Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Identifying your target market is only one-fifth of the battle. If you want to win the proverbial war, you have to know your audience inside and out. Discovering the sites they visit and using that knowledge to your advantage is key, but the best practices to do so can feel unclear. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines a five-step process to more effectively reach and market to your target community.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about finding sites that your audience visits so that you can better market to them.

Now, this is an awesome tactic to use for link building. It’s great for advertising. It’s great for reaching your community wherever they may go on the Web, but it’s not always obvious how to go about this, and that’s exactly what I want to talk you through.

Step 1 – Identify people who are part of our target audience.

So whoever it is that we are trying to reach, that we’re trying to sell to, that we’re trying to market to, these are people that we know perform certain kinds of searches, they visit places on the Web, they download and install apps. Whatever it is that they’re doing in the digital world, we want to uncover those things, and to do so we need to start with a sample set, a small but substantive sample set of say 5 to 10 people who really match our audience’s attributes. Then essentially we’re just going to clone them. We’re going to replicate those folks.

So assuming we start here with a little group, I’ve got my six fellows over here. I’m going to take out one of them and I’m going to essentially look at the attributes and characteristics of this person who’s in my audience.

This is Mortimer. He’s a freelance writer for the example that we’ll be using this Whiteboard Friday. I’m going to assume that I’m creating a product for writers specifically. I know that Mortimer is a contributor to several different publications.

Now that I know his name and a little bit about him and what he does, title, maybe the company where he works, etc., I can look at: What are the social networks that Mortimer uses? I’m going to do a search essentially just in Google, and I’m going to look for: Where are all the places that Mortimer has profiles on the Web? From where does he share content? If he’s using Twitter, by the way, this is super easy with Followerwonk, because I can go to the Followerwonk Analyze page and I can actually tap right in to see all of the content, well, the list of domains that Morty shares from most often. That’s pretty cool. If he’s not using Twitter, it’s fine. We can do this manually, and we can just start to look at: All right, where is he sharing content from? What’s he talking about, etc.? Where does he already have a profile? What networks is he using?

Next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to use data that I already know about keyword research. So I take my keyword research, which I’ve already performed, that I know this group of people is searching for in general. I can be a little bit broader than I normally would be around very sales or conversion-focused types of keyword research. I can essentially say, “What do I know these people look for when they’re looking to further their careers or their writing or their work in my area?” It doesn’t have to be conversion-focused. It can be very broad.

Step 2 – Collect search results.

So I can essentially collect those search results, and then I want to find the domains that are ranking well consistently numerous times for numerous different keywords.

So I might use words like “podcast for writers,” and then I’m also going to grab the related searches like “best literary podcast,” “good podcast for writers” — the “I Should Be Writing podcast” is actually a related search here — or “podcast books.”

Then I’m going to take those searches, line them up here as my keywords right here in the columns, and then for my rows, well, these are the domains that I found ranking consistently for these. It was MakeUseOf.com, TheWriteLife, and WritingExcuses.com. These all ranked somewhere for some of these queries, so I’m going to make a list like that.

This can actually be done pretty easily with tools. You could use your Moz exports if you’re using Moz’s ranking tools. You could use the same thing just to export all your ranking URLs from Searchmetrics or from GetSTAT if you’re using STAT, or you could use SEMrush. Whatever ranking software you’re using you can get an export. You can even do this manually. It just takes a little more time.

Step 3 – Broaden the lists.

Next up, I’m going to use some tools and some search queries to broaden these lists. So if I find that a lot of people and a lot of writers do visit Goodreads.com for obvious reasons, I can then plug that into SEMrush. From SEMrush, I can see all the keywords that they rank for and the domains that most often also rank for those keywords.

I can use SimilarWeb to essentially see similar websites. People also visit these sites. That’s inside SimilarWeb Pro. I can use Google.

What I want to do is add queries like “verse,” “verses,” “alternatives,” “sites like,” “similar sites” onto the end of Goodreads or whatever the domains are that come from my lists over here. Then I will get a bunch more domains that I can plug in.

Step 4 – Survey your target audience.

The last thing I want to do to broaden this list just one more time, and to validate and verify that I’ve captured all the right stuff, is I might try and send out a survey to my target audience. So if I’m connected to these 6 people and hopefully 10 to 20 more at least like them, and I’m actually going to survey them and say — I really like using Typeform, I’ve used it a few times. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been sending some Typeform surveys lately. Looks great on mobile. I get high completion rates. So I love that software.

I might ask them, “What are your three favorite websites for freelance writing resources?” And then boom, one, two, three. Submit. Sweet.

Now, what would be even greater here is if I captured an email address because then I can reach out to those folks and say, “Hey, here are the most popular websites.” Or I put up a blog post that shows what they are. Now I can go and reach out to the websites that most frequently appeared here and say, “Hey, guess what? You showed up most often in my survey, and I wrote about it.” Great for networking and building a relationship and furthering a relationship.

Step 5 – Identify sites that have marketing opportunities to reach your audience.

The last step is actually the work that goes into identifying the marketing opportunity. So I know all these sites. I’ve got a huge list that I’ve now expanded and expanded again. Now I can go and look for things like an ad opportunity. On Goodreads they have an advertising platform that I can specifically use.

I can look for community discussion or commenting features. BookLikes has a system where I can set up a profile and then start commenting and contributing to their forum and their Q&A.

Bookish has a cast of characters.

This is on their About page. I can find the people behind the site, and then I can connect with them. If they all have Twitter accounts, I can follow them on Twitter. I can connect with them via LinkedIn. I could pitch them on email if I have something specific that I’d like to contribute to this site or if I’m not seeing an advertising opportunity or something else.

LitReactor had a great place where I could actually create an account and then start submitting my content just like YouMoz does for Moz.com. So those guest submission opportunities.

Basically I’m looking for anything like this, types of opportunities where I can get involved in these sites and be visible to their audiences so that I can start creating a relationship with those audiences and then hopefully earn their interest, earn their attention, earn their trust, and have them go check out whatever it is that I’m doing on my own website.

