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inevitably-johnlocked · 4 years

Note

hello friend! this is very specific but do you by any chance have any fics where sherlock likes it when someone plays with his hair or that kind of thing? jdjsjjs sorry its such a weird request

Hey Nonny!

AHHHHH okay oddly enough I never anticipated this being something people would want up until recently when I myself wanted more fics, so I don’t have a lot of fics labelled properly for it D: Here’s the best I got for you, so please forgive me; the list will grow as I re-read fics and re-tag them LOL.

I’m also adding fics I’ve tagged on my MFL list too <3

As always, lovelies, add your fics if if has any of the requested stuff, please add it below!!

HAIR PETTING / PLAYING / PULLING

See also:

Hair and Beards

John Has a Beard

Shaving

Tangential by Bitenomnom (NR, 2,047 w., 1 Ch. || Ace Sherlock, Fluff and Love, Cuddles, Friendship, Sherlock is a Kept Man, Sherlock Divorces his Work, Nightmares) – In which John stitches up Sherlock's head (but not really), Sherlock comes into John's room at night to take his laptop (but not really), Sherlock is married to his Work (but not really), and John is more than proficient at keeping Sherlock (really, definitely). Part 48 of Mathematical Proof

Untouched by KittieHill (E, 3,239 w., 1 Ch. || Kissing, Frottage, Virgin Sherlock, Body Worship, Sherlock’s Scars Mentioned, Masturbation, PWP, Rimming, Multiple Orgasms) – Sherlock leaked a lot. John had never needed lubricant. John loved watching it, had once spent an entire afternoon edging Sherlock so he could watch as the thick precome drip, drip, dripped onto Sherlock's belly.

Love and Hair Dye by WhimsicalEthnographies (E, 3,920 w., 1 Ch. || Est. Rel., Body Worship, Self Conscious John, Voyeurism, Idiots in Love, Smutty Smut) – Self conscious John decides to cover the greys on his head, and the colour isn’t what he thought it would be. Now he’s more self-conscious than ever.

Living Musical by VeeTheRee (G, 4,149 w. 1 Ch. || Est. Rel., Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Hobbies, Summer, Song Fic, POV Sherlock, Painting, Play Fighting, Soft Sherlock, Dancing, Love Declarations, Hair Petting, Promise of Forever) – A one-shot of John and Sherlock being domestic during summer. There is paint, fluff, and music from Imagine Dragons, namely from the album 'Speak To Me', specific song in this one-shot is 'Living Musical'. Part 1 of the Happy Fluffy Johnlock Time series

Onomatopoeia by aquabelacqua (M, 6,904 w., 1 Ch. || First Time/Kiss, Frottage, Dirty Talk, Domestics, Word Kink, POV Sherlock, Dry Humping / Sex, Chair Sex, Hair Pulling, Lazy Mornings, Hand Jobs, Friends to Lovers) – Something is the matter with John. Sherlock is determined to figure out what it is. Mark his words.

Division by MrsNoggin (E, 19,542 w., 11 Ch. || Coffee Shop AU || First Kiss/Time, Fluff, Barista Sherlock, Clingy Sherlock, POV John, John’s Limp, Bed Sharing, Fluff, Sleepy Cuddles, Sensuality, Touching, Virgin Sherlock, Insecure John) – John likes mysteries. And every morning he dips into the local independent coffee bar with his newspaper and ponders another... one Sherlock Holmes.

Just To Hold You Close by sussexbound (E, 70,841 w., 18 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Sherlock POV, ASD Sherlock, PTSD John, Demisexual Sherlock, Bisexual John, Cuddling/Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Enthusiastic Consent, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Sexual Tension, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Cuddle Negotiations, For a Case Until It Isn’t, Hair Petting, Sexual Negotiation, Anxiety, Trust Issues, Slow Burn, Panic Attacks, Frottage, Hand/Blow Jobs, Referenced Self Harm / Abuse / Suicidal Ideation, First Kiss/Time, Anal, Autistic Sherlock) – When a woman is murdered and the last person to see her alive is recently invalided army vet turned reluctant (and prickly) professional cuddler, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is pulled into a world of intimacy and intrigue he never could have imagined. John is a conundrum and mystery: frank yet reserved, tender yet angry, open yet afraid. Sherlock is instantly drawn into his orbit, and begins to feel and desire things he never has before.

Kintsukuroi by sussexbound (E, 91,823 w., 20 Ch. || S4 Compliant / Post-TLD, Grief / Mourning, PTSD, Internalized Homophobia, Therapy, Past Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Anxiety, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, Cuddling, Suicidal Ideation, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, Sexting, Frottage, Inexperienced Sherlock, Rimming / Anal / BJ’s, Emotional Turmoil, Finding Each Other) – “I love you.” Sherlock sees the words hit John with almost physical force. He reels back a little, jaw twitching and eyes filling. “I love you,” he repeats, a little softer, a little more gentle, as earnest as he possibly can. Because they’ve been teetering on the brink of this thing for years, and it had become painfully obvious over the last few months that they were at a tipping point. This had to happen. Now it has. Now they can see where they end up. The tears in John’s eyes spill over, and he wipes at them angrily. “Do you even know what that means?”

Definitions by siennna (T, 101,528 w., 12 of ? Ch. || Dev. Rel., Pining, Fluff and Romance, First Kiss, Love Confessions, Fluff, Cuddles, Girl’s Night, Texting, Virgin Sherlock, Drunk Sherlock, Background Mollstrade, Hair Petting, Laying on Lap) – Sherlock’s journey in defining his flat mate and stumbling through the muddled world of emotion. {{This feels complete; the chapter count is listed as ? but I feel like it is done}}

Unkissed Series by 221b_hound (T to E, 184,100 w. across 45 works || Established Relationship, Ace Sherlock) – Sherlock returned from the dead a year ago. John returned to Baker Street six months ago. They've been in a couple since then. or at least, not NOT a couple. For two smart men, they sure can be dumb. Luckily, an art thief tries to drown Sherlock, Sherlock has a fever dream and things are about to change.

MARKED FOR LATER

Curlock by 88thParallel (G, 1,285 w., 1 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Sherlock’s Hair, Fluff, Ficlet) – How Sherlock learned to control and appreciate the incredible gift he was born with, and the man who helped him sort it out.

Curls and Frizz by 221b_gone_feels (G, 2,026 w., 2 Ch. || Est. Rel., Sherlock’s Curls, Frizz, Curly Hair Problems, Fluff, Insecure Sherlock) – When it rains especially hard one day, John sees him in a new light. Or, hairstyle.

Pull by philalethia (E, 6,352 w., 1 Ch. || First Kiss/Time, Hair Pulling, Hair Stroking, Kink Exploration, Scalp Massage, Pillow Humping, Demi Sherlock, Past Drug Use) – John pulls Sherlock's hair in a moment of frustration. Sherlock is surprised to find that he enjoys it.

I'll Show You the Difference by Ginger_Cat (E, 19,677 w. || Post-HLV, Infidelity, Hand/Blow Jobs, Hair-Pulling, First Kiss, Caught-In-The-Act, Almost Parentlock, Minor Character Death, Angst, Bittersweet Ending) – John attempts to prove that Sherlock's love for him is platonic. He fails, miserably.

