Building Better Customer Experiences - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Are you mindful of your customer’s experience after they become a lead? It’s easy to fall in the same old rut of newsletters, invoices, and sales emails, but for a truly exceptional customer experience that improves their retention and love for your brand, you need to go above and beyond. In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, the ever-insightful Dana DiTomaso shares three big things you can start doing today that will immensely better your customer experience and make earning those leads worthwhile.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I’m the President and partner of Kick Point, and today I’m going to talk to you about building better customer experiences. I know that in marketing a lot of our jobs revolve around getting leads and more leads and why can’t we have all of the leads.

The typical customer experience:

But in reality, the other half of our job should be making sure that those leads are taken care of when they become customers. This is especially important if you don’t have, say, a customer care department. If you do have a customer care department, really you should be interlocking with what they do, because typically what happens, when you’re working with a customer, is that after the sale, they usually get surveys.

- Surveys

“How did we do? Please rate us on a scale of 1 to 10,” which is an enormous scale and kind of useless. You’re a 4, or you’re an 8, or you’re a 6. Like what actually differentiates that, and how are people choosing that?

- Invoices

Then invoices, like obviously important because you have to bill people, particularly if you have a big, expensive product or you’re a SaaS business. But those invoices are sometimes kind of impersonal, weird, and maybe not great.

- Newsletters

Maybe you have a newsletter. That’s awesome. But is the newsletter focused on sales? One of the things that we see a lot is, for example, if somebody clicks a link in the newsletter to get to your website, maybe you’ve written a blog post, and then they see a great big popup to sign up for our product. Well, you’re already a customer, so you shouldn’t be seeing that popup anymore.

What we’ve seen on other sites, like Help Scout actually does a great job of this, is that they have a parameter of newsletter at the end of any URLs they put in their newsletter, and then the popups are suppressed because you’re already in the newsletter so you shouldn’t see a popup encouraging you to sign up or join the newsletter, which is kind of a crappy experience.

- Sales emails

Then the last thing are sales emails. This is my personal favorite, and this can really be avoided if you go into account-based marketing automation instead of personal-based marketing automation.

We had a situation where I was a customer of the hosting company. It was in my name that we’ve signed up for all of our clients, and then one of our developers created a new account because she needed to access something. Then immediately the sales emails started, not realizing we’re at the same domain. We’re already a customer. They probably shouldn’t have been doing the hard sale on her. We’ve had this happen again and again.

So just really make sure that you’re not sending your customers or people who work at the same company as your customers sales emails. That’s a really cruddy customer experience. It makes it look like you don’t know what’s going on. It really can destroy trust.

Tips for an improved customer experience

So instead, here are some extra things that you can do. I mean fix some of these things if maybe they’re not working well. But here are some other things you can do to really make sure your customers know that you love them and you would like them to keep paying you money forever.

1. Follow them on social media

So the first thing is following them on social. So what I really like to do is use a tool such as FullContact. You can take everyone’s email addresses, run them through FullContact, and it will come back to you and say, “Here are the social accounts that this person has.” Then you go on Twitter and you follow all of these people for example. Or if you don’t want to follow them, you can make a list, a hidden list with all of their social accounts in there.

Then you can see what they share. A tool like Nuzzel, N-U-Z-Z for Americans, zed zed for Canadians, N-U-Z-Z-E-L is a great tool where you can say, “Tell me all the things that the people I follow on social or the things that this particular list of people on social what they share and what they’re engaged in.” Then you can see what your customers are really interested in, which can give you a good sense of what kinds things should we be talking about.

A company that does this really well is InVision, which is the app that allows you to share prototypes with clients, particularly design prototypes. So they have a blog, and a lot of that blog content is incredibly useful. They’re clearly paying attention to their customers and the kinds of things they’re sharing based on how they build their blog content. So then find out if you can help and really think about how I can help these customers through the things that they share, through the questions that they’re asking.

Then make sure to watch unbranded mentions too. It’s not particularly hard to monitor a specific list of people and see if they tweet things like, “I really hate my (insert what you are)right now,” for example. Then you can head that off at the pass maybe because you know that this was this customer. “Oh, they just had a bad experience. Let’s see what we can do to fix it,“without being like, "Hey, we were watching your every move on Twitter.Here’s something we can do to fix it.”

Maybe not quite that creepy, but the idea is trying to follow these people and watch for those unbranded mentions so you can head off a potential angry customer or a customer who is about to leave off at the pass. Way cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one.

2. Post-sale monitoring

So the next thing is post-sale monitoring. So what I would like you to do is create a fake customer. If you have lots of sales personas, create a fake customer that is each of those personas, and then that customer should get all the emails, invoices, everything else that a regular customer that fits that persona group should get.

Then take a look at those accounts. Are you awesome, or are you super annoying? Do you hear nothing for a year, except for invoices, and then, “Hey, do you want to renew?” How is that conversation going between you and that customer? So really try to pay attention to that. It depends on your organization if you want to tell people that this is what’s happening, but you really want to make sure that that customer isn’t receiving preferential treatment.

So you want to make sure that it’s kind of not obvious to people that this is the fake customer so they’re like, “Oh, well, we’re going to be extra nice to the fake customer.” They should be getting exactly the same stuff that any of your other customers get. This is extremely useful for you.

3. Better content

Then the third thing is better content. I think, in general, any organization should reward content differently than we do currently.

Right now, we have a huge focus on new content, new content, new content all the time, when in reality, some of your best-performing posts might be old content and maybe you should go back and update them. So what we like to tell people about is the Microsoft model of rewarding. They’ve used this to reward their employees, and part of it isn’t just new stuff. It’s old stuff too. So the way that it works is 33% is what they personally have produced.

So this would be new content, for example. Then 33% is what they’ve shared. So think about for example on Slack if somebody shares something really useful, that’s great. They would be rewarded for that. But think about, for example, what you can share with your customers and how that can be rewarding, even if you didn’t write it, or you can create a roundup, or you can put it in your newsletter.

Like what can you do to bring value to those customers? Then the last 33% is what they shared that others produced. So is there a way that you can amplify other voices in your organization and make sure that that content is getting out there? Certainly in marketing, and especially if you’re in a large organization, maybe you’re really siloed, maybe you’re an SEO and you don’t even talk to the paid people, there’s cool stuff happening across the entire organization.

