Image Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Image link building is a delicate art. There are some distinct considerations from traditional link building, and doing it successfully requires a balance of creativity, curiosity, and having the right tools on hand. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Moz's own SEO and link building aficionado Britney Muller offers up concrete advice for successfully building links via images.

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Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to go over all things image link building, which is sort of an art. I'm so excited to dig into this with you.

Know your link targets

So first and foremost, you need to know your link targets:

I. Popular industry platforms - top pages

What are those top platforms or websites that you would really like to acquire a link from? Then, from there, you can start to understand who might be influencers on those platforms, who's writing the content, who might you contact, and also what are the top pages currently for those sites. There are a number of tools that give you a glimpse into that information. Moz's OSE, Open Site Explorer, will show you top pages. SEMrush has a top page report. SimilarWeb has a popular page report. You can dig into all that information there, really interesting stuff.

II. Old popular images - update!

You can also start to dig into old, popular images and then update them. So what are old popular images within your space that you could have an opportunity to revamp and update? A really neat way to sort of dig into some of that is BuzzSumo's infographics filter, and then you would insert the topic. You enter the industry or the topic you're trying to address and then search by the infographics to see if you can come across anything.

III. Transform popular content into images

You can also just transform popular content into images, and I think there is so much opportunity in doing that for new statistics reports, new data that comes out. There are tons of great opportunities to transform those into multiple images and leverage that across different platforms for link building.

IV. Influencers

Again, just understanding who those influencers are.

Do your keyword research

So, from here, we're going to dive into the keyword research part of this whole puzzle, and this is really understanding the intent behind people searching about the topic or the product or whatever it might be. Something you can do is evaluate keywords with link intent. This is a brilliant concept I heard about a couple weeks back from Dan Shure's podcast. Thank you, Dan. Essentially it's the idea that keywords with statistics or facts after the keyword have link intent baked into the search query. It's brilliant. Those individuals are searching for something to reference, to maybe link to, to include in a presentation or an article or whatever that might be. It has this basic link intent.

Another thing you want to evaluate is just anything around images. Do any of your keywords and pictures or photos, etc. have good search volume with some opportunities? What does that search result currently look like? You have to evaluate what's currently ranking to understand what's working and what's not. I used to say at my old agency I didn't want anyone writing any piece of content until they had read all of the 10 search results for that keyword or that phrase we were targeting. Why would you do that until you have a full understanding of how that looks currently and how we can make something way better?

Rand had also mentioned this really cool tip on if you find some keywords, it's good to evaluate whether or not the image carousel shows up for those searches, because if it does, that's a little glimpse into the searcher intent that leads to images. That's a good sign that you're on the right track to really optimize for a certain image. It's something to keep in mind.

Provide value

So, from here, we're going to move up to providing value. Now we're in the brainstorming stage. Hopefully, you've gotten some ideas, you know where you want to link from, and you need to provide value in some way. It could be a...

I. Reference/bookmark Maybe something that people would bookmark, that always works.

II. Perspective is a really interesting one. So some of the most beautiful data visualizations do this extremely well, where they can simplify a confusing concept or a lot of data. It's a great way to leverage images and graphics.

III. Printouts still work really well. Moz has the SEO Dev Cheat Sheet that I have seen printed all over at different agencies, and that's really neat to see it adding value directly.

IV. Curate images. We see this a lot with different articles. Maybe the top 25 to 50 images from this tradeshow or this event or whatever it might be, that's a great way to leverage link building and kind of getting people fired up about a curated piece of content.

Gregory Ciotti — I don't know if I'm saying that right — has an incredible article I suggest you all read called "Why a Visual Really Is Worth a Thousand Words," and he mentions don't be afraid to get obvious. I love that, because I think all too often we tend to overthink images and executing things in general. Why not just state the obvious and see how it goes? He's got great examples.

Optimize

So, from here, we are going to move into optimization. If any of you need a brush-up on image optimization, I highly suggest you check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on image SEO. It covers everything. But some of the basics are your...

Title

You want to make sure that the title of the image has your keyword and explains what it is that you're trying to convey.

Alt text

This was first and foremost designed for the visually impaired, so you need to be mindful of visually impaired screen readers that will read this to people to explain what the image actually is. So first and foremost, you just need to be helpful and provide information in a descriptive way to describe that image.

Compression

Compression is huge. Page speed is so big right now. I hear about it all the time. I know you guys do too. But one of the easiest ways to help page speed is to compress those huge images. There's a ton of great free tools out there, like Optimizilla, where you can bulk upload a bunch of large images and then bulk download. It makes it super easy. There are also some desktop programs, if you're doing this kind of stuff all the time, that will automatically compress images you download or save. That might be worth looking into if you do this a lot.
You want to host the image. You want it to live on your domain. You want to house that. You can leverage it on other platforms, but you want sort of that original to be on your site.

SRCSET

Source set attribute is getting a little technical. It's super interesting, and it's basically this really incredible image attribute that allows you to set the minimum browser size and the image you would prefer to show up for different sizes. So you can not only have different images show up for different devices in different sizes, but you can also revamp them. You can revamp the same image and serve it better for a mobile user versus a tablet, etc. Jon Henshaw has some of the greatest stuff on source set. Highly suggest you look at some of his articles. He's doing really cool things with it. Check that out.

Promotion

So, from here, you want to promote your images. You obviously want to share it on popular platforms. You want to reach back out to some of these things that you might have into earlier. If you updated a piece of content, make them aware of that. Or if you transformed a really popular piece of content into some visuals, you might want to share that with the person who is sharing that piece of content. You want to start to tap into that previous research with your promotion.

Inform the influencers

Ask people to share it. There is nothing wrong with just asking your network of people to share something you've worked really hard on, and hopefully, vice versa, that can work in return and you're not afraid to share something a connection of yours has that they worked really hard on.

Monitor the image SERPs

From here, you need to monitor. One of the best ways to do this is Google reverse image search. So if you go to Google and you click the images tab, there's that little camera icon that you can click on and upload images to see where else they live on the web. This is a great way to figure out who is using your image, where it's being held, are you getting a backlink or are you not. You want to keep an eye on all of that stuff.

Two other tools to do this, that I've heard about, are Image Raider and TinEye. But I have not had great experience with either of these. I would love to hear your comments below if maybe you have.

Reverse image search with Google works the best for me. This is also an awesome opportunity for someone to get on the market and create a Google alert for images. I don't think anyone is actually doing that right now. If you know someone that is, please let me know down below in the comments. But it could be a cool business opportunity, right? I don't know.

So for monitoring, let's say you find your image is being used on different websites. Now you need to do some basic outreach to get that link. You want to request that link for using your image.

This is just a super basic template that I came up with. You can use it. You can change it, do whatever you want. But it's just:

Hi, [first name].
Thank you so much for including our image in your article. Great piece. Just wondering if you could link to us.com as the source.
Thanks,
Britney

Something like that. Something short, to the point. If you can make it more personalized, please do so. I can't stress that enough. People will take you way more seriously if you have some nugget of personal information or connection that you can make.

From there, you just sort of stay in this loop. After you go through this process, you need to continue to promote your content and continue to monitor and do outreach and push that to maximize your link building efforts.
So I hope you enjoyed this. I look forward to hearing all of your comments and thoughts down below in the comments. I look forward to seeing you all later. Thanks for joining us on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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December 15, 2017 at 09:48AM

How Long Should Your Meta Description Be? (2018 Edition)

Posted by Dr-Pete

Summary: The end of November saw a spike in the average length of SERP snippets. Across 10K keywords (90K results), we found a definite increase but many oddities, such as video snippets. Our data suggests that many snippets are exceeding 300 characters, and going into 2018 we recommend a new meta description limit of 300 characters.

Back in spring of 2015, we reported that Google search snippets seemed to be breaking the 155-character limit, but our data suggested that these cases were fairly rare. At the end of November, RankRanger's tools reported a sizable jump in the average search snippet length (to around 230 characters). Anecdotally, we're seeing many long snippets in the wild, such as this 386-character one on a search for "non compete agreement":

Search Engine Land was able to get confirmation from Google of a change to how they handle search snippets, although we don't have specifics or official numbers. Is it time to revisit our guidelines on meta descriptions limits heading into 2018? We dug into our daily 10,000-keyword tracking data to find out...

The trouble with averages

In our 10K tracking data for December 15th, which consisted of 89,909 page-one organic results, the average display snippet (stripped of HTML, of course) was 215 characters long, slightly below RankRanger's numbers, but well above historical trends.

This number is certainly interesting, but it leaves out quite a bit. First of all, the median character length is 186, suggesting that some big numbers are potentially skewing the average. On the other hand, some snippets are very short because their meta Ddescriptions are very short. Take this snippet for Vail.com:

Sure enough, this is Vail.com's meta description tag (I'm not gonna ask):

Do we really care that a lot of people just write ridiculously short meta descriptions? No, what we really want to know is at what point Google is cutting off long descriptions. So, let's just look at the snippets that were cut (determined by the " ..." at the end). In our data set, this leaves just about 3.6% (3,213), so we can already see that the vast majority of descriptions aren't getting cut off.

Coincidentally, the average is still 215, but let's look at the frequency distribution of the lengths of just the cut snippets. The graph below shows cut-snippet lengths in bins of 25 (0-25, 25-50, etc.):

If we're trying to pin down a maximum length for meta descriptions, this is where things get a bit weird (and frustrating). There seems to be a chunk of snippets cut off at the 100–125 character range and another chunk at the 275–300 range. Digging in deeper, we discovered that two things were going on here...

Oddity #1: Video snippets

Spot-checking some of the descriptions cut off in the 100–125 character range, we realized that a number of them were video snippets, which seem to have shorter limits:

These snippets seem to generally max out at two lines, and they're further restricted by the space the video thumbnail occupies. In our data set, a full 88% of video snippets were cut off (ended in " ..."). Separating out video, only 2.1% of organic snippets were cut off.

Oddity #2: Pre-cut metas

A second oddity was that some meta description tags seem to be pre-truncated (possibly by CMS systems). So, the "..." in those cases is an unreliable indicator. Take this snippet, for example:

This clocks in at 150 characters, right around the old limit. Now, let's look at the meta description:

This Goodreads snippet is being pre-truncated. This was true for almost all of the Goodreads meta descriptions in our data set, and may be a CMS setting or a conscious choice by their SEO team. Either way, it's not very useful for our current analysis.

So, we attempted to gather all of the original meta description tags to check for pre-truncated data. We were unable to gather data from all sites, and some sites don't use meta description tags at all, but we were still able to remove some of the noise.

Let's try this again (...)

So, let's pull out all of the cut snippets with video thumbnails and the ones where we know the meta description ended in "...". This cuts us down to 1,722 snippets (pretty deep dive from the original 89,909). Here's what the frequency distribution of lengths looks like now:

Now, we're getting somewhere. There are still a few data points down in the 150–175 range, but once I hand-checked them, they appear to be sites that had meta description tags ending in "..." that we failed to crawl properly.

The bulk of these snippets are being cut off in the 275–325 character range. In this smaller, but more normal-looking distribution, we've got a mean of 299 characters and a median of 288 characters. While we've had to discard a fair amount of data along the way, I'm much more comfortable with these numbers.

What about the snippets over 350 characters? It's hard to see from this graph, but they maxed out at 375 characters. In some cases, Google is appending their own information:

While the entire snippet is 375 characters, the "Jump..." link is added by Google. The rest of the snippet is 315 characters long. Google also adds result counts and dates to the front of some snippets. These characters don't seem to count against the limit, but it's a bit hard to tell, because we don't have a lot of data points.

Do metas even matter?

Before we reveal the new limit, here's an uncomfortable question — when it seems like Google is rewriting so many snippets, is it worth having meta description tags at all? Across the data set, we were able to successfully capture 70,059 original Meta Description tags (in many of the remaining cases, the sites simply didn't define one). Of those, just over one-third (35.9%) were used as-is for display snippets.

Keep in mind, though, that Google truncates some of these and appends extra data to some. In 15.4% of cases, Google used the original meta description tag, but added some text. This number may seem high, but most of these cases were simply Google adding a period to the end of the snippet. Apparently, Google is a stickler for complete sentences. So, now we're up to 51.3% of cases where either the display snippet perfectly matched the meta description tag or fully contained it.

What about cases where the display snippet used a truncated version of the meta description tag? Just 3.2% of snippets matched this scenario. Putting it all together, we're up to almost 55% of cases where Google is using all or part of the original meta description tag. This number is probably low, as we're not counting cases where Google used part of the original meta description but modified it in some way.

It's interesting to note that, in some cases, Google rewrote a meta description because the original description was too short or not descriptive enough. Take this result, for example:

Now, let's check out the original meta description tag...

In this case, the original meta description was actually too short for Google's tastes. Also note that, even though Google created the snippet themselves, they still cut it off with a "...". This strongly suggests that cutting off a snippet isn't a sign that Google thinks your description is low quality.

On the flip side, I should note that some very large sites don't use meta description tags at all, and they seem to fare perfectly well in search results. One notable example is Wikipedia, a site for which defining meta descriptions would be nearly impossible without automation, and any automation would probably fall short of Google's own capabilities.

I think you should be very careful using Wikipedia as an example of what to do (or what not do), when it comes to technical SEO, but it seems clear from the data that, in the absence of a meta description tag, Google is perfectly capable of ranking sites and writing their own snippets.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to control. For critical pages, writing a good meta description is like writing ad copy — there's real value in crafting that copy to drive interest and clicks. There's no guarantee Google will use that copy, and that fact can be frustrating, but the odds are still in your favor.

Is the 155 limit dead?

Unless something changes, and given the partial (although lacking in details) confirmation from Google, I think it's safe to experiment with longer meta description tags. Looking at the clean distribution, and just to give it a nice even number, I think 300 characters is a pretty safe bet. Some snippets that length may get cut off, but the potential gain of getting in more information offsets that relatively small risk.

That's not to say you should pad out your meta descriptions just to cash in on more characters. Snippets should be useful and encourage clicks. In part, that means not giving so much away that there's nothing left to drive the click. If you're artificially limiting your meta descriptions, though, or if you think more text would be beneficial to search visitors and create interest, then I would definitely experiment with expanding.

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December 19, 2017 at 05:03AM

Use as Directed: A Content Marketing Plan for Robust Business Performance

Posted by Alex-T

The chances that your company invests in a content marketing strategy are very high. Content Marketing Institute revealed that 89% of B2B and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing, while the money spent on this activity ranges between 26% to 30% of an entire marketing budget.

I believe that spending up to 50% of your overall budget on content marketing needs isn’t too much, if you know how to take advantage of it. Not only will it benefit your brand’s awareness, but it will also help you generate traffic, leads, and sales. My personal experience working with digital businesses has shown that only a few are successful in finding a strategic approach to their content plan. Sadly, most companies practice throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if a piece of content gets any readers.

In this post, you'll learn how to ensure that every piece of content you create drives traffic, attracts leads, and generates sales. I’ll give you ready-to-use solutions on how you can plan, execute, and measure your content promotion, so that content starts earning your business money.

Disclaimer: If you decide to follow any of my recommendations, make sure to adjust these techniques in accordance to your audience’s interests and your business needs, and test, test, and test again. As we all know, every business is unique, and what’s good for one brand may not be as helpful for another. Remember that blindly following any suggestions and mimicking other brands’ activities may not deliver desirable results.

Numbers don’t lie: Measure how your current content is performing

It’s important to start off your new content marketing campaign by analyzing your current situation. You may discover old content that hasn’t performed well yet, but that has the potential to benefit you with a few changes and a second chance. Working with old content is always a good idea, as the copywriting is already taken care of.

Many marketers don’t understand what’s absolutely required when it comes to measuring a content marketing campaign. Data measurement and analysis can be quite intimidating, especially if you're just starting out.

