I recently took some time out to do a bit of travelling across East Asia (which was incredible!) and decided that I would, along with a group of friends, set up a travel blog. Knowing that I would be embarking on some amazing adventures, I thought it'd be a waste not to blog about them. Plus, the idea of bringing in a little extra cash to go into my travel fund helped in my decision.

After a month or so of development the site was finally ready and I wanted to start thinking about how to get some traffic going on the website. Whilst paid advertising and social media were a huge part of the strategy, I knew that appearing in the search engines for a wide selection of long-tail phrases was going to be instrumental to the blog's success. This is when I began developing my link building strategy and, after trialing out some very successful approaches, I've decided to now share my link building tactics with you all – you can thank me later

Identifying My Link Targets

As a brand new blog it can be really tough to gain links from high authority sites. Unless you have something particularly unique or special (and even then you might struggle), it's an uphill battle to get your content in front of anyone. With this in mind I decided to start off small. However, the general rule of thumb that I kept for any links that I was looking to build was this:

"The link must have a genuine potential to generate traffic back to the blog"

Resource/Links Pages

Many blogs and other websites have 'useful links' or ' useful resources' pages. These pages generally list partner websites, relevant blogs or other sites that they work with. Although these types of links aren't going to result in ground-breaking link building wins they could, if you prospect correctly, provide a link that will not just give you an SEO boost, but actually generate traffic to your site as well. These types of links are particularly relevant for the travel industry.

A lot of people write-off these types of links, classing them as 'spammy' or 'low quality links'. Now, whilst I agree that they aren't enormously powerful, I disagree that they are useless. To find the pages where I wanted to get a link placed back to my blog, I followed these quick steps:

1. First, I ran this query through Google – intitle:travel blog inurl:"links" OR "resources".
2. I then went into Google's search settings and selected to view 100 results per page instead of 10.
3. Once I had 100 listings, I scraped all of the URLs using the 'Scrape Similar' plugin for Chrome and exported them to a .CSV file.
4. I did a bit of manual work to remove irrelevant links and then grabbed the domain/page authority for each of the links using MozCheck.com and pasted this into the sheet. I could then sort the links by page authority and remove any that had a PA lower than ~25. This helped to find higher quality targets.
5. After witling the list down to around 40 targets, I scanned the amount of outbound links on the pages using Niels Bosma's SEOtools plugin for Excel and sorted the list by pages with the lowest number of outbound links on them. This not only improved the power of the link by it also meant that there was more of a chance that I would get some traffic from the page.
6. Finally, I got in touch with webmasters from the sites to see if they would list my site on theirs (using only branded anchor text) in exchange for their site appearing on the 'Our Friends' section of my blog.

The end result was that I managed to gain around 15 links to my blog that actually brought through some traffic as well. This took me around 3-4 hours in total (including outreach) and helped to create a nice bit of domain diversity to the site's link profile. On top of this, it also helped me to start building a few relationships with webmasters that turned out to be very useful later down the line.

Useful: within this article I explain how to sort through link targets in Excel in a bit more detail.

**BONUS: here is the outreach email template that I used when contacting webmasters…

Hi NAME HERE,

Just thought I would drop you a quick mail regarding your website, DOMAIN URL HERE. I really enjoy the stuff you write and it has been getting me excited for my travelling trip!

I am starting up a travel blog myself and it has just gone live a couple of days ago. The blog will follow our group as we travel across East Asia and Australia (we leave today!). I was just wondering if you would be kind enough to drop a link to the blog (http://www.meltedstories.com) on your links page (URL OF THEIR LINKS PAGE HERE) as it would be a big help. I've added you onto my 'Our Friends' page anyway because it will be a great resource for my readers.

Don't worry if you don't want to add our blog, but if you let me know your Twitter handle anyway then I will make sure we follow you and drop you some retweets! You can follow us at @melted_stories.

Feel free to get in touch at any time though!

Matthew Barby
Just an Honest Backpacker
www.meltedstories.com
@melted_stories
facebook.com/MeltedStories

Prospecting Through Competitive Research

The next stage of my link building strategy was to do some competitive research. For many SEOs this is a staple part of any link building campaign and can reveal some very interesting insights into what other websites related to your own are doing to acquire links.

My first port of call is always the amazing, and strangely under-rated, 'Competitive Link Finder' tool from SEOmoz. By simply plugging in the URLs of five other travel blogs, similar in style to mine, I was able to instantly get 20 solid link targets from a list of around 45. This took me 15 minutes to do and I just placed all of the links into an outreach spreadsheet that I created. Here are the types of links that I found:

• High authority travel blogs that my competitors have guest posted on.
• Blogs that run weekly 'photo of the week' competitions that will link to your photo if you win.
• Good quality travel-niche directories.
• 'Top travel blogger' lists and competitions.
• Content that my competitors have collaborated on in order to get a mention.
• Links to interview articles where my competitors have answered questions on a high authority blog and have received a link in return.

All this within 15 minutes – not bad, eh?

Every bit of information that I gathered I kept inside a link prospecting spreadsheet. This formed the basis of my link building strategy and allowed me to identify a list of targets that I could approach with a variety of content and propositions. My advice for any blog owner would be to do the same because it allows you to sustain your link building efforts in the long term. Then, every few months, I do some further research and add to the spreadsheet.

Acquiring Links from Your Targets

Now that I'd done some competitive link research, it was time to plan out the approaches that I would take to actually acquire links from my targets. This can often be the place where many people hit a brick wall. During the early stages of my time at Wow Internet, I found that I was overcomplicating the process of acquiring links. However, the reality is that it's often best to keep things simple. You don't necessarily have to spend a fortune on creating an amazing infographic, or bit of video content. More often than not, all you need to do is simply ask (I know, crazy, right?).

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has taken some stick recently and I can, in some cases, see why. A recent post on the SEOmoz blog by James Finlayson outlined the slippery slope of poor guest post content and I completely agree. This brings me back to my initial link building rule:

"The link must have a genuine potential to generate traffic back to the blog"

Forget judging your guest blog opportunities based solely on the PA/DA of the site and start thinking more about site engagement. If I see a website with a domain authority score of 40 but there are no comments from readers and minimal social shares, then I would generally ignore this site, in favour of a site with lower DA but more comments/social shares. This is particularly important when building links to a blog, so as the old saying goes – don't judge a book by its cover!

Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities and Gaining Them

I had already found a handful of guest blogging opportunities from my competitive research, but I knew I would need a much greater sample size to work with in order to build a solid profile of high quality links. This, unfortunately, takes quite a bit of time. This is where I took a leaf out of Paddy Moogan's book.

