Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When is it smart to focus on viral-worthy content and clickbait? When is it not? To see fruitful returns from these kinds of efforts, they need to be done the right way and used in the right places. Rand discusses what kind of content investments make sense for this type of strategy and explains why it works in this week's Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about when and where you might use clickbait and linkbait and viral-focused content as compared to other types for your SEO-driven campaigns.

There's a lot of savvy sort of folks at the intersection of SEO and content marketing who are practicing things like this right now. We've actually spoken to a few agencies who are specifically focused on this, and they have really solid businesses because many brands understand that these types of investments can produce significant returns. But you have to apply them in the right scenarios and the right spaces. So let's walk through that.

Content investments

Let's say that you're a payroll software provider. Your goal is to increase traffic and conversions, and so you're considering what types of content investments you and your consultant or agency or in-house team might be making on the content front. That could be things like what we've got here:

A. Viral, news-worthy linkbait

I don't necessarily love the word "linkbait," but it still gets a lot of searches, so we're putting it in the title of the Whiteboard Friday because we practice what we preach here, baby.

So this might be something like "The Easiest and Hardest Places to Start a Company." Maybe it's countries, maybe it's states, regions, whatever it is. So here are the easy ones and the hard ones and the criteria, and you go out to a bunch of press and you say, "Hey, we produced this list. We think it's worth covering. Here's the criteria we used." You go out to a bunch of companies. You go out to a bunch of state governments. You go out to a bunch of folks who cover this type of space, and hopefully you can get some clickbait, some folks actually clicking, some folks linking.

It doesn't necessarily have the most search volume. Folks aren't necessarily interested in, "Oh, what are the hardest places to start a company? Or what are the hardest versus easiest places to start a company?" Maybe you get a few, but it's not necessarily going to drive direct types of traffic that this payroll software provider can convert into customers.

B. Searcher-focused solutions

But there are other options for that, like searcher-focused solutions. So they might say, "Hey, we want to build some content around how to set up payroll as an LLC. That gets a lot of searches. We serve LLCs with our payroll solution. Let's try and target those folks. So here's how to set up payrolls in LLCs in six easy steps. There are the six steps."

C. Competitor comparison content

They see that lots of people are looking for them versus other competitors. So they set up a page that's "QuickBooks versus Gusto versus Square: Which Software is Right for Your Business?" so that they can serve that searcher intent.

D. Conversion-funnel-serving content

So they see that, after searching for their brand name, people also search for, "Can I use this for owner employees, businesses that have owner employees only?" So no employees who are not owners. What's the payroll story with them? How do I get that sorted out? So you create content around this.

All of these are types of content that serve SEO, but this one, this viral-focused stuff is the most sort of non-direct. Many times, brands have a tough time getting their head around why they would invest in that. So do SEOs. So let's explain that.

If a website's domain authority, their sort of overall link equity at the domain level is already high, they've got lots and lots of links going to lots of places on the site and additional links that don't go to the conversion-focused pages that they're specifically trying to rank for, for focused keyword targets isn't really required, then really B, C, and D are where you should spend your time and energy. A is not a great investment. It's not solving the problem you want to solve.

If the campaign needs...

• More raw brand awareness - People knowing who the company is, they haven't heard of them before. You're trying to build that first touch or that second touch so that people in the space know who you are.
• Additional visitors for re-targeting - You're trying to get additional visitors who might fit into your target audience so that you can re-target and remarket to them, reach them again;
• You have a need for more overall links really to anywhere on the domain - Just to boost your authority, to boost your link equity so that you can rank for more stuff...

Then A, that viral-focused content makes a ton of sense, and it is a true SEO investment. Even though it doesn't necessarily map very well to conversions directly, it's an indirect path to great potential SEO success.

Why this works:

Why does this work? Why is it that if I create a piece of viral content on my site that earns a lot of links and attention and awareness, the other pieces of content on my site will suddenly have a better opportunity to rank? That's a function of how Google operates fundamentally, well, Google and people.

