Combining Email and Facebook for a Dynamite Ecommerce Marketing Campaign

Posted by andrewchoco

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

Most people view email marketing and social advertising as two separate entities, and I’ll be honest, I used to think that as well. However, I’ve discovered that combining multiple different avenues for a coherent marketing campaign yields some pretty impressive results.

We’ve tried this tactic before at Directive Consulting, combining SEO and PPC; but in this blog post, I’m going to break down a few ways to combine email and social advertising for multi-channel success.

More specifically, you’ll learn:

• How to create custom and lookalike audiences on Facebook from an email list
• Best practices for launching email and social campaigns simultaneously
• How we used this tactic to increase overall sessions and revenue
• Some additional strategies to take your ecommerce campaigns to the next level

Using email lists to create Custom Audiences on Facebook

Most (if not all) ecommerce stores require an email address when completing a purchase, and many times you can see what item the person bought. Keeping an organized and segmented email list is the first step to social advertising success. If you’re an online clothing store that specializes in creative t-shirts for men and women, create individual lists segmenting categories (e.g., sports, funny, and cute) and gender. If you’re using a CRM such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, or Salesforce, you can export these contact lists as .CSV files and then upload those to Facebook under the “Audiences” section using Ads Manager.

When logging onto your Ads Manager or Business Manager account, go to your ad account and select the drop-down hamburger menu in the top left-hand corner.

If "Audiences" doesn’t appear in the “Frequently Used” section, hit "All tools" and you’ll find it under the “Assets” section.

After clicking on “create custom audience,” you’ll need to select the “customer file” section and then “choose a file or copy” and you’ll be prompted to upload your .CSV file into Facebook.

Facebook will then match up the emails with actual Facebook users (you can expect anywhere from a 20% - 70% match rate), but with ecommerce those numbers tend to be on the higher side.

Using email lists to create Facebook Audiences

Another great feature of Facebook ads is the ability to create lookalike audiences from previously uploaded email lists. Facebook will match up the corresponding profiles of your email lists with a broader group of people who have similar profiles based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. As long as your email list consists of more than 100 people, Facebook will be able to create a lookalike audience. Obviously, though, the more people you have in the original email list, the more similar the lookalike audience will be (because Facebook will have more data to pull from.)

When you create your lookalike audience, you select a country and choose anywhere from 1% - 10% of a country’s population.

But you don’t have to stop there. Once you have a lookalike audience (we usually use the 10% option so we capture the most people), you can layer additional targeting on top of the lookalike. For the clothing store example, you could take the audience of 20 million and add additional behavior targeting of men’s fashion buyers and online buyers. Now that’s a specific audience!

Launching simultaneous campaigns for maximum reach

Now how can you tie together email marketing and social advertising for optimal reach?

Anytime an ecommerce shop launches a promotion or sale, they send out an email blast.

I usually check my email in the morning, see the promotion, and then promptly forget about it five minutes later. It’s common knowledge that every opportunity needs multiple touches before they end up converting to a sale, but sending three emails a day promoting a sale is a good way to lose a lot of subscribers.

The solution? Launch a social promotion targeted at your specific email list. Then ramp up the budget to ensure that every person sees your ad at least once during the campaign. A good way to do this is by looking at the estimated reach when creating an ad campaign and making sure your budget is high enough that the estimated reach per day matches up with the amount of people on your email list.

We used this tactic with a client of ours who sells collectable banknotes from countries all around the world.

Their most popular is the Zimbabwean $100 trillion dollar banknote, so they ran a promotion for 10% off. We didn’t segment the audiences like I mentioned earlier, because they were only promoting one country’s banknote, but we did create two different ad images as well as a carousel ad so we could target everyone in the list with multiple products for the same price.

While you may think this is an obnoxious ad and the red circle and arrow is overkill, this ad actually performed the best out of all of them, generating over 180 clicks in three days with a CTR of 8.7%. Little touches like this really draw in your audience’s attention and can lead to much higher engagement.

Carousel ads are great for ecommerce shops because they can show off multiple products without increasing the price of your campaigns. We recently switched over to carousel ads for a client of ours who builds custom fences and had 3,000% more sessions on the site from the carousel ads.

We launched these ads for a three-day period while the sale was running and combed it with an email blast that went out at the beginning of the sale. These are the results we saw when comparing the week of the promotion to the previous week:

We saw our sessions go up, as well as the pages per session and average session duration. We didn’t have a single transaction from Facebook the previous week, but had four during the sale, generating enough revenue to easily cover the cost of that campaign.

Another interesting thing we saw was that the email didn’t directly lead to any sales. I’m not saying it had no effect on the sales that week, but only launching an email campaign wouldn’t have had the same impact as combining these two platforms and working together to create additional touches throughout the sale period.

Additional strategies

1. Use lookalike audiences

For the above example, we only targeted our custom audience of email subscribers (the sale was a special promo just for those customers). But taking it even further, creating a broader audience from the lookalike audience would have been a great audience to target, as well.

What better way to introduce your brand and product to a potential customer than immediately offering a sale? You can also further target these audiences to get extremely specific. For our banknote client, our targeted lookalike audience looks something like this:

2. Create a new segmented list for sale buyers

If you’re launching a promotion for a sale using this tactic, segment each new email address you receive into its own list titled “sale buyers.” There’s a chance these people have been wanting to buy your product all along and finally waited until a sale came along to do it, but more likely, these people are impulse shoppers who made a purchase because of the exclusivity of the deal you’re promoting. This now gives you a list of customers that you know make purchases during sales, and you can test out other promotional deals later on. If you don’t offer free shipping regularly, have a two-day period when you do, and target these specific people.

3. Use Twitter as another platform to target your audience

Twitter is another social platform that gives you the ability to upload a .CSV of email addresses, and matches up twitter profiles with those corresponding emails.

In the Twitter Ads platform, go to "Tools" and then "Audience manager."

Head over to “Create new audience” and upload your own .CSV, just like you did for Facebook. (A word of warning: You do need 500 or more matches for Twitter to allow you to use the audience for promotions.)

For ecommerce, most people will use their personal email for Twitter as well as buying a product, so this shouldn’t be an issue with a big enough email list.

Now it’s your turn

Now you’re prepared to launch a robust and successful email and social advertising campaign.

Remember, it’s important to ensure your budget aligns with the amount of people you’re trying to reach, and to use eye-popping images to catch your audience’s attention. Let me know in the comments if these tactics worked for you, or if you have any additional strategies for email and social success!

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!

