Google is removing some Australian news sites from search results in a move which follows a government order to pay publishers for their content.
The post Google Reportedly Blocking Australian News From Search via @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
When you hear the phrase corporate branding, you might think of industry titans—car companies, ubiquitous hotel chains, and fast food arches.
Despite this association, corporate branding applies to businesses of all sizes, not just the giants with unlimited marketing budgets.
To better understand the role corporate branding plays, I’ve broken down the impact of corporate branding to help you know how it can drive your business forward, no matter how big or small your business is.
Think of your favorite brand (or one you interact with regularly.) What comes to mind? Do you think of their tagline? The logo? The color palette? The chosen ambassador?
These assets, among many others, are what make up corporate branding. Corporate branding is the outward projection of a brand’s mission and culture in colors, logo, tone, and design.
A successful corporate brand encompasses an organization’s goals, mission, and ideology and appears across all mediums (website, packaging, copy, ads, etc.) to ensure visual consistency.
A strong corporate branding strategy focuses on a wide range of assets, from details as small font and color options and as large as building structure and slogan.
This element might seem too complicated to enact at your organization, but corporate branding is vital to all businesses, from small local businesses to massive ecommerce brands.
Emotions play a large role in marketing, and when a consumer relates to your brand’s values, they build an emotional connection with your brand. These emotional connections increase customer loyalty, not to mention profits and word-of-mouth advertising.
Companies with robust corporate branding strategies attract and maintain new customers, increase community interest, and improve overall marketing strategy.
Companies with strong brand affiliation offer a 31% higher shareholder return than their contemporaries.
In addition to increasing shareholder return, corporate branding fosters employee engagement and encourages 3x faster profit growth than an organization without a strong branding strategy.
While this might feel unattainable to small businesses without huge marketing budgets, the truth is, your organization can increase growth through a strong corporate branding strategy.
Here are five ways corporate branding can change how your potential consumers view your brand—and drive profits.
Brand personality refers to the personification of your company’s mission. This personality is conveyed through the style, voice, and tone you use in your business’ communication.
Just like we tend to judge people based on first impressions, your brand’s personality impacts how consumers perceive your organization from the start.
When building your brand’s personality, include language and sentiments that ring true to your mission and resonate with prospective customers.
A strong brand personality will help:
Building a strong customer relationship isn’t just good business; it costs less, too. The average company spends five times more to attract new customers rather than focusing on keeping more of the customers they already have.
Like any relationship, the bond between you and your customer needs to be nurtured to grow.
With a corporate branding strategy, interactions with prospective consumers become a comfortable exchange. By including your organization’s voice and mission in all of your content and customer experience, you establish a shared relationship with your customer.
These two strategies can help your further nurture that connection:
The internet is home to roughly 3.17 billion active social media users. The majority of companies are well aware of this statistic and harness an average of five social mediums to connect with those users.
This fact means the average consumer sees hundreds of advertisements daily.
To help your business be heard and seen online, you need to be one of many scrolled-past advertisements—you need to stand out.
Corporate branding can help you share your brand’s story. That story serves as a hook to draw your audience in and make you more than a company, but a community they can relate to.
The Pareto Principle says 80% of revenue originates from 20% of your existing consumer base. That percentage quantifies just how important it is to ensure customers are loyal and return to your business again and again.
After you’ve worked to foster strong customer relationships, you want to ensure those relationships last.
By growing your corporate branding strategy and incorporating it into new mediums and platforms, you ensure your message is reaching and resonating with your current base.
Consider offering a loyalty deal to your most valuable consumers to further build loyalty.
When people feel valued, they are much more likely to purchase from the company providing value. Nearly 60% of loyal customers make more purchases with their preferred companies, so building and establishing trust and loyalty can impact your bottom line.
Building a brand is a long, ongoing process, but there are seven simple steps you can enact today to begin your journey to a memorable brand.
Before wedding yourself to any decisions about your brand, get to know both your ideal customers and direct competitors. You can learn more about the shape of the market by:
Use a tool like Ubersuggest to explore what your competitors are doing. Look at the colors, phrasing, and images they use to connect with their audience and consider if similar branding aligns with your mission. (Just make sure your branding is original!)
A mission statement is a summary of your company’s goals and values. Your mission is the driving force behind your brand and is vital to align your audience with your business.
When creating your mission statement, ask these questions:
Use the answers to craft a statement that outlines who your audience is, what your brand contributes, and what makes your product or service different.
Brand personality helps customers connect with your brand and build customer confidence. When choosing what you want to embody, use these questions to get started:
After you’ve established a value proposition, use it to create a positioning statement that clearly outlines your target market and how you want your brand to be perceived.
A slogan is a short, catchy phrase associated with your organization that shares your product or service’s driving benefit. Ideally, your slogan should become completely synonymous with your brand, like McDonald’s “I’m lovin it!” jingle.
However, creating a catchy slogan can be challenging—you have a lot to say in very few words. Here are six tips to help you create a catchy slogan that encapsulates your brand’s essence.
Colors and typography guide how your audience views your brand, so you want to make sure you choose the right one. Here are a few factors to consider when choosing your brand’s colors:
Your logo is the face of your company, so it should represent your brand’s personality and be memorable enough to be recognized anywhere.
The good news is, you don’t have to drop thousands of dollars; there are plenty of free tools to help you create a professional logo.
As you design your logo, ask yourself these questions:
You’ve spent a lot of time and effort identifying your target consumers, developing your story and personality, and determining the right font and colors for your brand.
It’s time to put all of those pieces together and deploy your corporate branding strategy. Keep in mind a corporate brand should be incorporated everywhere.
Don’t forget to include your branding strategy in your:
Using your corporate brand everywhere your customers interact with your brand ensures consistency, which builds trust and increases engagement.
Building a brand story and creating a corporate branding strategy for your business is no small task—but it can increase trust, encourage engagement, and drive profits.
As you craft your corporate brand, keep your customer and your mission statement at the center to ensure your branding resonates and connects with your ideal customer.
What is the most effective corporate branding strategy you’ve used?
The post How Corporate Branding Translates Into Actual Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.
Posted by matthew_jkay
Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.
Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.
The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.
Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they’ve made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?
Well, not really.
The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:
1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).
2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.
The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.
What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.
The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.
The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.
Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.
The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.
The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.
To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.
Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?
At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.
The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.
I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you’re also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.
I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.
What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this “pillar” and “cluster” content respectively.
The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it’s fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.
At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they’re often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.
We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it’s appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:
A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.
A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).
A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.
Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:
For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the “older posts” section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:
Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.
HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.
A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.
A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.
Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.
I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.
The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.
This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.
Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.
The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:
|
Seed Keywords |
Expanded Keywords |
|---|---|
|
ski chalet |
ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name] etc |
There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.
Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:
|
Topic |
Keywords |
|---|---|
|
ski chalet |
ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name] |
|
catered chalet |
catered chalet luxury catered chalet catered chalet rental catered chalet hire catered chalet [location name] |
|
ski accommodation |
ski accommodation cheap ski accommodation budget ski accommodation ski accomodation [location name] |
Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They’re showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.
|
Topic |
Keywords |
Buyer’s stage |
|---|---|---|
|
ski resorts |
ski resorts best ski resorts ski resorts europe ski resorts usa ski resorts canada top ski resorts cheap ski resorts luxury ski resorts |
Consideration |
|
skiing |
skiing skiing guide skiing beginner’s guide |
Consideration |
|
family holidays |
family holidays family winter holidays family trips |
Awareness |
This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they’re just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.
Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:
You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.
The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:
This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.
The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.
Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:
We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:
We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:
From the example above, you can see “digital marketing agency” as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.
We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:
And then sheets to separate topics out:
Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.
We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:
The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the site is not already being found for, or is not targeted to.
I promised a template Google Sheet earlier in this blog post and you can find that here.
Do you have any questions on this process? Ways to improve it? Feel free to post in the comments below or ping me over on Twitter!
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The following article includes an excerpt from our free resource, An Illustrated Guide to Organizational Structures. If you’d like to download the full resource, click here.
Choosing the best organizational structure for your company, division, or team is a lot like picking out a new car.
At the most basic level, you’re always looking for something road-worthy — something that can take you (and your passengers) from point A to point B without a hitch.But beyond that, there are a lot of options to consider. Automatic or manual? Four-wheel drive or two? Built-in GPS? Leather interior? Flux capacitor? (Only if you’re going back in time, of course.)
In the world of organizational structures, the options you have to choose from include things like chain of command (long or short?), span of control (wide or narrow?), and centralization (centralized or decentralized decision-making?), just to name a few.
An organizational structure is a visual diagram of a company that describes what employees do, whom they report to, and how decisions are made across the business. Organizational structures can use functions, markets, products, geographies, or processes as their guide, and cater to businesses of specific sizes and industries.
What’s the point of an organizational structure? As a business leader, do you even need one? As I said, org structures help you define at least three key elements of how your business is going to run. Here’s what each of those elements means to an organization:
Your chain of command is how tasks are delegated and work is approved. An org structure allows you to define how many “rungs of the ladder” a particular department or business line should have. In other words, who tells whom to do what? And how are issues, requests, and proposals communicated up and down that ladder?
Your span of control can represent two things: who falls under a manager’s, well, management … and which tasks fall under a department’s responsibility.
Centralization describes where decisions are ultimately made. Once you’ve established your chain of command, you’ll need to consider which people and departments have a say in each decision. A business can lean toward centralized, where final decisions are made by just one or two entities; or decentralized, where final decisions are made within the team or department in charge of carrying out that decision.
You might not need an org structure right away, but the more products you develop and people you hire, the harder it’ll be to lead your company without this crucial diagram.
(To dive deeper into what all of these different organizational structure components are, check out my earlier post, “The 6 Building Blocks of Organizational Structure.”)
In this post, we’ll explore how you can combine those components to form different types of organizational structures. We’ll also highlight the benefits and drawbacks of different structure types so you can evaluate which is the best option for your company, division, or team. Let’s dive in.
Organizational structures fall on a spectrum, with “mechanistic” at one end and
“organic” at the other.
Take a look at the diagram below. As you’ll probably be able to tell, the mechanistic structure represents the traditional, top-down approach to organizational structure, whereas the organic structure represents a more collaborative, flexible approach.
Here’s a breakdown of both ends of the structural spectrum, their advantages and disadvantages, and which types of businesses are suited for them.
Mechanistic structures, also called bureaucratic structures, are known for having narrow spans of control, as well as high centralization, specialization, and formalization. They’re also quite rigid in what specific departments are designed and permitted to do for the company.
This organizational structure is much more formal than organic structure, using specific standards and practices to govern every decision the business makes. And while this model does hold staff more accountable for their work, it can become a hindrance to the creativity and agility the organization needs to keep up with random changes in its market.
As daunting and inflexible as mechanistic structure sounds, the chain of command, whether long or short, is always clear under this model. As a company grows, it needs to make sure everyone (and every team) knows what’s expected of them. Teams collaborating with other teams as needed might help get a business off the ground in its early stages, but sustaining that growth — with more people and projects to keep track of — will eventually require some policymaking. In other words, keep mechanistic structure in your back pocket … you never know when you’ll need it.
Organic structures (also known as “flat” structures) are known for their wide spans of control, decentralization, low specialization, and loose departmentalization. What’s that all mean? This model might have multiple teams answering to one person and taking on projects based on their importance and what the team is capable of — rather than what the team is designed to do.
As you can probably tell, this organizational structure is much less formal than mechanistic, and takes a bit of an ad-hoc approach to business needs. This can sometimes make the chain of command, whether long or short, difficult to decipher. And as a result, leaders might give certain projects the green light more quickly but cause confusion in a project’s division of labor.
Nonetheless, the flexibility that an organic structure allows for can be extremely helpful to a business that’s navigating a fast-moving industry, or simply trying to stabilize itself after a rough quarter. It also empowers employees to try new things and develop as professionals, making the organization’s workforce more powerful in the long run. Bottom line? Startups are often perfect for organic structure, since they’re simply trying to gain brand recognition and get their wheels off the ground.
Now, let’s uncover more specific types of organizational structures, most of which fall on the more traditional, mechanistic side of the spectrum.
One of the most common types of organizational structures, the functional structure departmentalizes an organization based on common job functions.
An organization with a functional org structure, for instance, would group all of the marketers together in one department, group all of the salespeople together in a separate department, and group all of the customer service people together in a third department.
The functional structure allows for a high degree of specialization for employees, and is easily scalable should the organization grow. Also this structure is mechanistic in nature — which has the potential to inhibit an employee’s growth — putting staff in skill-based departments can still allow them to delve deep into their field and find out what they’re good at.
Functional structure also has the potential to create barriers between different functions — and it can be inefficient if the organization has a variety of different products or target markets. The barriers created between departments can also limit peoples’ knowledge of and communication with other departments, especially those that depend on other departments to succeed.
A divisional organizational structure is comprised of multiple, smaller functional structures (i.e. each division within a divisional structure can have its own marketing team, its own sales team, and so on). In this case — a product-based divisional structure — each division within the organization is dedicated to a particular product line.
This type of structure is ideal for organizations with multiple products and can help shorten product development cycles. This allows small businesses to go to market with new offerings fast.
It can be difficult to scale under a product-based divisional structure, and the organization could end up with duplicate resources as different divisions strive to develop new offerings.
Another variety of the divisional organizational structure is the market-based structure, wherein the divisions of an organization are based around markets, industries, or customer types.
The market-based structure is ideal for an organization that has products or services that are unique to specific market segments, and is particularly effective if that organization has advanced knowledge of those segments. This organizational structure also keeps the business constantly aware of demand changes among its different audience segments.
Too much autonomy within each market-based team can lead to divisions developing systems that are incompatible with one another. Divisions might also end up inadvertently duplicating activities that other divisions are already handling.
The geographical organizational structure establishes its divisions based on — you guessed it — geography. More specifically, the divisions of a geographical structure can include territories, regions, or districts.
This type of structure is best-suited to organizations that need to be near sources of supply and/or customers (e.g. for deliveries or for on-site support). It also brings together many forms of business expertise, allowing each geographical division to make decisions from more diverse points of view.
The main downside of a geographical org structure: It can be easy for decision- making to become decentralized, as geographic divisions (which can be hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from corporate headquarters) often have a great deal of autonomy. And when you have more than one marketing department — one for each region — you run the risk of creating campaigns that compete with (and weaken) other divisions across your digital channels.
Process-based organizational structures are designed around the end-to-end flow of different processes, such as “Research & Development,” “Customer Acquisition,” and “Order Fulfillment.” Unlike a strictly functional structure, a process-based structure considers not only the activities employees perform, but also how those different activities interact with one another.