So, from Google's perspective, it works because in the case where Google sees DomainX.com, which has lots of pages earning many, many different links from all around the web, and DomainY.com, which may be equally relevant to the search query and maybe has just as good content but has few links pointing to it and those links, maybe the same number of links are pointing to the specific pages targeting a specific keyword, but overall across the domain, X is just much, much greater than Y. Google interprets that as more links spread across the content on X makes the search engine believe that X is more authoritative and potentially even more relevant than Y is. This content has been referenced more in more different ways from more places, therefore its relevance and authority are perceived as higher. If Y can go ahead and make a viral content investment that draws in lots and lots of new links, it can potentially compete much better against X.

This is true for people and human beings too. If you're getting lots and lots of visitors all over Domain X, but very few on Domain Y, even if they're going in relatively similar proportion to the product-focused pages, the fact that X is so much better known by such a broader audience means that conversions are likely to be better. People know them, they trust them, they've heard of them before, therefore, your conversion rate goes up and Domain X outperforms Domain Y. So for people and for search engines, this viral-focused content in the right scenario can be a wonderful investment and a wise one to make to serve your SEO strategy.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments below. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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April 01, 2018 at 12:14AM

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

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

Posted by efgreg

We all work hard building our businesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are online businesses actually valued?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to move the multiple needle in your favor

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

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

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

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

Average net profit

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

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

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

Add-backs

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

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

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

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

When not to cut expenses

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

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

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

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

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

Length of history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other factors that lead to a higher multiple

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

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

1. Minimize critical points of failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. High amounts of traffic

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

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

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

3. Email subscribers

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

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

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

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

4. Social media following

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

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

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

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

5. How many product offerings you have

Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.

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

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

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

6. Hours required

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Dig a deeper moat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That begs the question...

When should you sell?

Honestly, it depends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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April 01, 2018 at 12:14AM

Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday
Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When is it smart to focus on viral-worthy content and clickbait? When is it not? To see fruitful returns from these kinds of efforts, they need to be done the right way and used in the right places. Rand discusses what kind of content investments make sense for this type of strategy and explains why it works in this week's Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about when and where you might use clickbait and linkbait and viral-focused content as compared to other types for your SEO-driven campaigns.

There's a lot of savvy sort of folks at the intersection of SEO and content marketing who are practicing things like this right now. We've actually spoken to a few agencies who are specifically focused on this, and they have really solid businesses because many brands understand that these types of investments can produce significant returns. But you have to apply them in the right scenarios and the right spaces. So let's walk through that.

Content investments

Let's say that you're a payroll software provider. Your goal is to increase traffic and conversions, and so you're considering what types of content investments you and your consultant or agency or in-house team might be making on the content front. That could be things like what we've got here:

A. Viral, news-worthy linkbait

I don't necessarily love the word "linkbait," but it still gets a lot of searches, so we're putting it in the title of the Whiteboard Friday because we practice what we preach here, baby.

So this might be something like "The Easiest and Hardest Places to Start a Company." Maybe it's countries, maybe it's states, regions, whatever it is. So here are the easy ones and the hard ones and the criteria, and you go out to a bunch of press and you say, "Hey, we produced this list. We think it's worth covering. Here's the criteria we used." You go out to a bunch of companies. You go out to a bunch of state governments. You go out to a bunch of folks who cover this type of space, and hopefully you can get some clickbait, some folks actually clicking, some folks linking.

It doesn't necessarily have the most search volume. Folks aren't necessarily interested in, "Oh, what are the hardest places to start a company? Or what are the hardest versus easiest places to start a company?" Maybe you get a few, but it's not necessarily going to drive direct types of traffic that this payroll software provider can convert into customers.

B. Searcher-focused solutions

But there are other options for that, like searcher-focused solutions. So they might say, "Hey, we want to build some content around how to set up payroll as an LLC. That gets a lot of searches. We serve LLCs with our payroll solution. Let's try and target those folks. So here's how to set up payrolls in LLCs in six easy steps. There are the six steps."