A lot of what you can bring is taking that stuff that others have produced, maybe you need to turn it into something that is easy to share on social media, or you need to turn it into a blog post or a video, like Whiteboard Friday, whatever is going to work for you, and think about how you can amplify that and get it out to your customers, because it isn’t just marketing messages that customers should be seeing.

They should be seeing all kinds of messages across your organization, because when a customer gives you money, it isn’t just because your marketing message was great. It’s because they believe in the thing that you are giving them. So by reinforcing that belief through the types of content that you create, that you share, that you find that other people share, that you shared out to your customers, a lot of sharing, you can certainly improve that relationship with your customers and really turn just your average, run-of-the-mill customer into an actual raving fan, because not only will they stay longer, it’s so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one, but they’ll refer people to you, which is also a lot easier than buying a lot of ads or spending a ton of money and effort on SEO.

Thanks!

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!

Building Better Customer Experiences - Whiteboard Friday published first on http://goproski.com/

The Long-Term Link Acquisition Value of Content Marketing

Posted by KristinTynski

Recently, new internal analysis of our work here at Fractl has yielded a fascinating finding:

Content marketing that generates mainstream press is likely 2X as effective as originally thought. Additionally, the long-term ROI is potentially many times higher than previously reported.

I’ll caveat that by saying this appliesonly to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients.

Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO.

To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:

1. Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain
2. Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content

While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl).

Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works:

So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?

To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from 2015 and 2016 through today. Having a few years of aggregation gave us an initial benchmark for how links accumulate over time for general interest content that is relatively evergreen.

We profiled four campaigns:

• Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders
• America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places
• Reverse-Photoshopping Video Game Characters
• Water Bottle Germs Revealed

The first view we looked at was direct links, or links pointing directly to the client blog posts hosting the content we’ve created on their behalf.

There is a good deal of variability between campaigns, but we see a few interesting general trends that show up in all of the examples in the rest of this article:

1. Both direct and secondary links will accumulate in a few predictable ways:
   1. A large initial spike with a smooth decline
   2. A buildup to a large spike with a smooth decline
   3. Multiple spikes of varying size
2. Roughly 50% of the total volume of links that will be built will accumulate in the first 30 days. The other 50% will accumulate over the following two years and beyond.
3. A small subset of direct links will generate their own large spikes of secondary links.

We’ll now take a look at some specific results. Let’s start by looking at direct links (pickups that link directly back to our client’s site or landing page).

The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over time

This campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively smooth decline in link acquisition over the first month.

After the first month, long-term new direct link acquisition continued for more than two years (and is still going today!).

The less common result: Slow draw up to a major spike

In this example, you can see that sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks to see the initial pickup spike and subsequent primary syndication. In the case of this campaign, we saw a slow buildup to the pinnacle at about a week from the first pickup (exclusive), with a gradual decline over the following two weeks.

“These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications.”

Zooming out to a month-over-month view, we can see resurgences in pickups happening at unpredictable intervals every few months or so. These spikes continued up until today with relative consistency. This happened as some of the stories written during the initial spike began to rank well in Google. These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications. For evergreen topics such as body image (as was the case in this campaign), you will also see writers and editors cycle in and out of writing about these topics as they trend in the public zeitgeist, leading to these unpredictable yet very welcomed resurgences in new links.

Least common result: Multiple spikes in the first few weeks

The third pattern we observed was seen on a campaign we executed examining hate speech on Twitter. In this case, we saw multiple spikes during this early period, corresponding to syndications on other mainstream publications that then sparked their own downstream syndications and individual virality.

Zooming out, we saw a similar result as the other examples, with multiple smaller spikes more within the first year and less frequently in the following two years. Each of these bumps is associated with the story resurfacing organically on new publications (usually a writer stumbling on coverage of the content during the initial phase of popularity).

Long-term resurgences

Finally, in our fourth example that looked at germs on water bottles, we saw a fascinating phenomenon happen beyond the first month where there was a very significant secondary spike.

This spike represents syndication across (all or most) of the iHeartRadio network. As this example demonstrates, it isn’t wholly unusual to see large-scale networks pick up content even a year or later that rival or even exceed the initial month’s result.

Aggregate trends

“50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years.”

When we looked at direct links back to all four campaigns together, we saw the common progression of link acquisition over time. The chart below shows the distribution of new links acquired over two years. We saw a pretty classic long tail distribution here, where 50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years.

“If direct links are the cake, secondary links are the icing, and both accumulate substantially over time.”

Links generated directly to the blog posts/landing pages of the content we’ve created on our clients’ behalf are only really a part of the story. When a campaign garners mainstream press attention, the press stories can often go mildly viral, generating large numbers of syndications and links to these stories themselves. We track these secondary links and reach out to the writers of these stories to try and get link attributions to the primary source (our clients’ blog posts or landing pages where the story/study/content lives).

These types of links also follow a similar pattern over time to direct links. Below are the publishing dates of these secondary links as they were found over time. Their over-time distribution follows the same pattern, with 50% of results being realized within the first month and the following 50% of the value coming over the next two to three years.

The value in the long tail

By looking at multi-year direct and secondary links built to successful content marketing campaigns, it becomes apparent that the total number of links acquired during the first month is really only about half the story.

For campaigns that garner initial mainstream pickups, there is often a multi-year long tail of links that are built organically without any additional or future promotions work beyond the first month. While this long-term value is not something we report on or charge our clients for explicitly, it is extremely important to understand as a part of a larger calculus when trying to decide if doing content marketing with the goal of press acquisition is right for your needs.

Cost-per-link (a typical way to measure ROI of such campaigns) will halve if links built are measured over these longer periods — moving a project you perhaps considered a marginal success at one month to a major success at one year.

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!

The Long-Term Link Acquisition Value of Content Marketing published first on http://goproski.com/

A Quarter-Million Reasons to Use Moz's Link Intersect Tool

Posted by rjonesx.

Let me tell you a story.

