A lot of people switch to solar energy in an attempt to help their wallet and while it is a cost effective transition to make, it also has a noticeably positive impact on the environment and the owner’s carbon footprint. A properly set up solar panel grid can eliminate over three tonnes of greenhouse emissions every single year per household. Since solar panels are durable enough to last multiple decades, an investment in green electricity isn’t only beneficial to your wallet but also to the environment. For people considering making the change to solar power system as their primary electrical source it is important to ensure that their system is properly set up to get the maximum efficiency out of them.
Most power grids rely on inefficient fossil fuels in order to provide power are responsible for a majority of the current emissions crisis, solar power avoid harming the environment by harvesting all of their electricity from abundant rays of photons from the sun. Since the sun is producing energy regardless if it is being used as an electrical source, this means there is very little pollution being produced in the process.
Smaller startup solar panels still require assistance from the power company’s grid in order to ensure a constant supply of power but larger panels are able to be completely self-sufficient by storing excess electricity in batteries. In fact larger solar panels that produce more electricity than can be stored in reserve are able to sell back the electricity to the power company which means that less of their energy comes from harmful sources helping their pollution output as well.
A common concern with the environmental impact of solar power is that they are produced in a way that negates any potential ecological benefits. Luckily solar panels are made of silicon, which is one of the most abundant resources on the planet and require very few harmful chemicals in order to be processed. While the manufacturing of solar panels does produce a small amount of emissions, these are very insignificant when compared against the alternative of using fossils fuels as a primary energy source. Also most companies who specialize in solar power system have environmental impact in mind, and do their best to produce them in the cleanest way possible. Since a good system will last for a couple of decades, any negative effects of their creation gets negated by the abundant clean electricity they provide for the coming years.
While other forms of green energy are obtainable at an industrial level, for residential and small business use, solar power is the only viable option. For environmentally conscious consumers looking to reduce their carbon footprint, making the switch to solar power system is the best way to do your part in preserving our planet for future generations.
Posted by randfish
From search ads and SEO to display ads, content, and your social efforts, there's a lot to consider when creating the correct marketing concoction. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over advice on how and why you should be auditing your funnel to ensure you have a balanced, effective marketing mix.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to balance your marketing mix. Specifically, I want to talk a little bit more about search ads and SEO versus kind of content and social, those traffic channels that you invest in, either paid or organic, that can drive traffic kind of more at the top of the funnel or more in the conversion process.
But this is actually a complex equation, and the marketing mix overall is something that a lot of folks struggle with and that I find a ton of misplaced energy and misplaced dollars happening. So the way to solve for this, in my opinion, is we can start with a pretty simple auditing process. We can ask ourselves kind of strategically, "Where are we facing funnel challenges?"
I see lots of businesses — from tiny, small startups and small businesses on the web to giant companies — having this issue where they say, "We have a problem with the consideration and comparison phase. We feel really good that people are aware of our brand, and they come for that first visit. They come back for the return visit. But then they get to the consideration phase and we feel like we're losing out against our competitors right there before conversion happens."
Well, guess what? If you're spending all your marketing dollars on display or on offline forms of display marketing, which go to awareness, and very little in the consideration and comparison set, where things like search can be great, especially your brand versus competitors, or your competitor versus your own brand, or features, or what to buy, or recommendations, or reviews, all those kinds of things, ranking for that stuff, buying those key terms, having content that serves them and maybe doing some display advertising to people who've already been to your website through a retargeting that's trying to convince them, well, all of those forms of marketing can reach that set. But the problem is you're spending all your time and energy, and people, and dollars up in awareness.
I see this across the board. I've seen people spend a ton on first visit and return visit, and nothing on recidivism and retention. I've seen them spend a ton at the point of conversion, but nothing up here to drive awareness. So they have a great-looking funnel for a very small number of people.
If you know where you have this problem, if you can identify where your issues lie, then you can invest in the right channels. You can change up your marketing mix and your people, your time, and your dollars accordingly.
Also, don't be too narrow. My view here is a little bit narrow. But you should consider whether channels like community building, email marketing, offline advertising, or in-product, in-app marketing can actually be part of this mix and how they should be part of this mix. I don't want you to limit it just to search, social, content, display. There's a lot of opportunity there.
