Here at 97th Floor, elevating brands we believe in is part of our culture. In light of this, I thought it would be fun to analyze the digital marketing of a brand whose product I like and am very familiar with and really enjoy. That brand is YNAB.
What Is YNAB?
YNAB stands for You Need a Budget and when answering the question, "what is YNAB?", it's important to understand what YNAB does. It is a computer program used for budgeting and tracking expenses. The software takes a different approach from tools like Mint, which focus on pulling all of your bank accounts and credit/debit card transactions into one place where you can categorize and review transactions after they happen. This reactive approach works for many people and was actually my tool of choice before I discovered YNAB.
YNAB takes an opposite, more proactive approach to finances. By educating users on how to properly plan where each dollar will go, while also providing the technology to track spending, YNAB puts people in charge of their finances. A couple of years ago, a colleague mentioned it to me in a conversation and I’ve used it ever since. It is incredible for keeping track of spending and overall being on top of your finances.
But this isn’t an advertisement. If you want to know more about the program, YNAB has an excellent intro to the finer details here. For now, I’d like to take a step back from what YNAB can do, and instead focus on the digital marketing side of things.
For a while, I’ve wanted to dig into YNAB’s online marketing efforts to see what gems I could offer them as a “here’s to YNAB” type toast. As I dug deeper, I realized that YNAB has done an incredible job in building a devout YNAB community online. It is a difficult task to create a cult-like following (which I mean in the most positive sense) around your product. YNAB has created thousands of YNAB ambassadors by leveraging communities on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media sites, and through effective email campaigns.
But while YNAB is doing great things in the community building space, I want to shift the focus to what they could be doing with organic digital marketing to reach even more people and add another channel to fuel their community. For this post, the focus will largely be on SEO-related potential.
To begin, let's take a look at where YNAB is at organically. YNAB ranks for 6,069 keywords in the top 50 results as per Ahrefs. Again, one thing that is immediately apparent is how great of a brand YNAB has built (I’ll probably echo this many times throughout the post). Its brand search for the keyword “YNAB” generates around 130,000 monthly searches alone. Add the rest of its branded keywords and you have a very substantial amount of branded organic traffic.
YNAB also ranks for many non-branded keywords, albeit not nearly as well. There are many opportunities to push up these peripheral keywords so that they bring in significantly more search volume. We’ll get into this in greater detail further down in the analysis.
Part of YNAB’s building such a strong brand is due to leveraging the passionate following that surrounds the online financial niche. Some of the biggest communities on Reddit, like r/financialindependence, are related to finances, such as the following:
Reddit.com/r/personalfinance - 10,235,956 subscribers
Reddit.com/r/frugal - 628,703 subscribers
Reddit.com/r/financialindependence - 183,573 subscribers
The YNAB online community has done an excellent job siphoning traffic from these various subreddits into their own YNAB Reddit community (Reddit.com/r/ynab). The YNAB Reddit community, or subreddit, has over 30k subscribers. Many subreddits are created and die before they ever get enough users to sustain growth—the Reddit.com/r/budgetfirst/ subreddit, which was created by a group of YNAB Reddit users after YNAB switched to a subscription-based model, is one such example.
Despite the challenge of creating a sustainable reddit community, YNAB has managed to create a community that not only wants to be more involved in the YNAB ecosystem, but also help others in their pursuit to financial freedom. Gotta say, 30k hungry brand ambassadors is never a bad thing to have.
Ahrefs indicates that YNAB is increasing in referring domains quite healthily. The data below raises the question: where is YNAB getting their links from?
One thing I found right away, is that YNAB has some great links on what I like to call “feeder sites.” “Feeder sites” are sites that have content that is syndicated by many other large publications. Finding valuable feeder sites can be immensely powerful for SEO due to the amount and the quality of links that can be obtained.
Below is an example of what this feeder process looks like that YNAB has benefitted from.
An article was placed on the Reader’s Digest’s site, RD.com, entitled “34 Little Life Skills Everyone Needs to Be a Grown-Up.” RD.com is a feeder site to MSN.com as well as a handful of smaller sites. You can see that MSN.com syndicated the same article here. This means that for the effort of creating one very high-quality post, you can net a handful of links, sometimes from some large publications. This can be immensely powerful, and can lead to great jumps in increased rankings,
In the last few months, YNAB has received links like these:
And this is honestly only naming a few of the total links built recently.
YNAB is in a great position. It has the benefit of being able to target money-management communities with its methodology while at the same time targeting sites that focus on cell phone apps. This widens the targetable audience for the amount of websites YNAB can get links from. More links equal more authority, and when properly used, convert into better rankings and more traffic.
