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 50+ factors that affect a website's search engine placement.

Here are the top 10 factors that positively affect your search engine rankings: (We go over each one in detail below.)

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Here's each of the top 10 search engine ranking factors, with easy-to-understand explanations and actionable tasks you can apply today.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag

In Laymen's Terms: Include the search keywords you are targeting in your webpage's title tag.

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titles.
- Christine Churchill

The title tag (or "meta title") is the text that appears at the top of your browser window. Think of it as the title for the webpage. The meta title is also what is displayed as a link in search results.

In the HTML code, the meta title is the text between the <title> tags. For example, the meta title of this article looks like this in the HTML code:

<title>Improve Search Engine Rankings - Top 10 Tips to Improve Search Engine Rankings</title>

Your Action: Use the search keywords you're targeting in every webpage's title tag. Have a customized title for each page; don't be lazy and use the same title for every page on your site.

If you have a brochureware website designed by a Web designer, when you give the designer your text copy for each page, you should also provide a custom title for each page.

For WordPress users, you can install the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin. It lets you modify the title tag of each blog posts.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links

In Laymen's Terms: When other sites link to your webpages, how do they describe the link?

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is 'about'.
- Mike McDonald

The anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. (In the last sentence, the words "anchor text" is the anchor text of the link.)

Looking at how other websites link to you (ie., what they use for the anchor text) tells Google how people are describing your content.

Your Action: When you email other websites to promote your content, mention your preferred anchor text if they choose to link to your site. You won't always get what you ask for, but it never hurts to ask. And there's a big payoff if you can get other sites to use the search keywords you're targeting when they link to you.

Choose anchor text that helps your website/page rank better for your targeted keywords. For example, if I were to ask for a link to this article, I would ask for anchor text that says something like "Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors". That anchor text tells search engines that the link goes to a page about "search engine ranking" -- the search keywords that I would love to have this article rank prominently.

That anchor text is better than "the most awesome article ever written". While it would be interesting to see which anchor text generates more clicks from human surfers, there is no doubt that the keyword-rich version of the anchor text would help this article's ranking in search results much more than the keyword-less version.

3. Global Link Popularity of Site

In Laymen's Terms: How many other websites are linking to your site?

I am a strong believer that a sites overall link popularity drastically effect rankings.
- Neil Patel

In general, the more inbound links to your website, the better it is for you. Every inbound link is a "vote" for your site. If lots of other websites link to you, search engines conclude that lots of people find your content useful or interesting. That makes your webpage rank higher than a similar page with fewer inbound links.

But remember that quantity is not the whole game. As we continue to look at the top 10 search ranking factors, note that the quality and relevance of those inbound links matter greatly.

Your Action: Make link building -- the practice of getting more inbound links to your site -- a central part of your online marketing strategy.

4. Age of Site

In Laymen's Terms: The older your website, the better.

I believe it's always had some importance and within the past two years, aging has taken on more signifigance in the ranking factors.
- Scottie Claiborne

Older sites have more weight than newer sites. The age of a website is hard to fake. Plus, search engines figure that if your site has been around for so long, it's probably better than a brand new site.

Your Action: Start today. Be patient. The hard work you put in now to optimize your website may not payoff until next year. The good news is that after next year, you'll have a leg up on new competition.

5. Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure

In Laymen's Terms: How prominent is the webpage within your own site?

Without the proper linking structure, certain pages may not get enough emphasis. For example, ... links directly from the homepage usually do really well.
- Neil Patel

The more prominently you feature a particular page on your site, the more weight search engines will give it.

Your Action: Showcase your best content or the webpage you most want to highlight. Put it in your main navigation menu or link to it from your homepage.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site

In Laymen's Terms: Are the sites linking to you related to your topic (and targeted keywords)? The more relevant, the more weight those links are given.