It begins with me in a hotel room halfway across the country, trying to figure out how I’m going to land a contract from a fantastic new lead, worth annually $250,000. We weren’t in over our heads by any measure, but the potential client was definitely looking at what most would call “enterprise” solutions and we weren’t exactly “enterprise.”

Could we meet their needs? Hell yes we could — better than our enterprise competitors — but there’s a saying that “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM”; in other words, it’s always safe to go with the big guys. We weren’t an IBM, so I knew that by reputation alone we were in trouble. The RFP was dense, but like most SEO gigs, there wasn’t much in the way of opportunity to really differentiate ourselves from our competitors. It would be another “anything they can do, we can do better” meeting where we grasp for reasons why we were better. In an industry where so many of our best clients require NDAs that prevent us from producing really good case studies, how could I prove we were up to the task?

In less than 12 hours we would be meeting with the potential client and I needed to prove to them that we could do something that our competitors couldn’t. In the world of SEO, link building is street cred. Nothing gets the attention of a client faster than a great link. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to land a killer backlink, completely white-hat, with no new content strategy, no budget, and no time. I needed to walk in the door with more than just a proposal — I needed to walk in the door with proof.

I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to link building, so I wasn’t at a loss when it came to ideas or strategies we could pitch, but what strategy might actually land a link in the next few hours? I started running prospecting software left and right — all the tools of the trade I had at my disposal — but imagine my surprise when the perfect opportunity popped up right in little old Moz’s Open Site Explorer Link Intersect tool. To be honest, I hadn’t used the tool in ages. We had built our own prospecting software on APIs, but the perfect link just popped up after adding in a few of their competitors on the off chance that there might be an opportunity or two.

There it was:

1. 3,800 root linking domains to the page itself
2. The page was soliciting submissions
3. Took pull requests for submissions on GitHub!

I immediately submitted a request and began the refresh game, hoping the repo was being actively monitored. By the next morning, we had ourselves a link! Not just any link, but despite the client having over 50,000 root linking domains, this was now the 15th best link to their site. You can imagine me anxiously awaiting the part of the meeting where we discussed the various reasons why our services were superior to that of our competitors, and then proceeded to demonstrate that superiority with an amazing white-hat backlink acquired just hours before.

The quarter-million-dollar contract was ours.

Link Intersect: An undervalued link building technique

Backlink intersect is one of the oldest link building techniques in our industry. The methodology is simple. Take a list of your competitors and identify the backlinks pointing to their sites. Compare those lists to find pages that overlap. Pages which link to two or more of your competitors are potentially resource pages that would be interested in linking to your site as well. You then examine these sites and do outreach to determine which ones are worth contacting to try and get a backlink.

Let’s walk through a simple example using Moz’s Link Intersect tool.

Getting started

We start on the Link Intersect page of Moz’s new Link Explorer. While we had Link Intersect in the old Open Site Explorer, you’re going to to want to use our new Link Intersect, which is built from our giant index of 30 trillion links and is far more powerful.

For our example here, I’ve chosen a random gardening company in Durham, North Carolina called Garden Environments. The website has a Domain Authority of 17 with 38 root linking domains.

We can go ahead and copy-paste the domain into “Discover Link Opportunities for this URL” at the top of the Link Intersect page. If you notice, we have the choice of “Root Domain, Subdomain, or Exact Page”:

I almost always choose “root domain” because I tend to be promoting a site as a whole and am not interested in acquiring links to pages on the site from other sites that already link somewhere else on the site. That is to say, by choosing “root domain,” any site that links to any page on your site will be excluded from the prospecting list. Of course, this might not be right for your situation. If you have a hosted blog on a subdomain or a hosted page on a site, you will want to choose subdomain or exact page to make sure you rule out the right backlinks.

You also have the ability to choose whether we report back to you root linking domains or Backlinks. This is really important and I’ll explain why.

Depending on your link building campaign, you’ll want to vary your choice here. Let’s say you’re looking for resource pages that you can list your website on. If that’s the case, you will want to choose “pages.” The Link Intersect tool will then prioritize pages that have links to multiple competitors on them, which are likely to be resource pages you can target for your campaign. Now, let’s say you would rather find publishers that talk about your competitors and are less concerned about them linking from the same page. You want to find sites that have linked to multiple competitors, not pages. In that case, you would choose “domains.” The system will then return the domains that have links to multiple competitors and give you example pages, but you wont be limited only to pages with multiple competitors on them.

In this example, I’m looking for resource pages, so I chose “pages” rather than domains.

Choosing your competitor sites

A common mistake made at this point is to choose exact competitors. Link builders will often copy and paste a list of their biggest competitors and cross their fingers for decent results. What you really want are the best link pages and domains in your industry — not necessarily your competitors.

In this example I chose the gardening page on a local university, a few North Carolina gardening and wildflower associations, and a popular page that lists nurseries. Notice that you can choose subdomain, domain, or exact page as well for each of these competitor URLs. I recommend choosing the broadest category (domain being broadest, exact page being narrowest) that is relevant to your industry. If the whole site is relevant, go ahead and choose “domain.”

Analyzing your results

The results returned will prioritize pages that link to multiple competitors and have a high Domain Authority. Unlike some of our competitors’ tools, if you put in a competitor that doesn’t have many backlinks, it won’t cause the whole report to fail. We list all the intersections of links, starting with the most and narrowing down to the fewest. Even though the nurseries website doesn’t provide any intersections, we still get back great results!

Now we have some really great opportunities, but at this point you have two choices. If you really prefer, you can just export the opportunities to CSV like any other tool on the market, but I prefer to go ahead and move everything over into a Link Tracking List.

By moving everything into a link list, we’re going to be able to track link acquisition over time (once we begin reaching out to these sites for backlinks) and we can also sort by other metrics, leave notes, and easily remove opportunities that don’t look fruitful.

What did we find?

Remember, we started off with a site that has barely any links, but we turned up dozens of easy opportunities for link acquisition. We turned up a simple resources page on forest resources, a potential backlink which could easily be earned via a piece of content on forest stewardship.

We turned up a great resource page on how to maintain healthy soil and yards on a town government website. A simple guide covering the same topics here could easily earn a link from this resource page on an important website.