Unwind Series by illwick (E, 697,027+ w. across 33 fics || Light BDSM / Power Dynamics, Dom!John/Sub!Sherlock, Switchlock, Hair-Pulling, Snsory Deprivation, Deepthroating, Face-Fucking, Handcuffs, Overstimulation, Forced Orgasm, Prostate Milking / Massage, Rough Sex, Biting, Food Sex, Consensual Kink, Sex on Everything, Chair Bondage, Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, Masturbation, Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, Oral/Anal, Fingering, Sex Toys, Captain John, Establish Relationship, Bratty Sherlock, Greedy Sherlock, Military Kink, Uniform Kink, Gunplay, Roleplay, Shower Sex, Oral Fixation, Praise Kink, Dry Humping, Facials, Dog Tags, Edgeplay, Multiple Orgasms, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Threesomes, Homophobia, Size Kink, Past Relationships, Past Drug Use, Double Penetration, Angst/Hurt/Comfort, Jealous Sherlock, Possessive Sherlock, Panties) – John and Sherlock unwind after a case.

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #hair petting #hair pulling #sherlock's hair #my fic recs #Anonymous

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felassan · 3 years

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hey hey, just giving you this question because you are big lore nerd and I'm analysing this by myself (and eventually doing a post)... did you check out the Chant of Light, Drakon's prophecy for the future? Exaltations canticle? I read it last night and I was surprised. It can be added to Sandal's prophecy in da2 as well.... maybe you talked about this before? would you mind to point me your post in that case? I love your analysis

Hello! Ahh thankyouu 😊 (Please tag me in or drop me a link to your post because I’d be interested to read it!) The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Sandal’s prophecy is an interesting one as we recently learned this tidbit about it and things like it in one of the David Gaider dev commentary streams:

DG said Eleni Zinovia’s prophecy doesn’t refer to Fen’Harel. He can’t remember who wrote it in there or what it refers to actually. It was most likely just intended as flavor and he was even a bit surprised by it, like “What is this?” There’s a lot of things like that in the games, not everything has a ~grand meaning~. Sometimes such small off-hand things are picked up on by fans and the writers then make it into something bigger and more meaningful after the fact. This is what happened with Sandal (all the fans being like “Ooh, what does it mean, what does it mean?” about him). It’s possible Eleni will be picked up on like that in the future, but at the time it didn’t mean anything really. A lot of the way these stories are put together is that they put a lot of questions into the world, scattering possible/potential plothooks, and they don’t necessarily know where they lead at the time, but in future games they could come back to them and come up with an interesting backstory. Sometimes they pick it up and sometimes it never gets answered or ever mentioned again (the Wardens taking some of the blood from those who didn’t survive their particular bout of Joinings and putting it in a vial to remember them is an example of one of these things). It’s pretty rare that you’d get a situation where something is mapped out from beginning to end. Sometimes we the players get a revelation as we play and we’re like “Omg!! This is all connected! They are masters!” and the writers are like “Yes, toootally… It was that way alllllll along. It certainly did NOT get decided three quarters of the way through development…” [source]

I don’t think I’ve made a post about Kordillus Drakon’s vision of the Maker’s return or on the Canticle of Exaltations. I’d be really interested to see some of his prior drafts and compare the things he changed during the rewriting process.. Anyway here’s some assorted thoughts on the Canticle, albeit disjointed and not conclusive:

Parallels - Andraste’s vision of the Maker, Kordillus’ vision of the future

You can read Kordillus’ vision as a genuine vision of actual-Andraste, a figment of his imagination or a delusion born from religious fervor, something he’s making up (he was a fervent believer, it’s just that it’s also the case that sometimes religion is misused for power or empire), or a legit encounter that he had with a non-Andraste entity that was taking the form of Andraste or whom he had interpreted as Andraste (see the Inquisitor’s encounter with the spirit so-called ‘Divine Justinia’). Is it maybe spirit possession? “I accept the gift”, “let me be the vessel”

“the vessel” - vessels are a repeating motif in the lore: Wynne as the Vessel of her spirit of Faith, Calpernia and Samson seeking to be the Vessel of the Well’s power and Morrigan or the Inquisitor becoming such, fan theory that Sera is the vessel of Andruil (which I don’t subscribe to but it comes to mind), Flemeth as the vessel of Mythal, darkspawn as empty soulless vessels whereas Wardens are not, shells of flesh and souls, the soulless Titans’ workers (dwarves), possession, etc.

“The air itself rent asunder” can easily be read as referring to the Breach in DAI and/or the upcoming intended destruction/removal of the Veil. As you say this entire verse is similar to Sandal’s “shadows will part and the skies will open wide”. Shadows parting, spilling light. There are elements here that you could link to Eleni Zinovia’s words or the words of the Ardent Blossom Faerie (whether this was intentional on the writers’ parts or no at the time when they were written is a separate subject)

The “Waters of the Fade” line is important given the similar references elsewhere in the Chant - “Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls. From these emerald waters doth life begin anew”, “From the waters of the Fade you made the world. As the Fade had been fluid, so was the world fixed.” Reference to the fluidity of the Fade vs the mundane realm as static and way less malleable. “Realm of Opposition”, the idea of the 2 opposing realms, also sticks out to me as I’ve talked before about the contrast in the metaphysical opposing elements:

In a kind of metaphysical way, the dwarves are emblematic of the mundane sphere. Not “mundane” as in normal/boring, but in terms of reinforced reality vs reality as mutable, earth and sky, underground vs land, Children of the Stone vs Birds of Fancy, magic resistance vs inherent magical quality, tradition vs change, Titan progenitors vs origins in the Fade prior to taking physical form slash being spirit-y or spirit adjacent. It’s all very thematic, especially when you consider that dwarves do not dream compared to how elves are (or rather, are supposed to be) innately tied to the Fade. and at the moment, modern Thedas is unbalanced

I guess you could plot the races on a line from most Fadey/sky-like (very scientific I know) to least: spirits - elves - humans - Qunari - dwarves. note this isn’t a “who is most alive”, thing, it’s just a spectrum between 2 different but equally Alive ways of being. [source]

“The Realm of Opposition” is the post-Veil waking world. Obviously the “Realm of Dreams” is the Fade.

The waters stuff also reminds me of the Well of Sorrows (Andraste is the Lady of Sorrows) and how Mythal walked out of the sea of the Earth’s tears.

(Is anyone else reminded of the Eye of Sauron at this point in the Canticle btw? 😁)

Is it even Andraste he’s seeing? No way of knowing if it is, or was Mythal with a staff in hand, given their similar headpieces, for instance. And certainly a maker has returned to the world since Kordillus wrote this stuff down, just not The Maker - the maker or creator of the Veil, Solas.

Are the “men of stone” dwarves, golems (probably not) or Titans? “Sleepers waking at the dawn” immediately makes me think of how dwarves don’t dream. That whole verse makes me think of the Titans waking up and destroying the world via earthquakes or something in order for it to be made anew. This makes me 👀 given Descent and upcoming Titan plotbeats. Seventy time seven stuff is a reference in the Bible irl iirc.

And I heard from the East a great cry As men who were beasts warred with their brothers, Tooth and claw against blade and bow, Until one could no longer be told from the other, And cursed them and cursed their generations.

East of Orlais is Ferelden. This verse makes me think of Fereldans and their troubles with werewolves throughout their history and in their recent present, werewolves who were once human (or elven, depending) like them. Zathrian’s curse lasted for generations even. Interesting given werewolves resurfacing again in TN. The other thing that comes to mind here is that the Executors supposedly dwell across the eastern ocean.