YNAB gets numerous mentions on both large and small publications. It is in the great position of garnering many mentions through its thousands of devoted fans. Typically, sites struggle with gaining more authority, therefore, they need a lot of high quality and well-targeted link building.
One note, however, is that many of the specific blog posts on YNAB’s site don’t get as much link love as the core YNAB pages (homepage, feature page, etc.). YNAB would benefit from additional links to their established blog posts, as well as to new posts as they are published. With the right content paired with YNAB’s community, this kind of link building should be cake.
YNAB has opportunities to generate much more organic traffic through their currently ranking pages. In order to diagnose how many opportunities there are, I pulled all ranking keywords (positions 1–50) from Ahrefs. Second, we needed to segment the data in order to see rankings in specific ranking buckets. I segmented rankings by keywords in the top 3 positions, positions 4–5, positions 6–10, page 2, position 21–50, and page 3+ rankings. I did this for every URL on the site in order to gain an understanding of each page and its rankings. The results looked something like this:
From a glance at the spreadsheet above, you can see a particular URL and what keyword positions that it ranks for. This makes it easy to determine which URLs simply need a bump in optimization and authority in order to generate traffic increases. This also allows you to forecast how big the traffic increases will be.
Let’s go through an example of how this data can enable us to take traffic-increasing action.
We see in the above screenshot that the blog post “How to Pay off $26k of Debt in 18 Months on a $35k per Year Income” ranks for 4 keywords in the top 1–3 ranking positions and 9 keywords in positions 4–5. The keywords in positions 4–5 represent around 520 monthly searches. This is what we see on the keyword level.
Looking at the average difficulty of these keywords, as well as taking into account that this post ranks as it does with not many links, YNAB could bump these 9 keywords up into the top 3 with only a handful of inbound links. This would increase the traffic of this page to somewhere between 100–150% with minimal effort. Sure, this is merely a couple hundred visits extra, but considering the minimal effort it would take, it would be worth it. Furthermore, you can see how this strategy can scale across the entire site. YNAB could increase overall traffic to the site by a large margin simply by taking advantage of this strategy applied too many of their blog posts.
The Google Featured Snippets box can be incredibly powerful to leverage. I want to show you how YNAB could leverage it to rank in a position essentially above position #1 (sometimes referred to as position #0). For context, the Google Featured Snippets box was debuted in Sept 2014, and was created as a vehicle for putting relevant answers in user’s hands much more quickly. For example, if you search “how to budget and save money” in Google, you will see something like this (highlights in red are mine):
You can see in the above screenshot that bettermoneyhabits.bankofamerica.com occupies the #0 position in Google’s featured snippet. This gives bankofamerica.com a strong advantage over americasaves.org in positions #1 and #2. Not only does bankofamerica.com have an augmented snippet, it also rank above position #1. This position can generate much more traffic than position #1.
Another value in ranking in the Google Featured Snippets box is that you can circumvent the climb to the top and be picked for a top page ranking, even if your site technically occupies a different rank land somewhere else on page 1. A detailed post on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.
YNAB already ranks on the first page for a handful of keywords that have the Featured Snippets box, but someone else shows up for the Featured Snippet. Because YNAB already ranks on the first page, it could implement some on-page changes and increase its chances of stealing the coveted Featured Snippets position. This would drastically increase the traffic YNAB receives from currently ranking keywords. For example, YNAB ranks in the 10th position for “how to pay off debt." This keyword generates around 5,400 searches per month. At the 10th position, YNAB doesn’t pull in that many of the 5,400 searches. However, if YNAB ranked in position #0, it would pull in a large percentage of that traffic.
Here are some of the keywords that have Featured Snippets YNAB could steal:
The process of optimize live posts is fairly simple, although it takes diligence. Cole Rieben, one of our Campaign Managers here at 97th, has a great post on what changes can be made in order to boost a site into the Featured Snippet spot (found here).
Without a doubt, creating new, high-quality, keyword-targeted content is one of the most rewarding actions YNAB could take. Content should be created for the user first, but in order for it to be valuable, it must also be findable. SEO done well is the perfect marriage between solid content and the ability to have that content found when users are asking questions. Keyword research can further help you understand exactly what kind of content people are looking for. It is an insight into their needs. Think about it, these people are asking questions already, we just need to meet their question with the best answer.
YNAB has created a lot of content. Most of it is fairly short and doesn’t rank for a ton of keywords. In addition, there are so many budgeting-related questions being asked daily. If YNAB can answer these questions with their grade-A philosophy and budgeting tool, it would be a huge win-win. Users get the answers they need, and YNAB grows.
