INBOX INSIGHTS, August 4, 2021: You Might Be the Problem, SEO and Social Media, New Manager Skills - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS, August 4, 2021: You Might Be the Problem, SEO and Social Media, New Manager Skills

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Sometimes, The Problem is You

I don’t know who needs to hear this but YOU MIGHT BE THE PROBLEM.

Who, me? No way!

Yes. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. Change requires people and people need to be on board. All too often, we are asked to make a change without enough information. When that happens, we stand in the way whether we realize it or not.

Let’s figure out why you’re the problem.

Sometimes, you don’t agree.
Sometimes, you don’t understand.
Sometimes, you’re afraid.
Sometimes, you don’t realize you’re afraid.
Sometimes, you’re a bottleneck.
Sometimes, you feel like being a pain in the butt.

I have been the problem on more than one occasion. In the future, I will be the problem again. It happens to everyone at some point.

Let’s use SEO as an example. Your manager comes to you and says “we need to improve organic search and it’s now your job to fix it.” A few questions might immediately spring to mind such as:

Why does it need to be fixed? Is it broken? Did I break it? Is that why I’m being told to fix it? Does that mean I wasn’t doing my job? How could I know if they didn’t tell me until now? Am I in trouble? Should I be worried? I don’t know if I have time to take on more? What if I say no? Can I say no?

We all have an inner monologue that is running and these are common reactions. This inner monologue can create confusion when presented with new information. We need to find a way to organize our thoughts and find answers.

So, how do you quiet that inner monologue and not be the problem that is standing in the way of change?

It’s ok to ask for more information. It is challenging to affect change if you don’t know why you’re doing it. Think about times when you asked “why” and the response was “because I said so.” I’m going to make a big assumption and guess that you didn’t feel especially motivated at that moment.

It’s good to have a quick and easy checklist of questions to refer to. If you consistently ask for this information you’ll find that people are more apt to provide it. You’ve set the expectation that there is information you need to move forward.

Some initial questions to ask might be:

What is the goal?
What is the measure of success?
What is the baseline?
Is this solely my responsibility or do I have other resources?
How high of a priority is this initiative?
How quickly are improvements expected?

You might not have control over what is being asked of you but you do have complete control over how you react. Getting clarity and asking questions will ensure that you’re not part of the problem. It will ensure that you’re part of the solution. Have questions or a story to share? Connect with me in our free Slack group!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris answer a listener question: what are the most important skills or things to know when you become a new manager? What are some of the major obstacles that individual contributors face when finding themselves in a management role? Tune in to find out some of the mistakes each has made, plus ways to avoid those missteps in your own career, regardless of where you are in your career progression.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show, we looked at content marketing analytics basics. What should you be measuring in your content?

Watch/listen to this episode of So What? here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’ll be diving into the basics of natural language processing. If you’ve ever wondered what the big deal is, tune in to learn the very basics! Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Need a reminder?

Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, we revisit an age-old question: does Facebook popularity have any influence over SEO? To find out, we need data from both sources. With our friends at Talkwalker and the Moz API, we took a look at more than 20,000 web pages.

Our key outcome, highlighted in the red boxes, is equity-passing links – links to the web page from other websites. Equity-passing links are still the gold standard when it comes to a page’s likelihood to rank well. We see the highest correlation between equity-passing links and linking domains, which makes logical sense; a link has to come from a domain. We see smaller, less statistically relevant relationships with Moz’s in-house metrics like page authority, MozRank, MozTrust, and domain authority, indicating those measures may not necessarily be the best measures of a page’s likelihood to rank well.

However, the goods are where we look at the relationship between equity-passing links, Facebook Likes, and Facebook Shares. At 0.11 and 0.12 respectively (for the stats friends, these are Spearman correlations), this indicates there’s no statistically meaningful relationship between a page doing well on Facebook and a page’s ability to earn equity-passing links.

Here’s the key takeaway: just because something does well on Facebook doesn’t mean it’ll do well in Google Search. Don’t make the mistake of conflating your social media and SEO strategies; they’re separate and distinct and should be treated as such.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 21,531 articles in the English language targeting the word “the” in the title or content from Talkwalker, then extracted key SEO metrics from the Moz API. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2021 – August 1, 2021, 2021. The date of study is August 4, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed.

Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.

This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Data Science and AI

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

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In this 90-minute on-demand workshop, learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey. You’ll learn:

How to build a KPI map
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Basics of centrality, distribution, regression, and clustering
Essential soft skills
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Where can you find us in person?

MAICON, September 2021, virtual
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Content Marketing World, September 2021, Cleveland, OH
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2021, virtual

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