Posted by Adria Saracino

This article consists of part selling content marketing, and part how to actually create a content campaign. However, at a more Meta level, it's also about the idea of "how to be good at getting what you want." If you want your boss to care about content marketing, you need to know how to pitch it right.

Like everything in business, from sales to link building, "selling an idea" is all about persuasive speech and delivery. However, if persuasion doesn't come naturally to you, how do you formulate a pitch that will be sticky and affect change?

I'm not here to give vague, unhelpful advice like "be persuasive," "give solid delivery," or some other abstract concept that is difficult to act upon. Rather, I will do my best to give you an actionable, step-by-step formula to constructing an effective pitch and convincing your boss that content marketing is the answer to your online business woes.  

Whether you're selling content marketing to the C-Suite, your manager, a client, or even trying to convince yourself, here is everything you need to make a compelling argument and be on your way to content marketing success.

Step 1: Paint a story

Think of some of the best advertising campaigns you can recall. I get chills every time the Kellogg's Special-K commercials come on and they end it with the simple phrase, "What will you gain when you lose?" Genius in one simple question.

Just like Kellogg's stays top of mind by getting viewers to think about the flip side of weight loss, you need to paint a story and deliver an overarching vision in which the decision makers can relate if you want them to support you throughout the process.

Tom Critchlow once told me to "voice a vision" and I literally walked away baffled because it was so non-actionable that I wanted to rampage. However, now being on the other side, I'm going to say this "story painting" part is the most abstract piece of the "making-your-boss-care" puzzle because at the end of the day, each story will differ depending on the company. Since you have more intimate knowledge of the brand than I ever will, this story-painting task lies in your creative ability to succinctly develop a vision for your company.

All this being said, I can provide some tricks for developing your story:

• What is the brand message? If there is a PR team, ask. No sense painting a new vision that doesn't align. If not, start thinking about what you know about your customers and brainstorming why they chose your brand over another. What is your brand's USP? Sales and FAQ pages could be invaluable here. You could even bribe the social media manager to throw a question out on Facebook and see what responses you get.

PRO TIP: Send out an email asking all (or a group) of employees to put into an Excel doc words that come to mind when they think of your brand. Throw it into Wordle to create a word cloud to help with brainstorming. You could also add words from the Facebook responses from customers if you ended up bribing your social manager.

• Can you re-position the conversation? Just like Kellogg's, Taco Bell re-positioned the conversation in its market with the tagline "Think Outside the Bun." It was in the market of burger joint vs. burger joint, but instead of comparing itself to the competition by creating more noise about "fast food" and "sandwich-like" options, Taco Bell re-positioned the conversation to "us vs. them."

Can you focus the conversation on another angle in your market? Think about your competition and what all of the marketing noise sounds like. How can you differentiate your message?

• If you're not a natural storyteller, find someone who is. I personally am hit or miss with storytelling, so I often go to Lexi Mills or Ron Garrett for this skill. The bonus to getting someone else invested in the vision is that it becomes an opportunity to recruit more advocates of content marketing. Think of it as a mini coup, as there is strength in numbers.

• Google it. Hey, if you're not a great storyteller look to see what other people are saying. I just did to make sure I wasn't missing anything and found some great resources on storytelling for marketing.

Remember: decision makers need to see, understand, and be on board with your vision if you want to truly get their buy in. Sell the vision and you're on your way to getting the resources you need to get there.

Step 2: Match it with specific goals

I'll make it easy for you. There's only one real goal: conversions. All other "goals" are really just means to this one end. You're in business, so all goals should end in the monies. Any other goal you think of (links, rankings, domain authority, etc.) will be a short-term checkpoint to reaching the end of the race and improving conversions.

Your long-term goal should be the first thing you pitch: "I want to make us more money." Perfect; you got their attention and are speaking in their terms. Now, how do you get specific and create a road map of short-term-goal measurement "checkpoints" to show you are coming to the pitch with solutions and not just fanciful stories?

Remember, it's about painting a story. You want to go all Memento on them. Start with the end of the story (end goal = more money) and then flash back to the beginning – give them a high-level snapshot of your company's current performance.

For current performance: Usually a few key graphs and specific metrics in areas where the company is under-performing will be enough. If you can pair it with some competitive research, such as "so-and-so is dominating the search results," that will most likely help. The key is to not get caught up in minutia and to talk big picture. Don't say, "We are getting a high bounce rate on this one page and I think it's important to build content to improve it." You want the conversation to sound more like, "I audited our site and saw there are over 30 pages in which we're getting X-significant-amount-of-traffic and it has a 100% bounce rate, which is costing us approximately $ X a year."

For future goals: Again, you want to think bigger picture and not get caught up in the minutia. You definitely don't want to say, "I'm going to make a piece of linkbait that's going to get us a lot of links." Business leaders don't think in links, they think in money so start leveling up your language.

Content marketing isn't a string of piecemeal linkbait. It is aligning content with a company's customer funnel to make sure the brand is at top-of-mind throughout the purchasing path. Thus, your pitch should sound more like this, "To improve our organic traffic by X% and bring in $ X more a year, we need to dominate the SERPs for keywords relevant to our customers' purchasing behavior. To get here, we need to do X, Y, and Z."

Below, we'll talk more about the recipe for developing a content strategy which, depending on your company's specific performance, you can most likely plug into this part of the pitch for the X, Y, and Z variables. Also, I really loved Jay Baer's presentation at Content Marketing World on the four different types of metrics.

Step 3: Pair the vision + goals with the benefits

Kane Jamison of Content Harmony and I were shooting emails back and forth in preparation for our meet-up on content marketing in March, and he explained the core benefit of content marketing so well:

"Tangential/viral campaigns have to be justified to the client like this:

'Well, viral may results in links/social, which may result in domain authority and may result in ranking improvements across the domain, but if it fails then we don't have much to show for it.'

