Author Archive
7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles
Posted by Tom_C
We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let’s mash those two things together. In this post I’ve collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained…… 
Which Are My Top Folders
The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I’ve been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:
Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.
Creating Geo Link Maps
Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled’s backlinks:
Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep’s wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic…. I can but dream
Pretty Tag clouds
Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website….
These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let’s you make the pretty pictures.
Visualising Directory Links
When quickly scanning a site’s backlink profile there’s a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It’s not that the non-quality links don’t work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:
=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")
This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn’t catch everything I’ve found that it get’s you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:
Venn Diagrams
Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor’s links that looks a bit like this:
Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.
Broken Links
I know this tool has been written about before and it’s not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole’s chrome extension "SEO site tools":
Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it’s useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:
I like this view, especially when I’m looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.
SEOmoz Labs
While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:
Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.
Conversion Rate Lessons for Newspaper Paywalls
Posted by Tom_C
Paywalls are a hot topic online at the moment. In the UK The Times has recently put their whole site behind a pay wall and in early 2011 the New York Times is set to also go behind a pay wall. Both of these sites will join sites such as the Wall Street Journal which has been behind a paywall for some time already. For those who aren’t familiar with how paywalls work this image might clear things up:
There has been an awful lot written online about paywalls so I’m going to try and cover new ground in this post and focus exclusively on the conversion rate issues which are unique to paywalls and how news sites might seek to overcome them. Although that’s a pretty niche focus for this post hopefully the lessons and techniques can be applied to many different websites. Firstly, I’m going to look at the difficulties:
Objections To Overcome
In my eyes newspapers struggle with 3 unique problems which sets them slightly apart from other conversion funnels:
- Micropayments - People are unfamiliar with making small payments online. Much as you and I (being internet savvy hopefully!) are comfortable shelling out small payments and going through the hassle of remembering our verified by visa password, the average joe still isn’t familiar with this.
- Subscriptions - Again, this is related to the above point but there’s an objection which needs to be overcome which is paying for something regularly. We’re all a lot more comfortable paying once for a single product, paying regularly for access to something is a concept we’re a lot less familiar with.
- News is free right? - The last, but perhaps most obvious of the objections and the one people vocalise a lot is "surely I can just get my news from a free source?". We’ve been living in a news-free world now for about as long as the internet has been around and certainly the younger generations simply assume news should be free.
So if you’re going to launch a paywall I think you have to consider these 3 factors very carefully. How are you going to overcome them?
Countering These Objections
Since there are 3 objections, I’m going to present 3 solutions!
- Smooth The Funnel - As one client mentioned to me recently, "we try to smooth the sides of our funnel as much as possible". This approach to conversion rate optimisation I think overcomes the first objection. The idea being that if you’re going to make a micropayment (and certainly if you’re going to make more than one micropayment) then the process should be very quick and very painless.
- Educate Your Users - Whenever you try and sell something it’s important to answer the question "Why do I get if I buy this?". For ecommerce websites this often results in making sure delivery options are very clear, or ensuring it’s clear which version of a product you’re selling. For paywalls I think it’s crucial to educate very strongly about what exactly the product is that you’re offering. Which sections of the site do you get access to, how long for, what’s in those sections etc. Even though it’s a micropayment, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need long sales pages and a lot of persuasion to get people to buy. Long sales copy is useful not only to persuade people to purchase but also to educate people on what exactly it is they’re buying.
- Sell The Benefits - To overcome the "news is free" objection it’s crucial to sell the benefits of the content you have. Likely this needs to be something above and beyond "just" news. Consider what else you get, opinion, rich media etc.
Pay Walls In Action
Now, let’s look at some real life examples of paywalls in action and see what we can pick out from them considering the above objections and counter objections:
The New Scientist
One thing I hate about paywalls, is the idea that they are in fact a wall. I think there should be a psychological shift to think of them not as walls but instead as desirable products. I feel the New Scientist does this really well - take a look at the below call to action which appears at the top of an article which you can’t read in full online:
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This isn’t saying "you can’t read this article unless you pay", this is saying "look how great it would be if you subscribed to New Scientist!". There are really nice visual calls to action and there’s even a 20% discount in there! Sweet.
Looking further at the actual conversion funnel we see they’ve greased the sides of the funnel nicely since it only takes a matter of seconds to whiz through the clear and simple checkout process.
The Times
The Times is a fascinating case study for conversion - they’ve been doing some things well, some things not so well but it’s a really interesting case study. Firstly, as above the thing I hate most of all about the times website is that you run into the paywall. It’s a wall. A barrier. There’s no way (no easy way) of signing up to The Times unless you try and click on one of the headlines on the homepage. This doesn’t make any sense to me - the only way into the funnel for a user is to click on a headline that interests them, only to be denied access to that article. I think it would be immensely valuable to have a call to action on the homepage to actually subscribe - this means that people looking to subscribe can do so easily and by clicking on something which has the desired outcome.