These were just two examples of easy link targets. From community gardening pages, websites dedicated to local creek, pond, and stream restoration, and general enthusiast sites, the Link Intersect tool turned up simple backlink gold. What is most interesting to me, though, was that these resource pages never included the words “resources” or “links” in the URLs. Common prospecting techniques would have just missed these opportunities altogether.

While it wasn’t the focus of this particular campaign, I did choose the alternate of “show domains” rather than “pages” that link to the competitors. We found similarly useful results using this methodology.

For example, we found CarolinaCountry.com had linked to multiple of the competitor sites and, as it turns out, would be a perfect publication to pitch for a story as part of of a PR campaign for promoting the gardening site.

Takeaways

The new Link Intersect tool in Moz’s Link Explorer combines the power of our new incredible link index with the complete features of a link prospecting tool. Competitor link intersect remains one of the most straightforward methods for finding link opportunities and landing great backlinks, and Moz’s new tool coupled with Link Lists makes it easier than ever. Go ahead and give it a run yourself — you might just find the exact link you need right when you need it.

Find link opportunities now!

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!

A Quarter-Million Reasons to Use Moz’s Link Intersect Tool published first on http://goproski.com/

Big White – Ski Destinations For Baby Boomer’s

Video Source

The post Big White – Ski Destinations For Baby Boomer’s appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Big White – Ski Destinations For Baby Boomer’s published first on http://goproski.com/

Best Ski Resorts for Groups | Expert Ski Tips | Iglu Ski

Video Source

The post Best Ski Resorts for Groups | Expert Ski Tips | Iglu Ski appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Best Ski Resorts for Groups | Expert Ski Tips | Iglu Ski published first on http://goproski.com/

Faction CT 3.0 2018 Ski Review – We Test We Know

Video Source

The post Faction CT 3.0 2018 Ski Review – We Test We Know appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Faction CT 3.0 2018 Ski Review – We Test We Know published first on http://goproski.com/

Chill Factore – Ski Beginner Lessons

Video Source

The post Chill Factore – Ski Beginner Lessons appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Chill Factore – Ski Beginner Lessons published first on http://goproski.com/

SEO Negotiation: How to Ace the Business Side of SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

SEO isn’t all meta tags and content. A huge part of the success you’ll see is tied up in the inevitable business negotiations. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, our resident expert Britney Muller walks us through a bevy of smart tips and considerations that will strengthen your SEO negotiation skills, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a newbie to the practice.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. So today we are going over all things SEO negotiation, so starting to get into some of the business side of SEO. As most of you know, negotiation is all about leverage.

It’s what you have to offer and what the other side is looking to gain and leveraging that throughout the process. So something that you can go in and confidently talk about as SEOs is the fact that SEO has around 20% more opportunity than both mobile and desktop PPC combined.

This is a really, really big deal. It’s something that you can showcase. These are the stats to back it up. We will also link to the research to this down below. Good to kind of have that in your back pocket. Aside from this, you will obviously have your audit. So potential client, you’re looking to get this deal.

Get the most out of the SEO audit

☑ Highlight the opportunities, not the screw-ups

You’re going to do an audit, and something that I have always suggested is that instead of highlighting the things that the potential client is doing wrong, or screwed up, is to really highlight those opportunities. Start to get them excited about what it is that their site is capable of and that you could help them with. I think that sheds a really positive light and moves you in the right direction.

☑ Explain their competitive advantage

I think this is really interesting in many spaces where you can sort of say, “Okay, your competitors are here, and you’re currently here and this is why,“and to show them proof. That makes them feel as though you have a strong understanding of the landscape and can sort of help them get there.

☑ Emphasize quick wins

I almost didn’t put this in here because I think quick wins is sort of a sketchy term. Essentially, you really do want to showcase what it is you can do quickly, but you want to…

☑ Under-promise, over-deliver

You don’t want to lose trust or credibility with a potential client by overpromising something that you can’t deliver. Get off to the right start. Under-promise, over-deliver.

Smart negotiation tactics

☑ Do your research

Know everything you can about this clientPerhaps what deals they’ve done in the past, what agencies they’ve worked with. You can get all sorts of knowledge about that before going into negotiation that will really help you.

☑ Prioritize your terms

So all too often, people go into a negotiation thinking me, me, me, me, when really you also need to be thinking about, "Well, what am I willing to lose?What can I give up to reach a point that we can both agree on?” Really important to think about as you go in.

☑ Flinch!

This is a very old, funny negotiation tactic where when the other side counters, you flinch. You do this like flinch, and you go, “Oh, is that the best you can do?” It’s super silly. It might be used against you, in which case you can just say, “Nice flinch.” But it does tend to help you get better deals.

So take that with a grain of salt. But I look forward to your feedback down below. It’s so funny.

☑ Use the words “fair” and “comfortable”

The words “fair” and “comfortable” do really well in negotiations. These words are inarguable. You can’t argue with fair. “I want to do what is comfortable for us both. I want us both to reach terms that are fair.”

You want to use these terms to put the other side at ease and to also help bridge that gap where you can come out with a win-win situation.

☑ Never be the key decision maker

I see this all too often when people go off on their own, and instantly on their business cards and in their head and email they’re the CEO.

They are this. You don’t have to be that, and you sort of lose leverage when you are. When I owned my agency for six years, I enjoyed not being CEO. I liked having a board of directors that I could reach out to during a negotiation and not being the sole decision maker. Even if you feel that you are the sole decision maker, I know that there are people that care about you and that are looking out for your business that you could contact as sort of a business mentor, and you could use that in negotiation. You can use that to help you. Something to think about.

Tips for negotiation newbies

So for the newbies, a lot of you are probably like, “I can never go on my own. I can never do these things.” I’m from northern Minnesota. I have been super awkward about discussing money my whole life for any sort of business deal. If I could do it, I promise any one of you watching this can do it.

☑ Power pose!

I’m not kidding, promise. Some tips that I learned, when I had my agency, was to power pose before negotiations. So there’s a great TED talk on this that we can link to down below. I do this before most of my big speaking gigs, thanks to my gramsy who told me to do this at SMX Advanced like three years ago.

Go ahead and power pose. Feel good. Feel confident. Amp yourself up.

