Friday, March 30, 2018

How to Target Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.

Target featured snippet opportunities

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Video Transcription

Today, we are going over targeting featured snippets, Part 2 of our featured snippets series. Super excited to dive into this.

What's a featured snippet?

For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?

Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs actually has some of the capabilities to do that all for you. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.

So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.

I. Identify

All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.

II. Understand

From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.

III. Target

So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?

  • Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that's easy to consume.
  • Summaries do well. Whether they're at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
  • Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
  • Provide unique info
  • Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.

Examples

What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.

  • Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it's a big deal, maybe it's not. I just changed them to numbers to see what's going to happen. I'll keep you posted.
  • Fix broken links. But I'm also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I'm fixing broken links. I have the check my listings tool. It's a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what's a 404 or what I might need to update.
  • Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors' eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I've even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
  • Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it's that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You're just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.

One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.

So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."

I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.

How we nabbed the "find backlinks" featured snippet

All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.

Clean up the title

So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.

Clean up the H2s

The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.

Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies

I changed enter your competitor's domain URL — it felt a little duplicate — to enter your competitor's URL. Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."

So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.

So hopefully that example helps. I'm going to continue to sort of drudge through a bunch of these with you. I look forward to any of your comments, any of your efforts down below in the comments. Definitely looking forward to Part 3 and to chatting with you all soon.

Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all soon. See you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Thursday, March 29, 2018

MozCon 2018: The Initial Agenda

Posted by Trevor-Klein

With just over three months until MozCon 2018, we're getting a great picture of what this year's show will be like, and we can't wait to share some of the details with you today.

We've got 21 speakers lined up (and will be launching our Community Speaker process soon — stay tuned for more details on how to make your pitch!). You'll see some familiar faces, and some who'll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.

Topic details and the final agenda are still in the works, but we're excited enough about the conversations we've had with speakers that we wanted to give you a sneak peek. We hope to see you in Seattle this July 9–11!

If you still need your tickets, we've got you covered:

Pick up your ticket to MozCon!

The Speakers

Here's a look at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:


Jono Alderson

Mad Scientist, Yoast

The Democratization of SEO

Jono will explore how much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place.

As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.

We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning.

In his talk, he'll push for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.


Stephanie Briggs

Partner, Briggsby

Search-Driven Content Strategy

Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless.

Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.


Rob Bucci

CEO, STAT Search Analytics

"Near me" or Far:
How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent for You

In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?

For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.

By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like “best,” we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.

With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.


Neil Crist

VP of Product, Moz

The Local Sweet Spot: Automation Isn't Enough

Some practitioners of local SEO swear by manual curation, claiming that automation skips over the most important parts. Some swear the exact opposite. The real answer, especially when you're working at enterprise scale, is a sweet spot in the middle.

In this talk, Neil will show you where that spot is, why different verticals require different work, and some original research that reveals which of those verticals are most stable.


Dana DiTomaso

President and Partner, Kick Point

Traffic vs. Signal

With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal.

We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.


Rand Fishkin

Founder, SparkToro, Moz, & Inbound.org

A man who needs no introduction to MozCon, we're thrilled to announce that Rand will be back on stage this year after founding his new company, SparkToro. Topic development for his talk is in the works; check back for more information!


Oli Gardner

Co-Founder, Unbounce

Content Marketing Is Broken and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists.

We need our M.O.M.s!

No, he isn't talking about your actual mother. He's talking about your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.

In this session you'll learn:

  • Data and lessons learned from his biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content
  • A context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts
  • Advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA)
  • Innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered

Casie Gillette

Senior Director, Digital Marketing, KoMarketing

The Problem with Content & Other Things We Don't Want to Admit

Everyone thinks they need content but they don't think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value.

In this session, we'll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers today and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.


Emily Grossman

Mobile Product Marketer & App Strategist

What All Marketers Can Do about Site Speed

At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The mobile-first index underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe they need developers for most of those improvements. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.


Russ Jones

Principal Search Scientist, Moz

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Russ is our principal search scientist here at Moz. After a decade as CTO of an agency, he joined Moz to focus on what he's most interested in: research and development, primarily related to keyword and link data. He's responsible for many of our most forward-looking techniques.

At MozCon this year, he's looking to focus on cutting through bad metrics with far better metrics, exploring the hidden assumptions and errors in things our industry regularly reports, showing us all how we can paint a more accurate picture of what's going on.


Justine Jordan

VP Marketing, Litmus

A veteran of the MozCon stage, Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named an Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

At MozCon this year, she's looking to cover the importance of engagement with emails in today's world of marketing. With the upcoming arrival of GDPR and the ease with which you can unsubscribe and report spam, it's more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads.


Michael King

Managing Director, iPullRank

You Don't Know SEO

Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Mike will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.


Cindy Krum

CEO & Founder, MobileMoxie

Mobile-First Indexing or a Whole New Google

The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.


Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist, Moz

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA "Dr. Pete") is a Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science — which is more like a hallway and pretty wide — he's the architect behind MozCast, the keeper of the Algo History, and watcher of all things Google.


Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist, Moz

Britney is Moz's senior SEO scientist. An explorer and investigator at heart, she won't stop digging until she gets to the bottom of some of the most interesting developments in the world of search. You can find her on Whiteboard Friday, and she's currently polishing a new (and dramatically improved!) version of our Beginner's Guide to SEO.

At MozCon this year, she'll show you what she found at the bottom of the rabbit hole to save you the journey.


Lisa Myers

CEO, Verve Search

None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people’s ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.

In this session she’ll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.


Heather Physioc

Director of Organic Search, VML

Your Red-Tape Toolkit:
How to Win Trust and Get Approval for Search Work

Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.


Mike Ramsey

President, Nifty Marketing

The Awkward State of Local

You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.


Wil Reynolds

Founder & Director of Digital Strategy, Seer Interactive

Excel Is for Rookies:
Why Every Search Marketer Needs to Get Strong in BI, ASAP

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I'll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.