In order to fully understand the diagram below, you need to look at it from left to right: The customer acquisition process can’t start until you have a fully developed product to sell. By the same token, the order fulfillment process can’t start until customers have been acquired and there are product orders to fill.
Process-based organizational structure is ideal for improving the speed and efficiency of a business, and is best-suited for those in rapidly changing industries, as it is easily adaptable.
Similar to a few other structures on this list, process-based structure can erect barriers between the different process groups. This leads to problems communicating and handing off work to other teams and employees.
Unlike the other structures we’ve looked at so far, a matrix organizational structure doesn’t follow the traditional, hierarchical model. Instead, all employees (represented by the green boxes) have dual reporting relationships. Typically, there is a functional reporting line (shown in blue) as well as a product- based reporting line (shown in yellow).
When looking at a matrix structure org chart, solid lines represent strong, direct-reporting relationships, whereas dotted lines indicate that the relationship is secondary, or not as strong. In our example below, it’s clear that functional reporting takes precedence over product-based reporting.
The main appeal of the matrix structure is that it can provide both flexibility and more balanced decision-making (as there are two chains of command instead of just one). Having a single project overseen by more than one business line also creates opportunities for these business lines to share resources and communicate more openly with each other — things they might not otherwise be able to do regularly.
The primary pitfall of the matrix organizational structure? Complexity. The more layers of approval employees have to go through, the more confused they can be about who they’re supposed to answer to. This confusion can ultimately cause frustration over who has authority over which decisions and products — and who’s responsible for those decisions when things go wrong.
While it might appear drastically different from the other organizational structures highlighted in this section, the circular structure still relies on hierarchy, with higher-level employees occupying the inner rings of the circle and lower-level employees occupying the outer rings.
That being said, the leaders or executives in a circular organization aren’t seen as sitting atop the organization, sending directives down the chain of command. Instead, they’re at the center of the organization, spreading their vision outward.
From an ideological perspective, a circular structure is meant to promote communication and the free flow of information between different parts of the organization. Whereas a traditional structure shows different departments or divisions as occupying individual, semi-autonomous branches, the circular structure depicts all divisions as being part of the same whole.
From a practical perspective, the circular structure can be confusing, especially for new employees. Unlike with a more traditional, top-down structure, a circular structure can make it difficult for employees to figure out who they report to and how they’re meant to fit into the organization.
That concludes our exploration of different types of organizational structures. Keep in mind that what we’ve just looked at are simply archetypes — in real-world applications, organizations often use hybrid structures, which can borrow elements from multiple structure types.
Want to see some real-world examples of marketing team org structures from companies like GitHub and Rue La La? Download the complete resource, An Illustrated Guide to Organizational Structures.
To learn more about working on a marketing team, check out the 6 Building Blocks of Organizational Structure [Diagrams].
Posted by KameronJenkins
When Google says they prefer comprehensive, complete content, what does that really mean? In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins explores actionable ways to translate the demands of the search engines into valuable, quality content that should help you rank.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Hey, guys. Welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz.
Today we’re going to be talking about the quality of content comprehensiveness and what that means and why sometimes it can be confusing. I want to use an example scenario of a conversation that tends to go on between SEOs and Google. So here we go.
An SEO usually says something like, “Okay, Google, you say you want to rank high-quality content. But what does that really mean? What is high quality, because we need more specifics than that.”
Then Google goes, “Okay, high quality is something that’s comprehensive and complete. Yeah, it’s really comprehensive.” SEOs go, “Well, wait. What does that even mean?”
That’s kind of what this was born out of. Just kind of an explanation of what is comprehensive, what does Google mean when they say that, and how that differs depending on the query.
Here we have an example page, and I’ll kind of walk you through it. It’s just going to serve to demonstrate why when Google says “comprehensive,” that can mean something different for an e-commerce page than it would for a history of soccer page. It’s really going to differ depending on the query, because people want all sorts of different kinds of things. Their intent is going to be different depending on what they’re searching in Google. So the criteria is going to be different for comprehensiveness. So hopefully, by way of example, we’ll be able to kind of walk you through what comprehensiveness looks like for this one particular query. So let’s just dive in.
All right. So first I’m going to talk about intent. I have here a Complete Guide to Buying a House. This is the query I used as an example. Before we dive in, even before we look into keyword research tools or anything like that, I think it’s really important to just like let the query sit with you for a little bit. So “guide to buying a house,” okay, I’m going to think about that and think about what the searcher probably wanted based on the query.
So first of all, I noticed “guide.” The word “guide” to me makes it sound like someone wants something very complete, very thorough. They don’t just want quick tips. They don’t want a quick bullet list. This can be longer, because someone is searching for a comprehensive guide.
“To buying a house,” that’s a process. That’s not like an add-to-cart like Amazon. It’s a step-by-step. There are multiple phases to that type of process. It’s really important to realize here that they’re probably looking for something a little lengthier and something that is maybe a step-by-step process.
And too, you just look at the query, “guide to buying a house,” people are probably searching that if they’ve never bought a house before. So if they’ve never bought a house before, it’s just good to remember that your audience is in a phase where they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s important to understand your audience and understand that this is something that they’re going to need very, very comprehensive, start-to-finish information on it.
Two, implications. This is again also before we get into any keyword research tools. By implications, I mean what is going to be the effect on someone after reading this? So the implications here, a guide to buying a house, that is a big financial decision. That’s a big financial purchase. It’s going to affect people’s finances and happiness and well-being, and Google actually has a name for that. In their Quality Rater Guidelines, they call that YMYL. So that stands for “your money, your life.”
Those types of pages are held to a really high standard, and rightfully so. If someone reads this, they’re going to get advice about how to spend their money. It’s important for us, as SEOs and writers crafting these types of pages, to understand that these are going to be held to a really high standard. I think what that could look like on the page is, because they’re making a big purchase like this, it might be a good sign of trustworthiness to maybe have some expert quotes in here. Maybe you kind of sprinkle those throughout your page. Maybe you actually have it written by an expert author instead of just Joe Schmoe blogger. Those are just some ideas for making a page really trustworthy, and I think that’s a key to comprehensiveness.
Number three here we have subtopics. There are two ways that I’ll walk you through finding subtopics to fit within your umbrella topic. I’m going to use Moz Keyword Explorer as an example of this.
In Moz Keyword Explorer, you can search for different keywords and related keywords two different ways. You can type in a query. So you can type in something like “buy a house” or “home buying” or something like that. You start with your main topic, and what you’ll get as a result is a bunch of suggested keywords that you can also incorporate on your page, terms that are related to the term that you searched. This is going to be really great, because you’re going to start to notice themes emerge. Some of the themes I noticed were people tend to search for “home buying calculator,” like a can-I-afford-it type of calculator. A lot of people search financial-related things obviously, bad credit. I filed for bankruptcy, can I still buy a house? You’ll start to see subthemes emerge.
Then I also wanted to mention that, in Moz Keyword Explorer, you can also search by URL. What I might do is query my term that I’m trying to target on my page. I’m going to pick the top three URLs that are ranking. You pop them into Keyword Explorer, and you can compare them and you can see the areas of most overlap. So what you’ll get essentially is a list of keywords that the top ranking pages for that term also rank for. That’s going to be a really good way to mine some extra keyword ideas for your page to make it more comprehensive.
Then here we go. We have step four. After we’ve come up with some subtopics, I think it’s also a really good idea to mine questions and try to find what questions our audience is actually asking. So, for these, I like to use Answer the Public and Keywords Everywhere. Those are two really great tools that I kind of like to use in tandem.
