.

Google’s Display Planner

Before getting started, I want to note I won’t be going deep on how to use the Display Planner for the sake of time, and because there are a number of resources covering the topic. I highly suggest some background reading if you’re not familiar with it, or at least do some brief hands-on experimenting.

I’ll start by looking for options in Google’s Display Planner by entering keywords related to my website and the topics of interest to my audience. I’ll use the single word “gardening.” In the screenshot below, I’ve selected “individual targeting ideas” from the menu mid-page, and then “sites.” This allows me to see specific sites the system believes match well with my targeting parameters.

I’ll then select a top result to see a variety of information tied to the site, including demographics and main topics. Notice that I could refine my search results further by utilizing the filters on the left side of the screen under “Campaign Targeting.” For now, I’m happy with my results and won’t bother adjusting these.

Step 2 – Setting up Screaming Frog

Next, I’ll take the website URL and open it in Chrome.

Once on the site, I need to first confirm that there’s a portion of the site where discussion is taking place. Typically, you’ll be looking for forums, message boards, comment sections on articles or blog posts, etc. Essentially, any place where users are interacting can work, depending on your goals.

In this case, I’m in luck. My first target has a “Gardening Questions” section that’s essentially a message board.

A quick look at a few of the thread names shows a variety of questions being asked and a good number of threads to work with. The specific parameters around this are up to you — just a simple judgment call.

Now for the fun part — time to fire up Screaming Frog!

I’ll utilize the “Custom Extraction” feature found here:

Configuration → Custom → Extraction

…within SF (you can find more details and broader use-case documentation set for this feature here). Utilizing Custom Extraction will allow me to grab specific text (or other elements) off of a set of pages.

Configuring extraction parameters

I’ll start by configuring the extraction parameters.

In this shot I’ve opened the custom extraction settings and have set the first extractor to XPath. I need multiple extractors set up, because multiple thread titles on the same URL need to be grabbed. You can simply cut and paste the code into the next extractors — but be sure to update the number sequence (outlined in orange) at the end to avoid grabbing the same information over and over.

Notice as well, I’ve set the extraction type to “extract text.” This is typically the cleanest way to grab the information needed, although experimentation with the other options may be required if you’re having trouble getting the data you need.

Tip: As you work on this, you might find you need to grab different parts of the HTML than what you thought. This process of getting things dialed can take some trial-and-error (more on this below).

Grabbing Xpath code

To grab the actual extraction code we need (visible in the middle box above):

Posted by MiriamEllis

Albuquerque’s locals and tourists agree, you can’t find a more authentic breakfast in town than at Perea’s New Mexican Restaurant. Yelp reviewers exclaim, “Best green chile ever!!”, “Soft, chewy, thick-style homemade flour tortillas soak up all the extra green chili,” “My go-to for great huevos rancheros,” and “Carne was awesome! Tender, flavorful, HOT!” The descriptions alone are enough to make one salivate, but the Yelp reviews for this gem of an eatery also tell another story — one so heavily spiced with the potential of duplicate listings that it may take the appetite of any hard-working local SEO away:

“Thru all of the location changes, this is a true family restaurant with home cooking.”

“This restaurant for whatever reason, changes locations every couple years or so.”

“They seem to wander from different locations”

“As other reviews have already mentioned, Perea’s changes locations periodically (which is puzzling/inconvenient — the only reason they don’t get 5 stars)”

“They switch locations every few years and the customers follow this place wherever it goes.”

Reading those, the local SEO sets aside sweet dreams of sopapillas because he very much doubts the accuracy of that last review comment. Are all customers really following this restaurant from place to place, or are visitors (with money to spend) being misdirected to false locations via outdated, inconsistent, and duplicate listings?

The local SEO can’t stand the suspense, so he fires up Moz Check Listing

He types in the most recent name/zip code combo he can find, and up comes:

A total of 2 different names, 3 different phone numbers, and 4 different addresses! In 5 seconds, the local SEO has realized that business listings around the web are likely misdirecting diners left and right, undoubtedly depriving the restaurant of revenue as locals fail to keep up with the inconvenient moves or travelers simply never find the right place at all. Sadly, two of those phone numbers return an out-of-service message, further lessening the chances that patrons will get to enjoy this establishment’s celebrated food. Where is all this bad data coming from?

The local SEO clicks on just the first entry to start gaining clues, and from there, he clicks on the duplicates tab for a detailed, clickable list of duplicates that Check Listing surfaces for that particular location:

From this simple Duplicates interface, you can immediately see that 1 Google My Business listing, 1 Foursquare listing, 3 Facebook Places, 1 Neustar Localeze listing, and 1 YP listing bear further investigation. Clicking the icons takes you right to the sources. You’ve got your clues now, and only need to solve your case. Interested?

The paid version of Moz Local supports your additions of multiple variants of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of clients to help surface further duplicates. Finally, your Moz Local dashboard also enables you to request closure of duplicates on our Direct Network partners. What a relief!