C. Competitor comparison content

They see that lots of people are looking for them versus other competitors. So they set up a page that's "QuickBooks versus Gusto versus Square: Which Software is Right for Your Business?" so that they can serve that searcher intent.

D. Conversion-funnel-serving content

So they see that, after searching for their brand name, people also search for, "Can I use this for owner employees, businesses that have owner employees only?" So no employees who are not owners. What's the payroll story with them? How do I get that sorted out? So you create content around this.

All of these are types of content that serve SEO, but this one, this viral-focused stuff is the most sort of non-direct. Many times, brands have a tough time getting their head around why they would invest in that. So do SEOs. So let's explain that.

If a website's domain authority, their sort of overall link equity at the domain level is already high, they've got lots and lots of links going to lots of places on the site and additional links that don't go to the conversion-focused pages that they're specifically trying to rank for, for focused keyword targets isn't really required, then really B, C, and D are where you should spend your time and energy. A is not a great investment. It's not solving the problem you want to solve.

If the campaign needs...

• More raw brand awareness - People knowing who the company is, they haven't heard of them before. You're trying to build that first touch or that second touch so that people in the space know who you are.
• Additional visitors for re-targeting - You're trying to get additional visitors who might fit into your target audience so that you can re-target and remarket to them, reach them again;
• You have a need for more overall links really to anywhere on the domain - Just to boost your authority, to boost your link equity so that you can rank for more stuff...

Then A, that viral-focused content makes a ton of sense, and it is a true SEO investment. Even though it doesn't necessarily map very well to conversions directly, it's an indirect path to great potential SEO success.

Why this works:

Why does this work? Why is it that if I create a piece of viral content on my site that earns a lot of links and attention and awareness, the other pieces of content on my site will suddenly have a better opportunity to rank? That's a function of how Google operates fundamentally, well, Google and people.

So, from Google's perspective, it works because in the case where Google sees DomainX.com, which has lots of pages earning many, many different links from all around the web, and DomainY.com, which may be equally relevant to the search query and maybe has just as good content but has few links pointing to it and those links, maybe the same number of links are pointing to the specific pages targeting a specific keyword, but overall across the domain, X is just much, much greater than Y. Google interprets that as more links spread across the content on X makes the search engine believe that X is more authoritative and potentially even more relevant than Y is. This content has been referenced more in more different ways from more places, therefore its relevance and authority are perceived as higher. If Y can go ahead and make a viral content investment that draws in lots and lots of new links, it can potentially compete much better against X.

This is true for people and human beings too. If you're getting lots and lots of visitors all over Domain X, but very few on Domain Y, even if they're going in relatively similar proportion to the product-focused pages, the fact that X is so much better known by such a broader audience means that conversions are likely to be better. People know them, they trust them, they've heard of them before, therefore, your conversion rate goes up and Domain X outperforms Domain Y. So for people and for search engines, this viral-focused content in the right scenario can be a wonderful investment and a wise one to make to serve your SEO strategy.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments below. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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April 01, 2018 at 12:14AM

The Moz Year in Review 2017

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Posted by SarahBird

Yay! We’ve traversed another year around the sun. And I’m back with another Moz year-in-review post that promises to be as boring as its predecessors. Reading it feels like being locked in your tin can space capsule through lightyears of empty space. If you’re a little odd and like this kind of thing, do please continue.

Before we begin our odyssey, I invite you to check out previous reports: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. Transparency is a Moz core value. Putting detailed financial and customer data on the blog is one of the ways we live our values. We’re a little weird like that.

Okay spacepeople: take your protein pills and put your helmets on.

Launch to your favorite parts:

Part 1: TL;DR
Commencing countdown, engines on

Part 2: SO MANY wins
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

Part 3: Customer metrics
You've really made the grade

Part 4: Financial performance
And the stars look very different today

Part 5: Inside Moz HQ
The papers want to know whose shirts you wear

Part 6: Into the future
I think my spaceship knows which way to go

---

Part 1: TL;DR

Commencing countdown, engines on

What a year! 2017 was a time of doing new things differently — new teams, new goals, and new ways of operating. I’m so proud of Mozzers; they can do anything. If I’m sent to a far-off space colony, I want them with me.

