If you’ve ever found yourself tired of Overwatch esports spectators’ camera angle choices and thought you could do a better job, your big day is just around the corner. Blizzard’s shooter is getting an in-game spectator mode, though it’s gonna have to go through some testing first.Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan—who, in a stunning turn of events, did not introduce himself as “Jeff from the Overwatch team”—introduced the feature in a new developer update video.For now, it’s being called the Overwatch World Cup Viewer, and it’ll be specific to the World Cup, whose finals will take place at BlizzCon in early November. Viewers will be able to watch the World Cup from inside Overwatch, and they’ll have full camera control from a variety of perspectives including first- and third-person, as well as the top-down view with character icons that casters sometimes use during Blizzard-hosted esports broadcasts. There’ll also be a replay feature for matches that have already happened.AdvertisementTo begin, it’ll exist exclusively on PC in beta form shortly before BlizzCon, but Kaplan and company hope to expand it to all corners of Overwatch at some point after the World Cup.“Can you imagine going and watching one of your own matches later and being able to put the camera where you want in that sort of replay view? We think that would be pretty amazing,” said Kaplan.He did not, however, mention Overwatch League, which is separate from the World Cup. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there, given that OWL is tied up in deals with platforms like Twitch.AdvertisementThere are also balance changes on the way in the near future, and those are now on the public test server for all who’d like to try them out. You can theorycraft your way through the nitty gritty details here, but the short version is, Reaper, Roadhog, Symmetra, and Mercy will be getting buffs.Lastly, Kaplan said that, unlike in previous years, the Overwatch team won’t be announcing a new map at BlizzCon this year. There’ll be other stuff, but no map.“To be honest, we thought they got a bit lost in the shuffle,” he said of the announcements of the Oasis and Blizzard World maps. “They didn’t have as big of an impact as we wanted.”

Source: http://tz2d.me/?c=h7t

Photo: rawpixel (Unsplash)As part of my flea-market mermaid costume, I wore an old silk nightgown, then spent a rainy evening treading all over the bottom hem. I have already given the nightie a wash with mild laundry soap in cold water, which took care of most of the dirt, but it’s pretty ground in along the seam. Think it can be removed?I do think it can be removed! The fact that the stain didn’t entirely come out the first go around doesn’t mean that all hope is lost (which is a good rule to remember, generally). When that happens — whether it’s on Halloween or on a regular day — take heart, because it means that the stain can and will come out, it may just require a second pass.AdvertisementHalloween is a good time to point out this law of stainage, because Halloween is great, but also it can be spectacularly messy, which is a big part of the holiday’s charm.Okay so let’s start with mud/dirt/party sludge, because that’s what our Letter Writer is asking about, and also because Halloween is the unofficial first day of party sludge season. Mud and dirt are protein stains, which is good to remember around Halloween, what with its wild parties, because blood and vomit are also protein stains. So! That means that stain removers that work on mud and dirt will also work on blood and barf. This is also true of sexual fluids — yup, those are proteins too! — so when you and your date have a little too much fun with, on and in your sexy Gritty costume, your plan of action will be the same.What you’ll do is this: The way to treat a protein stain is to use an enzyme-based stain treatment, like Zout or Krud Kutter Sports Stain Remover, or a laundry detergent that has enzymes, like Tide Original or Arm

GIF This is wrussell9 cosplaying as Doctor Strange, getting more than a little help from the Cloak of Levitation, aka his sister elliebabygurl.

Source: http://tz2d.me/?c=h7r

Posted by Dr-PeteSearch is changing. As a 200-person search marketing software company, this isn’t just a pithy intro – it’s a daily threat to our survival. Being an organic search marketer can be frustrating when even a search like

Posted by DiTomasoShowing clients that you’re making them money is one of the most important things you can communicate to them, but it’s tough to know how to present your results in a way they can easily understand. That’s where Google Data Studio comes in. In this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday, our friend Dana DiTomaso shares how to create a client-friendly local marketing results dashboard in Google Data Studio from start to finish.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionHi, Moz fans. My name is Dana DiTomaso. I’m President and partner of Kick Point. We’re a digital marketing agency way up in the frozen north of Edmonton, Alberta. We work with a lot of local businesses, both in Edmonton and around the world, and small local businesses usually have the same questions when it comes to reporting.
Are we making money?
What I’m going to share with you today is our local marketing dashboard that we share with clients. We build this in Google Data Studio because we love Google Data Studio. If you haven’t watched my Whiteboard Friday yet on how to do formulas in Google Data Studio, I recommend you hit Pause right now, go back and watch that, and then come back to this because I am going to talk about what happened there a little bit in this video.
The Google Data Studio dashboard
This is a Google Data Studio dashboard which I’ve tried to represent in the medium of whiteboard as best as I could. Picture it being a little bit better design than my left-handedness can represent on a whiteboard, but you get the idea. Every local business wants to know,