I recently read Paddy's link building book (which was awesome) and he talked about outsourcing menial research tasks through oDesk in order to save time and increase productivity overall. One thing that Paddy stressed was to only outsource micro-tasks and leave as little obscurity to the task as possible. With this in mind I put together an extensive brief for the task of finding travel blogs that accepted guest posts and fit the following criteria:

• PR of at least 2.
• The blog must be English speaking and related to travel.
• Must have some form of interaction on the blog posts.
• Should have social shares on the recent articles.
• Must have posted new content within the last 2 months.

**BONUS: you can take a look at the full brief that I used for the link research project here.

As you can see in the link research brief, I didn't just want to simply gather the URLs of the blogs but I tried to get as much information on them as possible. This was so that I could use this valuable data for other link building methods and also to connect with the blog owners through social media and build long-term relationships with them. The data that I asked the oDesk applicant to gather for me was:

• The website URL.
• The name of the website.
• A contact name.
• A contact email (if possible).
• The URL of the contact page.
• Twitter handle of the contact.
• The Facebook page URL of the website (if relevant).
• The title of the most recent article posted (this is so I can easily see if the website is relevant without having to visit each one and check).

One week and $ 30 later, I had a list of 50 different guest blog targets – amazing! Don't underestimate the power of giving a good brief to a freelancer; it really can make the world of difference.

Useful: the name of the freelancer I used for the link research project (who is now also doing some further research for me now, as well) is Michael Howells. Here's a link to his oDesk profile.

**DOUBLE BONUS!: as I'm feeling particularly generous, I'm going to give you the list of 50 awesome travel-related guest blog opportunities that Michael gathered for me. You're welcome

Once I had the list of guest blog targets, it was then time to identify which would be the best places to start reaching out to. This is an important and often over-looked stage of many outreach campaigns. Bearing in mind that I had only a little bit of content on my blog, I needed to try and find an angle to work on with my pitch. To do this I split up my guest blog targets into sub-sections based on their primary theme (i.e. if five of the websites all specialised in backpacking on a budget then they would go in the same group).

Once I'd categorised all of the websites in my list, I had to now decide what I would use in my pitch to the webmasters that would gain their trust and allow me to post on their site. In my armoury were a wealth of photos that I had taken during my time travelling and a whole host of first-hand experiences. From looking at many of the websites that I was targeting for links, it was clear that they were heavily focused around lots of good images and most of them preferred to have the author’s voice clearly present throughout most of their articles. Knowing this, I carried out the following steps:

1. Highlighted blogs that talked about East Asia specifically in a few of their articles.
2. Narrowed down the list to find which of them accepted guest authors more frequently.
3. Picked ten initial targets and began to follow all of their social media accounts, comment on their articles and share their content through my blog's Twitter/FB/G+/Pinterest.
4. Got in touch with the webmasters in a friendly, quick email that let them know who I was, my travel plans and a brief intro to my blog. I then mentioned that I was looking to write for some travel blogs about my adventures and wanted to see if they would consider letting me do this on their blog.
5. If I received a reply, I made sure that I looked at the types of articles they posted on their blogs and then gave only relevant suggestions for possible article titles.

After I had a few articles published on different travel blogs it meant that I could reference these articles in my next flurry of outreach. This proved to be really effective as I progressed and gaining guest post opportunities seemed to get easier and easier. One tip that I would give to anyone doing any outreach is not to mention 'links' at all in your written communication as you risk losing your legitimacy as a genuine blogger. Travel blog owners particularly don't enjoy this.

**Bonus: Here's one of the outreach emails that I sent to a travel blog owner (as you can see, I keep it as personal as possible):

Hi Shannon,

I hope you're well. We spoke around a month ago simply about a link exchange for my travel blog, Melted Stories. I have something slightly different to ask about now!

Firstly I just want to say how much me and my girlfriend enjoy your blog (especially considering my girlfriend, Laura, is also a vegetarian).

I know that you don't really do this on your blog but my girlfriend and I have just finished 2 months of travelling around and experiencing Thailand and I wondered if you would consider letting us do a guest post on your blog?

It would be related to an experience that we had within Thailand and one that we feel would fit in with your audience. For example, we recently visited Chiang Mai and took a trip across to all the best places to see, including spending a day looking after ex-working elephants and visiting the tigers (that are most definitely not drugged!).

I won't babble on too much because I know you must be busy but you can take a look at some of both myself and Laura's writing at these links (below) and if you could let me know either way that would be great.

http://www.meltedstories.com/monkeys-muay-thai-and-magical-marine-life-in-ko-phi-phi/
http://www.meltedstories.com/sun-sea-and-snorkelling-in-koh-tao-3/

Also, we would love to have you write on our blog so if that's something that would interest you then you can have a free reign on what you talk about!

Matt
www.meltedstories.com
@melted_stories

Take Guest Blogging to the Next Level – Become a Columnist

I have to admit that this wasn't something that I necessarily planned from the outset but, as I moved forward with the guest blogging activities that I was doing, it became an obvious next step.

One of the first articles that I wrote was for the WildJunket Magazine, an online general travel publication. During my conversations with the magazine editor, Nellie Huang, I started to form a good relationship and she then asked me if I would consider becoming a regular columnist on the blog, specialising in 'travel tech'. I jumped at the chance, of course, and as a result of this I write 2-3 articles a month for the website and get some great links back to my blog. Not only this but WildJunket have a huge social following and loads of activity on their website. This was certainly something that I could use to my advantage.

After I had written a few articles for Nellie I got in touch with her to discuss any ways in which she could help me out, for example, with sharing my content, getting in touch with other bloggers and any other ways she could suggest. The response was really positive and Nellie allowed me to use the WildJunket press pack when contacting websites and she also said that if I wanted to write a sponsored post for companies on the blog then that is fine too (as long as it fit in with the editorial guidelines). On top of this she agreed to share anything I wished on the WildJunket social media accounts, which was great. I then added the following paragraph into my outreach emails:

As well as running Melted Stories, I am also a regular columnist for Wild Junket, which receives over 1.65 million pageviews a month and has a Twitter following of just under 30,000. Any article that I did write for you would be shared across all of my personal social media accounts, plus that of Wild Junket and Melted Stories, so it could be a win-win situation

This dramatically increased the number of replies that I received from webmasters. My advice would be to try and secure a similar type of setup on related blogs within your own industry. Look for blogs that have clear topic areas and, once you've built a relationship with the webmasters, suggest that you could become a regular columnist specialising in a specific topic on their blog.

Tip: Industry-relevant online magazines can be a particularly good target for this.

Sponsored Posts and Paid Tweets

This is likely to cause some controversy amongst a few readers, but in my opinion this can be a fantastic way of driving traffic through to your website and encouraging links back to your content.

Sponsored Posts

A sponsored post is, in essence, a guest post that you pay for. Many websites, especially within the travel industry, will allow you to write an article promoting your products/services in return for payment. Matt Cutts has voiced his opinion on this activity a few times and has said the following:

"Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute)."