New England in Need of More Natural Gas Pipeline Capacity

Many New Englanders would like to convert their home heating systems to natural gas, but are not allowed because there is insufficient pipeline capacity to get the natural gas to their homes. Not only does the residential market want natural gas for home heating but so do the industrial and electric utility markets. Low cost natural gas is in demand and has been replacing coal and nuclear power in electricity markets in New England, which is now over 50 percent dependent on natural gas. But despite the demand, natural gas pipelines are having a tough time getting built in New England. Recently, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts ruled against energy companies having electricity consumers pay for the costs of new natural gas pipelines.[i]

Without additional pipelines, New England will be importing higher cost liquefied natural gas (LNG) to its terminal on the Mystic River in Boston Harbor. That terminal is the only LNG facility in the United States importing LNG; the others are being converted to export facilities. The imported LNG is raising costs for residents of the Northeast. In the winter of 2014, New England was paying 15 times more for imported LNG than the cost of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale deposits in Pennsylvania.[ii]

Massachusetts Ruling

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled against electric utilities signing 20-year contracts for natural gas pipeline capacity, selling that capacity to power plants and passing the costs to their retail customers. The plan had electric utilities committing to the pipelines on behalf of the electric generators. The plan would have provided stable financing to expand much needed natural gas pipeline capacity to the region, and would have driven down the cost of wholesale electricity.

The need for the “pipeline tax” arose because power plant owners have been buying natural gas on the spot market, rather than through long-term contracts, which pipeline developers need to have to obtain federal approval. Typically, this is how the financing for construction of pipelines has been done. If there is a demonstrated “public need”, pipelines can be built by those promising to buy natural gas through long term contracts. Among the considerations has been the benefits a pipeline might bring to the region.

Specifically, the ruling blocks a financing plan for a $3 billion regional gas pipeline, the Access Northeast pipeline project, which was intended to expand the existing Algonquin gas pipeline in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Access Northeast was expected to save New Englanders approximately $1 billion a year.

This is the second project to be blocked in recent months. In April, Kinder Morgan, the nation’s biggest energy infrastructure company, dropped its plan for the Northeast Energy Direct project because of a lack of assurances that electricity ratepayers would pay for the $3.3 billion pipeline. The Northeast Energy Direct plan would have included a spur line into Connecticut to bring natural gas from the Marcellus shale regions of Pennsylvania.[iii]

Without the pipelines, New England will have insufficient natural gas capacity for electric generation during cold winters. During the Polar Vortex winter of 2013 and 2014, insufficient natural gas infrastructure cost electric consumers $2.5 billion dollars.

Natural Gas production in the United States increased 42 percent between 2000 and 2015, making the United States the largest producer of natural gas in the world. Hydraulic fracturing has made extracting it extremely cost effective and much cheaper than LNG, which New Englanders must buy due to insufficient pipeline capacity.

Tedious Pipeline Approval Process

Under the Natural Gas Act of 1938, companies wanting to build interstate pipelines must obtain certificates of public convenience and necessity from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The approval process is complex, expensive, and time consuming – often taking as much as three years. Before officially applying, however, applicants must go through a six-month pre-filing process, submitting reports on the expected construction and environmental impacts. After the pre-filling process, FERC begins its official review, but the timeline is uncertain and extensive. For example, Maine’s Down East Pipeline, which was filed for approval in December of 2006–over a decade ago–is still awaiting a decision from FERC. This slow process compares to less than 30 days for states to permit oil or natural gas wells.

Conclusion

Underground pipelines are the safest mode of energy transportation in the nation. There is a vast 2.5 million mile network of pipelines crisscrossing the United States. However, existing pipelines do not have enough capacity to meet growing demand, particularly when coal-fired and nuclear power plants are being prematurely retired. New England is over 50 percent dependent on natural gas for its electricity generation and needs dependable sources of natural gas to keep both its residential customers and its electricity generators supplied with natural gas. However, natural gas infrastructure projects are being blocked, making the region rely on much more expensive LNG imported from other nations.

---

[i] Mass Live, Strong reactions as state’s highest court nixes pipeline funding mechanism, August 17, 2016, http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/08/reactions_states_highest_court.html

[ii] American Action Forum, U.S. Natural Gas Pipelines: An Infrastructure Crisis, August 25, 2016, https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/u-s-natural-gas-pipelines-infrastructure-crisis/

[iii] Hartford Courant, Massachusetts Court Deals Blow To Regional Natural Gas Pipeline, August 26, 2016, http://www.courant.com/business/hc-eversource-withdraws-from-major-pipeline-project-20160825-story.html

 

The post New England in Need of More Natural Gas Pipeline Capacity appeared first on IER.

SEI Alumni Highlight: Ben Graves – Science Teacher at Delta High School

Solar in the Schools – A 21st Century Education for the Next Generation

The final weeks of summer brought teachers, as well as students to Solar Energy International’s (SEI)  campus. Ben Graves, a science teacher at Delta High School (about 30 miles from SEI), came to SEI for PV 201L: Solar Electric Lab Week (Grid Direct). Ben joined the hands-on lab week as part of the partnership with the Delta County School District for SEI’s Solar in the Schools program.  Ben teaches Environmental Science at both a freshman and Advanced Placement level. As part of the Solar in the School’s High School Career and Technical Pathway Program, Ben teaches the high school adaptation of SEI’s PV 101 class.  In the PV 101 class, students utilize SEI’s textbook, online curriculum and  come to SEI’s lab facility in Paonia for hands-on training.

As for Ben,“I’m at SEI to get more hands-on experience working with solar energy, installing panels, racking modules, and working with inverters to help inform the classes I teach, both at a freshman level and my senior level solar electricity class. In that class the students actually get certification from SEI as introductory PV installers and we’re really working to make that class more hands on and work more for the students who take it. “

Ben is able to come to SEI in part because he is a Teaching Fellow with the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, a nonprofit founded to increase the number of high-quality high school science and mathematics teachers with the ultimate goal of improving STEM education in the United States. Ben brings an innovative and hands-on approach to science for his students. Describing his PV 101 class he said “the students in that class are hands-on learners. They are students who have self-selected that they would like to go into the electrical industry or the solar industry… I’m hoping to take what I learn at SEI back to the classroom to make that PV 101 course that my high schoolers are taking much more hands-on day to day.”

And he knows that classes like PV 101 have a reach far beyond the semester; they are geared to prepare students for the “job market of the next decade.”The mission of Solar in the Schools resonates strongly with Ben. “That’s our target audience at Delta High School: to target students who self-identify as wanting to pursue a vocational pathway and providing them an opportunity to get a 21st century education in solar and renewable electricity.”