That can be too much of a stretch for a client to get on board with. Aligning the content you produce with the client's sales funnel sidestep that. The discussion turns into this:

'Well, if it goes viral, then we win the internet, but if it doesn't go viral then it's still great for X, Y, & Z business goals, and you can continue promoting it long in to the future.'"

If you have inquisitive management, they are going to start coming at you with questions and rebuttals trying to say what your team is currently doing is enough. Kane's reasoning will be enough explanation for most, but counteract any serious dubiousness with a list of reasons why content marketing is beneficial. You know your boss best, so you can read whether or not you'll need to dive into this in detail or just have it ready, but it's always good to pepper some of these into your pitch.

I wrote an article on aligning content marketing with the customer funnel that had some of these benefits, but here is an expanded list:

It's safer and actually strategic

Frankly, if a piece of content doesn't go viral, you have a backup plan if you align content to the broader marketing goal and message.

As Kane mentioned, "viral" content pieces on tangential topics put a lot of strain on the outreachers to deliver links and shares. However, creating sharable content that is also relevant to the top of your company's funnel can make sure you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. If it doesn't go "viral," it could still have other benefits, such as ranking for a relevant term, being used by the sales team, and so on. This is called diversifying your link building plan.

In addition, if you build content around broader PR or social media efforts, you are now integrating campaigns – economies of scale for content marketing. This makes sure you are leaving no stone unturned and capitalizing on all the potential business wins possible.

EXAMPLE: If the social team is hosting a huge contest, is there an opportunity to create relevant content onsite that has the opportunity to rank for keywords relevant to your funnel?

Creates a flywheel

Content marketing is a COO's operational dream. Over time, it creates a flywheel for efficient content creation. No endless cycle of "think of epic idea, build it, outreach it, repeat." Instead, you are front loading the research and planning to create a long term road map that follows a strategic set of creative parameters. 

In addition to the internal flywheel, content following a strategic plan can also market itself over time, eliminating the need to keep promoting it manually. For example, if the content targets a low-competition keyword that has decent volume, it can start ranking well on its own. If it's a topic a lot of other authors write about, when they are researching they could use your content. Furthermore, since users are search heavy during decision making, it's bringing new potential customers to your site all by itself. If you create content regularly enough, people can come to expect it and start coming to your site to see what you will launch next. All of these are examples of how content can become a snowball effect of wins with little to no redundant work.

Provides consistent user experience

This is the benefit I am personally most passionate about because, at the end of the day, your customers are who matter most. If you are creating inconsistent, tangential content to target who I call the gatekeepers, you run the risk of confusing your customers and irreparably damaging your brand's trust factor. Here's an easy rule to follow: all content you create should make sense as coming from your brand. No zombie infographics if you are an insurance company. No cat memes if you are a travel company. Keep it relevant and consistent. I have another version of #RCS: Relevant, Consistent Shit.

Captures long-term traffic

I used this image in my last post and I'm going to use it again because it's so relevant: content that is relevant to your customer funnel builds traffic over time. Unless they are searching for zombie apocalypse equipment, no one is searching for keywords around your zombie infographic. It will not gain long-term traffic unless you keep pushing it.

However, if you create content that you know targets a topic heavily searched, you could see results like this:

Step 4: Demonstrate potential results with examples

Keep up the storytelling theme by ideally having both good and bad examples to represent the hero and the villain. We are hardwired to connect with storytelling, so it can be difficult for decision makers to resist rooting for the good guys. You want to subtly paint this good vs. bad picture by choosing the right examples. The best "bad" examples usually hit home when they are your own company's work, but just remember to be tactful when talking about the negatives.

Here are some good examples for you to use. Note, I am showing these because I have access to how the campaigns did and the results are what you need to show your boss this stuff works. There's a lot of really, really cool content marketing going on out there, and I encourage you to follow up with the companies that are doing them to see if you can get some case studies on the results.

"The Small Business Champions"

Mackenzie Fogelson just talked about them in her building community value post. They even wrote a post explaining their campaign and the results. They might be all over the place, but I'm going to say it again because it has such clear results you can show your boss (remember: show, don't tell) – the team over at Simply Business is onto something with this whole content marketing thing.

I'll let you read the post over at CMI that goes into more depth, but essentially SB developed a brand message to become "the small business champion." As such, it decided to create content around common roadblocks businesses face – successfully navigating all the backend mumbo jumbo around operations. Things like being more efficient, installing and using Google Analytics, hiring your first employee…anything and everything that frustrates business owners.

The results*:

• Moved to 1^st or 2^nd position in SERPs for head key terms
• Ranking for top-of-funnel keywords
• 6% higher first-visit-to-buy conversions
• Improved customer retention by 30%

* Pulled from Simply Business' CMI post linked above

Platform for #SocialSuccess

Kieran Flanagan revealed the results to Salesforce's #SocialSuccess content marketing campaign on Moz last year. Similar to Simply Business above, Salesforce identified its brand message, "Get Found," and embarked on a journey to pull new potential customers into its funnel by creating content around social media issues its tools address.

The result was a #SocialSuccess section of the Salesforce site that included a variety of rich media around social media topics, including interviews with experts and eBooks.

The results*:

• Traffic for launch month up 80% YoY
• Traffic from social sites up 2500%
• 6500 newsletter signups
• 10,000 eBook downloads (and thus 10K leads)
• An ongoing platform for content marketing – Salesforce is still killing it today with #SocialSuccess-themed content

* Pulled from Kieran's SEOmoz post linked above

Step 5: Outline a "bird's eye view" plan

Don't plague them with the minutia. It's generally a fixed plan with concrete steps no matter the business.  It's only four real steps with some mini actions in between: research, compile, execute, analyze (RCEA – management loves acronyms, right?).

Note: I am going into more detail for each of these sections so you know what it is and have a starting point for when you get to the execution part. You don't need to include all this detail in your pitch!