Once you’ve clicked a news story you’re presented with a pop-up overlay like this:
Now, what I can’t show you with this screenshot is the painstakingly long time it takes for this pop-up to load. This will likely be their biggest source of lost conversions - the popup is so slow that often the page will re-load and nothing will happen for a few seconds before the popup starts to render and even when it does render it takes at least 7-8 seconds for the "already registered?" box to even appear. For a website trying to persuade me to buy a subscription to an online product slow loading technology like this really matters and will put many people off.
Ok, I don’t mean to be too negative about The Times but there’s another very weird conversion killer. When you actually click to subscribe to the site the first page you’re presented with is this single function page:
I find this page very odd. Talking about greasing the sides of the funnel, this is like sandpaper on the walls coated with glue. Why should I enter my email address? What purpose does it serve? There’s not even any security or trust given that my email address won’t be sold to 3rd parties. There’s a reason that websites give those assurances, it’s because users are worried about it! Once you’ve entered your email address the next step of the funnel prompts you to re-enter your email address anyway so this page is more or less totally redundant for me.
Ok, enough negativity - time for some positives! The first thing I really like about The Times is the development of Times+. This website is an entire micro-site dedicated to educating users about the benefits of signing up, along with example pieces of content including videos and articles. This really plays well into point 2 above.
Another aspect I find really intriguing about The Times is that they have the opportunity here to create a worthwhile online community with intelligent comments on their articles. This would genuinely set them apart from other newspaper sites where the comments quickly descend into madness or idiocy or both! The very fact that you’re within a walled garden and the fact that The Times prides itself on intelligent debate should offer them an opportunity set themselves apart. I can see the beginnings of this as a marketing tactic and I can only assume this will grow as the website matures but this is a perfect example of point 3 - overcoming the "news is free" concept.
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal gets quite a nice thumbs up for one specific page they have which is this one:
There are two things I love about this page. Firstly, this type of feature comparison table works very well at driving conversions. It’s clear for users and has nice strong calls to action throughout. The second reason I love this is because of the more subtle perceived value proposition that’s included alongside the Print + Online + Mobile option where there is included a free £20 Amazon voucher. This instantly makes your perceived value of the item shoot up which I think is really clever!
Conclusion
In conclusion, I don’t mind the idea of charging for content online. This has to happen I think as the web evolves. But I really hope we can stop thinking of them as paywalls. I dislike the idea of running into a wall or barrier which prevents a user from getting what they want. Instead I hope that we can start treating this more as a membership service with benefits, bonuses and bells and whistles. Also, I couldn’t write this article without linking to this very ironic page on The Economist…
Note: CRO, is not an exact science. That’s why you run testing. Almost certainly some of the advice I’ve given here will NOT convert better than the current sites. That’s the reality of CRO and it’s why testing is key. Testing testing testing. However, the analysis of the conversion path I think throws up interesting debate so hopefully I’ve at the very least given some of these sites some ideas of what they might be able to test.
Also - final note, thanks to Ed Fry who has been in the Distilled offices the past two weeks on work experience and helped me gather some data and put this post together!
Using Google’s Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report To Identify Low Hanging Fruit
Posted by Tom_C
Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet.
I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools:
Step 1 - Gathering The Fruit
The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just "web" queries and in this case I’ve selected "United States" since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be:
Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel:
Step 2 - Identify The Low Hanging Fruit
Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:
So I run a find and replace on the following two items:
- Find "<10" and replace with 1
- Find "-" and replace with 0
Be sure to only run these over columns B,C,D to avoid stripping out anything from your queries column in A!
Now, once we have this data it will depend on the number of impressions and number of keyphrases how exactly you want to slice the data. Analysing the data for SEOmoz I found that selecting all avg positions that were not equal to 1 and impressions over 200 gave me a sample set of 97 keyphrases to look at which wouldn’t take very long at all to whiz through and look at. If you have more time or if you have more keyphrases you might want to get a longer or shorter list.
As I mentioned this gives me a list of 97 keyphrases for the SEOmoz site. Let’s take a look at what some of those opportunities are!
An Example: SEOmoz’s Low Hanging Fruit
In this post I not only wanted to show you how to get the data but also to give you an insight into what kinds of actions you could take and what sorts of keyphrases you might look at so I ran the above process for the SEOmoz site and found the following low hanging fruit. Bear in mind that there weren’t that many really easy wins in the data since SEOmoz generally has fairly good SEO (unsurprisingly!). Still, it gives you an idea of the thought process.
Keyphrase: SEO | Ranking: 9.4 | Impressions: 49,500 | Clicks: 590
Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org
Now, I’ve shot myself in the foot a little here by picking a keyphrase which isn’t really a low hanging fruit, it’s actually a highly competitive keyphrase! That said, it’s useful information to have. Without having rank tracking set up for the site it instantly tells me that SEOmoz are highly competitive for this term, especially as some of the sites that rank above them are Google and Wikipedia. That said, there’s room for improvement. Maybe time for some more badge-bait Rand?!