Posted by jocameronWe’re proud to announce that we recently launched our brand-new Help Hub! This is the section of our site where we store all our guides and articles on how to use Moz Pro, Moz Local, and our research tools like Link Explorer.Our Help Hub contains in-depth guides, quick and easy FAQs, and some amazing videos like this one. The old Help Hub served us very well over the years, but with time it became a bit dusty and increasingly difficult to update, in addition to looking a bit old and shabby. So we set out to rebuild it from scratch, and we’re already seeing some exciting changes in the search results — which will impact the way people self-serve when they need help using our tools. I’m going to take you through 5 ways we improved the accessibility and reach of the Help Hub with our redesign. If you write software guides, work in customer experience, or simply write content that answers questions, then this post is worth a look.If you’re thinking this is just a blatant excuse to inject some Mozzy news into an SEO-style blog post, then you’re right! But if you stick with me, I’ll make sure it’s more fun than switching between the same three apps on your phone with a scrunched-up look of despair etched into your brow. :)Research and discoveryTo understand what features we needed to implement, we decided to ask our customers how they search for help when they get stuck. The results were fascinating, and they helped us build a new Help Hub that serves both our customers and their behavior.We discovered that 78% of people surveyed search for an answer first before reaching out:This is a promising sign, and perhaps no surprise that people working in digital marketing and search are very much in the habit of searching for the answers to their questions. However, we also discovered that a staggering 36% couldn’t find a sufficient answer when they searched:We also researched industry trends and dug into lots of knowledge bases and guides for popular tools like Slack and Squarespace. With this research in our back pockets we felt sure of our goal: to build a Help Hub that reduces the length of the question-search-answer journey and gets answers in front of people with questions.Let’s not hang about — here are 5 ways we improved organic reach with our beautiful new Help Hub.#1: Removing features that hide contentTabbed content used to be a super cool way of organizing a long, wordy guide. Tabs digitally folded the content up like an origami swan. The tabs were all on one page and on one URL, and they worked like jump links to teleport users to that bit of content.Our old Help Hub design had tabbed content that was hard to find and wasn’t being correctly indexedThe problem: searchers couldn’t easily find this content. There were two reasons for this: one, no one expected to have to click on tabs for discovery; and two (and most importantly), only the first page of content was being linked to in the SERPs. This decimated our organic reach. It was also tricky to link directly to the tabbed content. When our help team members were chatting with our lovely community, it was nearly impossible to quickly send a link to a specific piece of information in a tabbed guide.Now, instead of having all that tabbed content stacked away like a Filofax, we’ve got beautifully styled and designed content that’s easy to navigate. We pulled previously hidden content on to unique pages that we could link people to directly. And at the top of the page, we added breadcrumbs so folks can orient themselves within the guide and continue self-serving answers to their heart’s content. Our new design uses breadcrumbs to help folks navigate and keep finding answersWhat did we learn?Don’t hide your content. Features that were originally built in an effort to organize your content can become outdated and get between you and your visitors. Make your content accessible to both search engine crawlers and human visitors; your customer’s journey from question to answer will be more straightforward, making navigation between content more natural and less of a chore. Your customers and your help team will thank you.#2: Proudly promote your FAQs This follows on from the point above, and you have had a sneak preview in the screenshot above. I don’t mind repeating myself because our new FAQs more than warrant their own point, and I’ll tell you why. Because, dear reader, people search for their questions. Yup, it’s this new trend and gosh darn it the masses love it. I mentioned in the point above that tabbed content was proving hard to locate and to navigate, and it wasn’t showing up in the search results. Now we’re displaying common queries where they belong, right at the top of the guides:FAQ placement, before and afterThis change comprises two huge improvements. Firstly, questions our customers are searching, either via our site or in Google, are proudly displayed at the top of our guides, accessible and indexable. Additionally, when our customers search for their queries (as we know they love to do), they now have a good chance of finding the exact answer just a click away.Address common issues at the top of the page to alleviate frustrationI’ve run a quick search in Keyword Explorer and I can see we’re now in position 4 for this keyword phrase — we weren’t anywhere near that before. SERP analysis from Keyword ExplorerThis is what it looks like in the organic results — the answer is there for all to see. Our FAQ answer showing up in the search resultsAnd when people reach out? Now we can send links with the answers listed right at the top. No more messing about with jump links to tabbed content. What did we learn?In addition to making your content easily accessible, you should address common issues head-on. It can sometimes feel uncomfortable to highlight issues right at the top of the page, but you’ll be alleviating frustration for people encountering errors and reduce the workload for your help team.You can always create specific troubleshooting pages to store questions and answers to common issues.#3: Improve article quality and relevance to build trustThis involves using basic on-page optimization techniques when writing or updating your articles. This is bread and butter for seasoned SEOs, although often overlooked by creators of online guides and technical writers.It’s no secret that we love to inject a bit of Mozzy fun into what we do, and the Help Hub is no exception. It’s a challenge that we relish: to explain the software in clear language that is, hopefully, a treat to explore. However, it turns out we’d become too preoccupied with fun, and our basic on-page optimization sadly lagged behind. Mirroring customers’ languageBefore we started work on our beautiful new Help Hub, we analyzed our most frequently asked questions and commonly searched topics on our site. Next, we audited the corresponding pages on the Help Hub. It was immediately clear that we could do a better job of integrating the language our customers were using to write in to us. By using relevant language in our Help Hub content, we’d be helping searchers find the right guides and videos before they needed to reach out. Using the MozBar guide as an example, we tried a few different things to improve the CTR over a period of 12 months. We added more content, we updated the meta tags, we added jump links. Around 8 weeks after the guide was made more relevant and specific to searchers’ troubleshooting queries, we saw a massive uptick in traffic for that MozBar page, with pageviews increasing from around ~2.5k per month to ~10k between February 2018 and July 2018. Traffic from organic searches doubled.Updates to the Help Hub content and the increased traffic over time from Google AnalyticsIt’s worth noting that traffic to troubleshooting pages can spike if there are outages or bugs, so you’ll want to track this over an 8–12 month period to get the full picture. What we’re seeing in the chart above is a steady and consistent increase in traffic for a few months. In fact, we started performing too well, ranking for more difficult, higher-volume keywords. This wasn’t exactly what we wanted to achieve, as the content wasn’t relevant to people searching for help for any old plugin. As a result, we’re seeing a drop in August. There’s a sweet spot for traffic to troubleshooting guides. You want to help people searching for answers without ranking for more generic terms that aren’t relevant, which leads us to searcher intent.Focused on searcher intentIf you had a chance to listen to Dr. Pete’s MozCon talk, you’ll know that while it may be tempting to try to rank well for head vanity keywords, it’s most helpful to rank for keywords where your content matches the needs and intent of the searcher.While it may be nice to think our guide can rank for