In spite of (and because of!) all this change, we grew revenue and became significantly EBITDA and cash flow positive. Nice! We have a nice economic engine primed and ready to make some more big investments in 2018. Stay tuned.

These positive results were not from one single thing. Rather, iterative product and operations improvements helped improve both our top and bottom line. Plus, we made a bunch of longer-term investments that don’t show up yet in the 2017 report but will bear fruit in 2018 and beyond.

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Part 2: Ch-ch-ch... Changes!

Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

Here’s a little more detail on some of the changes I talked about.

We launched Keywords By Site, relaunched our crawler (a major technical undertaking), sunsetted two products (content and Followerwonk), built a bunch of new developer tools and standardized on some dev frameworks, and improved our local data distribution network. Check out Adam Feldstein’s post for a lot more detail on our 2017 major product accomplishments!

We’ve got another exciting launch on the way, too. We’ve invested a ton of blood, sweat, and tears into it during 2017 and can’t wait to share it with everyone.

All of these changes support our 2016 strategy of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” We choose to focus our energy on being the best place to learn and do SEO. Our mission is to simplify SEO for everyone through software, education, and community.

For those of you worried about Followerwonk, it’s going to okay. Better than okay. Our beloved “Work Dad” Marc Mims is now the proud father of Followerwonk! Marc’s dedication to the success of Followerwonk has never wavered over the many, many years he’s been building and maintaining it. We already miss his compassion, humor, and bike stories around the Mozplex. We wish him and Followerwonk the best! We bought that product because we loved it then; we love it even now. Sadly, though, it never quite fit with our mission as well as we'd hoped.

We created new programs to help people get the SEO help that’s right for them. We completely rebuilt our SEO Learning Center with fresh educational content. There’s a brand-new SEO podcast, MozPod, for you to check out.

We also began experimenting with and are now expanding SEO training workshops delivered by experts we trust and admire. I’m so excited about this because it’s a new way for Moz to have impact; it’s personal, live, interactive, and immediate in a way that most of our SEO education work can’t be. We won’t stop doing free, scalable education. It’s core to our beliefs. But it is fun to deliver custom, live training sessions in the mix too.

Many of our accomplishments are behind the scenes, and will deliver long-term positive impact.

Our investments in retiring tech debt, improving monitoring, investing in our development platforms, and nurturing our engineering culture have resulted in the most stable and performant software in Moz history. Our hard work and ingenuity is paying off in resilient and performant software.

We’ve also rebuilt most of our customer stack: new Salesforce implementation, HubSpot launch, new internal data warehouse, new CMS (Craft), Segment.io, and more! Phew! That’s a lot! In Q1 2018, we started with Terminus for Account-Based Marketing, and partnered with third-party data vendors, like Full Contact, to supplement our data warehouse. These big changes are going to set us up really well for the years ahead. And we’ve got more internal tools launching soon!

We are on a roll with internal improvements and momentum.

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Part 3: Customer metrics

You've really made the grade

We could ship and launch until our circuits go dead, but at the end of the day all our work is in service of meeting your needs.

We know you can hear us! You’re following us now more than ever before.

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Part 4: Financial performance

And the stars look very different today

Check out the infographic view of our data barf.

I’m proud of what we accomplished in 2017, especially considering the incredible amount of change in strategy and team structure. More revenue while spending less = magic! Also, the economic strength we’ve built will allow us to place some nice-sized bets this year. Boom!

We made $47.4 million in GAAP revenue in 2017, an increase of 11% from 2016.

We brought our over all expenses way down in 2017. Cost of Revenue increased slightly to $11.8 million. We reduced operating expenses aggressively. Curious on what we spend on, and trends? Check out this breakdown of our major expenses (OpEx and Cost of Revenue) as a percentage of annual revenue:

We generated cash, positive EBITDA, and for the first time in recent Moz history, we were positive net income.

