This is my first official blog post at Moz.com, and I'm going to be requesting your help and expertise and imagination.
I'm going to be asking you to take over as Panda for a little while to see if you can identify the kinds of things that Google's Navneet Panda addressed when faced with what looked like an incomplete patent created to identify sites as parked domain pages, content farm pages, and link farm pages. You're probably better at this now then he was then.
It's obvious that the technology behind search engines' ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.
The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google's recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.
Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.
Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site's search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.
As a group, we SEOs still tend to focus most of our attention on just one place
I'm a big advocate of the TAGFEE culture at Moz. It's one of the big reasons I joined the team and why I stay here. I also recognize that sometimes it can be hard to practice it in "Real Life."
How, for instance, can I be both authentic AND fun when I tell Anthony how angry I am that he took the last two donuts? I can certainly be transparent and authentic, but, anger and confrontation...where does that get fun?
But those times when you need to be authentic
The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and
Without a basic understanding of statistics, you can often present misleading results to your clients or superiors. This can lead to underwhelming results when you roll out new versions of a page which on paper look like they should perform much better. In this post I want to cover the main aspects of planning, monitoring and interpreting CRO results so that when you do roll out new versions of pages, the results are much closer to what you would expect. I’ve also got a free tool to give away at the end, which does most of this for you.
PlanningA large part running a successful conversion optimisation campaign starts before a single visitor reaches the site. Before starting a CRO test it’s important to have:
A hypothesis of what you expect to happenAn estimate of how long the test should takeAnalytics set up correctly so that you can measure the effect of the change accuratelyAssuming you have a hypothesis, let’s look at predicting how long a test should take.
How long will it take?As a general rule, the less traffic that your site gets and/or the lower the existing conversion rate, the longer it will take to get statistically significant results. There’s a great tool by Evan Miller that I recommend using before starting any CRO project. Entering the baseline conversion rate and the minimum detectable effect (i.e. What is the minimum percentage change in conversion rate that you care about, 2%? 5%? 20%?) you can get an estimate of how much traffic you’ll need to send to each version. Working backwards from the traffic your site normally gets, you can estimate how long your test is likely to take. When you arrive on the site, you’ll see the following defaults:
I suspect I’m not alone in saying: I’ve never been a fan of the New Google Maps.