Before you begin: Talk to other teams. You would not believe how many companies silo their teams and waste time, money, and efficiency repeating processes. One of these processes is understanding the customer. Someone in your company might already be an expert, so don't duplicate the work to find out yourself!

If you don't have anyone to talk to or a team that did one of the below steps, here is an overview of the type of functions you will need to perform to create a content marketing plan from the ground up.

Research

Benchmark audit

Look through all of the company's back-end analytics to get a clear picture of its current performance. You want to find out the answers to questions like:

• What is traffic pattern like? Any seasonality?
• What pages were visited most?
• What is the typical visitor flow?
• What pages get the most conversions?
• Where do visitors spend the most time?
• What are the bounce rates, particularly for high volume pages?
• How long goes the visitor typically stay on the site?
• How did they get to the site?
• What are the predominant referring keywords?
• Any interesting mobile vs. web data?

I call this a "benchmark" audit because you should also be taking out key metrics as the baseline you will compare all future performance to in order to determine ROI of your efforts. While you are doing this, keep in the back of your mind that you will need to develop a way to track all future content goals you develop. 

Talk to your customers

From the benchmark audit, you will probably start seeing visitor patterns in which you can draw conclusions around customer behavior. However, you cannot go solely off this data because it's usually muddled with a large number of potential and failed customers. 

Instead, pair these metric-driven insights with more thorough market research: talking to your customers. I wrote an article on how to develop personas, so I won't dive into it in detail here, but this is arguably the most important piece to making #RCS content: you need to know who you are creating it for! Conduct surveys, hold focus groups, do in-depth interviews, etc.; the more info you can gather, the better you will be able to develop clear customer stories.

Keyword research

This is so, so important because if you want to earn those long-term traffic benefits, you need to make sure your content aligns with phrase people are actually using as they search. The key here though is to focus on keywords THROUGHOUT the funnel. This is the number one task I see all SEOs struggle with – they are hardwired to only focus on the conversion, bottom-of-the-funnel-terms. If you are planning for a content piece around "buy X online" and think it will go viral or is even worth outreach time, you are sorely mistaken.

The key here is to dive into research by asking yourself questions as if you were searching yourself. You need to understand the search intent to be epic at more top-of-funnel keyword research. This is a pretty good article on the topic, and there are plenty of tools out there to aid creativity. Also, Kieran Flanagan gets it. Just remember, a winning content strategy is aimed at getting new customers into the funnel at all levels; don't miss the opportunity to get people in at the top.

PRO TIP: Like above when brainstorming your brand message, when you get a pretty good keyword list, throw it into Wordle after cutting out the redundant terms to get a word cloud that shows the most dominantly searched topic for your funnel. This will help get the content creative juices flowing later.

Content audit

This is essentially taking inventory of all the content on your site so you can conduct a content gap analysis. I wrote an article on conducting a content audit, but the specifics might change a bit depending on your needs. For example, you might stick to just the quantitative parts (pulling metrics) and only assessing qualitatively the content that has gregariously inconsistent metrics (such as tons of traffic, high bounce rate).

Compile

Bring all the pieces together and define goals

I'll keep this part short and sweet. Once you have all the above pieces:

• Create your customer personas
• Address any outlandish technical woes you found during benchmark audit
• Identify key areas on your site that you need to repurpose content based off findings from benchmark audit
• Figure out what content you are missing based off your content gap analysis and keyword research
• Prioritize keywords
• Start prioritizing areas to focus your content
• Clearly define measurable short and long-term goals

Create an editorial calendar

Once you are done prioritizing your areas to focus on, start brainstorming and filling in the editorial calendar (aka long-term project plan). Depending on factors like whether or not you have a blog, you might need to create a more detailed editorial calendar to keep your daily content creators focused. The key is to plan out all your content so you only have to focus on execution – this is the starting point of that flywheel.

Make sure you have the brand message, standards, and tracking in place

Remember the importance of a consistent user experience? You want to keep it consistent not only through the topics you cover but also the style in which you write. Remember that brand message you developed? All content should definitely align with that. Remember those personas? All of your content should definitely target one persona each.

In addition, make sure you are aligned with your brand/editorial standards that the wider company uses. If there isn't one, make one. This covers things like grammar, voice, on-page SEO considerations, blog theme style, etc.

PRO TIP: You also need governance standards – trust me, the bigger the organization, the crazier it can get. You want to clearly define dependencies early. This includes answers to questions like what is the editorial review workflow, who owns getting it through each stage, and what are the engagement standards?

Lastly, remember I mentioned during the benchmark audit to start thinking about how you can track goals? By now, you should have goals clearly defined. Make sure you implement any necessary backend tracking so you can start measuring and comparing to those benchmarks right away.

Execute

Easy – get 'er done. Start creating the content and launching.

Assess

After each larger content piece, you should be assessing how it did. However, you should also plan on assessing long term and conducting a content inventory of this new content (just like the content audit, just smaller scale and more outcomes focused). This is where you will really see the ROI of all your efforts. Check out this great article on measuring content marketing.

Step 6: Manage those expectations

Just like with everything else, you need to give due diligence to managing your boss' expectations. There are a ton of resources out there around effectively managing expectations, which takes practice. However, some key components include:

• Be honest – content marketing is front loaded, long term, but smart business
• Give clear deadlines – and meet them
• Involve the right people from the start

Step 7: Demand greatness

You're almost done. One key component to a successful content marketing program is to ensure everyone is on board and the key decision makers are all in. If they aren't, it will cause unnecessary roadblocks down the road, like cross-team conflict and lack of required resources.

Thus, before beginning, you need to demand greatness. This may be a conversation for after the initial pitch, but it is important. You can't let your decision makers half-ass their commitment to the program; they are either all in, or you're not proceeding. In addition, you need to clearly and consistently voice that there is a right way to do content marketing. Remember, this isn't a plan for putting together a string of irrelevant linkbait pieces.