☑ Walk the walk

You’ve got to when it comes to some of these things and to just feel comfortable in that space.

☑ Good > perfect

Know that good is better than perfect. A lot of us are perfectionists, and we just have to execute good. Trying to be perfect will kill us all.

☑ Screw imposter syndrome

Many of the speakers that I go on different conference circuits with all struggle with this. It’s totally normal, but it’s good to acknowledge that it’s so silly. So to try to take that silly voice out of your head and start to feel good about the things that you are able to offer.

Take inspiration where you can find it

I highly suggest you check out Brian Tracy’s old-school negotiation podcasts. He has some old videos. They’re so good. But he talks about leverage all the time and has two really great examples that I love so much. One being jade merchants. So these jade merchants that would take out pieces of jade and they would watch people’s reactions piece by piece that they brought out.

So they knew what piece interested this person the most, and that would be the higher price. It was brilliant. Then the time constraints is he has an example of people doing business deals in China. When they landed, the Chinese would greet them and say, “Oh, can I see your return flight ticket? I just want to know when you’re leaving.”

They would not make a deal until that last second. The more you know about some of these leverage tactics, the more you can be aware of them if they were to be used against you or if you were to leverage something like that. Super interesting stuff.

Take the time to get to know their business

☑ Tie in ROI

Lastly, just really take the time to get to know someone’s business. It just shows that you care, and you’re able to prioritize what it is that you can deliver based on where they make the most money off of the products or services that they offer. That helps you tie in the ROI of the things that you can accomplish.

☑ Know the order of products/services that make them the most money

One real quick example was my previous company. We worked with plastic surgeons, and we really worked hard to understand that funnel of how people decide to get any sort of elective procedure. It came down to two things.

It was before and after photos and price. So we knew that we could optimize for those two things and do very well in their space. So showing that you care, going the extra mile, sort of tying all of these things together, I really hope this helps. I look forward to the feedback down below. I know this was a little bit different Whiteboard Friday, but I thought it would be a fun topic to cover.

So thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I will see you all soon. Bye.

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!

SEO Negotiation: How to Ace the Business Side of SEO - Whiteboard Friday published first on http://goproski.com/

Winter sports are facing many challenges. Can they survive? | The Economist

Video Source

The post Winter sports are facing many challenges. Can they survive? | The Economist appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Winter sports are facing many challenges. Can they survive? | The Economist published first on http://goproski.com/

Graham Bell’s three tips for staying safe on the ski slopes

Video Source

The post Graham Bell’s three tips for staying safe on the ski slopes appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Graham Bell’s three tips for staying safe on the ski slopes published first on http://goproski.com/

K2 Marksman 2017 Ski Review By James From Edge & Wax

Video Source

The post K2 Marksman 2017 Ski Review By James From Edge & Wax appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

K2 Marksman 2017 Ski Review By James From Edge & Wax published first on http://goproski.com/

SHAYTARDS SKI LESSONS!

Video Source

The post SHAYTARDS SKI LESSONS! appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

SHAYTARDS SKI LESSONS! published first on http://goproski.com/

10 Top Ski Resorts in Australia

Video Source

The post 10 Top Ski Resorts in Australia appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

10 Top Ski Resorts in Australia published first on http://goproski.com/

A Beginners Guide To A Ski Holiday

Video Source

The post A Beginners Guide To A Ski Holiday appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

A Beginners Guide To A Ski Holiday published first on http://goproski.com/

Rossignol Famous 6 Ski Review

Video Source

The post Rossignol Famous 6 Ski Review appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Rossignol Famous 6 Ski Review published first on http://goproski.com/

Skiing lessons: Deep powder skiing | Online ski course

Video Source

The post Skiing lessons: Deep powder skiing | Online ski course appeared first on Go Pro Ski.

Skiing lessons: Deep powder skiing | Online ski course published first on http://goproski.com/

Do You Need Local Pages? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Does it make sense for you to create local-specific pages on your website? Regardless of whether you own or market a local business, it may make sense to compete for space in the organic SERPs using local pages. Please give a warm welcome to our friend Tom Capper as he shares a 4-point process for determining whether local pages are something you should explore in this week’s Whiteboard Friday!

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

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Capper. I’m a consultant at Distilled, and today I’m going to be talking to you about whether you need local pages. Just to be clear right off the bat what I’m talking about, I’m not talking about local rankings as we normally think of them, the local map pack results that you see in search results, the Google Maps rankings, that kind of thing.

A 4-step process to deciding whether you need local pages

I’m talking about conventional, 10 blue links rankings but for local pages, and by local pages I mean pages from a national or international business that are location-specific. What are some examples of that? Maybe on Indeed.com they would have a page for jobs in Seattle. Indeed doesn’t have a bricks-and-mortar premises in Seattle, but they do have a page that is about jobs in Seattle.

You might get a similar thing with flower delivery. You might get a similar thing with used cars, all sorts of different verticals. I think it can actually be quite a broadly applicable tactic. There’s a four-step process I’m going to outline for you. The first step is actually not on the board. It’s just doing some keyword research.

1. Know (or discover) your key transactional terms

I haven’t done much on that here because hopefully you’ve already done that. You already know what your key transactional terms are. Because whatever happens you don’t want to end up developing location pages for too many different keyword types because it’s gong to bloat your site, you probably just need to pick one or two key transactional terms that you’re going to make up the local variants of. For this purpose, I’m going to talk through an SEO job board as an example.

2. Categorize your keywords as implicit, explicit, or near me and log their search volumes

We might have “SEO jobs” as our core head term. We then want to figure out what the implicit, explicit, and near me versions of that keyword are and what the different volumes are. In this case, the implicit version is probably just “SEO jobs.” If you search for “SEO jobs” now, like if you open a new tab in your browser, you’re probably going to find that a lot of local orientated results appear because that is an implicitly local term and actually an awful lot of terms are using local data to affect rankings now, which does affect how you should consider your rank tracking, but we’ll get on to that later.

SEO jobs, maybe SEO vacancies, that kind of thing, those are all going to be going into your implicitly local terms bucket. The next bucket is your explicitly local terms. That’s going to be things like SEO jobs in Seattle, SEO jobs in London, and so on. You’re never going to get a complete coverage of different locations. Try to keep it simple.