Here are two steps to take in order to get some meaningful insights:

1. Figure out how your content ranks in Google and whether it brings you traffic and conversions

To get ahold of this data, you're going to need a combination of tools.

Start with Google Analytics

The "Landing Pages" report in Google Analytics will show how your pages perform according to the number of impressions, clicks, conversions, and the average position of each page in the search results. To view this report in Google Analytics, your Google Search Console needs to be connected with your Google Analytics account. If you haven’t connected it yet, this data can be viewed directly in Google Search Console via the "Search Traffic" > "Search Analytics" report.

The problem with Google, though, is that it doesn’t give you a page's exact ranking; it only shows your site’s average position. It also requires you to check each page manually, so you can’t see a bigger picture all at once. Using tools — like SEMrush, SpyFu, Searchmetrics, Ahrefs, SERPstat, etc. — will allow you to see more precise data about your content's rankings. For example, here's a screenshot of a Google Analytics report showing a list of keywords for which a specific page appears in the SERPs:

And here’s the same data from SEMrush that allows you to filter pages, export the data, and work with it in a spreadsheet:

2. Find content that can be easily improved/edited to begin bringing value

After completing step #1, you'll have an all-encompassing picture of your content’s past performance. Geared up with the information you’ve uncovered, find those pages that are showing up in the search results and bringing you clicks and conversions, but that aren’t listed among the top five or ten search results. These pages have a lot of potential to make it to the top of Google. I would recommend checking whether these pieces:

Are supported by internal links. The higher the referring article is in the search results, the better it is for you.

Are easily discoverable. How long will it take a user to find your article? And I’m not talking only about the number of internal links in your content piece, but also whether it's featured in a similar content feed on blog posts.

Have enough external links. If there are none, then you should definitely consider mentioning your article in one of your next guest posts, or ask your colleagues in the PR department to help spread the word.

Have a well-written title and meta descriptions. Sometimes, this is what really affects your click-through rate and, as a result, your traffic.

Make a user stay on your page reading longer. If the answer is no, you need to brainstorm what kind of triggers you can add to your page so that your users spend some time browsing around your content. It could be a catchy GIF, educational videos, or product slide presentations.

The needs and wants of your business: Define the right metrics to track your progress

From an early age, we're taught that there’s a difference between a need and a want, that we only have a few true basic needs, and myriad wants. The same logic can be applied to the business world, but it’s a lot harder to discern and comprehend.

During this stage, you need to select highly meaningful and relevant metrics that align perfectly with your business needs. Please don’t try to use generic metrics — your business may have its own kind of struggles and goals. For some businesses, for instance, a conversion does not equal money. I run a free online conference called Digital Olympus that does not intend to sell anything. For me, a conversion is a registration, and I’ve come to learn that the best conversion for my situation is when a registered user attends my online event. Keep such things in mind at all times!

Another great example of a non-monetary conversion comes from one of my clients. They are a completely free SaaS software for specialists in the agricultural industry. They realized that their conversions aren’t registrations alone, and the reason is quite simple. After carefully analyzing their users’ behavior, they discovered that after a user registers, they aren’t taking advantage of their tool at all. For them, the best conversion is a registered user that is actively involved with their product. Coincidentally, that’s where content marketing can come into play to solve their problems. Their users need help to understand how they can take advantage of the software; adding relevant content to the company’s site will surely add clarity and improve users' understanding of their product.

When it comes to creating and managing content, it’s always a good idea to see exactly how users interact with it. Do they click on your call-to-action buttons? How many of them read your article in its entirety? All of these metrics are very easy to track if you use Google Tag Manager. It’s a must-have tool, allowing you to track whatever you want without going through the excruciating process of dealing with your dev team. Here’s an excellent post by Simo Ahava that explains which metrics you can track and analyze with the help of GTM.

Have your Google Analytics reports ever shown you something like this?:

If the answer is yes, you must know that elevating feeling of joy and excitement, seeing all these visitors checking out your page. But unless you’re a deliberate YouTuber with a fame complex, you’re not interested in traffic, per se. You want to witness conversions.

The goals of pages that attract traffic but don’t convert, in the majority of cases, don't match up to the goals of your web visitors. If you haven’t added lead magnets on those pages yet, it should be your top priority, because currently those content pieces aren’t converting your traffic into something tangible.

Don’t neglect the importance of SEO

Yes, it’s definitely important to write meaningful content that will perfectly resonate with your audience — but that’s not all. If you want to bring a steady flow of new visitors with the help of that content, you must optimize each of your posts to make sure that it has a fighting chance to rank on Google.

I highly recommend spending some time researching topics that will increase your chances to rank well. Below are a few ways you can identify them:

1. Find related keywords

Imagine you discovered that keywords related to "content marketing strategy" are the keywords driving the most conversions. Those keywords should be analyzed in order to find other keywords related to that subject. These keywords have proven to mirror your audience’s search behavior the most, and they're very promising in terms of earning you more paying clients.

One of the easiest ways to find related keywords is to simply check Google’s Autocomplete. You can look for autocomplete suggestions manually or by using tools like AnswerThePublic.com and Keywordtool.io. The latter scans Google Autosuggest and gives you the search volume for each keyword entered. It's a time-saver.

Another tool worth trying is SEMrush's Keyword Magic tool. It automatically gives you the most necessary information about a keyword, factoring in metrics such as CPC and volume (basic, but much-needed), keyword difficulty, competition level, SERP features, and exact and broad keyword matches. This tool gathers the data you need and offers a wide range of analysis for both single keywords and groups of keywords.

2. Check the competition level in the SERPs

After you've compiled a list of related keywords, it’s time to choose the keywords (e.g., topics for your future articles) that will help you rank higher in Google.

To save time, use a tool like SEMrush's Keyword Difficulty. It tells you how difficult it will be for you to promote your piece of content based on the domain’s visibility in organic search results. However, the Keyword Difficulty tool doesn’t consider the number of referring domains for the website or page URL you’re trying to look up. Here’s what you can do to make the process of gathering this missing data hassle-free:

Begin by collecting the list of domains and pages (URLs) that currently rank in Google for the list of keywords you’ve selected during the previous step. To speed things up, use a tool that allows you to easily export lists of domains and pages.

After you collect all the domains and URLs, you'll need to check the number of referring domains for each of them. Tools like Ahrefs or the Majestic Bulk Backlink Checker will allow you to analyze multiple links at once.

Finally, you can get a good understanding of what kinds of keywords have more or less competition based not only on the number of searchers they have, but also on their actual situation in the SERPs.

After these steps are completed, you’ll see how many referring domains each of your content pieces ought to have in order to rank higher. You'll also be able to identify the number of referring domains by looking at how many links have been acquired by the other pages that currently rank well.

Content promotion that gives short-term results

As I’ve mentioned previously, you need to remember that ranking in Google and attracting organic visitors are among the top goals of any content piece. Ideally, every article you publish on your website should eventually rank well, but you need to give your new SEO campaign some time before it bears fruit. While you’re waiting, you can take advantage of the promotional activities that allow for almost instantaneous results. Depending on your budget and your current rankings, choose one of the following promotional activities that seem most relevant for you.

A. Promote your posts on social media channels

Some people say the world will never be same again thanks to social media. Not sure how to interpret that exactly, but not taking advantage of this powerful channel is reckless! This is a basic and very common way to promote content, and it’s not rocket science to figure out how things work. But let me give you a couple of really actionable tips that will help you to maximize the output:

Create a short video to promote your content. They tend to perform really well on Facebook.

Use GIFs that prove to be very effective. Tools like Canva will help you create them without needing to hire a designer, unless you really want your GIFs to win you an award.

On Twitter, tag users that have recently shared something similar to your content. Search for a term that is related to your article, and you’ll see a list of users who you can tag.

Facebook groups are always a great idea — especially private groups. I recommend researching such groups in advance. Be sure to think of a catchy, unique intro you’ll be able to post to each group. This article explains the benefits of building a Facebook group. Get inspired and get out there to network!

If you want to promote your post on Facebook, make sure that your preview image meets the Facebook Ads Guidelines.

Set up a small ad campaign on Twitter targeting users that have recently shared related content. Use BuzzSumo to find like-minded users.

B. Collect leads

If you choose this way of promotion, then you are going to put in some work. A dull page with "meh"-looking content won’t cut it. You'll need to prepare something beforehand, something that will look attractive enough to convince a visitor to give you their email. A user is more likely to give you their contact information when they are offered one (or all) of the following options:

Exclusive content

Content with quotes from or provided by well-known industry experts

A webinar with a popular industry expert

Useful tools and templates. For instance, it’d be very helpful if a post offered to download a free and ready-to-use content — a promotional plan with a detailed description of all stages and resources one may need to implement a marketing strategy.

In case you don’t have a staff developer to help you with designing and adding a form to your website, there are different online services (like wisepops.com, wishpond.com, popupmonkey.com, or sumo.com) that you can use to create any kind of forms you want.

C. Use remarketing

Typically, only about 30% of visitors are willing to give you their contact details. The remaining 70% read or skim your content, close the tab, and get back to their routine. But you still have a second chance with them. How? The answer is remarketing:

Prepare banners and landing pages that are relevant to your content. These can invite your users to join a webinar or offer an exclusive content. Basically, you can use the same lead magnets that you’ve already integrated into your content page.

Prepare a script to automatically exclude your existing clients and leads from your remarketing campaign. There’s no need to bother them... yet.

D. Use email marketing automation to turn leads into paying clients

If you are somehow collecting leads and aren’t putting them through email marketing funnels, then you might as well just burn the rest of your money. HubSpot will really come in handy here because you can create email marketing funnels based not only on how users interact with your emails, but also on the type of pages your leads have visited. I’ve tried several HubSpot features while working on a few projects in the past, and I couldn’t have asked for a more powerful functionality.

In case you aren’t a Hubspot user, there are other marketing tools that allow you to create email funnels. I'd also suggest involving your leads in as many activities as you possibly can, because every interaction matters and is making them warmer. Ask them to follow you on social media channels. You can also offer some case studies or success stories another client shared about your brand. Real-life cases with your actual clients are very powerful, and the open and click rates of these emails can be a lot higher.

Before you start pushing your products or services to your leads, it's important to research what brought them to your website in the first place. This is absolutely essential, but sadly, a lot of companies tend to forget to do this research and fail; open rates plummet and users unsubscribe. Don’t let this happen to you.

In conclusion

It’s obvious why some blogs only post a couple of articles a year. What’s the point in creating tons of content that won’t bring any value to the business?

Always keep your SEO goals in mind, and remember that you have to do some preparation in order for them to be delivered accurately and on time. Even short-term results require some leg work. No doubt that, once you’ve adjusted your routine, practiced some of the tactics mentioned above, and are consistent with them, every time you create a piece of meaningful and purposeful content, it will take you less time to manage and promote it.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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December 19, 2017 at 10:18PM

Followerwonk Is Moving On to a New, Loving Home

Posted by adamf

We have exciting news to share with you about our Twitter analytics tool, Followerwonk! For a while now we’ve been looking for a new home for the tool. We’re very pleased to announce that Marc Mims, one of the tool's original developers, formed a company to acquire it and will continue to operate the popular service under the Followerwonk brand.

A little history

In August 2016, we announced our intention to sell Followerwonk. It’s a useful and powerful application, but since acquiring it in 2012, we discovered that the overlap between users of Followerwonk and users of our core SEO products was smaller than we anticipated. To address that problem, in 2015 we offered it as a separate subscription — part of a larger strategy to extend our services beyond SEO. Last year we made some hard choices, ultimately deciding to refocus our efforts on our SEO core. It was then that we decided to seek a better home for our Twitter analytics tool.

Marc and Followerwonk go way back. As an engineer on the team that originally built and launched the tool, he came on board at Moz in 2012 when Moz first acquired it. He spent his first year on the Moz engineering team working on Followerwonk, and then a year working on Open Site Explorer, after which he returned to Followerwonk to help us relaunch it as a standalone product. In August 2016 we put Followerwonk in a holding pattern while we sought a buyer; during this time, Marc stayed on as a contractor to keep it healthy and operational for existing customers.

When Marc made an offer to acquire the product, it was like everything had come full circle; we were delighted to know Followerwonk will continue in good hands. There are only a few buyers in the world who could bring Marc's knowledge and passion for Followerwonk to the table.

In the months since August 2016, Marc spent his time making improvements and optimizations to the backend. He has quietly deployed 52 releases of Followerwonk in that time, improving performance and stability. He’s excited to be able to start adding new features now, too.

What does this mean for existing customers?

It means you can expect continued service from the product you love and the addition of new features and capabilities in the future. Moz will continue to host Followerwonk during a transition period while Marc prepares it to run on its own infrastructure. During that time, you can continue to use Followerwonk as you always have.

As Marc and Moz work together to transfer the service, Followerwonk customers should not notice much change; most of the work will be happening behind the scenes. Accounts will be transferred securely, and we will communicate directly with customers if any actions are required.

If you have legacy access to Followerwonk as part of your Moz Pro subscription from before its 2015 relaunch as a separate service, you will continue to have uninterrupted access to the tool through the transition period. Near the end of that period, Marc and Moz will jointly make a special offer allowing you to subscribe to Followerwonk and continue using it after the tool has left Moz’s infrastructure.

The transition period should take between three and six months. During that time, you can access the tool through your Moz login at https://moz.com/followerwonk. Afterwards, you’ll find it at https://followerwonk.com.

We’ll be sure to reach out to all customers and those with legacy access to provide more details well before any changes occur.

Final thoughts

In our hearts and minds, this is absolutely the best possible outcome for Followerwonk. It continues in the hands of a strong engineer, a beloved and respected member of the Moz team, an incredibly TAGFEE person, and someone who knows Followerwonk inside and out. Please join us in wishing Marc great success as he builds a team and a business around Followerwonk, giving it the love and attention it richly deserves.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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December 20, 2017 at 09:33AM

3 Creative Ways to Give Your Content Efforts a Boost - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

We know that content is our doorway to earning countless SEO benefits for our sites. Admittedly, though, it’s too easy to get stuck in a rut after one too many content marketing campaigns. In this extra-special holiday edition of Whitebeard Friday (see what we did there?), Rand offers three novel ways to add sparkle to your content creation efforts

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special Christmas edition of Whitebeard Friday. This week, I wanted to try and help with just a few tactical suggestions on some creative ways to pump up those content marketing campaigns.

I've seen that many, many folks in the SEO world, of course, naturally, are investing in content marketing because content is the path to links and amplification and search traffic. Sometimes those content campaigns can feel a little stale or repetitive. So I have some creative ideas, things that I've seen some people executing on that I think we might be able to leverage for some of our work.

1. Niche groups

First one, if you can identify in your community these sort of small but vocal niche groups that are . . . when I say your community, it doesn't have to be people you already reach. It can be people inside the community of content generation and of topical interest around your subject matter. Then help them to amplify their voices or their causes or their pet projects, etc.

So I'll use the example of being in the foodie and gourmand world. So here's a bunch of foodies. But this particular tiny group is extremely passionate about food trucks, and, in particular, they really hate the laws that restrict food truck growth, that a lot of cities don't allow food trucks to be in certain spaces. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get licensed. They are not permitted to be permanently in a place for a whole week. Whatever it is, whatever those legal restrictions are. So by serving this small group, you might think that content is way too niche.

The wonderful part is that content is the kind that gets amplified very loudly, very repetitively, that can help you earn links and traffic to this small community. If that community is small and loud and feels like their voices aren't being heard elsewhere, you can build some great brand advocacy inside that group as well. By the way, I would urge you to be authentic, choose causes that you or your company also care about. Don't just pick something at random.

2. Products and services

Second, if you can, try and seek out products and services that your audience uses or needs, but that doesn't actually directly conflict with your business. Then create a resource that lists or rates or ranks and recommends those top choices. We've actually done this a few times at Moz. I have this recommended list of agency and consultant providers, but Moz does not compete with any of those. But it's a helpful list. As a result of listing those folks and having this sort of process around it, many of those people are pumping up that content.