I think, in a perfect algorythm, relevance matters. Whether Google has figured out how to pull it off yet or not, I don't know but I do believe that is the ultimate goal. Whether they get more "weight" or not, relevant links are good business and help with rankings as well.
- Scottie Claiborne

All of your neighbours have a wide variety of thematic inbound link text from a wide variety of topical sites. You have the same anchor text from your unrelated porn/pills/casino link farm. Chances are a search engine can instantly spot you as a 'deviant' from the norm and flag you as having an unnatural inbound linking pattern.
- Lucas Ng (aka shor)

This factor is similar to #2 (anchor text of inbound links). How other sites link to you matter. For example, if you have a site about chess

Your Action: Relevance matters. Focus your link building efforts on sites within your topical niche.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

In Laymen's Terms: How popular is the site that is linking to you? Especially withing your niche.

A niche site may not have a high quantity of links but a few links from the 'authorities' in the neighbourhood is often enough to rank the site above the authorities for niche-related keywords. The authoritative sites are telling the search engines "Hey, we're voting for this site for these niche (anchor text) keywords".
- Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Your Action: Relevance and authority matter. For #6, we said you should focus your link building efforts on sites within your topical niche. This factor says you should prioritize your link building on getting links from the biggest of the relevant sites.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text

In Laymen's Terms: Within the webpage/article, how often and what keywords being used? How relevant is your article to target keywords?

It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. As engines get more sophisticated, it's not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.
- Scottie Claiborne

Your Action: Use the search keywords and phrases you're targeting throughout your page or article.... when it makes sense. Don't cram so many keywords in the article that Google penalizes you for keyword stuffing.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

In Laymen's Terms: Links from big websites (ie., sites that have lots of inbound links) are worth more than links from smaller sites.

I like links that are linked to by many sites. I think there's a big difference between a PR6 site with 20,000 links and a PR 6 with 500 inbounds.
- Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Your Action: Focus your marketing efforts on the biggest, most authoritative sites. Think of it this way -- it's better to get one link from a big site (like About.com) than to get 10 links from 10 small sites (like personal blogs).

10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

In Laymen's Terms: Relevance matters. Links from a webpage that is related to your page's content are worth more than links from random, unrelated sites.

All links help - on topic helps a lot more overall.
- Todd Malicoat

Your Action: Relevance matters (again). Focus your link building efforts on sites within your niche. And if you can help it somehow, try to get links on specific webpages within a site that's even more relevant.

Analyze the Full Survey

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey - SEOMoz

The results of the full survey are very interesting. We've only scratched the surface with our discussion of the top 10 most influential search ranking factors. This survey represents the most authoritative and comprehensive collection of knowledge about Google's search algorithm. (Outside the company, of course.)

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz:

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.

Matt Cutts: Write Clear, Understandable Content

As webmasters, it's constantly drilled into us that quality content is key as part of an SEO strategy. But when it comes to more technical content, how should you handle it?

Should your content be geared toward a higher, more specialized reading level, or should it be written in such a way that novices on the topic can understand? This is the topic of the latest webmaster help video featuring Google's Matt Cutts.

Many webmasters are hyper analyzing their content lately to ensure that however they present the content and readiness is going to rank the best in Google. But how can you find this balance between super technical writing and writing aimed at the general public who might be interested in the topic but don't have knowledge behind it to understand the more complex discussion or vocabulary?

Cutts began by sharing what is likely a familiar scenario for many. You end up at Wikipedia trying to find background information on a topic, but it's either way too technical or simply not understandable.

"So you see this sort of revival of people who are interested in things like 'explain it to me like I'm a 5-year-old'," Cutts said. "You don't have to dumb it down that much. but if you're erring on the side of clarity, and on the side of something that's going to be understandable, you'll be in much better shape because regular people can get it, and then ... feel free to include the scientific terms or the industry jargon, the lingo, or whatever it is."

It seems Cutts believes you should strive to strike the right balance between technical writing while still ensuring that the average person can understand it.

"You need to find some way to pull people in, to get them interested, to get them enticed to try to pick up whatever concept it is you want to explain," Cutts said. "So I would argue, first and foremost, you need to explain it well, and then if you can manage to do that while talking about the science or being scientific, that's great."

Cutts said that how you explain a topic often matters almost as much as what you're actually saying.

"If you're saying something important but you can't get it across, then sometimes you never get across in the first place, and it ends up falling on deaf ears," he said.

What about if your target audience is a group of people that are industry professionals or have the same sites reference you? You don't necessarily want to alienate that audience because you dumb it down too much for the general public.