You’re just trying to get a rough idea here. Lastly you’ve got your near me or nearby terms, and it turns out that for SEO jobs not many people search SEO jobs near me or SEO jobs nearby. This is also going to vary a lot by vertical. I would imagine that if you’re in food delivery or something like that, then that would be huge.

3. Examine the SERPs to see whether local-specific pages are ranking

Now we’ve categorized our keywords. We want to figure out what kind of results are going to do well for what kind of keywords, because obviously if local pages is the answer, then we might want to build some.

In this case, I’m looking at the SERP for “SEO jobs.” This is imaginary. The rankings don’t really look like this. But we’ve got SEO jobs in Seattle from Indeed. That’s an example of a local page, because this is a national business with a location-specific page. Then we’ve got SEO jobs Glassdoor. That’s a national page, because in this case they’re not putting anything on this page that makes it location specific.

Then we’ve got SEO jobs Seattle Times. That’s a local business. The Seattle Times only operates in Seattle. It probably has a bricks-and-mortar location. If you’re going to be pulling a lot of data of this type, maybe from stats or something like that, obviously tracking from the locations that you’re mentioning, where you are mentioning locations, then you’re probably going to want to categorize these at scale rather than going through one at a time.

I’ve drawn up a little flowchart here that you could encapsulate in a Excel formula or something like that. If the location is mentioned in the URL and in the domain, then we know we’ve got a local business. Most of the time it’s just a rule of thumb. If the location is mentioned in the URL but not mentioned in the domain, then we know we’ve got a local page and so on.

4. Compare & decide where to focus your efforts

You can just sort of categorize at scale all the different result types that we’ve got. Then we can start to fill out a chart like this using the rankings. What I’d recommend doing is finding a click-through rate curve that you are happy to use. You could go to somewhere like AdvancedWebRanking.com, download some example click-through rate curves.

Again, this doesn’t have to be super precise. We’re looking to get a proportionate directional indication of what would be useful here. I’ve got Implicit, Explicit, and Near Me keyword groups. I’ve got Local Business, Local Page, and National Page result types. Then I’m just figuring out what the visibility share of all these types is. In my particular example, it turns out that for explicit terms, it could be worth building some local pages.

That’s all. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks.

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!

Do You Need Local Pages? - Whiteboard Friday published first on http://goproski.com/

Ranking the 6 Most Accurate Keyword Research Tools

Posted by Jeff_Baker

In January of 2018 Brafton began a massive organic keyword targeting campaign, amounting to over 90,000 words of blog content being published.

Did it work?

Well, yeah. We doubled the number of total keywords we rank for in less than six months. By using our advanced keyword research and topic writing process published earlier this year we also increased our organic traffic by 45% and the number of keywords ranking in the top ten results by 130%.

But we got a whole lot more than just traffic.

From planning to execution and performance tracking, we meticulously logged every aspect of the project. I’m talking blog word count, MarketMuse performance scores, on-page SEO scores, days indexed on Google. You name it, we recorded it.

As a byproduct of this nerdery, we were able to draw juicy correlations between our target keyword rankings and variables that can affect and predict those rankings. But specifically for this piece…

How well keyword research tools can predict where you will rank.

A little background

We created a list of keywords we wanted to target in blogs based on optimal combinations of search volume, organic keyword difficulty scores, SERP crowding, and searcher intent.

We then wrote a blog post targeting each individual keyword. We intended for each new piece of blog content to rank for the target keyword on its own.

With our keyword list in hand, my colleague and I manually created content briefs explaining how we would like each blog post written to maximize the likelihood of ranking for the target keyword. Here’s an example of a typical brief we would give to a writer:

This image links to an example of a content brief Brafton delivers to writers.

Between mid-January and late May, we ended up writing 55 blog posts each targeting 55 unique keywords. 50 of those blog posts ended up ranking in the top 100 of Google results.

We then paused and took a snapshot of each URL’s Google ranking position for its target keyword and its corresponding organic difficulty scores from Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, and KW Finder. We also took the PPC competition scores from the Keyword Planner Tool.

Our intention was to draw statistical correlations between between our keyword rankings and each tool’s organic difficulty score. With this data, we were able to report on how accurately each tool predicted where we would rank.

This study is uniquely scientific, in that each blog had one specific keyword target. We optimized the blog content specifically for that keyword. Therefore every post was created in a similar fashion.

Do keyword research tools actually work?

We use them every day, on faith. But has anyone ever actually asked, or better yet, measured how well keyword research tools report on the organic difficulty of a given keyword?

Today, we are doing just that. So let’s cut through the chit-chat and get to the results…

While Moz wins top-performing keyword research tool, note that any keyword research tool with organic difficulty functionality will give you an advantage over flipping a coin (or using Google Keyword Planner Tool).

As you will see in the following paragraphs, we have run each tool through a battery of statistical tests to ensure that we painted a fair and accurate representation of its performance. I’ll even provide the raw data for you to inspect for yourself.

Let’s dig in!

The Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Yes, statistics! For those of you currently feeling panicked and lobbing obscenities at your screen, don’t worry — we’re going to walk through this together.

In order to understand the relationship between two variables, our first step is to create a scatter plot chart.

Below is the scatter plot for our 50 keyword rankings compared to their corresponding Moz organic difficulty scores.

We start with a visual inspection of the data to determine if there is a linear relationship between the two variables. Ideally for each tool, you would expect to see the X variable (keyword ranking) increase proportionately with the Y variable (organic difficulty). Put simply, if the tool is working, the higher the keyword difficulty, the less likely you will rank in a top position, and vice-versa.

This chart is all fine and dandy, however, it’s not very scientific. This is where the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) comes into play.

Phew. Still with me?

So each of these scatter plots will have a corresponding PCC score that will tell us how well each tool predicted where we would rank, based on its keyword difficulty score.