Now here's another example. Foodie Moz, Foodie Moz sounds like a great domain. I should go register that right after this hat stops hitting me in the back of the head. I don't know how Santa deals with that. So Foodie Moz presents the best cookbooks of 2017. Now, Foodie Moz might be in the food and recipe world. But it turns out, the wonderful part is cookbooks are something that is used by their audience but not directly conflicting with them.

Since it's not self-promotional, but it is useful to your audience, the likelihood that you can earn links and amplification because you seem like a non-self-interested party is much greater. You're providing value without asking anything in return. It's not like anyone buying these cookbooks would help you. It's not like you have some ulterior motive in ranking this one number one or that one number two. You're merely putting together an unbiased set of resources that help your audience. That is a great way to get a piece of content to do well.

3. Content creators

Third, last but not least here, if you can, find content creators who have been very successful. You can recruit them, the people who have had hit pieces, to create content for your brand. In a lot of ways, this is like cheating. It's almost like buying links, except instead of buying the links, you're buying the time and energy of the person who creates content that you have high likelihood or high propensity for being successful in that content niche with what they create because of their past track record and the audience they've already built.

Pro-tip here. Journalists and media contributors, even contributors to online media, like a BuzzFeed or something like that, are great targets. Why? Well, because they're usually poorly paid and they are desperate to build a portfolio of professional work. Some of these folks are insanely talented, and they already have networks of people who have liked their work in the past and have helped amplify them.

So if you can use a tool like BuzzSumo — that would be generally what I'd recommend, there's a few others, but BuzzSumo is really great for this — you can search for, for example, recipes and see the most shared content in the recipe world in, say, the last three months. Then we can identify, "Oh, here we go. This person wrote the hardest recipe challenge gifts. Oh, all right. That did really, really well. I wonder if we can see who that is. Oh look, she does freelance work. I bet she can write for us."

It's like cheating. It's a great hack. It's a great to way to recruit someone who you know is likely to have a great shot at their work doing well, give them the freedom to write what they want, to create what they want, and then host it on your site. A great way to do content creation, for a decent price, that has a high likelihood of solid amplification.

All right, everyone, look forward to some of your thoughts and tactics. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, a Merry Christmas from all of us at Moz. For those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, happy belated Hanukkah. I know that I'm filming this during Hanukkah, but it's probably after Hanukkah that you're seeing it. For those of you who are celebrating any other holiday this year, a very happy holiday season to you. We look forward to joining you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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December 21, 2017 at 10:18PM

Mozzy Good Wishes to You & Yours!

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

As the long holiday weekend draws to a close and we prepare to welcome a brand-new year, we at Moz just want to thank you all for a wonderful, fulfilling year on the blog. Your colorful commentary, delightful debates, thrilling thumbs-up, and vivacious visits have made the past twelve months sparkle and shine (and with that, I'll bid the alliteration adieu).

Our "card" features a cameo from a little Moz Dog you may recognize: the inimitable Lettie Pickles!

At the Moz HQ, we practice a multitude of holiday traditions. Whether it's Mozzers gathering in the common room (affectionately named "Roger") to light candles on the menorah during Hanukkah, trading and stealing gifts for the company-wide White Elephant exchange (someone won a bonafide Commodore 64 this year!), or getting our boogie and our board gaming on at the Moz holiday party, we try to honor this special season with a healthy mix of reverence and good old-fashioned fun.

The folks who come to our blog for digital marketing advice hail from almost every remote corner of the world (we know; we looked at our analytics ;). This week, when things tend to slow down and it's just a little more difficult than usual to get anyone to reply to your emails, we'd love to invite you to share your own unique tales and traditions in the comments. What's your favorite way to celebrate, in the office and at home? What mishaps and magical moments alike filled your days, and what's your resolution for 2018? Let's take a little breather as we gear up for all the new projects and responsibilities awaiting us just around the corner and share with each other; after all, that's what being a community is all about! :)

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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December 25, 2017 at 04:16PM

The Very Best of the Moz Blog 2017: Our Top 50 Posts

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

Now, I know we technically have a few days left in 2017, but I'm ready to dive head-first into a fond, full-blown retrospective. Each year we look back on what we've published, compiling and sharing the pieces you liked best. Normally we divvy it up via various metrics: traffic, 1Metric score, total thumbs up, total comments, the best of YouMoz, and so on and so forth. This year, however, we're doing things just a little differently.

A lot has changed in the past year...

The way we run the blog has changed in a few significant ways from the days of yesteryear. YouMoz, our user-generated content blog, was retired in the autumn of 2016 (though we hope to resurrect it in another form someday). We reduced our publishing frequency a bit, and refocused our content on core SEO topics after spending 2015 and 2016 branching out into other marketing subjects (like social media and content marketing). We also made some big changes with regards to commenting: we closed comments on posts older than 30 days (they became veritable spam factories), and implemented stricter moderation filters to better catch spammy comments fishing for either a link or easy MozPoints.

And if I'm being completely honest, I don't think the "Best of" posts from years past have offered you, our beloved readers, as much value as they should've. The most excited comments on those posts occur when someone discovers a gem they'd missed, when a post reaches out to you from the masses of online content clamoring for your attention and speaks to you. The way we formerly ranked "the best" resulted in a lot of overlap; the same few posts with lots of thumbs up, a busy comments section, and high traffic overwhelmed the leaderboard.

What criteria now determines "best"?

At the end of 2017, we're starting fresh. First, I've taken our ten most popular blog post categories by traffic — these represent the topics readers are actively seeking information on. Next, I thought about which metric matters most to me when I consider the success of a blog post. Traffic, thumbs, social shares... Nice to see, yes, but they don't paint a very clear picture of a post's impact. I found myself returning to my favorite blog post metric again and again: the comments.

A post with a lively comments section can be many things. Perhaps it sparked questions or debate; perhaps the findings were controversial; perhaps it was simply inspiring. Whatever the reason, a heavily commented-on post represents something that struck a chord, that convinced a person to peek out from behind their keyboard shield and contribute a thought, that coaxed a little extra effort and commitment from our community. As a silent lurker myself, I am consistently blown away by the humility, genius, and generosity you all display in the blog comments section every day.

So there we have it: this year's Best of the Moz Blog 2017 is a list of the top five most-commented posts in the top ten blog categories. That's fifty unique blog posts throughout the year on a variety of topics, some of which you may have missed. Most blog posts fall into several of our categories, but every post will only be listed once; if it's hit the top five in a more popular category, I've taken it out of the running for the rest. It's my sincere hope that this list uncovers something useful for you, something that helps make your job and day just a little easier.

Without further ado, let's get this party started!

(If you're curious, check out the Best of 2016 and the Best of 2015, too.)

The top 5 Whiteboard Fridays

Whiteboard Friday is far and away our most popular blog category, earning three times as much traffic as the rest. Because it always overlaps with at least one other category, you're bound to get a tidy grab bag of SEO takeaways with this list!

10 Things that DO NOT (Directly) Affect Your Google Rankings

Rand Fishkin, September 22nd

Thumbs: 85
Comments: 180

What do the age of your site, your headline H1/H2 preference, bounce rate, and shared hosting all have in common? You might've gotten a hint from the title: not a single one of them directly affects your Google rankings. In this rather comforting Whiteboard Friday, Rand lists out ten factors commonly thought to influence your rankings that Google simply doesn't care about.

What Do Google's New, Longer Snippets Mean for SEO?

Rand Fishkin, December 8th

Thumbs: 100
Comments: 136

Featured snippets and meta descriptions have brand-new character limits, and it's a huge change for Google and SEOs alike. Learn about what's new, when it changed, and what it all means for SEO in this episode of Whiteboard Friday. (And this is cheating, but for good measure, you might follow up with Dr. Pete's official recommendation for meta description lengths in 2018.)

What Links Can You Get that Comply with Google's Guidelines?

Marie Haynes, January 20th

Thumbs: 68
Comments: 112

If you've ever been the victim of a Google penalty, you know how painful it can be to identify the problem and recover from the hit. Even if you've been penalty-free thus far, the threat of getting penalized is a source of worry. But how can you avoid it, when it seems like unnatural links lurk around every corner?

In this Whiteboard Friday, we warmly welcome Google penalty and unnatural link expert Marie Haynes as she shares how to earn links that do comply with Google's guidelines, that will keep your site out of trouble, and that can make a real impact.

7 ‹Title Tag› Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic - Whiteboard Friday

Cyrus Shepard, May 5th

Thumbs: 185
Comments: 103

You may find yourself wondering whether the humble title tag still matters in modern SEO. When it comes to your click-through rate, the answer is a resounding yes! In this Whiteboard Friday, we welcome back our good friend Cyrus Shepard to talk about 7 ways you can revamp your title tags to increase your site traffic and rankings.

Comment Marketing: How to Earn Benefits from Community Participation

Rand Fishkin, January 13th

Thumbs: 53
Comments: 97

It's been a few years since we've covered the topic of comment marketing, but that doesn't mean it's out of date. There are clever, intentional ways to market yourself and your brand in the comments sections of sites, and there's less competition now than ever before. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand details what you can do to get noticed in the comments and the benefits you'll reap from high-quality contributions.

The top 5 posts in On-Page SEO

The results of our recent Moz Blog Reader Survey highlighted on-page SEO as the topic you'd most like to learn about, so it's not surprising to see that this category sits right under Whiteboard Friday for popularity. There's an interesting theme that emerges from these top posts: it seems we're still working on many of the same things, but how we treat them has necessarily changed over time.

How Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation Can Impact SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, October 20th

Thumbs: 68
Comments: 92

Which link is more valuable: the one in your nav, or the one in the content of your page? Now, how about if one of those in-content links is an image, and one is text? Not all links are created equal, and getting familiar with the details will help you build a stronger linking structure. This Whiteboard Friday covers links in headers and footers, in navigation versus content, and how that can affect internal and external links, link equity, and link value between your site and others.

It's Time to Stop Doing On-Page SEO Like It's 2012

Rand Fishkin, February 6th

Thumbs: 84
Comments: 91

On-page SEO has evolved in the past five years. Rand outlines the changes in five succinct tactics: move beyond keyword repetition rules; searcher intent matters more than raw keywords; related topics are essential; links don't always beat on-page; and topical authority is more important than ever.

The Wonderful World of SEO Meta Tags [Refreshed for 2017]

Kate Morris, April 13th

Thumbs: 46
Comments: 67

Which meta tags are absolutely necessary, which are dependent on your situation, and which should you absolutely ignore or remove? Kate Morris refreshes her original 2010 post on the subject of meta tags, sharing a few new tips and reiterating what's remained the same over the past 7 years.

Designing a Page's Content Flow to Maximize SEO Opportunity - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, December 1st

Thumbs: 54
Comments: 48

Controlling and improving the flow of your on-site content can actually help your SEO. What's the best way to capitalize on the opportunity present in your page design? Rand covers the questions you need to ask (and answer) and the goals you should strive for in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

How to Do a Content Audit [Updated for 2017]

Everett Sizemore, March 22nd

Thumbs: 49
Comments: 31

Learn how to do content audits for SEO in this comprehensive, updated guide by Everett Sizemore, including tips for crawling large websites, rendering JavaScript content, and auditing dynamic mobile content.

The top 5 posts in Local SEO

Local SEO overlaps with what we think of as traditional SEO in many ways, so it's not surprising at all to see this category near the top. There's still a lot of doubt and apprehension, it seems, when it comes to local SEO best practices and what really works, and the top posts in this category reflect that.

Local SEO Spam Tactics Are Working: How You Can Fight Back

Casey Meraz, March 28th

Thumbs: 48
Comments: 75

It's very clear that spam tactics in Google's local results are earning higher rankings. In this post, Casey Meraz identifies exactly what spammers are doing to get ahead, what they can get away with, and what you can do to fight back against the problem plaguing local results.

Not-Actually-the-Best Local SEO Practices

Miriam Ellis, December 11th

Thumbs: 47
Comments: 72

Not all common practices in local SEO are the best practices. In fact, some of them can be pretty darn harmful. Check out Miriam's list of what-not-to-dos (and what-you-should-actually-dos) in this comprehensive blog post.

The 2017 Local SEO Forecast: 10 Predictions According to Mozzers

Miriam Ellis, February 14th

Thumbs: 35
Comments: 67

From Google providing intimate details about businesses to Amazon expanding even further into the local scene, local SEO stood to see a lot of change this year. Check out what the SEOs at Moz had to say about what to prepare for in 2017.

Proximity to Searcher is the New #1 Local Search Ranking Factor

Darren Shaw, February 22nd

Thumbs: 58
Comments: 65

Forget everything you thought you knew about the most impactful local ranking factors — searcher proximity just may be the number-one thing influencing where a local business shows on the SERPs.

How to Perform a Basic Local Business Competitive Audit

Miriam Ellis, August 22nd

Thumbs: 32
Comments: 65

Are you outranked in Google's Local Pack? Then it's high time to perform a competitive business audit. Use this example analysis and downloadable spreadsheet to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of multiple businesses and devise a plan to win.

The top 5 posts in Basic SEO

Basic SEO is another category that enjoys a lot of overlap with other topics; perhaps that's one reason why it's so popular. This year's top posts in this category cover a range of subjects, and all are pretty useful for someone learning (or leveling up in) SEO.

Aren't 301s, 302s, and Canonicals All Basically the Same? - Whiteboard Friday

Dr. Pete, March 3rd

Thumbs: 62
Comments: 69

They say history repeats itself. In the case of the great 301 vs 302 vs rel=canonical debate, it repeats itself about every three months. In this Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete explains how bots and humans experience pages differently depending on which solution you use, why it matters, and how each choice may be treated by Google.

How to Prioritize SEO Tasks [+Worksheet]

Britney Muller, September 21st

Thumbs: 41
Comments: 64

An absolute essential if you want to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, Moz's own SEO Britney Muller offers five tips for prioritizing your SEO work: setting specific goals, identifying important pages for conversions, uncovering technical opportunities via a site crawl, time management, and providing consistent benchmarks and reporting.

5 Tactics to Earn Links Without Having to Directly Ask - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, July 28th

Thumbs: 71
Comments: 63

Typical link outreach is a tired sport, and we've all but alienated most content creators with our constant link requests. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines five smart ways to earn links to your site without having to beg.

"SEO Is Always Changing"... Or Is It?: Debunking the Myth and Getting Back to Basics

Bridget Randolph, July 19th

Thumbs: 56
Comments: 60

We're so fond of the idea that SEO is hard because it's always changing. But is that really true? Bridget Randolph challenges a common industry refrain and brings us back to the basics of what's really important in our work.

How to Target Multiple Keywords with One Page - Next Level

Brian Childs, June 15th

Thumbs: 45
Comments: 56

In this edition of our educational Next Level series, you'll learn an easy workflow for researching and targeting multiple keywords with a single page.

The top five posts in Link Building

A thousand years from now, when the Space Needle has toppled into Puget Sound and our great-great-great-great-etc. grandchildren are living on Mars, link building will still prove to be one of the most popular subjects on the Moz Blog. And you get a double-whammy of goodness this year, because they just so happen to all be Whiteboard Fridays!

Should SEOs Care About Internal Links? - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, May 26th

Thumbs: 85
Comments: 87

Internal links are one of those essential SEO items you have to get right to avoid getting them really wrong. Rand shares 18 tips to help inform your strategy, going into detail about their attributes, internal vs. external links, ideal link structures, and much, much more in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

How to Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts & Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, February 17th

Thumbs: 73
Comments: 81

We all know how effective link building efforts can be, but it can be an intimidating, frustrating process — and sometimes even a chore. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand builds out a framework you can start using today to streamline and simplify the link building process for you, your teammates, and yes, even your interns.