My suggestion is not simply to find blogs that offer this and then place a link to your site within them. What I would suggest is using sponsored posts to increase your online community. To do this I found websites that had a particularly large social following, loads of interactivity on the website and a captive niche audience. I then wrote a post related to my travels and a little intro to my travel blog. What I found was that I was able to bring over some good levels of traffic from the post and capture some new readers for my blog – exactly what I wanted!

NOTE: If I ever pay for a sponsored post then I make sure that any links back to my site are 'nofollowed' because it's not worth the risk of having a Google penalty imposed.

Paid Tweets

These are similar, in a way, to sponsored posts and are pretty self-explanatory – you pay someone to tweet something from their twitter account.

Again, there are going to be a few people who say how wrong this is and that they would never do this for one of their clients, etc, etc. What I would say to those people is that if you would be prepared to pay for advertising space on someone's website then what's the difference in paying them to tweet your content on Twitter?

I must admit that I've only done this a couple of times and have had varying results, but in one case I managed to generate a few hundred visits to one of the articles on my blog, which is often more than I would get with a banner ad and for a fraction of the cost! There is also the advantage of being able to expand your own Twitter following in the process, which is another added bonus.

Useful: You can use BuySellAds.com to search for Twitter users that sell tweets within your niche.

Bringing it all Together

It's still early days for my travel blog but I've had some awesome initial results and hopefully this article has given you a few ideas of your own to help you go out and build some quality links to your blog. The key message that I'm trying to convey here is the importance of building relationships online and forming a solid community within your blog.

Simple things like blog commenting, which was traditionally a staple part of link building, has now become a fantastic way to build relationships with bloggers and actually drive traffic back to your own blog. A lot of link building can be quite indirect and it isn't always the quickest to do, but if you follow my one simple rule then you should be able to keep on the right track:

"The link must have a genuine potential to generate traffic back to the blog"

I'd love to hear your own link building triumphs, so be sure to let me know in the comments of the blog or get in touch with me on Twitter or Google+. Before you do that, here's an awesome photo of my partner and me with a tiger in Thailand…

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!

SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

The phrase "look before you leap" has never been more true! Before you start investing in tactics, it's important to do your market research. Many businesses are tempted to dive into the details before answering the bigger questions, like who their customers are, how those customers make purchase decisions, where their potential users are on the web, and how customers may choose between similar companies and offerings. 

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why building out a research-based roadmap before you start you building your tactics (like SEO, content, and social campaigns) will help boost your chance of success. Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

For your viewing pleasure, here's a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today's video:
 

Video Transcription

"Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk a little bit about doing your market research before you start jumping in and investing in tactics. Shout out to @Andrew_Isidoro on Twitter for suggesting this topic. I really appreciate it Andrew.

The reason this is so important and why I was so passionate and why I was excited when Andrew suggested it, is because I've seen us here at Moz and many, many other companies back when we use to do consulting, even with the folks that I try and help today, lots of people I talk to all over the industry, making this mistake of wanting to dive right into the details and start sending their tweets and building their content, tweaking their website, set up their conversion tests, optimizing their pages for search engines, all that stuff, before they have answers to the big questions. Who's our customer target? Where on the web are they? How do they make their purchase decisions? What are their influencers? What are the things that influence them to make a purchase or not, and how do they choose between different companies and different offerings?

If we answer these questions, we can build something really beautiful, a research based roadmap. We know things like the personas of who we're targeting. What types of customers are we trying to reach? For example, when we launch SEOmoz Pro years ago, we thought we were just trying to target primarily, at least, in-house marketers, people who worked in-house at companies, not consultants and agencies. So we hadn't built things like white labeling and custom reports and the ability to add your logo and all that kind of stuff, branding. Those personas were critical to getting the product right. About 40%, in fact, of our customers are agencies and consultants.

Channels, what are the channels that we're going to reach people at? Is it social networks? Is it things like YouTube, where there's a lot of video going on and obviously a lot of search activity? Is it Google and Bing, where the searches are taking place? Is it content? Are they only at events? Is there a very, very small set of these folks and we need to reach them initially through events or direct outreach? Do we need to build a sales pipeline and then have introductions being made? Are we going to use LinkedIn? Those channels are critical to knowing what marketing things we're going to do.

The tactics to pursue on a per channel basis. So it could be the case that the same tactic I'm using again and again on a certain channel is going to work very well. You could see, for example, that content marketing for Moz, at least, works pretty well across all of our social channels. But it's not exactly what we do in person. We try and have a very educational bent to a lot of our content, and that might change up a little bit depending on which forum we're in and what kind of folks we're trying to reach or who we're talking to at the time. So those different tactics per channel.

We want the information. We want to know how they make purchase decisions so that we can provide the information that potential customers need to make a decision. If they're making it based on features or based on price or based on what experts have said. Is it based on feedback? Is it based on brand? A lot of times marketing decisions are made on brand. Is it based on design and UX?

This roadmap can then tell us things like:  what goes on the website, where and how we're going to spend the money. Is it going to be on people and resources to build up kind of a long-term marketing funnel through content and search and social, organic or inbound channels? Or is it going to be on a lot of one-off purchases of an email list that we're going to blast or a homepage takeover or a lot of display ads, PPC ads, those kind of things?

How are we going to measure success? How do we know whether we're actually winning? Is it based on a percentage of the market? Is it based on market share against another company? Is it pure adoption? Is it something else? Is it brand awareness?

What marketing tactics do we need to be good at? What are the ones where it's a very competitive sphere versus the ones where it isn't? What are things where we need to invest a lot of time and energy to build up skills and tactics versus maybe throwing dollars at it, hiring an agency to do it? All those kinds of things.

This research based roadmap can answer all of those questions for you, but you can't do it unless you're doing market research first. I do want to talk a little bit about some types of market research and how to specifically conduct those.

So a very obvious one, one that folks who are in the SEO and web marketing fields are very familiar with is competitive research. Competitive research, very obvious to most of us because we investigate what our competitors are doing to be successful in search results, or on Twitter, Facebook, or in their content efforts.

We can look at lots of attributes of competitive research. Who are the evangelists? Who are the people who are pushing this company, speaking on behalf of them? What are the marketing channels that they're using? What are their traffic sources? Where are they getting visits and traffic from? This can be challenging to get to, and I won't dive into all of these. Press and mentions? Where are they getting mentioned? By whom? What are people saying about them? Who do they compare them to? Hopefully it's us.

Design and UX, what are they doing successfully or not so successfully on their website? Unique value propositions, what's the angle that they take that says, "Oh this is what's really unique about our company. This is the particular reason why you would buy- I don't know – Columbia Sportswear brand instead of Nike or Reebok or Mountain Gear or whatever it is." And who's their target market? Oftentimes these two are very tied together. The UVP or USP ties in with the target market because they're trying to reach a particular person, and they think that those specific attributes that are unique to their company are what's going to successfully reach them.