Keyphrase: Social media marketing | Ranking: 7.9 | Impressions: 8,100 | Clicks: 320
Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics
Again, this is a highly competitive keyphrase but one which I feel SEOmoz could perform better for. The current ranking is working ok for them but could certainly improve dramatically if they could shift the ranking from 7.9 into the top 3. Digging around we see that the page is linked internally from every page in the navigation with good anchor text and it has a total of 255 root domains linking to the page so there’s clearly a fair amount of work already done here. That said, I feel like there’s an opportunity waiting since SEOmoz links out to lots of other sites from here and most of those blogs will likely link back to the SEOmoz guide if there was a nicely written email. Incidentally, if you’re looking for a link from SEOmoz and have a top notch guide for one of the sites which doesn’t have any resources attached then get in touch! So long as you link back to the page 
Also, BONUS TIP - while researching backlinks in this space I stumbled across the fact that Amazon authors can get links from Amazon.com check out Darren Rowse on Amazon and then compare to Rand Fishkin on Amazon and you’ll see that Rand has missed an opportunity to get blog posts imported and hence get clean followed links from Amazon. Sweet!
Keyphrase: What is seo | Ranking: 3.9 | Impressions: 1,900 | Clicks: 210
Ranking URL: http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization (Note here that this URL isn’t reported in GWT, it’s the old beginner’s guide URL which now redirects but the same keyphrase stands).
Here, I see the answer being a little easier than the above keyphrases. The term is less competitive and the title of the page doesn’t even mention "what is seo"! My actions would be to reword the title tag to be "What is SEO? The Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz" and to mention "What is SEO" on the page at least once (currently it only mentions "what is search engine optimisation" and although Google knows they’re the same phrase I’d still like to see the exact phrase on the page somewhere). Also, there is no navigation link on the site to the beginner’s guide so slipping a few links into the next few blog posts with the anchor text "what is seo" will help boost the rankings for that phrase.
Keyphrase: Free seo tools | Ranking: 4.2 | Impressions: 480 | Clicks: 73
Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/tools
The term "seo tools" is fiercely competitive but the "free seo tools" term seems like it would be a lot easier to go after, in fact SEOmoz is one of only 2 of the top 10 results which doesn’t mention the term free in the title tag of the page. This could be rectified easily and in addition to that the page doesn’t even mention "free seo tools" on the page. Personally, since this is something people search for I’d be tempted to re-design the page to add a "Free SEO Tools" sub-header to differentiate between the free and PRO tools. That way it’s a good user experience and also gets the phrase on the page.
Keyphrase: Keyword research | Ranking: 19 | Impressions: 110 | Clicks: 12
Ranking URL: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research
Note here that the impression numbers are so low because the page is ranking 2nd page. Not having a page ranking in the top 10 here is a mistake for SEOmoz I think (sorry, I mean opportunity!). The correct page is clearly the page on keyphrase research from the new beginner’s guide and the best way to make that page rank is to throw some more internal links to the page. Currently there are basically no internal links to that page except from other beginner’s guide pages. Linking to it from elsewhere should be able to get that page ranking. One idea to help get internal links to pages of the beginner’s guide would be to automatically link to the keyword research page from any blog post within the keyphrase research category. That way it would essentially get more deep links internally to the individual pages of the beginner’s guide.
A Data Warning
A warning here that I’m still not sure how much I trust this impression and click data. I wrote a post over on Distilled about how the reported numbers are way out from analytics numbers. To be honest, if I was doing SEO full-time for SEOmoz I’d like to think I’d have better resources of keyphrase research, ranking data and visitor numbers but using Google’s webmaster tools search queries report can be a nice quick way to identify keyphrase opportunities for a site which you’re less familiar with or for which you don’t have these things set up.
5 Ways Being An SEO Helps You With Online Dating
Posted by Tom_C
Howdy mozzers. Since a lot of people in the search space are geeks, it naturally follows that there are plenty of single SEO guys and gals. Therefore this post is for you! Actually, it’s more of a collection of random SEO tips and tricks I’ve picked up recently that I decided to hang together by applying the tips to online dating at the same time!
Disclaimer: I’m going to reference OKCupid throughout this post. They are not a client, I have no alliegnece with them but they’re like the Google of online dating. Their blog is an A+ example of how to write engaging content which gets links. I reference it all the time when talking to clients.
5 Ways Being an SEO Makes You Better At Online Dating
1) Add Trust
This is something I learned from doing Conversion Rate Optimisation. Getting users to convert almost always isn’t about changing the colour of buttons or the position of images. It’s about getting the right message across to your users. You want to find out what makes them tick and then give them what they want. This can sometimes be as simple as changing the text of a header on a page.
Top Dating Tip: Mention things like "good at cooking", "sporty" - people respond well to these kinds of hints that you’re an awesome person.
Top SEO Tip: Make sure the language and message used on your site fits your users. I wrote a post on using natural language for CRO which contains a nice little case study you might want to check out.