But on the other hand, you want your content to be approachable by the masses, because that opens you to a much wider audience than the smaller group of technical people you might currently target.

Sometimes it's about finding a balance or writing for two different audiences with different content for each.

"If you're only talking to industry professionals, exterminators were talking about the scientific names of bugs, and your audience is only exterminator experts, then that would make sense" Cutts said. "But in general I will try to make something is natural sounding as possible."

He also suggested a tried-and-true techniques that many people have used for years: reading your content aloud. Often you can pick up the little mistakes or the awkward sounding parts, such as excessive use of keywords, when you read it out loud.

"When I'm writing a blog post, I'll sometimes read it out loud to try to catch what the snags are, and where things are going to be unclear," Cutts said. "Anything you do like that you'll end up with more polished writing, and that's more likely to stand the test of time."

Bottom line, don't focus on being so technical that you're excluding a lot of the audience that might want to learn more about your topic, but just can't understand it because you're not explaining it well.

Is Chasing AuthorRank A Waste Of Time For SEOs?

On June 7, 2011, Google announced support for a new type of markup called the Authorship Tag. This was the rel=”author” tag. It did not take long before the speculation started — when would Google start using data from this new tag to impact rankings?

The industry took to referring to this concept as AuthorRank. Note that Google never uses this term, and they continue to talk only about “Authorship.”

However, Google has continued to fan the flames with periodic comments on this topic, the most famous of which came from Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt in his book The New Digital Age:

What Is The Reality Of AuthorRank?

It is still not clear that Google has done anything with this yet. There are many that claim AuthorRank is already a ranking factor, and occasionally, we hear someone offering proof. The short form of this “proof” is that a one-year-old post had rel=author tagging added (which incorrectly attributed the post to Rand Fishkin) and suddenly the post shot up from a 9 to 12 ranking range to number 1.

Must be AuthorRank, right? However, Stone Temple Consulting’s Mark Traphagen summarized the challenges with this example well in his comment on the post:

To add to some of the other comments indicating that this test lacked a few controls I’d like to see before I would accept “Aha! Author Rank!”  your interview has been online for almost a year now. We’ve seen other cases where making any change to an older post, but especially adding Authorship, can cause Google to re-crawl the post, and in so doing perhaps pick up other signals or relevancies that it hadn’t before.

The fact is these types of stories are rare, creating a far greater likelihood that there is “nothing to see here” than that we should exclaim, “Aha! Author Rank!”

In addition, in December, we saw Google take some visible action based on an author-trust-like basis. This was when they started removing photos in some cases for people who had correctly implemented Authorship. What makes this interesting is two things:

1. It was the first obviously tangible and visible action based on Authorship
2. There was no ranking-based action as part of it

To me, this is a clear indication that they are not yet ready to do more. You can read Mark Traphagen’s comprehensive commentary on this here.

Implementation Problems

A lot of people get the implementation of Authorship wrong. Consider this result from the Huffington Post:

The Authorship photo is missing! Looking a bit closer at the HTML for this article, there is no markup related to Google Plus on the article page. You can +1 the article, but there is nothing that points to her author profile. You do find the following tag on her Author Page:

Nowhere does her content include a proper rel=author tagging. Note that the rel=”me” tag we saw on her author page is a holdover from the process for implementing rel=author using the method originally announced by Google, which was called the 3 link method. I won’t recount it all here, but suffice it to say that the markup is broken. The acid test is this output from Google’sStructured Data Testing Tool:

This shows that major publishers can make mistakes with this tagging. It obviously is not moving the needle for them, or else they would have already fixed it. Google is prone to errors, too. Here is an example from a little over a year ago:

Looks like Authorship is showing up just fine, right? Trouble is, I didn’t write the article, Stephan Spencer did. To make matters even more interesting, the rel=author markup attributing that article to Stephan was 100% correct, and Google credited it to me, anyway!

Why is this so hard? The web is a complex place. There are many who don’t bother to implement rel=author tags, including famous authors. There are others who get it wrong, or had it right for a while, and then break it. Finally, Google itself makes mistakes.

The bottom line is that Google would love it if there could be a ranking signal here, but it is just not easy for them to do.