Chances are, most of your clients don’t move locations every couple of years (at least, we hope not!), but should an incoming client alert you to a move they’ve made in the past decade or so, it’s likely that a footprint of their old location still exists on the web. Even if they haven’t moved, they may have changed phone numbers or rebranded, and instead of editing their existing listings to reflect these core data changes, they may have ended up with duplicate listings that are then auto-replicating themselves throughout the ecosystem.

Google and local SEOs share a common emotion about duplicate listings: both feel uneasy about inconsistent data they can’t trust, knowing the potential to misdirect and frustrate human users. Feeling unsettled about duplicates for an incoming client today?

Get your appetite back for powerful local SEO with our free Check Listing tool!

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Posted by Alan_Coleman

Hey Moz Blog readers.

I’m delighted to share with you a big body of work the Wolfgang team has just completed. It’s our E-commerce Benchmarks 2016 study. We dove into Google Analytics insights from over 80 million website sessions and over one-quarter of a billion dollars in online revenue for travel and retail websites, calculating average e-commerce website key performance indicators (KPIs) for you to use as benchmarks.

I hope these findings help you benchmark your KPIs and gain deeper insights into what you can do to boost conversion.

There are a number of unique features to this study:

Posted by randfish

The rules of link building aren’t always black and white, and getting it wrong can sometimes result in frustrating consequences. But where’s the benefit in following rules that don’t actually exist? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand addresses eight of the big link building myths making their rounds across the web.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about some of the weird and crazy myths that have popped up around link building. We’ve actually been seeing them in the comments of some of our blog posts and Whiteboard Fridays and Q&A. So I figured, hey, let’s try and set the record straight here.

1. Never get links from sites with a lower domain authority than your own

What? No, that is a terrible idea. Domain authority, just to be totally clear, it’s a machine learning system that we built here at Moz. It takes and looks at all the metrics. It builds the best correlation it can against Google’s rankings across a broad set of keywords, similar to the MozCast 10K. Then it’s trying to represent, all other things being equal and just based on raw link authority, how well would this site perform against other sites in Google’s rankings for a random keyword? That does not in any way suggest whether it is a quality website that gives good editorial links, that Google is likely to count, that are going to give you great ranking ability, that are going to send good traffic to you. None of those things are taken into account with domain authority.

So when you’re doing link building, I think DA can be a decent sorting function, just like Spam Score can. But those two metrics don’t mean that something is necessarily a terrible place or a great place to get a link from. Yes, it tends to be the case that links from 80- or 90-plus DA sites tend to be very good, because those sites tend to give a lot of authority. It tends to be the case that links from sub-10 or 20 tend to not add that much value and maybe fail to have a high Spam Score. You might want to look more closely at them before deciding whether you should get a link.

But new websites that have just popped up or sites that have very few links or local links, that is just fine. If they are high-quality sites that give out links editorially and they link to other good places, you shouldn’t fret or worry that just because their DA is low, they’re going to provide no value or low value or hurt you. None of those things are the case.

2. Never get links from any directories

I know where this one comes from. We have talked a bunch about how low-quality directories, SEO-focused directories, paid link directories tend to be very bad places to get links from. Google has penalized not just a lot of those directories, but many of the sites whose link profiles come heavily from those types of domains.

However, lots and lots of resource lists, link lists, and directories are also of great quality. For example, I searched for a list of Portland bars — Portland, Oregon, of course known for their amazing watering holes. I found PDX Monthly’s list of Portland’s best bars and taverns. What do you know? It’s a directory. It’s a total directory of bars and taverns in Portland. Would you not want to be on there if you were a bar in Portland? Of course, you would want to be on there. You definitely want those. There’s no question. Give me that link, man. That is a great freaking link. I totally want it.

This is really about using your good judgment and about saying there’s a difference between SEO and paid link directories and a directory that lists good, authentic sites because it’s a resource. You should definitely get links from the latter, not so much from the former.

3. Don’t get links too fast or you’ll get penalized

Let’s try and think about this. Like Google has some sort of penalty line where they look at, “Oh, well, look at that. We see in August, Rand got 17 links. He was under at 15 in July, but then he got 17 links in August. That is too fast. We’re going to penalize him.”

No, this is definitely not the case. I think what is the case, and Google has filed some patent applications around this in the past with spam, is that a pattern of low-quality links or spammy-looking links that are coming at a certain pace may trigger Google to take a more close look at a site’s link profile or at their link practices and could trigger a penalty.

Yes. If you are doing sketchy, grey hat/black hat link building with your private networks, your link buys, and your swapping schemes, and all these kinds of things, yeah, it’s probably the case that if you get them too fast, you’ll trip over some sort of filter that Google has got. But if you’re doing the kind of link building that we generally recommend here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz more broadly, you don’t have risk here. I would not stress about this at all. So long as your links are coming from good places, don’t worry about the pace of them. There’s no such thing as too fast.

4. Don’t link out to other sites, or you’ll leak link equity, or link juice, or PageRank

…or whatever it is. I really like this illustration of the guys who are like, “My link juice. No!” This is just crap.