2) Be Efficient
Effective SEOs are efficient people (and efficient people are also effective SEOs I imagine?). Rand wrote a fantastic post on using outsourcing to get things done which highlights the different tasks that you might be able to outsource and Will wrote a fantastic post on automating tasks (with a followup cheatsheet full of APIs). Anytime you find yourself doing the same task over and over again you should really stop and think about how you can do it more effectively. Can you outsource? Can you automate?
Top Dating Tip: Write an "opening message" - full of humour and intelligence and wit (outsource this if you find it hard) which you can use to woo potential suitors. Online dating is a long slow process (at least for guys) and you’ll need to message lots and lots of people in order to get dates (at least if you’re as ugly as I am) so take the pain out of this process by automating the opening email. Of course, with all good email marketing you need to make it look like it’s not automated. Include references to specifics from their profile and get their name right!
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Top SEO Tip: Automate automate automate. Did you see recently that you can now run scripts from within Google Products? Kind of like Google Apps only stupidly easy to use. It lets you send emails, access calendars and even create Google sites. The programming language is kind of like Visual Basic but includes powerful tools like sending emails and fetching web pages. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the possibilities here!
3) Research
Research is integral to strong SEO. You need to research rankings, links, site owners, potential link opportunities and a whole host of other things. The internet lends itself to researching and gathering data and sometimes you need to employ some of the SEO tricks you’ve learned to use Google effectively or to track down an errant webmaster. There was a scary email conversation between distilled and SEOmoz staff following a Q&A where we discussed how to find the individual behind a social media profile. The amount of data you can gather from a simple digg profile is terrifying. Within a few minutes we had his real name, family members, wife’s name, address and phone number. So next time you think you’re posting something "anonomously" think again!
Top Dating Tip: Users will often use the same photo to sign up to loads of different sites. So use a service like TinEye to do a reverse image search on potential suitor’s profile photos. What people write on social media profiles and what they write on their personal blog are two very different things!
Top SEO Tip: Following the image theme, I recently picked up a really neat trick you can use to find people who are hotlinking your images. Simply use the imagesearch: command in Google Images like this: imagesite:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org (make sure you’re searching google image search!)
I’d like to think that you’d use this list of sites as a list of places to get links from rather than a list of sites to goatse but each to their own… (hat tip for this imagesite search query goes to Andre who I met at A4uexpo in Munich).
4) Stay Fresh
The idea that having "fresh content" would help you rank was one of the myths Rand recently addressed and I certainly don’t think it carries much weight. That said, for fresh queries, fresh data is essential. Rand recently talked about how twitters of a URL may help them rank for QDF-style queries. Certainly QDF is one area of SEO that a lot of people overlook.
Top Dating Tip: Having a fresh profile helps get dates. If your join date is 2 years ago or your last login date was over a month ago then chances are you’re not interested. So make sure that you keep things up to date. I also think that some of the ranking algorithms at sites like OKCupid favour fresh profiles over stale ones.
Top SEO Tip: Think about which queries are triggering QDF algorithms in your industry. Are they worth chasing? Is your site set up to publish content fast? Is your content team set up to publish content fast?! Some SEOs I’ve talked to recently still didn’t even know there was such a thing as QDF so if you’re in this space make the most of it and think about twitters of your URL like Rand says. Here’s a good beginners QDF video (oldie but goodie)
5) Test Test Test
Testing is crucial to online success. Whether it’s testing process changes, or multivariate testing using Google Website Optimizer it’s important to keep testing things. Karl from Conversion Rate Experts gave a fantastic presentation in Munich at A4uexpo where he really demonstrated why testing radical changes is much better than changing little changes. Unfortunately I can’t link to his slides but I’m assured he has a post in the works so keep your eyes peeled for that soon.
Top Dating Tip: Test which profile picture will get you most dates by using the My Best Face feature. It lets you see which profile image works better for you and gives you lovely graphical breakdowns of the data to show you which demographic your image works best for. It’s like CRO for online dating!
Top SEO Tip: Try segmenting your website optimiser tests. Will wrote a post on how to segment your tests which you should check out.
I hope you enjoyed this - look out for my next installment entitled "5 ways being an SEO doesn’t help you get dates online" which will mainly feature images of SEOs looking geeky and having poor social skills.
5 Ways To Turbo-Charge User Generated Content For SEO
Posted by Tom_C
User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn’t including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content.
Remember folks that even if you don’t have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content, regardless of whether it’s UGC or in-house. If you have a team of writers you can pretty much think of them like a small bunch of users creating UGC for your site so these tips apply for many different types of sites. If these tips don’t apply then you’re probably running a boring website anyway. 
1) Nudge Users Into Doing SEO For You
This is one of the most powerful tools in your UGC armory and applies equally well to UGC uploads and also in-house content generation (how many in-house SEOs have come up against CMS limitations in teh past!). The idea is simple - firstly you need to figure out what a perfectly optimised UGC upload looks like. For example, say I was doing SEO for youtube (I’m not btw) I might consider a video like this pretty much spot on:
This video has all of the key elements
- A descriptive title with the relevant keyphrases in there ("omg cat" and "dramatic chipmunk")
- Submitted to the correct category ("comedy")
- Lots of good relevant tags added (like "slack" and "jawed")
- A good (though not actually perfect) description with the main keywords repeated on the page.