Answer the Public, if you’ve never used it, is a really fun tool. You can put in a keyword, and you get a huge list. Depending on how vague your query is, you might get a ton of ideas. If your query is really specific, you might not get as many keyword ideas back. But it’s a really great way to type in a keyword, like “buying a house” or “buy a house” or “home buying” or something like that, and get a whole, big, long list of questions that your audience is asking. People that want to know how to buy a house, they’re also asking these questions.
I think a comprehensive page will answer those questions. But it can be a little bit overwhelming. There’s going to be probably a lot of questions potentially to answer. So how do you prioritize and choose which questions are the best to address on your page?
That’s where the Keywords Everywhere plug-in comes in handy. I use it in Chrome. You can have it highlight the keywords on the page. I think I have mine set to highlight anything that’s searched 50 or more times a month. That’s a really good way to gauge, just right off the bat you can see, okay, now there are these 10 instead of these 100 questions to potentially answer on my page.
So examples of questions here, I have questions like: Can I afford this? Is now the right time to buy? So you can kind of fit those into your page and answer those questions.
Then finally here I have trends. I think this is a really commonly missed step. It’s important to remember that a lot of terms have seasonality attached to them. So what I did with this query, I queried “buy a house,” and I wanted to see if there were any trends for home buying-type of research queries in Google Trends. I zoomed out to five years to see if I could see year-over-year if there were any trends that emerged.
That was totally the case. When people are searching “buy a house,” it’s at its peak kind of around January into spring, and then in the summer it starts to dive, and then it’s at its lowest during the holidays. That kind of shows you that people are researching at the beginning of the year. They’re kind of probably moving into their house during the summertime, and then during the holidays they’ve had all the time to move in and now they’re just enjoying the holidays. That’s kind of the trend flow that it follows. That’s really key information, if you’re going to build a comprehensive page, to kind of understand that there’s seasonality attached with your term.
Because I know now that there’s seasonality with my term, I can incorporate information like what are the pros and cons of buying in peak season versus off-season for buying a house. Maybe what’s the best time of year to buy. Those are, again, other ideas for things that you can incorporate on your page to make it more comprehensive.
This page is not comprehensive. I didn’t have enough room to fit some things. So you don’t just stop at this phase. If you’re really building a comprehensive page on this topic, don’t stop where I stopped. But this is kind of just an example of how to go about thinking through what Google means when they say make a page comprehensive. It’s going to mean something different depending on your query and just keep that in mind. Just think about the query, think about what your audience wanted based on what they searched, and you’ll be off to a great start building a comprehensive page.
I hope that was helpful. If you have any ideas for building your own comprehensive page, how you do that, maybe how it differs in different industries that you’ve worked in, pop it in the comments. That would be really good for us to share that information. Come back again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted by KameronJenkins
When Google says they prefer comprehensive, complete content, what does that really mean? In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins explores actionable ways to translate the demands of the search engines into valuable, quality content that should help you rank.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Hey, guys. Welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz.
Today we’re going to be talking about the quality of content comprehensiveness and what that means and why sometimes it can be confusing. I want to use an example scenario of a conversation that tends to go on between SEOs and Google. So here we go.
An SEO usually says something like, “Okay, Google, you say you want to rank high-quality content. But what does that really mean? What is high quality, because we need more specifics than that.”
Then Google goes, “Okay, high quality is something that’s comprehensive and complete. Yeah, it’s really comprehensive.” SEOs go, “Well, wait. What does that even mean?”
That’s kind of what this was born out of. Just kind of an explanation of what is comprehensive, what does Google mean when they say that, and how that differs depending on the query.
Here we have an example page, and I’ll kind of walk you through it. It’s just going to serve to demonstrate why when Google says “comprehensive,” that can mean something different for an e-commerce page than it would for a history of soccer page. It’s really going to differ depending on the query, because people want all sorts of different kinds of things. Their intent is going to be different depending on what they’re searching in Google. So the criteria is going to be different for comprehensiveness. So hopefully, by way of example, we’ll be able to kind of walk you through what comprehensiveness looks like for this one particular query. So let’s just dive in.
All right. So first I’m going to talk about intent. I have here a Complete Guide to Buying a House. This is the query I used as an example. Before we dive in, even before we look into keyword research tools or anything like that, I think it’s really important to just like let the query sit with you for a little bit. So “guide to buying a house,” okay, I’m going to think about that and think about what the searcher probably wanted based on the query.
So first of all, I noticed “guide.” The word “guide” to me makes it sound like someone wants something very complete, very thorough. They don’t just want quick tips. They don’t want a quick bullet list. This can be longer, because someone is searching for a comprehensive guide.
“To buying a house,” that’s a process. That’s not like an add-to-cart like Amazon. It’s a step-by-step. There are multiple phases to that type of process. It’s really important to realize here that they’re probably looking for something a little lengthier and something that is maybe a step-by-step process.
And too, you just look at the query, “guide to buying a house,” people are probably searching that if they’ve never bought a house before. So if they’ve never bought a house before, it’s just good to remember that your audience is in a phase where they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s important to understand your audience and understand that this is something that they’re going to need very, very comprehensive, start-to-finish information on it.
Two, implications. This is again also before we get into any keyword research tools. By implications, I mean what is going to be the effect on someone after reading this? So the implications here, a guide to buying a house, that is a big financial decision. That’s a big financial purchase. It’s going to affect people’s finances and happiness and well-being, and Google actually has a name for that. In their Quality Rater Guidelines, they call that YMYL. So that stands for “your money, your life.”
Those types of pages are held to a really high standard, and rightfully so. If someone reads this, they’re going to get advice about how to spend their money. It’s important for us, as SEOs and writers crafting these types of pages, to understand that these are going to be held to a really high standard. I think what that could look like on the page is, because they’re making a big purchase like this, it might be a good sign of trustworthiness to maybe have some expert quotes in here. Maybe you kind of sprinkle those throughout your page. Maybe you actually have it written by an expert author instead of just Joe Schmoe blogger. Those are just some ideas for making a page really trustworthy, and I think that’s a key to comprehensiveness.
Number three here we have subtopics. There are two ways that I’ll walk you through finding subtopics to fit within your umbrella topic. I’m going to use Moz Keyword Explorer as an example of this.
In Moz Keyword Explorer, you can search for different keywords and related keywords two different ways. You can type in a query. So you can type in something like “buy a house” or “home buying” or something like that. You start with your main topic, and what you’ll get as a result is a bunch of suggested keywords that you can also incorporate on your page, terms that are related to the term that you searched. This is going to be really great, because you’re going to start to notice themes emerge. Some of the themes I noticed were people tend to search for “home buying calculator,” like a can-I-afford-it type of calculator. A lot of people search financial-related things obviously, bad credit. I filed for bankruptcy, can I still buy a house? You’ll start to see subthemes emerge.
Then I also wanted to mention that, in Moz Keyword Explorer, you can also search by URL. What I might do is query my term that I’m trying to target on my page. I’m going to pick the top three URLs that are ranking. You pop them into Keyword Explorer, and you can compare them and you can see the areas of most overlap. So what you’ll get essentially is a list of keywords that the top ranking pages for that term also rank for. That’s going to be a really good way to mine some extra keyword ideas for your page to make it more comprehensive.
Then here we go. We have step four. After we’ve come up with some subtopics, I think it’s also a really good idea to mine questions and try to find what questions our audience is actually asking. So, for these, I like to use Answer the Public and Keywords Everywhere. Those are two really great tools that I kind of like to use in tandem.