The 3 Easiest Link Building Tactics Any Website Can Use to Acquire Their First 50 Links - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, September 8th

Thumbs: 81
Comments: 77

Without a solid base of links, your site won't be competitive in the SERPs — even if you do everything else right. But building your first few links can be difficult and discouraging, especially for new websites. Never fear — Rand is here to share three relatively quick, easy, and tool-free (read: actually free) methods to build that solid base and earn yourself links.

When and How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Count Metrics - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, June 16th

Thumbs: 50
Comments: 71

How can you effectively apply link metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority alongside your other SEO metrics? Where and when does it make sense to take them into account, and what exactly do they mean? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand answers these questions and more, arming you with the knowledge you need to better understand and execute your SEO work.

Image Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Britney Muller, December 15th

Thumbs: 48
Comments: 63

Image link building is a delicate art. There are some distinct considerations from traditional link building, and doing it successfully requires a balance of creativity, curiosity, and having the right tools on hand. In this Whiteboard Friday, Moz's own SEO and link building aficionado Britney Muller offers up concrete advice for successfully building links via images.

The top 5 posts in Advanced SEO

2017's top posts in the advanced SEO category cover just about every post type we like to publish (and that you like to read): in-depth case studies, Whiteboard Fridays, best practice advice, and solid how-tos.

[Case Study] How We Ranked #1 for a High-Volume Keyword in Under 3 Months

Dmitry Dragilev, April 19th

Thumbs: 73
Comments: 140

If you've been struggling to take the number-one spot in the SERPs for a competitive keyword, take a cue from this case study. Dmitry Dragilev shares his team's 8-step methodology for ranking first in a popular niche.

How Google AdWords (PPC) Does and Doesn't Affect Organic Results - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, November 17th

Thumbs: 68
Comments: 89

It's common industry knowledge that PPC can have an effect on our organic results. But what effect is that, exactly, and how does it work? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the ways paid ads influence organic results — and one very important way they don't.

SEO Best Practices for Canonical URLs + the Rel=Canonical Tag - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, July 14th

Thumbs: 62
Comments: 87

If you've ever had any questions about the canonical tag, well, have we got the Whiteboard Friday for you. In this episode, Rand defines what rel=canonical means and its intended purpose, when it's recommended you use it, how to use it, and sticky situations to avoid.

How to Uncover Hidden Keyword-Level Data Using Google Sheets

Sarah Lively, February 13th

Thumbs: 42
Comments: 83

Which keywords are driving your organic traffic? Keyword-level data doesn't have to be (not provided). Sarah Lively shares a smart solution using two free add-ons for Google Sheets.

How Long Should Your Meta Description Be? (2018 Edition)

Dr. Pete, December 19th

Thumbs: 49
Comments: 76

The end of November saw a spike in the average length of SERP snippets. Across 90K results, we found a definite increase but many oddities, such as video snippets. Our data suggests that many snippets are exceeding 300 characters, and we recommend a new meta description limit of 300 characters.

The top 5 posts in Technical SEO

Technical SEO posts are some of my favorite categories to publish (which is perhaps a strange sentiment coming from a poetry major). The debate that recently raged — about whether it's necessary or unnecessary for SEO — will always stick with many of us, as will Rand's excellent Whiteboard Friday rebuttal on the topic.

XML Sitemaps: The Most Misunderstood Tool in the SEO's Toolbox

Michael Cottam, April 11th

Thumbs: 43
Comments: 83

XML sitemaps are a powerful tool for SEOs, but are often misunderstood and misused. Michael Cottam explains how to leverage XML sitemaps to identify and resolve indexation problems.

JavaScript & SEO: Making Your Bot Experience As Good As Your User Experience

Alexis Sanders, June 20th

Thumbs: 56
Comments: 79

More and more, we're realizing it's incredibly important for us as SEOs to understand JavaScript's impact on search experience. Can search engines see your content and experience your site the way a user does? If not, what solutions can you use to fix it?

Pros and Cons of HTTPS Services: Traditional vs Let's Encrypt vs Cloudflare

JR Ridley, September 13th

Thumbs: 38
Comments: 78

Thinking about going secure? It's more important than ever, with Google issuing security warnings for many non-secure sites in Chrome. This comparison of three popular HTTPS services will help you determine the best option for implementing an SSL certification on your site.

Mastering Google Search Operators in 67 Easy Steps

Dr. Pete, March 1st

Thumbs: 82
Comments: 76

Google search operators are like chess – knowing how the pieces move doesn't make you a master. Dive into 67 examples, from content research to site audits, and level up your search operator game.

Unlocking Hidden Gems Within Schema.org

Alexis Sanders, October 18th

Thumbs: 45
Comments: 69

Schema.org can be a confusing resource if you're trying to learn how to use and implement structured data. This mini-guide arms you with the right kind of thinking to tackle your next structured data project.

The top 5 posts in Keyword Research

The posts generating the most buzz in our keyword research category seem to revolve around quick yet effective wins and tactical advice. And with time constraints being one of the biggest challenges reported in our Reader's Survey, it's really no surprise.

The Lazy Writer’s Guide to 30-Minute Keyword Research

Britney Muller, July 26th

Thumbs: 52
Comments: 54

Keyword research doesn’t have to be a marathon bender. A brisk 30-minute walk can provide incredible insights — insights that connect you with a wider audience on a deeper level. Britney Muller shares several ways to get your keyword research tasks done efficiently and well.

The Keyword + Year Content/Rankings Hack - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, February 10th

Thumbs: 63
Comments: 49

What's the secret to earning site traffic from competitive keywords with decent search volume? The answer could be as easy as 1, 2, 3 — or more precisely, 2, 0, 1, 7. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand lets you in on a relatively straightforward tactic that can help you compete in a tough space using very fresh content.

3 Tactics for Hyperlocal Keywords - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, February 24th

Thumbs: 63
Comments: 47

Trying to target a small, specific region with your keywords can prove frustrating. While reaching a high-intent local audience is incredibly valuable, without volume data to inform your keyword research, you'll find yourself hitting a wall. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares how to uncover powerful, laser-focused keywords that will reach exactly the right people.

Which of My Competitor's Keywords Should (& Shouldn't ) I Target? - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, November 24th

Thumbs: 45
Comments: 44

You don't want to try to rank for every one of your competitors' keywords. Like most things with SEO, it's important to be strategic and intentional with your decisions. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his recommended process for understanding your funnel, identifying the right competitors to track, and prioritizing which of their keywords you ought to target.

NEW in Keyword Explorer: See Who Ranks & How Much with Keywords by Site

Rand Fishkin, October 23rd

Thumbs: 41
Comments: 43

It's not often that a product-focused post makes our blog's Best of the Year list, so this is both interesting and heartening to see. We worked really hard to bring better data and more usefulness to Keyword Explorer this year, and y'all left some really kind sentiments in the comments. Thanks for always being here for us, folks! :)

The top 5 posts in Content

I won't say it, I promise. ;) But content is just as important as ever, and the rather vague advice of "create great content and the rest will come" has certainly gotten a bit exhausting over the years. We've made an effort to publish more actionable ways to think about and use content, and it seems like that's been resonating with you so far!

Refurbishing Top Content - Whiteboard Friday

Britney Muller, February 3rd

Thumbs: 66
Comments: 82

You've got top-performing content on your site that does really well. Maybe it's highly converting, maybe it garners the most qualified traffic — but it's just sitting there gathering dust. Isn't there something else you can do with content that's clearly proven its worth?

As it turns out, there is! In this Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller shares three easy steps for identifying, repurposing, and republishing your top content to juice every drop of goodness out of it.

What We Learned From Analyzing 1.4 Million Featured Snippets

A.J. Ghergich, January 17th

Thumbs: 48
Comments: 78

From optimal snippet length, to practical application tips, to which queries prefer tables, lists, or paragraphs, learn everything you need to know to supercharge your snippet wins.

The Perfect Blog Post Length and Publishing Frequency is B?!!$#÷x - Whiteboard Friday

Rand Fishkin, August 18th

Thumbs: 76
Comments: 65

The perfect blog post length or publishing frequency doesn't actually exist. "Perfect" isn't universal — your content's success depends on tons of personalized factors. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why the idea of "perfect" is baloney when it comes to your blog, and lists what you should actually be looking for in a successful publishing strategy.

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Jen Carney, August 2nd

Thumbs: 31
Comments: 51

You've spend too much time and effort on content creation to share it only once. Check out four smart strategies you can implement today to improve the reach of your existing content.

How to Build the Right Content Marketing Strategy for SEO Growth

Alli Berry, November 15th

Thumbs: 30
Comments: 51

Keywords are important for innumerable SEO tasks, but driving your content marketing strategy isn't one of them. Your strategy should be based on the audience you're trying to reach if you want your organic traffic to convert.

Paid Search Marketing

While it perhaps seems a little strange for an SEO blog to cover, paid search plays an important part in our digital marketing world, and as reported in our Reader's Survey, plenty of us wear more than one hat. Here are the top posts from 2017 that generated the most commentary about all things paid:

Do iPhone Users Spend More Online Than Android Users?

Martin Meany, October 11th

Thumbs: 27
Comments: 71

iPhone users tend to spend 3x as much as Android users, according to an analysis of 31 million mobile e-commerce sessions. Digital marketers can capitalize on this revelation via Facebook and AdWords.

Branding Success: How to Use PPC to Amplify Your Brand

Purna Virji, February 21st

Thumbs: 34
Comments: 44

You might be surprised to learn that branding and PPC go hand-in-hand. Find out how to leverage your PPC campaigns to strengthen your brand and win conversions and loyalty from your customers.

No, Paid Search Audiences Won’t Replace Keywords

Kirk Williams, May 30th

Thumbs: 33
Comments: 29

Keywords or audience targeting? Kirk Williams sets out to argue that far from being dead, keywords are still the most useful tool in the paid search marketer's toolbox.

Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches - Whiteboard Friday

Kane Jamison, September 29th

Thumbs: 31
Comments: 29

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won't do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch's traffic and results. In this Whiteboard Friday, we're welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

The Step-By-Step Guide to Testing Voice Search Via PPC

Purna Virji, March 21st

Thumbs: 30
Comments: 24

Conversational interfaces are becoming more and more popular, but it's hard to know where to start when it comes to voice search. A $50 PPC budget is enough to jumpstart your voice search keyword list and strategy — learn how in this step-by-step guide.

Top comments by thumbs up

Comments are my favorite blog post success metric, and it simply wouldn't do if we didn't honor the folks who contributed the most popular comments in 2017. Thank you, all of you, for sharing your thoughts with the greater Moz and SEO community, and for taking precious time out of your day to make the blog a more interesting and better place. And for all the comment lurkers out there like me, I offer you solemn solidarity and zero judgment (but I'd be delighted to see y'all venture out from behind the screen now and again ;).

1. Praveen Sharma on "10 Things that DO NOT (Directly) Affect Your Google Rankings - Whiteboard Friday" – 58 thumbs up

Short, sweet, accurate, relevant advice is the name of the game. :) We've had feedback before that some readers come to the blog for the comments as much as the post itself, and this example shows why. Thanks for sharing your insight, Praveen!

2. SEOMG on "7 ‹Title Tag› Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic - Whiteboard Friday" – 42 thumbs up

Much like the above, this comment exemplifies clear, useful examples related to the post topic. You rock, SEOMG!

3. Praveen Sharma on "The 3 Easiest Link Building Tactics Any Website Can Use to Acquire Their First 50 Links - Whiteboard Friday" – 39 thumbs up

Swooping in again with another helpful tidbit to add to the blog post at hand, Praveen's made it on the Top 10 list twice. We really appreciate your contributions, Praveen!

4. Trevor Klein on "Moz Transitions: Rand to Step Away from Operations and into Advisory Role in Early 2018" – 38 thumbs up

A bittersweet comment that clearly struck a chord with many in our community. Rand, I hope you know how much we all love and appreciate you! And Trevor, thank you so much for your candid and genuine thoughts; you truly spoke for all of us there.

5. Gianluca Fiorelli on "SEO Best Practices for Canonical URLs + the Rel=Canonical Tag - Whiteboard Friday" – 30 thumbs up

Gianluca's comments on the Moz Blog are legendary; each one is a treasure, a miniature blog post in and of itself. Thank you for sharing your smarts with us, Gianluca!

6. Rand Fishkin on "What Do Google's New, Longer Snippets Mean for SEO? - Whiteboard Friday" – 28 thumbs up

By using the comments section to clarify a few points about his Whiteboard Friday video and highlight his advice, Rand adds extra value and oomph to the post as a whole... and the community responded. :) Thank you for always leaving 10X comments, Rand!

7. Eric Hahn on "10 Things that DO NOT (Directly) Affect Your Google Rankings - Whiteboard Friday" – 26 thumbs up

The discussion in the thread spurred by this helpful, on-topic comment is the kind of lively, educational back-and-forth we love to witness. Thank you for inspiring folks to ask questions and learn, Eric!

8. Igor Gorbenko on "What Do Google's New, Longer Snippets Mean for SEO? - Whiteboard Friday" – 25 thumbs up

It makes me really happy that our community has — and rewards — such awesome personality. Igor, thank you for your wit and your insights! ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ ♪♬

9. Tim Soulo on "Moz Transitions: Rand to Step Away from Operations and into Advisory Role in Early 2018" – 22 thumbs up

The blog community definitely resonated with all the heartfelt, personal stories shared on this post. Tim, thank you for sharing!

10. Gianluca Fiorelli on "Comment Marketing: How to Earn Benefits from Community Participation - Whiteboard Friday" – 21 thumbs up

In an incredibly meta turn of events, Gianluca's comment on our Comment Marketing Whiteboard Friday rounds out the list of 2017's top comments on the Moz Blog. I don't think there's a person on this Internet that's done a better job of personal comment marketing than Gianluca! :)

Here's to you!

Thank you all, each and every one of you, for helping to keep our little community a thriving, nurturing place to learn SEO, share ideas, and hey, even make mistakes now and again. It's an honor to have a hand in providing content to such a TAGFEE and brilliant group of people, and I can't describe how excited I am for all that 2018 will bring.

Let me know in the comments how you liked the change-up this year, what other "Best of" formats or lists you might find helpful, and any other ponderings or thoughts you might have — and thank you again for reading!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-very-best-of-moz-blog-2017-our-top.html
December 28, 2017 at 03:58AM

How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

It's hard enough as it is to explain to non-SEOs how to rank a webpage. In an increasingly complicated field, to do well you've got to have a good handle on a wide variety of detailed subjects. This edition of Whiteboard Friday covers a nine-point checklist of the major items you've got to cross off to rank in the new year — and maybe get some hints on how to explain it to others, too.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special New Year's edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to run through how to rank in 2018 in a brief checklist format.

So I know that many of you sometimes wonder, "Gosh, it feels overwhelming to try and explain to someone outside the SEO profession how to get a web page ranked." Well, you know what? Let's explore that a little bit this week on Whiteboard Friday. I sent out a tweet asking folks, "Send me a brief checklist in 280 characters or less," and I got back some amazing responses. I have credited some folks here when they've contributed. There is a ton of detail to ranking in the SEO world, to try and rank in Google's results. But when we pull out, when we go broad, I think that just a few items, in fact just the nine we've got here can basically take you through the majority of what's required to rank in the year ahead. So let's dive into that.

I. Crawlable, accessible URL whose content Google can easily crawl and parse.

So we want Googlebot's spiders to be able to come to this page, to understand the content that's on there in a text readable format, to understand images and visuals or video or embeds or anything else that you've got on the page in a way that they are going to be able to put into their web index. That is crucial. Without it, none of the rest of this stuff even matters.

II. Keyword research

We need to know and to uncover the words and phrases that searchers are actually using to solve or to get answers to the problem that they are having in your world. Those should be problems that your organization, your website is actually working to solve, that your content will help them to solve.