All right everyone. I look forward to your suggestions and ideas, as well as any cool tools or processes you use, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Eye Tracking in 2016: How Searchers Interact with Mobile SERPs vs. Desktop

Posted by rMaynes1

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

In 2014, Mediative released an eye-tracking study that looked at how Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has changed over the last decade, and how searcher behavior has adapted as a result. We learned that:

1. Top organic results are no longer always in the top-left corner, so users look elsewhere to find them.
2. Mobile devices have habitually conditioned searchers to scan vertically more than horizontally. Searchers are looking for the fastest path to the desired content.
3. People are viewing more search results listings during a single session and spending less time viewing each one.
4. Businesses that are positioned lower on the SERP (especially positions 2–4) see more click activity than they did several years ago, making this real estate much more valuable.
5. The #1 organic listing still captures the most click activity (32.8%), regardless of what new elements are presented.

On a desktop, the #1 organic listing is shifting further down the page, opening up the top of the page with more potential areas for businesses to achieve visibility.

The way website listings are presented on a mobile search engine results page is significantly different from how they’re presented on a desktop. The decrease in available screen size means there are a limited number of listings immediately visible to searchers, and competition for the top spots can be fierce.

The 2016 eye-tracking study

In this latest eye-tracking study, Mediative took 49 participants of mixed age and gender, asking them to complete 41 search tasks on an iPhone 5 using Google. We used the X2-60 Tobii mobile device eye tracker to track where they looked on the screen, measuring time to first look, how many participants looked, and how many participants clicked on each listing.

The Tobii X2-60

An example of one of the tasks we asked? “You’re interested in taking a vacation to New Orleans. Use Google to find cheap flights from Toronto to New Orleans.” Participants were shown the mobile SERP below:

The area highlighted in the image above shows what’s viewable on the mobile screen, before scrolling is necessary.

Ultimately, we wanted to know:

1. Where on the mobile SERP do searchers look and click the most? How does this differ from desktop searchers?

2. How important is the location of a listing on the SERP to win views and clicks from searchers?

3. Does the need for scrolling negatively or positively impact the views and clicks that listings further down the page receive?

4. What can advertisers do to ensure their Google listings are seen and clicked on a mobile SERP?

Key findings:

1. The #1 organic listing still captures the most click activity; it just takes 87% longer for it to be first seen on a mobile compared to a desktop.

In cases such as the one shown below, the knowledge panel that appears to the right of the results on a desktop (left image) becomes a key feature at the top of the mobile SERP (right image). Searchers have to scroll in order to see the organic listings that can be seen without scrolling on a desktop. This didn’t deter searchers from seeking out the top organic listing, however — it just took longer.

Takeaway:

The relevancy of your listing to the searcher’s intent becomes more important than ever as it’s taking longer for people to first lay eyes on the organic listing. This provides more of an opportunity for them to be distracted by other brands and features on the SERP that appear before the organic listings.

2. Only 7.4% of clicks were below the 4th organic listing versus 16% on a desktop, and only 62.9% of tasks resulted in a scroll-down.

Takeaway:

Being above the 4th organic listing — whether in an organic, local, knowledge graph, paid position, etc — is critical. Fewer and fewer clicks are going to listings below the top 4 organic listings, leaving less opportunity for advertisers to drive traffic to their sites.

Mobile SEO needs to be taken extremely seriously. However, many businesses don’t realize the importance of optimizing their sites specifically for mobile, resulting in ranking lower on a mobile than on a desktop.

• Invest in putting as much relevant content into your SERP listing and use available tools such as Schema to ensure that your listing stands out on the screen, increasing the likelihood of capturing clicks.
• Take advantage of the fact that other elements are presented above the organic listings, where over 35% of the page clicks on mobile were won.
• Track mobile rankings separately so as to optimize specifically for mobile, depending on the results that are seen.

Tips to rank higher in the mobile SERPs:

• If you have an app, ensure it’s indexed. More and more, apps are going to be competing with websites for rankings and traffic.
• Remember you’re dealing with a reduced space, so ensure your most important information is at the very beginning of page titles and descriptions, including priority keywords in the body of the website content.
• Websites with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) might result in higher rankings. Although not confirmed by Google, the company did reiterate the importance of page speed and the need to improve page load times, of which AMP is one way to achieve this.

3. 11% more clicks went to the knowledge graph on a mobile phone compared to a desktop, and almost 22% less clicks went to the top #1 organic listing on a mobile compared to a desktop.

A heat map showing the views captured by a knowledge graph result on a mobile phone. The displayed knowledge graph is shown to the right.

The introduction of more elements at the top of the page requires significant scrolling before the lower organic listings are reached, and these additional elements took a portion of clicks away from the top organic listings in that time.

When we studied mobile SERPS that only included organic listings, we found that:

• 99% of people looked at the top organic listing vs. 83% on a desktop
• 40% of page clicks were to the top organic listing vs. 34% on a desktop
• 75% of page clicks were to the top 4 organic listings vs. 60% on a desktop

When we studied mobile SERPS that also included paid listings, local listings, a knowledge graph, etc, we found that:

• 78.5% of people looked at the top organic listing vs. 99% on organic-only pages
• 33.2% of page clicks were to the top organic listing vs. 40% on organic-only pages
• 57% of page clicks were to the top 4 organic listings vs. 75% on organic-only pages

Takeaway:

Features on the mobile SERP such as the knowledge graph results have the potential to capture a significant amount of attention away from the organic listings. The major difference between a knowledge graph on a desktop versus a mobile phone is that scrolling is required on a phone to see organic listings. Once again, the importance of a strong mobile SEO strategy cannot be understated. If you find your organic listing is losing too many clicks to the knowledge graph, find other keywords that don’t produce the knowledge graph and include them in your optimization strategy.

4. The top sponsored ad is seen by 91% of searchers.

Takeaway:

Mobile screen real estate is extremely valuable. You have two ways to try and earn as much of that real estate as you can: paid search and mobile SEO. Although paid search can’t guarantee that you’ll always appear at the top of the results, a good paid search campaign can definitely help capture more clicks.