To analyze what the market looks like in terms of budget/finance related keywords, I pulled a lot of data—like, over 111,000 unique keywords worth of data.
After researching the keyword level data, we needed to organize it to make it useful. The goal in leveraging all of this data is to understand a few things.
The first is keyword groupings of well-ranking URLs in the finance space. These URLs are from many other finance related sites. The data allow us to understand what keyword groups Google ranks these pages for. Secondly, I want to understand what it took for these sites to rank well
From Quick Answers to the People Also Ask section, featured snippets have been at the top of numerous result pages and top of mind for many digital marketers and online businesses. First position in Google search is no longer adequate, especially when almost any competitor on the first page could qualify and leap multiple positions to snag the prime real estate above the first organic result. The result pages that have featured snippets tend to have two important elements, an entity and an attribute related to that entity. Here is a diagram Google used to explain the concept in their patent for Inferring attributes from search queries:
While these results are not new, there are still tons of opportunity to be had. For starters, they’re being rolled out to more international SERPs as time goes on. There are still plenty of US queries for which Google will eventually display a featured snippet. Below are the findings of three consecutive studies performed by Stone Temple Consulting whose data from 855k test queries support the assumption that there is still more growth to be had.
Is Optimizing for a Featured Snippet Worth the Time and Effort?
Before you go any further, and before I get into optimizations and prerequisites for showing up in a featured snippet, you should weigh the potential gains from your efforts. For some markets there aren’t currently any featured snippets present. Don’t forget that Google is still rolling this out to new areas and for more terms. So I would still encourage research and optimizing pages that rank high for potential featured positions. The payoff may not be immediate though.
In most cases where the opportunity currently exists, tests have shown an unexpected increase in click throughs. The assumption is that having a featured snippet on the result page for a query would reduce the clicks to the first position url and subsequent urls. Matthew Barby’s sample of Hubspot urls showed the opposite with an improved amount of click throughs to result #1 that followed the featured snippet. His analysis showed that the urls that displayed in a featured snippet saw a higher click-through-rate than ones that only displayed in regular first page results.
Where to Optimize
I would first start by digging through Google result pages where your site ranks #1. If there are featured snippets on any of those result pages that aren’t pulling from your site then there is great opportunity for some upgrades to your page. If your site ranks for a large amount of queries in position #1 then focus first on the higher volume terms. While it is very possible to grab a featured snippet position if you aren’t ranking #1, there are two separate studies showing that about 30% of featured snippets pull from the #1 result. The graph below was pulled from a study run by Moz on 10k keywords.
The second study was run by Stat with 1 million competitive keywords. While they found a similar result that about 30% of featured snippet results pulled from the #1 ranking page, they do call out that 70% of featured snippets came from results other than the first organic position. Even more interestingly, they found that a small percentage of queries sourced their featured snippet from positions beyond #10. I would recommend downloading their whitepaper that explains their findings from analyzing 1 million high-CPC terms.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers illustrates this nicely as he proved this to work for Moz and the question phrase “What is page authority?.” Another site lept over Moz’s #1 result for the term to capture the featured snippet position.
The Moz team noticed that Drumbeat Marketing did a great job of directly and promptly defining page authority and answering the question. Moz promptly upgraded their copy with the question in the header, and to read as follows:
Not long after, they captured the prized featured snippet display for that query while maintaining rank in the first position.
The next area of focus should be on any other keywords your site ranks for on the first page. You could waste a lot of time researching all the keywords you could potentially rank for but your time is most wisely spent on first page positions based on the data from industry tests.
How to Optimize
Now that you know which pages need your attention you can determine which type of featured snippet to rank for. Is it a list? Is it a paragraph answer? Is it a table with information? Google very plainly communicates in their explanation of featured snippets that page markup won’t be a factor in qualifying for these positions.
Where does the answer summary come from?
The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from a webpage. What's different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. When we recognize that a query asks a question, we programmatically detect pages that answer the user's question, and display a snippet as a featured snippet in the search results.
How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?
You can't. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.
So the best thing you can do is upgrade your content to fit the query's featured snippet. In Stat’s research they discovered that paragraph answers are the most common type of featured snippet and displayed that way for more than 80% of the million terms they tracked.
Optimize for Paragraphs
The paragraph featured snippet displays pages that have answer oriented copy as well as the question in a header. Google will only pull a few sentences, so make your answers brief but directed at the searcher. In most cases Google will pull the copy from text they deem most valuable to the user. As such, I have run into an interesting scenario where Google actually selected partial information from a list and displayed it in paragraph form. Below is the result page for “home protection plan”. You will notice that the answer is displayed in a paragraph form, but the page it pulls from actually has it listed out.