All right, again, it’s a myth rooted in some fact. Historically, a long time ago, PageRank used to flow in a certain way, and it was the case that if a page had lots of links pointing out from it, that if I had four links, that a quarter each of the PageRank that this page could pass would go to each of them. So if I added one more, oh, now that’s one-fifth, then that becomes one-fifth, and that becomes one-fifth. This is old, old, old-school SEO. This is not the way things are anymore.

PageRank is not the only piece of ranking algorithmic goodness that Google is using in their systems. You should not be afraid of linking out. You should not be afraid of linking out without a “nofollow” link. You, in fact, should link out. Linking out is not only correlated with higher rankings. There have also been a bunch of studies and research suggesting that there’s something causal going on, because when followed links were added to pages, those pages actually outranked their non-link-carrying brethren in a bunch of tests. I’ll try and link to that test in the Whiteboard Friday. But regardless to say, don’t stress about this.

5. Variations in anchor text should be kept to precise proportions

So this idea that essentially there’s some magic formula for how many of your keyword anchor text, anchor phrases should be branded, partially branded, keyword match links that are carrying anchor text that’s specifically for the keywords you’re trying to rank for, and random assorted anchor texts and that you need some numbers like these, also a crazy idea.

Again, rooted in some fact, the fact being if you are doing sketchy forms of link building of any kind, it’s probably the case that Google will take a look at the anchor text. If they see that lots of things are kind of keyword-matchy and very few things contain your brand, that might be a trigger for them to look more closely. Or it might be a trigger for them to say, “Hey, there’s some kind of problem. We need to do a manual review on this site.”

So yes, if you are in the grey/black hat world of link acquisition, sure, maybe you should pay some attention to how the anchor text looks. But again, if you’re following the advice that you get here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz, this is not a concern.

6. Never ask for a link directly or you risk penalties

This one I understand, because there have been a bunch of cases where folks or organizations have sent out emails, for example, to their customers saying, “Hey, if you link to us from your website, we’ll give you a discount,” or, “Hey, we’d like you to link to this resource, and in exchange this thing will happen,” something or other. I get that those penalties and that press around those types of activities has made certain people sketched out. I also get that a lot of folks use it as kind of blackmail against someone. That sucks.

Google may take action against people who engage in manipulative link practices. But for example, let’s say the press writes about you, but they don’t link to you. Is asking for a link from that piece a bad practice? Absolutely not. Let’s say there’s a directory like the PDX Monthly, and they have a list of bars and you’ve just opened a new one. Is asking them for a link directly against the rules? No, certainly not. So there are a lot of good ways that you can directly ask for links and it is just fine. When it’s appropriate and when you think there’s a match, and when there’s no sort of bribery or paid involvement, you’re good. You’re fine. Don’t stress about it.

7. More than one link from the same website is useless

This one is rooted in the idea that, essentially, diversity of linking domains is an important metric. It tends to be the case that sites that have more unique domains linking to them tend to outrank their peers who have only a few sites linking to them, even if lots of pages on those individual sites are providing those links.

But again, I’m delighted with my animation here of the guys like, “No, don’t link to me a second time. Oh, my god, Smashing Magazine.” If Smashing Magazine is going to link to you from 10 pages or 50 pages or 100 pages, you should be thrilled about that. Moz has several links from Smashing Magazine, because folks have written nice articles there and pointed to our tools and resources. That is great. I love it, and I also want more of those.

You should definitely not be saying “no.” You shouldn’t be stopping your link efforts around a site, especially if it’s providing great traffic and high-quality visits from those links pointing to you. It’s not just the case that links are there for SEO. They’re also there for the direct traffic that they pass, and so you should definitely be investing in those.

8. Links from non-relevant sites or sites or pages or content that’s outside your niche won’t help you rank better

This one, I think, is rooted in that idea that Google is essentially looking and saying like, “Hey, we want to see that there’s relevance and a real reason for Site A to link to Site B.” But if a link is editorial, if it’s coming from a high-quality place, if there’s a reason for it to exist beyond just, “Hey, this looks like some sort of sketchy SEO ploy to boost rankings,” Googlebot is probably going to count that link and count it well.

I would not be worried about the fact that if I’m coffeekin.com and I’m selling coffee online or have a bunch of coffee resources and corvettecollectors.com wants to link to me or they happen to link to me, I’m not going to be scared about that. In fact, I would say that, the vast majority of the time, off-topic links from places that have nothing to do with your website are actually very, very helpful. They tend to be hard for your competitors to get. They’re almost always editorially given, especially when they’re earned links rather than sort of cajoled or bought links or manipulative links. So I like them a lot, and I would not urge you to avoid those.

So with that in mind, if you have other link ideas, link myths, or link facts that you think you’ve heard and you want to verify them, please, I invite you to leave them in the comments below. I’ll jump in there, a bunch of our associates will jump in there, folks from the community will jump in, and we’ll try and sort out what’s myth versus reality in the link building world.

Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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