Compare that to a video like this which has virtually zero SEO value:
The video titls is "640×360.mp4", there’s no description and no tags.
So when you’re building your UGC upload process (or internal CMS for uploading content) you need to build in as many nudges as possible to turn videos like the second into videos like the first. What these nudges might be will vary wildly and depends on your definition of a perfectly optimised page and what sort of content users are uploading. That said, here’s a few nudges that you might want to consider:
- Enforce a minimum and maximum title length. This will force people to put at least a few relevant phrases in there but also avoid spamming the title with too many phrases.
- Enforce a description.
- Let users choose their own related content on the site and embed links to those pieces of content automatically. This can be a good way of increasing internal linking to strong content.
- Provide users with some popular tags they might want to use instead of letting them think for themselves.
It’s important to note here that some of these changes might seem to be a trade off between usability and SEO, enforcing a description for example might lose you a few video uploads. You should carefully watch this to ensure that you don’t kill conversion rates in the process and you should strongly emphasise WHY a description is important to ensure users are motivated to add one. Be sure to put the WHY in their own terms (i.e. "your video will get more views and comments if you include a description"). Linkedin does this very well with their "your profile is only 60% complete" calls to action.
2) Mash Up Your Own Content for Agile Rankings
Sometimes we get quite hung up in SEO as to what exactly we mean by "unique content". We might check for example, that an article written for a website is unique. But once we determine that the content is unique how many times can we put that article on our site? Can we re-use the headline on multiple pages? Full answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this post, suffice to say that you can often get away with re-using sections of unique content on more than one page on your site. And unique content is an asset. So consider these two situations:
Ranking For Head Terms - If your site is full of user generated content then you will naturally have plenty of long-tail phrases nailed. But what about the big terms? These terms are harder to nail down. Instead of relying on your community to optmise for this phrase, instead you can aggregate content from your community and sit it on a page that otherwise is perfectly optimised by hand. For example, let’s continue looking at youtube and consider the keyphrase "poker videos". Now in the UK there are no youtube results for this on the first page. In fact the highest ranking youtube page is this video:
Now, ranking with an individual video is fine - but it’s not perfect because it’s not the best page for a user to land on and also it’s not ranking 1st page! So what can we do about it? Well how about we create a page which sits on this URL: www.youtube.com/videos/sports/poker-videos and is perfectly optimised for the term "poker videos" with a good title, header and intro text. Then most of the content on the page can be pulled from existing uploaded videos. So aggregating content in this way can provide you with powerful canonical pages which you can internally link to strongly and can rank for specific head terms without you having to rely on individual videos.
Being Agile & QDF Terms - The above technique can be done en masse as part of a site overhaul and I suggest that building these kinds of pages into your site as part of the category structure is a GOOD THING. But sometimes, search phrases come out of nowhere - these are the phrases that weren’t anywhere yesterday, let alone 6 months ago when you did your research! Still with the youtube example, looking at the hot trends for today I see that "draft picks 2010" is a hot phrase right now:
Keeping with the youtube example I see that there are plenty of videos for the term but that’s just the problem - there isn’t a good single page for Google to find that is specifically about the term. So, if YouTube were being agile they could quickly deploy a page (www.youtube.com/nfl-draft-picks-2010/) targeting the term, link to it from a high-crawl page (like the homepage) and BAM they’d be ranking in no time. The beauty of this is that all they need to do is do a little picking and choosing of existing content to create the page. They don’t need to write anything much in the way of original content to rank for the term. This is great for videos but applies equally to other forms of UGC and can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. QDF FTW!
3) Link Building is Hard - Get Someone Else To Do It!
This is one of the aspects that is talked about most elsewhere - widgets and embeddable goodness is talked about a lot so I’m not going to labour the point. One thing I do want to point out here is that you can apply conversion rate optimisation methodologies to your link building efforts here by improving conversion rate of sharing content. For example, YOUmoz is a linkbuilding tool for SEOmoz - so when a new YOUmoz post goes live we could set up an email that is sent to the user who submitted it which has a strong call to action to both blog and tweet about their latest YOUmoz post. This simple action might improve the link conversion rate of YouMoz posts by 20%. Boom, extra links!
4) Use Your Community To Do Research
Another way that you can use your community to help your link building efforts is by using feedback forms and surveys. For example, a site I worked on recently which let’s say promotes widget expertise sent out a survey to their users and one of the questions they asked was "where else do you talk about widgets online". Some people said Facebook, some said blogs but a surprising number said they not only talk about widgets on this site but they also discuss widgets on forums. So this is a really valuable insight and should motivate you to ensure that when you offer widgets and embeddable content you also offer forum code as well as HTML to ensure that you’re getting as much exposuring as possible. I can’t really predict exactly what insight you’ll gain from surveying your users but I can guarantee that if you do it you’ll learn something about other sites in your industry, keyphrases you were missing or usability issues which can lead to conversion rate improvements.
