Official: Google is rolling out green “Ad” label globally

Yellow is out, green is in for text ads in Google search results. The post Official: Google is rolling out green “Ad” label globally appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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New survey says Google Maps favored by nearly 70 percent of iPhone users

The survey data seem to contradict statements made by Apple and others about Apple Maps' dominance on the iPhone. The post New survey says Google Maps favored by nearly 70 percent of iPhone users appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Common misconceptions when measuring SEO content performance

As SEO practitioners turn their focus toward user engagement as a measure of content success, columnist Ian Bowden says the conventional wisdom surrounding user engagement metrics may, in fact, be misleading. The post Common misconceptions when measuring SEO content performance appeared first on...

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How to quickly find and export all subdomains indexed by Google

Performing an SEO audit? Contributor Max Prin demonstrates how to find all of a website's indexed subdomains using a simple (and free) Chrome plugin. The post How to quickly find and export all subdomains indexed by Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Why We Only Accept 1 Out of Every 10 Guest Blog Pitches

Posted by BopDesign

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

We’ve been pitched a blog post about hoverboards.

While hoverboards are pretty cool and I’d like to own one, our business and our blog have absolutely nothing to do with hoverboards.

Why did we get pitched a post about hoverboards? Most likely because the person pitching the post saw we have a decent domain authority and they wanted to get a piece of it by getting a backlink from us. I’m sure their blog post on hoverboards would have been very interesting, but it likely would have caused our audience of B2B marketing professionals to scratch their heads in confusion.

We know who we are, and who we are not

We are a boutique digital marketing firm that focuses on creating websites and providing content marketing services.

Writing about anything else doesn’t provide value for our brand.

Over the past eight years, we’ve built up the blog on our website writing (mostly) weekly posts about all aspects of web design and digital marketing. This blogging strategy has enabled us to add two to four new blog posts to our website each month. Our main goal has always been to provide our clients and prospects with helpful, actionable information that helps them do their jobs better or aids them in making a decision about digital marketing.

Potential clients get helpful tips and can do their jobs better.

We get great content that may help us rank better and attract more potential clients.

We hate rejection, too

While we love adding insightful information to our blog, we hate having to reject guest post submissions.

Below is an actual pitch we received (sender’s information not included to protect their privacy).

Any smart website owner should be excited to get a guest post pitch. Not only is it flattering (you really like us and want to write for us?), but you get free, hopefully useful content for your website. You can use someone else’s writing to drive traffic to your website.

It's not us; it's you

So, why the heck do we end up rejecting nine out of ten pitches we receive?

Simply stated, many of the guest post pitches we receive "aren’t a good fit," which can mean a variety of things.

Here are the top reasons we reject a guest blog (and why you should, too):

• The topic is irrelevant
• The company pitching the blog isn’t related to our industry
• The writing is terrible
• The blog is tailored to the wrong audience (B2C vs B2B or CTO vs CMO)
• The website they want us to link to is sketchy
• We’ve published a blog post from them recently
• The writing in the email is terrible and full of grammar issues
• The person hasn’t researched our business or even looked at our website
• The topic is too inflammatory
• The topic is relevant but not inline with our firm’s philosophy
• The topic is tired and overused
• There is no value for our audience

When I read a guest blog pitch, I evaluate it for all of these things.

Don't make me hate helping you

Recently, I made the mistake of tentatively accepting a guest post pitch even though the grammar in the email wasn’t up to our standards. We work with CEOs, founders, and marketing directors in a variety of industries, including biotech and finance, all who tend to have advanced educations and expect quality writing.

As such, we require all the content on our website to be grammatically correct, to flow well, and to be coherent.

I ignored my instinct because the proposed topic was really interesting and I felt it would be a great blog post for our current clients. I ended up paying for it. The draft that the guest writer sent over was subpar, to put it nicely. A blog post will undergo revisions, but this post was grammatically challenged and incoherent, jumping from point to point and back again.

I Tracked Changes during the revision process, then returned the post to the writer, who I didn’t hear back from.

The winning 10%

We’ve noticed that winning guest pitches — whether ours or others who pitch to our blog — have a few things in common, in that the pitchers seem to realize the following:

• It’s not easy and it does take time
• Always be professional and respectful
• Know your audience (both the person you're emailing and the folks who are reading their website/blog)
• Read their existing blog posts
• Pitch a relevant topic
• Follow-up is key to getting a response (rejection or approval)
• Don’t push it
• Don’t get discouraged

We don’t anticipate this 90/10 rule for the blog pitches we accept to change. It’s unfortunate, but we know that many digital marketers will never fully understand guest blog pitches and will continue the machine-gun pitching strategy.

7 tips for a successful guest blog pitch

Based on our experience pitching guest blogs and accepting guest blogs, we have several insights to share with writers, marketers, and website owners.

1. Steer clear of paying for guest post opportunities

This one always surprises me. It’s only a matter of time before sites that sell space on their blog are nixed from the SERPs. We always decline when a website we pitch tells us they will publish it for a fee.

2. Do your own research

We always perform our own research to vet a website, ensure it’s relevant, and make sure it actually has a blog we’d like to write for.

3. Don’t always go after 60+ DA websites

It’s great to land a guest blog on a high DA site, but these are often very tough. It's often better to start with the "low-hanging fruit," relevant sites that might have low domain authority.

4. Write a thoughtful article that adds value

Don’t write crap. Consider every guest blog you write to be a graded assignment. Your professional reputation still matters in a digital world. If you write crap, you will be judged for it.

5. Provide options.

People, including editors, like to have options. You might have a great topic, but it’s always best to present several great topics. You never know, the editor may have previously accepted a similar topic.