We will use the following table from statisticshowto.com to interpret the PCC score for each tool:

Coefficient Correlation R Score	Key
.70 or higher	Very strong positive relationship
.40 to +.69	Strong positive relationship
.30 to +.39	Moderate positive relationship
.20 to +.29	Weak positive relationship
.01 to +.19	No or negligible relationship
0	No relationship [zero correlation]
-.01 to -.19	No or negligible relationship
-.20 to -.29	Weak negative relationship
-.30 to -.39	Moderate negative relationship
-.40 to -.69	Strong negative relationship
-.70 or higher	Very strong negative relationship

In order to visually understand what some of these relationships would look like on a scatter plot, check out these sample charts from Laerd Statistics.

And here are some examples of charts with their correlating PCC scores ®:

The closer the numbers cluster towards the regression line in either a positive or negative slope, the stronger the relationship.

That was the tough part - you still with me? Great, now let’s look at each tool’s results.

Test 1: The Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Now that we’ve all had our statistics refresher course, we will take a look at the results, in order of performance. We will evaluate each tool’s PCC score, the statistical significance of the data (P-val), the strength of the relationship, and the percentage of keywords the tool was able to find and report keyword difficulty values for.

In order of performance:

#1: Moz

Revisiting Moz’s scatter plot, we observe a tight grouping of results relative to the regression line with few moderate outliers.

Moz Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.412
P-val	.003 (P<0.05)
Relationship	Strong
% Keywords Matched	100.00%

Moz came in first with the highest PCC of .412. As an added bonus, Moz grabs data on keyword difficulty in real time, rather than from a fixed database. This means that you can get any keyword difficulty score for any keyword.

In other words, Moz was able to generate keyword difficulty scores for 100% of the 50 keywords studied.

#2: SpyFu

Visually, SpyFu shows a fairly tight clustering amongst low difficulty keywords, and a couple moderate outliers amongst the higher difficulty keywords.

SpyFu Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.405
P-val	.01 (P<0.05)
Relationship	Strong
% Keywords Matched	80.00%

SpyFu came in right under Moz with 1.7% weaker PCC (.405). However, the tool ran into the largest issue with keyword matching, with only 40 of 50 keywords producing keyword difficulty scores.

#3: SEMrush

SEMrush would certainly benefit from a couple mulligans (a second chance to perform an action). The Correlation Coefficient is very sensitive to outliers, which pushed SEMrush’s score down to third (.364).

SEMrush Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.364
P-val	.01 (P<0.05)
Relationship	Moderate
% Keywords Matched	92.00%

Further complicating the research process, only 46 of 50 keywords had keyword difficulty scores associated with them, and many of those had to be found through SEMrush’s “phrase match” feature individually, rather than through the difficulty tool.

The process was more laborious to dig around for data.

#4: KW Finder

KW Finder definitely could have benefitted from more than a few mulligans with numerous strong outliers, coming in right behind SEMrush with a score of .360.

KW Finder Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.360
P-val	.01 (P<0.05)
Relationship	Moderate
% Keywords Matched	100.00%

Fortunately, the KW Finder tool had a 100% match rate without any trouble digging around for the data.

#5: Ahrefs

Ahrefs comes in fifth by a large margin at .316, barely passing the “weak relationship” threshold.

Ahrefs Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.316
P-val	.03 (P<0.05)
Relationship	Moderate
% Keywords Matched	100%

On a positive note, the tool seems to be very reliable with low difficulty scores (notice the tight clustering for low difficulty scores), and matched all 50 keywords.

#6: Google Keyword Planner Tool

Before you ask, yes, SEO companies still use the paid competition figures from Google’s Keyword Planner Tool (and other tools) to assess organic ranking potential. As you can see from the scatter plot, there is in fact no linear relationship between the two variables.

Google Keyword Planner Tool Organic Difficulty Predictability
PCC	0.045
P-val	Statistically insignificant/no linear relationship
Relationship	Negligible/None
% Keywords Matched	88.00%

SEO agencies still using KPT for organic research (you know who you are!) — let this serve as a warning: You need to evolve.

Test 1 summary

For scoring, we will use a ten-point scale and score every tool relative to the highest-scoring competitor. For example, if the second highest score is 98% of the highest score, the tool will receive a 9.8. As a reminder, here are the results from the PCC test:

And the resulting scores are as follows:

Tool	PCC Test
Moz	10
SpyFu	9.8
SEMrush	8.8
KW Finder	8.7
Ahrefs	7.7
KPT	1.1

Moz takes the top position for the first test, followed closely by SpyFu (with an 80% match rate caveat).

Test 2: Adjusted Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Let’s call this the “Mulligan Round.” In this round, assuming sometimes things just go haywire and a tool just flat-out misses, we will remove the three most egregious outliers to each tool’s score.

Here are the adjusted results for the handicap round:

Adjusted Scores (3 Outliers removed)	PCC	Difference (+/-)
SpyFu	0.527	0.122
SEMrush	0.515	0.150
Moz	0.514	0.101
Ahrefs	0.478	0.162
KWFinder	0.470	0.110
Keyword Planner Tool	0.189	0.144

As noted in the original PCC test, some of these tools really took a big hit with major outliers. Specifically, Ahrefs and SEMrush benefitted the most from their outliers being removed, gaining .162 and .150 respectively to their scores, while Moz benefited the least from the adjustments.

For those of you crying out, “But this is real life, you don’t get mulligans with SEO!”, never fear, we will make adjustments for reliability at the end.

Here are the updated scores at the end of round two:

Tool	PCC Test	Adjusted PCC	Total
SpyFu	9.8	10	19.8
Moz	10	9.7	19.7
SEMrush	8.8	9.8	18.6
KW Finder	8.7	8.9	17.6
AHREFs	7.7	9.1	16.8
KPT	1.1	3.6	4.7

SpyFu takes the lead! Now let’s jump into the final round of statistical tests.

Test 3: Resampling

Being that there has never been a study performed on keyword research tools at this scale, we wanted to ensure that we explored multiple ways of looking at the data.

Big thanks to Russ Jones, who put together an entirely different model that answers the question: “What is the likelihood that the keyword difficulty of two randomly selected keywords will correctly predict the relative position of rankings?”

He randomly selected 2 keywords from the list and their associated difficulty scores.

Let’s assume one tool says that the difficulties are 30 and 60, respectively. What is the likelihood that the article written for a score of 30 ranks higher than the article written on 60? Then, he performed the same test 1,000 times.