Consider paid text ads if you’re looking to improve website traffic, or optimize for local searches if appropriate, rather than focusing all efforts on ranking #1 in the organic listings. As three paid ads on mobile become more common, brands must be prepared to see a drop in traffic from organic listings, and perhaps consider increasing their investments in paid search.

5. 19.2% of page clicks on average went to the top 2 sponsored text ads, compared to 14.5% on a desktop.

Takeaway:

Paid search represents a bigger opportunity for traffic to your site on a mobile compared to desktop, especially if ad extensions are present.

Tips for using paid search ad extensions to push organic listings from view:

• Location extensions ensure the business address is shown alongside the ad.
• Call extensions add the ability to call the business directly from the paid ad.
• App extensions show a link below the ad text that allows people to download your app
• Site link extensions add links to various website pages from within the ad.
• Call-out extensions add descriptive text to your ad to describe more about what you do or offer.

6. 47% more clicks went to the map and local listings when they were above the organic listings.

Takeaway:

The positioning of the local listings, whether below or above the organic listings, can have a significant impact on the views and clicks captured by each of the local listings or the organic listings. With only three local listings appearing on mobile, it’s important for your business to be there, especially if your website is struggling to rank in the top 4 organic listings.

Tips to rank in the local listings and capture more clicks:

• Have a complete and accurate Google+ page for every location. Focus on the number of citations and NAP accuracy across third-party sites and local directories.
• Get reviews! The stars in the listing only appear once 5 reviews have been generated
• Ensure your site is full of locally relevant, useful content, with plenty of local keywords used throughout

Measure more than just clicks. Clicks to a local listing from a mobile device can result in a reduction in traffic to the brand’s website, as the local listings link to the Local Finder. It’s therefore important to measure impression data from local listings as well as traffic to business Google+ pages, as this can contribute to driving traffic to local stores and businesses.

To conclude

There’s no doubt about it: being listed at the top of the SERP is critical on a mobile device. People may scroll up and down, but ultimately, with over 92% of clicks going to an area above the 4th organic listing, if your business listing is below that, you’re almost invisible on a mobile search. Mobile must be taken seriously, but there are still far too many businesses that don’t see that importance and are still focusing all their efforts on desktop.

To discover out more takeaways and tips, plus average click-through rates per SERP element, download the full study on our site!

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Tweeting & Politics: Are the Same Candidates Winning at the Polls Winning on Twitter?

Posted by angelacherry

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Much has happened since we last posted about what Twitter can teach us about the US presidential candidates. In the past three weeks, an additional 15 states have participated in electoral contests to help narrow the field of candidates who will ultimately secure the Republican and Democratic party nominations for president.

With so much activity happening offline, we were due for an update of the latest and greatest activity happening online on our beloved Twitter! As with our previous post, we’re putting our Twitter analytics tool, Followerwonk, to work analyzing the top presidential candidates. This includes tracking changes in followership, analyzing conversations and engagement, and other interesting insights we uncover on this journey. You can also follow the data we’re tracking for the current five top-performing candidates* in realtime by visiting their individual Followerwonk analysis report pages:

• Hillary Clinton
• Ted Cruz
• Marco Rubio
• Bernie Sanders
• Donald Trump

*Top-performing candidates as measured by their finishing positions in the most recent electoral contests. This list will evolve with the election cycle.

What’s happened since we last checked in?

In our first post, we examined Twitter trends around the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Since then, Nevada and South Carolina hosted contests in the second half of February, and most notably, yesterday was the BIG ONE: Super Tuesday.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Super Tuesday, it marks the single biggest day for casting ballots in the 2016 US presidential race until the general election in November. Voters in 12 states cast ballots with a significant number of delegates at stake: 595 for Republicans across 11 contests, and 865 for Democrats across 12 contests.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s dig in!

Cloudy with a chance of Trump

We wanted to know what the Twitterverse had to say about the candidates during the electoral contests in Nevada and South Carolina. To capture this, we created a series of word clouds representing the most common words associated with tweets and retweets mentioning each candidate during the 48 hours surrounding the contests.

You’ll see that each candidate’s word cloud contains popular words and slogans from their respective campaigns, such as:

• “cruzcrew” for Cruz
• “marcomentum” for Rubio
• “makeamericagreatagain” for Trump
• “imwithher” for Clinton
• “feelthebern” for Sanders

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the one word surfacing in every single word cloud: “Trump.” And while it makes an appearance in each of the five candidate’s word clouds, it’s especially significant in those of his GOP rivals.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the Nevada Caucus.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

What’s in a name?

Given Trump’s broad name recognition, his prevalence may not seem surprising. That is, until you consider that according to a recent Gallup survey, there is one candidate with slightly higher name recognition (Clinton) who did not achieve the same distinction. In addition, the most recent measurement of media coverage per candidate conducted by the FiveThirtyEight blog uncovered that while Trump received 54 percent of the GOP primary media coverage, Clinton received 77 percent of the Democratic primary media coverage.

Furthermore, at this stage in the primaries, both Trump and Clinton are considered the front-runners to win their party’s nominations, according to the latest news analysis from the Chicago Tribune and ABC News, among others.

So what gives?

If we had to speculate about the reason Trump is so prominent across the candidate word clouds — and to be clear, we are speculating — it’s likely the same reason he’s so prominent in our current political discourse: the American public is fascinated by his meteoric rise as a politician. It’s expected that someone like Clinton, who has built a long political career, would hit these milestones, but perhaps unexpected that a businessman and reality TV star would do the same. Twitter is ultimately reflection of the world around it, after all.

Tweeting up a storm

As we did with the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, we explored which states’ residents were actively tweeting during the 48-hour period surrounding the most recent electoral contests.

Once again, residents of the US capital, Washington, DC, swept the top spot across all contests.

We also found that Nevadans were highly engaged, ranking in the top 10 states tweeting about each candidate across both the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primaries.