Alexis Sanders

Technical SEO Account Manager, Merkle

Alexis works as a Technical SEO Account Manager at Merkle, ensuring the accuracy, feasibility, and scalability of the agency’s technical recommendations across all verticals. You've likely seen her on the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, OnCrawl, The Raven Blog, and TechnicalSEO.com. She's got a knack for getting the entire industry excited about the more technical aspects of SEO, and if you haven't already, you've got to check out the technical SEO challenge she created at https://TechnicalSEO.expert.


Darren Shaw

Founder, Whitespark

At the forefront of local SEO, Darren is obsessed with knowing all there is to know about local search. He organizes and publishes research initiatives such as the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and the Local Search Ecosystem.

At MozCon this year, he'll unveil the newest findings from the Local Search Ranking Factors study, for which he's already noticing significant changes from the last release, letting SEOs of all stripes know how they need to adjust their approach.


Grab your ticket today!


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Agencies Expect World Liquids Consumption to Continue to Grow

Global economic expansion is driving oil demand higher and increasing production of U.S. shale oil, particularly from the Permian Basin in Texas, is supplying most of the demand growth and will continue to do so until at least 2020, even with prices at $60 a barrel.

Source: Bloomberg

The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Short-Term Energy Outlook expects global liquids demand to exceed 100 million barrels per day in 2018 and reach almost 102 million barrels per day by 2019. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes it will reach 104.7 million barrels per day by 2023. EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook predicts that by 2040 world liquids fuel consumption will be 112.8 million barrels per day despite growing demand for electric vehicles. (See blog entitled, Despite Electric Vehicles, World Petroleum Consumption Will Continue to Climb.) China, India, and other countries in Asian are areas with increasing demand for liquid fuels.

The global manufacturing industry has shown strong growth, much stronger than the last 8 years according to the JPMorgan Global Purchasing Managers Index. Further, freight and passenger travel are also increasing, consuming largely liquid fuels.

In China, industrial production last year grew at the fastest pace since 2014. Industrial production in China averaged 12.28 percent from 1990 until 2018, reaching a high of 29.4 percent in August of 1994. China’s industrial production rose by 7.2 percent year-on-year in January to February of 2018, beating market expectations of 6.1 percent and following a 6.2 percent gain in December. It was the steepest increase in industrial output since June of last year, as production rebounded for mining (1.6 percent from -0.9 percent in December) and increased at a faster pace for manufacturing (7.0 percent from 6.5 percent) and electricity, gas and water production (13.3 percent from 8.2 percent).

Source: Bloomberg

Not only is industrial production picking up in China, but China’s airline passenger traffic increased 15 percent in 2017—the fastest rate of annual growth since 2009. Data from Crucial Perspective shows that passenger load factors are running at record highs in China. (Passenger load factors are a measure of how full planes are). The International Air Transport Association predicts that China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest air travel market by 2022—two years sooner than previously expected.

Source: Bloomberg

India is experiencing rapid air transportation growth, with back-to-back years of 20+ percent growth in passengers, although officials expect that to “moderate” to a rate of 8 to 10 percent for the next two years. All major Indian airports are operating at close to or above design capacity because of the big increase in traffic. The main drivers of growth have been a rising middle class, lower air ticket prices and improving regional connectivity. The two years of growth in domestic air traffic has made India the third largest domestic aviation market after the United States and China.

According to the International Air Transport Association, fuel consumption by commercial airlines worldwide is expected to increase by 5 percent to the highest level on record. The association also estimates air freight in 2017 increased the most in seven years and cargo growth will remain above the trend in 2018.

Freight transportation is also up. The Baltic Dry Index—a measure of freight costs heavily influenced by China’s demand for coal and iron ore—is about 25 percent higher than a year ago. Much of those raw materials are used by Chinese manufacturers to make finished goods for export. Once manufactured, the goods are transported by ship to consumers around the world. Last year, global growth in containerized goods grew at the fastest rate since 2013, mainly due to China.

Source: Bloomberg

In the United States, the Cass Shipments Index, measuring total freight volume, increased 12.5 percent year-on-year in January, which confirms that the U.S. economy—the world’s largest—is strong and getting stronger. In the United States, truck tonnage rates—another indicator of the transport of goods—are at their highest seasonal level in at least 20 years, according to data from the American Trucking Association. Truck tonnage rates increased by almost 8 percent last year and have declined only once annually since 2013, resulting in growth in diesel demand.

All these indicators indicate that there will be strong growth in liquids demand worldwide. According to the chart below, world liquids consumption grew each year since the global recession, and IEA, EIA, and OPEC expect it to continue to grow.

Source: Bloomberg

Conclusion

Forecasters are expecting liquids demand to be strong in the future. While OECD countries are expected to see relatively flat demand, non-OECD countries are expected to see growth in their liquids demand, particularly China, India, and other Asian countries.

The post Agencies Expect World Liquids Consumption to Continue to Grow appeared first on IER.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Just How Much is Your Website Worth, Anyhow? An Easy Guide to Valuation

Posted by efgreg

We all work hard building our businesses.

We put in the sweat equity and all the tears that can come with it to build something truly great. After another day hustling at the office or typing furiously on your keyboard, you might be wondering… what is the end game here?

What are you really going for? Is there a glowing neon sign with the word “Exit” marking the path to your ultimate goal?

For the majority of businesses, the end goal is to eventually sell that business to another entrepreneur who wants to take the reins and simply enjoy the profits from the sale. Alas, most of us don’t even know what our business is worth, much less how to go about selling it — or if it's even sellable to begin with.

That's where Empire Flippers comes in. We've been brokering deals for years in the online business space, serving a quiet but hungry group of investors who are looking to acquire digital assets. The demand for profitable digital assets has been growing so much that our brokerage was able to get on the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row, both times under the 500 mark.

We can say with confidence that, yes, there is indeed an exit for your business.

By the end of this article you're going to know more about how online businesses are valued, what buyers are looking for, and how you can get the absolute top dollar for your content website, software as a service (SaaS), or e-commerce store.