That’s quite a turnaround from 2016, in which we closed the year negative EBITDA of $5.7 million! We flipped EBITDA! We have adopted a cash-flow-neutral-to-positive operating philosophy right now to be ready for some future investments. We may decide to go cash flow negative again to fund further growth.

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Part 5: Inside Moz HQ

The papers want to know whose shirts you wear

So, who is behind the wheel here?

We ended 2017 with roughly the same number of Mozzers as we began. It was a conscious choice to remain approximately headcount neutral in 2017; we only opened up new positions after ensuring rigorous conversations took place around the business need for the role. This discipline is hard to live under, but we like the results. We’re working smarter, and getting more rigorous in our decision-making.

Let me be clear: WE ARE HIRING! These are just 5 of our currently open positions:

• DevOps Engineer
• Sr. Platform Software Engineer
• Backend Engineer - C++
• Fullstack Engineer - JavaScript/Node
• Chief Marketing Officer

See more at our Careers page!

Here’s where we need YOU: Moz is committed to bringing more women into tech. There is a dire lack of diversity in the technology industry. This past year we added 6% more women to the company overall and 9% to engineering specifically. We must and will do better. We need more women in engineering and leadership roles here. Check out those jobs above and join the team!

Moz partners with some fantastic organizations focused on getting more women into the tech pipeline. Ada Academy, Year Up, Ignite Worldwide, and Techbridge all encourage women and girls to pursue STEM careers early in their lives. Our newest partner, Unloop, enables people who have been in prison to develop skills and succeed in careers in tech. It is our responsibility to ensure that all people have opportunity and access to participate in STEM fields.

Generosity comes in many forms. One way in which we support the generosity of Mozzers is to match charitable donations to 501c3 organizations by 150%.

We also donated our space 35 times to various organizations in the community requesting to use the Mozplex as a venue for their meetups. Check our our event brochure and take a 360 tour of the Mozplex!

Mozzers also donate a ton of time to causes they are passionate about. We also offer a very discounted price for nonprofits that we’re happy many folks take advantage of. We’re passionate about communities and helping folks.

Moz partnered with Halo Partners to provide professional coaching to all employees. 54 Mozzers received coaching. 27 Mozzers used this benefit for the first time! I’m a huge believer in coaching and training. Beginner’s mind is how we grow and become the best versions of ourselves.

Through it all, we made sure to have some fun. Moz offers a Paid Paid Vacation benefit, reimbursing employees $3k per year in vacation costs. Yes, that’s right. You get your regular pay, plus another $3k a year to spend on your trip! It’s bonkers!

Mozzers visited 6 of the 7 continents last year!

We also had 7 Mozling babies last year. Luv those babies.

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Part 6: Into the future

I think my spaceship knows which way to go

2017 was a strengthening year for Moz. We went through a lot of change and made some important investments. Mozzers are dynamic, helpful, smart, and hardworking. They have a service orientation and build for the long term. The investments we made in 2017 will bear fruit in the years ahead. And we’re poised to make some ambitious moves in the coming months.

While I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, I believe we have higher mountains still to climb. We have had triumphs and tribulations, heartbreaks and happy dances. These many years later, the SEO industry is healthy, growing, and dynamic. Many organizations are still struggling with basic web presence, let alone thoughtful SEO strategy. Moz is still teensy-tiny compared to the opportunity. I believe the opportunity for SEO expertise is vast.

I want to close on a note of gratitude.

First, a bunch of folks helped pull together the metrics for our 2017 report, and I am deeply grateful for their help. This post is kind of a bear! Thank you Jess, Felicia, Christian, Kevin, Susan, Michael, Jeremy, and anyone else who pulled data and helped get this post off the ground!

Second, thank you to this community. It’s because of you that we are here. This community would be nothing if it wasn’t for your care, attention, and feedback. We will continue to work hard to make your work lives more enjoyable and successful. We want to be your favorite resource for doing great SEO. If we’re not there yet, trust that we will keep working to be. Thank you for the opportunity to serve.

Gratitude also to David Bowie for inspiring this post and so much more. We miss you. <3

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!

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