Posted by HeatherPhysiocHave you ever made SEO recommendations that just don’t go anywhere? Maybe you run into a lack of budget, or you can’t get buy-in from your boss or colleagues. Maybe your work just keeps getting deprioritized in favor of other initiatives. Whatever the case, it’s important to set yourself up for success when it comes to the tangled web of red tape that’s part and parcel of most organizations. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Heather Physioc shares her tried-and-true methods for building yourself a toolkit that’ll help you tear through roadblocks and bureaucracy to get your work implemented.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionWhat up, Moz fans? This is Heather Physioc. I’m the Director of the Discoverability Group at VML, headquartered in Kansas City. So today we’re going to talk about how to build your red tape toolkit to overcome obstacles to getting your search work implemented. So do you ever feel like your recommendations are overlooked, ignored, forgotten, deprioritized, or otherwise just not getting implemented?
Common roadblocks to implementing SEO recommendations
If so, you’re not alone. So I asked 140-plus of our industry colleagues the blockers that they run into and how they overcome them.

Low knowledge. So if you’re anything like every other SEO ever, you might be running into low knowledge and understanding of search, either on the client side or within your own agency.
Low buy-in. You may be running into low buy-in. People don’t care about SEO as much as you do.
Poor prioritization. So other things frequently come to the top of the list while SEO keeps falling further behind.
High bureaucracy. So a lot of red tape or slow approvals or no advocacy within the organization.
Not enough budget. A lot of times it’s not enough budget, not enough resources to get the work done.
Unclear and overcomplicated process. So people don’t know where they fit or even how to get started implementing your SEO work.
Bottlenecks. And finally bottlenecks where you’re just hitting blockers at every step along the way.
So if you’re in-house, you probably said that not enough budget and resources was your biggest problem. But on the agency side or individual practitioners, they said low understanding or knowledge of search on the client side was their biggest blocker.