And those who slept, the ancient ones, awoke, For their dreams had been devoured By a demon that prowled the Fade As a wolf hunts a herd of deer. Taking first the weakest and frailest of hopes, And when there was nothing left, Destroying the bright and bold By subtlety and ambush and cruel arts

Dwarves getting dreams (“Mythal gives you dreams”) or regaining their connection to the Titans (see Valta), the Titans awakening again, remaining slumbering Old Gods waking, imprisoned sleeping Evanuris waking, or the few remaining ancient elves in secret enclaves waking from uthernera (Abelas and co and ones like them, that Solas makes reference to)...? The wolf-like demon that devours dreams and prowls the Fade is an allusion (not from Kordillus, but the writers) to the Dalish belief that Fen’Harel is He Who Hunts Alone, Roamer of the Beyond. The wolf metaphor in Kordillus’ vision points to someone who is smart, clever, strategic, cunning, someone who goes about things in a subterfuge-y and plotting-/scheming-type way. It almost reads like the Evanuris’ anti-Solas “Dread Wolf Bad” propaganda, of which we encounter some of during Trespasser. The Fade-prowling demon that devours dreams also reminds me of the Nightmare in DAI.

The number nine, like the number seven, in this setting always makes me like.. [alarmed vibrating]. There are nine Creator-figures, including Ghilan’nain and Fen’Harel. “The mortal dust of Our Lady” could refer to the Urn of Sacred Ashes, thus the “sacred mountain” would be the mountain in the Frostbacks at Haven which contained the remains of the ruined Temple of Andraste, the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Obviously this area in DAI was the site of the Breach and in DAI Corypheus lifts (ascends) it into the sky for a bit. There’s even a reference here to passing through the fire, calling to mind that part of the Gauntlet in DAO. The mountain stuff here also reminds me of The Ptarmigan: An Avvar Tale:

Korth the Mountain-Father kept his throne at the peak of Belenas, the mountain that lies at the center of the world, from which he could see all the corners of earth and sky.

Belenas, Belenas... a mountain at the center of the world, and the reference to earth and sky (Realm of Opposition and the Realm of Dreams). It’s especially notable when you consider the Lady of the Skies, Tyrdda’s leaf-eared lover, Korth’s mountain-y-ness (Titan?) and the stuff about his heart (the Evanuris mined the bodies of Titans for lyrium and “something else”, which we suspect are their hearts). This part “And he saw strong men become weak, brave men grow cowardly, and wise men turn foolish for love” reminds me of the Canticle verse above which referred to men warring with their brothers. And in elven language “Bel” is part of bellanaris, eternity (this Canticle ends with a reference to eternal life). Belenas, bellanaris.

And I looked up and saw The seven gates of the Black City shatter, And darkness cloaked both realms.

Oh shit, here it comes. Y’know? Seven seals, some potentially already broken (the dark and lit orbs in the concentric circles on the DWR mural). Darkness is coming alright. People have speculated about this at length. 😁 And in other places in-world there are references to this belief.

Look upon the Light so you May lead others here through the darkness, Blade of the Faith!

This reminds me of the Inquisitor’s journey and role in DAI. Parallels again.

The Maker returns In dread

Self-explanatory, emphasis mine. A maker.

And saw the darkness warp and crumble

Interesting given the fabric of reality is currently warping, as witnessed by Strife in one of the recent shorts.

shroud

Another word for veil.

The meek lambs became bold And rose up, casting aside their shepherds To dance at the Maker's feet

reminds me of the ‘Slightest Ones’ bard song and some elves leaving in the Trespasser epilogue.

Where once a terrible fire swept The Light of redemption from the face of the world

the time Andraste was burned. The gates of Minrathous is also where we’re headed in the next game.

What are the “sins of creation”, exactly? - Why does it make me think back to the waters of the Fade and the well of all souls which the Chant holds life began anew from and the Maker made the world from? Why do they need “redeemed”? Why does that make me think of the creation of the Veil and the terrible consequences that had for Thedas in general and for the ancient elves, and of Solas’ drive and desire to correct that mistake? And Justice is an aspect of Mythal.

Harmony in all things. Let Balance be restored And the world given eternal life.

See above with the “modern Thedas is unbalanced” stuff. Balance could be restored with the removal of the Veil, and then the remaining elves would be immortal again probably. I tend to veer away from “everything is elves” and “everything relates back to or is in some way a metaphor for or reference etc to Solas and Mythal” but it’s like Kordillus had a vision of the future of Thedas at that time (things which we then saw in previous games set after he died, and some things which we still haven’t seen yet but which have been foreshadowed - as in some things which have still yet to come to pass in the world’s storyline) and, naturally, interpreted it through his fervent Andrastian/cult of the Maker lens. I wouldn’t take it all completely at face value though, having given away major future plotbeats in the Chant just like that would be a bold choice.

#dragon age #bioware #mj replies #lairofsentinel #video games #sorry for my delayed reply :')#solas #Morrigan #queen of my heart #mj meta #strife #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #tevinter nights #tevinter nights spoilers #tevinter nights spoiler #spoilers #spoiler

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theonyxpath · 6 years

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Yes, I’d say the creation of the 2nd Edition of Scion has taken the most thought (and Thoth) of any of our projects to date.

From the years spent iterating the Storypath System that powers Scion, to the years and years we and the Scion community dissected and recombined the first edition rules and setting, to the extensive amount of care the writers and developer Neall Raemonn Price have put into improving first edition in every way they could.

Like the Netjer (Egyptian) pantheon pictured above, all the pantheons have been researched and re-researched and run past experts in the myths and cultures they represent. You don’t in any way need a doctorate to use and enjoy them in your game, but now they more accurately reflect our current understanding of the gods and their cohorts.

Neall goes into this in his interview with Eddy and Dixie on last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, and it is well worth your time to check it out if you’re a Scion fan. He goes into his thinking on Scion, as well as some of the often torturous steps we have had to take to get the first two game books created. If you’re not a Scion fan, he also reveals how Beckett’s Jyhad Diary was developed and written, and so basically, it’s a great overview of how RPG books are created.

You can check it out on your favorite podcast venue or directly on PodBean here: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

This Friday on the Onyx Pathcast, the Wraith Curse rears its ugly head, and the gang have to recreate an entire episode where they only mention Wraith in discussing TTRPGs and how they affect our non-game lives. Listen in to find out how the Wraith Curse manifests this time!

Dragon-Blooded art by Yiyoung Li

Now for myself, I too have thought a lot about Scion. From green-lighting the first edition and realizing that without something wahoo going on, the sales distribution system was going to under-order Scion: Hero, (“We need new games to sell!” “Here’s a new one we made.” “Wah? It’s new and has no sales history, how can we order that?”), to getting a copy of the book put into every retailer bag at that year’s GAMA trade show. Retailers who then ordered the game in such amounts that we had to do a second print pretty much before the book hit stores!

I’ve thought a lot about the dedication of the Scion community during the (very) lean years when almost nothing new came out, yet WW‘s old Scion forums were still getting more posts than entire other gaming websites. I read your posts you magnificent bastards, and incorporated that thinking into what we needed to do to elevate Scion for second edition.