Step 8: Deliver

If you had to sell the idea in the first place – you better deliver. If you make mistakes, own up to them and devise a solution for how to fix them.

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Whew! There is your eight-step program to selling and delivering a content marketing plan. Hopefully you walk away with your boss caring, but if not, keep at it and consider shipping a smaller version of it anyway. Sometimes you need to show those results to get buy in because it puts them in terms they definitely understand: their own business success.

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Posted by David Mihm

It’s obviously not uncommon for small businesses to move — fluctuating rents, growth, lifestyle concerns for the business owner or employees, and any number of factors make good reasons to move. However, few business owners understand the Local Search headaches they may be creating for themselves or their customers as a result of a move.

Celia Bell, Assistant Director of SCORE’s Austin chapter, is currently experiencing some of those headaches and sent me an email last week to ask for my advice on how to alleviate them. Given her essential help with Local University Austin next week, it was the least I could do to respond. The problem Celia’s having is so common, though, that I thought I’d just turn my advice into a blog post/case study.

The situation

SCORE is a nationwide volunteer-driven non-profit organization that mentors small business owners and prospective entrepreneurs in 340 markets across the country. Each of its chapters operates relatively independently from a physical location, with significant support from the parent organization — not unlike a typical commercial franchise or chain-store model.

SCORE’s Austin chapter recently moved to a location about eight miles northwest of its old local headquarters. Unfortunately, Google was displaying its former headquarters right on the main search result for “SCORE Austin,” and SCORE clients were actually visiting the old address for meetings and workshops. (In fairness to Google, other search engines were confused as well, though not quite to the same extent.)

 

The goal of this exercise: Ensure all prominent web, mobile, and app search results display only the current, proper information for the SCORE chapter.

Getting started

SCORE’s volunteer webmaster only increased her frustration level by attempting to edit the group's Google Plus Local page over and over again, with nothing to show for it. Sadly, I suspect many business owners (and marketing agencies) go through the same process, with equally unsatisfying results. I hope that this guide yields more success and helps explain why the process must be more comprehensive than just a quick edit at Google.

The reason that simply correcting misinformation about your business at Google does not solve the problem is that Google's Local index pulls in business data from a nearly-infinite number of sources across the web. Some of these are more authoritative than others (such as those provided by Localeze, Infogroup, and Acxiom–see below), but a business owner's verified listing is only one source of this data. If all you're doing is updating your Google+ Local Page, you're going to continue to see problems because "new" erroneous data will constantly feed into Google from all of its other sources.

Assessing the damage

One of the central tenets of local search engine optimization is to ensure that your business’s Name, Address, and Phone number, NAP for short, is consistent everywhere it’s mentioned around the web (and offline, too). Your NAP is basically your digital thumbprint — Google’s unique identifier for an individual business.

When you move locations, you create an inconsistency in the A of your NAP. Sadly, there’s no “301 redirect” or “forward location” command that you can give the local search engines, similar to what you can file with the U.S. Postal Service. Google, Bing, and others can't identify your new NAP as belonging to the same business. In the best case, inconsistencies lead to lower search engine rankings for keyword searches you want to rank for. But in the worst case (SCORE’s), not even customers who are specifically looking for your business can find you! So, unfortunately, it's up to you to update this information yourself.

The first thing I did was to run an Accuracy Report on GetListed for both SCORE's old and new NAP information. I wanted to see which search engines had indexed which location(s), and in what manner.

Incorrect (Old) NAP: SCORE Austin 3809 S 2nd St Austin, TX 78704 (512) 928-2425

Correct (New) NAP: SCORE Austin 5524 Bee Cave Rd., Building M Austin, TX  78746 (512) 928-2425

Running this report provided three key insights:

1) SCORE’s phone number did not change during the move.

2) Their business name is actually an acronym for “Service Corps Of Retired Executives” — which is how they’re listed on four of the most prominent local search engines:

US Score-Services Corps of Retired (Google)
US SCORE-SVC CORPS OF RETIRED (Infogroup)
US Score-Svc Corps of Retired (YP.com)
Service Corps of RTRD Exctvs Assctn (Nokia)

3) SCORE recently implemented a nationwide effort to unify branding across all of its chapters–moving from an older strategy of each chapter operating its own unique website (scoreaustin.org, e.g.) to giving each chapter its own subdomain on the national website (austin.score.org).

Item #1 is a major advantage over many small businesses who move locations — a constant phone number means that Google and other search engines should be able to verify changes much more quickly. Item #2 is a disadvantage, since neither the old NAP or new NAP is 100% clean. This will mean multiple rounds of clean up. Item #3 may be a disadvantage depending on the email address in which SCORE’s Google Plus Local pages are claimed.

The cleanup process

After running your Accuracy Report, go back to Google and perform a search, where your query is any combination of incorrect/old NAP information. Make note of the webpages that Google returns near the top of its rankings, as Google is likely pulling data from most of these sites. I find it useful to keep track of this information on an Excel or Google Spreadsheet, from a task management standpoint.

You can also click through to any Plus Pages returned by these searches. If you're lucky, sometimes Google will even tell you a few of the sites they are pulling this information from towards the bottom of those pages. In SCORE's case, Citysearch was a very important site feeding Google bad information.

You should also search Google Maps for out-of-date information. Once you do, click the little triangular drop-down button and select "Report a problem" at the bottom of the list. On the report a problem screen, correct any misinformation and explain to Google why you are requesting the change (i.e. you've moved!).

Pay special attention to the bottom of the webpages where your information is incorrect. Many of these are local directory sites where you will be able to update the information yourself--but they, in turn, may be getting this misinformation from another source. Good examples of this in SCORE's case were sites like this one for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser — a newspaper that was not even in SCORE's market — which was supplied with data by both Local.com and Acxiom.