The top states tweeting during the Nevada and South Carolina contests in February also offered a glimpse of the anticipation felt in a few Super Tuesday states. Most notably was Alaska, which took a top 10 spot for 70% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards, as well as Texas and Vermont, which took top 10 spots on 40% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards. And not wanting to be left out of the ongoing Twitter discussion, New Hampshire residents remained active in the two electoral contests that followed their own, with that state taking a top 10 spot on 60% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the Nevada caucus.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

An examination of the most active states tweeting on Super Tuesday reveals a few interesting findings, particularly for the geolocation of people tweeting about Clinton. For instance, despite winning the Minnesota caucus, Minnesota does not appear in Sanders’s top 10 Super Tuesday rankings, but it does appear on Clinton’s list. In addition, despite sweeping the primary contests in the South, no southern state ranked on Clinton’s top 10 list. On top of that, Clinton is the only one of the five candidates to not have her home state (Arkansas) rank in her top 10 list, whereas the other candidates had their respective home states make appearances in their top 10 lists. It’s worth noting though that New York, a state for which she served as senator, does appear on Clinton’s list.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during Super Tuesday.

Who’s winning the follower race?

We know which states are doing the most tweeting, but what about which candidate is winning the race for followers? It depends on how you look at it.

If you look at sheer quantity of followers, the rankings are as follows:

1. Trump: 6 million+ followers
2. Clinton: 5.3 million+ followers
3. Sanders: 1.3 million+ followers
4. Rubio: 1.1 million+ followers
5. Cruz: 782,000+ followers

Number of Trump followers as of February 29, 2016

However, if you look at net gains in followers over the past several weeks, it’s a different picture.* We decided to take this view because it takes into account the fact that some of the candidates were much more well-known prior to announcing their candidacy. We began tracking each of the candidates on Twitter on January 14, 2016, a couple of weeks prior to the Iowa Caucus. If you look at the percentage gain in net followers since mid-January, the ranking shifts to:

1. Sanders: 34.29 percent (gain of about 391,000 followers)
2. Cruz: 21.78 percent (gain of about 154,700 followers)
3. Rubio: 19.16 percent (gain of about 203,000 followers)
4. Trump: 14.55 percent (gain of about 826,000 followers)
5. Clinton: 7.99 percent (gain of about 408,700 followers)

Net gain of followers for Sanders since mid-January, as of February 29, 2016.

*Wondering what’s up with the flat line on February 21? It represents one in only a small handful of times where our social graph fetching hit a snag and failed to accurately capture the total number of followers that day. We’re bummed it happened, but rest assured it was fixed by February 22.

Shifting winds impacting followership

It’s also fun to drill down into certain moments in time to understand how changes in followership fluctuate throughout the campaign cycle.

For example, the GOP debate on February 25, 2016 marked a major shift in tone from Rubio toward Trump. Much of the news analysis the following day, including this piece from the The Hill and this one from CNN, noted that Rubio was far more critical of Trump than he’s been in previous debates. Sure enough, if you look at trends in followership for Rubio, apart from the dates of electoral contests, he experienced his biggest spike within the 24-hour period surrounding that debate, gaining about 15,000 new followers.

Change in followership for Rubio from January 31–February 29, 2016

Not to be outdone, the very next day on February 26, 2016, Trump experienced a decent bump himself, collecting about 44,000 new followers on the day Governor Chris Christie endorsed him for the presidency.

Until next time…

Keep checking back in with the Moz Blog and Followerwonk on Twitter between now and the general election in November, where we’ll keep you posted on our latest analysis and findings of all things presidential on Twitter.

We’d also love to hear from you in the comments if you have any insights to share from issues or candidates you track on Twitter, or areas you’d like to see us explore in future posts. Don’t be shy!

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Sneaking a Peek at My Inbox: What Types of Email Subject Lines Should You Be Using?

Posted by Isla_McKetta

[Estimated read time: 15 minutes]

Like most of you, I get a lot of email. Here’s a look at all the marketing emails I received in my personal email in one 24-hour period:

That’s not even counting the transactional shipping confirmations and informational blog post notifications. Or all the work-related newsletters I have sent to my address at Moz.

I do not open most of this email. In fact, preparing for this blog post, I’ve had a really fun time shunting it off into a folder called “content examples.” But receiving so much email is an excellent opportunity to think about what motivates me to open and email, what doesn’t, and what really annoys me. It’s also given me the chance to think about the various types of email subject lines and how we could all be using them better.

So how do you, as a savvy email marketer, stand out in your customer’s amazingly crowded inbox? I’m here to help you do just that. First we’ll briefly cover the different types of email. Then we’ll talk subject lines and take a close look at how two very different companies — Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh and Moz — compose subject lines and what you can learn from both.

Types of email

Before we get into subject lines, it’s important to do a brief overview of the different types of emails, because different types of email require different things from a subject line.

Informational

Informational emails are educational. This doesn’t mean that they have a lesson plan attached, but it does mean that they’re geared to tell a reader something they didn’t already know. Change the logo on your mobile app? Send an informational email. Publish a new blog post? Send an informational email. Updating a user on how many airline miles they have or that a new report is ready? You get the idea.

These emails are (ostensibly) all about what the recipient needs and they (often) fall near the top of the marketing funnel. Here are some examples of informational emails I’ve received recently:

The newsletter

This particular newsletter tells me all the things I need to know about what’s happening in the publishing industry. They have the unsexiest subject lines ever, but their content is valuable enough that I open the email anyway.

Another favorite newsletter is the Moz Top 10. More on that later.

The blog post

Yay! A new blog post! There are other ways to receive updates about new blog posts, but some of us are old fashioned and we are talking email here.

The informational update

What has the Park Service been up to in this, their centennial year? I’m so glad you asked. There’s an email for that.

The report

I signed up to get the latest nonprofit jobs in Seattle emailed to me sometime around the time I graduated college. In 2001. Dear Idealist keeps on sending me that report. Every day. That’s a lot of emails, but they must be doing a good job because I haven’t unsubscribed yet.