What you want here is a primary keyword and hopefully a set of related secondary keywords that share the searcher's intent. So the intent behind of all of these terms and phrases should be the same so that the same content can serve it. When you do that, we now have a primary and a secondary set of keywords that we can target in our optimization efforts.

III. Investigate the SERP to find what Google believes to be relevant to the keywords's searches

I want you to do some SERP investigation, meaning perform a search query in Google, see what comes back to you, and then figure out from there what Google believes to be relevant to the keywords searches. What does Google think is the content that will answer this searcher's query? You're trying to figure out intent, the type of content that's required, and whatever missing pieces might be there. If you can find holes where, hey, no one is serving this, but I know that people want the answer to it, you might be able to fill that gap and take over that ranking position. Thanks to Gaetano, @gaetano_nyc, for the great suggestion on this one.

IV. Have the most credible, amplifiable person or team available create content that's going to serve the searcher's goal and solve their task better than anyone else on page one.

There are three elements here. First, we want an actually credible, worthy of amplification person or persons to create the content. Why is that? Well, because if we do that, we make amplification, we make link building, we make social sharing way more likely to happen, and our content becomes more credible, both in the eyes of searchers and visitors as well as in Google's eyes too. So to the degree that that is possible, I would certainly urge you to do it.

Next, we're trying to serve the searcher's goal and solve their task, and we want to do that better than anyone else does it on page one, because if we don't, even if we've optimized a lot of these other things, over time Google will realize, you know what? Searchers are frustrated with your result compared to other results, and they're going to rank those other people higher. Huge credit to Dan Kern, @kernmedia on Twitter, for the great suggestion on this one.

V. Craft a compelling title, meta description.

Yes, Google still does use the meta description quite frequently. I know it seems like sometimes they don't. But, in fact, there's a high percent of the time when the actual meta description from the page is used. There's an even higher percentage where the title is used. The URL, while Google sometimes truncates those, also used in the snippet as well as other elements. We'll talk about schema and other kinds of markup later on. But the snippet is something that is crucial to your SEO efforts, because that determines how it displays in the search result. How Google displays your result determines whether people want to click on your listing or someone else's. The snippet is your opportunity to say, "Come click me instead of those other guys." If you can optimize this, both from a keyword perspective using the words and phrases that people want, as well as from a relevancy and a pure drawing the click perspective, you can really win.

VI. Intelligently employ those primary, secondary, and related keywords

Related keywords meaning those that are semantically connected that Google is going to view as critical to proving to them that your content is relevant to the searcher's query — in the page's text content. Why am I saying text content here? Because if you put it purely in visuals or in video or some other embeddable format that Google can't necessarily easily parse out, eeh, they might not count it. They might not treat it as that's actually content on the page, and you need to prove to Google that you have the relevant keywords on the page.

VII. Where relevant and possible, use rich snippets and schema markup to enhance the potential visibility that you're going to get.

This is not possible for everyone. But in some cases, in the case that you're getting into Google news, or in the case that you're in the recipe world and you can get visuals and images, or in the case where you have a featured snippet opportunity and you can get the visual for that featured snippet along with that credit, or in the case where you can get rich snippets around travel or around flights, other verticals that schema is supporting right now, well, that's great. You should take advantage of those opportunities.

VIII. Optimize the page to load fast, as fast as possible and look great.

I mean look great from a visual, UI perspective and look great from a user experience perspective, letting someone go all the way through and accomplish their task in an easy, fulfilling way on every device, at every speed, and make it secure too. Security critically important. HTTPS is not the only thing, but it is a big part of what Google cares about right now, and HTTPS was a big focus in 2016 and 2017. It will certainly continue to be a focus for Google in 2018.

IX. You need to have a great answer to the question: Who will help amplify this and why?

When you have that great answer, I mean a specific list of people and publications who are going to help you amplify it, you've got to execute to earn solid links and mentions and word of mouth across the web and across social media so that your content can be seen by Google's crawlers and by human beings, by people as highly relevant and high quality.

You do all this stuff, you're going to rank very well in 2018. Look forward to your comments, your additions, your contributions, and feel free to look through the tweet thread as well.

Thanks to all of you who contributed via Twitter and to all of you who followed us here at Moz and Whiteboard Friday in 2017. We hope you have a great year ahead. Thanks for watching. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-to-rank-in-2018-seo-checklist.html
December 28, 2017 at 10:18PM

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexing

Is mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team.

“We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-does-mobile-first-indexing-work-and.html
January 01, 2018 at 10:12PM

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Posted by sherrybonelli

An important first step in any local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. Getting on Google My Business can increase your chances of showing up in Google’s Local Pack, Local Finder, Google Maps, and organic rankings in general. Qualifying local businesses can claim this free listing on Google and include basic information about their company, like their address, phone number, business hours and types of payments accepted.

If you haven’t claimed and verified your Google My Business Listing yet, that’s the first step. To get started, visit https://www.google.com/business.

Many local businesses just claim their GMB listing and forget about it. What most businesses don’t realize is that there are a variety of other features you can use to optimize your Google My Business listing and several reasons why you should frequently check your business listing to ensure that it’s accuracy stays intact. Want to know more?

Complete all the information Google asks for

There are a variety of questions you can answer to complete your Google My Business profile. When done, your listing will have valuable data that will make it easier for potential customers to find your company. And if you don’t fill that information in, someone else could. Many business owners don’t realize that anyone can suggest a change to your business listing — and that includes competitors.

When a searcher clicks on your GMB listing they can see a “Suggest an edit” option:

When someone clicks on that option they can literally edit your Google My Business listing (and make some pretty dramatic changes, too):

This is just one reason why it’s very important that you login to your Google My Business dashboard regularly to ensure that no one has attempted to make any unwanted changes to your listing. You'll see a notification that changes are pending if someone has made suggested changes that need your approval.

Also, it’s important to realize that Google encourages people who are familiar with your business to answer questions, so Google can learn more information about your company. To do this they can simply click on the “Know this place? Answer quick questions” link.

They’ll then be prompted to answer some questions about your business:

If they know the answer to the questions, they can answer. If not, they can decline.

Now, some business owners have cried foul, saying that competitors or others with malicious intent can wreak havoc on their Google My Business listings with this feature. However, Google’s philosophy is that this type of “user-generated content” helps to build a community, more fully completes a business’ profile, and allows Google to experiment with different search strategies.

After you get your Google My Business listing verified, continue to check your listing regularly to be on the safe side.

Google My Business Posts

Google Posts are “mini-ads” that show up in Google search in your Google My Business listing (in the Knowledge Panel and on Google Maps.)

You can have fun with your Posts by adding an image, a Call to Action (CTA), and even including a link to another page or website. If you’re using Yext, you can create GMB Posts directly from your Yext dashboard.

Here are just a few Post ideas:

If you’re having an event (like a webinar) you can set up an event Post with a date and time and then add a link to the registration page.

Do you have a sale going on during a specific time? Create a “sale” event Post.

Does your latest blog post rock? Add a short description of your blog post and link to the post on your blog.

New product you want to feature? Show a picture of this cool gadget and link to where people can make the purchase.

Want to spread holiday joy? Give potential customers a holiday message Post.

The possibilities with Posts are endless! Posts stay “live” for seven days or “go dark” after the date of the event. Google is great about sending you reminders when it’s time to create a new Post.

TIP: To grab a searcher’s attention, you want to include an image in your Post, but on Google Maps the Post image can get cut off. You might have to test a few Post image sizes to make sure it’s sized appropriately for Maps and the Knowledge Panel on desktop and mobile devices.

To get started with Posts, login to your GMB dashboard and you’ll see the Posts option on the left-hand side:

Do Google My Business Posts help with search rankings? Joy Hawkins and Steady Demand tested whether Posts had an impact on rankings, and they found that making Google My Business Postsmaking Google My Business Posts can improve rankingsimprove rankings.

Booking button feature

Google’s new Booking button feature can really help your business stand out from the crowd. If you have any type of business that relies on customers making appointments and you’re using integrated scheduling software, people can now book an appointment with your business directly from your Google My Business listing. This can make it even easier to get new customers!

If you have an account with one of Google’s supported scheduling providers, the booking button is automatically added to your Google My Business listing.

Messaging

Did you know that you can allow potential customers to send you text messages? This is a great way to connect directly with potential customers.

If you don’t want text messages sent to your personal phone number, you can download Google’s Allo app. When you set up your Allo account, use the same phone number connected to your Google My Business account. Now when someone messages you, Allo will send you a notification instead of the message appearing in your personal text messages.

To get started with Messaging, login to your GMB dashboard and click on “Messaging”:

This feature is still in its infancy, though. Right now, messaging is only available to mobile web users and is not available to mobile app or desktop users. People also won’t see the Messaging option in the Knowledge Panel or on Google Maps.

The ONLY way someone can message your business is if they perform a mobile web search on Chrome. (I expect that Google will expand the Messaging feature once they work the kinks out.)

Questions & Answers

Questions & Answers is a relatively new feature to Google local search. It’s very cool! Just like it sounds, Q&A allows people to ask questions about your business and you can answer those questions.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about Questions & Answers:

The Q&A feature is not visible on the mobile GMB app.

You need to login to the GMB dashboard to see if you have any new questions that need answering.

You cannot monitor the Questions on a mobile device unless you have an Android phone.

You can use the Google Maps App on Android devices to manage the Q&A feature as the business. To do this, download the Google Maps app, sign in with the email address you use for your GMB listing, and you will get push notifications if someone asks your business a question.

TIP: It’s important to note that just like “Suggest an Edit” on GMB, anyone can answer questions asked of your business. Therefore, you want to keep an eye out and make sure you answer questions quickly and ensure that if someone else answers a question, that the answer is accurate. If you find that someone is abusing your GMB listing’s Q&A feature, reach out to the Google My Business support forums.

Google My Business online reviews

Unlike Yelp, which vehemently discourages business owners to ask their customers for reviews, Google encourages business owners to ethically ask their customers or clients for online reviews. Online reviews appear next to your listing in Google Maps and your business’ Knowledge Panel in search. Reviews can help your business stand out among a sea of search results.

Additionally, online reviews are known to impact search result rankings, consumer trust, and click-through rates. According to BrightLocal’s 2017 Consumer Review Survey:

97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business online every day

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

Positive reviews make 73% of consumers trust a local business more

49% of consumers need at least a four-star rating before they choose to use a business

Responding to reviews is more important than ever, with 30% naming this as key when judging local businesses

68% of consumers left a local business review when asked — with 74% having been asked for their feedback

79% of consumers have read a fake review in the last year

If you follow Google’s guidelines for Google My Business reviews, you can ask your customers for reviews. (However, if you violate any of these policies, your reviews could be removed.)

When customers leave reviews for you — good or bad — make sure you respond to them. Not only does it show that customer that you appreciate their feedback, it also shows potential customers that you care.

What happens if you get a negative review? First, don’t freak out. Everybody has a bad day and most people recognize that. Also, if you have a troll that gave you a one-star review and left a nasty comment, most people with common sense recognize that review for what it is. It’s generally not worth stressing over.

To learn more about strategically getting more online reviews, check out this article from Moz.

Get more out of your GMB listing

Hopefully these features have given you a new reason to login to your Google My Business account and get busy! If you have any other questions about optimizing your GMB listing, let me know in the comments.

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January 02, 2018 at 10:27PM

SEO Ranking Factors & Correlation: What Does It Mean When a Metric Is Correlated with Google Rankings? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

In an industry where knowing exactly how to get ranked on Google is murky at best, SEO ranking factors studies can be incredibly alluring. But there's danger in believing every correlation you read, and wisdom in looking at it with a critical eye. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the myths and realities of correlations, then shares a few smart ways to use and understand the data at hand.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are chatting about SEO ranking factors and the challenge around understanding correlation, what correlation means when it comes to SEO factors.

So you have likely seen, over the course of your career in the SEO world, lots of studies like this. They're usually called something like ranking factors or ranking elements study or the 2017 ranking factors, and a number of companies put them out. Years ago, Moz started to do this work with correlation stuff, and now many, many companies put these out. So people from Searchmetrics and I think Ahrefs puts something out, and SEMrush puts one out, and of course Moz has one.

These usually follow a pretty similar format, which is they take a large number of search results from Google, from a specific country or sometimes from multiple countries, and they'll say, "We analyzed 100,000 or 50,000 Google search results, and in our set of results, we looked at the following ranking factors to see how well correlated they were with higher rankings." That is to say how much they predicted that, on average, a page with this factor would outrank a page without the factor, or a page with more of this factor would outrank a page with less of this factor.

Correlation in SEO studies like these usually mean:

So, basically, in an SEO study, they usually mean something like this. They do like a scatter plot. They don't have to specifically do a scatter plot, but visualization of the results. Then they'll say, "Okay, linking root domains had better correlation or correlation with higher organic rankings than the 10 blue link-style results to the degree of 0.39." They'll usually use either Spearman or Pearson correlation. We won't get into that here. It doesn't matter too much.

Across this many searches, the metric predicted higher or lower rankings with this level of consistency. 1.0, by the way, would be perfect correlation. So, for example, if you were looking at days that end in Y and days that follow each other, well, there's a perfect correlation because every day's name ends in Y, at least in English.

So search visits, let's walk down this path just a little bit. So search visits, saying that that 0.47 correlated with higher rankings, if that sounds misleading to you, it sounds misleading to me too. The problem here is that's not necessarily a ranking factor. At least I don't think it is. I don't think that the more visits you get from search from Google, the higher Google ranks you. I think it's probably that the correlation runs the other way around — the higher you rank in search results, the more visits on average you get from Google search.

So these ranking factors, I'll run through a bunch of these myths, but these ranking factors may not be factors at all. They're just metrics or elements where the study has looked at the correlation and is trying to show you the relationship on average. But you have to understand and intuit this information properly, otherwise you can be very misled.

Myths and realities of correlation in SEO

So let's walk through a few of these.

1. Correlation doesn't tell us which way the connection runs.

So it does not say whether factor X influences the rankings or whether higher rankings influences factor X. Let's take another example — number of Facebook shares. Could it be the case that search results that rank higher in Google oftentimes get people sharing them more on Facebook because they've been seen by more people who searched for them? I think that's totally possible. I don't know whether it's the case. We can't prove it right here and now, but we can certainly say, "You know what? This number does not necessarily mean that Facebook shares influence Google results." It could be the case that Google results influence Facebook searches. It could be the case that there's a third factor that's causing both of them. Or it could be the case that there's, in fact, no relationship and this is merely a coincidental result, probably unlikely given that there is some relationship there, but possible.

2. Correlation does not imply causation.

This is a famous quote, but let's continue with the famous quote. But it sure is a hint. It sure is a hint. That's exactly what we like to use correlation for is as a hint of things we might investigate further. We'll talk about that in a second.

3. In an algorithm like Google's, with thousands of potential ranking inputs, if you see any single metric at 0.1 or higher, I tend to think that, in general, that is an interesting result.

Not prove something, not means that there's a direct correlation, just it is interesting. It's worthy of further exploration. It's worthy of understanding. It's worthy of forming hypotheses and then trying to prove those wrong. It is interesting.

4. Correlation does tell us what more successful pages and sites do that less successful sites and pages don't do.

Sometimes, in my opinion, that is just as interesting as what is actually causing rankings in Google. So you might say, "Oh, this doesn't prove anything." What it proves to me is pages that are getting more Facebook shares tend to do a good bit better than pages that are not getting as many Facebook shares.

I don't really care, to be honest, whether that is a direct Google ranking factor or whether that's just something that's happening. If it's happening in my space, if it's happening in the world of SERPs that I care about, that is useful information for me to know and information that I should be applying, because it suggests that my competitors are doing this and that if I don't do it, I probably won't be as successful, or I may not be as successful as the ones who are. Certainly, I want to understand how they're doing it and why they're doing it.