The Other Elephant In The Room — PublisherRank

There is one more part to this story. On August 6, 2013, Google announced a new feature calledIn-Depth Articles. Here is an example result for a search on “history of world war 2″:

Like many, my initial impulse was that this was tangible evidence of the quality of the published content. But a quick examination tells us that this is not AuthorRank. Instead, this feature seems to be much more closely related to the authority of the publisher. You can think of this as PublisherRank if you like (though Google does not use this term, either).

Even so, this is a pretty niche application, and these results always sit at the bottom of the first page of the SERPs, even now, more than six months after its initial release. Who a publisher is seems much easier to track, to me, and yet this new feature appears to have a minimal footprint in the SERPs.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Here is the real question: even if Google had much better Authorship data, would using it as a ranking factor improve the search results? This is a far harder question to answer than you might think. This does not mean that Google does not use it, or won’t use it at all. Consider what Google’s John Mueller said on this Google Plus Discussion:

Earlier in the same thread, he also said: “Even if there’s never a direct ranking effect, it’s not bad to be known to create great content.” That tells the story right there. So, Google does something with it, but it does not appear to be ranking related, as this time.

My own prediction is that we will see some more tinkering with niche scenarios like In-Depth Articles. These may continue to be driven more by Publisher Authority than Author Authority, or perhaps we will even see something author specific.

Ultimately, it is all only a curiosity to me, and that is all it should be for you, too. Chasing the notion of AuthorRank can only lead you to behavior which will run counter to what Google wants to see and detect, anyway. It is a fool’s errand, and I urge you to not do it.

Instead, step back, and imagine what you would do if there were no Google or Bing. If search engines suddenly became illegal, you’d be really happy if you had built your reputation online in a big way.

Maybe someday, clear signs of a real AuthorRank will emerge, and that could be pretty interesting, but I suspect that any impact in the near future will be subtle and small. However, if I am wrong and the impact is big, guess how Google will design the algorithm — to reward those who focused on their brand and reputation all along.

Google Started Showing Restaurant Menus As Well! Google Restaurant Isinede Girdi

That Google menus experiment we told you about a couple weeks ago?

It’s now official. But it’s only available in the U.S. at the moment.

Google announced that it’s now showing restaurant menus as a OneBox-style answer at the top of its search results. It seems to be primarily triggered by searches that involve both the restaurant name and the word “menu,” although Google’s example involves a query that starts with “show me the menu for….”

The menu OneBox shows multiple food options and is divided into different categories, depending on how the individual restaurants (or chains) organize their menu. You’ll typically see tabs such as lunch, dinner, entreés, sandwiches and the like.

There’s actually more that we don’t know about the menus than we do. For example:

• Where is Google getting the menu details? It seems to be from sites like AllMenus.com and Gayot.com, but there’s no official list.
• Has Google made a deal with its sources to show the menus, or is it just scraping that information?
• What should a restaurant do if it wants its menu showing like this?
• What if it doesn’t want its menu showing this way for some reason? (It’s outdated, for example.)
• How often will Google be updating the menu information?

We’ve put some of these questions to our contacts at Google, but since it’s Friday evening, we may not get a reply immediately.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson told us the data for these menus come from a 3rd party data provider. Here is Google’s statement:

We get all of our menu data from a partner, similarly to how we show other types of answers, like weather. As our data comes from a 3rd party provider, we cannot add menus for individual restaurants directly, but we are constantly working to expand our database of menus and restaurants.

How Your Salary Compares to Online Marketers Across the World

A short time ago, Moz released the 2014 Industry Survey results. We collected data from over 3,700 marketers spanning more than 80 countries around the globe.

Thanks to new analysis tools from Survey Monkey we are able to slice the data many different ways to gain insight into the demographics, tools, and tactics of online marketers living everywhere. One popular data set we wanted to examine in detail is the salaries of online marketers.

Transparency in salary data helps everyone make better decisions, and knowing the factors most associated with changes in salary can help you advance your career.

The average salary of online marketers

If you include all 3,700 respondents in our analysis, we arrive at a average salary calculated from the midpoint of the survey ranges:

Note that the almost half the respondents, or 49.1%, were from the United States, which greatly influences this number.