By the way - did I mention that you should go take the SEOmoz industry survey?!
5) Educate Your Users on SEO
Not everyone in the real world hates SEOs. Shock horror! In fact, plenty of regular users are really keen to understand more about how SEO works. So running training sessions for your users highlighting in particular the benefits good SEO can bring them can really help motivate your community and helps users optimise their own content, do their own link building, keyphrase research etc.
Towards the end of last year the SEOmoz team did some work with Etsy and actually put together some training courses/videos/PDFs for the community to help users learn about SEO. Here’s the Etsy Guide to SEO.
Etsy Guide to SEO Workshop from Etsy on Vimeo.
So, in summary - user generated content is a phenomenal asset, use it wisely and you will profit! As usual, I’d love to hear about other creative uses for UGC in the comments…
Negotiating Partnerships For Scale-able Linkbuilding
Posted by Tom_C
I’m no business guru. I’ve never run or owned a business. But from what I’ve overheard from smart people who do run businesses, developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to succeeding. It’s the essence of being remarkable which is what Seth Godin talks about a lot. It’s one of the first questions that I ask clients when they come on board - "What’s your USP? Tell me why you’re better than your competitors".
Listening to clients tell you why they’re better than the competition is a little like getting a client to sell their product to you for CRO (as the Conversion Rate Experts talk about in their SEOmoz case study). The answer to this question will often surprise you and start you thinking of all kinds of juicy ways that you can go about gaining links.
So this is one way of getting link building techniques. But once you have this information about a businesses USP there are other ways to leverage it. And that’s what I want to talk about in this post.
Negotiating Partnerships For Links
Ok, so the stage is set - you’ve figured out what it is that makes your company (or website) better or different from your competitors. You’ve figured out your USP. Now, you need to package that USP up and exchange it for links. Let’s take a really basic example; a successful blogger like Glenn Allsopp. He figured out that one of his USPs was writing kick-ass pieces of content. So he decided to do some guest posting (please read his awesome guide to guest posting). When you boil it down, all a guest post is at the end of the day is a little mini-partnership between two bloggers.
Let’s look at a slightly bigger picture example. Let’s say you’re running a website with data on local pubs and bars. Let’s call this website BeerMoz.com. Now they look hard at the competition and figure out that more or less everyone has the same data, but their USP is in packaging up the data in nice Web 2.0 ways while their competitors are stuck in Web 1.0 swamps. One of the consequences is that BeerMoz has some kick-ass widgets. These widgets let you see the top rated pubs and bars in your area. Awesome linkbuilding-sauce. However, they don’t just stop there, here’s the clever part - Beermoz take their widgets and create partnerships with other local data providers.
What does this partnership look like? Well it looks a little like regular users embedding a widget only it’s done on a much larger scale. Take a camping website (say TentMoz.com) who has local data on campsites, they’re interested in jazzing up their campsite pages by displaying the best pubs to drink in nearby. This data is provided by BeerMoz and there’s a link back to BeerMoz via their widget.
This one partnership nets BeerMoz hundreds if not thousands of links. Admittedly it’s only from one domain so the value of those links tails off but they’re still great links to have - ideally to inner pages too (if the widget is set up correctly to point at individual pubs).
While it’s not going to bring any classical SEO benefit, consider Twitter’s partnerships with Google and Bing. These are exactly the kinds of deals that (done with anyone not a search engine) nets you some really strong links.
How To Find The Partnerships
Once you’ve come up with the concept, finding a website to partner with can often take just a little extra creative thinking. Often a good place to explore are those people who compete with you in the rankings but are not direct business competitors. For example, look at the people who rank for "SEO Tools" - you’ve got a mixture of sites actually offering their own SEO Tools but also blogs writing about SEO tools.
The hard part, however, is often getting to talk to the right people at the company once you’ve identified them. This is where having some business development experience comes in very handy. This stage of getting to talk to the right people, saying the right things and bargaining like a pro is something that business development people are very good at and I strongly recommend that you consider giving a little bit of SEO training to one of these people rather than trying to teach these skills to an SEO.
If you’re struggling however, consider reading a sales book to get some ideas of how best to speak to the right people and say the things they want to hear. Also - consider using LinkedIn as a resource to find contacts or get introductions at a company that you’re aiming for. Leveraging your personal network for an introduction can be the most effective way of getting a warm lead in these situations - twitter has saved my bacon more than once. Mmmm bacon.
Closing The Deal
Once you’re into the detail of negotiating the partnership there’s a few tips and things to bear in mind. Firstly, remember that you likely have more assets than the one you’re offering. For example, consider throwing into the negotiations some free exposure in your email newsletter or some twitter love for some of their content. Try and figure out what it is that drives their online presence and offer them something that helps it.
Here’s a story that my Dad loves to tell - many years ago (likely pre-internet!) he had a small dingy (like a small boat if dingy doesn’t translate to the US folks) and was trying to sell it. He advertised in the local paper for a few months at a really reasonable price but got zero responses. It appeared people just weren’t interested. Frustrated he decided to advertise again, but this time with a price tag several times what he was advertising it at before. Instantly he had several enquiries and sold it almost over night.