The post SEI Alumni Highlight: Ben Graves – Science Teacher at Delta High School appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

The Two-Part SEO Ranking Model: Let's Make SEO Simple

Posted by EricEnge

There sure is a lot of interest in SEO ranking factors:

There have been major studies done on this, notably by both Moz and Searchmetrics. These are groundbreaking pieces of research, and if you're serious about SEO, you need to understand what these studies say.

That said, these are too complex for most organizations to deal with. They need a simpler way of looking at things. At Stone Temple Consulting (STC) we deal with many different types of organizations, including some of the world's largest companies, and some of the highest-traffic websites in the world. For most of these companies, understanding that there are 200+ ranking factors does more harm than good.

Why, you ask? So many people I talk to are looking for a silver bullet. They want to hear that they should only change their heading tags on the second Tuesday of every month, except during leap years, when they should do it on the first Tuesday, except in February when they should change it on the third Monday. These distractions end up taking away from the focus on the two things that matter most: building great content (and a great content experience) and promoting it well.

Today's post is going to lay out a basic approach that most companies can use to simplify their thinking about SEO, and keep their focus on the highest priorities.

What Google recently said

Here's what Google Dublin's Andrey Lippatsev said in a Hangout that I participated in on March 23, 2016. Also participating in the Hangout was Ammon Johns, who asked Andrey what the two most important ranking factors are:

Andrey Lippatsev: Yes. Absolutely. I can tell you what they are. It is content and links going into your site.

There we go, that's a start. According to Google, it's links and content that are the two biggest. Hopefully, the idea that content is a big factor is obvious, but below I'll break out more what great content really entails. In addition, you can see some backup for the power of links in the study I recently published on links as a ranking factor.

Should we think of the world as consisting only of these two factors? It's quite simplistic, and possibly too much so, but let's try to simplify this even more. How many organizations would dramatically improve their SEO if they focused on creating great content and promoting it effectively? I can tell you that from my experience these are two things that many organizations simply don't do.

Does that mean that we can take our two factors and put them into a (purely) hypothetical ranking score equation that looks like this?

I actually think that this equation is pretty effective, though it has some limitations and omissions that I'll describe in more detail below. You also need to think about the concept of "great content," that will get a high Content Score, in the correct manner.

What is "great content?"

If we step back and think about what makes up great content, it seems to me that there are three major components that matter:

1. Relevancy
2. Quality
3. The overall content experience

The first part of this is simple. If the content is not relevant to a query, it shouldn't rank for that query, ever. That makes sense, right?

The second part is also pretty simple, and that's the notion of quality. Does it provide information that people are looking for? Is that information relatively unique to your site? Clearly, it makes sense for the quality of the content to matter a lot.

We can combine the notions of quality and relative uniqueness into the notion of material differentiation. Rand covers this brilliantly in his Whiteboard Friday about creating 10X content.

Creating the 220,001st article on how to make French toast is just not going to cut it:

You need to create something new and compelling that also offers a lot of value. That may not be easy, but being the best at something never is.

If you're in a competitive market, it's reasonable to guess that your top competitors are making great, relevant content on topics that matter to their target audience. For the most important queries, it's probable that the top 5 (and maybe more) pieces of content in that space are really, really good (i.e. more comprehensive than other articles on the topic, or brings in new information that others don't have).

The third part encompasses many pieces.

• Is your content well-organized and easy to read?
• Does it effectively communicate its key points? How do people engage with it? If they land on a page on your site that has the answer to their question, can they quickly and easily find that information?

Once again, you'll find that the major competitors that rank in the top of the SERPs all handle this pretty well too.

Let's now take a look at what the role of the content score in ranking might look like:

Note that the Y-axis is "Chances of Ranking," as opposed to "Ranking." Nonetheless, this curve suggests that the Content Score is a big one, and that makes sense. Only the best of the best stuff should rank. It's simple.

Digging a bit deeper on what goes into content quality

But what about title tags? Heading tags, use of synonyms? Page layout and design? Stop and think about it for a moment. Aren't those all either part of creating higher-quality content, or making that content easier to consume?

You bet.

For example, imagine that I wrote this piece of content:

It could be the greatest information in the world, but it's going to be really hard for users to read, and it will probably have terrible user engagement signals. On the other hand, imagine that my content looks like this:

Would you say the quality of one of these pieces of content is higher? I would. The second one is much easier to read, and therefore will deliver more value to users. It will get better engagement, and yes, it will probably get linked to more often.

Why do links get separate treatment?

You could argue that links are just another measurement of content quality, and there is some truth to that, but we give them separate treatment in this discussion for two reasons:

1. They're still the best measurement of authority.

Yes, I know I'm ruffling some feathers now, but this is what my experience after more than 15 years in SEO (and seeing hundreds of SEO campaigns) has taught me. To get and sustain a link, someone has to have a website, has to be willing to modify that website, and they have to be willing to have their site's visitors click on the link to leave their site and go to yours.

That's a pretty material commitment on the linking site's part, and the only incentive they have to do that is if they believe that your content is of value to their site's visitors.

Why not social signals? While I've long argued that they have no impact except for aiding in content discovery, let's for sake of argument say that I'm wrong, and there is some impact here, and explain why social signals can never be a critical part of the Google algo. It's simple: social signals are under the control of third-party companies that can make them invisible to Google on a moment's notice (and remember that Google and Facebook are NOT friends). Imagine Google giving Facebook (or any other 3rd party) the power to break their algorithm whenever they want. Not happening!

2. The power of links should cause different actions on your part.

What is that action? It's called marketing, and within that discipline is the concept of content marketing. Done the right way, these are things you should do to raise the reputation and visibility of your brand.

In fact, this may consume a material amount of your entire company budget. With or without search engines in the world, you've always wanted to do two things:

(1) Make really good stuff, and

(2) market it effectively.

In 2016, and beyond, this will not change.

No doubt, part of attracting great links is to produce great content, but there are other overt actions involved to tell the world about that great content, such as active outreach programs.

Expanding on user engagement

Many have speculated that Google is using user engagement signals as a ranking factor, and that it will increase its investment in these areas over time. For example, what about click-through rate (CTR)? I discuss CTR as a ranking factor here, but to net it out simply, it's just too easy a signal to game, and Google tells us that it uses CTR measurements as a quality control check on other ranking signals, rather than as a direct signal.