(You might have noticed I didn’t include the word “agency” in the last paragraph. Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible. Even though having clients is great, other digital assets are far easier to sell.)

If you’ve built a digital asset you’re looking to exit from, the first question you likely have is, “This sounds fantastic, but how do I go about putting an actual price tag on what I’ve created?”

We’ll dive into those answers below, but first let’s talk about why you're already in a great position just by being a reader of the Moz Blog.

Why is SEO the most valuable traffic for a digital asset?

SEO is by far the most attractive traffic source for people looking at purchasing online businesses.

The beauty of SEO is that once you’ve put in the work to achieve the rankings, they can maintain and bring in traffic for sometimes months without significant upkeep. That's in stark contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as Facebook ads, which require daily monitoring to make sure nothing strange is happening with your conversions or that you’re not overspending.

For someone who has no experience with traffic generation but wants to purchase a profitable online business, an SEO-fueled website just makes sense. They can earn while they learn. When they purchase the asset (typically a content website for people just starting out), they can play around with adding new high-quality pieces of content and learn about more complicated SEO techniques down the road.

Even someone who is a master at paid traffic loves SEO. They might buy an e-commerce store that has some real potential with Facebook ads that's currently driving the majority of its traffic through SEO, and treat the SEO as gravy on top of the paid traffic they plan to drive toward that e-commerce store.

Whether the buyer is a newbie or a veteran, SEO as a traffic method has one of the widest appeals of any other traffic strategy. While SEO itself does not increase the value of the business in most cases, it does attract more buyers than other forms of traffic.

Now, let’s get down to what your business is worth.

How are online businesses actually valued?

How businesses are valued is such a common question we get at our brokerage that we created an automated valuation tool that gives a free estimate of your business’s value, which our audience uses with all of their different projects.

At the heart of any valuation is a fairly basic formula:

You look at your rolling 12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible (something we’ll talk about later in this article).

You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.

When you see this formula, they’re using an annual multiple, whereas at Empire Flippers we use a monthly multiple. There's really not much of a difference between the two formulas; it mainly depends on your preference, but if you’re brand new to buying and selling online businesses, then it's helpful to know how different brokers price businesses.

We prefer the monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it's trending.

Just like you can influence Google SERPs with SEO knowledge, so can you manipulate this formula to give you a better valuation as long as you know what you’re looking at.

How to move the multiple needle in your favor

There are various things you can do to get a higher multiple. A lot of it comes down to just common sense and really putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.

A useful thing to ask: “Would I ever buy my business? Why? Why not?”

This exercise can lead you to change a lot of things about your business for the better.

The two areas that most affect the multiple come down to your actual average net profit and how long the business has been around making money.

Average net profit

The higher your average net profit, the higher your multiple will tend to be because it's a bigger cash-flowing asset. It makes sense then to look at various ways you can increase that net profit and decrease your total amount of expenses.

Every digital asset is a little different in where their expenses are coming from. For content sites, content creation costs are typically the lion’s share of expenses. As you approach the time of sale, you might want to scale back your content. In other cases, you may want to move to an agency solution where you can scale or minimize your content expenses at will rather than having in-house writers on the payroll.

There are also expenses that you might be applying to the business but aren’t really “needed” in operating the business, known as add-backs.

Add-backs

Add-backs are where you add certain expenses BACK into the net profit. These are items that you might’ve charged on the business account but aren’t really relevant to running the business.

These could be drinks, meals, or vacations put on the business account, and sometimes even business conferences. For example, going to a conference about email marketing might not be considered a “required” expense to running a health content site, whereas going to a sourcing conference like the Canton Fair would be a harder add-back to justify when it comes to running an e-commerce store.

Other things, such as SEO tools you’re using on a monthly basis, can likely be added back to the business. Most people won’t need them constantly to run and grow their business. They might subscribe for a month, get all the keyword data they need for a while, cancel, and then come back when they’re ready to do more keyword research.

Most of your expenses won’t be add-backs, but it is good to keep these in mind as they can definitely increase the ultimate sales price of your business.

When not to cut expenses

While there's usually a lot of fat you can cut from your business, you need to be reasonable about it. Cutting some things might improve your overall net profit, but vastly decrease the attractability of your business.

One common thing we see in the e-commerce space is solopreneurs starting to package and ship all of the items themselves to their customers. The thinking goes that they’re saving money by doing it themselves. While this may be true, it's not an attractive solution to a potential buyer.

It's far more attractive to spend money on a third-party solution that can store and ship the product for you as orders come in. After all, many buyers are busy traveling the world while having an online business. Forcing them to settle down just so they can ship products versus hanging out on the beaches of Bali for a few months during winter is a tough ask.

When selling a business, you don’t want to worry only about expenses, but also how easy it is to plug into and start running that business for a buyer.

Even if the systems you create to do that add extra expenses, like using a third party to handle fulfillment, they’re often more than worth keeping around because they make the business look more attractive to buyers.

Length of history

The more history you can show, the more attractive your business will be, as long as it's holding at a steady profit level or showing an upward trend.

The more your business is trending upward, the higher multiple you're going to get.

While you can’t do much in terms of lengthening the business’s history, you can prepare yourself for the eventual sale by investing in needed items early on in your business. For example, if you know your website needs a big makeover and you’re 24 months out from selling, it's better to do that big website redesign now instead of during the 12-month average your business will be priced on.

Showing year-over-year growth is also beneficial in getting a better multiple, because it shows your business can weather growing pains. This ability to weather business challenges is especially true in a business whose primary traffic is Google-organic. It shows that the site has done quality SEO by surviving several big updates over the course of a few years.

On the flipside, a trending downward business is going to get a much worse multiple, likely in the 12–18x range. A business in decline can still be sold, though. There are specific buyers that only want distressed assets because they can get them at deep discounts and often have the skill sets needed to fix the site.

You just have to be willing to take a lower sales price due to the decline, and since a buyer pool on distressed assets is smaller, you’ll likely have a longer sales cycle before you find someone willing to acquire the asset.