There's also customer research, and you can do customer research of all kinds. You can do profiling, that can be demographic or psychographic. You can do targeted surveys where essentially I have a list of customers. For example, here at Moz obviously we have a list of the 21,000 people who pay to use Moz, and we can send a targeted survey to them. We actually have a customer advisory board of about 300 folks that Jackie runs here on our product team, and she talks to those folks very directly and will send them questions to answer.

There's also, and these are quite interesting, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, just the last few years, sizing and perceptions surveys. The two big providers for those are Survey Monkey's Audience product and Google's Consumer Surveys product. Essentially what they've got is lots of people that they advertise to, they're sort of random citizens of the web, denizens of the web, and they will take surveys based on profile data that you request. So you can get senses of how big is my brand in a space? Have people heard of this thing that I'm trying to offer? How many people are even interested in this thing? You can ask those broad, broad questions to a random group of users with specific sets of interests or for profile features.

You can do in-person interviews. A lot of startups especially do in-person interviews. They talk to a customer, bring him into the office. What are you doing? How are you doing it now? What could you see making that process easier or better? What is something you would pay for?

Usability studies are similar, but they are actually with a finished product or a near-finished product. Wireframe reviews are sort of a little bit less of a finished product, but more of a "hey let's walk through these wireframes and see if this product were built, would it solve your problems? Would it be something you'd passionate about, something you would buy?"

Then there's also, there's two more, expert data that you can gather in terms of market research, and expert data is a little bit different from customer data. So this is not saying, "Hey I want to reach out to anyone who would potentially be a customer," but rather, "I want to reach out to the experts in the field." This is something, again, that we do a lot of at Moz. We have kind of a core group of people inside and outside of the company who have been marketing experts, web marketing experts, for many, many years and have a lot of deep depth of knowledge in SEO and all those kinds of features. Finding those folks is really cool because a lot of times they turn out to be the evangelists and the influencers of much of the rest of the field. So by bringing them into your process, you can do those interviews, surveys, profiling, usability studies, wireframe reviews, the same as you can with customers, but potentially get very different data and oftentimes very interesting data. I would be careful, though. I'm personally biased, oftentimes, to listening to the experts at the expense of customers. Not a good idea. You should very much consider both of these folks. Experts sometimes are so deep that they can't see the forest for the trees, which is a problem I have myself a lot of the time too.

Then the last one is published or professional data, and these are often collected by large firms, Forrester Research, for example. They put together these large scale studies on different industries. This form of data is also fine, but it's usually a leading indicator that you then want to verify and validate with some of these other forms.

So by doing this, by doing these forms of market research, you can get the answers to these questions, build that research based roadmap, and then when you go and execute, you'll know that you're on the right path. This is really powerful because a lot of the time when you take off and you start diving into the details without it, it's bad biscuits. Bad biscuits make the baker broke, bro.

All right everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

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 SEOmoz, Inc.

This kind of thing might happen to Rand all the time, but it’s not often that a digital marketing company based in Leeds gets 100,000+ people reading anything it does (at least on its own site). That’s what unexpectedly happened to us on www.branded3.com a few weeks ago – what essentially started as a rant from some guy having a bad day blew up and now has 1,184 votes on Hacker News (and incoming links from some of the biggest sites in the world).

I think it’s likely I’ll never replicate this, and I didn’t intend this either – so I’ll not preach: “this is how you get 100,000 page views.” Everyone else is just as qualified as I am to write a post that’s read all around the world, and that’s exactly what I want to happen. I’d like to tell you what I’m taking away from this, and how I’ll use it when I’m creating content for my clients in the future.

Commonly known as sharking. Google it.

1. [citation needed]…but not always.

Google only wants you to list the links that are most relevant to and most important to your content – Eric Enge likened this to a research paper around a month ago on Search Engine Watch. The difference between your content and a research paper, though, is that your content doesn’t get discredited if there is nobody to link to that backs up the point you’re trying to make.

In a Webmaster Help Video earlier in the year, Google Engineer Matt Cutts said don’t link out to low quality sites – this is pretty much the equivalent of quoting from Wikipedia in an essay. You don’t have to get peer approved before people will read your post, though, so if there’s nobody to link to that’s talking about whatever you are then that could actually be a good thing. If someone else is covering the same subject as you there’s no real reason why you should get all the links, so you should definitely write about things that no one else is covering if you can.

NB: Not having anyone to back up your point doesn’t excuse you from not having a point in the first place.

2. Content needs to solve people’s problems…or highlight them.

I had a problem with Path and as of the time I started writing the post, nobody had solved it, though a few people had tweeted about experiencing similar problems. I tweeted @path at roughly 7am and the first person to reply was someone else who was (very) actively looking for an answer to the same problem. I embedded Design33’s tweet in the post and linked to him; let my cohort know; and instantly a problem shared is a problem…erm, doubled.

Whether your content is solving someone’s problem, or you’re just empathising with them; if you know where to find them…let them know it’s there and get your influencers on board.

3. Find out what people are looking for.

The principles behind content marketing are gaining real traction in the SEO community, and more and more companies are getting on board with long-term content strategies. There’s plenty to say about planning your content out for months in advance, but as Simon points out in this fantastic YouMoz post from last year, it’s not all about Google Keyword Tool anymore. There are some great tools out there to find hot topics (Bottlenose is particularly useful), but the best way to find what your audience is looking for is by using the same tools as they are.

Wil Reynolds is a great advocate of using Google Complete to find content topics (check out Wil’s LinkLove 2013 presentation, around slide 90) – start typing questions, don’t press enter; just note down what people are actually searching for. Search Twitter and find out not only what problems need solving, but who it is that actually has that problem (see point two)! Google Keyword Tool shouldn’t be your first stop when you’re looking for fires to put out, and if it’s monthly search volume you’re looking at, chances are someone faster has created content solving the same issue weeks ago.

4. Find your forum.

…by which I don’t literally mean a forum, since as an industry we’ve pretty much ruined that for everyone – all I’m saying is that you just need to find the right soapbox to spread your message.

In the comment string on our site this guy called me out for posting this on a company blog. At the time I hadn’t really questioned where else I could actually write this up, so Luca made me think. If I had put this on my own blog nobody would have read it…I would have just been complaining without any real platform to build on (might as well have just put it on Facebook or Twitter).

One of our clients is a cloud storage company who obviously have a vested interest in online security, and do write about issues such as this from time to time. They’d never approve something like this for their blog (more in point six) so I would have had to dry it right out…or put it on another site on their behalf.

Hammering this article to fit brand guidelines would have dulled its impact so much, and for a company to write about real life issues like this they really would have had to find a real life case…otherwise they’re just tipping off the media. It would never have worked.

If you’re going to be controversial, find a site that’s fine with that to host your content – that goes for the content you’re putting out on behalf of your clients too. We’ve had plenty of content turned down by webmasters for being too much for their blogs, and you’ve got to respect that. Guest blogging is like the name implies, and you’ve got to make sure you don’t leave a mess in someone else’s house.