You can invest a lot of time and energy, and dollars, and people into one of these channels to try and move the needle on something, and get what look like good results in the channel itself. Like, "Oh, search is driving lots of traffic." Or, "We have high rankings." Or, "We are spending a lot on this display channel, and we're seeing lots of people visit."
But then, when you actually dig in, you see that you're not moving the needle on what you need to. You're not improving the problem that you have in your funnel.
So you might ask: "I've got a retargeting ad or a whole set of retargeting ads. Are we effectively improving conversion rate, or are we just bringing people back to the site? Which was our goal? Were we doing retargeting to earn return visits? Or are we doing retargeting so that we can increase conversion or so we can improve consideration and comparison against the competition?"
"Is this piece of content, or our content strategy overall, or the tactic of producing a daily blog post or a monthly report, or a white paper every quarter, is that reaching a broad enough audience? Is it targeting enough of our visitors and their influencers? Is it driving return visits? Is it driving conversion? Is it getting us a lead that we can then follow up with? What's happening there?"
You can ask that question in SEO and in PPC as well. Does ranking for this keyword bring in the right qualified potential traffic? Does it bring us enough?
Are we ranking for a keyword where, you know what, it sounds like a great keyword and it would convert great. But we're not getting enough people because Google has a knowledge graph and an instant answer up top. So the keyword opportunity score is way down low in the toilet, and it's just not going to drive any traffic. So maybe we need to expand that keyword set. Maybe we're doing great with SEO, but we need to do more of it for different keywords.
If you are doing this auditing process and you identify whether the tactics are actually moving the needle in the places you think they are, you can now move on to, "We know our funnel problems, where they exist, where they don't. We know which tactics work and don't."
Now we can say, "You know what? Let me look at my marketing mix.
Let me look at my resource allocation and say, 'Oh, maybe I'm putting 20% of my budget to display and 18% to paid search. Maybe I'm putting 15% to offline, and I'm putting 12% to social and 8% to content." Whatever the numbers may be, "Is that the right mix? Does that effectively sound like it's doing the right things over here, or should I be changing this up?"
Should I say, "Huh. You know what? We saw that we have a bunch of opportunity in SEO, or we have a bunch of opportunity in content. We have a lot of time and energy and people being spent in display. Could we put that on autopilot for a little bit? Let our display run for a quarter. Maybe do a weekly or monthly check-in from one person. But ask those people to go concentrate on content, and then have our SEOs help them become sophisticated and savvy with how to promote that content."
Maybe. Maybe you can. The questions I like to ask in the resource allocation phase are: Are any of these already purely on autopilot? Are they just sort of running and they haven't been audited? Because that can speak to why the tactic isn't working, or why it's not targeting the right phase of the funnel.
How many people and hours, not just dollars are going to each? Because a lot of folks, when they look at their marketing budget from a CFO level or a chief marketing officer, they'll look purely at the numbers, not at the people. That can be very dangerous too, because if you say, "Hey, we've got a bunch of our budget is allocated to display. We have almost no budget to allocate it to SEO. But that's intentional because SEO is a free channel." Ahh. Pull out your hair. That's crazy.
Or the only dollars that we have assigned to it are our SEO consultants, rather than people and hours, and time, and energy, which is what you need to be successful with an inbound marketing flywheel, like the content, search, social, email, community system.
Are any of these maxing out? If you're seeing that you're putting more dollars, more time against them, but you're getting lower and lower ROI over time, that could be a sign that you're sort of maxed out in that channel, and you either need to get more creative on how you're reaching more people, or you might think about switching some of that expenditure of time and people and dollars.
Then, finally, do any of these have tracking or data issues? I find that in a huge number of organizations the reason they're not solving the funnel challenges that they want to, and pursuing poor tactics and not investing in channels like search and social and content, is because they have no good way to measure it. So the first step might be admitting, "You know what? We're bad at measuring the ROI of content. So that's the first thing we have to do."