Other factors that lead to a higher multiple

While profit and length of history are the two main factors, there are a bunch of smaller factors that can add up to a significant increase in your multiple and ultimate valuation price.

You’ll have a fair amount of control with a lot of these, so they’re worth maximizing as much as possible in the 12–24 month window where you are preparing your online business for sale.

1. Minimize critical points of failure

Critical points of failure are anything in your business that has the power to be a total deal breaker. It's not rare to sell a business that has one or two critical points, but even so you want to try to minimize this as much as possible.

An example of a critical point of failure could be where all of your website traffic is purely Google-organic. If the site gets penalized by a Google algorithm update, it could kill all of your traffic and revenue overnight.

Likewise, if you’re an Amazon affiliate and Amazon suddenly changes their Terms of Service, you could get banned for reasons you don’t understand or even have time to react to, ending up with a highly trafficked site that makes zero money.

In the e-commerce space, we see situations where the entrepreneur only has one supplier that can make their product. What happens if that supplier wants to jack up the prices or suddenly goes out of business completely?

It's worth your while to diversify your traffic sources, have multiple monetization strategies for a content site, or investigate having backup or even competing suppliers for your e-commerce products.

Every business has some kind of weakness; your job is to minimize those weaknesses as much as possible to get the most value out of your business from a potential buyer.

2. High amounts of traffic

Higher traffic tends to correlate with higher revenue, which ultimately should increase your net profit. That all goes without saying; however, high traffic also can be an added bonus to your multiple on top of helping create a solid net profit.

Many buyers look for businesses they can optimize to the extreme at every point of the marketing funnel. When you have a high amount of traffic, you give them a lot of room to play with different conversion rate optimization factors like increasing email options, creating or crafting a better abandoned cart sequence, and changing the various calls to action on the site.

While many sellers might be fantastic at driving traffic, they might not exactly be the biggest pro at copywriting or CRO in general; this is where a big opportunity lies for the right buyer who might be able to increase conversions with their own copywriting or CRO skill.

3. Email subscribers

It's almost a cliche in the Internet marketing space to say “the money is in the list.” Email has often been one of the biggest drivers of revenue for companies, but there's a weird paradigm we’ve discovered after selling hundreds of online businesses.

Telling someone they should use an email list is pretty similar to telling someone to go to the gym: they agree it’s useful and they should do it, but often they do nothing about it. Then there are those who do build an email list because they understand its power, but then never do anything useful with it.

This results in email lists being a hit-or-miss on whether they actually add any value to your business’s final valuation.

If you can prove the email list is adding value to your business, then your email list CAN improve your overall multiple. If you use good email automation sequences to up-sell your traffic and routinely email the list with new offers and pieces of high-quality content, then your email list has real value associated with it, which will reflect on your final valuation.

4. Social media following

Social media has become more and more important as time goes on, but it can also be an incredibly fickle beast.

It's best to think of your social media following as a “soft” email list. The reach of your social media following compared to your email list will tend to be lower, especially as social organic reach keeps declining on bigger social platforms like Facebook. In addition, you don’t own the platform that following is built off of, meaning it can be taken away from you anytime for reasons outside of your control.

Plus, it's just too easy to fake followers and likes.

However, if you can wade through all that and prove that your social following and social media promotion are driving real traffic and sales to your business, it will definitely help in increasing your multiple.

5. How many product offerings you have

Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.

What happens if that product goes out of style? Or gets discontinued?

Whether you’re running an e-commerce store or a content site monetizing through affiliate links, you want to have several different product offerings.

When you have several products earning good money through your website, then a buyer will find the business ultimately more attractive and value it more because you won’t be hurt in a big way if one of the “flavors of the month” disappears on you.

6. Hours required

Remember, the majority of buyers are not looking at acquiring a job. They want a leveraged cash-flowing investment they can ideally scale up.

While there's nothing wrong with working 40–50+ hours per week on a business that is really special, it will narrow your overall buyer pool and make the business less attractive. The truth is, most of the digital assets we’re creating don’t really require this amount of work from the owner.

What we typically see is that there are a lot of areas for improvement that the seller can use to minimize their weekly hour allotment to the business. We recommend that everyone looking to sell their business first consider how they can minimize their actual involvement.

The three most effective ways to cut down on your time spent are:

  • Systemization: Automating as much of your business as possible
  • Developing a team: The biggest wins we see here tend to be in content creation, customer service, general operations, and hiring a marketing agency to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. While these add costs that drive down the average net profit, they also make your business far more attractive.
  • Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs): SOPs should outline the entire process of a specific function of the business and should be good enough that if you handed them off to someone, they could do the job 80 percent as well as you.

You should always be in a position where you’re working ON your business and not IN.

7. Dig a deeper moat

At Empire Flippers, we’re always asking people if they built a deep enough moat around their business. A deep moat means your business is harder to copy. A copycat can’t just go buy a domain and some hosting and copy your business in an afternoon.

A drop-shipping store that can be copied in a single day is not going to be nearly as attractive as one that has built up a real following and a community around their brand, even if they sell the same products.

This fact becomes more and more important as your business valuation goes into the multiple six-figure and seven-figure valuation ranges because buyers are looking to buy a real brand at this point, not just a niche site.

Here are a few actions you can take to deepen this moat:

  • Niche down and own the market with your brand (a woodworking website might focus specifically on benches, for example, where you’re hiring expert artisans to write content on the subject).
  • Source your products and make them unique, rather than another “me too” product.
  • Negotiate special terms with your affiliate managers or suppliers. If you’ve been sending profitable traffic to an affiliate offer, often you can just email the affiliate manager asking for a pay bump and they’ll gladly give it. Likewise, if you’re doing good business for a drop-shipping supplier, they might be open to doing an exclusivity agreement with you. Make sure all of these special terms are transferable to the buyer, though.

The harder it is to copy what you’ve built, the higher the multiple you’ll get.

But why would you EVER sell your online business in the first place?

You’re now well-equipped with knowledge on how to increase your business’s ultimate value, but why would you actually sell it?