5. Write for your audience…

Something everyone is taught in English class from a relatively early age is how to write for an audience. Even if you came into SEO from something else – a computer science degree, MA in marketing; whatever – you still have those classes to fall back on, and they’ll give you a pretty solid foundation in content marketing. In this industry everything comes from experience – if you covered search engine optimisation in your degree I’m sure you found half the things you knew were obsolete by the time you’d graduated…and post-Penguin the other half will get you penalised too.

I found when I moved from in-house to agency side search engine marketing, most of the things I’d been doing for the last year were considered pretty spammy. If you’re writing to put content on websites that nobody reads, like article marketing websites, then you’re not writing for an audience…and that shows in the work you put out.

You don’t have to be a journalist to create great content. If you’re solving problems imagine you’ve got that problem yourself and then just write for you…

6. …don’t write for your client.

If you think you’ve found a hot topic and your client isn’t happy with being associated with it, there’s probably a case for not pushing that. Controversial content gets links, but there’s a certain amount of press that comes with those links.

I don’t have a PR agency, so TechCrunch pointing out that it was probably my fault isn’t a disaster from my point of view. If your client makes a mistake then it might be. In the case of my blog post it wasn’t long before the media-at-large didn’t care anymore (TechCrunch may have even been the start of that) and the chances are pretty good that nobody will remember a guy getting mad at his phone in a few weeks – if a tech company posted a rant about Path it would probably be called a smear campaign.

…and I won’t lie – when the VP of Marketing called me I was more than a little worried.

7. Your content has to be worthy of links to get any…

This is my very first YouMoz post, and there’s a good reason for that – up until now I’ve not really had anything to say that I think might help the community, so I’ve stuck to my blog, Twitter and getting all up in other people’s business when I get the chance.

If you’ve got an opportunity to write for a great site – or to work with a well-known journalist, or whatever – giving them a few hundred words of nothing content will a) not generate much in the way in traffic, b) not generate any leads, and c) make that great site think twice about having you back.

8. …and so does your site.

Which leads me on to number eight: the whole point of placing links as part of a content marketing strategy (or at least it probably should be the main point) is for people to click through to your site. Make sure your users are arriving on a page they want to see.

@stekenwright @phillipsnick @newsyc20 @path I think that branded3.com needs to install a WordPress caching plugin.

— David Lynch (@kemayo) April 30, 2013

When St. Louis-based developer David Lynch submitted the post to Hacker News our entire site went down almost immediately (at 17:25, which our Development team were definitely not happy about). It’s a pretty extreme example, but if your site doesn’t present people with the screen they were expecting to see they’re probably going to leave straight away.

This applies not only in a technical SEO sense (see Aleyda Solis’ wonderful resources on mobile SEO and which versions of a page you should be serving to which people for a start), but also in something as intrinsic as the services you’re providing.

Going back to point four (Find your forum): the company I work for not only has a burgeoning social team, but an entire blog dedicated to social media – the perfect place to host an article about a social network, in my opinion.

Make sure your link is pointing to the kind of page your audience wants to find.

9. Be funny, or insightful. Probably not both.

The links generated by my post contain so much more useful information and insight than my content does. Like I said, I’m not pretending to be a journalist uncovering a story. I just presented a real life experience in a humorous way…because it was pretty funny. How do you explain what you do to your partner’s grandparents? I go with “I work with computers”. Imagine trying to explain a social network to two different pairs of 80 year-olds before 6:30 in the morning? You’ve got to laugh, as the expression goes.

Your multi-national debt management firm probably can’t be funny in its content (very happy for people to prove me wrong here). Companies like this have guidelines to uphold and the chances are they’re much more interested in their brand guidelines than the links you’re working so hard to get for them. Make sure you take tone of voice into account and if your content doesn’t work in their speak, see point six. You’re writing the wrong thing.

Your post definitely needs a Wonka meme.

10. Don’t do it for the links.

Writing my blog post, I had absolutely no intention of getting a single link. In all honestly I didn’t fully expect the guys at Path to see it – I just wanted to vent and if possible, make my colleagues laugh. In a very helpful post on Quick Sprout last October KISSmetrics’ Neil Patel wrote that he never manually built a link – he just kept writing. We’re not KISSmetrics, but our blog has been covering as many of the happenings in the digital marketing world as we can possibly manage for more than half a decade – and mostly we just do it because we want to.

Posting a piece of content on your blog every few weeks or months and expecting it to get picked up isn’t going to happen; and it’s definitely not content marketing – it’s just content. No matter how good your stuff is, don’t be disheartened if you don’t get any traction with a blog post…or a hundred blog posts.

What I do think is important is that you look at every piece of content you write and think about how to make it better this time. You don’t need to over-analyse every post before it goes live – I would guess you’ve got targets and deadlines to make after all – just think about how to improve on what you’ve got so your next article will make outreach easier, or will help more people out; and if your last piece performed well, how are you going to beat it? Even if you know you won’t.

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!

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Neil Patel
Consulting Lessons from the Frontline

Annie Cushing
Take Credit Where Credit’s Due

Bill Slawski
Future Search

Wil Reynolds
How to Get Unstuck!

Kate Morris
Languages and Countries

Pete Meyers
Do-It-Yourself Data-Driven Content

John Doherty
Creating Executive Support for Marketing Initiatives

Eppie Vojt
Scaling Outreach (without looking like an idiot)

Rand Fishkin
Behavioral Psychology and Inbound Marketing

Julianne Staino is an SEO Analyst at Distilled NYC. She loves learning new SEO techniques and creative approaches to link building.

distilled » Blog

Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Welcome back to SearchLove Boston! After some beer pong competition, we’re back and getting some input from folks inside AND out of SEO, talking about how to really get hands dirty and get things done, starting with very pragmatic explanation of getting your team to work better together and organize to make an impact. Today, we’ve got some take-home bullet points from the presentations for those of you who weren’t able to be there in person, or if you just want to review, as well as links to the SlideShare decks for more details.

Mackenzie Fogelson: How to use Content, SEO & Social Media to Achieve (Big) Goals

TL;DR: Focus on growing your business, and quality SEO and marketing will follow.

• SEO isn’t just limited to what it used to be, but now includes marketing, and data science, where we’ve got to be the hybrid of lots of things. It’s painful, with lots of roadblocks.
• You’ve got to look for buy-in, change perspectives (toward value and assets of business), measure and justify ROI, un-siloing teams
• We’ve got to start thinking about growing your business instead of just SEO/marketing or social media
• VERY collaborative. Getting team to work together is crucial
• consultants need to be working with companies that want to fully engage in this
• build brand, community & accomplish goals for business
• without buy-in from the company, you should go somewhere else.