Answer the Public, if you’ve never used it, is a really fun tool. You can put in a keyword, and you get a huge list. Depending on how vague your query is, you might get a ton of ideas. If your query is really specific, you might not get as many keyword ideas back. But it’s a really great way to type in a keyword, like “buying a house” or “buy a house” or “home buying” or something like that, and get a whole, big, long list of questions that your audience is asking. People that want to know how to buy a house, they’re also asking these questions.
I think a comprehensive page will answer those questions. But it can be a little bit overwhelming. There’s going to be probably a lot of questions potentially to answer. So how do you prioritize and choose which questions are the best to address on your page?
That’s where the Keywords Everywhere plug-in comes in handy. I use it in Chrome. You can have it highlight the keywords on the page. I think I have mine set to highlight anything that’s searched 50 or more times a month. That’s a really good way to gauge, just right off the bat you can see, okay, now there are these 10 instead of these 100 questions to potentially answer on my page.
So examples of questions here, I have questions like: Can I afford this? Is now the right time to buy? So you can kind of fit those into your page and answer those questions.
Then finally here I have trends. I think this is a really commonly missed step. It’s important to remember that a lot of terms have seasonality attached to them. So what I did with this query, I queried “buy a house,” and I wanted to see if there were any trends for home buying-type of research queries in Google Trends. I zoomed out to five years to see if I could see year-over-year if there were any trends that emerged.
That was totally the case. When people are searching “buy a house,” it’s at its peak kind of around January into spring, and then in the summer it starts to dive, and then it’s at its lowest during the holidays. That kind of shows you that people are researching at the beginning of the year. They’re kind of probably moving into their house during the summertime, and then during the holidays they’ve had all the time to move in and now they’re just enjoying the holidays. That’s kind of the trend flow that it follows. That’s really key information, if you’re going to build a comprehensive page, to kind of understand that there’s seasonality attached with your term.
Because I know now that there’s seasonality with my term, I can incorporate information like what are the pros and cons of buying in peak season versus off-season for buying a house. Maybe what’s the best time of year to buy. Those are, again, other ideas for things that you can incorporate on your page to make it more comprehensive.
This page is not comprehensive. I didn’t have enough room to fit some things. So you don’t just stop at this phase. If you’re really building a comprehensive page on this topic, don’t stop where I stopped. But this is kind of just an example of how to go about thinking through what Google means when they say make a page comprehensive. It’s going to mean something different depending on your query and just keep that in mind. Just think about the query, think about what your audience wanted based on what they searched, and you’ll be off to a great start building a comprehensive page.
I hope that was helpful. If you have any ideas for building your own comprehensive page, how you do that, maybe how it differs in different industries that you’ve worked in, pop it in the comments. That would be really good for us to share that information. Come back again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
If you’re someone who produces videos professionally, sells video content, or simply creates videos as a hobby, you need a place to share your work online. Not every WordPress theme is set up to house your artwork — you’ll need a video theme that will create the experience you want your visitors to have the moment they enter your website.
With the variety of WordPress video themes available, finding just one to use on your website may feel time-consuming and tedious. The good news is we’ve curated this list of 15 of our favorite WordPress video themes (in no specific order) to help you through the process.
There are video WordPress themes tailored to a variety of different needs. Whether you’re looking to add your videos to a multi-purpose WordPress theme, or if you’re hoping to create a video-based site for your blog, portfolio, or other creative work, there are a number of options available. We’ve compiled the following list — which includes feature descriptions and a few key takeaways — to help you determine which option best suits your needs.
Multi-purpose video themes are WordPress themes that aren’t necessarily completely video-focused, yet have strong and unique video-related features. These themes are ideal for anyone who doesn’t need their website to revolve around their videos and would actually benefit from a wide range of additional features.
Bridge is a multi-purpose theme ideal for sharing your business’ videos with customers. It provides you with options to integrate your videos in different layouts and sections. You can create section video backgrounds so your video takes up the entire width of the screen and add different transitions (including fades, animations, and more) to the beginning and/ or end of your videos. The video slider feature lets you place multiple video clips in one section so your visitors can slide right and left through all of your clips.
Brooklyn is a multi-purpose WordPress video theme, meaning it’s ideal for virtually any type of business. The theme is easy to use due to its drag-and-drop page builder that allows you to add and embed your videos with the click of a button. There are options to feature photo and video galleries on different website pages as well as create fullscreen video backgrounds. There is also a video widget to make adding, editing, and formatting your website’s videos quick and straightforward.
If you’re a video blogger these themes might be ideal for you — they’re built for people who want to include written blog content alongside videos on their website.
Videoblog is a blog and magazine video theme that gives you the ability to list your latest or featured posts on your homepage. The rest of your site pages are formatted in two-column, magazine layouts so your written, video, and photo content are all aligned in an organized manner to enhance user experience.
TheMotion is a video blogging theme with a feature called Live Customizer that allows you to add all of your video content, test it out in different sections, and see your changes in real time. The theme offers a variety of ways to feature videos on specific website pages in two columns. The theme has a sleek, modern design with the option to add a video slider so your visitors can easily move right or left through your collection of videos.
Vlog is a video theme built for blog and magazine content. The theme is compatible with YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion to make sharing your video content simple. You can group your videos into playlists to keep related content together so it’s easy to find for your visitors. You can also set your video’s thumbnail as your featured image for your article or blog post so you don’t have to deal with any images if you don’t want to.
If you are looking to share your portfolio, feature your videos and photos in a gallery, and possibly sell your work straight from your website, the following portfolio and photography-based video themes may suit your needs.
Reel Story is a video theme ideal for sharing your portfolio. The video portfolio module allows you to create a three-column grid layout with a “projects category” filter so your visitors can easily browse your work and locate specific items they may be searching for. The theme is also Retina-ready, meaning it’s optimized for sharing hi-res, professional content and videos.
Fargo is a photography and video WordPress theme ideal for sharing your content in a gallery format. The theme’s Smart Galleries allow you to move from written content to photo content to video content seamlessly. Fargo’s flexible navigation includes customizable transitions that create an interactive, 3D experience for your visitors while they browse your different site pages.
PhotoNote is a video theme ideal for photographers. The theme has a touch-enabled slideshow on the homepage so your visitors can slide through your landscape and portrait photographs. It’s compatible with YouTube and Vimeo so you can quickly add your videos to the top of your site pages — and make them fullscreen if you choose. PhotoNote comes with two different “skin colors” (light or dark) for your theme’s background so you can ensure your content pops off the page.
Inspiro is a video theme built for professional photographers and videographers who want to share their content in a portfolio format. The theme features formatting options that allow you to create custom, fullscreen slideshows that include both your photos and videos. On each slide, there is a “video lightbox”, meaning your video appears to jump off the screen as the entire background dims — this helps your visitors focus on the content they’re viewing. The theme also works for professionals who are hoping to sell their work because it includes a WooCommerce integration.
Primero is a theme created for photographers and videographers. The theme also has several portfolio options for you to display all of your work in custom galleries. You can embed your photos and videos inline with text or other photo or video content.
Videographers, directors, and producers may benefit from these WordPress themes. They have layouts and customizable options tailored to sharing and displaying videos of many lengths, topics, and genres.
If you produce your own movies and videos, FilmMaker could be a great WordPress theme option for you. The theme gives you the ability to create fullscreen video backgrounds or add a parallax effect to your site pages — the parallax effect provides a 3D, cinematic experience for your visitors while they scroll down the page.