The reasons are vast and numerous — too many to list in this post. However, there are a few common reasons you might resonate with.

Here are a few business reasons why people sell their businesses:

  • Starting a new business or wanting to focus on other current projects
  • Seeking to use the capital to leverage themselves into a more competitive (and lucrative) space
  • Having lost any interest in running the business and want to sell the asset off before it starts reflecting their lack of interest through declining revenue
  • Wanting to cash out of the business to invest in offline investments like real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.

Just as there are a ton of business reasons to sell, there are also a ton of personal reasons why people sell their business:

  • Getting a divorce
  • Purchasing a home for their family (selling one digital asset can be a hefty down payment for a home, or even cover the entirety of the home)
  • Having medical issues
  • Other reasons: We had one seller on our marketplace whose reason for selling his business was to get enough money to adopt a child.

When you can collect 20–50 months of your net profit upfront, you can do a lot of things that just weren’t options before.

When you have a multiple six-figure or even seven-figure war chest, you can often outspend the competition, invest in infrastructure and teams you couldn’t before, and in general jumpstart your next project or business idea far faster without ever having to worry about if a Google update is going tank your earnings or some other unforeseen market change.

That begs the question...

When should you sell?

Honestly, it depends.

The answer to this question is more of an art than a science.

As a rule of thumb, you should ask yourself if you’re excited by the kind of money you’ll get from the successful sale of your online business.

You can use our valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate or do some back-of-the-napkin math of what you’re likely to receive for the business using the basic multiple formula I outlined. I prefer to always be on the conservative side with my estimations, so your napkin math might be taking your 12-month average net profit with a multiple of 25x.

Does that number raise your eyebrows? Is it even interesting?

If it is, then you might want to start asking yourself if you really are ready to part with your business to focus on other things. Remember, you should always set a MINIMUM sales price that you’d be willing to walk away from the business with, something that would still make you happy if you went through with it.

Most of us Internet marketers are always working on multiple projects at once. Sadly, some projects just don’t get the love they deserve or used to get from us.

Instead of letting those projects just die off in the background, consider selling your online business instead to a very hungry market of investors starting to flood our digital realm.

Selling a business, even if it's a side project that you’re winding down, is always going to be an intimate process. When you're ready to pull the trigger, we’ll be there to help you every step of the way.

Have you thought about selling your online business, or gone through a sale in the past? Let us know your advice, questions, or anecdotes in the comments.


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Julian Morris Outlines Problems with the Social Cost of Carbon

Earlier this month, Reason Foundation’s Julian Morris released an excellent policy study examining climate change, regulation, and the social cost of carbon (SCC). In the study, Morris highlights six problems with calculating the social cost of carbon. In this blog, I’ll provided an outline of those six problems, as well as some additional information on the work IER’s staff has done on the social cost of carbon. I strongly encourage you to read the entire policy study, as it provides a great overview of the problems many have identified with calculating the social cost of carbon.

1. The first problem Morris identifies with calculating the social cost of carbon is the fact that future emissions of global greenhouse gases (GHGs) are unknowable. Morris explains:

Future human-related emissions of GHGs will depend on many factors, especially: the human population, the extent and use of technologies that result in energy consumption, the types of technology used to produce energy, and the efficiency with which technologies use energy.

Policymakers have routinely failed in their ability to predict future technological change in the energy industry—the most recent example being their inability to foresee the tremendous changes brought about by the shale revolution. These technological changes have caused an increase in the use of more energy-dense fuels like natural gas. Consequently, greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. sources have declined from their recent peak.

Source: Energy Information Administration. March 2017 Monthly Energy Review

2. The relationship between emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases is based on a number of variables including the amount of emissions as well as the amount of time GHGs will remain in the atmosphere. As Morris explains, this presents a problem because the rate at which GHGs leave the atmosphere is also dependent on many factors:

The rate at which GHGs such as methane and dinitrogen monoxide break down depends on such things as temperature and the amount of water vapor and other chemicals in the atmosphere with which they might react. The rate at which CO2 is taken up by plants, soil and oceans varies considerably depending on factors such as temperature and the availability of nutrients. The dynamic and interactive nature of these effects complicates the picture further.

3. It’s likely the sensitivity of climate to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases is much less than many of the earlier models predicted. Morris writes:

Early estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases found that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would result in a warming of between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with a “best guess” of 3°C. But those estimates were based on poorly specified models. Tests of models using those estimates of climate sensitivity predict about twice as much warming as actually occurred. Nonetheless, the IWG used those early, inaccurate estimates. More recent estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that future emissions are likely to result in much more modest warming of the atmosphere (with a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations resulting in a warming of 1.5°C or less).

4. It’s possible the benefits of climate change outweigh the costs, at least for likely ranges of change. Some of the benefits of climate change may include better agricultural output caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a lower number of deaths caused by cold temperatures. Furthermore, Morris points out that many economic models assume very limited adaptation, meaning it is likely they are overestimating negative impacts of climate change. He explains:

Rising wealth and the adoption of new technologies have reduced mortality from extreme weather events by 98% in the past century (see Figure ES4). It seems highly likely that continued innovation and more widespread adoption of adaptive technologies will continue to reduce mortality, mitigating most—if not all—[of] the adverse consequences of rising temperatures.

5. The costs of future emissions reductions are unknown and are dependent on the timeframe of any reduction.  As Morris explains:

Proponents of taking action now argue that any delay would increase the total cost of emissions reductions—because baseline emissions (i.e. the emissions that would occur without any mandated reductions) would be higher and the size of any such future reduction would have to be greater. But such arguments presume both significant increases in baseline emissions and a need dramatically to reduce such emissions. If the trends in technology identified earlier do continue, growth in baseline GHG emissions will continue to slow and in the longer term may even fall without any government mandates. Indeed, it is possible that baseline emissions in the future (i.e. after 2050) will be consistent with a pathway of emissions that results in atmospheric GHG concentrations that generate net benefits.