What we can learn about this story is that often attaching a price tag to something makes it’s perceived value go up. If you think about it, there’s no real reason for this to be true but nevertheless it’s how us simple predictable humans work. So why not open these negotiations by trying to SELL them your USP? If your USP is genuinely valuable then there’s no reason that you can’t sell it to them. Couch it in terms of licensing, or syndication of data. As discussions progress you can gradually start to talk about removing the price tag if they’ll only link to you in return for giving them this data. Boom! They see what you’re offering as valuable, they think they’re getting a steal and you get your links. (BTW - I wonder if this is technically buying links? I’m sure Google would never penalise you for it but it’s an interesting hypothetical example…)
Reciprocal Linking Isn’t Dead
If you’re struggling to really stand out from the crowd or don’t have a USP to talk of then firstly you have bigger problems than not enough links!! But secondly, consider reciprocal linking. Yes, yes I know I’ll probably get shouted at in the comments but reciprocal linking done between trusted sites on a manual level from pages without large numbers of external links is a GOOD THING. There, I said it. So consider negotiating some reciprocal links from strong sites. A few things to bear in mind:
- You want to carefully consider what you’re offering and to who you offer it. There’s only so many of these that you want to put in place so make sure they’re high quality.
- Don’t link to their pages which link to yours. Try and spread it around a little.
- Try not to create site-wide links. These are generally a bad idea. A smaller number of strong links will trump sitewide links every time.
What experiences have you had using partnerships for link building? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Diagnosing Google Crawl Allowance Using Webmaster Tools & Excel
Posted by Tom_C
There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ - it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge - all you need is:
- A verified Google webmaster central account
- Google Analytics
- Excel
If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Lurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).
Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.
Step 1 - Download the internal links
Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:
Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":
This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note - for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).
Step 2 - Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics
This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics - go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.
Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).
Step 3 - Put both sets of data in excel
Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel - I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:
Step 4 - Vlookup ftw
Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:
Note - that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.
Step 5 - Categorise your urls
Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:
If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.
Step 6 - Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness
Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:
It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:
And:
Step 7 - Combine the two pivots
Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:
Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.
Conclusions
25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic
So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight - afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.
Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic - Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.
Using Bespoke Products & Services To Build Links
Posted by Tom_C
I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I’m just nice like that.
This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:
- Antiques dealers
- Bespoke interior decorators
- Painters
- Bespoke aquarium builders
- Photographers
- Landscape gardners
If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:
"When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items."
A Real Life Example
Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it’s a win-win
Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped "bespoke aquarium builders" into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company - they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about:
Pretty aren’t they?
Anyway - while you’re all drooling over the nice pretty fish I’m going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn’t have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn’t going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer’s house, and he doesn’t even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO have websites and would provide valuable links.
Remember To Add Value
When building a link building campaign however you should always remember that you’ll get more links if you can add value to the linker. Therefore I don’t suggest that Aquarium Architecture simply ask for a link. Instead, I’d recommend that as part of the process a case study is built on the site for each new client which shows off photos of the aquarium along with making-of shots and/or design sketches. They’ve already done this to a limited extent as you can see here:
So now, not only do Aquarium Architecture have a direct and intimate relationship with their clients but they also have now built some content on their site which the client has a motivation to link back to. If you were building this process for an antiques website instead of an aquariums website you might want to include the history of the particular antique item on the case study page. These kinds of case study pages can be really high value and are a natural place for the client to link to. Not to mention the fact that you’re building out website content all the time to help long-tail rankings and you’re constantly adding testimonials which will help conversion rates. Win-win-win!
Or, Alternatively, Why Not Make Some News?
Of course, manually building links is hard work, even when you have a process like above. Therefore you might also want to consider taking some of the more unusual/remarkable/impressive contracts and craft a news story out of it. Again, the Aquarium Architecture guys did this well (again, nothing that Distilled was involved with):
The above story appeared in the Daily Express in the UK and is a fine example of the kind of linkbait that you can create when you have products of such a unique and high-value nature. Unfortunately in the above example Aquarium Architecture didn’t get a link out of the story but there are plenty of ways you can go about getting links from this kind of thing.
Key Takeaways
So I completely understand that not all clients or websites will be able to do this kind of thing but hopefully even if you can’t follow this exact process you can gain some insights into how you might build a process into your existing business practices to help your company build links.
Using Bespoke Products & Services To Build Links
Posted by Tom_C
I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I’m just nice like that.
This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:
- Antiques dealers
- Bespoke interior decorators
- Painters
- Bespoke aquarium builders
- Photographers
- Landscape gardners
If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:
"When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items."
A Real Life Example
Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it’s a win-win
Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped "bespoke aquarium builders" into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company - they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about:
Pretty aren’t they?
Anyway - while you’re all drooling over the nice pretty fish I’m going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn’t have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn’t going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer’s house, and he doesn’t even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO have websites and would provide valuable links.