We have to be able to say, "Did someone come to visit us for the first time from a piece of content? What happened in the 90-day window, or 120-day window, whatever the cookie lasts, however long we can make the cookie last? Did we see that person come back again and go to consideration and comparison phase, or go to conversion, or become more of a recidivist for our products or a highly-retentive customer who's subscribing to us?"
If the answer to those things is yes, then you know what? Data is the place to invest. When you do that, then you're able to effectively allocate your marketing channels.
So hopefully, this will kick off an exercise in audit for many of you. I'd love to hear from you in the comments with your shares about places you have reallocated dollars, places you've seen present lots of opportunity or present poor opportunity. Then, I'd love to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted by ajfried
We all judge people on first impressions. When we see someone for the first time, we're quick to decide what type of person they are — based on the clothes they wear, how they style their hair, and anything else we notice that immediately puts them in a group.
It’s certainly not fair, but it’s human nature. And I'd like to keep my faith in humanity and argue that lots of us try NOT to prejudge others.
Believe it or not, Google is the same. It judges, too. Some might disagree with this theory, but our internal research supports it, as you'll see in the data below. Google pre-classifies every single search term into a group for later recall.
Is that fair?
Is Google fair about how it does this?
Imagine, for a moment, that you're about to walk onto the stage of MozCon. You've spent months preparing and you have new and thought-provoking research to share. You are legend and you're about to blow everyone’s mind. And as you make your way up... SPLAT! You fall right on your face. I mean, really wipe out.
You'll probably recover, because you're dynamic and you'll still nail your presentation. However, you'll also be forever stamped as the one that fell on your face during the conference.
Is it fair that people treat us this way? Or how about Google? Is it fair that Google judges us like this, that we're classified into select groups, or that Google may show years-old negative content about us or our clients?
I think most people would agree: it’s not. Something that's truly not relevant to an individual's or brand’s storyline shouldn't be appearing prominently in a query for their name. An event that's nothing more than a blip on the radar shouldn't become the most important thing you see about them.
Yet, often it is. More often than you think. Some of the biggest brands in the world are dealing with this problem — having unfavorable content appearing for their name — and desperately try to get rid of it.
On Google’s About page, Larry Page describes a perfect search engine as something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."
As an example, it states: "This means making search smarter and faster, so it can understand that when you type in [jaguar] you’re looking for the car, not photos of the animal."
Well, first of all, they might want to find a different example, because queries without context can't hint at intent, as you'll see below.
It’s a basic issue of not knowing what the context is for the query. And, arguably, some of the most important searches don’t have context. A brand? An individual? There's nothing necessarily unique about these searches to give them context. For example, if I search for "Applebee's" from my phone, there's context behind it. I'm on my phone, I'm in the vicinity of a restaurant, I'm probably hungry. But a query for, say, a gentleman named "James Young" is useless, as it gives Google no context or basis for figuring out which results might be most relevant. Do I want to know where he lives? When he was born? What kind of work he's in?
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Arguably, these queries without context are the most important queries, and they're where audiences form opinions about brands. [Tweet this] |
Sometimes, it can seem like it is when your search results don’t reflect who you are or the content you're putting out into the world. Truth is, though, Google's probably not out to get you — in reality, it's an emotionless machine.
As I've mentioned previously, I don't believe it's evil. I think it's a machine controlled by an algorithm, with imperfections and flaws. Choices must be made based on the information available. Sometimes there isn’t enough to work with, or the right information that it'd like to show is missing, so it makes the wrong choices.
So... How do we change what Google wants to show?
Google’s job is to show you what you're looking for. This can only be done by finding patterns and trends. Behind all the search results are templates that every query needs to fit in to.
When you perform a search in Google, you're effectively seeing whatever information it wants to show you on that day. It's a ton of information — but it’s not data. If you're able to collect all that information and trend it, an unbelievable amount can be learned.
For example, among the top 100 hedge funds:
Having this data, you start to uncover a deeper meaning behind the search results. You expose the template Google has created for this "type" of query. It should come as no surprise that these templates will change from industry to industry.
The graph below gives a breakdown of what shows up in search results for these industries. (Note: the percentages are the percentage of Google page 1 results.)
Some notable observations:
Armed with this information, you can now identify what kind of content Google wants to show for you or your brand.