So a lot of the time when we run into these blockers and it seems like nothing is getting done, we start to play the blame game. We start to complain that it’s the client who hung up the project or if the client had only listened or it’s something wrong with the client’s business.
Build out your red tape toolkitBut I don’t buy it. So we’re going to not do that. We’re going to build out our red tape toolkit. So here are some of the suggestions that came out of that survey.
1. Assess client maturity
First is to assess your client’s maturity. This could include their knowledge and capabilities for doing SEO, but also their organizational search program, the people, process, ability to plan, knowledge, capacity.
These are the problems that tend to stand in the way of getting our best work done. So I’m not going to go in-depth here because we’ve actually put out a full-length article on the Moz blog and another Whiteboard Friday. So if you need to pause, watch that and come back, no problem.
2. Speak your client’s language
So the next thing to put in your toolkit is to speak your client’s language. I think a lot of times we’re guilty of talking to fellow SEOs instead of the CMOs and CEOs who buy into our work. So unless your client is a super technical mind or they have a strong search background, it’s in our best interests to lift up and stay at 30,000 feet. Let’s talk about things that they care about, and I promise you that is not canonicalization or SSL encryption and HTTPS.
They’re thinking about ROI and their customers and operational costs. Let’s translate and speak their language. Now this could also mean using analogies that they can relate to or visual examples and data visualizations that tell the story of search better than words ever could. Help them understand. Meet them in the middle.
3. Seek greater perspective
Now let’s seek greater perspective. So what this means is SEO does not or should not operate in a silo. We’re one small piece of your client’s much larger marketing mix. They have to think about the big picture. A lot of times our clients aren’t just dedicated to SEO. They’re not even dedicated to just digital sometimes. A lot of times they have to think about how all the pieces fit together. So we need to have the humility to understand where search fits into that and ladder our SEO goals up to the brand goals, campaign goals, business and revenue goals. We also need to understand that every SEO project we recommend comes with a time and a cost associated with it.
Everything we recommend to a CMO is an opportunity cost as well for something else that they could be working on. So we need to show them where search fits into that and how to make those hard choices. Sometimes SEO doesn’t need to be the leader. Sometimes we’re the follower, and that’s okay.
4. Get buy-inThe next tool in your toolkit is to get buy-in. So there are two kinds of buy-in you can get.
Horizontal buy-inOne is horizontal buy-in. So a lot of times search is dependent on other disciplines to get our work implemented. We need copywriters. We need developers. So the number-one complaint SEOs have is not being brought in early. That’s the same complaint all your teammates on development and copywriting and everywhere else have.
Respect the expertise and the value that they bring to this project and bring them to the table early. Let them weigh in on how this project can get done. Build mockups together. Put together a plan together. Estimate the level of effort together.
Vertical buy-inWhich leads us to vertical buy-in. Vertical is up and down. When you do this horizontal buy-in first, you’re able to go to the client with a much smarter, better vetted recommendation. So a lot of times your day-to-day client isn’t the final decision maker. They have to sell this opportunity internally. So give them the tools and the voice that they need to do that by the really strong recommendation you put together with your peers and make it easy for them to take it up to their boss and their CMO and their CEO. Then you really increase the likelihood that you’re going to get that work done.
5. Build a bulletproof plan
Next, build a bulletproof plan. Case studiesSo the number-one recommendation that came out of this survey was case studies. Case studies are great. They talk about the challenge that you tried to overcome, the solution, how you actually tackled it, and the results you got out of that.
Clients love case studies. They show that you have the chops to do the work. They better explain the outcomes and the benefits of doing this kind of work, and you took the risk on that kind of project with someone else’s money first. So that’s going to reduce the perceived risk in the client’s mind and increase the likelihood that they’re going to do the work. Make your plan simple and clear, with timelinesAnother thing that helps here is building a really simple, clear plan so it’s stupid-easy for everybody who needs to be a part of it to know where they fit in and what they’re responsible for. So do the due diligence to put together a step-by-step plan and assign ownership to each step and put timelines to it so they know what pace they should be following.Forecast ROIFinally, forecast ROI. This is not optional. So a lot of times I think SEOs are hesitant to forecast the potential outcomes or ROI of a project because of the sheer volume of unknowns.
We live in a world of theory, and it’s very hard to commit to something that we can’t be certain about. But we have to give the client some sense of return. We have to know why we are recommending this project over others. There’s a wealth of resources out there to do that for even heavily caveated and conservative estimate, including case studies that others have published online.
Show the cost of inactionNow sometimes forecasting the opportunity of ROI isn’t enough to light a fire for clients. Sometimes we need to show them the cost of inaction. I find that with clients the risk is not so much that they’re going to make the wrong move. It’s that they’ll make no move at all. So a lot of times we will visualize what that might look like. So we’ll show them this is the kind of growth we think that you can get if you invest and you follow this plan we put together.
Here’s what it will look like if you invest just a little to monitor and maintain, but you’re not aggressively investing in search. Oh, and here, dropping down and to the right, is what happens when you don’t invest at all. You stagnate and you get surpassed by your competitors. That can be really helpful for clients to contrast those different levels of investment and convince them to do the work that you’re recommending.
6. Use headlines