He also threw out examples where the two randomly selected keywords shared the same rankings, or data points were missing. Here was the outcome:

Resampling	% Guessed correctly
Moz	62.2%
Ahrefs	61.2%
SEMrush	60.3%
Keyword Finder	58.9%
SpyFu	54.3%
KPT	45.9%

As you can see, this tool was particularly critical on each of the tools. As we are starting to see, no one tool is a silver bullet, so it is our job to see how much each tool helps make more educated decisions than guessing.

Most tools stayed pretty consistent with their levels of performance from the previous tests, except SpyFu, which struggled mightily with this test.

In order to score this test, we need to use 50% as the baseline (equivalent of a coin flip, or zero points), and scale each tool relative to how much better it performed over a coin flip, with the top scorer receiving ten points.

For example, Ahrefs scored 11.2% better than flipping a coin, which is 8.2% less than Moz which scored 12.2% better than flipping a coin, giving AHREFs a score of 9.2.

The updated scores are as follows:

Tool	PCC Test	Adjusted PCC	Resampling	Total
Moz	10	9.7	10	29.7
SEMrush	8.8	9.8	8.4	27
Ahrefs	7.7	9.1	9.2	26
KW Finder	8.7	8.9	7.3	24.9
SpyFu	9.8	10	3.5	23.3
KPT	1.1	3.6	-.4	.7

So after the last statistical accuracy test, we have Moz consistently performing alone in the top tier. SEMrush, Ahrefs, and KW Finder all turn in respectable scores in the second tier, followed by the unique case of SpyFu, which performed outstanding in the first two tests (albeit, only returning results on 80% of the tested keywords), then falling flat on the final test.

Finally, we need to make some usability adjustments.

Usability Adjustment 1: Keyword Matching

A keyword research tool doesn’t do you much good if it can’t provide results for the keywords you are researching. Plain and simple, we can’t treat two tools as equals if they don’t have the same level of practical functionality.

To explain in practical terms, if a tool doesn’t have data on a particular keyword, one of two things will happen:

1. You have to use another tool to get the data, which devalues the entire point of using the original tool.
2. You miss an opportunity to rank for a high-value keyword.

Neither scenario is good, therefore we developed a penalty system. For each 10% match rate under 100%, we deducted a single point from the final score, with a maximum deduction of 5 points. For example, if a tool matched 92% of the keywords, we would deduct .8 points from the final score.

One may argue that this penalty is actually too lenient considering the significance of the two unideal scenarios outlined above.

The penalties are as follows:

Tool	Match Rate	Penalty
KW Finder	100%	0
Ahrefs	100%	0
Moz	100%	0
SEMrush	92%	-.8
Keyword Planner Tool	88%	-1.2
SpyFu	80%	-2

Please note we gave SEMrush a lot of leniency, in that technically, many of the keywords evaluated were not found in its keyword difficulty tool, but rather through manually digging through the phrase match tool. We will give them a pass, but with a stern warning!

Usability Adjustment 2: Reliability

I told you we would come back to this! Revisiting the second test in which we threw away the three strongest outliers that negatively impacted each tool’s score, we will now make adjustments.

In real life, there are no mulligans. In real life, each of those three blog posts that were thrown out represented a significant monetary and time investment. Therefore, when a tool has a major blunder, the result can be a total waste of time and resources.

For that reason, we will impose a slight penalty on those tools that benefited the most from their handicap.

We will use the level of PCC improvement to evaluate how much a tool benefitted from removing their outliers. In doing so, we will be rewarding the tools that were the most consistently reliable. As a reminder, the amounts each tool benefitted were as follows:

Tool	Difference (+/-)
Ahrefs	0.162
SEMrush	0.150
Keyword Planner Tool	0.144
SpyFu	0.122
KWFinder	0.110
Moz	0.101

In calculating the penalty, we scored each of the tools relative to the top performer, giving the top performer zero penalty and imposing penalties based on how much additional benefit the tools received over the most reliable tool, on a scale of 0–100%, with a maximum deduction of 5 points.

So if a tool received twice the benefit of the top performing tool, it would have had a 100% benefit, receiving the maximum deduction of 5 points. If another tool received a 20% benefit over of the most reliable tool, it would get a 1-point deduction. And so on.

Tool	% Benefit	Penalty
Ahrefs	60%	-3
SEMrush	48%	-2.4
Keyword Planner Tool	42%	-2.1
SpyFu	20%	-1
KW Finder	8%	-.4
Moz	-	0

Results

All told, our penalties were fairly mild, with a slight shuffling in the middle tier. The final scores are as follows:

Tool	Total Score	Stars (5 max)
Moz	29.7	4.95
KW Finder	24.5	4.08
SEMrush	23.8	3.97
Ahrefs	23.0	3.83
Spyfu	20.3	3.38
KPT	-2.6	0.00

Conclusion

Using any organic keyword difficulty tool will give you an advantage over not doing so. While none of the tools are a crystal ball, providing perfect predictability, they will certainly give you an edge. Further, if you record enough data on your own blogs’ performance, you will get a clearer picture of the keyword difficulty scores you should target in order to rank on the first page.

For example, we know the following about how we should target keywords with each tool:

Tool	Average KD ranking ≤10	Average KD ranking ≥ 11
Moz	33.3	37.0
SpyFu	47.7	50.6
SEMrush	60.3	64.5
KWFinder	43.3	46.5
Ahrefs	11.9	23.6

This is pretty powerful information! It’s either first page or bust, so we now know the threshold for each tool that we should set when selecting keywords.

Stay tuned, because we made a lot more correlations between word count, days live, total keywords ranking, and all kinds of other juicy stuff. Tune in again in early September for updates!

We hope you found this test useful, and feel free to reach out with any questions on our math!

Disclaimer: These results are estimates based on 50 ranking keywords from 50 blog posts and keyword research data pulled from a single moment in time. Search is a shifting landscape, and these results have certainly changed since the data was pulled. In other words, this is about as accurate as we can get from analyzing a moving target.

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!

Ranking the 6 Most Accurate Keyword Research Tools published first on http://goproski.com/