Informational emails are strictly for the reader’s benefit and as such, you can often get away with less enticing subject lines and still preserve your open rate. Although it might also be tempting to loop news about your latest sale or promotion into the “Informational” category, those emails are actually asking the reader to do something, so they fall under the next category…

Sale or offer

If your personal inbox looks anything like mine, sale or offer emails are what most marketers are good at. It’s also where we marketers look for our conversions, so it’s really, really important for us that people open sales emails. Here’s a sample of the sales emails in my inbox:

Did you spot the red herring? That email from Amazon, while containing an offer, is also a triggered email. Amazon is really good at triggered emails. More on that below.

Transactional or triggered

According to MailChimp, transactional email is “email sent to an individual based on some action.” That could be anything from a new customer welcome email to a drip campaign a reader signs up for.

In the case of Amazon, I was looking at that steam cleaner and added it to my cart as I consider it. Actually, I added it to my cart to see if they’d add it to my daily deals (because they are just that good at tracking). No luck yet, but I’m patient.

Here are some other triggered emails from my inbox:

The order confirmation

The pending invite

The drip campaign

Most transactional and triggered emails are also emails that your reader is looking out for, so we’re not going to worry as much about their subject lines. As long as you’re being clear, you’re probably fine.

Types of email subject lines

Now that you have a really good handle on the types of email you can send, it’s time to think of the style of selling that particular email. Keep in mind that although we marketers like things to align in predictable categories, some of the best email subject lines often fall into more than one of the following categories (ooh! cross-genre subject lines!).

Direct

Make no bones about it, we have a deal for you. That deal is…

The direct, straightforward, unadorned subject line works for a company like Wolferman’s which prides itself on quality baked goods. If the information or deal is interesting enough, it appeals to a wide range of people and will never offend anyone.

Playful

Make someone laugh and they’ll remember you. Or at least they won’t delete your email outright. The only thing that would have made me like this email from Shutterfly more is if there was a big ol’ kiss emoji after “Mr. President.”

I’m also really a fan of this subject line from the Bernie Sanders campaign:

Notice that both of the playful subject lines here use pop culture references? That’s not a necessity (and can be dangerous if you’re too oblique), but these references can be a great way to tap into a reader’s memory and call upon all the images that your referent conjures.

Curiosity-inducing

I’ve ranted before about how people misuse the curiosity gap in their titles. But don’t underestimate the power of curiosity to get people to open emails. If you pique just the right amount, you’re in. This subject line is specific enough and yet open enough to make me want to click:

This one is not:

Personalized

Personalizing an email doesn’t just have to mean using someone’s name. Kissmetrics nails it when they say you can use location, time, personas, and more to make your reader feel like the email is just for them. Travelocity is famous for pulling together fabulous emails based on what you’re browsing and what trips you’ve purchased. I’d show you one, but they sent me this email:

And I think I over-opted-out. As discussed above, Amazon is another personalization rock star. They’ll send you triggered emails tailored to items you’ve browsed, items you’ve bought, items related to items you’ve bought — and it’s all right there in the subject line. However, personalization can go wrong if you’re acting on bad information.

No, I did not give Classmates my correct name when I registered over a decade ago. As a result, their personalization doesn’t pull hard at my subconscious. Instead, it gives me a good giggle.

Scarcity

Humans are hardwired to respond to scarce resources. Whether that means “There are only a few tickets left!” or “This offer expires in four hours!”, letting your email recipients know that something is limited can be a good way to get them to take action.

Call to action

Most frequently used by political parties (or so it seems right now), the call to action (CTA) subject line literally calls the recipient to take an action.

The “RE:” here is extraneous and annoying, but the CTA here works. I get a lot of similar emails that tell me to contact my senator or sign a petition.

The CTA-type subject line also works for marketers.

This email from Rejuvenation is a reminder, a call to action, and (if you read down the line far enough) an offer as well. You could invite your subscribers to “Come into the store for a special discount” or the classic “Tell us how we’re doing.” Both are calls to action.

A note on formatting subject lines

Whatever type of subject line you’re using, there are various things you can do within the text to make it stand out. You can use all caps:

Or add in some symbols:

Different audiences respond to different things, but to my mind both of these come off as gimmicky. I notice them but they almost never compel me to open that email. And when my local art museum started using them I died a little inside.

You can make your subject line extra long:

Or extra short:

Just remember that if your customer is reading your email on mobile (which 65% of people do), they can likely only see the first 50 characters of whatever you write. So I hope L.L. Bean wasn’t telling me there were 70 free shirts available, because I’ll never know.

How Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh uses email and email subject lines

As a new mom who does most of my shopping online, I get a lot of email from Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh.

Sometimes I get several per day.

Which makes Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh an easy case study for us to put all our email subject line knowledge to use.

Carter’s mostly uses the sale/offer type of email (except when I order something), so we’ll focus on those types of emails (plus, then I don’t have to show you how many times I’ve ordered from this company in the same time span). I received 25 emails from Carter’s or OshKosh in one 10-day stretch:

How I respond

First of all, that’s a lot of email. Granted, they are writing to an audience (me!) who isn’t getting a lot of sleep, and, as a result, has no short-term memory. But it is a little smothering, and I sometimes run a little animated clip through my brain of the Carter’s email team doing battle with the OshKosh team over who can send the most email the fastest. It isn’t pretty and invariably I lose.

We can chat about whether this volume of emails is effective; I did, after all, admit (just a few paragraphs ago) to a large number of purchases. But that’s more because I’m caught up in their rewards cycle and because at the end of a day full of marketing and mothering, online shopping is all I have the energy for. I might have a problem ;).

Really, though, I’d say this is too much email and I have since “managed my email preferences.”

What they could do better

Mix it up

Of those 25 emails, 16 used the direct approach. That’s a lot for a retailer, especially one sending this much email. Here’s a look at what other tactics they used:

Carter’s and OshKosh clearly have a handle on how to motivate people with deals and by time-limiting those deals. But I’d love to see them try to do more with playful subject lines. To be fair, after creating the above graphic, I received the following email:

It’s a step in the right direction?

Remember that it’s important to keep your customers engaged. Using a wider variety of subject line types and testing new territory can be a great way to do that.

Personalize

All-caps aside, this subject line would have been terrific:

If I had a girl. Carter’s has enough information about my browsing and purchase history by now to know that I have a son. They might be confused about his age because I’ve been stockpiling outfits for when he grows, but he is a boy. And no matter how gender neutral I try to be, I’m probably not going to outfit my son in dresses anytime soon.