6. The Interagency Working Group (IWG) used inappropriately low discount rates when assessing costs and benefits. When discount rates that accurately reflect the opportunity cost of capital are used, the costs of taking action to reduce future GHG emissions now is likely greater than the benefits of taking such action. He explains:

Unfortunately, when discounting the benefits and costs associated with global warming, many analysts have used discount rates that do not reflect the opportunity cost of capital. For example, the IWG provided an estimate of the SCC at a 5% discount rate, but it is the highest rate given. In its guidance, the IWG emphasized the SCC calculated at a 3% discount rate. Its rationale for using the lower rate is that future benefits from avoiding climate change costs relate to future consumption, rather than investment. Policies to address climate change would affect both consumption and investment, but for the purposes of evaluation what matters is the effect on investment, since it is the effect of policies on investment decisions that will determine rates of innovation and hence economic growth, the ability to adapt to climate change, and future consumption. In other words, while future consumption is of primary concern, due to its relationship to human welfare, return on investment is the key factor determining future consumption. Thus, the appropriate discount rate is the rate of return on capital.

It’s not simply that Morris thinks a 7 percent discount rate is more appropriate. In 2014, IER’s Robert Murphy pointed out that the Obama administration’s IWG ignored OMB guidelines to provide a SCC estimate based on both a 3 and 7 percent discount rate. Instead, they reported their estimates based on a global perspective, and the highest discount rate they used was 5 percent. Here, Murphy explains why the choice of discount rate is an important element when calculating the SCC:

To see what a big deal this is, consider the Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the FUND model, one of the three used by the Working Group to generate its SCC estimates. The table below shows the FUND model’s estimates of the SCC at various discount rates, including the 7% rate that the OMB requires but that the Working Group for some reason ignored:

 

As the above table shows, at a 7% discount rate the FUND model actually shows a negative SCC through at least the year 2030. For those keeping score at home, a “negative social cost of carbon” is the same thing as a positive social benefit of carbon.

It’s clear that the social cost of carbon is a misleading tool for policymaking as it is presented as an objective fact. However, as Julian Morris’s policy study helps demonstrate, many of the parameters for calculating the SCC are impossible to measure, while others can be adjusted up or down based on any number of assumptions. This is why we at IER have continued to argue that the SCC is not an appropriate tool for policymaking.

The post Julian Morris Outlines Problems with the Social Cost of Carbon appeared first on IER.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

SEI’s Solar in Schools achieves new milestone: First successful 10 kW high school install in Paonia

Nine Paonia High School students who are participating in Solar Energy International’s high school solar course had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience installing a solar system for their school this February. They worked during their class period for a week alongside Empowered Energy Systems LLC, who donated their time to the project, to install a 10kW ground mount solar system. The students learned about every step of the installation process from excavation and pouring concrete to setting the railing and placing the solar panels. Now they can leverage the skills gained from this experience to pursue a career, or continuing education, in the solar industry or other technical trades.

One of the participating students, Harley Ewert 2019, shared the value of his experience,

“Working on solar installation isn’t the typical education you think of having in high school, but it exemplified how important learning first hand can be. It is amazing how quickly a term or item can be remembered when it is tied back to a physical experience rather than a definition on a computer screen.”

The system will output approximately 16,000 kWh/year of solar electricity and save the school approximately $1,500/year. This year students learned technical skills during the installation, and over subsequent years students will have the opportunity to collect a variety of data from the system to accompany physics, math, or science curriculum in the school. Not only is this 10kW solar system offsetting some energy costs for the school, but it serves as an educational resource for years to come.

Solar Energy International organized the donations and installation of the solar system. The Trina Solar solar panels and Sunny Boy inverters for the system were donated in collaboration with the Solar Foundation. While the funds for the rest of the system were local donations from community members, businesses, and utilities including DMEA, Basin Electric. Empowered Energy Systems LLC donated their time to install the ground mount and involve the students in a safe manner, and the AC electrical work was donated by Aubrey Harris from Electrical Service and Repair LLC.

Beata Ramza, Solar Energy International AmeriCorps VISTA, reflects on the experience, “This project was a culmination of the community coming together to donate time, skills, and resources to provide an educational opportunity to Paonia High School students. It’s truly inspiring to see what we can do when we work together.” From start to finish, the installation of the Paonia High School solar PV system was a local effort that will benefit the community for years to come.

The picture below shows the Paonia PV 101 students and their instructor Mandy Cotten alongside Jim Heneghan from DMEA, Pete from Solar Energy International, Kristen, Joey, JJ, and Joseph from Empowered Energy Systems LLC, and Aubrey Harris from Electric Services and Repair LLC, in front of one row of solar panels from the Paonia High School 10kW solar system.

Original press release by Beata Ramza.

The post SEI’s Solar in Schools achieves new milestone: First successful 10 kW high school install in Paonia appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

Limiting California‘s Waiver Authority Is Not a Federalism Issue

The federal government has passed two main laws regulating the efficiency and emissions of motor vehicles nationwide. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, created by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) in 1975 in reaction to the Arab fuel embargo, mandate higher fuel efficiency for vehicles in an effort to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. The Clean Air Act (CAA), passed in 1970, includes a mandate for the regulation of tailpipe emissions of vehicles. The statutory responsibilities for these regulations rest with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) respectively.

The EPCA, which created CAFE standards, expressly preempts states from establishing their own fuel economy standards. Under the CAA, federal air standards also generally preempt state level standards. This is perfectly appropriate from both a constitutional and a philosophical perspective when it comes to the car industry. Cars are sold in a national market and between travel and people relocating, cars move between states millions of times a year. It is not feasible for individual states to have separate standards for cars. Constitutionally, this is a clear matter of interstate commerce. Philosophically, while federalism usually is preferable it is not mandatory. In a highly integrated national market for a mobile product like cars, a patchwork of state regulation serves only to impair commerce, not to advance any liberty or self-government interest. Especially as to fuel economy standards, the original justification for which has been superseded by technology-driven domestic production gains, if they are going to exist at all for national security reasons then they must be set based on nationwide interests.