Cycle for making this work

• Earn Buy-In: break presentations down into your audience, pain points and solutions
• Form an Alliance with your Team: this is an extension of buy-in, and should be thought of broadly. It isn’t just about including typical members of the team, but also those who think more about the products. You’ll want to survey, think and plan (set up a process even for how you’ll communicate)
• Define your Goals: informs what you’ll be measuring. Needs to be very granular: define each term, and explain how you will do things, step-by-step, answering: What do you want to do? What does that mean? (really) and How does that equate to KPIs?
• Lay out your strategy: don’t plan out (in detail) any more than 3 months so that you can go back, collect data and adjust your approach.
• Execute & Test: Hold regular communication sessions: “stand-ups” just 10 min to align for the week, and bi-weekly pushes (“don’t forget….”); monthly “sit-down” meeting to prove your value
• Evaluate & Adjust: Tailor your approach to discussion in meeting toward what is important to the company. Customize your report to include sections for applause, overview, traffic, stuff to know, looking forward, adjust.

Will Critchlow: The Importance of Technical SEO

Will discussed the importance of paying attention still to technical components of SEO, including Page Speed, Robots.txt, mobile, JavaScript, AJAX and PushState, Infinite Scroll, but paying attention to the in a broader context, and making sure you know who your audience is, and what the impact of your recommendations are (if it costs a ton, it may not be worth it, even if it’s “best practice”). He recommends tailoring your presentations as if they are all for Jeff Bezos.

• The state of JavaScript indexation
  • FB comments can get indexed
  • Discus not getting indexed as a JS version
  • looks like selective JavaScript execution/pulling out links.
  • still important to make anything you want google to see available without JS
  • Google is crawling links that are in JS
• Different to specify, versus auditing.
  • if comments are getting indexed, leave it alone
  • if links are only accessible via JS, fix it even if the pages are still getting discovered

Abby Covet: Search is the Front Door to User Experience

• iamania.com: explanation of information articecture
• all businesses lack clarity about the importance of user experience
• more and more, internet is a place we go not just to use a tool, but to spend time there
• problems we’re facing online are the same problems businesses have been facing in the real world for years
• limited space on the “door” to get customers in
  • looking for lessons from physical architecture to apply in the digital world
• labyrinth: something only needs to be effective, doesn’t need to be efficient (experience is crucial)
• Everything can potentially be the first interaction with the brand/site, not just the home page
• There are simple antipatterns to avoid to increase user satisfaction

Doors to avoid

• There is no way through here: ask where the next click is.
• What the $ %*@ is this?!
• Danger Will Robinson (things that look scary to users, even if they may not be)
• Password, dude? (content that is locked out and doesn’t have an explanation)
• OMG this is just a hall of badly labeled doors

Search AND the result = experience

5 ways UX & search can work together

• share your research
• kill lorem ipsum: use actual words in testing
• get to know your writers (get them if you don’t have them)
• Sell the process together
• click the links!

Card sorting is a great tool for information architecture: helps the user define their optimal experience.

Rob Ousbey + Panel of Experts

• Wil Reynolds
• Neil Patel
• Rand Fish

Distilled’s very own Rob Ousbey led a discussion with several familiar speakers, Wil Reynolds, Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin to answer the audience’s questions about content marketing generally, the art of retaining customers, spotting and maximizing under-utilized marketing opportunities,

Content Marketing

• Neil – Good content require $ $ $ $ . It’s not cheap to create great content.  Utilize existing platforms and invest lots of money in great content.
• Rand – What are opportunities for smaller budgets? How to produce good content on the cheap – writer must be talented. Amateur is acceptable but it must have a USP (unique selling point) to be successful and gain traction.
• Be willing to fail for a long time.
• Wil – working on his story-telling and visuals. Using his friend network to use their skills.
• Wil – has made the focus of his blog the sharing of unique moments in running a company which  = Niche subject matter.

Loyalty Marketing

• Art of retaining clients, Lifetime value, retention of clients – all should be the focus.
• Rand – retention rates were critical for the SEOMoz fund-raising cycle with Foundry. Investors like to look @ monthly churn. Average churn. Etc,  People think SEO is a one-time thing hence sign up and then abandon SEO Moz in first three months, this is his explanation of his client abandonment rate.
• Bit.ly/strategytimeyo  - slides of the SEOMoz funnel.

Underrated Marketing Opportunties

• Neil – Guides are neglected. They are expensive but useful.
• Neil – Quizzes increase likelihood of them being a customer
• Neil – Product Marketing. Get customers to market for you.
• Neil – Dropbox example (maximize your space by sharing Dropbox with friends)
• Neil – Zapier example (shares to use product)
• Wil – Quizzes – interesting re-marketing. Email capture…although mixed feelings on whether or not this is always a good idea.
• Rand – likes email, good inbound channel. Use email to drive social, drive conversions, earn links, get UGC (User Generated Content). Advises caution about too many emails, as it dilutes the brand.

Where do people waste time and $ $ $ in their marketing

• Neil. Lots of people waste money. But it could be seen as experimental, or a learning experience.
• Rand. Wasted money on PR. Hired number of firms, spent money. 80% of press pieces would have got anyway. Remaining 20% not very valuable.
• Neil. PRSERVE.com – pay for performance PR model. Outed as a dodgy business model.However he liked the honesty of it.

Link-Building – how has it changed?

• Wil – re-focus on business questions. Also thinks about advantages that might apply beyond SEO, eg increased conversions as well as a few links.

Are links overshadowed by ranking factors?

• Rand. Importance of author rank, regardless of whether it’s official or not. Why wouldn’t you want to rank and be seen as a Thought Leader in your niche?
• Rand.How is brand being built? Inbound. Invest in it or lose out. Advertising, Brand Marketing still works.
• Neil. Industry, very reactive, industry responds to Google. Focus on being proactive, do what is best for your customers and your business. Build revenue that way.

Personal Approaches – how to manage off time? how to be productive?

• Rand. Executive assistant! Organizes travel. Blogs/emails/writes late at night.
• Wil. Also has an assistant to manage his schedule.

Phil Nottingham: Leveraging video for link building

There are opportunities for SEO in video, but you’ve got to start with good video marketing strategy. Video is a media type, it is not content. Have a goal in mind before you start creating it so that you know it it’s the appropriate medium. Video is good for:

1. Building Brand – put on you tube, social platforms
2. Increasing Conversions – eg a product video to increase conversions.  (doubles  conversion rate) host this yourself, don’t put it on youtube. Get rich snippets – as it can lead to growth in organic traffic
3. Links and social shares… – which covering in more depth as main subject of this talk

There are two ways people link to video:

1. Link to page as a good resource. This is using video as a page type; eg as a part of the wireframe. These are good when they make sense with the content. Popcorn.js is a language to define other on-page triggers, so video defines framework of the page. (eg a 37 seconds into the video playing, have a lightbox appear to encourage people to sign up for a newsletter or something). See cloudsovercuba.com is a good example of video integration.
2. Embed the video – This happens when it’s more important, critical to process in blog for example. A general rule for embed vs link decision: create something people will embed. This kind of video has to be much more targeted and either instruct, educate, or entertain. Embedding on Vimeo or another search platform often leads to failed opportunity for links, since all social platforms links back to themselves. To avoid this, use a provider and host on own site. WISTIA is preferred. Phil has built a new tool paste iFrame embed code, including source link, and you can generate an embed code that links back to your site. Generally, remember, Youtube – good for branding, not for link bait. YouTube is, however, good for content that encourages social sharing. Use YouTube keyword tool to assess if there is search volume for the sort of thing you are posting.