5. None of these studies that I have ever seen so far have looked specifically at SERP features.

So one of the things that you have to remember, when you're looking at these, is think organic, 10 blue link-style results. We're not talking about AdWords, the paid results. We're not talking about Knowledge Graph or featured snippets or image results or video results or any of these other, the news boxes, the Twitter results, anything else that goes in there. So this is kind of old-school, classic organic SEO.

6. Correlation is not a best practice.

So it does not mean that because this list descends and goes down in this order that those are the things you should do in that particular order. Don't use this as a roadmap.

7. Low correlation does not mean that a metric or a tactic doesn't work

Example, a high percent of sites using a page or a tactic will result in a very low correlation. So, for example, when we first did this study in I think it was 2005 that Moz ran its first one of these, maybe it was '07, we saw that keyword use in the title element was strongly correlated. I think it was probably around 0.2, 0.15, something like that. Then over time, it's gone way, way down. Now, it's something like 0.03, extremely small, infinitesimally small.

What does that mean? Well, it could mean one of two things. It could mean Google is using it less as a ranking factor. It could mean that it was never connected, and it's just total speculation, total coincidence. Or three, it could mean that a lot more people who rank in the top 20 or 30 results, which is what these studies usually look at, top 10 to top 50 sometimes, a lot more of them are putting the keyword in the title, and therefore, there's just no difference between result number 31 and result number 1, because they both have them in the title. So you're seeing a much lower correlation between pages that don't have them and do have them and higher rankings. So be careful about how you intuit that.

Oh, one final note. I did put -0.02 here. A negative correlation means that as you see less of this thing, you tend to see higher rankings. Again, unless there is a strong negative correlation, I tend to watch out for these, or I tend to not pay too much attention. For example, the keyword in the meta description, it could just be that, well, it turns out pretty much everyone has the keyword in the meta description now, so this is just not a big differentiating factor.

What is correlation good for?

All right. What's correlation actually good for? We talked about a bunch of myths, ways not to use it.

A. IDing the elements that more successful pages tend to have

So if I look across a correlation and I see that lots of pages are twice as likely to have X and rank highly as the ones that don't rank highly, well, that is a good piece of data for me.

B. Watching elements over time to see if they rise or lower in correlation.

For example, we watch links very closely over time to see if they rise or lower so that we can say: "Gosh, does it look like links are getting more or less influential in Google's rankings? Are they more or less correlated than they were last year or two years ago?" And if we see that drop dramatically, we might intuit, "Hey, we should test the power of links again. Time for another experiment to see if links still move the needle, or if they're becoming less powerful, or if it's merely that the correlation is dropping."

C. Comparing sets of search results against one another we can identify unique attributes that might be true

So, for example, in a vertical like news, we might see that domain authority is much more important than it is in fitness, where smaller sites potentially have much more opportunity or dominate. Or we might see that something like https is not a great way to stand out in news, because everybody has it, but in fitness, it is a way to stand out and, in fact, the folks who do have it tend to do much better. Maybe they've invested more in their sites.

D. Judging metrics as a predictive ranking ability

Essentially, when I'm looking at a metric like domain authority, how good is that at telling me on average how much better one domain will rank in Google versus another? I can see that this number is a good indication of that. If that number goes down, domain authority is less predictive, less sort of useful for me. If it goes up, it's more useful. I did this a couple years ago with Alexa Rank and SimilarWeb, looking at traffic metrics and which ones are best correlated with actual traffic, and found Alexa Rank is awful and SimilarWeb is quite excellent. So there you go.

E. Finding elements to test

So if I see that large images embedded on a page that's already ranking on page 1 of search results has a 0.61 correlation with the image from that page ranking in the image results in the first few, wow, that's really interesting. You know what? I'm going to go test that and take big images and embed them on my pages that are ranking and see if I can get the image results that I care about. That's great information for testing.

This is all stuff that correlation is useful for. Correlation in SEO, especially when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements, can be very misleading. I hope that this will help you to better understand how to use and not use that data.

Thanks. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

The image used to promote this post was adapted with gratitude from the hilarious webcomic, xkcd.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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January 04, 2018 at 10:17PM

Selling SEO to the C-Suite: How to Convince Company Executives to Support SEO

Posted by rMaynes1

The implementation of a solid SEO strategy often gets put on the back burner — behind website redesigns, behind client work, behind almost everything — and even when it is taken seriously, you have to fight for every resource for implementation. SEO must be a priority. However, convincing the company executives to prioritize it and allocate budget to SEO initiatives can feel like scaling a mountain.

Sound familiar?

Convincing company executives that SEO is one of the most critical elements of a holistic digital marketing strategy to increase website traffic (and therefore customers, sales, and revenue) won’t be easy, but these steps can increase the chances of your program being taken seriously, and getting the budget needed to make it a success.

Before you start: Put yourself in the shoes of the C-Suite and be ready to answer their questions.

While it’s no doubt frustrating that your executives don’t understand the importance of SEO, put yourself in their shoes and consider what is important to them. Have solid answers ready to questions.

CEOs are decision-makers, not problem-solvers. They are going to ask:

Why should we invest in SEO vs. [insert another strategy here]?

Is this going to be profitable?

Do you have proven results?

What does success look like? What are your KPIS?

CIOs and CFOs will fixate on cost reductions. They are going to ask:

What will this cost us?

Can similar results be achieved at a reduced cost?

What level of spend will maximize ROI?

CMOs want to ensure the organization's message is distributed to targeted audiences in order to meet sales objectives. They will ask:

How many more qualified leads will this bring us?

What will this do to increase our brand exposure?

What is our competition doing?

CEOs are unbelievably busy. In the nicest way, they don’t care about details, and they don’t care about tactics (because they simply do not have time to care). What do they care about? Results.

For example, the CEO of a large insurance broker sits in his office and Googles the term “Seattle insurance.” Success for him is seeing his company listed at #1 in the organic results. He doesn’t want to know how it was achieved, but for as long as that’s the result, he’s happy to invest.

Getting the support you need for your SEO strategy can be tough, to say the least, especially if there is no understanding, no interest, and no funding from the C-level executives in your company — and unfortunately, without these, your SEO plans will never get off the ground.

However, executive-level buy-in is crucial for a successful SEO campaign, so don’t give up!

Educate your stakeholders

1. Start at the beginning: Define what SEO is, and what it isn’t

It might sound like a no-brainer, but before you even start, find out your C-Suite’s SEO expertise level. Bizarre as it may sound, some might not even really fully understand what SEO is, and the concept of keywords might be entirely alien.

Start from the very beginning with examples of what SEO is, and what it isn’t.

Include:

How people search for your business online with non-branded industry keywords. Use analytics to show that this is what people are actually searching for.

Show what happens when you conduct a simple search for a related keyword. Where does your business rank and where do your competitors rank?

If you want to go into a bit more detail, you can show things like where keywords appear in your page content, or what meta-data in the titles and description fields look like. Gather as much valuable insight as you can from the CMO to help tailor your presentation to fit the style the CEO is used to. It will vary from CEO to CEO. Same story — but a different approach to getting the message across.

Remember, keep it high-level. When talking to your C-Suite about SEO, it’s important to talk to them in a language they'll understand. If your presentation includes references to “schema,” “link audits,” or “domain authority,” start again, scrapping the technical jargon. Instead, talk about how SEO helps businesses connect directly with people who are searching online for the products and services that are being offered by the company. Highlight how it's a powerful business development tool that aligns your business with customer intent, one that targets potential customers further down the sales funnel because it attracts traffic mostly from people who are in the market to convert. Focus on the purpose of an SEO program being to build a sustainable base of monthly quality potential customers by generating additional traffic to the website.

Use hard facts to support your points. For example:

72% of marketers say relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

71% of B2B researchers start with a generic search. (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

Conversion rates are 10 times higher on search than from social on desktops, on average. (Source: GoDaddy 2016)

Half of search queries are four words or longer. Not including long-tail keywords could mean losing potential leads. (Source: Propecta 2017).

Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published 0–4 monthly posts. (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

2. The meat of your presentation: Why SEO is so important

Once you’ve shown what SEO is, you can move onto why it's so important to the organizational goals. Sounds simple, but this is probably the most difficult part of convincing your executives of the need for an SEO strategy.

C-Suite executives are not interested in the how of SEO. They want to know the why (the value, the return on investment), and the when (how long it will take to see the results and the ROI of this endeavor). It’s almost guaranteed that they're not going to want to know the minute details and tactics of your proposed strategy.

Outline the project at a high level, and don’t get bogged down in the details. If the CEO is well-educated in other channels (like paid search, offline marketing, print marketing, or display advertising), try to use SEO examples that can be understood in a relative way to how these other channels perform.

Note: To sell SEO to the C-suite doesn’t necessarily mean you're committing to doing all of this work yourself. You might be pitching for the budget to use an SEO agency to do all of this for you.

Break out the proposed project into 4 sections, each with a "what" and a "why."

1. SEO audit:

Your website is a business development tool, and so the SEO audit is focused on assessing how well the site is performing currently. Talk about how you'll assess the website in several areas to understand any problems impacting site performance and identify any potential optimization opportunities to make it more search engine-friendly, and to align it to business objectives both from a technical and content perspective.

2. Recommendations:

From the audit, determine what needs to be done and when. Not all tactics will work for all organizations, and as an SEO expert, you'll be able to review the business and draw on your past experience to determine what's going to earn the highest ROI. Prioritize recommendations and have a case to present for each, proving how it's more important than another recommendation, and how it will impact the overall business if implemented. Ensure that those critical SEO components that will expedite the results are implemented first. Be sure to address these questions:

What combination of tactics is going to work best for this organization?

What is going to have the biggest impact now, and what can wait?

What should be a top organizational priority?

Do you have access to the internal resources and knowledge to be able to implement the recommendations, or do you need to consider using an external agency?

3. Implementation:

Whether this is an internal project or you're engaging an SEO agency, the project lead should be very hands-on, making SEO recommendations and guiding the IT team through the successful implementation of as many of them as possible so as to have the biggest impact on organic search. At times it can feel like you have to jump through hoops to get the smallest recommendation implemented, and that's understandable. However, if you endeavor to understand the internal IT processes, you can customize recommendations to fit the IT team’s schedule. You’ll see more success that way.

This is one of the biggest obstacles that Mediative, as an agency, runs into. We conduct SEO audits and provide recommendations for success, in priority order — but getting access to internal IT resources and getting your SEO recommendations into the implementation queue can be incredibly challenging.

We worked with a Fortune 500 company for four years on SEO, covering the major areas of site architecture and site content, with the ultimate goal of increasing site traffic. At any given time, there were 40+ active SEO initiatives — open tickets with the client’s IT department — all of which had an impact on the SEO of the client’s website. However, they represented only about 20% of the total open tickets for all IT service requests in this client’s IT department; as a result, vying for precious IT resources became a huge challenge. A great SEO agency will learn to adapt tactics to fit in with whatever sort of IT procedures your company already has in place.

4. Goals and measurement of results:

HubSpot has presented the core metrics that CEOs care about the most; you should address these metrics with benchmarks and informed predictions (not vague guesses) for how SEO can improve them. Unlike channels such as paid search, it can be difficult to give the exact cost and the exact number of leads or revenue SEO can generate. The key here is to get the understanding of the CMO to help present your case to the CEO. SEO or organic search traffic (when measured properly with analytics) can be the biggest driver of low-cost traffic and quality visitors to your website.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – This is the total cost of acquiring a customer in the organization. If you can show how SEO acquires customers below the company average, you’re already winning.

Time to Payback CAC – This is the number of months it takes you to earn back the CAC you spent to get a new customer. Again, if you can show that SEO reduces this number, it will increase the likelihood of your program getting the thumbs up.

Marketing Originated Customer % – This ratio shows what percentage of your new business is driven by marketing efforts, a sure-fire way to secure more SEO budget if you can prove exactly how many new customers it’s driving.

Look at simpler metrics as well, such as:

Traffic to your website.

Number of leads generated.

Decreased bounce rates.

Inform your executives that you'll be measuring these metrics in conjunction with other metrics, such as average ranking position, to see the overall impact of your SEO efforts.

Use industry research to put a monetary value on ranking higher. For example, the fictional company Acme Shoes sells shoes online. The company website recently ranked #4 on a desktop Google search for [women’s shoes].

A #4 ranking sends the website 20,000 unique visitors per month.

The average value of a website visitor has been calculated at $20, therefore ranking at #4 is valued at $400,000/month.

Research has shown that, on average, the #4 ranking gets 7.3% of Google results page clicks, and the #1 ranking gets 32.8% of page clicks — 4.5x more. Therefore, it can be estimated that increasing ranking to #1 will lead to 90,000 monthly unique visitors.

The estimated revenue from ranking #1 for [women’s shoes]: $1.8m/month.

Present different scenarios. For example, what would happen if no SEO efforts are made over the next 12 months? Now in contrast, what do you predict will happen with $X of investment, and how that would increase even further if doubled? Be sure to have a few options available, not just all-or-nothing.

Be very specific about the goals at each level of investment. Find examples of SEO strategies that have had great results. Best case would be results from your own tests in preparation for a larger project, but sometimes even small SEO tests are not approved until the C-suite has bought in. In this case, find case studies from your industry, or research/results of similar tactics to those that you want to implement. The C-Suite want tangible, real-world solutions that are proven to work, not vague ideas.

Tip: A lot of SEO is “free” — it just takes time, knowledge, and resources (which is where it gets expensive) to make it successful. Use the word “free” as much as you can. For example, an online listings component of an SEO strategy may utilize free directory listings.

In summary, an SEO project may address all 4 sections listed above very well, but the key is communication. Great SEO agencies are strong communicators with all stakeholders involved — the marketing team, IT teams, content writers, designers, code developers, etc. It's important to remember that following best practices, executing SEO tactics in a timely manner, and measuring the results all require clear and concise communication at different levels of the organization.

Congratulations! You’ve perfectly pitched SEO to your C-Suite. You’re almost guaranteed to get the green light! So what now?

Manage expectations from day one.

Basketball player Michael Jordan was once quoted as saying: “Be true to the game, because the game will be true to you. If you try to shortcut the game, then the game will shortcut you. If you put forth the effort, good things will be bestowed upon you. That's truly about the game, and in some ways that's about life, too.”

He could have been talking about SEO.

SEO is a commitment. To reap the long-term benefits, you have to put in the effort with minimal gains at first. Make sure your C-Suite knows this. They might get frustrated that after 3 months of effort, the results are not prominent. But that’s how SEO goes. SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” tactic. It’s an ongoing program that builds successes with time and consistency.

By setting realistic expectations that it will take several months before results are seen, there won’t be pressure to try other tactics, like paid search or display advertising, at the expense of SEO. Of course, these tactics can complement your SEO efforts and can provide a short-term benefit that SEO can’t, but don’t be swayed from SEO as a core strategy. Stay the course, and keep focused on the long-term benefits of what you're doing. It will be worth it!

Continually measure and track performance

You should be ready at the drop of a hat to provide up-to-date results with performance measured to key metrics (to the last month) of how your SEO efforts are stacking up. You never know when cost-cutting measures might be implemented, and if you’re not ready with solid results, it might be your program that gets cut.

Show how your SEO efforts compare to other programs in the company, such as social media marketing or paid search. Search is always evolving, so keep up and be seen keeping up. 
Never stop selling!

In the case of our Fortune 500 client, we were able to implement all of the key SEO initiatives by prioritizing and building cases for implementation. After several months, organic search traffic and revenue was leading all other digital marketing channels for this client — more than PPC and email marketing. 
Organic search generated approximately 30% of all visits to the client’s site, while maintaining year-over-year growth of 20–25%. This increase was not simply from branded traffic, however — year-over-year non-branded traffic had increased approximately 50%.

These are the kind of results that are going to make the company executives sit up and take SEO seriously.