The lesson: We’re digital marketers. We have A LOT of data on our customers. If you aren’t already using that data to customize your email marketing, impress your boss by asking how to start.

Don’t cry wolf

OMG I’m so sad I missed the 50% off sale this weekend. Wait, today everythings’s 60% off?

Promotions are awesome. They get your customers’ attention. The move old inventory. They increase your bottom line. And time-limited promotions are a very good way to tie into that fear of missing out that makes scarcity subject lines so effective.

But when I’ve been a customer for less than half a year and I already know the sale gets better and better and better the longer I wait, you’ve lost all the power that scarcity offers. Instead, I feel duped if I bought at the higher price and fail to be motivated by email subject lines that mostly tout the latest deal.

Be strategic about the strings you’re pulling with your subject lines. They’re a lot more effective that way.

Am I being unfair to Carter’s and OshKosh? Maybe. I’m sure that they have thoroughly tested their subject lines and related open and clickthrough rates. And let’s face it, creating emails at that volume while trying to maintain freshness is hard. Either way, there are some good lessons to be learned here (or in your reactions to your own inbox).

How we use subject lines for the Moz Top 10

Now let’s take a look at how well I’m doing in writing subject lines for the Moz Top 10.

The Moz Top 10 is a newsletter, so we’re obviously going to take a slightly different tack than your average retailer (at least at the sales level — don’t underestimate the power of a strong newsletter for your top-of-funnel content marketing), but there is still some insight to be gained from what works and what doesn’t. To understand the difference, I analyzed a year’s worth of editions.

If you’re counting, we split test five different subject lines (each going to an initial run of about 15,000 readers) for each bi-weekly edition. That’s about 130 different subject lines. I’ve split out some of the most instructive weeks below.

Note: This is not a controlled experiment. Things other than tone change from subject line to subject line in a given week, and if you try to compare open rates from one week to another, you’ll be lost (bonus points if you can pick out the edition where everyone was on vacation).

March 24, 2015: Curiosity and personalization work

This chart is representative of the most common trend across Moz Top 10 subject lines: piquing a reader’s curiosity and personalizing the subject line by using the word “you” are winning tactics with this audience.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
How Much Traffic Will You Lose Starting April 21? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			18.57
Predicting April 21 Traffic Losses and Debunking SEO Myths – Moz Top 10	✓						17.69
Mobile SEO-Pocalypse, SEO Myths, and the Good Side of Google’s Answer Boxes – Moz Top 10		✓					17.44
Exposing SEO Myths and Measuring the User Journey with Content Groupings – Moz Top 10	✓						16.44
Google’s Mobile Deadline Looms: How Will it Affect Your Traffic? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			18.14

What I could do better: I’d love to personalize the email further, but we just don’t have that kind of data on this list. And I’m going to want to remember to avoid subject lines that sound formulaic.

February 10, 2015: Just the facts

It’s not surprising that a direct headline works well for a newsletter like the Moz Top 10. In this case, the top two subject lines were directly worded. What is surprising, though, is that personalizing the subject line a little (adding “you”) actually caused the open rate to drop. This is something that bears more testing.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Twitter Takes Over the SERPs Plus Good Ways to Break Bad News to Your Clients – Moz Top 10		✓		✓			20
Twitter Cuts a Deal with Google and 5 Steps to a Universal SEO Strategy Audit – Moz Top 10	✓						22.13
Keep Clients Happy, Learn Omniture, and Audit Your SEO Strategy – Moz Top 10						✓	19.95
SEO Strategy Audit Plus Tips for Content Creation and Keyword Research – Moz Top 10	✓						21.12
The Consultant’s Dream Moz Top 10: Breaking Bad News (Well), Learning Omniture, and Saving Time			✓				20.24

Lesson learned: Assumptions are not always right. Test, test, test.

August 19, 2014: Scarcity for the loss

This newsletter will expire in 10 minutes. Seriously, we don’t use scarcity much in Moz Top 10 subject lines. The chart below illustrates why. If you think we should, I’d love it if you shared your ideas in the comments on how to effectively do that.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Google Favors Secure Sites Plus Why You Should Use Twitter Analytics – Moz Top 10	✓			✓			15.85
Link Echoes, HTTPS as Ranking Signal, and What New SEOs Need to Know – Moz Top 10	✓		✓				15.68
The Latest Tool Tips for SEOs: Smart Dashboards, Twitter Analytics, and Excel for Link Builders	✓				✓		14.99
Increase Your Email and Twitter Engagement Plus Improve Your Rankings Using HTTPS				✓		✓	15.56
What are Link Echoes and Why Should You Be Using HTTPS? – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			16.84

Fewer than 15% of people opened the “scarcity” edition. That’s a poor open rate even for a week when everyone was clearly out of the office.

The takeaway: Write for your audience. In this case, I think marketers are so used to hearing “the latest” that it’s lost its power.

July 8, 2014: Sometimes clickbait wins

Did I hate myself a little for writing the winning subject line here? You bet. Did it cause a little controversy around the office? Absolutely. Did it work? Unfortunately, yes.

Subject Line	Direct	Playful	Curious	Personal	Scarcity	CTA	Open Rate
Does Google Read Text in Images? And the End of Author Photos – Moz Top 10			✓				18.88
Google Sells Domains and Canada Gets Tough on Spam – Moz Top 10	✓						20.09
Are You Using Robots.txt the Right Way? Plus How to Fix a Google Penalty – Moz Top 10			✓	✓			15.82
How-to Insights for Local SEO, Google Penalties, and Email Alerts for SEO – Moz Top 10	✓						18.85
Google Says Bye-Bye to Author Photos and Puts Domains up for Sale – Moz Top 10		✓					22.76

My trick when writing clickbaity titles is to be honest while you’re being playful. This was the week Google ditched author photos and started selling domains, so the subject line is strictly correct. It can also be misconstrued and I counted on our readers here to take this as playful rather than misleading. Their clicks said they wanted to read and our unsubscribes didn’t jump, so I think I skated through on this one.