Remember To Add Value
When building a link building campaign however you should always remember that you’ll get more links if you can add value to the linker. Therefore I don’t suggest that Aquarium Architecture simply ask for a link. Instead, I’d recommend that as part of the process a case study is built on the site for each new client which shows off photos of the aquarium along with making-of shots and/or design sketches. They’ve already done this to a limited extent as you can see here:
So now, not only do Aquarium Architecture have a direct and intimate relationship with their clients but they also have now built some content on their site which the client has a motivation to link back to. If you were building this process for an antiques website instead of an aquariums website you might want to include the history of the particular antique item on the case study page. These kinds of case study pages can be really high value and are a natural place for the client to link to. Not to mention the fact that you’re building out website content all the time to help long-tail rankings and you’re constantly adding testimonials which will help conversion rates. Win-win-win!
Or, Alternatively, Why Not Make Some News?
Of course, manually building links is hard work, even when you have a process like above. Therefore you might also want to consider taking some of the more unusual/remarkable/impressive contracts and craft a news story out of it. Again, the Aquarium Architecture guys did this well (again, nothing that Distilled was involved with):
The above story appeared in the Daily Express in the UK and is a fine example of the kind of linkbait that you can create when you have products of such a unique and high-value nature. Unfortunately in the above example Aquarium Architecture didn’t get a link out of the story but there are plenty of ways you can go about getting links from this kind of thing.
Key Takeaways
So I completely understand that not all clients or websites will be able to do this kind of thing but hopefully even if you can’t follow this exact process you can gain some insights into how you might build a process into your existing business practices to help your company build links.
Applying Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto to SEO
Posted by Tom_C
This post was inspired by Rand. If I’m honest, I’m not sure how many of my posts aren’t inspired by Rand… Specifically however it was this tweet which set the wheels in motion (if ever so slowly):
The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes - freakonomics
been shown to increase safety, save lives and make millions. Atul Gawande is a surgeon and has worked hard to get checklists implemented in the medical profession to help save lives. He’s written a book about these checklists called The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). If you want to read more about these fascinating checklists and their incredible power I suggest you check out the FT link above or click here to read this New Yorker article written by Atul Gawande himself. Also, be sure to check out a sample from one of the medical checklists.
That said, this is the internet age - why should we be forced to read anything at all when we can instead get all the knowledge we need through a short and catch video clip? Well, here’s the short and catchy video clip of John Stewart’s interview with Atul Gawande on The Daily Show (sorry, only available to US viewers I’m afraid - c’mon guys get your act together. I can watch the show in the UK, why can’t I watch clips online from the UK?):
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Atul Gawande | ||||
|
||||
As you have probably guessed by now, I was inspired by all of this to apply some of this checklist theory to our SEO projects. The main idea being that while we all know what to do - sometimes we forget to do some of the basics and by having a simple checklist at hand we can make sure we don’t miss anything out. There are obviously lots of different areas of SEO that this would apply to (and other areas - I think it’d work great for PPC) but I’ve chosen to focus on new projects. Below is a checklist that I am in the process of implementing at Distilled for any new SEO project which comes on board. I anticipate that it’s still useful for in-house folks too when launching a new site or project. I welcome your feedback and thoughts on this work in progress!
SEO Project Kickoff Checklist
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Is billing set up? - This is useful to ensure that not only is the client in the system and set up for billing but that the project has actually transitioned from sales to operations. It’s also essential to check here that the SEO team knows how much the client is paying.
Is the project in the project management system? - This is a no-brainer (like all the things on the list!) but useful to ensure that you can keep track of the project. In addition it’s important to ensure client contact details are stored there.
Introduce all team members - Ensure anyone within the company who’s working with this client has sat down and knows what everyone else is doing. This is especially important if the client is paying for multiple services such as PPC, Web Development, SEO etc.
Do you know which URL you’re working on? - Often you’ll start work for a company but that business may own many different sections and URLs. Which one are you working on?
What is a conversion? - Whether goal tracking is set up or not in analytics it’s crucial to understand what a conversion is and how much that conversion is worth to the business.
Do you have access to analytics & webmaster central? - SEO without data is like the winter olympics without snow. Ensure you have access to the data from the very start.
Check for irregularities - validating analytics data can be a complete piece of work sometimes, that’s not what I mean here. What I mean here is just a quick sense-check that the site ranks for it’s own name, that analytics data vaguely ties up with rankings, PPC traffic isn’t appearing in analytics as organic etc.
Benchmark current data - The three data points I think it’s useful to benchmark (that you can’t go back and check later) are: 1) Link metrics (my favourite are DA and PA) - it’s useful to store a copy of linkscape somewhere too, 2) A count of indexed pages (yes, I know this is sometimes wildly inaccurate but it’s still worth noting down), 3) A snapshot of rankings for the top 20 keyphrases (full rank tracking/analysis can be set up later in the project).
Has a kickoff meeting with the client been scheduled? - And does the client know who their contact is within the SEO team.