Things start to get interesting when we break down salaries by country. Here are the average salaries of the countries with the highest number of survey participants. All salaries are converted to US dollars.

Australia leads the pack in online marketing salaries, with the United States close behind. (For many countries, the number of responses were too few to draw a conclusion with any statistical confidence. For example, the data shows Japanese marketers are very well paid, but only three marketers from Japan responded to the survey.)

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Update: In the comments below, marketers from India have indicated the figure of $26,724 seems way too high for that country. It's certainly possible, as the the lowest option on the survey was $0-$30,000, and we used the midpoint of that range for calculation.

Apparently, the salary buckets we designed with our mostly Western audience are not one-size-fits-all.

Here is the raw data for India only, which might paint a more accurate picture.

Answer Options	Response Percent	Response Count
< $30000	63.2	134
$30,000-45,000	9.9	21
$45,000-60,000	3.8	8
$60,000-75,000	1.9	4
$75,000-100,000	1.4	3
$100,000-150,000	0.9	2
$150,000-250,000	0	0
> 250000	0.9	2
I'd rather not say	17.9	38

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Salary by role / job title

We also broke down salary by the specific field and job title the marketer worked in. No surprise, engineers commanded the highest salary, closely followed by user experience professionals.

It's unfortunate to see web designers and social media professionals make less than the average salaries. These are extremely valuable roles that often garner outsized returns in company investment. Hopefully the perception of the value of these jobs begins to change.

What is surprising is to see SEO and content professionals in the middle-lower portion of the pack.

It appears that the more skills you add to your toolkit, and the more you become a T-shaped marketer, the higher your long-term earning potential.

Salary by years of experience and age

If there is one factor that seems more closely tied to your earning level than any other, it's the number of years of experience that you have.

Folks working over 10 years in the industry blew everyone else out of the water. This trend was consistent across all job types and all countries examined. The longer you have worked in the field, the more you make.

Another consistent earnings trend is age. Simply put, older online marketers tend to have higher salaries than younger folks, who presumably have less experience on average.

The survey did have a couple of respondents under the age of 18 who reported earning more than $100,000 per year. Although we have every reason to believe their claim, we lacked enough data points to make a confident conclusion.

The gap: salary by gender

Although women have made great progress in joining the ranks of online marketers, as an industry we still have a ways to go in terms of pay equality.

For reference, the number of female respondents in 2014 was 28%, up from 21% when we ran the survey in 2012.

On average, those same women earned more than $10,000 less in salary than their average counterparts.

When we compare men and women by how long they've worked in the industry, a pattern starts to emerge which might help explain the gap.

The chart below graphs percentage of all men and women against years of experience. While online marketing is still a male-dominated industry, in the past the imbalance was even worse. Hence, for today at least, more men have more years of experience behind them.

If this explained it, we would expect women and men to earn roughly equal salaries for equal years of experience. In reality, this isn't true.

While women marketers with between 1-3 years of experience actually earn slightly more than their male counterparts, the salary gap increases dramatically as the years of experience rise.

As the chart below shows, a male marketer with between 5-10 years of experience earns an average of $15,000 more than a female with the same amount of experience. The gap grows even larger with 10 or more years experience to an amazing $30,000 difference between men and women.

Let's hope these numbers start to shift, especially with the increasing number of women now entering the field. It's hopeful to see the younger generation actually pull ahead of male salaries in many areas.

Salary by education

How much does formal education play a role in your salary?

Hopefully not much, when you consider that one of our founders dropped out of college just two classes before graduation.

While having a doctoral degree pays off (hat tip to Dr. Pete), the benefit of having a master's degree compared to a 4-year degree is almost nothing. This is an industry were the successful are largely self-taught, and most people continue to learn by experience, which is likely why experience seems to play such a heavy role in compensation levels.

In the future, as more colleges and learning institutions offer programs in online marketing, we may see a time when a person's degree plays a more significant role in salary potential than it does today.

More data than you can poke a stick at

This is only a small sampling of the data we collected for the 2014 Industry Survey.

For anyone who wants to run their own analysis, Moz has made the complete data set available under a Creative Commons license. You are free to use it for research to slice and dice any way you choose.