The same approach should be considered for the People Also Ask section. Once research is done on related questions, follow the same pattern of addressing the question and exclusively answering it below the header. In most cases you will be building out questions and answers on your landing page and not a designated FAQ page.
Optimize for Lists
The featured snippet that displays a list is one of the more recognizable types and usually occupies more real estate on a result page than paragraph answers. These types of answers tend to show up for how-to’s, cost breakdowns, as well as numbered and bulleted lists of all kinds. To rank for this type of featured snippet you may want to adjust some copy to introduce a list. Do your best to use the term or phrase in the heading of the list. It is important that it stays relevant and increases the value of the page. Another thing to keep in mind, especially if you win these positions, is that you leave the user wanting a little more. Give them a reason to go to your page. Recipes can be a great chance to do this as each step usually involves more details that can’t fit.
Stat’s research also found the use of <ol> tags on pages are 41.6% more common in featured snippets than in regular results. They saw the use of <table> tags nearly 22% more common in featured areas than in regular results. This brings me to the next type of featured snippet.
Optimizing for Tables
Optimizing for tables really comes down to displaying data or information that may already exist on your page a little differently. If you currently have a list on that page but there is an opportunity to grab a table snippet then find a way to compare the list to another list or just display multiple attributes at once. As mentioned above, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that you are using <table> tags on your pages.
The most important area to focus on for optimizing your chances of being featured is your on page copy. Backlinks and other external factors for ranking become less important the closer your page is to the first position. Remember that before you optimize any pages you will need to research the Google result pages for keywords you rank for on the first page. The benefits of more clicks are definitely there, and you can always do more to direct the user to your page with enticing copy. This is definitely an area of optimization that you will want to return too often as Google expands to new markets and includes featured snippets in more result pages.
Yesterday, September 23, was the final day of BrightEdge’s Share15 conference in San Francisco. Share15 is a Content Performance Marketing event put on “for digital marketers, by digital marketers.” The conference is a specific opportunity for BrightEdge users to get hands-on. This year’s conference had speakers from several big players in the industry, including BrightEdge, Salesforce, Google, and many others.
.@chrisbennett of @97thFloor shares how to bucket #keywords for #content success at #Share15 pic.twitter.com/JvsydGAGeD
— BrightEdge (@brightedge) September 23, 2015
Chris Bennett, 97th Floor’s CEO, had the chance to speak at the conference yesterday. 97th Floor is a certified BrightEdge Agency Partner, and several of our clients use BrightEdge in their business. Chris was excited for the opportunity to speak here, as this was his first year presenting at a Share conference. He also enjoyed this chance to speak alongside his old friend, Kirill Konrod from Adobe, who had some great insights on Google’s Quick Answer boxes. Chris’s presentation emphasized tactics such as focusing on keyword research, using those keywords to recognize and create better content, and making sure that you are creating altruistic content for the user.
For a session that @97thFloor claims doesn't include earth shattering news, I'm sure loving these ideas! #contentmarketing #share15 — Taylor Harker (@TaylorHarker) September 23, 2015
Not only was Chris one of the speakers at Share15, but 97th Floor was a sponsor of this year’s event, setting up a “swag machine" for use by conference attendees.
The machine was filled with shirts and portable chargers. To get their swag, participants could tweet a selfie in front of the machine, tagging @97thfloor, #share15, and a special hashtag the machine would generate. Once the tweet went out, the machine would dispense the loot.
We figured that Share15 was the perfect opportunity to showcase the machine. Where better than a Digital Conference to share a fun, innovative platform to build social engagement?
At #share15 with @97thfloor #dm858 how cool is this? pic.twitter.com/21KKbXTJ5K
— Lisa Brown (@bunltd) September 23, 2015
Not only did this generate buzz for 97th Floor and Share15, it also fell right in line with Chris’s message from his presentation, and 97th Floor’s own brand, combining creative tactics for bigger results.
@97thfloor #share15 #dm901 awesome swag machine!! pic.twitter.com/IXTsfqGHoy
— Jim Yu (@jimyu) September 23, 2015
Having a great time @97thFloor #share15 #dm042 pic.twitter.com/Tsas0gPgLP
— Sophia Eng (@sophianeng) September 23, 2015
We loved coming to Share15 and working with BrightEdge. Their staff was wonderful to work with and a real class act. They really proved just how much they care about their customers. Thanks, guys!
Dreamforce, Salesforce’s enormous, annual conference, happened last week, bringing together more than 150,000 professionals from several different industries, with millions more viewing live via the Internet. The event took place from September 15–18 across several venues in downtown San Francisco and included approximately 1,600 sessions and keynote addresses.