You can doubt Google's statements about this, but if you own or publish a website, you probably get many emails a week offering to sell you links via one scheme or another. However, you never get emails offering you CTR ranking schemes. Why is that, you think? It's because even the scammers and spammers don't think it works.

Important note: Rand has done many live CTR tests and a number of these have shown some short-term rankings movement, so CTR could be used in some manner to discover hot trends/news, but still not be a core ranking factor.

What about other user engagement signals? I'd bet that Google is, in fact, doing some things with user engagement signals, though it's hard to be sure what they are. It's not likely to be as simple as bounce rate, or its cousin, pogosticking.

Pogosticking sure seems like a good signal until you realize there are many scenarios where they don't work at all. For example, when users are comparison shopping, they'll naturally hop from site to site.

Finding good user engagement factors that make for really reliable signals is quite hard. Many have speculated that artificial intelligence/machine learning will be used to derive these types of factors. Here are three pieces of content that cover that topic in some detail:

1. The Machine Learning Revolution: How it Works and its Impact on SEO, an article here on Moz by yours truly
2. SEO in a Two-Algorithm World, a Powerpoint by Rand Fishkin
3. The Past, Present, and Future of SEO, an article by Mike Grehan

Information architecture

Having a solid information architecture (IA) that Google can crawl and easily find your content is also a major requirement. In Andrey Lippatsev's response, he undoubtedly presumed that this was in good shape, but it would be wrong to leave this out of this discussion.

At Stone Temple Consulting, we've helped tons of sites improve their organic traffic simply by working on their IA, eliminating excessive page counts, improving their use of SEO tags like rel=canonical, and things of this nature. This is clearly a big factor as well. Usability also feeds into IA, because people need to be able to find what they're looking for on your site.

What I've left out with the two-factor model

First of all, there are other types of results, such as images, videos, and maps results, that are opportunities to get on the first page, but the above discussion is focused on how to rank in regular web search results.

To be fair, even in the regular web results, I've left some things out. Here are some examples of those:

1. Local links. I'm not referring to "local pack" listings here. If I search on "digital cameras" right now, in the regular web search results, I'll see some listings for stores near me. Clearly, proximity is a very large factor in ranking those pages.
2. Query deserves diversity. An example of this is the query "Jaguar." Chances are that my two-factor algorithm would rank only car sites in the top 10, but Google knows that many people that type that query want information on the animal. So even if the two-factor algo would slant things one way, you'll see some animal-related sites in the top 10.
3. In-depth articles. This is a feature that's hard to spot in the search results, but sometimes Google includes in the bottom of the top 10 results some pieces of content that are particularly comprehensive. These are for queries where Google recognizes there's a decent chance that the user is engaging in extensive research on a topic. Here's an example for the query "constitution":

We conducted a small sample review of 200 SERPs and found that about 6% of the results appeared to be from factors such as these. The two-factor model also doesn't account for personalization, but this post is looking at ranking factors for regular search results other than personalization, which, of course, also has a large impact.

Looking for ranking hacks?

OK, I'm going to give you one. Make your content, and the experience of consuming that content, unbelievably good. That's step one. Stick to your knitting, folks, and don't cop out on the effort to make your content stand out. You have no choice if you want to get sustainably positive results from SEO.

Don't forget the overall site and page usability, as that's a big part of what makes your content consumable. This is a critical part of making great content. So is measuring user engagement. This provides a critical feedback loop into what you're doing, and whether or not it's working for your target audience.

Then, and only then, your focus should turn to marketing that will help drive your reputation and visibility, and help attract links to your content. Here it is in a nutshell:

If your content isn't competitive in relevance and quality, links won't help. If it is, links will make the difference.

Your content has to be elite to have a chance to score highly on any given competitive search result. After that, your superior marketing efforts will help you climb to the top of the heap.

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 Two-Part SEO Ranking Model: Let's Make SEO Simple

Posted by EricEnge

There sure is a lot of interest in SEO ranking factors:

There have been major studies done on this, notably by both Moz and Searchmetrics. These are groundbreaking pieces of research, and if you're serious about SEO, you need to understand what these studies say.

That said, these are too complex for most organizations to deal with. They need a simpler way of looking at things. At Stone Temple Consulting (STC) we deal with many different types of organizations, including some of the world's largest companies, and some of the highest-traffic websites in the world. For most of these companies, understanding that there are 200+ ranking factors does more harm than good.

Why, you ask? So many people I talk to are looking for a silver bullet. They want to hear that they should only change their heading tags on the second Tuesday of every month, except during leap years, when they should do it on the first Tuesday, except in February when they should change it on the third Monday. These distractions end up taking away from the focus on the two things that matter most: building great content (and a great content experience) and promoting it well.

Today's post is going to lay out a basic approach that most companies can use to simplify their thinking about SEO, and keep their focus on the highest priorities.

What Google recently said

Here's what Google Dublin's Andrey Lippatsev said in a Hangout that I participated in on March 23, 2016. Also participating in the Hangout was Ammon Johns, who asked Andrey what the two most important ranking factors are:

Andrey Lippatsev: Yes. Absolutely. I can tell you what they are. It is content and links going into your site.

There we go, that's a start. According to Google, it's links and content that are the two biggest. Hopefully, the idea that content is a big factor is obvious, but below I'll break out more what great content really entails. In addition, you can see some backup for the power of links in the study I recently published on links as a ranking factor.

Should we think of the world as consisting only of these two factors? It's quite simplistic, and possibly too much so, but let's try to simplify this even more. How many organizations would dramatically improve their SEO if they focused on creating great content and promoting it effectively? I can tell you that from my experience these are two things that many organizations simply don't do.

Does that mean that we can take our two factors and put them into a (purely) hypothetical ranking score equation that looks like this?

I actually think that this equation is pretty effective, though it has some limitations and omissions that I'll describe in more detail below. You also need to think about the concept of "great content," that will get a high Content Score, in the correct manner.

What is "great content?"

If we step back and think about what makes up great content, it seems to me that there are three major components that matter:

1. Relevancy
2. Quality
3. The overall content experience

The first part of this is simple. If the content is not relevant to a query, it shouldn't rank for that query, ever. That makes sense, right?

The second part is also pretty simple, and that's the notion of quality. Does it provide information that people are looking for? Is that information relatively unique to your site? Clearly, it makes sense for the quality of the content to matter a lot.

We can combine the notions of quality and relative uniqueness into the notion of material differentiation. Rand covers this brilliantly in his Whiteboard Friday about creating 10X content.