I’ve ground my teeth in frustration during the time Storypath was iterating and while Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero have been incubating, and thought long and hard about the iterations and improvements that slowed things down. Were they worth it?

Well, the answer is yes, as far as I can see. Storypath is the simple base 10-sided pool system that can be expanded depending on your table’s interest in more shared storytelling that I hoped for. It is so flexible that we can add tweaks to it to emulate a post-apocalyptic scarcity game with zombies in Dystopia Rising: Evolution, and reflexive and meta humor mechanics in They Came From Beneath the Sea!.

And it enables play from man on the street to god levels of power for Scion and the Trinity Continuum.

VtR2 Guide to the Night art by Sam Araya

Scion has a built-in setting now, with the World, yet it is so designed that you can pull back on that and keep the god stuff hidden, or dial it to 11 and make the presence of the gods even more impactful on our normal world. I thought about whether adding the World was the right way to go – and had probably far more discussions with Neall than he wanted to have about it – but in the end, I think the default setting combined with the very easy options to alter that if you so choose hits the right spot.

It’s there and it’s rich and deep with history, but still open enough that your characters matter. Which is a big part of Scion, as I see it.

And one more thing that I’ve thought about A LOT, and have mentioned before, is that to me Scion is just getting started. The 4 book core of Origin, Hero, Demigod, and God is really the central spine of the possible ways Scion can be played. There’s the “Children of the Gods in Modern Times” that defines that spine, and we can provide a lot more projects that help build on that. We already have the Companion, Jumpstart, Ready Made Characters, and Bestiary being worked on.

But let’s change that to “Children of ____ in Modern Times”, or “Children of the Gods in _____ Times”, and we open up a huge range of possibilities if we start filling in those blanks!

Whew! I get pretty fired up thinking about all that.

Now, on to the Notes from our Monday Meeting today! We talked about:

1- We are all over the place online right now! It’s great! On this Tuesday night at 6pm Pacific US time, Pugmire: Homeward Bound begins on the Saving Throw Show Twitch channel. Here’s the intro video (it is amazing and beautiful!): youtu.be/qMpNHXjbZK8

And the link to their Twitch channel: twitch.tv/savingthrowshow

2- I did a wee little interview that surprisingly covered all sorts of Onyx Path and classic White Wolf stories and yet did not go into my love of pudding. Why is that surprising? Because the podcast interview was for Everybody Loves Pudding, and I was lured into this because I thought I’d be able to expound on the virtues and wonders of pudding. But, even without the pudding, it’s a pretty good chat – the guys were very on target with the questions. Not sure if you can say the same about my answers, but judge for yourself: http://www.everybodylovespudding.com/podcast/season-1-episode-22/

3- Eddy Webb is flying up to my neck of the woods and we’ll be going together to Save Against Fear, the convention that benefits the Bodhana Group, whose mission is to use tabletop gaming in their therapeutic efforts. Links are below in the Convention News section of The Blurbs, but we recently added that I’ll be there on Saturday signing Magic Cards and working on some artist proof sketches. So if you are near there and want your cards signed and to help a great group – come on by and meet me and Eddy!

4- On a related topic, Monica Valentinelli is working with Extra Life on a fundraiser where she’s playing D&D5e to help sick kids. Onyx Path has donated Scarred Lands PDF rewards at various levels of contribution, so here’s your chance to help a super cause and dig into Scarred Lands! https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=326323

M20 Gods and Monsters art by Claudio Pozas

5- If you missed the Prince’s Gambit casual Vampire card game by Justin Achilli Kickstarter campaign, we have copies of the card set available to buy from Studio2 and your local retailer, see below, and the basic set and booster pack will go on sale on Wednesday from DriveThru. The retail card set is all the cards from the Kickstarter in one box, and the DriveThru cards take all the cards and divide them into a basic set, and then the added cards from the KS in a booster pack. And, because we are asked this, Prince’s Gambit is a different type of game than VTES, it is not VTES, was not intended to replace VTES, and lots of us here are VTES fans and glad that new VTES cards are being made.

6- Finally, we have a fantastic sale going on at IPR for our Deluxe and Prestige books from our Kickstarter print-run overruns! Half off until the end of October, it’s our HalfoWeen Sale! The Mummy: The Curse Prestige Editions have sold out as of this writing, which means there are no more of them available for sale anywhere in the world! (Except EBAY, I’m sure. But other than that…)

I’m not finding a clever way to lead in to out tag-line this time, no wait, I just did. Damn:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Lo the darkness that lies like a pall over Chicago. The V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter arises in October!

We’re also working on the Kickstarter for They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!), which has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS. They take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

And our latest, the dice for Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e:

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

The Prince’s Gambit basic card set and the added cards from the PG Kickstarter booster pack will both be available on DriveThru this Wednesday!

CONVENTIONS!

From Fast Eddy Webb, we have these:

Eddy will also be a featured guest (and RichT will be there at some point, too) at Save Against Fear (October 12-14) in Harrisburg, PA. He’ll be running some Pugmire games, be available for autographs, and will sometimes accept free drinks. http://www.thebodhanagroup.org/about-the-convention

Dixie Cochran will be at High Level Games Con in Atlantic City October 12-14, running a Women in Game Design panel, Eddy’s RPG Developer Bootcamp, and possibly making a surprise appearance at another event!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Manuscript Approval:

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Editing:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Trinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Rulebook (TCFBtS!)

Dog and Cat Ready Made Characters (Monarchies of Mau) (With Eddy)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Jumpstart (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Indexing:

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution

M20: Gods and Monsters – AD’d and Contracted.

Geist 2e

The Realm

Trinity Continuum (Aeon and Core) – Tracking down Core finals and going over Aeon Sketches.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – KS art finals in.

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats

C20 Player’s Guide

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – Got KS artnotes out.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Trinity Core – Working on symbols this week.

Trinity Aeon – Fancying up my Opnet images.

Ex3 Dragon Blooded

Proofing

Scion Hero – Inputting Neal’s 2nd proof changes.

PTC: Night Horrors: The Tormented – KT has Steffie’s corrections in.

Scion Origin – Doing Neall’s errata changes, and swapping out the font.

VtR: Guide to the Night – Danielle is getting me her p.xx stuff on Monday and I’ll be wrapping this one up for approval by WW shortly thereafter.

Fetch Quest – Package design done

At Press

Monarchies of Mau and Screen – At Studio2. Dice and buttons getting ready to ship to Studio2.

Cavaliers of Mars – Backer copies all shipped out.

Wraith 20th – Printing the Deluxe interior, proofing cover.

Wraith 20 Screen – Printing.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Cav Talent cards – PoD proof coming.

Lost 2e Screen – Prepping files.

Scion Screen – Prepping files.

Prince’s Gambit core deck and booster PoD – On sale at DriveThru on Wednesday!

Changeling: The Lost 2e – Prepping files for printer.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: OK, celebrate this one or don’t as you see fit. I know a lot of my South Philly buddies do and will. All I know is today I didn’t get my new fancy brush recommended by Jeff Miracola today because no mail on the Monday holiday. And the last kid has off from school, so I get to hear him shouting at his friends as they multi-play a shooter. Some holiday.

#Onyx Path Publishing

6 notes · View notes

krestmarketinggroup-blog · 7 years

Photo

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner “You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem.”