Download Raw Data

You can see a great example of this from the folks at Digital 22, who put together this breakdown of online marketing salaries in the UK using the survey data.

Now, let's go ask for a raise.

Social Engagement Metrics That Matter - Measuring, Tracking, and Reporting FTW

Let's be real here, measuring your social efforts is a pain in the butt. I mean, there are tons of metrics to track, and data to look at, but actually knowing if you're making an impact to the organization, that's a bit trickier. Right? It's simple to track followers and see which platforms send you traffic, but how do you know that you're meeting your goals? How do you make sure everyone understands social's impact on the organization?

Follower counts are boooooooring.

These are the types of questions I often hear when people are grasping with "proving their worth" or getting management and other team members on board with making social a focus. It's so easy to get caught up in doing the things, that you sometimes forget to measure and understand why the things need to be done.

Today I want to walk you through the process we use here at Moz for measuring our social efforts. This is a process we're constantly working to improve, and we have just recently added new metrics and changed our goals a bit. It's something that you don't do once, then set aside.

Social Media Goals

Before I dig into the specific metrics, it's important to take a look at your business goals. At Moz, we use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system throughout the organization. This helps to ensure that we're all measuring things in a similar way and that we're all working toward meeting and impacting the company's overall objectives.

Since social media is pretty top-of-the-funnel, you'll often have goals around increasing engagement and traffic to your site, or growing community and improving customer service, and not as much around increasing sales or subscriber numbers. Moz has always been a very customer/community-centered organization, so while the community team will always be focused on customer service and expanding the community, on a quarterly basis we additionally focus on helping to meet the goals of the marketing team as a whole.

Let's take a look at one of these examples:

Marketing Objective: Increase Site Traffic, Engagement, and Customer Flow through Site Funnel

Key Result: Improve Non-paid traffic to the site from all sources by 25% by end of Q2

Social roadmap: Increase engagement with community by 5% on Social channels in order to increase traffic from social by 15%

Engagement Metrics That Matter

Ok, so you know how you want to use social media to reach goals for your organization. Engagement is a great goal, because it can impact the business by increasing traffic, growing brand awareness, talking with community members, showing your voice. But "engagement" isn't a simple number like followers. It's a fuzzy word we like to use to mean "interactions with your brand." Plus, every social channel is completely different, and engagement isn't the same for each, so how can you measure it? On top of that, how are you going to gather all the information? Which tools will you use, or do you have to go to each network to grab the info?

But what if I told you that actually all the social networks (including your blog!) really do have the same engagement metrics? Several years ago, Avinash Kaushik wrote a post where he touts the best social media metrics are Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic value.

We've adopted this method of engagement tracking, and actually use this not only for our social sites, but also for engagement on the blog and in other areas of the site. Let me explain what each of these means for different platforms, and how they're really all the same. :)

Conversation rate – This one is fairly straightforward in that it's based on the number of conversations per post. On Twitter, this is replies to a tweet, or on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, it's a comment on the pin, post, or photo.

Amplification rate – Any time a post is retweeted or re-shared, it's being amplified. All the networks allow you to do this, so think of this one as the number of re-pins, retweets, or reshares of a particular post.

Applause rate – Every social network out there has an "easy" touch point to show appreciation, or applause, if you will. Twitter has favorites, Facebook has likes, Google+ has plusses, heck even most blogs (such as our own) have thumbs up or up-votes. So the applause rate is based on the number of "likes" each post gets.

Economic value – This is the sum of short- and long-term revenue and cost savings. Now, I have to be honest, we don't have the economic value part all worked out yet for the community side of things yet. But it will be a focus over the next few months to have things set up correctly.

Relative Engagement Rates – This is something that actually gets me all giddy. :D So, you have all these engagement metrics, but what do those numbers even mean? How can you compare the conversation rate on Facebook with the conversation rate on Instagram? This is where the relative rates come in, think of it as the average number of conversations happening per post, per follower (fan, encircle, etc.).

Think about it this way, using the relative engagement rates, you can start to compare followers to followers on different networks. Now, Facebook and Twitter (or Pinterest, or G+, or Instagram, etc.) are obviously not the same, but if you can determine the engagement rate per follower, per channel, you can then work to improve those rates accordingly.