The CAA does allow the state of California to seek a waiver of federal preemption in order to impose more stringent air standards under certain circumstances. Other states then have the option of adopting California’s standards (but not to create their own). However, this waiver opportunity does not apply to CAFE standards. This lack of waiver authority rightly derives from the justification for the CAFE program: reducing dependence on foreign oil, a national security question. Despite these statutory limitations, the state of California has consistently sought to push the bounds of regulation, eventually bringing itself into conflict with federal authority. In 2009 the Obama administration worked around this conflict, in a process about which they bragged “we put nothing in writing,” by deciding to make federal CAFE standards match California’s desired standards. This unprecedented decision was reached through secretive meetings between California and friendly federal regulators. The decision was then imposed on automakers—companies in the midst of federal bailouts and in no position to resist—without debate.

The Obama administration subsequently continued to push the regulatory boundaries of this new combined process, seeking to drive CAFE standards ever higher. The most recent standards have been criticized by the auto industry for unnecessarily raising the price of new vehicles and for being unworkably stringent. In response, the Trump administration has indicated that it may slow the pace of CAFE standard increases and perhaps cease allowing California to set higher standards through the waiver process.

Those on the right side of the political spectrum generally favor federalism and state-led solutions, but when it comes to CAFE standards that is not an appropriate approach. Due to the integrated national market for vehicles, what we have here is not one state regulating its own population, but one state setting regulatory standards for the other 49 states. The sheer size of the California market (combined with 14 additional states and the District of Columbia that conform to their standards) means that automakers must either make their entire fleet compliant with California or sell different cars in different states, which is difficult to impossible for economic reasons. The California legislature and its Air Resources Board set these national standards without the opportunity for the governments and populations of other states to weigh in. That is not federalism. Congress and the executive branch must decide national issues that affect all states at the national level. Sacramento shouldn’t be able to limit the types of cars people can drive in Atlanta or Zanesville, but that is the practical impact of the current situation. The Trump administration is right to seek a remedy.

The problem of California setting national vehicle standards is becoming ever more salient as the attitude of the California government grows more radical. The state government heavily favors electric vehicles and there are proposals being floated to even eliminate cars with combustion engine altogether. There is no room in the California government’s imagined future for the types of cars or trucks sold in the rest of the country.

Inherent in the Clean Air Act is the concept of cooperative federalism, but in this instance, by forcing its will (with the blessing of the Obama administration), California is engaging in coercive federalism. So long as the EPA and DOT continue to defer to California, the other 49 states are disenfranchised in the creation of these regulations. Limiting California’s waiver ability is thus not a violation of federalism principles; it simply prevents unelected bureaucrats in Sacramento from dictating what kind of cars the rest of America drives. President Trump should revoke the California waiver as it is in the best interest of American consumers and a check on coercive federalism.

The post Limiting California‘s Waiver Authority Is Not a Federalism Issue appeared first on IER.

Presenting Your Findings: How to Create Relevant and Engaging SEO Reports - Next Level

Posted by meghanpahinui

Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! Our last episodes covered how to transform low-value content and how to track the right keywords for your local business. Today, Meghan is here to share all the juicy details to include in a truly persuasive SEO report for your clients and how you can create your own with Moz Pro. Read on and level up!


When it comes to creating useful SEO reports for clients and members of your team, it can be tough to balance the best, most relevant information to include with what they actually want to see. Essentially, you should show your clients that what you’re doing is working and getting results that positively impact their business. That being said, though, you’ll need to ask yourself what they consider progress:

  • Are they trying to generate more traffic to their site?
  • Increase overall sales?
  • Improve their rankings?
  • Are they hoping to start ranking for a specific set of keywords or break into a new market which will provide more revenue?

Regardless of their specific business goal, you’ll need to create reports which are concise, straightforward, and easy to digest to remind your clients why they're investing in SEO and your services. If a report is too long, your client may lose interest. If a report is too short or doesn’t include the data they find most relevant, they may wonder what the heck they're paying for!

I like to think about creating SEO reports as if I’m writing up an experiment: I have an objective or problem that I’m trying to solve, a hypothesis about what will get me to that goal and solve my problem, and a procedure to follow, all of which leads to observations that will help me benchmark my progress and set up a new goal.

In this installation of Next Level, we’ll talk about what information you should include in your SEO reports and show you what modules you can add to your Custom Report in Moz Pro to illustrate that data.

1. Determine your objective

What's the current SEO goal and how does it align with your client’s business objectives?

The first step in any endeavor is determining what you’re setting out to achieve. You’ll want to make sure to outline your current SEO goals clearly for your client. For example, your goal may be to increase rankings for select keywords, to increase overall Search Visibility, or to generate more inbound links. Perhaps even more importantly, you’ll want to explain how these SEO goals will impact your client’s business overall.

Include tangible business objectives, such as “increase monthly revenue” or “drive more traffic to your online shop,” but don’t forget to explain why you’ve chosen these as your objectives. Simply telling a client that you’re planning to work on increasing their keyword rankings won’t help them to understand why that’s important. By outlining what you’re working towards and why, you'll not only give direction to your report but also set your client’s expectations.

2. Form your hypothesis

Where should your efforts be focused to meet this goal?

How you plan to accomplish your client’s business goals through SEO is something that you’ll definitely want to think about when putting your SEO report together. What do you think needs to happen in order to make sure your client’s expectations and business goals are met? For example, if your client wants to increase the overall organic search traffic that comes to their site, you'll want to focus on improving their keyword rankings.

“Okay, but how are you going to do that?” asks your client. Here’s where you can outline your plan of attack and what you think will have the most impact, like making sure that all pages have meta descriptions that are the right length, or that all pages have title tags.

Asking yourself these types of “how” questions in advance will set you up for success when you go to create your report. A clear idea of your procedure — your way forward — will make sure the most relevant information is included and doesn’t get lost among a bunch of data irrelevant to your current goal. Taking the time early on to outline your next steps will help you stay on track and create concise, easy-to-digest reports.