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say “efficiency” is a more accurate term than “efficacy,” but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there’s a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

At RDI, we specialize in marketing services for mid to large enterprise clients with annual revenues of our ideal client ranging from $50M/year to $20B/year. The size of clients that we work with have 50+ person marketing departments, and some with more than 1,000. Implementing profitable and evolving SEO programs is much more difficult for non-agile companies and those with marketing that predates the internet. Despite having more resources and built-in topical authority, enterprise SEO can be much harder than SMB SEO — not only because the SEO challenges are greater, but because it introduces another layer of organizational challenges.

What is enterprise SEO? This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by Ratish Naroor , Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there’s more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website is its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process. There’s no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count.

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

Unique and difficult SEO challenges. This may include large page counts where scaling on-page changes and crawl control is important, competitive industries where search terms have high paid CPAs, or international SEO operating in multiple languages and countries.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO? When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics. 1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle. Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.” The direction and depth of this “grain” is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

VPs and directors: High-level performance reports like M/M and Y/Y traffic and conversions give them a bird’s eye view of the site and the effects of your SEO efforts. Tying this data to a dollar figure will help make your case. This can include simple analytics data from Google Analytics, or more advanced tools such as our favorite BI tool, DOMO , or its competitor Tableau .

Product owners/business units: Keyword-level data and traffic to a specific site section that a team works on. An enterprise SEO tool like BrightEdge or Conductor can make these reports easy to manage.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or “something our IT team handles.” It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?”

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the “SEO Brainshare.” Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

As an agency, we have to be clear with our main point of contact: “You can’t change your SEO results without changing your site. We need you to be the driver of change at your organization. RDI will arm you with the ideas, rationale, and detailed instructions, but you have to get the people in your organization to act.”

While my experience is very agency-focused, in-house SEOs will have to explain a similar scenario to their managers, and the managers of the content, creative, and development teams. The best way to enable yourself for success is make sure you have access to all the players needed for SEO greatness, and they each know what’s at stake and have a certain degree of ownership from their managers. If the product owner doesn’t have a KPI tied to organic traffic or conversions on their pages, it’s highly unlikely they will prioritize and take ownership of organic traffic to those pages.

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?” and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn’t been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn’t their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to a podcast where Bill Hunt (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, “If you can’t put a dollar number on it, you won’t get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

Now you need to see how many non-brand conversions you would get if you achieved the rank you feel is plausible (this is more of an art than science; I like to use the rank of the top competitor as “achievable”): (Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,’Rank CTR’!A:B,2,0)),0)

For this you’ll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from AWR for unbranded search , but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

You will need to do this once for current estimated traffic and again after you have set your target rank numbers, then run a delta to get percent change. (The above formula and CTR curve can be found in the Content Gap Analysis template on our site.)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis . Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the Content Gap Analysis we look at what competitors are doing, then measure the estimated traffic for a topic area. This kind of analysis looks for gaps on our client’s site where competitors have content and we do not. We can examine the likelihood of us being successful in our next content endeavor and to put a number on the estimated traffic a competitor’s site section or page is getting. Once you find opportunities with a forecastable impact, prioritize them in content or site projects and try not to juggle too many balls at once — at least until some content projects have shipped. Don’t forget to quickly communicate the success of a project to accelerate the two factors mentioned above, even if it’s just a quick email with a screenshot from Google/Adobe Analytics.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

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!

http://bit.ly/2woAp9d

#articlewriting #digitalmarketing #blogpower #linkbuilding #socialmediamarketing #lagunabeachseo #bestlocalseo #contentwriting #seo #huntingtonbeachseo

1 note · View note

wickedbananas · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by Ratish Naroor, Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there's more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website is its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process. There's no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count.

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics.

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle. Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.” The direction and depth of this "grain" is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or "something our IT team handles." It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?”

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to a podcast where Bill Hunt (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, "If you can't put a dollar number on it, you won't get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

For this you'll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from AWR for unbranded search, but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

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!

from The Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2ug1VnY via IFTTT

#The Moz Blog #Moz #seo

1 note · View note

cryamore · 7 years

Text

MINI UPDATE PART 1: Backer-only Discord Server Questions

Mirroring a recent Kickstarter update over here on Tumblr to try and keep all the social outlets up to date.

This has to be split into two parts because Tumblr only allows five embedded videos per post.

Thanks for everyone’s comments and support on the previous Kickstarter backer only update! A good number of people have joined the Cryamore Backer Discord server that I started up.

We’ve got about 132 members on there right now and it may grow a bit more once I send out the invite to the Paypal backers as a means to get them caught up with what’s been going on behind the backer-only posts. I just have to mirror the backer-only posts in somewhere like Dropbox for their prolonged perusal and prepare a short list of Q&A in case they have any queries and I’ll send out this draft I’ve done.

With that said, I wanted to make a short update reiterating questions gathered from the Discord channels and sharing some of the things we feel we can have non-backers see since it won’t spoil the game... too much.

FoolishWolf asked: I guess my first question is if it is possible to give an ETA on the project at this point?

Rob: We want to be finished this year. We're currently in the "Polish" phase where all the moving and working parts are in, it's just a matter of cleaning up presentation, major bugs, and final art.

Alan: There are going to be gameplay polishes too as we go along. The mechanics we've got are now all adjusted to any suggestions we've taken in from our publisher's testing but we'd like to see if during the backer tests, anyone feels it could be improved further.

That's fair. I guess this is just the marketer in me, but is there gifs and videos that maybe you can release for the community for #Indiedevhour and #screenshotsaturday that we share around. Kinda get the hype train going?

Rob: We want to get back into doing more of that, yeah. Now that we're polishing stuff up.

Alan: We'll be sharing stuff as often as we can on Discord which we'll then pool together for the mini updates.

Clay | Terminally Nerdy asked:

Once the game is in a “playable” preview state, would you all want someone to stream/talk about it?

We’re absolutely okay with it as this would help reinforce the fact that the game is legit. We’ll make sure to mark which builds are public ready.

Can you get Atlus to port the Persona series to PC, and will Jack Frost be in the game?

We sadly don’t have that kind of pull but I personally would like to see the Persona series on PC too.

Phosphatide asked:

How close is it to the proposed "40+ tracks" from the Kickstarter?

We’re pretty much within the forty track count already. I’ll share surasshu’s answer here as it’s better to hear it from one of our composers.

here's a link to a larger version (just adjust the zoom) in case Kickstarter decides to shrink the whole thing to an unreadable point.

fpwong asked:

What do ppl usually use for programming AI in Unity? UE4 has inbuilt behaviour trees but idk if unity has anything of the sort.

Alan: We’re not sure about other people using Unity but for us, we’ve been using a mix of C# and FlowCanvas/NodeCanvas to achieve an easily tweakable AI system. It’s the same thing we used to set up our cutscene/dialogue system too, so it’s multipurpose!

youtube

Rob: This video is quite outdated though; It’s mostly the dialogue on example there and a few older bugs but that shows how the dialogue tree is set up, how it can control objects to walk away from the scene, change sprites and more.

Brendan (luigimeistersa) asked:

Hey dev guys. Does Cryamore have any kind of buffs you can apply to Esmy?

Alan: We sadly don’t have much in way of buff abilities besides things like Oxy Barrier which provide you with a protective bubble and allow you to breathe underwater or other abilities like Time Paradox and Shadow Cloak. You do get a Well Rested buff though from sleeping at the inn though and the buff comes at various tiers.