The Producer is created for professional video production work. The theme is responsive, meaning your video content will look high quality and fit the screen no matter what type of device your visitors are on — whether that’s desktop, mobile, or tablet. You can also add the credit roll effect to the end of your videos to list all of your producers, designers, and more.
Creative video themes are versatile and flexible enough to be used for a variety of business needs and different industries, however, they’re still all created specifically for video-based websites.
Focus is a great option for displaying all types of videos, whether you’re sharing your work for professional or personal use. The theme has integrations with YouTube and Vimeo so you can easily transfer your content over from those platforms to your website. The theme also has creative layout and template options suited for video blogs and even educational video sites.
VideoBox is a creative video theme with a WooCommerce integration for anyone who may want to sell their video or photo content. The homepage layout includes a slider that allows you to feature multiple, fullscreen videos or photos for your visitors to click through. VideoBox has a minimalist design with a dark color scheme making it easy for your visitors to focus on your content.
VideoPro is a creative video theme with a responsive design and also includes layout options ideal for a variety of video types such as movies, games, news, entertainment, education, and more. VideoPro integrates with sites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook, so you can easily embed, import, and share your content. VideoPro also has a feature that allows you to create a multi-episode video series on your website — displaying related videos below whichever video is being watched by a visitor at any given moment.
WordPress video themes allow you to display your content, mix and match your videos with photos and written content, sell your content, and more. Whatever your needs, there is a video theme that will work for your WordPress website. Try installing one of the themes above, or check out the number of other video themes in the WordPress theme library. By applying your unique content you can create a website that works for your business needs.
Posted by MiriamEllis
This article was written jointly in partnership with Kameron Jenkins. You can enjoy her previous articles here.
When you’ve accomplished step one in your local search marketing, how do you take step two?
You already know that any local business you market has to have the table stakes of accurate structured citations on major platforms like Facebook, Yelp, Infogroup, Acxiom, and YP.
But what can local SEO practitioners do once they’ve got these formal listings created and a system in place for managing them? Our customers often come to us once they’ve gotten well underway with Moz Local and ask, “What’s next? What can I do to move the needle?” This blog post will give you the actionable strategy and a complete step-by-step tutorial to answer this important question.
Listings on formal directories are called “structured citations.” When other types of platforms (like online news, blogs, best-of lists, etc.) reference a local business’ complete or partial contact information, that’s called an “unstructured citation.” And the best unstructured citations of all include links, of course!
For example, the San Francisco branch of a natural foods grocery store gets a linked unstructured citation from a major medical center in their city via a blog post about stocking a pantry with the right ingredients for healthier eating. Google and consumers encounter this reference and understand that trust and authority are being conveyed and earned.
The more often websites that are relevant to your location or industry link to you within their own content, the better your chances of ranking well in Google’s organic and local search engine results.
Link building is as old as organic SEO. Structured citation building is as old as local SEO. Both practices have long sought to influence Google rankings. But a close read of the local search marketing community these days points up an increasing emphasis on the value of unstructured citations. In fact, local links were one of the top three takeaways from the 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Why is this?
Your goal with linked unstructured citations is to build your community footprint and your authority simultaneously. All you need is the right tools for the research phase!
For the sake of this tutorial, let’s choose at random a small B&B in Albuquerque — Bottger.com — as our hypothetical client. Let’s say that the innkeeper wants to know how the big Tribal resort casinos are earning publicity and links, in the hopes of finding opportunities for a smaller hospitality business, too. *Note that these aren’t absolutely direct competitors, but they share a city and an overall industry.
We’re going to use Moz’s Link Intersect tool to do this research for Bottger Mansion. This tool could help Bottger uncover all kinds of links and unstructured linked citation opportunities, depending on how it’s used. For example, the tool could surface:
A client may already know who the “big fish” in their community are, or you can cast a net by identifying popular local events and seeing which businesses sponsor them. Sponsorships can be pricey, depending on the event, so if a local company sponsors a big event, it’s an indication that they’re a larger enterprise with the budget to pursue a wide array of creative PR ideas. Larger enterprises can serve as models for small business emulation, at scale.
In our case study, we know that Bottger is located in Albuquerque, so we decided to locate sponsors of the famous Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Right away, we spotted two lavish Albuquerque resort-casinos — Isleta and Sandia. These are the “big fish” we want our smaller client to look to for inspiration.
We’re going to compare Bottger’s domain to Isleta and Sandia’s domains. In Moz Pro, navigate to “Link Explorer” and then select “Link Intersect” from the left navigation. Input your domain in the top and the domains you want to mine link ideas from in the fields beneath, as depicted below.
Open Link Explorer in a new tab
Next to Bottger’s domain, we’ve selected “root domain” as that will show us all competitor links who haven’t linked to us at all. We’re also going to select “root domain” on the resort domains, so we can see all of their backlinks, rather than just links to particular pages on their sites.
Moz’s Link Intersect tool will let you compare your site with up to 5 competitors. It’s totally up to you how many sites you want to evaluate at once. If you’re just getting started with link building, you may want to start with just one domain, as this should yield plenty of link opportunities to start with. If you’ve already been doing some link building, you have more time to dedicate to link building, or you’d just generally rather have more options to work with, go ahead and put in multiple domains to compare.
Once you’ve input your domain and your competitor(s) domains, click “Find Opportunities.” That will yield a list of sites that link to your competitors, but do not link to you.
In this example, we’re comparing our client’s domain against two other domains: A (Isleta) and B (Sandia). In the “Sites that intersect” column, you will see whether Site A has the link, Site B has it, or if they both have it.
Now that we have a list of link ideas from Isleta and Sandia’s backlink profiles, it’s time to decide which ones might yield good opportunities for our B&B. That’s right — just because something is in a competitor’s link profile doesn’t necessarily mean you want it!
The first step is to drill down and get more detail about links the big resorts have. Select the arrow to expand this section and view the exact page the link is coming from.
In this example, both Sandia and Isleta have links from the root domain marriott.com. By using the “expand” feature, we can see the exact pages those links are located on.
You can use the MozBar Chrome plugin to view whether your competitor’s link is no-followed or followed. Since only followed links pass authority, you may want to prioritize those, but no-followed links can also have value in the form of generating traffic to your site and could get picked up by others who do eventually link to your site with a follow link.
Select the MozBar icon from your browser and click the pencil icon. If you want to see Followed links, select “Followed” and the MozBar will highlight these links on the page in green. To find No-Followed links, click “No-Followed” and MozBar will highlight these links on the page in pink.
Common types of links you’ll see in the profiles of local business websites
If this is your first foray into link building for local businesses, you may be unfamiliar with the types of sites you’ll see in Link Intersect. While no two link profiles are exactly the same, many local businesses use similar methods for building links, so there are some common categories to be aware of. Knowing these will help you decipher the results Link Intersect will show you.
Press releases
Press release sites like PRweb.com and PRnewsire.com are fairly common among local businesses that want to spread the word about their initiatives. Whether someone at the business won an award or they started a new community outreach program, local businesses often pay companies like PRweb.com to distribute this news on their platform and to their partners. These are no-followed links (don’t pass link authority aka “SEO value”) but they can offer valuable traffic and could even get picked up by sites that do link with a follow link.
If your competitor is utilizing press releases, you may want to consider distributing your newsworthy information this way!