Creating the 220,001st article on how to make French toast is just not going to cut it:

You need to create something new and compelling that also offers a lot of value. That may not be easy, but being the best at something never is.

If you're in a competitive market, it's reasonable to guess that your top competitors are making great, relevant content on topics that matter to their target audience. For the most important queries, it's probable that the top 5 (and maybe more) pieces of content in that space are really, really good (i.e. more comprehensive than other articles on the topic, or brings in new information that others don't have).

The third part encompasses many pieces.

• Is your content well-organized and easy to read?
• Does it effectively communicate its key points? How do people engage with it? If they land on a page on your site that has the answer to their question, can they quickly and easily find that information?

Once again, you'll find that the major competitors that rank in the top of the SERPs all handle this pretty well too.

Let's now take a look at what the role of the content score in ranking might look like:

Note that the Y-axis is "Chances of Ranking," as opposed to "Ranking." Nonetheless, this curve suggests that the Content Score is a big one, and that makes sense. Only the best of the best stuff should rank. It's simple.

Digging a bit deeper on what goes into content quality

But what about title tags? Heading tags, use of synonyms? Page layout and design? Stop and think about it for a moment. Aren't those all either part of creating higher-quality content, or making that content easier to consume?

You bet.

For example, imagine that I wrote this piece of content:

It could be the greatest information in the world, but it's going to be really hard for users to read, and it will probably have terrible user engagement signals. On the other hand, imagine that my content looks like this:

Would you say the quality of one of these pieces of content is higher? I would. The second one is much easier to read, and therefore will deliver more value to users. It will get better engagement, and yes, it will probably get linked to more often.

Why do links get separate treatment?

You could argue that links are just another measurement of content quality, and there is some truth to that, but we give them separate treatment in this discussion for two reasons:

1. They're still the best measurement of authority.

Yes, I know I'm ruffling some feathers now, but this is what my experience after more than 15 years in SEO (and seeing hundreds of SEO campaigns) has taught me. To get and sustain a link, someone has to have a website, has to be willing to modify that website, and they have to be willing to have their site's visitors click on the link to leave their site and go to yours.

That's a pretty material commitment on the linking site's part, and the only incentive they have to do that is if they believe that your content is of value to their site's visitors.

Why not social signals? While I've long argued that they have no impact except for aiding in content discovery, let's for sake of argument say that I'm wrong, and there is some impact here, and explain why social signals can never be a critical part of the Google algo. It's simple: social signals are under the control of third-party companies that can make them invisible to Google on a moment's notice (and remember that Google and Facebook are NOT friends). Imagine Google giving Facebook (or any other 3rd party) the power to break their algorithm whenever they want. Not happening!

2. The power of links should cause different actions on your part.

What is that action? It's called marketing, and within that discipline is the concept of content marketing. Done the right way, these are things you should do to raise the reputation and visibility of your brand.

In fact, this may consume a material amount of your entire company budget. With or without search engines in the world, you've always wanted to do two things:

(1) Make really good stuff, and

(2) market it effectively.

In 2016, and beyond, this will not change.

No doubt, part of attracting great links is to produce great content, but there are other overt actions involved to tell the world about that great content, such as active outreach programs.

Expanding on user engagement

Many have speculated that Google is using user engagement signals as a ranking factor, and that it will increase its investment in these areas over time. For example, what about click-through rate (CTR)? I discuss CTR as a ranking factor here, but to net it out simply, it's just too easy a signal to game, and Google tells us that it uses CTR measurements as a quality control check on other ranking signals, rather than as a direct signal.

You can doubt Google's statements about this, but if you own or publish a website, you probably get many emails a week offering to sell you links via one scheme or another. However, you never get emails offering you CTR ranking schemes. Why is that, you think? It's because even the scammers and spammers don't think it works.

Important note: Rand has done many live CTR tests and a number of these have shown some short-term rankings movement, so CTR could be used in some manner to discover hot trends/news, but still not be a core ranking factor.

What about other user engagement signals? I'd bet that Google is, in fact, doing some things with user engagement signals, though it's hard to be sure what they are. It's not likely to be as simple as bounce rate, or its cousin, pogosticking.

Pogosticking sure seems like a good signal until you realize there are many scenarios where they don't work at all. For example, when users are comparison shopping, they'll naturally hop from site to site.

Finding good user engagement factors that make for really reliable signals is quite hard. Many have speculated that artificial intelligence/machine learning will be used to derive these types of factors. Here are three pieces of content that cover that topic in some detail:

1. The Machine Learning Revolution: How it Works and its Impact on SEO, an article here on Moz by yours truly
2. SEO in a Two-Algorithm World, a Powerpoint by Rand Fishkin
3. The Past, Present, and Future of SEO, an article by Mike Grehan

Information architecture

Having a solid information architecture (IA) that Google can crawl and easily find your content is also a major requirement. In Andrey Lippatsev's response, he undoubtedly presumed that this was in good shape, but it would be wrong to leave this out of this discussion.

At Stone Temple Consulting, we've helped tons of sites improve their organic traffic simply by working on their IA, eliminating excessive page counts, improving their use of SEO tags like rel=canonical, and things of this nature. This is clearly a big factor as well. Usability also feeds into IA, because people need to be able to find what they're looking for on your site.

What I've left out with the two-factor model

First of all, there are other types of results, such as images, videos, and maps results, that are opportunities to get on the first page, but the above discussion is focused on how to rank in regular web search results.

To be fair, even in the regular web results, I've left some things out. Here are some examples of those:

1. Local links. I'm not referring to "local pack" listings here. If I search on "digital cameras" right now, in the regular web search results, I'll see some listings for stores near me. Clearly, proximity is a very large factor in ranking those pages.
2. Query deserves diversity. An example of this is the query "Jaguar." Chances are that my two-factor algorithm would rank only car sites in the top 10, but Google knows that many people that type that query want information on the animal. So even if the two-factor algo would slant things one way, you'll see some animal-related sites in the top 10.
3. In-depth articles. This is a feature that's hard to spot in the search results, but sometimes Google includes in the bottom of the top 10 results some pieces of content that are particularly comprehensive. These are for queries where Google recognizes there's a decent chance that the user is engaging in extensive research on a topic. Here's an example for the query "constitution":

We conducted a small sample review of 200 SERPs and found that about 6% of the results appeared to be from factors such as these. The two-factor model also doesn't account for personalization, but this post is looking at ranking factors for regular search results other than personalization, which, of course, also has a large impact.