What we could do better

There’s a lot to learn when writing subject lines. Based on the above data, I’m going to keep trying a few tactics at once. I’ll definitely try to keep up the playful tone and personalize when appropriate. I may never use a scarcity-based subject line again, and will always strive to pique the readers’ curiosity and interest without being misleading. In the long run, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Want to see how well I learn from this deep dive into email subject lines?

Sign up for the Moz Top 10.

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Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages

Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a fear of local landing pages. But don’t worry! Confusion and concern over this common challenge have made it an FAQ in the local column of the Moz Q&A forum, and my goal here is to give you a prescription for meeting these projects with confidence, creativity, and even genuine enjoyment!

Up ahead: a definition, a “don’t” list, a plan of action, and a landing page mockup.

Quick definition: What’s a local landing page?

Local landing pages (aka city landing pages) are pages you create on a website to highlight a geographic aspect of a business for its customers. Local landing pages are most appropriate for:

• Service area businesses (SABs) that need to publicize the fact that they serve a variety of cities surrounding the city in which they are physically located. In this scenario, the goal of most local landing pages is to gain organic rankings for these service cities, as they’re unlikely to earn local pack rankings unless there is minimal geographic competition for the services offered.
• Multi-location brick-and-mortar businesses that need to publicize the fact that they have more than one forward-facing office. In this scenario, the goal will often be to get multiple offices ranking in the local packs by linking from the Google My Business listing for each office to its respective local landing page on the company’s website. You may also achieve organic visibility, as well, depending on the competition.

Diminish your fear by knowing what to avoid

Knowledge is power. By avoiding these common pitfalls, you’ll feel confident knowing that you’re developing a new set of pages that will help your client’s website, rather than harming it.

1. Do not publish fake addresses on local landing pages.

Tell clients that PO Boxes and virtual offices are considered ineligible in Google’s guidelines, so it’s not a good idea to use them on the website in an attempt to appear more local.

Be especially cautious here if your client is an SAB and gives you a string of addresses. Of course, an SAB can have multiple legitimate locations (like a pizza delivery chain) but if it’s a small business, your due diligence is required to make absolutely sure the addresses are legitimate and do not represent your client’s brother’s house, aunt’s house, friend’s house, etc.

Look the addresses up via Google Streetview. Do you see residences, or even empty lots? Red flag! Let such clients know that Google can read street-level signage and doesn’t take kindly to falsified address information. Google understands that SABs may operate out of a single home, but operating out a string of homes may look (and be!) spammy.

2. Do not engage in creating local landing pages for clients who lack a reasonable amount of time to discuss their business with you.

A minimum requirement is that they can have a phone session with you for each city you’re going to cover, but a much better hope lies with clients who are willing to make an active contribution to the project. *More on this later.

3. Do not engage in creating local landing pages if you don’t have enough information about the business to avoid creating thin or duplicate content.

This is related to point 2. Writing a paragraph and swapping out the city names on a set of pages is not a good plan, and you’ll encounter this lazy scenario on countless local business websites. Don’t be tempted to go this route just because your client’s competitors are getting away with it. Properly view them as weak competitors whom you can surpass with a superior effort.

4. Do not create city landing pages if no one involved in the project (including yourself) can discover a genuine reason (apart from a desire to rank) to differentiate cities and services from one another.

Don’t create these pages unless you can honestly say that you believe they will be useful and interesting to the company’s customers. *Suggestions for inspiration to follow.

5. Do not stuff local landing pages with blocks of city names, zip codes, or keywords.

Google’s Webmaster guidelines specifically state that they do not like this.

6. Beware call tracking numbers.

If your client wants to use call tracking numbers, be sure you fully understand the risks and options.

7. Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.

Link to them from a high-level menu.

8. Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages.

At some point in your work as a local SEO, you will be contacted by a company that serves most or all of a state, or multiple states. They will say, “Our goal is to rank for every single town and city in our service area.” If your client serves California, there are some 500 incorporated cities in the state, not to mention thousands of tiny towns.

Can you honestly build thousands of unique, high-quality pages?

With enough funding and a large staff of copywriters, this might be possible, but it’s going to be the exception rather than the rule for small-to-medium local businesses. It’s generally more reasonable to have the client designate their most important cities and target these first. Then, if need be, move on from there, provided that you can avoid all 7 of the above pitfalls in creating further landing pages. Recommending PPC for more minute coverage may be a wiser alternative to prevent website quality from suffering.

Sigh of relief! Now that you know the major errors to avoid, you can move forward with the landing page development project feeling confident that your work is going to help your client, rather than harming them. Gather that tension up into a ball and cast it away!

Jump-start landing page inspiration with tools, talk and action

Here’s a ready-made process for generating ideas for the content you’re going to be developing. I’m going to make the assumption that you’ve already had your client fill out some sort of questionnaire prior to taking them on. This questionnaire may have been really detailed, or kind of generic. If it missed geo-specific questions, the following process will help you glean the initial information you need from the business owner.

1. Ask your client (more) questions

By now, you’ve assessed that your client is willing to be engaged in the landing page process. Now, either create a second questionnaire, or, if preferable for both of you, get on the phone and cover all of the following:

• Every service offered
• Every major city/town served
• Most typical type of client
• Most typical client requests/needs/questions
• Services, tips, or advice that are unique to each city (such as different requirements based on laws, weather, terrain, style, precautions, codes, etc)
• Types of satisfaction guarantees offered
• Specials offered
• Why the business is better than its competitors
• Who those competitors are
• Participation in or support of local events, teams and organizations

*As you take notes, be sure you’re jotting down not just what your client says, but how they say it. Language matters, not only as a means of learning the lingo of your client’s industry, but in discovering whether corporate lingo actually matches customer speech.

2. Assess their local landing pages

From your notes from conversation #1, you’re ready to first pay a virtual call to the websites of every major local competitor your client mentioned. Assess their local landing pages, if they have them, for content quality, usability, and usefulness. There’s a good chance that you’ll see lazy efforts that you can surpass with your own work. Take notes about what you like and don’t like in the competitors’ landing pages. Note, too, what keywords they’re targeting.