In addition to fixing your data on these local directories, you'll want to fix it on sites that supply them with this data. These sites are Acxiom, Infogroup (ExpressUpdateUSA) and Localeze. Together, these are the three most important business data providers to Google, and if you want to update your old information permanently, you'll need to update it at all three of these sites. These companies also feed most major mobile apps like Facebook Nearby, Foursquare, and Apple Maps.

After searching Google and Google Maps, reporting problems directly, and keeping note of all of their erroneous data sources, you'll want to check one more site that Google operates: Google MapMaker. Think of MapMaker as a Wikipedia for locations. Google users from all of the world can add, edit, delete, and consolidate business information using this tool. For the most part, each edit is reviewed by other Google users before it goes live to the public.  

Not many business owners (or even marketers, for that matter) know about MapMaker, but it seems to have become a very important element in Google's business data cluster over the last few years, and it can be very helpful in cleaning up out-of-date information. Remember the "Report a problem" step above? My understanding is that that process actually feeds into the MapMaker community, but I've found that edits requested directly in MapMaker sometimes get processed more quickly than "reported problems."

To request an edit, simply click the "Edit" link under any incorrect listing for your business on MapMaker, update your information, and tell the community why you are asking for a change (i.e. your business has moved!).

Whew! This all seems a little complicated. As I said above, though, keeping track of all of the sites where you're listed incorrectly via an Excel or Google Spreadsheet can make things a lot simpler.  

Most of these major data sources for Google allow you to update information on out-of-date listings by creating a free account. Note: it's important to UPDATE old, out-of-date listings rather than create new ones. Just creating new, correct ones won't make the old, incorrect ones go away. During the course of your research, you may also find some independently-operated sites (such as local libraries or chambers of commerce), where you'll just have to reach out via email or by placing a phone call.

In my spreadsheet, I typically enter the profile page along with username, email address, and password information for each major data source on its own line. I then make a note of the last time I "touched" each listing and any notes that will help me remember special treatment for each.  

It's a best practice to choose a generic email address for your business (something like frontdesk@mybusiness.com) rather than a personal one (doglover@yahoo.com), so that future employees or agencies will be able to log in and update your information without you giving away any personal details.

Frustratingly, even though this is 2013 and this is the INTERNET, it typically takes 2-3 months for all of these updates to flow through the Local Ecosystem. So you may continue to see incorrect information showing up at Google while it assimilates all of these changes. If you've followed the process above, however, you should see a permanent update of your information at Google and other major search engines and mobile apps.

N.B. #1 I realize this guide is U.S.-Centric, and here on the SEOmoz Blog we have many international users. Over the course of the Spring, I'll be releasing Local Search Ecosystems for a number of major search markets around the world, including the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Brasil. I already released the Canadian Ecosystem last year.  Although the data aggregators that feed Google vary across the world, the same process can be followed in other countries.

N.B. #2 I realize the additional step of querying Google and Google Maps for out-of-date NAP information seems unnecessary and duplicative, given what GetListed.org is designed to do. We are currently working on surfacing this information much more efficiently within the next version of GetListed, so stay tuned!

Fixing bad data across the Local Search ecosystem: The Cliffs Notes Version

1) Search Google.com and Maps.Google.com for your business name and city.
1a) In this era of increasing mobile engagement, you may also want to check Apple Maps or other primary mobile applications.

2) Run an Accuracy Report on GetListed.org for both correct and incorrect information returned by Google.

3) Search Google.com for your incorrect NAP. 

4) From your Google.com searches and GetListed.org Accuracy Report, keep track of major data sources that list your information incorrectly in an Excel or Google Spreadsheet.

5) Search Google Maps for your incorrect NAP and "Report a problem" for any listing that is incorrect. 

6) Visit Infogroup, Localeze, and Acxiom to check for out-of-date information.

7) Create accounts on major search engines and update incorrect listings.

8) Search Google MapMaker for your incorrect NAP.  Make edits as needed for any listing that is incorrect. 

9) Keep track of your accounts and your progress in an Excel or Google Spreadsheet.

Other great resources for helping you move locations digitally

• Marking Your Place as Closed or Moved from the Google Places for Business Help Section
• Google Support Guru Joel Headley on the best way to move your business
• Moving? No Need for Your Local Search Ranking to Suffer (VIUS)
• 31 Places to Change Your Business Address (Outspoken Media)
• Closing an Old Google Local Listing vs Editing It (NGS Marketing)
• How to Remove Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories (NGS Marketing)
• Improved Messaging for Moved Businesses (Mike Blumenthal)

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Posted by TannerC

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.

In order to create a successful blog, you have to be passionately curious about the topic you're covering.

This notion was the central point of my Mozinar on "Blogging Like You Mean It" a few weeks ago, when I shared my personal story of blogging success. Here's a concise recap of the story, for those who missed it: I was once tasked with creating a blog on a topic I was completely uninterested in: television. At that time, there wasn't a TV in my home and I had absolutely no interest in television.

 

 

In order to run the blog, I knew I had to find a way to approach the topic that would be interesting enough to make blogging feel less like work and more like fun. (That's the real trick to successful blogging, by the way: writing about things you are completely and naturally passionate about.) For this project, I was able to come up with a question that fully peaked my interest in the topic: "How has television impacted the history of our culture, and how will it continue to do so in the future?"

 

With that one question, I was able to get interested in the topic, and eventually the blog started ranking in the top search results for some extremely competitive terms related to TV. Within a matter of weeks, we were writing articles that captivated people from around the globe and were even featured prominently on sites like The Guardian, AdWeek, New York Magazine, BuzzFeed, About.com, and Design Work Life. Today, the blog has been taken over by a remarkable, dedicated team at CableTV.com.

 

After I shared this short story in my Mozinar, the number one question people had was: "Can you give an example of exactly how to take an uninteresting topic and make it interesting?"