Structured citations / directories
One of the primary types of domains you’ll see in a local business’ backlink profile is directories — structured citation websites like yellowpages.com that list a business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP) with a link back to the business’ website. Because they’re self-created and not editorially given, like Press Releases, they are often no-followed. However, having consistent and accurate citations across major directory websites is a key foundational step in local search performance.
If you see these types of sites in Link Intersect, it may indicate your need for a listings management solution like Moz Local that can ensure your NAP is accurate and available across major directories. Typically, you’ll want to have these table stakes before focusing on unstructured linked citations.
News coverage
Another favorite among local businesses is local media coverage (or just media coverage in general — it’s not always local). HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a popular service for connecting journalists to subject matter experts who may be valuable sources for their articles. The journalists will typically link your quote back to your website. Aside from services like HARO, local businesses would do well to make media contacts, such as forming relationships with local news correspondents. As news surfaces, they’ll start reaching out to you for comment!
If you see news coverage in your competitor’s backlink profile, you can get ideas of what types of publications want content and information that you can provide.
Local / industry coverage
Blogs, hobby sites, DIY sites, and other platforms can feature content that depicts city life or interest in a topic. For example, a chef might author a popular blog covering their dining experiences in San Francisco. For a local restaurant, being cited by this publication could be valuable.
If you see popular local or industry sites in your competitor’s backlink profile, it’s a good signal of opportunity for your business to build a relationship with the authors in hopes of gaining links.
Trade organizations
Most local businesses are affiliated with some type of governing/regulating body, trade organization, award organization, etc. Many of these organizations have websites themselves, and they often list the businesses they’re affiliated with.
If your competitor is involved with an organization, that means your business is likely suited to be involved as well! Use these links to get ideas of which organizations to join.
Community organizations
Community organizations are a great local validator for search engines, and many local businesses have taken notice. You’ll likely find these types of organizations’ websites in your competitor’s backlink profile, such as Chamber of Commerce websites or the local YMCA.
As a local business, your competitors are in the same locale as you, so take note of these community organizations and consider joining them. You’ll not only get the benefit of better community involvement, but you can get a link out of it too!
Sponsorships / event participation
Local businesses can sponsor, donate to, host or participate in community events, teams, and other cherished local resources, which can lead to both online and offline publicity.
Local businesses can earn great links from online press surrounding these groups and happening. If an event/team page highlights you, but doesn’t actually link to benefactors/participants, don’t be shy about politely requesting a link.
Scholarships / .edu sites
A popular strategy used by many local businesses and non-local businesses alike is scholarship link building. Businesses figured out that if they offered a scholarship, they could get a link back to their site on education websites, such as .edu domains. Everyone seemed to catch on — so much so that many schools stopped featuring these scholarships on their site. It’s also important to note that .edu domains don’t inherently have more value than domains on any other TLD.
If your business wants to offer a scholarship, that is a great thing! We encourage you to pursue this for the benefit it could offer students, rather than primarily for the purpose of gaining links. Scholarship link building has become very saturated, and could be a strategy with diminishing returns, so don’t put all your eggs in this basket, and do it first and foremost for students instead of links.
Other businesses
Businesses may sometimes partner with each other for mutually beneficial link opportunities. Co-marketing opportunities that are a byproduct of genuine relationships can present valuable link opportunities, but link exchanges are against Google’s quality guidelines.
Stay away from “you link to me, I’ll link to you” opportunities as Google can see it as an attempt to manipulate your site’s ranking in search, but don’t be afraid to pursue genuine connections with other businesses that can turn into linking opportunities.
Spam
Just because your competitor has that link doesn’t mean you want it too! In Link Intersect, pay attention to the domain’s Spam Score and DA. A high spam score and/or low DA can indicate that the link wouldn’t be valuable for your site, and may even harm it.
Also watch out for links generated from comments. If your competitor has links in their backlink profile coming from comments, you can safely ignore these as they do not present real opportunities for earning links that will move the needle in the right direction.
Now that you’re familiar with popular types of local backlinks and what you can do with them, let’s actually dig into Isleta and Sandia’s backlinks to see which might be good prospects for us.
Both the Albuquerque Marriott and Hilton Garden Inn link to Isleta and Sandia on their “Local Things to Do” pages. This could be a great prospect for Bottger! In many cases, “things to do” pages will include lists of local restaurants, historic sites, attractions, shops, and more. Note how their addresses are included on the following pages, making them powerful linked unstructured citations. Bottger hosts fancy tea parties in a lovely setting, which could be a fun thing for tourists to do.
Isleta and Sandia also have links from a wedding website. If Bottger uses their property as a wedding venue, offers special wedding or engagement packages, or something similar, this could be a great prospect as well.
Link Intersect also yielded links to various travel guide websites. There are plenty of links on websites like these to local attractions. In the following example, you can see an Albuquerque travel guide that’s broken up by category, “hotels” being one of them:
Isleta and Sandia also have been featured in the Albuquerque Journal. In this example, a local reporter covered news that Isleta was opening expanded bingo and poker rooms. This seems to be a journalist who covers local businesses, so she could be a great connection to make!
Many other links in Isleta and Sandia’s backlink profiles came from sources like events websites, since these resorts are large enough to serve as the venue for major events like concerts and MMA matches. Although Bottger isn’t large enough to host an event of that magnitude, it could spark good ideas for link building opportunities in the future. Maybe Bottger could host a small community tea tasting event featuring locally sourced herbal teas and get in touch with a local reporter to promote it. Even competitor links that you can’t directly pursue can spark your creativity for related link building opportunities.
And let’s not forget how we found out about Isleta and Sandia in the first place: the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta! Event sponsors are featured on an “official sponsors” page with links to their websites. This is a classic, locally relevant opportunity for any Albuquerque business.
If you’re thinking, “This sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of work. How am I ever going to keep track of all this?” — we’ve got you covered!
Moz Pro’s “Link Tracking Lists” was built for just this purpose.
In Link Intersect, you’ll see little check boxes next to all your competitors’ links. When you find one you want to target, check the box. When you’re done going through all the links and have checked the boxes next to the domains you want to pursue, click “Add to Link Tracking List” at the top right.
Since we’ve never done link building for Bottger before, we’re going to select “Create New List” from the dropdown, and label it something descriptive.
Make sure to put your client’s domain in the “target URL” field. For Step 3, since we’ve just selected the links we want to track from Link Intersect, those will already be populated in this field, so no further action is needed other than to click “Save.”
We’ll come back to Link Tracking Lists when we talk about outreach, but for now, all you need to know is that you can add the desirable competitor links (in our case, links from Isleta and Sandia) to Link Tracking lists straight from Link Intersect, making it easy to manage your data.
Now it’s time to connect the dots: how do you go from knowing about your competitor’s links to getting those types of links for yourself?
There are three main ways you can get unstructured linked citations to your local business’ website, and those categories are what’s going to dictate the strategy you need to take to secure that opportunity for yourself.
Since this tutorial is about proactively pursuing link opportunities, we’re going to focus on unstructured linked citations types one and two.
If your competitor has been featured in an article from say a local journalist or blogger, then your outreach will be focused on making a connection with that writer or publication for future link opportunities, rather than getting the exact link your competitor has. That’s because the article has already been written, so it’s unlikely that the writer will go back and edit their story just to add your link.
The one exception to this rule would be if the article links to your competitor, but your competitor’s link is now broken. In this scenario, you could reach out to the writer and say something like, “Hey! I notice in your article [article title] you link to [competitor’s link], but that link doesn’t seem to be working. I have similar content on my website [your URL]. If you find it valuable, please feel free to use it as a replacement for that broken link!”