Ways to build links on YouTube:

1. YT analytics > playback locations > get list of people who embed video, then email them to give HD or ad free version that has your link.
2. Pay for seeding. Eg Unruly media as it allows you to get your site linked to, not the Vimeo platform
3. Don’t advertise product, advertise content; eg: choose channels that you want to target.
4. Retarget using Google display network.
5. Leverage video assets. Richer page types correlates with better links. Mixed media; eg: Zappos, Appliances Online, Wistia, videos online intergrated with entire page type. IMPORTANT.

Helpful tips:

• Product Videos don’t generate links generally, but are more about conversions.
• Top-tier guests posts get links.
• Generally a series of videos better than one-offs and are also more cost-effective.
• Informational Content, non-branded, esp in tech space, Dailymotion and bliptv, Photobuckets (followed profile links). 
• Use Video to Boost PR Efforts
• Video news releases – more effective for pitches.
• Have video on the about pages – corporate pages. Useful  opportunity.
• YouTube – API allows you to create a playlist.

Final Thoughts – why is no-one doing this?

1. People think they don’t have budget. Start small – then gradually increase it.
2. Don’t have skills to produce it.

Questions:

• Does video slow down page load – No, not if you make sure to use HTML5 video, layoff the flash.
• Users posting video about your product to your site. Via youtube. UGC – good media type.

Ross Hudgens: Actionable Content Marketing Tactics

Actionable tips – content marketing is difficult. Generally it’s a slow, long-term process. No hard, fast wins.  Consistency is key. Four Acts  - actionable links

Act 1: Actionable Ways to Get Links:

1. Time-based brand mentions. Allows you to gind searches for your brand in google. ALLINURL:/tag/BRAND – search this to spot missing link opportunities.
2. Add ‘forum’  to your search queries
3. Create unique employee pages.
4. Download Twitter archive, get a list of all tweets, find all your URLs you have tweeted. Then ask for links.
5. As above with Google+.
6. Reverse image search on personal brand avatars. (didn’t understand this one)
7. Do competitive research on a brand level.
8. Domain name misspellings. Tlcseso.com/brand-link-misspelling – find who has misspelt your brand name and then ask them to correct it and get a link.
9. Image Raider – find out who is stealing your images. Imageraider.com
10. Locate owned videos
11. Yesware email plugin. Tracks email opens.
12. Linkclump – chrome extension, allows you to open up a load of links. Great tip!
13. Link Search Tool – generates search operators.
14. Site:twitter/username EMAIL – to find email

Act 2: Actionable Ways to Improve Social Push

1. Linkedin – people not using it as a platform for content. They should
2. Add social accounts of clients to your email signature.
3. KWs in twitter bio/description, in account name, confirm twitter account. Advertise.
4. Twitter Scheduling – use followerwonk to assess popularity and TweetDeck to schedule tweets.
5. Beef up email marketing.
6. Differentiate your share buttons, make it pretty and eye-catching but not aggressive.
7. Have trust symbols on secondary pages, not just home pages.
8. Slideshare Gold. Pricey but valuable. Makes things more visible, you can add a link on twitter.
9. When people download deck, get the email signup.
10. Pay with a_blank_ – you can submit until you have shared something, for a site etc.
11. FB posts – 80 characters or less, get 23% more engagement.
12. Relationship Building – +1s, twitters. Positive affinity with people post, share, +1, like etc. Get involved!
13. Creating private lists on twitter. Monitor them.
14. Find influences on pinterest, nurture first then outreach after following and supporting for a bit.
15. Influencers on Hacker news – search ‘SEO in their bio’.
16. Ego appeals. Positive screenshot/ image/mentions in a blog post – it can create good karma and a link back.
17. Get more clickthroughs and safe links from infographics. Siegemedia.com/infographic-embed-codes
18. Rank using slideshare authority.
19. Comment early on posts likely to rank.
20. Nudge newsletter signups on contact forms
21. Invite colleagues/friends to signup others.
22. Power of the default options – can increase signups.
23. Add email updates as nav element on site
24. Mention your product as a feature of larger case study.

Act 3: Actionable Ways to Connect to Your Audience

1. Favorite/like people’s tweets/statuses
2. Find the Influencers
3. Ego appeals

Act 4: Actionable Ways to Get More Traffic

1. Infographics
2. Use SlideShare authority
3. Comment early on posts
4. Default “yes” for newsletter signups

Rebecca Churt: Why Personas Should Be Central to Your SEO Strategy

Personas

Purpose is to guide/focus set of actions based on goals centered on good UX, conversions, and targeting ideal customers. Figure out user groups:

• How do they find you? (mobile, which browsers)
• What are their goals (motivation, engagement)
• Are they worth it? (ROI)

Hubspot – all marketing actions are based upon personas

Building Personas

List all the common traits, create a profile, and give them a face

• Example – demographic, their job/level of seniority, day in life/pain points, values, experience, identify common objections

Determine these by interviewing customers

• What keywords do they search for, who are the influncers/thought leaders in that industry, what other companies they may be searching for, what trends does the buyer see in the industry, and what are the typical titles/roles of the prospective buyer

Important to remember YOU are not your personas, they are not real people, make sure that they aren’t too general, target first touch, and ensure you don’t confuse personas with job titles. 

Main takeaways for SEO

• Keep company/product up to do
• Complete market research – keyword and competitor research
• Create tools to attract more people and engagement
• Champion content

Mike Blumenthal: Anatomy of Local Search Results

Local search is about branding

Citation examples that ultimately show up in blended results that became more apparent with the release of the Venice update

24% of all results are blended map insertions, 69% are blended organic, and 7% are pure maps packs (analyzing 22 phrases across 35 cities – 770 search results)

Location matters for local search optimization

• Use long-tail categories to expand search radius
• Extend radius of search by removing spammers: Local listing fields

Linkbuilding for Local

• Reviews and Review Site Diversity
• Citations from prominent local sites – local ranking factors are citations, reviews, links, the website

New look in Local – direct link to Google Places

• Zagat is out, stars are in (new review system)
• Hack to see what your Google+ look like (see list view &tbm=plcs)
• Maybe carousel will replace pack results

Future of Search Marketers

• Link building is in trouble
• We’re not looking for fast, unsustainable growth versus building flywheels
• As an industry we broke directories, comments, forums, and a 150-year-old form of communication (the infographic), guest blogging
• We can’t even clean up after ourselves with link removal requests
• Stop worrying about CDNs, edge nodes, site speed, linking C-blocks, anchor text, how many journalists you know, being misquoted, nofollow
• Start worrying whether anyone will click
• Call it link equity NOT link juice
• Combine content, fame, technology is what we should be thinking about

Remember the things we are good at

• Earn attention and shares (measure links based on engaged visitors)
• Engage our knowledge of the web – good at searching, good at knowing what’s wrong with a site with a quick glance, and how influential a person is
• We can find out who people are, where they write, and what they own

Homework

• Make yourself uncomfortable
• All of this is inspired by Entrepreneurial Design

And that’s all for SearchLove Boston 2013!