This way, when you increase your follower count, you can also focus on sustaining (which is actually an improvement all on its own) or improving the engagement rate per follower. So you can show your boss or client, that not only have you increased followers, you've also increased engagement per follower. And at this point, the traffic to the site from social has probably increased as well.

Ok, these numbers aren't rocket science, and honestly they're not that hard to get, I mean it's mostly math. But the very smart folks over at TrueSocialMetrics have made it super easy on all of us by essentially creating the tool that Avinash pleaded for in his initial post. (Also, bravo on seeing a need and making it happen!)

How to track them

As I mentioned previously, you could go about grabbing these numbers on your own and calculating them by hand… but why in the world would you do that when TrueSocialMetrics has already done all the work for you?

Your first step is to run over to TrueSocialMetrics and sign up for a free account. With the free plan you get 12 social networks and a month of data history. I personally prefer the "small" plan which is only $30/month and gives you a year of data history. (FYI, we have no affiliation with them, we're just a happy customer!)

Once you sign up, you'll add connections to all your social networks, including your blog, and then start calculating the data right away. The initial dashboard looks something like this:

Holy numbers, Batman! Remember, right now we're just at the point of tracking the data, we'll make this look a bit prettier in the next step.

Here at Moz, we capture our metrics on a weekly basis, and then send a monthly email to the entire staff, showing how we did during the previous month. We've toyed with a number of ways to show this data, and make it clear what's moving the needle.

Every Monday morning, Megan logs into TrueSocialMetrics and grabs the following numbers for each channel for the previous week, and adds them to our spreadsheet:

• Posts
• Replies
• Shares/RTs
• Favorites/Likes/Plusses
• Conversation Rate
• Amplification Rate
• Applause Rate
• Channel Growth
• Visits from each channel

What I like about this is that you're essentially using this for data storage, and anyone can do it. It's not a method that only one person knows how to do, it's a simple process of adding numbers to a spreadsheet. Then you'll make something a bit easier to digest that you send around to the rest of the team, or to your client.

How to report it

Having the data and doing something with the data are two different things. Not only do you need to use the information to help meet your goals, but there are always other folks who are dying to know the ROI of what you do each day. So how can you take these metrics, and report them to the team in a way that is easily digestible? In a way that shows performance over time and helps everyone understand what's going on from a social perspective.

Community action plan

The first thing we did, was to create a Community Action Plan, which is a quick and easy way to see where we're at with reaching our goals at any given time. It shows our weekly KPIs, the baseline for each metric, the percent increase for this current period, our goal by the end of the period, and where we're at with that goal.

On a weekly basis we grab the data, throw it in the spreadsheet, and then our action plan magically shows us how we're doing against our goals. I <3 magic.

You can download a sample version of spreadsheet that we use for this here:

Sample Social Media Action Plan

Monthly email

In addition to having this easy-to-read dashboard, we also send out a monthly email to the entire staff which shows our engagement rates over the past six months, traffic from the social channels, as well as a few other community metrics we look at that aren't social specific. We lovingly call this email the "Community Chronicle." :)

Here's a taste of what it looks like this:

Notice the downward spiral of Facebook engagement and traffic, while Twitter continues to soar? This is a trend we've been noticing for the past few months, ever since Facebook made some algo changes to their feeds that shows less and less updates from brands. *insert sad face here*

But this is exactly the kind of trend we want to know about, so we can react to it. We've been testing various ways of increasing engagement on Facebook, and we've seen a slight up-tick. We'll all surely be watching this over the next few months to see if we can get those numbers back up organically, or if we'll be forced to pay the man! The Facebook man that is.

What's next?

Well, now it's your turn to take action. Capturing the data is the easy part, the tough part is to do something with it. You'll need to decipher the trends, determine when to make changes, what works, and what doesn't work. Since it can be different for every organization, I'd love to see how you set up your action plans and if you add other metrics to it. If you do create one, send it over, I'll add a link in this post.

Social media can be a tough one to explain to the boss/client, but it doesn't have to be. Put it into simple terms and track it over time. Let me know how it goes!