Can you bind them (abilities) to the row of number keys on PC?

Alan: We're using Rewired for Unity to support keybinding and a variety of controllers (here's a list) so you should be able to rebind controls to any key you wish on a desktop keyboard.

Rob: Controllers may be more limited for keybinding in comparison, however.

AreYouSmarterThanACheeseGrater asked:

So, how are you going to work sleeping? Will time advance a set number of hours or will time progress to the next morning/evening?

Alan: Here’s an excerpt from our design document to easily explain how sleeping works.

Take note, costs are subject to change but sleeping in specific beds advances time by a set amount and you get better rest in a shorter amount of time from the more expensive rooms at the inn (to be fully rested and free from fatigue for a day in just two hours would be amazing). You do have the option to be cheap and just sleep in your own bed but you use up more time in a day.

Downing energy drinks is a way to stay awake without having to sleep but you can only carry so much and it won't fully restore your fatigue and you'll eventually find yourself sleeping on the ground, helpless against any threats around you.

shadowreaper5 asked: Are you still looking for help? I can't draw or code, but if you need someone to poke every corner for bugs I'm your man

We'll put out a public call for assistants when there's nothing else left but the art polish push, there's a bit of design polish that Rob and I still have to work on here and there but when the backgrounds and pixel tracing are all that's left, we're hoping we get many applicants that're willing to stick through.

As for poking every corner for bugs, I've currently given 13 members on the Backer Discord @tester status. Having them on Discord will help us all communicate as they run the builds. I expect we're going to have a few questions of why the game won't start when loading a save (recurring bug that happened in old builds regarding data from a previous build being kept in the %appdata% folder on Windows systems and conflicting with the new build)

Does your [insert magic equivalent here] regenerate quicker if you sleep in a bed/inn?

Alan: In our aim to nail down the fun factor without sacrificing too much of the original vision, we decided to make EP regenerate automatically.

You should see it in action in this older stress test video that Rob shared on the Discord server.

youtube

As you can see, the blue meter to the lower left goes down each time Esmy uses a skill. The meter is actually comprised of a number of cells but displays as a meter, the cell count is shown to the right of the meter as EP <number>. Each ability eats a number of cells, i.e. an ability like Ignite Lv1 costs = 1 cell but Shadow Cloak of any level will use = 4 cells. A channeled ability like Boulder Dash will eat up a cell every second.

Cells can be increased by finding certain collectibles in the game.

Rob: You can also see in the video above that even in-editor, the game runs pretty smoothly (60FPS+) with 8 monsters and numerous adds it summons.

Alan: I've personally tried it on my own PC with a 1GB video card from 7 years ago and it runs fine in-editor and runs even better on a compiled build.

lemon-rev asked: With your post regarding the update, I can now fully understand why the game looks at is base level, playtime on each of those levels sounds great, but are they leveling, completing quests, just beating up mobs, I am sure each of those other sections that have to be redone for unity as well as the type of content for each one.

Some context is necessary here for the non-backers reading this. During the previous backer update, I mentioned the listed completion times we got for each dungeon when we had testers run through it, here are those numbers...

Northern Caverns v1 Build: 20-30 minutes

Rime Rapids v1 Build: 30-40 minutes

Molten Mountain v1 Build: 30-40 minutes

Terrestrial Woods v1 Build: 40-60 minutes

Vale of Gale v1 Build: 40-60 minutes

Sunken Ship v2 Build: 40-120 minutes

Mekanika v2 Build: 40-120 minutes

Phantom Marshes v2 Build: 40-120 minutes

The v1 builds were before I ran a level design revamp over the layouts so those numbers can go up. All in all though, that's currently around 4.6 hours worth of dungeon crawling (and there's one dungeon unaccounted for still).

With that bit of context given, to fully answer lemon-rev's question, take note, these are all approximate numbers as there was a guide provided for the publisher testers to consult and these numbers also DO NOT include boss fights, cutscenes or enemy ambushes. There's also the time required to head out into the overworld and look for and access those dungeons so we estimate that we could hit 12 hours at the very least of regular gameplay without completing any sidequests and hopefully 16-18 hours if you try to 100% the whole game.

sky asked: Is Linux still planned?

Yes! This is also why we're going to have to reach out to our backers for testing assistance as we've only been able to test on PC and Mac so far and do not have much if any Linux testbeds.

We've had a number of people on the Discord server that I've tagged as willing testers and we look forward to working with them soon!

CONTINUED IN PART 2

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victorineb · 7 years

Text

Fic Recs Mega Post

Whenever I write one of these posts I’m struck by the sheer amount of incredible writing talent in this little fandom of ours. It is quite astonishing, and it’s a privilege to get to read all of this wonderful work. Below there’s a small selection of the fantastic stuff I’ve been reading recently, featuring gods, monsters and feral jungle men - and that’s just for starters!

Storms (series) by @lovecrimevariations (KareliaSweet): This frankly astonishing series starts out in barnstorming but fairly innocuous style in Where Are The Storms I Was Promised, in which Will Graham, famous monster hunter, is called to deal with the Wendigo that’s been terrorising an entire town. And then it proceeds, over the course of a further six instalments, to document the beautiful, bloody, often painful course of the relationship between Will and Hannibal, constantly deepening and recontextualising the ‘verse as it goes. Reading this series is almost like watching a really good magic trick – every time you think you’ve got its measure, it pulls something new and surprising out of its hat. And it’s not just flash and sparkle either, the writing is utterly beautiful, the characters are perfectly captured and it is both deeply funny and enormously moving (I was genuinely weepy a number of times throughout). Plus, it also features a majestic, powerful, do-not-under-any-circumstances-fuck-with incarnation of Bedelia, who is worth the price of admission all by herself. Seriously, she was my favourite part of this whole series and I love it beyond any sense or reason. If you have any love of writing whatsoever, read this series, it is a masterclass.

You’ll be in my heart by @starkaryen: Based on the totally beautiful art (here and here) by @camilleflyingrotten, here Will is a scientist on an expedition to find and study gorillas. Instead, he ends up finding Hannibal, a mostly-feral man who lives in the jungle, has an adopted gorilla family, and takes an immediate shine to Will. Who, because this is Will and Hannibal, finds himself taking a shine right back. And all is rosy in Camp Hannigram, until Jack damn Crawford sticks his nose in (like always) and threatens Hannibal’s way of life. As befits the utterly gorgeous artwork, this fic is just lovely from start to finish. It features a particularly adorable version of Hannibal – the scenes in which he indulges his obsession with Will’s safari hat are nothing short of precious – and a charmingly earnest Will. It’s a simple, innocent bit of loveliness, which is rather refreshing in this dark and sophisticated fandom of ours XD.

(Also, if you’d like a little more Tarzan AU, this time with an A/B/O flavour, check out Hannizan by @hotsauce418, which is just pure filth and utterly wonderful with it XD.)