97th Floor’s CEO Chris Bennett spoke at the conference on Wednesday, September 16. Salesforce is one of 97th Floor’s clients, and Chris attends Dreamforce regularly. His presentation, “Building Content that Grows Your Business,” marked the third time Chris has been invited to speak at Dreamforce, having spoken previously in 2013 and 2014.
.@chrisbennett Content marketing and seo works for B2B, too. #cmseo #df15 #seo pic.twitter.com/9ku7FxhXlS
— Stuart (@steuwart) September 16, 2015
This year, Chris focused on fundamental principles to ensure success in digital marketing. While the tactics he presented seemed simple, he showed several case studies demonstrating impressive results. Tactics included baking promo into content, and basing content on sound research. Chris especially emphasized keyword research, recommending marketers “add three hours to the five minutes you currently spend.” People responded well to his presentation and provided lots of positive feedback:
@chrisbennett really liked your presentation, super tactical. Thanks for the tips!! #df15
— Jason Bilog (@JasonBilog) September 16, 2015
Your content must provide value and prioritize the customer's needs over your company's needs. via @chrisbennett #DF15 #contentmarketing
— Mike Koyle (@mikekoyle) September 20, 2015
My boy @chrisbennett killing it @Dreamforce #DF15! You NEED to follow this guy! @crowdmics @97thFloor #seo #marketing pic.twitter.com/V0IX0O60SA
— Sean Holladay (@seanholladay) September 16, 2015
View the full deck from Chris’s presentation below:
O.K. before you keep reading I have to apologize, I hate case studies and examples of sites that don't show the sites involved. One of the things that I try to do to set us apart from a lot of blogs is to give specific ideas on how to do things, but in the case study below I can't. We are growing and have a lot of clientele that just won't let us share their info, or even mention them as a client. That is fine, I guess if I was a 100 million a year plus company with very intelligent competitors I wouldn't want our service providers giving away our secrets either.
With that said this will still be really cool to share and I will show you (doctored) screen shots from their analytics.
We helped a friend/client launch a blog in October and it has been some of the most successful blog marketing we have done to date in the realms of blog optimization and social media saturation to a brand new domain and website.
The blog is general and covers a lot of different topics mostly internet and advertising related, which helps. If you have a niche blog you can still have tremendous success in blog promotion, especially in terms of links and subscribers which is the most import aspect of a blogs success in my opinion.
The Stats: The blog is exactly 39 days old it has a total of 21 pages, it has received over 165,000 uniques, over 3,000 links and over 1,117 subscribers. The subscribers and the amount of branding we have seen (see below) are what we are most exited about.
We have had campaigns that generate more traffic and links then this blog (I am working on another case study where I will actually show you an example of an article that had over 150k visits in one day, and has had over 3k links just to the article), but what is different about this site is the vast amount of subscribers and the consistent traffic. Barely any of this traffic is from Digg, the blog is receiving thousands of visitors a day on a consistent basis. So it has been a combined effort on behalf of the posts instead of one home run submitted to Digg with one traffic spike and virtually no traffic a week later. The lowest day so far as been over 1,600 visitors and the highest has been 14,922 with several days over 10k.
Graph screen shot of the blogs entire life so far: 
Page Views to some of the URL's: 
Traffic Sources: (what is best about this is Direct Traffic to the domain, is over 14% which is over 24,000 visitors. Remember this blog is only 39 days, that is some sweet branding) 
The majority of the initial traffic came from StumbleUpon, I think that is why the subscriber rate has been so good. We also get a tremendous amount of traffic from other hub sites picking up our stories and linking to them.
How to do it: I would credit a handful of things the the sites success.
1.) The site owner has fallen in love with marketing and has done a great job with generating outstanding content. He has engulfed himself in Social Media and in his competing blogs and really understands how to generate good content for his audience.
2.) We mapped out and understood our audience prior to launch. We actually had a good amount of posts ready before launch so that we wouldn't lose steam. After the first few pages being submitted to social sites we let the sites subscribers and community promote the rest of our content as it was created.
3.) The Domain is easy to remember, easy to spell and all that. By watching the direct traffic to the homepage and branded search terms in Google we are really seeing that a good domain can go a long way.
Again I apologize for not being able to give away more. I'm working on about 3 posts that all give away the farm with specific examples. Also remember this site/company did not exist before the last week in October, there wasn't a huge brand name to piggy back off of or any prior marketing or advertising to build off of. This was brand new, raw straight out of the gates marketing.