Looking for ranking hacks?

OK, I'm going to give you one. Make your content, and the experience of consuming that content, unbelievably good. That's step one. Stick to your knitting, folks, and don't cop out on the effort to make your content stand out. You have no choice if you want to get sustainably positive results from SEO.

Don't forget the overall site and page usability, as that's a big part of what makes your content consumable. This is a critical part of making great content. So is measuring user engagement. This provides a critical feedback loop into what you're doing, and whether or not it's working for your target audience.

Then, and only then, your focus should turn to marketing that will help drive your reputation and visibility, and help attract links to your content. Here it is in a nutshell:

If your content isn't competitive in relevance and quality, links won't help. If it is, links will make the difference.

Your content has to be elite to have a chance to score highly on any given competitive search result. After that, your superior marketing efforts will help you climb to the top of the heap.

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!

Cass Sunstein Lets Carbon Tax Cat Out of the Bag

On August 8 the 7^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied petitions to review the Department of Energy’s final rules pertaining to energy efficiency standards in commercial refrigeration equipment. The petitioners (a small business and two trade associations) had levied objections against both the process and the outcome of DOE’s rulemaking. The court denied the petitions and ruled that DOE’s use of the “social cost of carbon” as a tool in federal cost/benefit analysis was neither “arbitrary nor capricious.”

Now we at IER have been writing for years about the dubious “social cost of carbon”; for example you can read our in-depth Comment submitted to the Office of Management and Budget. Over the next few weeks, we will have many things to say about the recent court ruling.

However, in the present article I want to keep things simple and focus on a Bloomberg reaction written by Cass Sunstein, who was overjoyed at the court ruling. I will demonstrate to any open-minded reader that the American public has indeed been grossly misled on the issue of a carbon tax…and I will use nothing but Sunstein’s own statements. If even a huge fan of the court ruling unwittingly shows just how outrageous it was, then that is a slam dunk in the case against the “social cost of carbon” as a guide to federal policy.

Sunstein’s Awkward Admission #1: The “Scientific” Estimate Is All Over the Map

We should first establish who Cass Sunstein is, and why his opinion is so instructive. Sunstein is a legal scholar currently at Harvard, who had also spent 27 years at Chicago. Indeed, in recent years Sunstein was the most frequently cited American legal scholar. Besides his academic work, Sunstein also held a powerful political post, serving President Obama as the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 – 2012. Finally, Sunstein is perhaps best known in policy wonk circles for his book Nudge, in which he and co-author Richard Thaler argue that “it’s time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better.”

Now that we have some background on Sunstein’s position in policy-making circles, let’s turn to his shocking (and unwitting) admissions on the climate change debate. First, Sunstein doesn’t pull punches when opening his column:

A federal court this week upheld the approach that the government uses to calculate the social cost of carbon when it issues regulations — and not just the cost imposed on Americans, but on people worldwide. It’s technical stuff, but also one of the most important climate change rulings ever. [Bold added.]

So there should be no doubt that Sunstein is a huge fan of the ruling. In that context, then, it’s odd that Sunstein soon follows up with the following discussion:

First established by the Barack Obama administration in 2010, the central value for the social cost of carbon, last updated in 2015, is now $36. That figure is set within a range from $11 to $105, meant to acknowledge scientific and economic uncertainty. (Disclosure: As administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I was involved in the process.) The $36 figure has international resonance; many nations are paying attention to it. It also plays a large role in discussions about the size of any possible carbon tax.

Although Sunstein doesn’t seem to realize it, the above statements contain a shocking admission. The “scientific and economic uncertainty” surrounding the concept mean that the Obama Administration was reporting a range for the “social cost of carbon” going from $11 to $105. When journalists or others cite the point estimate of $36, that is simply the “central value” in the broader range. As Sunstein himself admits later in his article: “Any particular number will of course be highly controversial.”

That range is enormous if the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) is going to be the foundation of the cost/benefit analyses of regulations involving greenhouse gas emissions. What would the world need to look like for Sunstein (or the circuit judges) to agree with the petitioners, that the SCC is an arbitrary concept?

Things that are actually settled science do not exhibit such controversy. For example, this NASA page reports that the (equatorial) radius of the moon is 1,738.1 kilometers. Now that’s just a rounded estimate, of course. If we polled various astronomers and physicists, they might disagree slightly on the best figure to report for “the radius of the moon.” However, no reputable scientists would say, “Any particular moon radius reported is controversial, but we are confident the range of the true figure is between 531 kilometers and 5,069 kilometers.” Would that make you confident that the scientists had a good idea of how big the moon was? Note that I used the same ratio of lower and upper bounds to the “central value” that Sunstein used for the social cost of carbon.

Or take human population. Nobody knows for certain how many people are on planet earth right now, but surely the proper experts have a pretty good idea. This website for example says the figure is some 7.4 billion people. To repeat, this is obviously just an estimate, and various scientists might disagree with each other and the best figure to report. But surely they wouldn’t say, “To account for the uncertainty in our analysis, we will report a range for the total global population between 2.3 billion and 21.6 billion. This is settled science—we are really confident the human population is somewhere in that range.”

If a government agency issued that kind of statement—saying the global population was somewhere between 2.3 billion and 21.6 billion—after studying the matter, and then issued regulations and taxes costing trillions of dollars on the basis of these calculations, would you feel good about the process?

Of course not. Such huge disparities in the bounds would indicate that scientists don’t really have a handle on these issues. And by the same token, when Cass Sunstein proudly tells us that the Obama Administration thinks the social cost of carbon is $36 per ton, but that it issued a range of $11 to $105 because of the “scientific and economic uncertainty” (his phrase, not mine), that should be Exhibit A in the petitioners’ case.

Sunstein’s Awkward Admission #2: Government’s Procedure Massively Overstates Benefits to Americans

Later in his piece, Sunstein drops another bombshell on readers who know how to interpret his unwitting admission:

In deciding on the social cost of carbon, the Department of Energy considered global damages, not damages limited to the U. S.. That means that if a power plant in New York emits carbon, the U.S. government will consider not merely costs to Americans, but also costs to people in Canada, China, Germany, Russia and anywhere else. Indeed, it will treat the latter costs as if they were every bit as important as the former.

This is an admittedly unusual step. In making regulatory choices, the federal government doesn’t ordinarily take account of global damages. A purely national social cost of carbon would be a lot lower than $36 — certainly less than $10, and possibly below $5. [Bold added.]