3. Transform your notes into content

Now, it’s time to take your notes and turn them into:

• Unique, introductory text regarding the client’s services in each city
• At least one unique customer question and owner answer per page
• Specific advice/tips for that city that are unique to that city

4. Discover common questions and find their answers

Next, let’s fire up a really awesome tool to start generating additional topics. Hat tip to Linda Buquet who first alerted me to AnswerThePublic.com, a free tool that enables you to type in a keyword and generate the best list of related questions I’ve ever seen. It’s available in 5 countries, and even a simple search like “house painting” turns up 24 questions you can sort through to discover what types of queries people are commonly making about your client’s business model.

Return to the business owner for expert answers. Bingo! By now, you’ve got some very useful content already taking shape to help differentiate one landing page from another. I also like combing through Google’s “related searches” at the bottom of SERPs for further ideas.

5. Incorporate appropriate visuals

Now we turn to the visual documentation of your client’s business. Have them equip a designated staff member with a camera, either to take before-and-after photos of projects or to do a full video documentary of a minimum of 1–3 projects per city.

If your client’s industry isn’t of exceptional visual interest (plumbing, HVAC, accounting) a modest visual documentation, accompanied by a text transcript, should be sufficient to give customers a good idea of what it would be like to work with the business. If your client’s industry is highly visual (landscaping, architecture, home staging), the more you can show off their best work, the better. For the sake of authenticity, be sure that photo labeling and tagging are specific to the target city and that video narratives mention the target city.

• While you’re shooting footage, consider getting 1–3 video testimonials in each city from very happy clients and write transcripts. If competition isn’t stiff, even a single video testimonial can set the business apart. In tougher markets, go to extra effort with this step.
• An alternative (or addition) to video testimonials is use of an on-page traditional review app. And don’t forget that brick-and-mortar businesses can link to their various profiles on third-party review sites (Yelp, Google, etc).
• Have widely recognized customers? Get their permission to brag about it! For example: “We clean the carpets at every branch of Bank of America in San Diego,” “We designed the Transamerica building in San Francisco,” or “We groomed the Pomeranian who won Best in Class at the Boston Dog Show.” Be city-specific with this content.
• Consider the usefulness of interviewing staff who either operate each brick-and-mortar office or who travel to serve the SAB’s customers. A short, welcoming video that displays professionalism, approachability, and company ideals can help customers feel comfortable even before a transaction occurs.
• If there is an element of the business that changes from location to location (brick-and-mortar) or from city to city (SAB), be sure you are aware of this and describing this on the page. Some examples would be a class schedule for a yoga studio that’s unique to each location, or a landscaping company’s recommended schedule of yard cleaning at high elevations versus valley floor locations. This content should be highly visible on the page, as it’s highly relevant to city-specific user groups.
• Finally, think back to your assessment of your client’s competitors. Is there something they weren’t doing and that isn’t mentioned above that your client’s business inspires you to showcase? Maybe it’s something funny, extra persuasive, or extra local in flavor that would help your client stand out as particularly individualistic. Don’t hesitate to go beyond my basic suggestions to provide a creative edge for your client.

Pulling it all together

Fear is now a thing of the past. While you may be a bit buried under a heap of notebooks, spreadsheets, and docs, you’ve gathered both confidence and a wealth of resources for getting these local landing pages built. Whether you’re working with the owner’s webmaster or are implementing the development yourself, I hope the following basic mockup will help you get organized.

*I’m using an SAB for my example — a fictitious house painter who is targeting the town of Mendocino, California as part of his service area. If your landing pages are for a multi-location brick-and-mortar business, be certain that the very first thing on the page is the complete name, address and phone number of the respective location, preferably in Schema.

Click the image for a larger version in a new tab.

Key to the mockup

1. This section covers your introductory text — including a basic description of what the company does — plus geographic-specific advice, satisfaction guarantee information, and a mention of well-known clients served.
2. Here is a vertical section featuring 3 project showcase videos + text project summaries.
3. The reviews section features an on-page review widget, a request for customers to leave a review, and an invitation to see further reviews on third-party platforms.
4. Here’s where we put our question research to work, with the owner answering questions he says customers frequently ask, plus questions generated by a tool and other research.
5. Here’s an area for extra creativity. We’re featuring a “Meet the Owner” video, some relevant local news, and mentioning company support for local entities, including a special deal.
6. While we’ve sprinkled calls-to-action throughout the page, never forget that final CTA in closing up!

Speaking of closing up…

Your landing pages won’t look exactly like my sample mockup (hopefully they’ll be a lot nicer!) but I do hope this exercise has helped you gain confidence in moving fearlessly forward with these projects. I want to stress again the importance of owner involvement in this scenario. Your questionnaires and phone conversations are invaluable, and even if you have to use a crowbar with some clients, the effort truly shows in the authenticity, usefulness, and persuasiveness of the finished product.

I did want to take a minute to talk about scale, because this also comes up pretty frequently in our forum. Depending on available funding and creativity, the approach I’ve described is likely scalable for a medium-to-large business with anywhere from two to a few dozen target cities. Once you get beyond that, the project might get out of hand in terms of ROI, but I want to provide a couple of real-world examples.

1. I’ve cited REI before, but I’ll do it again. They operate 143 stores across 36 states, and I continue to be impressed by the effort they’ve made to differentiate their landing pages for each location. An interactive map drills down to pages like this: http://ift.tt/1OKOmyw. They’re not quite as text-intensive as my mockup, but the inclusion of a schedule of interesting local events makes these pages feel cared-for and worth visiting.
2. If you’re operating at a similar scale, like Orchard Supply Hardware with 91 stores, and don’t feel you can or should make the investment in landing pages, you’ll likely end up going with something like a city/zip code search that shows store NAP in a given radius. Granted, this approach is going to be lacking in SEO opportunities, but if your brand is big enough and your competition isn’t too tough, it’s an option.

Do you have any other good ideas for making your local landing pages valuable? Please share them with the community!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!