We, the common by @thelongcon23 (thelongcon): A retelling of the show (and beyond) in omegaverse style, this fic alternates masterfully between Hannibal and Will’s POVs as the omega becomes fascinated, obsessed, and ultimately falls in love with the alpha. The result is that while the course of events remains largely the same (Will still gets framed and gutted, and they still go over the cliff in each other’s arms), others change drastically (the way Will locates Hannibal in Florence, for instance, gets a very clever omegaverse twist). And their relationship after the fall? Well, I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never seen it go down quite like this before. If you’re looking for fluff, I suggest you go elsewhere, but if you’re after passion, intensity, and that terribly Hannigram sense that love and cruelty are not mutually exclusive, this is the fic for you. The writer has a firm grip on the characters’ voices and motivations and is uncompromising and incisive in their betrayal of both. This is not necessarily an easy read (particularly towards the end, when Hannibal gives Will a reckoning of his own) but it is a compelling and fascinating one.

Cookies by @desperatelyseekingcannibals (TigerPrawn): Now, those of you who are after some fluff, here’s some of the best around. Tiger’s non-cannibal AU is an absolute treat, full of emotional idiots, kick-ass women and a totally adorable kid (and I don’t say that lightly cos kid!fic ain’t my thing!). It all starts when Will accompanies his daughter Abigail as she goes door-to-door selling cookies for charity and finds himself face to face with the ever-so-handsome Doctor Lecter. And then somehow, before he knows it, Will is agreeing to a date in exchange for Hannibal buying all of Abby’s stock, and soon finding that he might have stumbled into a real relationship. Not that it’s smooth sailing, of course, this is still Hannigram we’re talking about! It is my deep and ardent belief that Hannibal dreams of being a romcom when it grows up and with this utterly charming, romantic, as-sweet-as-its-name-suggests fic, that dream is made a reality. Anyone who’s ever wanted to see Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter fall in love the old-fashioned way (you know, without all those annoying stints in prison and near-fatal injuries), treat yourself and read this fic. I guarantee it will melt even the most dark and twisted of hearts.

Picture Imperfect by @shiphitsthefan: Will Graham is a very special alpha – unlike many of his sex, he can be trusted not to turn into a hormonal animal around omegas. It’s how he’s made his career as a photographer. That is, right up until he’s in a room with concert harpsichordist Hannibal Lecter and everything goes to hell when they scent each other and can barely keep themselves from ripping their clothes off and bonding right there and then. Seems like they’re true mates and it’s only a matter of time before they give into their urges – so Will, being a decent and respectful alpha, has to get this courtship show on the road before that happens. Well, mostly before that happens. Given the UST inherent to the plot, this is every bit as intensely, stupidly hot as you’d hope, but it’s also a really clever, thoughtful exploration of the omegaverse concept, set in a ‘verse in which omegas are the ruling gender, a nice reversal of the usual a/b/o setup. Plus it has an almost indecently adorable version of Hannigram, in which progressive Will and traditionalist Hannibal attempt to conjoin their lives so that they can get on and shag already! Smart and sexy a/b/o is one of our fandom’s greatest strengths and this is truly just an exemplary version of it.

Space Invader II: A Very Darko Sequel by @devereauxsdisease: A sequel to the utterly wonderful Space Invader (and if you haven’t read it, I’m begging you, go remedy that this instant), this return to Dev’s Spacedogs ‘verse sees Adam and Nigel still ensconced in blissful coupledom. So blissful, in fact, that it’s making Darko wonder if he might want some of that relationship stuff for himself. Cue the appearance of a certain sassy lab tech last seen working for the FBI. That’s right, Beverly Katz is alive, in town and about to rock Darko’s world XD. This is just an utter joy to read, stuffed with Dev’s trademark mix of fantastic dialogue, heartfelt emotion and wickedly dirty jokes. And best of all is her way with the characters, all of whom are wonderfully loveable and who work beautifully together. I spent the whole fic marvelling at the way in which these disparate characters come together and feel like they were always meant to be that way – they make a lovely, entertainingly weird family and are never less than an utter delight to spend time with.

Forgemaster by @llewcie: Valhalla Enchanted by way of the Greek gods now, in this peerless piece of sweetness by the lovely Llew. Char and Ella are the new Dionysus and Aphrodite (in this ‘verse, the gods can retire and be replaced) and live like brother and sister, i.e. bickering, winding each other up, pushing each other’s buttons... They particularly like making bets, which winds up with Ella making Char agree to three dates with Hephaestus, being played in this fic by One Eye. Given that One Eye is unsociable, ragged, and constantly dirty from his forge, Char is less than impressed with his companion and says so… somewhat unfortunately within One Eye’s earshot. So when, despite himself, Char finds himself falling for the blacksmith god’s charms, he’s got a lot of work to do to convince One Eye that he’s worth the trouble! Llew has the charm turned up all the way to eleven in this gorgeously frothy, funny little comedy of errors, with a sweetly vain version of Char melting under the steadily growing appeal of One Eye’s gentle strength. If you need cheering up for any reason, this fic should be your first port of call.

Pure Imagination by @constructfairytales (beforethedawn and Destinyawakened): Stranger Things was one of my favourite shows last year (admittedly it’s no Hannibal, but what is?). It was smart and weird, and as an 80s baby it pressed every last one of my nostalgia buttons, from soundtrack to costume design. So, of course, it was with nothing but delight that I started this crossover AU, in which Will is police chief of the town where young Will Byers goes missing and Hannibal is the psychiatrist he brings in to counsel the traumatised community. And I wasn’t disappointed – this is a fantastic blend of Hannibal’s surreal romanticism with the full-on monstery weirdness of the ST ‘verse, with plenty of unexpectedly but pleasingly fluffy Hannigram at the centre of it. Though it follows the basic plot of ST, having Will and Hannibal involved inevitably shakes things up (Will’s empathy is given a brilliant twist) and predictable this certainly ain’t. Instead it’s fun, thrilling and playful, with at least one story development that genuinely had me on the edge of my seat. And did I mention the Hannigram? Cos, yeah, there’s no slow burn here. Our boys are goners from the second they meet and the intensity of their connection is all kinds of wonderful.

The Estate by @bokuno-jinsei: Amusingly, the tags on this fantastic fic eventually turn into a short plea for Will Graham to stop thinking so much (a plea which anyone who’s written the over-analytical little shit will know is hopeless). Fortunately, Will clearly paid no attention, and so we readers are treated to this charmingly introspective piece of canon divergence. So, Hannibal gets as far as sitting Will at the dinner table in Florence. But, before he can get out his bonesaw, he seemingly has second thoughts and so Will wakes some time later to find himself ensconced in the last place he expected to revisit – Lecter Castle. Where, he finds, Hannibal has decided to change the game between them: if Will agrees to see if they can live together, Hannibal will cease any attempts to change or influence Will. So the pair find themselves as the unlikeliest of roommates as Will wrestles with his demons, his desires and, inevitably, his feelings for Hannibal. Anybody who enjoys intense conversations, brewing sexual tension and Hannibal in waders (yes, really), step this way, you’re in for a treat.

Inevitable by Vulcanmi: I do adore canon divergence. And I have a weakness for prison fics (love Hannigram falling in love while incarcerated). So this fic is entirely my jam. It picks up in the second half of s3: Hannibal is in jail, Will is “happily” married to Molly, and Jack is still desperate to have his pet empath back on board to deal with the Tooth Fairy. Except in this ‘verse, Will decides not to give into Jack and remains with his family, far away from Baltimore. In order to make it up to his former boss, though, Will writes a letter to a certain inmate, suggesting that he offer his services where Will cannot. Of course, it’s not the last letter Will ends up sending to Hannibal. Not by a long shot. And we all know what happens once Will gives Hannibal an inch… (hey, I didn’t mean that kind of inch, you filthy perverts!). Though it starts out as an angsty exploration of Will’s determination to separate himself from Hannibal, somewhere along the way this fantastic fic transforms into a twisted yet adorable romcom, as our murder muffins confront their feelings and try to figure out whether there’s any version of the world in which they might be together. And, frankly, it’s an utter delight to read. One for those (*raises hand*) who like their hurt/comfort 20% hurt and 80% comfort.