Now we who have been objecting to the use of the “social cost of carbon” have emphasized this point repeatedly, but it’s refreshing to see Sunstein admit it so candidly. Even if we put aside the “scientific and economic uncertainty” from the last section and accepted the $36 figure at face value, it is crucial to realize that this is a global figure. The alleged damage to Americans from the emission of another ton of CO₂ is “certainly less than $10, and possibly below $5.”

In other words, when using the Obama Administration’s official estimates for the social cost of carbon, rules that hurt the U.S. economy – and only the U.S. economy and citizens — are being credited with benefits (from mitigated climate change) where perhaps 90 percent of these alleged gains accrue to foreigners.

To be sure, those who favor aggressive government intervention to restrict greenhouse gas emissions have argued that if emissions hurt humanity, then cutting them is the right thing to do, costs to Americans be damned. But when the DOE reports that these particular energy conservation rules will cost $93.9 million to $165 million annually for manufacturers, while providing “total benefits in excess of $4 billion,” did Americans realize that the vast majority of the “climate benefits” would go to foreigners? Or did they actually think that the cost/benefit analysis of a policy imposed on Americans was quantified in terms of impacts on Americans? (After all, this is the guideline from OMB on how to do a cost/benefit analysis—you are supposed to report the domestic figures. This accords with common sense, because Americans would want to know how American policies affect Americans.)

If Americans want to use climate change policy as a form of international aid—where Americans make themselves poorer in order to make foreigners better off—that is certainly their prerogative. But nobody in the Obama Administration is making the case in this way. No, the public is being told that climate catastrophe is just around the corner unless we take immediate action, and they are told that this is a wonderful plan that will be good for the U.S. economy. The average American has no idea that the vast bulk—perhaps more than 90 percent—of the alleged climate benefits from reducing U.S. emissions accrue to foreigners, and that these benefits are included when the EPA or DOE reports on the “efficiency” of new interventions.[1] Indeed, it would be accurate to describe the analysis and policies as “un-American,” not as a pejorative slogan, but as a simple statement of fact.

Conclusion

The debate over climate change policy is a difficult and technical one. However, in this article I quoted from Cass Sunstein, who is a fan of the recent court ruling upholding the DOE’s use of the “social cost of carbon.” Sunstein’s own statements unwittingly reveal just how unsettled the science is, if we wish to use computer models to impose a carbon tax. Furthermore, he shows that if such a tax ever is levied, the alleged climate benefits will accrue largely to foreigners.

The American public has been sold a bogus narrative, in which the experts all agree on how bad the situation is, and how “commonsense” interventions will more than “pay for themselves” in benefits to Americans. As Cass Sunstein’s own article reveals, this is all nonsense. The official range for the social cost of carbon varies by almost a factor of ten, and even if we could agree on what the number was, it would still be the case that the vast majority of any climate “benefits” would not accrue to Americans. They would bear almost all of the economic cost of new climate regulations or carbon tax, while foreigners would reap the lion’s share of the alleged climate benefits.

---

[1] To avoid confusion: Recent analyses of federal policies that would restrict carbon dioxide emissions include other alleged benefits besides mitigated future climate change damages, and these alleged benefits (such as energy savings for consumers) accrue to Americans. However, it is very dubious to assume that American consumers are unable to take into account the advantages of energy efficiency when making product purchases, and so (allegedly) need federal regulators to “help” them by restriction their options.

The post Cass Sunstein Lets Carbon Tax Cat Out of the Bag appeared first on IER.

Should You Be Outsourcing SEO Training for Your Team?

Posted by rachelgooodmanmoore

When first looking to offer something new, most businesses fall in line with one of two schools of thought:

1. Build it internally
2. Purchase or outsource it

There are pros and cons to both sides of the coin.

Here’s an example: Say you’re looking to expand the selection of products your company sells. Building a new offering in-house would allow you complete control over the size and shape of the new product. The drawback? Building it yourself usually takes significant internal resources and time. If, instead, you chose to purchase a product from another organization (let’s call them Acme Corp) and whitelabel it — or maybe even purchase Acme Corp itself — you’ll be able to go to market sooner, but you’ll almost certainly have less control over the product you’re offering.

The idea of “build internally” or “purchase externally” doesn’t just apply to products — it also includes internal programs like market research, sales strategy development, and even professional training. In fact, it includes almost everything that makes up an organization, from its processes to its people.

Think back to the last product (internal or external) your company released. In which camp is your organization? Whether you go the outsourcing or building in-house route depends on your business and the situation at hand. There are arguments for the merits of both, and some organizations employ a mix of multiple strategies.

Let’s look at some of the considerations and use cases for why you may want to choose one over the other when it comes to training — in particular, SEO training.

Is SEO training unique?

It’s worth examining if (and how) SEO education differs from other flavors of professional training. While SEO training is a different beast than, say, learning to code or how to do business accounting, from my perspective as an online trainer, teaching SEO isn’t remarkably different than teaching any kind of digital marketing.

SEO training: a different type of beast.

At basic and intermediate levels, neither SEO nor digital marketing in general are extremely technical (compared to something like learning JavaScript, MySQL, or setting up a Salesforce CRM), nor do they require an MBA or PhD to master. Both are easier with a fundamental understanding of how websites and the Internet work, and both are at their best when backed by real data and at least a dash of creativity.

SEO versus digital marketing training

Do these two actually differ from each other at all? Search engine optimization is a subset of what digital marketing is all about, so they're related. But there are differences, nonetheless. Let’s take a closer look:

The training face-off

Digital Marketing Education	SEO Education
Focuses on all aspects of how to attract traffic, convert those visitors into leads, and help transform those leads into customers	Mainly focuses on how to best attract visitors
Covers ways to attract visitors from all sources	Deals almost exclusively with increasing or refining traffic from search engines
Deals with topics like email marketing, marketing automation, social media, content creation, and beyond	Hones in on topics like keyword research, site architecture, on- and off-page optimization, and analytics (though may also include topics like content creation as they pertain to generating search traffic)
Typically measures ROI in terms of marketing or sales-qualified leads generated	Most direct ROI numbers are around traffic generated by source (namely search engines or search-influenced sources)

The right column, for our purposes in this article, is how we’ll be defining "SEO training."

Now that we’re on the same page with what we mean when discussing SEO training, let’s dive into the ten-thousand-dollar question*: should you build and run this type of training in-house, or outsource it?

*Yes, some SEO training programs really do cost that much.