To conclude:


As the proponent for SEO in your organization, you play a critical role in ensuring that the strategies with the quickest and biggest impact on results are implemented and prioritized first. There’s no magic bullet with SEO – no one thing that works. A solid SEO strategy — and one that will convince stakeholders of its worth — is made up of a myriad of components from audits to content development, from link building to site architecture. The trick is picking what is going to work for your organization and what isn’t, and this is no mean feat!

For more SEO tips from Mediative, download our new e-book, The Digital Marketer's Guide to Google's Search Engine Results Page.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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January 08, 2018 at 10:12PM

Troubleshooting Local Ranking Failures [Updated for 2018]

Posted by MiriamEllis

I love a mystery… especially a local search ranking mystery I can solve for someone.

Now, the truth is, some ranking puzzles are so complex, they can only be solved by a formal competitive audit. But there are many others that can be cleared up by spending 15 minutes or less going through an organized 10-point checklist of the commonest problems that can cause a business to rank lower than the owner thinks it should. By zipping through the following checklist, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find one or more obvious “whodunits” contributing to poor Google local pack visibility for a given search.

Since I wrote the original version of this post in 2014, so much has changed. Branding, tools, tactics — things are really different in 2018. Definitely time for a complete overhaul, with the goal of making you a super sleuth for your forum friends, clients, agency teammates, or executive superiors.

Let’s emulate the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which earned lasting fame by hitting on a simple formula for surfacing and solving mysteries in a most enjoyable way.

Before we break out our magnifying glass, it’s critical to stress one very important thing. The local rankings I see from an office in North Beach, San Francisco are not the rankings you see while roaming around Golden Gate park in the same city. The rankings your client in Des Moines sees for things in his town are not the same rankings you see from your apartment in Albuquerque when you look at Des Moines results. With the user having become the centroid of search for true local searches, it is no mystery at all that we see different results when we are different places, and it is no cause for concern.

And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way and are in the proper detective spirit, let’s dive into how to solve for each item on our checklist!

☑ Google updates/bugs

The first thing to ask if a business experiences a sudden change in rankings is whether Google has done something. Search Engine Land strikes me as the fastest reporter of Google updates, with MozCast offering an ongoing weather report of changes in the SERPs. Also, check out the Moz Google Algo Change history list and the Moz Blog for some of the most in-depth strategic coverage of updates, penalties, and filters.

For local-specific bugs (or even just suspected tests), check out the Local Search Forum, the Google My Business forum, and Mike Blumenthal’s blog. See if the effects being described match the weirdness you are seeing in your local packs. If so, it’s a matter of fixing a problematic practice (like iffy link building) that has been caught in an update, waiting to see how the update plays out, or waiting for Google to fix a bug or turn a dial down to normalize results.

*Pro tip: Don’t make the mistake of thinking organic updates have nothing to do with local SEO. Crack detectives know organic and local are closely connected.

☑ Eligibility to list and rank

When a business owner wants to know why he isn’t ranking well locally, always ask these four questions:

Does the business have a real address? (Not a PO box, virtual office, or a string of employees’ houses!)

Does the business make face-to-face contact with its customers?

What city is the business in?

What is the exact keyword phrase they are hoping to rank for?

If the answer is “no” to either of the first two questions, the business isn’t eligible for a Google My Business listing. And while spam does flow through Google, a lack of eligibility could well be the key to a lack of rankings.

For the third question, you need to know the city the business is in so that you can see if it’s likely to rank for the search phrase cited in the fourth question. For example, a plumber with a street address in Sugar Land, TX should not expect to rank for "plumber Dallas TX." If a business lacks a physical location in a given city, it’s atypical for it to rank for queries that stem from or relate to that locale. It’s amazing just how often this simple fact solves local pack mysteries.

☑ Guideline spam

To be an ace local sleuth, you must commit to memory the guidelines for representing your business on Google so that you can quickly spot violations. Common acts of spam include:

Keyword stuffing the business name field

Improper wording of the business name field

Creating listings for ineligible locations, departments, or people

Category spam

Incorrect phone number implementation

Incorrect website URL implementation

Review guideline violations

If any of the above conundrums are new to you, definitely spend 10 minutes reading the guidelines. Make flash cards, if necessary, to test yourself on your spam awareness until you can instantly detect glaring errors. With this enhanced perception, you’ll be able to see problems that may possibly be leading to lowered rankings, or even… suspensions!

☑ Suspensions

There are two key things to look for here when a local business owner comes to you with a ranking woe:

If the listing was formerly verified, but has mysteriously become unverified, you should suspect a soft suspension. Soft suspensions might occur around something like a report of keyword-stuffing the GMB business name field. Oddly, however, there is little anecdotal evidence to support the idea that soft suspensions cause ranking drops. Nevertheless, it’s important to spot the un-verification clue and tell the owner to stop breaking guidelines. It’s possible that the listing may lose reviews or images during this type of suspension, but in most cases, the owner should be able to re-verify his listing. Just remember: a soft suspension is not a likely cause of low local pack rankings.

If the listing’s rankings totally disappear and you can’t even find the listing via a branded search, it’s time to suspect a hard suspension. Hard suspensions can result from a listing falling afoul of a Google guideline or new update, a Google employee, or just a member of the public who has reported the business for something like an ineligible location. If the hard suspension is deserved, as in the case of creating a listing at a fake address, then there’s nothing you can do about it. But, if a hard suspension results from a mistake, I recommend taking it to the Google My Business forum to plead for help. Be prepared to prove that you are 100% guideline-compliant and eligible in hopes of getting your listing reinstated with its authority and reviews intact.

☑ Duplicates

Notorious for their ability to divide ranking strength, duplicate listings are at their worst when there is more than one verified listing representing a single entity. If you encounter a business that seems like it should be ranking better than it is for a given search, always check for duplicates.

The quickest way to do this is to get all present and past NAP (name, address, phone) from the business and plug it into the free Moz Check Listing tool. Pay particular attention to any GMB duplicates the tool surfaces. Then:

If the entity is a brick-and-mortar business or service area business, and the NAP exactly matches between the duplicates, contact Google to ask them to merge the listings. If the NAP doesn’t match and represents a typo or error on the duplicate, use the “suggest an edit” link in Google Maps to toggle the “yes/no” toggle to “yes,” and then select the radio button for “never existed.”

If the duplicates represent partners in a multi-practitioner business, Google won’t simply delete them. Things get quite complicated in this scenario, and if you discover practitioner duplicates, tread carefully. There are half a dozen nuances here, including whether you’re dealing with actual duplicates, whether they represent current or past staffers, whether they are claimed or unclaimed, and even whether a past partner is deceased. There isn’t perfect industry agreement on the handling of all of the ins-and-outs of practitioner listings. Given this, I would advise an affected business to read all of the following before making a move in any direction:

How to Delete a Google My Business Listing: A Common Question with a Complex Answer

Why You Cannot Ignore Practitioner Listings on Google My Business

Practitioner Listings: To Claim or Not to Claim

☑ Missing/inaccurate listings

While you’ve got Moz Check Listing fired up, pay attention to anything it tells you about missing or inaccurate listings. The tool will show you how accurate and complete your listings on are on the major local business data aggregators, plus other important platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Factual, Yelp, and more. Why does this matter?

Google can pull information from anywhere on the web and plunk it into your Google My Business listing.

While no one can quantify the exact degree to which citation/listing consistency directly impacts Google local rankings for every possible search query, it has been a top 5 ranking factor in the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey as far back as I can remember. Recently, I’ve seen some industry discussion as to whether citations still matter, with some practitioners claiming they can’t see the difference they make. I believe that conclusion may stem from working mainly in ultra-competitive markets where everyone has already got their citations in near-perfect order, forcing practitioners to look for differentiation tactics beyond the basics. But without those basics, you’re missing table stakes in the game.

Indirectly, listing absence or inconsistency impacts local rankings in that it undermines the quest for good local KPIs as well as organic authority. Every lost or misdirected consumer represents a failure to have someone click-for-directions, click-to-call, click-to-your website, or find your website at all. Online and offline traffic, conversions, reputation, and even organic authority all hang in the balance of active citation management.

☑ Lack of organic authority

Full website or competitive audits are not the work of a minute. They really take time, and deep delving. But, at a glance, you can access some quick metrics to let you know whether a business’ lack of achievement on the organic side of things could be holding them back in the local packs. Get yourself the free MozBar SEO toolbar and try this:

Turn the MozBar on by clicking the little “M” at the top of your browser so that it is blue.

Perform your search and look at the first few pages of the organic results, ignoring anything from major directory sites like Yelp (they aren’t competing with you for local pack rankings, eh?).

Note down the Page Authority, Domain Authority, and link counts for each of the businesses coming up on the first 3 pages of the organic results.

Finally, bring up the website of the business you’re investigating. If you see that the top competitors have Domain Authorities of 50 and links numbering in the hundreds or thousands, whereas your target site is well below in these metrics, chances are good that organic authority is playing a strong role in lack of local search visibility. How do we know this is true? Do some local searches and note just how often the businesses that make it into the 3-pack or the top of the local finder view have correlating high organic rankings.

Where organic authority is poor, a business has a big job of work ahead. They need to focus on content dev + link building + social outreach to begin building up their brand in the minds of consumers and the “RankBrain” of Google.

One other element needs to be mentioned here, and that’s the concept of how time affects authority. When you’re talking to a business with a ranking problem, it’s very important to ascertain whether they just launched their website or just built their local business listings last week, or even just a few months ago. Typically, if they have, the fruits of their efforts have yet to fully materialize. That being said, it’s not a given that a new business will have little authority. Large brands have marketing departments which exist solely to build tremendous awareness of new assets before they even launch. It’s important to keep that in mind, while also realizing that if the business is smaller, building authority will likely represent a longer haul.

☑ Possum effect

Where local rankings are absent, always ask:

“Are there any other businesses in your building or even on your street that share your Google category?”

If the answer is “yes,” search for the business’ desired keyword phase and look at the local finder view in Google Maps. Note which companies are ranking. Then begin to zoom in on the map, level by level, noting changes in the local finder as you go. If, a few levels in, the business you’re advising suddenly appears on the map and in the local finder, chances are good it’s the Possum filter that’s causing their apparent invisibility at the automatic zoom level.

Google Possum rolled out in September 2016, and its observable effects included a geographic diversification of the local results, filtering out many listings that share a category and are in close proximity to one another. Then, about one year later, Google initiated the Hawk update, which appears to have tightened the radius of Possum, with the result that while many businesses in the same building are still being filtered out, a number of nearby neighbors have reappeared at the automatic zoom level of the results.

If your sleuthing turns up a brand that is being impacted by Possum/Hawk, the only surefire way to beat the filter is to put in the necessary work to become the most authoritative answer for the desired search phrase. It’s important to remember that filters are the norm in Google’s local results, and have long been observed impacting listings that share an address, share a phone number, etc. If it’s vital for a particular listing to outrank all others that possess shared characteristics, then authority must be built around it in every possible way to make it one of the most dominant results.

☑ Local Service Ads effect

The question you ask here is:

“Is yours a service-area business?”

And if the answer is “yes,” then brace yourself for ongoing results disruption in the coming year.

Google’s Local Service Ads (formerly Home Service Ads) make Google the middleman between consumers and service providers, and in the 2+ years since first early testing, they’ve caused some pretty startling things to happen to local search results. These have included:

An episode in which Google’s requirement for Advanced Verification resulted in something like 90% of listings being kicked out of the results in San Diego

SABs who haven’t signed up for LSA being removed from 3-packs and relegated to no-man’s land at the bottom of ad units.

Mass removal of home-based businesses from the local results, due their lack of a visible address … and then Google saying this was a bug

Spam listings disappearing and then reappearing

Suffice it to say, rollout to an ever-increasing number of cities and categories hasn’t been for the faint of heart, and I would hazard a guess that Google’s recent re-brand of this program signifies their intention to move beyond the traditional SAB market. One possible benefit of Google getting into this type of lead gen is that it could decrease spam, but I’m not sold on this, given that fake locations have ended up qualifying for LSA inclusion. While I honor Google’s need to be profitable, I share some of the qualms business owners have expressed about the potential impacts of this venture.

Since I can’t offer a solid prediction of what precise form these impacts will take in the coming months, the best I can do here is to recommend that if an SAB experiences a ranking change/loss, the first thing to look for is whether LSA has come to town. If so, alteration of the SERPs may be unavoidable, and the only strategy left for overcoming vanished visibility may be to pay for it... by qualifying for the program.

☑ GMB neglect

Sometimes, a lack of competitive rankings can simply be chalked up to a lack of effort. If a business wonders why they’re not doing better in the local packs, pull up their GMB listing and do a quick evaluation of:

Verification status – While you can rank without verifying, lack of verification is a hallmark of listing neglect.

Basic accuracy – If NAP or map markers are incorrect, it’s a sure sign of neglect.

Category choices – Wrong categories make right rankings impossible.

Image optimization – Every business needs a good set of the most professional, persuasive photos it can acquire, and should even consider periodic new photo shoots for seasonal freshness; imagery impacts KPIs, which are believed to impact rank.

Review count, sentiment and management – Too few reviews, low ratings, and lack of responses = utter neglect of this core rank/reputation-driver.

Hours of operation – If they’re blank or incorrect, conversions are being missed.

Main URL choice – Does the GMB listing point to a strong, authoritative website page or a weak one?

Additional URL choices – If menus, bookings, reservations, or placing orders is part of the business model, a variety of optional URLs are supported by Google and should be explored.

Google Posts – Early-days testing indicates that regular posting may impact rank.

Google Questions and Answers – Pre-populate with best FAQs and actively manage incoming questions.

There is literally no business, large or small, with a local footprint that can afford to neglect its Google My Business listing. And while some fixes and practices move the ranking needle more than others, the increasing number of consumer actions that take place within Google is reason enough to put active GMB management at the top of your list.

Closing the case

The Hardy Boys never went anywhere without their handy kit of detection tools. Their father was so confident in their utter preparedness that he even let them chase down gangs in Hong Kong and dictators in the Guyanas (which, on second thought, doesn’t seem terribly wise.) But I have that kind of confidence in you. I hope my troubleshooting checklist is one you’ll bookmark and share to be prepared for the local ranking mysteries awaiting you and your digital marketing colleagues in 2018. Happy sleuthing!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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January 09, 2018 at 10:07PM

9 Predictions for SEO in 2018

Posted by randfish

For the last decade, I've made predictions about how the year in SEO and web marketing would go. So far, my track record is pretty decent — the correct guesses outweigh the wrong ones. But today's the day of reckoning, to grade my performance from 2017 and, if the tally is high enough, share my list for the year ahead.

In keeping with tradition, my predictions will be graded on the following scale:

Nailed It (+2) – When a prediction is right on the money and the primary criteria are fulfilled

Partially Accurate (+1) – Predictions that are in the ballpark, but are somewhat different than reality

Not Completely Wrong (-1) – Those that got near the truth, but are more "incorrect" than "correct"

Way Off (-2) – Guesses which didn't come close

Breakeven or better means I make new predictions for the year ahead, and under that total means my predicting days are over. Let's see how this shakes out... I'm not nervous... You're nervous! This sweat on my brow... It's because... because it was raining outside. It's Seattle! Yeesh.

Grading Rand's 2017 Predictions

#1: Voice search will be more than 25% of all US Google searches within 12 months. Despite this, desktop volume will stay nearly flat and mobile (non-voice) will continue to grow.

+1 - We have data for desktop and mobile search volume via Jumpshot, showing that the former did indeed stay relatively flat and the other kept growing.

But, unfortunately, we don't know the percent of searches that are done with voice rather than keyboards or screens. My guess is 25% of all searches is too high, but until Google decides to share an updated number, all we have is the old 2016 stat that 20% of mobile searches happened via voice input.

#2: Google will remain the top referrer of website traffic by 5X+. Neither Facebook, nor any other source, will make a dent.

+2 - Nailed it! Although, to be fair, there's no serious challenger. The social networks and e-commerce leaders of the web want people to stay on their site, not leave and go elsewhere. No surprise Google's the only big traffic referrer left.

