A week ago, Matt Cutts posted a video discussing what SEOs could expect in the coming months. One of the mentioned updates was around host or domain clustering / crowding. I think some type of domain crowding update went out, starting last night. Hat tip to Jason Mun for noticing.
There is an enormous ecosystem of search activity happening around mobile app discovery, but there appears to be a disconnect in marketing strategy when it comes to using Inbound Marketing channels to drive mobile app installs. When it comes to search, a lot of attention has been given to App Store Optimization (ASO) to optimize apps for search inside of an app store. In all fairness, this channel has presented significant opportunity, but too often, major players in the mobile space are treating mobile and web as independent of lines business, instead of leveraging search demand on the web (a traditional Google search) to drive traffic to a mobile application. More often, they’re using paid channels to drive discovery.
Yesterday I made one of the scariest decisions I’ve made in a while, up there with my decision to leave college or move to Seattle. I gave my notice without having the safety net of a new job to land on. For almost two years, I’ve had one of the best jobs in my life, reporting to one of the smartest people I’ve had the opportunity to work for. My life is more stable than I could have ever imagined a few years ago. Yet, once again, I make the leap into uncertainty. I’m anxious, but really excited to see what the next year brings.
This post has been in the making for years. This isn’t a recent itch that’s crept up on me. If I’m honest, it started the day I sat in my uncle’s office creating a Cool Boarders 2 cheat code website on Angelfire when I was about 11 years old. Ever since then, I’ve had a passion for building stuff. My family nurtured this. I was effectively groomed to be an entrepreneur one day.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the growing complexity of SEO. I’m guilty of this myself.
However, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that there is value in the same SEO we’ve been doing for years. I’ve had a reminder like this recently that I’d like to share (well, within reason… I can’t share all the details).
It seems like you can’t get through a week without hearing about “Content Marketing” or “Content Strategy”. These strategies call for increasingly complicated pieces of content, including “Big Content”, video, data visualization, photography, and robust design.
This progression creates a problem for SEOs. There is a skill gap that exists across a lot of individuals. I think this is linked to the identity crisis we’re going through as an industry. What are we good at? What is our role? What exactly do “SEOs” do in the ever expanding umbrella of “Inbound Marketing”? And why do we keep doing guest blog posts when we know better?
Transparency is something we don’t get enough of in SEO. Through hundreds of posts of strategy, theory, tools, and tactics, it’s not too often that we talk about real examples. Some of the best content at Mozcon this year were presentations that shared real examples of scrappy SEO projects.
My hope is to do something a little bit different. I’ve written philosophically about how to get links, but let’s talk about some real links, and how they were acquired.
Two weeks ago I stood on a stage in London as I gave a 45 minute talk to 300 to 400 people. It was the first time I’ve ever left the States. In the week leading up to my trip, I tweeted that every time I present, I stress, causing sleepless nights. I ended up getting a number of tweets, and direct messages, asking why – and some people seemed seriously concerned that I have social anxiety about presenting. I don’t.
Although I hate the phrase “content marketing”, I want talk about leveraging content to drive business metrics beyond top of funnel traffic. In my presentation in Boston earlier this year, I talked about how to think about users, not traffic, when approaching a link building campaign.
You should be doing the same with your content.
By tackling metrics like COCA, ARPU and LTV, SEO can be used to monetize demand in a way that pure traffic chasing can’t.
Keyword Cannibalization. Duplicate Content. Crawl Priority. All of these are inherently SEO jargon, which can downplay the significance of such problems to boards, exec teams, or senior management. These problems sometimes exist due to information architecture problems or issues with the CMS. However, keyword cannibalization can be the result of a much larger, strategic problem for a company. A problem that can significantly minimize realized revenue. Let’s step out of SEO for a moment and look at some economic aspects of such a problem.
Earlier this week, in an interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts made a statement about devaluing infographics. Naturally, this set Twitter buzzing, myself included. A number of SEOs have spoken up with a wide variety of opinions on it, so I guess I might as well jump in.