Thanks for joining us, and please let us know what you think.

Shannon Skinner is an SEO Analyst in the New York Distilled office. She loves anything related to data analytics and taking creative approaches to problem solving.

distilled » Blog

Did you know that there are over 90 billion URLs are packed into our Mozscape API? That’s a lot of links. So many links, in fact, that it can be daunting to dream up all of the many ways that you could put those links to good use. When we originally built Linkscape (the predecessor to Mozscape), we mainly had one thing in mind… SEO and backlinks.

But there’s a whole lot more than that.

Links are only the beginning, it’s what those links can tell us that’s so darn interesting. Which is why I wanted to call out all of the amazing ways that developers (and marketers) are using Mozscape data to better their work, as well as encourage new uses of Mozscape data that have yet to be explored. (Feel free to jump in and create your own API key any time.)

How Mozscape is Being Used Today

Mozscape's wealth of links can be used in a variety of ways: from SEO audits, to domain valuations, to excel integration. Here at Moz, we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we can utilize the API. We currently use it to run some of our own tools such as Open Site Explorer and the Mozbar.

But I don't want to focus on the way we use it. Let's take a look at the way other developers have demonstrated some exciting uses for Mozscape. Hopefully these will get your mind going, thinking up other ways to use the data as well.

SEO Audits

We’ll start with the most obvious of use cases, SEO audits. There quite a few examples of SEO audit tools that use Mozscape data, but a few of our favorites (that are in front of a paywall) are the HubSpot Website Grader and The Found SEO Audit Tool, both of which bring the heat.

Mozscape data is what powers things like the total pages indexed by search, MozRank, a list of the most authoritative pages, along with their corresponding anchor texts. The beauty of this use case is that it can provide a great lead-gen funnel for all of the SEO agencies out there, proving value up front with an email address required prior to running the report. As a digital marketing agency, using Mozscape data to develop a site audit is a great way to get users into your sales funnel. You know, that inbound marketing stuff — cold calls are old news.

Domain Valuation

How valuable is a website, purely from an online authority perspective? Traditionally, that was a very tough question. You could look at things like site traffic (which typically isn’t very accurate) or rankings for certain terms, but that’s a far-sighted approach to the question. Think about using the metrics behind Mozscape, like MozRank, Domain Authority, and MozTrust instead. Flippa, for example, uses Mozscape data as a datapoint for due diligence.

You could imagine this kind of domain valuation anywhere else domains are bought or sold, most of which have yet to use Mozscape data. The value, of course, is providing as much confidence to the buyers of web properties based on the “web footprint” of the site.

Spreadsheet Kung-Fu

The spreadsheet kung-fu of this industry is unmatched anywhere else. With the integration of Mozscape data to Excel, some have been able to make Excel sing. The beauty of using Excel for analyzing Mozscape data is that you can slice and dice as you please, without setting up complex API calls. Perhaps our favorite example of Excel comes from the illustrious Richard Baxter, with the Links API Extension from SEO Gadget.

However, if Google Docs are more up your alley, the amazing Aleyda Solis created just the thing for you (so did Chris Lee). Tools like these allow the average marketer to dig into the firehose of data available through the API in a simple and recognizable interface.

Client Reporting

Yes, that's right. iAcquire uses the data when creating client reports as it not only helps them to inform the client about how their pages are doing but to also show the importance of certain pages on their site. The data is both a research tool and an education tool.

"Below is a screenshot from a ranking research report showing data we gathered for the keyword 'inbound marketing tips.' Moz stats are represented throughout the stats columns. As we work with these reports we are able to see if any of our content distribution efforts resulted in links on page or domain as can be seen in the far left columns."

How Mozscape Could Be Used

That’s how Mozscape is being used today, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. A few folks have realized the potential outside of the traditional use cases that I’ve mentioned above. The power of the data comes when we take Mozscape data outside of its traditional context of pure link evaluation. Let me show you what I mean.

Link Building

Its relatively easy to imagine Mozscape's data being used for link building. With Mozscape's massive amount of link data, SEOs are able to prioritize their link building efforts, and focus on value added efforts.

CRM

You could imagine that some of the examples noted above have been used for link building, but what about a deeper integration into a contact manager? Something that would allow the user to prioritize outreach by the value of a domain.

Just as one can do with the Klout score (or Social Authority) on Twitter, the same can be done for customer relationship efforts in filtering Domain Authority to determine importance.

Top Lists

We’ve seen hints of blogs using Mozscape data determine a top startup list, like the GeekWire 200, but the same could be applied for any rankings list of web properties.

Traditionally, lists have used Alexa or Compete traffic data to determine web prominence, but they’re so inaccurate. Other lists have used social specific metrics like social followings, but those too fall short. Geekwire’s list of the top 200 startups in Seattle uses a blend of both social and web data (External links, MozTrust) to determine just how influential a site is, providing the full picture.

How Could You Use the API?

I’m sure we've missed a ton of ideas, so we’re calling on you to help us find those new opportunities for Mozscape. Things like a tightening relationship between links and social networks, and categorizing link sources. How would you use this data, and how would you build it? Better yet, why not create your key and get going? 

We want to make it easy for you.

We've been working quite hard to make our indexes faster and have recently updated our Mozscape API documentation. We want to make it as simple for you to use the data to get your idea up an running as possible.

Plus, if you create something, it's likely we'll get you added to our app gallery. We have everything from large corporations to individuals who have used the API and we show off their work in the gallery.

We'd love to hear from you. Obviously we always encourage folks to jump in and check out the free API (as well as the paid), and use the data for something useful for you. We're also quite open to hearing about ways we can improve our own tools with the data or help educate people better. I look forward to reading through your feedback and seeing if there are ways we can help get people started using Mozscape.

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!

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Statistics show three quarters of online shopping journeys end in abandoned shopping baskets.
So, what are the reasons for so many cancelled purchases? Summit’s Street Survey hits the High Street to find out.

Cart abandonment report: http://www.listrak.com/sca-index

Street Surveys are weekly features in which High Street shoppers discuss their shopping activities and experiences.