 

For this post, I'm going to do one better. We're going to quickly go over three examples of how to turn a not-so-exciting topic (whether it's for your day job or whatever else) utilizing websites submitted by readers on the official SEOmoz Facebook page. Rather than turn this into a basic list of top-fives or elaborate examples for each of these three websites, you're going to get a bit more of the actual insights every blogger should be following, regardless of context.

 

It all starts with questions

First off, any uninteresting topic can be made interesting by asking questions.

 

Questions work remarkably well for two reasons: primarily, they give us clear purpose and direction in our efforts. When we're asking questions and actively pursuing the answers, our work suddenly becomes an opportunity to learn and grow, not just to get links or fill up pages on the web.

 

Seconldy, we, as bloggers, should focus on asking (and pursuing the answers of) questions is because there is bound to be an audience for the content created around those questions; people who are looking for the same answers.

 

 

These two facts alone make blogging become not only easier and more rewarding for us as writers, but also create an opportunity for us to create real, meaningful content that will easily create an audience that can rely on us.

 

In an article for The Boston Globe titled "Are we asking the right questions?", Leon NeyFakh evaluates the work of Dan Rothstein, co-founder of Right Question Institute in Cambridge. Leon asserts that, "Wielded with purpose and care, a question can become a sophisticated and potent tool to expand minds, inspire new ideas, and give us surprising power at moments when we might not believe we have any."

 

With the power of questions in mind, we can start evaluating nearly any topic and turning out ideas for successful blog posts. Reader Simon Abramson suggested that we first look at the official blog of Wild Earth, which, as far as I can gather, is a company that takes people into nature to help them build self-reliance, confidence, and ecological resilience. This is certainly a topic I know very little about and am currently not very interested in, personally.

 

The first step for any blogger (when covering any topic) should be to simply ask a lot of questions. If you're not sure where to start with the questions, focus on the 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, and why (and occasionally, how)?

 

 

Who started the whole "nature can help you as a person" industry? What are the psychological affects of being in nature for any period of time? Where are the best places to go if you want to experience nature at its best? When are the best times in your life to go? Why should a busy office worker consider such an option? How does nature build confidence, from a biological perspective?

 

Once you've asked as many questions as you can, try to find one or two that really sparks your interest. Personally, I'd love to look at the psychological affects of nature. With that one question alone a waterfall of other questions comes to mind, and every one of those questions is an opportunity for a blog post.

 

As a blogger, you'll want to focus on a primary question, then let that question fuel other questions that will become your blog content. The more questions you ask around a central question, the more ideas you'll have and the easier your job will become.

 

Use available resources for natural research

So, questions become the central focus of our efforts and allow us to pursue things that not only interest us, but also that of our ideal audience. Now what? Next, do what comes naturally when you have a question: pursue the answers. If you don't have any questions off the top of your head, pursue other questions the same way you would pursue answers.

 

This stage of blogging is what 60% of the work consists of: research. Plan on spending the majority of your blogging work schedule doing research, particularly reading. Keep in mind that your gift to readers is doing the research so they don't have to. Everything you write after this point on should be a concise, easy-to-consume version of whatever it is you spend all of your time researching.

 

Where to start researching answers and additional questions we may not be asking yet? I like to utilize sites like Quora, Topsy, Google Alerts, and Google Blog Search (setup as an RSS feed).

 

If our blog was about, say, a local housecleaning service – something like Marvelous Maids, a housecleaning company that serves St. Charles County in Missouri, as submitted by Moz community member Kathy Stamm Gage – and our primary question to turn that topic into something interesting was along the lines of, "What's the science behind common cleaning chemicals?", then our first task would be to explore the "housecleaning" category on Quora, which – believe it or not – is an actual thing.

 

 

Immediately after visiting the Quora page, we should have a few ideas for additional questions we can then turn into blog posts. Now, sometimes you'll have topic that simply doesn't have much information or activity on Quora, in that event it's best to get clever (by asking "instead of exploring the "housecleaning" page of Quora, what about "germs?") or move onto a resource that will certainly have more information (like a library).

 

In this case, digging around the "housecleaning" section of Quora yields some really interesting results that already spark some blog post ideas. Questions such as, "What are some housecleaning hacks?" teach us that instant orange drink mix will clean the inside of a dishwasher just as easily as expensive cleaners, due to the citric acid. That can definitely be turned into a blog post.

 

Moving on from Quora, we should begin exploring other resources. Our best power for blogging is all about quantity right now, especially if your blog is fairly small or just starting out. Focus on having a vast quantity of questions ready to go and be researched. Attempt to gather a very large quantity of resources you can utilize when exploring those questions as well.

 

As another example, if we stick to the topic of housecleaning, we can take to Topsy and search for "housecleaning chemicals" to get a pretty good list of additional questions/topics worth researching. Including: "How to clean your home using herbs rather than scary chemicals" and "A list of scary chemical cleaners to avoid." Curious about what either of those might entail? If you are, your readers will be too.

 

 

The best questions, of course, come from you. You can easily open up doors to topics and things that do interest you about your original question/theme by being naturally curious. For me, the questions come easy. "What chemicals do we really need to be worried about in common cleaning supplies?" or, "How sustainable are home cleaning supplies, really?" or, "Are things we hear about household cleaning chemicals fact or fiction?" or even, "If you were to add-up all of the various chemicals used in all of the supplies you use to clean your home, what would that list entail exactly?" All questions I personally wouldn't mind researching in order to create compelling (and, most importantly: helpful!) content.

 

These questions all provide instant blog posts that are pretty interesting, easy to research, related to a not-so-interesting industry, all discovered because we asked some simple questions and checked-out a few websites. Voila, blogging success is within our grasp!