6. Be genuine.

Ditch your generic email pitch. You may start with a template, but spend 15 minutes or so tailoring it to your pitch.

If you can, find the person’s name and personalize the message. Keep in mind that many of the people you pitch receive lots of unsolicited pitches every day. Stand out from the rest by being genuine and unique.

7. Don’t spam or waste people’s time.

If the website you're pitching isn’t relevant to your industry, don’t pitch them. If they take the time to send you a rejection notice, be gracious and respectful. Take it as a learning experience and thank them for their time.

The last thing I’ve learned about rejecting and submitting guest blog posts is a success comes from creating a partnership between the person doing the pitching and the person being pitched. Our approach is always to offer something of value, be respectful, and, hopefully, create a connection beneficial for everyone.

Have you been successful in pitching guest posts? What’s worked for you?

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Keyword Explorer Upgrades: New Features, More Lists, and Better Metrics

Posted by randfish

It's been 5 weeks since Keyword Explorer's launch and in that time, more than 75,000 folks have tried out what is, in my opinion, the best keyword research tool on the market. And I'm not alone:

And that's just a sampling of the many, many kind pieces of feedback we've received the last few weeks (OK, there's even more than that... just keeps going).

But today, we're upgrading it further with three of the most requested features since launch.

Keyword volume is now international

Since launch day, KW Explorer has only had support for US volume, but as of today, that's no longer the case. Russ Jones has been working with the team to support a larger capacity for international volume data, and we've got significant coverage for UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those. Over time, we'll be refining and adding to the keyword volume corpus so we can continue to improve.

Note that volume data in the US is still our most accurate, as we're able to apply our clickstream dataset (which is currently US-only) to those metrics. Outside the US, our data will be more similar to what you find in Google AdWords, though our volume buckets still have greater accuracy overall and less spikiness month to month. For temporal fluctuation data, I'd still recommend Google Trends, whose accuracy seems much better than in years past.

Suggestions filters now include questions

Many users of KW Explorer have noted a fondness for specifically finding keyword searches in the form of questions. We've heard from fans of AnswerThePublic (which visualizes Google Suggest data), who were hoping we could add that type of data/filtering. Today, it's here!

The questions filter goes across all the types of suggestions data we pull, and uses a fairly comprehensive set of question formats (who, what, where, when, why — and also: is, does, can, how, etc). In testing this feature, I've been pretty impressed; there are a ton of great content ideas in these, even on the ones without a lot of search volume.

Keyword grouping at the click of a button

Another of our most-requested features since our private beta was a way to group similar keywords together so they could all be added to a list or quickly filtered through together. I love the way the team put this feature together: not just offering one way to do it, but providing three different groupings based on how closely vs. distantly related you want to see those terms grouped.

Lexical similarity, the spelling-and-phrase-based closeness of the words to each other, is how KW Explorer does grouping. As you can see, *low* lexical similarity provides fewer groups with more keywords in each, while *high* lexical similarity gives more groups and fewer keywords.

Grouping makes scanning easier, but we've also added a slick, "one click to add all keywords in a group" button to the feature.

For those of you who like keywords in groups, this will make the process of identifying and adding them to lists (either en masse or individually) vastly more streamlined.

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In addition to those features, we've also made two other substantive changes to Keyword Explorer:

Improved Keyword Difficulty scores

The model used for Keyword Difficulty in KW Explorer was a significant upgrade from the old Keyword Difficulty tool. We addressed a lot of the bunching and overly simplistic handling, and produced what I felt was a vastly superior set of numbers. However, not all scores felt right, and in doing some research with the team, Dr. Pete discovered a great deal of bunching at the bottom of the score set, wherein far too many terms were getting a 0–10 score than should. He made a fix that we've now pushed to production and you should see better KW Difficulty scores across the board.

It's a small change, but one that improves the model, and we'll continue to watch for outliers and issues so we can keep improving. Dr. Pete keeps collecting feedback for analysis, so if you find terms and phrases that don't seem to match, drop him a line over Twitter or get in touch with us through any of our support channels. Difficulty isn't designed to be an absolute, though. When using it, we strongly recommend looking at similar keywords in a sector based on their relative differences in KW Difficulty, not as a perfect number in the abstract (similar to DA/PA).

More lists for everyone

Lists are one of the most useful parts of Keyword Explorer. They've saved me hours upon hours of tedious Excel imports, cutting, pasting, fetching metrics, etc. But we noticed that many folks were filling up their lists fast, so we've tripled the limits for both tiers of Keyword Explorer on its own, and bundled as part of Moz Pro.

If you had 10 lists, you now have 30. If you had 30 lists, you've now got 100.

So go to town! I've loved creating lists for friends, my own projects, folks I'm helping with SEO, and observing what data and insights shake out.

It's pretty satisfying to see how fast KW Explorer gets data, how clean the exports are, and how obvious the right keywords to target become once you've got all the right metrics to compare.

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One of my big frustrations over the years has been when we (or other software companies) release a product, and then let it languish. Great products get better through iteration, feedback, and upgrades. I'm hopeful that this is just the first of many updates I'll have to share about Keyword Explorer's progress, and to make that a reality, I need your help.

Check out the new Keyword Explorer updates in action!

Please, if you haven't yet given KW Explorer a spin, now's a great time to do so. You can feel free to send me feedback directly — rand at moz dot com — or via our customer support, Q+A forum, Twitter, or the comments on this post.

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SearchCap: Apple Maps, AdWords spend & SEO trends

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Apple Maps, AdWords spend & SEO trends appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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