Sometimes the contact information of the writer will be right next to the article, itself. For example: 
If there’s no email address or contact form in the writer’s bio, you can usually find a link to one of their social media accounts, like Twitter, and you can connect with them there via a public or direct message. If you live in a small, tight-knit community, you may even be able to meet with the author in person.
If you notice your competitors are issuing a lot of press releases and you want to try that out for yourself, you’ll likely need to sign up for an account, as these are a primarily self-serve platform. Most quality press release sites charge per release, and the price can differ depending on length.
You’ll either want to sign up for a citation service like Moz Local that distributes your data to these types of listings programmatically, or if you do it manually, you’ll want to find the link to create your listings. Please note that your business may already be on the directory even if you haven’t set up a profile. Before creating a new listing, search for your business name and its variants, your phone number, and current and former addresses to see if there are existing listings you can claim and update.
Most businesses will make it easy to contact them. If you’re trying to contact another business for the purpose of proposing teaming up for a co-marketing opportunity, look in their footer (the very bottom of the website). If there’s no contact information there, search for a “Contact Us” or “About” page. You may not find an email address, but you may be able to find a contact form or phone number. Below is an example from Albuquerque Little Theater, where they have contact information on the right and advertising information in the top navigation for businesses that are interested in taking out ads in their printed show programs. Not an unstructured linked citation, but a great way to get your business known to the community!
Most organizations will make it easy for those who want to join, unless they are more exclusive or invitation-only. In the event that you do wish to get involved in an invitation-only organization that has no public-facing contact information, try viewing a member list and seeing if there’s anyone you know. Or maybe you know someone who can introduce you to one of the members. Genuine connections are key for this type of organization.
Outreach emails are necessary when the link opportunity you’re pursuing isn’t a link you could create yourself, or if the link source is one where you can’t make face-to-face contact with decision-makers. One of the most important questions you should be asking yourself for these opportunities is, “Why would this website link to me?”
Here’s how Bottger might go about sending an outreach email:
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Greeting that matches the nature of the outreach target |
“Hey Jill!” might be fine when outreaching to the author of a blog, while “Hello Ms. Smith” might be better for more professional outreach. |
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Introduction |
Give a brief summary of who you are, what you do, and your interest in contacting them. For example: “I work with Bottger Mansion, a historic Bed & Breakfast in Old Town Albuquerque. I found your page about Albuquerque activities — you’ve really captured a lot of what Albuquerque has to offer!” |
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The ask, and the value add |
This is where you’ll actually ask for the link. It’s a good idea here to add value. Don’t just ask for something; offer to give something back! To continue the same example: “As long-time residents of Old Town, we’d love to provide you with a comprehensive list of activities in the city’s historic district! We feel an Old Town Activities list would be a great addition to your page. Bottger Mansion regularly hosts high tea, for example, which we’d love to let more people know about with a spot on your list!” |
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Close |
Wish them well, thank them for their time, and sign off. Make sure that it’s easy for them to find information about you by including your full name, title, organization, and website/social links in your email signature. |
Don’t be afraid to get on the phone, either! Hearing your voice can add a human element to the outreach attempt and offer a better conversion rate than a more impersonal email (we all get so many of those a day that ones from people we don’t know are easy to ignore).
And remember that local businesses have a particular advantage in accruing unstructured linked citations. Lively participation in the life of your community can continuously introduce you to decision-makers at popular local publications, paving the way towards neighborly outreach on your part. Learn to see the opportunities and think of ways your business can add value to the content that is being written about your town or city.
Next-to-last, we’re going to jump back to Link Tracking Lists for a second, because that’s going to come in extremely handy here. Remember when we created the list with Sandia and Isleta’s links that we were interested in pursuing? Those will now show up when we go to Moz Pro > Link Explorer > Link Tracking Lists.
Every time Bottger successfully secures a link that they’ve added to their Link Tracking List, the red X in “Links to target URL?” column will turn blue, indicating that the site links to Bottger’s root domain. If we were pursuing links to individual pages, and a link prospect linked to our target page, the red X would turn green.
Another handy feature is the “Notes” dropdown. This allows you to keep track of your outreach attempts, which can be one of the trickiest parts about link building!
Before starting this process for yourself, familiarize yourself with these four risks so that your fishing trip doesn’t result in a basket of bad catches that could waste your resources or get your website penalized.
Link Intersect can be amazingly helpful for discovering new, relevant link opportunities for your local business, but link builders beware. If all you ever do is copy your competitors, the most you’ll ever achieve is becoming the second-best version of them. Use this method to keep tabs on strategies your competition is using, and even use it to spark your own creativity, but avoid copying everything your competitors do, and nothing else. Why be the second-best version of your competition when you can be the best version of yourself?
Comparing your site’s backlink profile with your direct competitors’ backlink profiles will return a list of links that they have and you don’t, but don’t use Link Intersect results as an exact checklist of links to pursue. Your competitors might have bad backlinks in their profile. For example, avoid pursuing opportunities from domains with a high Spam Score or low Domain or Page Authority (DA/PA). Learn more about how to evaluate sites by their Spam Score or DA/PA.
They might also have great backlinks that aren’t the right opportunity for your business, and those should be avoided too! Do you remember Isleta and Sandia’s links for events like MMA matches? If Bottger were to blindly take those resorts’ link profiles as directives, they might think they have to host a fight at their B&B, too!
Take what you find with a grain of salt. Evaluate every link opportunity on its own merit, rather than deeming it a good opportunity simply because your competitor has it.
Choose the domains and pages you want to compare yourself against wisely. As a small local B&B, Bottger wouldn’t want to compare their backlink profile to that of Wikipedia or The New York Times, for example. Those sites are popular, but not relevant in any way to the types of unstructured linked citations Bottger would want to pursue, such as links that are locally relevant or industry-relevant.
In other words, just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it will yield relevant unstructured linked citation opportunities for you. Here in this tutorial, we’ve outlined one potential use-case for Link Intersect: finding unstructured linked citations your local business competitors have. However, this is not the only use for Link Intersect. Instead of comparing your site against competitors or near-competitors, you could compare it against:
If you know what types of links you’re trying to find, choosing sites to evaluate against your own should be a lot easier, and yield more relevant opportunities.
If you’ve never embarked on link building before, we encourage you to read through Google’s quality guidelines for webmasters, specifically its section on “Link schemes.” If you were to distill those link guidelines down into a single principle, it would be: don’t create links for the purpose of manipulating your site’s ranking in Google search. That’s right. Google doesn’t want anyone embarking on any marketing initiatives solely for the purpose of improving their ranking. Google wants links to be the natural byproduct of the quality work you’re doing for your audience. Google can penalize sites that participate in activities such as:
This underscores that the activities that are just good business, like being involved in the local community, are also the ones that can produce the links that Google likes. Sites owners might need a little nudge, which is why we’ve included a section on outreach, but that doesn’t mean the links are unnatural. Unstructured linked citations should be a byproduct of the good work local businesses are doing in their communities.
At Moz, we’re strong believers in authenticity, and there is no better pond for building meaningful marketing relationships than the local one. Focusing on unstructured linked citations can be viewed as a prompt to grow your community relationships — with journalists, bloggers, event hosts, business associations, and customers. It’s a chance for a real-world fishing trip that can reel in a basket of publicity for your local brand beyond what money can buy. Your genuine desire to serve and build community will stand you in good stead for the long haul.
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