 

A vision of what we've covered

We've touched on a few concepts that seem really basic, and yet we continue to see blogs that don't follow any of this pattern. The results speak for themselves, though: by pursuing things that are naturally interesting to us and finding answers for them, we're uncovering what a lot of people out there want to know as well.

 

The problem that our readers have is that they don't have all of the time or ability to research like we can.

 

 

That's also one of your greatest gifts to readers: putting in the time to learn about something so they don't have to. When you then reconstruct what you discover into an easy-to-digest blog post, or graphic, or video, or Tweet, you're establishing yourself as not only someone on their way to expert status, but you're also providing a true, can't-be-faked value.

 

Even if your topic isn't naturally interesting to you (like nature programs or housecleaning), there are ways to make it interesting through natural discovery.

 

Our last example of how this all works comes from Douglas Hodgson, who asked me to evaluate the business of eye care for Frontier Eye Care. Eye care is a naturally an interesting topic for me though, so I think this one will be a little easier than the last two. It's important and interesting to me because I was born with poor eyesight and because eyesight plays such a critical role in what I (and I'm sure millions and millions of others) do every single day.

 

So, how do you take a topic like eye care and make it worth researching? What value could we possibly provide to people who are interested in the eye care industry?

 

It's not so hard to come up with solutions when we make the topic really interesting by asking questions.

 

How has technology affected eyesight and what does the future of technology hold for it? Is there a certain science to picking out the perfect eyewear?

 

Post ideas flourish with just these few questions. What about a graphic illustrating the perfect angles and measurements to make (at home?) before picking a pair of sunglasses? We could even evaluate the history of eyeglasses used by famous figures. Maybe a post on how glasses or rigid gas permeable lenses are created and why 3D home printing may change that (will it though?), or what about an article explaining the countless factors that impact how our eyes develop as we grow (genetics, facial structure, encounters with bright lights, and so on)?

 

The ideas can flow, some will certainly be winning topics, others will just be interesting for a handful of people. What we need to do as bloggers is remember that our goal is to focus on one primary approach or question, then find related questions either we have or other people have, and put in the work to do the research and come up with solutions.

 

 

This is really basic stuff, I hope, but it's quite easy to forget or overlook. There are no worthwhile tricks to successful blogging outside of hard work, in my opinion. This approach not only allows you to learn a lot about your topic on your own, but it also sets you out as a clear, reliable resource in your industry. For any business or industry, that reputation can mean serious success.

 

If you have additional questions or insights into this type of blogging strategy, I'd love to hear your thoughts either in the comments or on Twitter.

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Posted by willcritchlow

One of the things that excites me most about the development of the web is the growth in learning resources. When I went to college in 1998, it was exciting enough to be able to search journals, get access to thousands of dollars-worth of textbooks, and download open source software. These days, technologies like Khan Academy, iTunesU, Treehouse and Codecademy take that to another level.

I've been particularly excited by the possibilities for interactive learning we see coming out of places like Codecademy. It's obviously most suited to learning things that look like programming languages – where computers are naturally good at interpreting the "answer" – which got me thinking about what bits of online marketing look like that.

The kinds of things that computers are designed to interpret in our marketing world are:

• Search queries – particularly those that look more like programming constructs than natural language queries such as [site:distilled.net -inurl:www]
• The on-site part of setting up analytics – setting custom variables and events, adding virtual pageviews, modifying e-commerce tracking, and the like
• Robots.txt syntax and rules
• HTML constructs like links, meta page information, alt attributes, etc.
• Skills like Excel formulae that many of us find a critical part of our day-to-day job

I've been gradually building out codecademy-style interactive learning environments for all of these things for DistilledU, our online training platform, but most of them are only available to paying members. I thought it would make a nice start to 2013 to pull one of these modules out from behind the paywall and give it away to the SEOmoz community. I picked the robots.txt one because our in-app feedback is showing that it's one of the ones from which people learned the most.

Also, despite years of experience, I discovered some things I didn't know as I wrote this module (particularly about precedence of different rules and the interaction of wildcards with explicit rules). I'm hoping that it'll be useful to many of you as well – beginners and experts alike.

Interactive guide to Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a plain-text file found in the root of a domain (e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt). It is a widely-acknowledged standard and allows webmasters to control all kinds of automated consumption of their site, not just by search engines.

In addition to reading about the protocol, robots.txt is one of the more accessible areas of SEO since you can access any site's robots.txt. Once you have completed this module, you will find value in making sure you understand the robots.txt files of some large sites (for example Google and Amazon).

For each of the following sections, modify the text in the textareas and see them go green when you get the right answer.

Basic Exclusion

The most common use-case for robots.txt is to block robots from accessing specific pages. The simplest version applies the rule to all robots with a line saying User-agent: *. Subsequent lines contain specific exclusions that work cumulatively, so the code below blocks robots from accessing /secret.html.

Add another rule to block access to /secret2.html in addition to /secret.html.

User-agent: * Disallow: /secret.html

Exclude Directories

If you end an exclusion directive with a trailing slash ("/") such as Disallow: /private/ then everything within the directory is blocked.

Modify the exclusion rule below to block the folder called secret instead of the page secret.html.

User-agent: * Disallow: /secret.html

Allow Specific Paths

In addition to disallowing specific paths, the robots.txt syntax allows for allowing specific paths. Note that allowing robot access is the default state, so if there are no rules in a file, all paths are allowed.

The primary use for the Allow: directive is to over-ride more general Disallow: directives. The precedence rule states that "the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule. The order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined.".

We will demonstrate this by modifying the exclusion of the /secret/ folder below with an Allow: rule allowing /secret/not-secret.html. Since this rule is longer, it will take precedence.

User-agent: * Disallow: /secret/

Restrict to Specific User Agents

All the directives we have worked with have applied equally to all robots. This is specified by the User-agent: * that begins our commands. By replacing the *, however, we can design rules that only apply to specific named robots.