Outsourcing: the benefits

Let’s start our tour of outsourcing versus building training in-house by examining the pros of hiring an outside trainer or signing up for an SEO training course:

1. Outsourcing saves time.

Whether it’s hours devoted to developing an SEO curriculum, putting together lessons, actually teaching, or following up with trainees after your session, building and delivering from-scratch training can take an enormous amount of time and effort.

Outsourcing means you get hours in your day back, and because the training is built by professionals, the end product may be higher quality than something built internally.

2. Outsourcing can save you money.

Note "can" (and not "will") save you money. If you only need training one (or a few) time(s), or if you have a relatively small group of people enrolled, it can be significantly more cost-effective to outsource training.

On the other hand, if you have a large number of people to train or plan on offering a course on a regular basis (for example, as part of new hire onboarding), it may be worth the upfront cost to develop in-house training.

3. Outsourcing lets you put more budget towards day-to-day operations.

It may sound counterintuitive, but companies that “run lean” or dedicate the lion’s share of budget to day-to-day operations may not be able to sacrifice the man hours necessary to develop, deliver, and maintain a training program. Outsourcing one is often significantly less expensive for the scale these organizations need.

4. Don’t have an internal expert, but need new internal expertise? No problem.

If you're looking to strengthen existing SEO skills or build your company’s SEO expertise from the ground up, but aren’t ready to hire a search marketing manager just yet, finding a good SEO training course or bringing in an outside trainer can provide the skills you’re looking for.

It's also useful for agencies hoping to offer full SEO services or building an SEO pilot program. Bringing in outside help to train up a few team members on key skills means you don’t need to invest in a net new hire for a program with an uncertain future.

5. Outsourced training makes it easier to reach a remote or multi-lingual team.

It’s as common to hear about companies expanding to open their first satellite office in Beijing as it is to hear that office is in Boston. Thanks to the Internet, today’s world is smaller than ever.

If yours is one of the many companies with international workers or a largely remote workforce, it can be hard to deliver training that’s equally accessible and applicable to everyone. In situations like this — and especially if you have a multilingual workforce — outsourcing training that’s available in various languages can be a great option.

6. Outsourcing may give you access to accreditations or certifications.

Many online and in-person SEO training programs include some sort of certification of completion or proficiency. If that's a priority, you'll want to purchase an in-person or online program from an organization with industry name recognition that offers a certification.

7. Outsourcing gives you access to the best quality educators.

Whether you’re a full-fledged Google algorithm guru or just know your way around a site crawl, no one can argue that you’ve got some SEO chops. You already know the material, so it should be no trouble to whip up some training based on your expertise... right?

Maybe, but maybe not. “Doing” skills are different than teaching skills; being skilled at SEO doesn’t automatically correlate to being skilled at teaching SEO. And, perhaps more importantly, teaching doesn’t automatically lead to learning. Just because you have knowledge to share doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be as successful as possible when helping your colleagues actually learn.

One of the biggest benefits of outsourced training is that it gives you access to professional educators, not just folks with practical experience who educate in their free time.

Outsourcing: the drawbacks

Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits of outsourcing training, let’s give in-house training the same treatment. What are cons of relying on a 3rd-party provider for your SEO training needs?

1. Only relying on outsourced education doesn’t give you any equity.

No, I’m not talking about link equity. The equity I’m referring to here is, metaphorically, the same kind of equity you get from buying a house versus renting an apartment.

As a renter, you’re only paying for access to the property — not an actual stake in it. Buying, on the other hand, may take more effort and investment upfront, but it gives you control (and ownership!) over the actual property itself.

What does this metaphor have to do with in-house versus outsourced training? Only relying on outsourced efforts means you’re continually paying someone else for access to their educational property. If you have training needs that span over many employees or many years, this can get very expensive. In those cases, while it may initially be more costly to develop training in-house, it’s a better long-term investment because of the ‘equity’ it provides.

2. Outsourcing training doesn’t always scale with growing businesses.

Plan ahead for the long-term: If you're growing your organization and plan on having multiple people involved in creating optimized content for your website, it may be a better long-term investment to build in-house training that grows with your team.

3. Outsourced training generally focuses on best practices and one-size-fits-most processes.

Most training programs center on teaching “best practices” or general strategies. If you have a specific process or way of doing SEO, it may be difficult (if not impossible) for an outside trainer to communicate your optimization process — in your terms, using your tools — to your team. For some organizations, that alone may be enough to tilt the scales towards creating all training in-house.

4. Have specific content needs? Building your own curriculum may be your best bet.

Related to having unique processes, having specific content needs also may mean that outsourcing training isn’t the best bet for you. Only want to learn about optimizing content for mobile search engines and advanced link building strategies, but don’t want to have to pay for access to 30 other courses to get the two you do? While some training providers can build a fully custom program designed around exactly what you want to learn, many may come as standard “packages” with little flexibility around what you can learn as a whole or within each session.

5. Training for large teams often comes with a large price tag.

Almost any type of purchasable training program — be it pre-recorded videos, live sessions, in-person classroom experiences, or otherwise — are priced on a “per seat” basis. If your team either needs access to multiple sessions, you have many team members who’ll all need access to the same courses, or both, outsourced training can quickly get pricey.

6. Your access to training materials may be limited.

Some SEO training providers place legal restrictions on re-using the their training materials. This means you may not be able to record sessions, download slides, or distribute useful materials to your team. If sharing the educational love with your coworkers is a deal breaker for you, consider creating and running your SEO training in-house. If you’re still leaning towards using an outside provider, be sure to read their FAQs or legal materials before pulling the trigger.

Key questions to ask

While there are many benefits of outsourcing your SEO training needs, depending on your specific needs there may be an equal number of drawbacks. When considering the right training route for your team it’s worth taking the time to consider questions like:

• How many people need to take this training right now? And over the next one to two years?
• Do I have the internal expertise (or access to it) to create high quality training myself?
• Will it cost me more to build training than it’s currently worth?
• Will it take me longer to build training than value it will provide?
• When do I need my employees trained by? Do I have time to wait, or is there an immediate need?
• Do I need a general SEO training program, one that focuses on specific topics, or one that details my unique process?
• Are the outsourced training options available to me worth the price? What do they include?
• Is it important to get some sort of certification, badge, or other certificate of proficiency upon completion of the training?

The answers to these questions may not give you a black-and-white answer as to whether building training in-house or finding an outside provider is the best choice for you, but they can help make the decision a bit less murky.

Thinking of going the outsourced route for some (or all) of your team’s SEO training? Check out Moz Academy’s online workshops and custom training options.

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!