SEO can be confusing, which is probably why your client hired you! Make sure you explain what you’re planning to do, how you plan to do it, and why. This will keep your client from feeling out of the loop and asking themselves questions like “What am I looking at? Is this really helping me?”

A transparent, informative explanation can be as simple as this:

“I’m working on making sure all your pages have relevant meta descriptions so searchers are better able to determine if your site is what they’re looking for in SERPs. This will help improve your overall click-through rate, which should help increase traffic to your site.”

If you can weave your goals directly into the explanation of what you're doing and how, all the better!

3. Outline your procedure

What have you already done to work towards meeting this goal?

Time to show off what you’ve completed so far! Here, you'll include SEO goals you’ve already achieved, like fixed missing descriptions, resolved issues with 404 pages on the site, pages which have been optimized for target keywords, etc. People like to see evidence that their investments are paying off, so take care to remind your client what they're paying you to do, and create a detailed report to show just how effective you’ve been already.

The Moz Pro Custom Report tool comes in handy for this type of reporting, as well as the “Observations” portion we’ll talk about in just a bit. You can use the handy visuals in Custom Reports modules to illustrate what you’ve been working on and outline what you plan to attack next.

4. Record your observations

The “Observations” portion of your report is your place to show real, tangible data to your client. You’ve outlined what you’re doing to help them achieve their current SEO goal, and now it’s time to show them the results of your labor.

Keyword performance

The idea here is pretty straightforward: show your client which of their keywords have improved in the rankings, and how their Search Visibility has changed since the last report. For transparency, you may also want to include some info about the keywords that didn’t do as well — now would be a good time to tell your client how you plan to tackle those low-performing keywords!

You may also want to display how your client is ranking compared to their main competitors and call out specific instances of improvement.

Here's an example:

“Although the rank dropped for 5 of your target keywords, your overall Search Visibility is up by 7%, and you’re ranking higher than your competitors for all 5 of those keywords.”

It's important to keep your client’s expectations grounded by reminding them that fluctuation in keyword rankings from week to week is pretty normal, and comparing rankings over a longer period of time is often more representative of true performance.

Page optimization

A great way to add in more detail about keyword rankings to your Custom Report is with Page Optimization modules. The Page Optimization tool allows you to pair a specific page on the site you’re tracking with a target keyword to see a report of how well-optimized that page is for that keyword. This is especially useful if your client has a specific set of keywords they need to be ranking for. The Page Optimization tool makes suggestions as to what you can do to improve your chances of ranking, and will show you what you’re already doing that’s helping your client rank where they are now! When you add Page Optimization modules to your report, they can illustrate not only improvements you’ve made to certain pages and how rankings have changed for those keyword/URL pairs, but they can also highlight pages you’re not already working on that may be good opportunities for optimization.

Inbound traffic

Showing your client that more people are heading to their site is a straightforward way to show off the progress you’ve made. If you can, be sure to point out where you think the increase in traffic is coming from, whether it’s from higher keyword rankings, new backlink generation, or other factors related to the work you've done.

Link generation

If one of your goals is to generate more backlinks for your client, you’ll want to show them what you’ve accomplished. Be honest about the types of links you’re looking to acquire. For example, if you’re interested in quality over quantity and are focusing your efforts on acquiring links from sites with high MozRank and MozTrust, make sure you let your client know that, and explain what effect it could have on their backlink profile. Will your strategy earn them more links overall, or higher quality links — and which is better for their business? Explain why your goal is the best plan of attack for achieving their overall business goals.

Site crawl

Adding in Site Crawl modules to your Custom Report can effectively illustrate what you’ve been working on with regards to your client’s site specifically. For example, if you’ve focused on redirecting 404 pages to live, active pages, you could show them a graph illustrating the decrease over time in pages returning this type of error. Perhaps you have been working on cleaning up redirect chains, reviewing meta noindex tags, or editing pages with thin content. All of these things can be outlined so you can demonstrate your progress in your Custom Report using Site Crawl modules. You can also use these modules to show your client how their site has improved — e.g., by showing them a steady number of pages crawled each week alongside declining rates of on-site issues like 404 pages and thin content — and highlight areas of their site you think may still need some work.

5. Draw your conclusions

What’s next?

Once you’ve laid out what you’re working on, why, and how it’s impacting your client’s business so far, you’ll want to outline what they can expect to see next. Let them know what your next course of action is and what you think is working (or not working) so they can be prepared for your next report. If you’re planning to work on optimizing pages for keywords that aren’t ranking currently, or if you’re planning to go after some link-building opportunities, make sure they're aware!

Perform a final review

Finally, before sending your brand-new report out to your client, make sure to review it one last time to confirm that it’s telling the right story.

  • Does it properly illustrate what you’re working on and how that's positively impacting their overall business goals?
  • Does it use language which is easy to understand and that your client will care about?

Not everyone is an SEO wiz, so it’s important to make sure the report you’re presenting is easily comprehended. For example, if you’ve illustrated that their overall search visibility has gone up, will they understand that jargon and what it means? If not, have you made sure to explain what it is and why it’s important? Try to view the report from your client’s point of view and see if you’re able to find the true value in the data you’re presenting. Taking this extra step can really help solidify your report and make sure it’s the best representation of your work.

Schedule your report to auto-send

Within the Custom Reports section of Moz Pro, you can set up your shiny new report to be emailed weekly or monthly to help keep your clients up-to-date on how things are going. You can also choose to email the report directly to anyone who might have a stake in seeing the results of your SEO efforts, such as colleagues or stakeholders.

The most important thing is to make sure your clients know what they are paying for! They want to see tangible results that are applicable to their business specifically. A well-crafted, intentional SEO report will both make your job easier and help your client rest easy knowing their investment is paying off.

If you’re ready to dive in and start creating your own shiny new Custom Report, be sure to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Moz Pro:

Start your free month now!

If you find you need more help getting started with your own report, be sure to check out our page all about Custom Reports on the Help Hub.


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