Replace the * with googlebot in the example below to create a rule that applies only to Google's robot.

User-agent: * Disallow: /secret/

Add Multiple Blocks

It is possible to have multiple blocks of commands targeting different sets of robots. The robots.txt example below will allow googlebot to access all files except those in the /secret/ directory and will block all other robots from the whole site. Note that because there is a set of directives aimed explicitly at googlebot, googlebot will entirely ignore the directives aimed at all robots. This means you can't build up your exclusions from a base of common exclusions. If you want to target named robots, each block must specify all its own rules.

Add a second block of directives targeting all robots (User-agent: *) that blocks the whole site (Disallow: /). This will create a robots.txt file that blocks the whole site from all robots except googlebot which can crawl any page except those in the /secret/ folder.

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /secret/

Use More Specific User Agents

There are occasions when you wish to control the behavior of specific crawlers such as Google's Images crawler differently from the main googlebot. In order to enable this in robots.txt, these crawlers will choose to listen to the most specific user-agent string that applies to them. So, for example, if there is a block of instructions for googlebot and one for googlebot-images then the images crawler will obey the latter set of directives. If there is no specific set of instructions for googlebot-images (or any of the other specialist googlebots) they will obey the regular googlebot directives.

Note that a crawler will only ever obey one set of directives – there is no concept of cumulatively applying directives across groups.

Given the following robots.txt, googlebot-images will obey the googlebot directives (in other words will not crawl the /secret/ folder. Modify this so that the instructions for googlebot (and googlebot-news etc.) remain the same but googlebot-images has a specific set of directives meaning that it will not crawl the /secret/ folder or the /copyright/ folder:

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /secret/

Basic Wildcards

Trailing wildcards (designated with *) are ignored so Disallow: /private* is the same as Disallow: /private. Wildcards are useful however for matching multiple kinds of pages at once. The star character (*) matches 0 or more instances of any valid character (including /, ?, etc.).

For example, Disallow: news*.html blocks:

• news.html
• news1.html
• news1234.html
• newsy.html
• news1234.html?id=1

But does not block:

• newshtml note the lack of a "."
• News.html matches are case sensitive
• /directory/news.html

Modify the following pattern to block only pages ending .html in the blog directory instead of the whole blog directory:

User-agent: * Disallow: /blog/

Block Certain Parameters

One common use-case of wildcards is to block certain parameters. For example, one way of handling faceted navigation is to block combinations of 4 or more facets. One way to do this is to have your system add a parameter to all combinations of 4+ facets such as ?crawl=no. This would mean for example that the URL for 3 facets might be /facet1/facet2/facet3/ but that when a fourth is added, this becomes /facet1/facet2/facet3/facet4/?crawl=no.

The robots rule that blocks this should look for *crawl=no (not *?crawl=no because a query string of ?sort=asc&crawl=no would be valid).

Add a Disallow: rule to the robots.txt below to prevent any pages that contain crawl=no being crawled.

User-agent: * Disallow: /secret/

Match Whole Filenames

As we saw with folder exclusions (where a pattern like /private/ would match paths of files contained within that folder such as /private/privatefile.html), by default the patterns we specify in robots.txt are happy to match only a portion of the filename and allow anything to come afterwards even without explicit wildcards.

There are times when we want to be able to enforce a pattern matching an entire filename (with or without wildcards). For example, the following robots.txt looks like it prevents jpg files from being crawled but in fact would also prevent a file named explanation-of-.jpg.html from being crawled because that also matches the pattern.

If you want a pattern to match to the end of the filename then we should end it with a $ sign which signifies "line end". For example, modifying an exclusion from Disallow: /private.html to Disallow: /private.html$ would stop the pattern matching /private.html?sort=asc and hence allow that page to be crawled.

Modify the pattern below to exclude actual .jpg files (i.e. those that end with .jpg).

User-agent: * Disallow: *.jpg

Add an XML Sitemap

The last line in many robots.txt files is a directive specifying the location of the site's XML sitemap. There are many good reasons for including a sitemap for your site and also for listing it in your robots.txt file. You can read more about XML sitemaps here.

You specify your sitemap's location using a directive of the form Sitemap: <path>.

Add a sitemap directive to the following robots.txt for a sitemap called my-sitemap.xml that can be found at /my-sitemap.xml.

User-agent: * Disallow: /private/

Add a Video Sitemap

In fact, you can add multiple XML sitemaps (each on their own line) using this syntax. Go ahead and modify the robots.txt below to also include a video sitemap called my-video-sitemap.xml that lives at /my-video-sitemap.xml.

User-agent: * Disallow: /private/ Sitemap: /my-sitemap.xml

What to do if you are stuck on any of these tests

Firstly, there is every chance that I've made a mistake with my JavaScript tests to fail to grade some correct solutions the right way. Sorry if that's the case – I'll try to fix them up if you let me know.

Whether you think you've got the answer right (but the box hasn't gone green) or you are stuck and haven't got a clue how to proceed, please just:

1. Check the comments to see if anyone else has had the same issue; if not:
2. Leave a comment saying which test you are trying to complete and what your best guess answer is

This will let me help you out as quickly as possible.

Obligatory disclaimers

Please don't use any of the robots.txt snippets above on your own site – they are illustrative only (and some would be a very bad idea). The idea of this post is to teach the general principles about how robots.txt files are interpreted rather than to explain the best ways of using them. For more of the latter, I recommend the following posts:

• How to block content from the search results (pro-tip – don't rely on robots.txt despite my examples above excluding "secret" files and folders)
• Learn more about why you might want to block robots from certain areas of your site
• Avoid accidentally giving conflicting directives with the various different ways of blocking robots
• Read up on some "don'ts" (old but still relevant): robots.txt misuse, accidentally blocking link juice

I hope that you've found something useful in these exercises whether you're a beginner or a pro. I look forward to hearing your feedback in the comments.

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