While we've all heard a million times that "content is king" and we should create more content, the reality is that only the RIGHT content is what’s going to make the difference. Content is not churning out post after post after post of products and other junk. Rather, content is about creating an impression that enhances the brand in the viewer's mind.
Practically, this idea of templates becomes extremely important in planning the right content for your brand. If you can use these templates to identify certain trends appearing for brands similar to your own, you can create the content Google wants to show.
To help articulate this point, I want to share a few case studies.
Take, for example, a client we had in the not-for-profit industry. He was the president of an organization and notable enough to have a Wikipedia profile, as did all of his competitors. His corporate site and social profiles were ranking relatively consistently with everyone else, and he authored content regularly. However, he had a disproportionate amount of media coverage about him compared to his competitors, causing negative content to rank prominently.
What became clear was that all the authored content was on his corporate sites, as opposed to a leading industry publication. Content creation was happening, but it was being put in the wrong place. According to the data, someone like this individual should be generating content on reputable industry publications.
Result: We worked to migrate some of his content to relevant publications. With a few relevant links, it began ranking within a few weeks.
Another example was the CEO of an asset management company who had a disproportionate amount of news content appearing about them, some of which was negative. This caused frequent changes to the search results for the individual's name and a lack of branding around their name.
When you examine the results closer, you notice that on average, the CEO of a company like this would have two non-owned, executive-style profiles on sites like Forbes, Bloomberg, or Fortune.
Result: This individual was missing from notable lists, specifically the Forbes billionaire list. Working with the communications team, he was included in the list, displacing some of the negative content.
The final example I'll offer was of a client who had been trying to brand themselves through the use of content, blogging, press releases, and other similar information.
The biggest problem they had? They already had a nice amount of “ownership” within their search results. That means they had full and total control over half of the results appearing. Based on the peer analysis, it was going to be highly unlikely that they'd get more than that.
However, when we ran a frequency analysis, we noticed that every single one of their competitors has a GuideStar profile appearing.
The only differentiator between our client and their competitors was the level of their profile, which is earned by completing it. They were at silver, while everyone else had gold status (Note: there's some speculation about the level of status).
Once we helped them build up their profile to gold, we added a few easily-attainable and relevant links pointing to the profile. Easy ones, like from their corporate website. It doesn’t get more legit than that.
Result: Within a matter of weeks, we saw the profile ranking at the bottom of page 1, displacing negative content about the brand.
At the end of the day, Google is nothing more than an organized system. We sometimes give it too much credit because it happens to be REALLY good at understanding what we want and mean. But this is based on an organized understanding of how we (all humans that use Google) use the search engine.
Not all content can rank for all types of queries. Just because a certain result appears for one query doesn’t mean that another will; randomly creating a bunch of profiles is not going the solution. For example, if you happen to be one of the 200 richest Americans in the world, Pinterest is not likely to rank for you. (It appears for 3 of them on page 2: Randa Williams, Milane Frantz, and H. Ross Perot Sr).
Using historical and competitor analysis, understanding what type of content is frequently appearing will give you tremendous insight into the kind of content you should be building to fit into the template Google has built for your brand.
The only loose end in this process is the thought that you're now "stuck" in a template. Once Google perceives you a certain way, is that it? Are you stuck? Can the CEO who loves arts and crafts convince Google that Pinterest should rank prominently for queries with their name?
There is some subjectivity to this, to be sure, but the entire process above is by far the path of least resistance. This is the content Google wants to show for queries about you or your brand, based on trends of others in your industry.
If you create an experience on that network that's highly popular, engaging, and something in which you invest a lot of time and effort, I think it's fair to say that it could change how search engines classify you. But convincing someone to blog or use social media when it’s not something they'll do aggressively or passionately usually doesn’t end well. Most people have these profiles, but that doesn’t mean they actively use them.
These templates exist because of the type of information that typically shows for these queries. It’s low-hanging fruit. If you have info that doesn’t make sense for who you are, it likely won’t appear right away without really hard work.
Work with the algorithm and make sense of which content it's clear that the search engine wants to show. If you create that content, it will rank.
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