Inside the Imitation by @belladonnaq (Belladonna_Q) with artwork by @reapersun: A confession. I’ve never seen The Thing (because I’m a scaredy-cat who doesn’t watch anything that could remotely be described as scary. “But Vic, isn’t Hannibal scary?” Yeah, yeah, I contain multitudes, now hush mango, I’m working). However, I’ve never let ignorance get between me and my Hannigram and so I jumped headfirst into the The Thing/Hannibal crossover which, fortunately, works utterly brilliantly with absolutely zero knowledge of the film. So, once again Jack Crawford finds reason to call upon the services of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. Except this time, it’s not in order to investigate the Minnesota Shrike, but a strange case with its roots in a decades-old tragedy in Alaska. Soon things turn weird and monstery and Will and Hannibal find themselves reluctantly (well, as ever, Will’s reluctant, Hannibal’s thrilled) investigating a burned-out government building with something truly frightening at its core. This is thrilling, clever and wonderfully creepy, a fantastic reframing of canon (especially the Hannigram) and tons of fun throughout. I have to admit, I did not see the twist coming in this fic (though that’s possibly because I’m a dim bulb when it comes to plot) and it was delivered brilliantly, turning everything on its head and upping the stakes for our beloved murder muffins. Oh, and make sure to check out @reapersun’s fabulous artwork that accompanies the fic, it’s staggeringly gorgeous.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Volume 2 by @fragile-teacup: A continuation of the marvellous The Spaces Between series, this picks up a little after volume one, with our boys enjoying Argentinian high society. Unfortunately, while the end of the previous instalment hinted at full-blown murder husbandry, it quickly turns out that Will and Hannibal haven’t quite sorted out their feelings to anyone’s satisfaction (you’re shocked, I can tell). Fortunately, we’re pretty much out of slow burn territory here and the idiots manage to get their act (mostly) together just in time for some ghosts to rear their perfectly-coiffed, millionairess heads and throw a spanner in the works. This sequel continues the achingly lovely tone of its predecessor, with romance a-plenty amongst bouts of emotional idiocy and bloodlust. It’s sweet and tender without compromising on the intensity and darkness of our beloved boys and builds their relationship with care and patience, allowing for a believable building of trust and love between them. It is, in other words, a treat to read in every way, so get yourself to ao3 and have at it!

As ever and always, if I’ve miscredited anyone or if there are bad links, please let me know and I’ll correct it ASAP. Happy reading, lovely fannibals!

#fic rec mega post #hannibal fic rec #hannigram fic rec #spacedogs fic rec #rare pairs fic rec #hannibal #hannigram #spacedogs #rare pairs

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theamishpirate · 7 years

Text

Tagged by @kajeaynart

Rules: Answer the questions and tag 20 blogs you want to get to know better.

♦ Nicknames: ♦ Amish, Joe Frangles, Frojangles, Spencer, and like twenty others but those are too close to my real name to mention so WHOOPS

♦ Star sign: ♦ Cancer

♦ Height: ♦ 6′1′’, 6′2′‘ if you count the poofy hair

♦ Time right now: ♦ 10:36 AM

♦ Last thing you googled: ♦ “st bernard hug” I NEEDED A GIF FOR REASONS

♦ Song stuck in my head: ♦ It’s been hopping around between “Cracked”, “Sing”, and “Ain’t Misbehavin’“, all by Pentatonix. I’ve been listening to that album a lot recently, and the songs there are really growing on me. I hope that they keep doing original songs as well as covers.

♦ Last movie I watched: ♦ The Lego Batman Movie. It was exactly what it said on the tin, and I couldn’t have been happier with it.

♦ Last TV show I watched: ♦ Mythbusters! It’s pretty much the only TV show I regularly watch nowadays. I am bad at TV

♦ What I’m wearing right now: ♦ PAX East t-shirt and robot pajama pants.

♦ When I created this blog: ♦ Mercy. My first post was in 2012, but it’s entirely possible I made my blog the year before that. I originally made this thing so I could more easily follow art blogs, and now look at me.

Remember kids: Don’t do blogs. Not even once.

♦ The kind of stuff I post: ♦ Most of what I do is character-related discussion, either for my own or other folks' characters. Lots of AUs, those are good for character studies. Also short stories that don’t belong on Sandy’s blogs, not to mention giveaways and fanart responses. I want to get more into posting game dev stuff. Expect more of that in the future.

♦ Do I get asks regularly?: ♦ Not very often, no. Most of what I get is when I ask folks for specific questions on things. I’ve tried reblogging memes in the past, but those generally haven’t gotten much response.

♦ Why did I choose my url: ♦ So, a long time ago, when my family was driving my brother to college, we passed through Amish country. Our mom told us how when the Amish want to stop a horse/mule/farm animal, they use “yarr” instead of “woah.” Given that this was the era of Pirate of the Carribean, it wasn’t long before we were imagining horse-drawn galleons, and the rest is history.

♦ Hogwarts House: ♦ Hufflepuff x 10,294,820,548,390,583

♦ Pokémon team: ♦ Current team in Sun: Dolly the Mudsdale, Angel the Arcanine, Nutwing the Decidueye, Waddles the Snorlax, Grunkle Rick the Toxapex, and Snowdrop the Ninetails.

♦ Favorite color(s): ♦ Reds and blues, browns can also be really nice. I really really like the gradients of sunset/sunrise skies and the sun through clouds too.

♦ Average hours of sleep: ♦ If I’m doing my job right, then 8ish. In reality, it tends more towards 6-7. But I’m getting better at it.

♦ Lucky number: ♦ 5

♦ Favorite characters: ♦ This is weird. I’ve never actually put much thought into a question like this. I can definitely pick out some favorite works, and say that the characters were one reason I liked those works, but it’s really hard for me to pick individual characters and say, “Yes, this is one of my favorites.”

Plus, I’m still getting over a cold, which isn’t great for thinking things through. :P

So, to cheat a lot a little bit, here some of my favorite works that I liked because of the characters: Polar Bear Cafe, Gravity Falls, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, 12 Angry Men, LotR, MLP, Owlboy, and many more I can’t think of right now.

♦ Dream job: ♦ Full time game developer/maker of rad stuff

♦ Number of blankets I sleep with: ♦ 3 in the winter, 2 in the transition-y season, and 1 in the summer. I prefer sleeping with big, heavy blankets, but the room has to be pretty cold for that to work out.

As for other blogs...how about @sleepisfornerds and @ponymaker?

#I think this is the first time I've ever been tagged in one of these #this was fun!#favorite character question aside #that one's going to bother me for a while #I'll get a better answer someday #someday when I am less sick

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christinesumpmg · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

christinesumpmg1 · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

mariasolemarionqi · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

fairchildlingpo1 · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

dainiaolivahm · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

rodneyevesuarywk · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes

mercedessharonwo1 · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

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!

http://ift.tt/2uhOGHK

#Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

0 notes