#3: The Marketing Technology space will not have much consolidation (fewer exits and acquisitions, by percentage, than 2015 or 2016), but there will be at least one major exit or IPO among the major SEO software providers.

+2 - As best I can tell from Index.co's thorough database (which, BTW, deserves more attention than Crunchbase, whose data I've found to be of far lower quality), Martech as a whole had nearly half the number of acquisitions in 2017 (22) versus 2016 (39). 2017 did, however, see the Yext IPO, so I'm taking full credit on this one.

#4: Google will offer paid search ads in featured snippets, knowledge graph, and/or carousels.

0 - Turns out, Google had actually done a little of this prior to 2017, which I think invalidates the prediction. Thus I'm giving myself no credit either way, though Google did expand their testing and ad types in this direction last year.

#5: Amazon search will have 4% or more of Google's web search volume by end of year.

-2 - Way off, Rand. From the Jumpshot data, it looks like Amazon's not even at 1% of Google's search volume yet. I was either way too early on this one, or Amazon searches may never compete, volume-wise, with how Google's users employ their search system.

#6: Twitter will remain independent, and remain the most valuable and popular network for publishers and influencers.

+2 - I'm actually shocked that I made this prediction given the upheaval Twitter has faced in the last few years. Still, it's good to see a real competitor (despite their much smaller size) to Facebook stay independent.

#7: The top 10 mobile apps will remain nearly static for the year ahead, with, at most, one new entrant and 4 or fewer position changes.

+1 - I was slighly aggressive on wording this prediction, though the reality is pretty accurate. The dominance of a few companies in the mobile app world remains unchallenged. Here's 2016's top apps, and here's 2017's. The only real change was Apple Music and Amazon falling a couple spots and Pandora and Snapchat sneaking into the latter half of the list.

#8: 2017 will be the year Google admits publicly they use engagement data as an input to their ranking systems, not just for training/learning

-2 - I should have realized Google will continue to use engagement data for rankings, but they're not gonna talk about it. They have nothing to gain from being open, and a reasonable degree of risk if they invite spammers and manipulators to mimic searchers and click for rankings (a practice that, sadly, has popped up in the gray hat SEO world, and does sometimes, unfortunately, work).

Final Score: +4 — not too shabby, so let's continue this tradition and see what 2018 holds. I'm going to be a little more cavalier with this year's predictions, just to keep things exciting :-)

Rand's 9 Predictions for 2018

#1: The total number of organic clicks Google refers will drop by ~5% by the end of the year

In 2017, we saw the start of a concerning trend — fewer clicks being generated by Google search on desktop and mobile. I don't think that was a blip. In my estimation, Google's actions around featured snippets, knowledge panels, and better instant answers in the SERPs overall, combined with more aggressive ads and slowing search growth (at least in the United States), will lead to there being slightly less SEO opportunity in 2018 than what we had in 2017.

I don't think this trend will accelerate much long term (i.e. it's certainly not the end for SEO, just a time of greater competition for slightly fewer click opportunities).

#2: Twitter and LinkedIn will both take active steps to reduce the amount of traffic they refer out to other sites

Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all had success algorithmically or structurally limiting clicks off their platforms and growing as a result. I think in 2018, Twitter and LinkedIn are gonna take their own steps to limit content with links from doing as well, to limit the visibility of external links in their platform, and to better reward content that keeps people on their sites.

#3: One or more major SEO software providers will shutter as a result of increased pressure from Google and heavy competition

Google Search Console is, slowly but surely, getting better. Google's getting a lot more aggressive about making rank tracking more difficult (some rank tracking folks I'm friendly with told me that Q4 2017 was particularly gut-punching), and the SEO software field is way, way more densely packed with competitors than ever before. I estimate at least ten SEO software firms are over $10 million US in annual revenue (Deepcrawl, SEMRush, Majestic, Ahrefs, Conductor, Brightedge, SISTRIX, GinzaMetrics, SEOClarity, and Moz), and I'm probably underestimating at least 4 or 5 others (in local SEO, Yext is obviously huge, and 3–4 of their competitors are also above $10mm).

I predict this combination of factors will mean that 2018 sees one or more casualties (possibly through a less-than-rewarding acquisition rather than straight-out bankruptcy) in the SEO software space.

#4: Alexa will start to take market share away from Google, especially via devices with screens like the Echo Show

Voice search devices are useful, but somewhat limited by virtue of missing a screen. The Echo Show was the first stab at solving this, and I think in 2018 we're going to see more and better devices as well as vastly better functionality. Even just the "Alexa, show me a photo of Rodney Dangerfield from 1965." (see, Rand, I told you he used to be handsome!) will take away a lot of the more simplistic searches that today happen on Google and Google Images (the latter of which is a silent giant in the US search world).

#5: One of the non-Google tech giants will start on a more serious competitor to YouTube

Amazon's feud with Google and the resulting loss of YouTube on certain devices isn't going unnoticed in major tech company discussions. I think in 2018, that turns into a full-blown decision to invest in a competitor to the hosted video platform. There's too much money, time, attention, and opportunity for some of the big players not to at least dip a toe in the water.

Side note: If I were an investor, I'd be pouring meetings and dollars into startups that might become this. I think acquisitions are a key way for a Facebook, an Amazon, or a Microsoft to reduce their risk here.

#6: Facebook Audience Network (that lets publishers run FB ads on their own sites) will get the investment it needs and become a serious website adtech player

Facebook ads on the web should be as big or bigger than anything Google does in this realm, mostly because the web functions more like Facebook than it does like search results pages, and FB's got the data to make those ads high quality and relevant. Unfortunately, they've underinvested in Audience Network the last couple years, but I think with Facebook usage in developed countries leveling out and the company seeking ways to grow their ad reach and effectiveness, it's time.

#7: Mobile apps will fade as the default for how brands, organizations, and startups of all sizes invest in the mobile web; PWAs and mobile-first websites will largely take their place

I'm calling it. Mobile apps, for 95% of companies and organizations who want to do well on the web, are the wrong decision. Not only that, most everyone now realizes and agrees on it. PWAs (and straightforward mobile websites) are there to pick up the slack. That's not to say the app stores won't continue to generate downloads or make money — they will. But those installs and dollars will flow to a very few number of apps and app developers at the very top of the charts, while the long tail of apps (which never really took off), fades into obscurity.

Side note: games are probably an exception (though even there, Nintendo Switch proved in 2017 that mobile isn't the only or best platform for games).

#8: Wordpress will continue its dominance over all other CMS', growing its use from ~25% to 35%+ of the top few million sites on the web

While it depends what you consider "the web" to be, there's no doubt Wordpress has dominated every other CMS in the market among the most popular few million sites on it. I think 2018 will be a year when Wordpress extends their lead, mostly because they're getting more aggressive about investments in growth and marketing, and secondarily because no one is stepping up to be a suitable (free) alternative.

35%+ might sound like a bold step, but I'm seeing more and more folks moving off of other platforms for a host of reasons, and migrating to Wordpress for its flexibility, its cost structure, its extensibility, and its strong ecosystem of plugins, hosting providers, security options, and developers.

#9: The United States will start to feel the pain of net neutrality's end with worse Internet connectivity, more limitations, and a less free-and-open web

Tragically, we lost the battle to maintain Title II protections on net neutrality here in the US, and the news is a steady drumbeat of awfulness around this topic. Just recently, Trump's FCC announced that they'd be treating far slower connections as "broadband," thus lessening requirements for what's considered "penetration" and "access," all the way down to mobile connection speeds.

It's hard to notice what this means right now, but by the end of 2018, I predict we'll be feeling the pain through even slower average speeds, restrictions on web usage (like what we saw before Title II protections with Verizon and T-Mobile blocking services and favoring sites). In fact, my guess is that some enterprising ISP is gonna try to block cryptocurrency mining, trading, or usage as an early step.

Over time, I suspect this will lead to a tiered Internet access world here in the US, where the top 10% of American earners (and those in a few cities and states that implement their own net neutrality laws) have vastly better and free-er access (probably with more competitive pricing, too).

Now it's time for your feedback! I want to know:

Which of these predictions do you find most likely?

Which do you find most outlandish?

What obvious predictions do you think I've shamefully missed? ;-)

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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January 10, 2018 at 11:09PM

Why Google AdWords' Keyword Volume Numbers Are Wildly Unreliable - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Many of us rely on the search volume numbers Google AdWords provides, but those numbers ought to be consumed with a hearty helping of skepticism. Broad and unusable volume ranges, misalignment with other Google tools, and conflating similar yet intrinsically distinct keywords — these are just a few of the serious issues that make relying on AdWords search volume data alone so dangerous. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we discuss those issues in depth and offer a few alternatives for more accurate volume data.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about Google AdWords' keyword data and why it is absolutely insane as an SEO or as a content marketer or a content creator to rely on this.

Look, as a paid search person, you don't have a whole lot of choice, right? Google and Facebook combine to form the duopoly of advertising on the internet. But as an organic marketer, as a content marketer or as someone doing SEO, you need to do something fundamentally different than what paid search folks are doing. Paid search folks are basically trying to figure out when will Google show my ad for a keyword that might create the right kind of demand that will drive visitors to my site who will then convert?

But as an SEO, you're often driving traffic so that you can do all sorts of other things. The same with content marketers. You're driving traffic for multitudes of reasons that aren't directly or necessarily directly connected to a conversion, at least certainly not right in that visit. So there are lots reasons why you might want to target different types of keywords and why AdWords data will steer you wrong.

1. AdWords' "range" is so broad, it's nearly useless

First up, AdWords shows you this volume range, and they show you this competition score. Many SEOs I know, even really smart folks just I think haven't processed that AdWords could be misleading them in this facet.

So let's talk about what happened here. I searched for types of lighting and lighting design, and Google AdWords came back with some suggestions. This is in the keyword planner section of the tool. So "types of lighting," "lighting design", and "lighting consultant," we'll stick with those three keywords for a little bit.

I can see here that, all right, average monthly searches, well, these volume ranges are really unhelpful. 10k to 100k, that's just way too giant. Even 1k to 10k, way too big of a range. And competition, low, low, low. So this is only true for the quantity of advertisers. That's really the only thing that you're seeing here. If there are many, many people bidding on these keywords in AdWords, these will be high.

But as an example, for "types of light," there's virtually no one bidding, but for "lighting consultant," there are quite a few people bidding. So I don't understand why these are both low competition. There's not enough granularity here, or Google is just not showing me accurate data. It's very confusing.

By the way, "types of light," though it has no PPC ads right now in Google's results, this is incredibly difficult to rank for in the SEO results. I think I looked at the keyword difficulty score. It's in the 60s, maybe even low 70s, because there's a bunch of powerful sites. There's a featured snippet up top. The domains that are ranking are doing really well. So it's going to be very hard to rank for this, and yet competition low, it's just not telling you the right thing. That's not telling you the right story, and so you're getting misled on both competition and monthly searches.

2. AdWords doesn't line up to reality, or even Google Trends!

Worse, number two, AdWords doesn't line up to reality with itself. I'll show you what I mean.

So let's go over to Google Trends. Great tool, by the way. I'm going to talk about that in a second. But I plugged in "lighting design," "lighting consultant," and "types of lighting." I get the nice chart that shows me seasonality. But over on the left, it also shows average keyword volume compared to each other — 86 for "lighting design," 2 for "lighting consultant," and 12 for "types of lighting." Now, you tell me how it is that this can be 43 times as big as this one and this can be 6 times as big as that one, and yet these are all correct.

The math only works in some very, very tiny amounts of circumstances, like, okay, maybe if this is 1,000 and this is 12,000, which technically puts it in the 10k, and this is 86,000 — well, no wait, that doesn't quite work — 43,000, okay, now we made it work. But you change this to 2,000 or 3,000, the numbers don't add up. Worse, it gets worse, of course it does. When AdWords gets more specific with the performance data, things just get so crazy weird that nothing lines up.

So what I did is I created ad groups, because in AdWords in order to get more granular monthly search data, you have to actually create ad groups and then go review those. This is in the review section of my ad group creation. I created ad groups with only a single keyword so that I could get the most accurate volume data I could, and then I maximized out my bid until I wasn't getting any more impressions by bidding any higher.

Well, whether that truly accounts for all searches or not, hard to say. But here's the impression count — 2,500 a day, 330 a day, 4 a day. So 4 a day times 30, gosh, that sounds like 120 to me. That doesn't sound like it's in the 1,000 to 10,000 range. I don't think this could possibly be right. It just doesn't make any sense.

What's happening? Oh, actually, this is "types of lighting." Google clearly knows that there are way more searches for this. There's a ton more searches for this. Why is the impression so low? The impressions are so low because Google will rarely ever show an ad for that keyword, which is why when we were talking, above here, about competition, I didn't see an ad for that keyword. So again, extremely misleading.

If you're taking data from AdWords and you're trying to apply it to your SEO campaigns, your organic campaigns, your content marketing campaigns, you are being misled and led astray. If you see numbers like this that are coming straight from AdWords, "Oh, we looked at the AdWords impression," know that these can be dead f'ing wrong, totally misleading, and throw your campaigns off.

You might choose not to invest in content around types of lighting, when in fact that could be an incredibly wonderful lead source. It could be the exact right keyword for you. It is getting way more search volume. We can see it right here. We can see it in Google Trends, which is showing us some real data, and we can back that up with our own clickstream data that we get here at Moz.

3. AdWords conflates and combines keywords that don't share search intent or volume

Number three, another problem, Google conflates keywords. So when I do searches and I start adding keywords to a list, unless I'm very careful and I type them in manually and I'm only using the exact ones, Google will take all three of these, "types of lights," "types of light" (singular light), and "types of lighting" and conflate them all, which is insane. It is maddening.

Why is it maddening? Because "types of light," in my opinion, is a physics-related search. You can see many of the results, they'll be from Energy.gov or whatever, and they'll show you the different types of wavelengths and light ranges on the visible spectrum. "Types of lights" will show you what? It will show you types of lights that you could put in your home or office. "Types of lighting" will show you lighting design stuff, the things that a lighting consultant might be interested in. So three different, very different, types of results with three different search intents all conflated in AdWords, killing me.

4. AdWords will hide relevant keyword suggestions if they don't believe there's a strong commercial intent

Number four, not only this, a lot of times when you do searches inside AdWords, they will hide the suggestions that you want the most. So when I performed my searches for "lighting design," Google never showed me — I couldn't find it anywhere in the search results, even with the export of a thousand keywords — "types of lights" or "types of lighting."

Why? I think it's the same reason down here, because Google doesn't believe that those are commercial intent search queries. Well, AdWords doesn't believe they're commercial intent search queries. So they don't want to show them to AdWords customers because then they might bid on them, and Google will (a) rarely show those, and (b) they'll get a poor return on that spend. What happens to advertisers? They don't blame themselves for choosing faulty keywords. They blame Google for giving them bad traffic, and so Google knocks these out.

So if you are doing SEO or you're doing content marketing and you're trying to find these targets, AdWords is a terrible suggestion engine as well. As a result, my advice is going to be rely on different tools.

Instead:

There are a few that I've got here. I'm obviously a big fan of Moz's Keyword Explorer, having been one of the designers of that product. Ahrefs came out with a near clone product that's actually very, very good. SEMrush is also a quality product. I like their suggestions a little bit more, although they do use AdWords keyword data. So the volume data might be misleading again there. I'd be cautious about using that.

Google Trends, I actually really like Google Trends. I'm not sure why Google is choosing to give out such accurate data here, but from what we've seen, it looks really comparatively good. Challenge being if you do these searches in Google Trends, make sure you select the right type, the search term, not the list or the topic. Topics and lists inside Google Trends will aggregate, just like this will, a bunch of different keywords into one thing.

Then if you want to get truly, truly accurate, you can go ahead and run a sample AdWords campaign, the challenge with that being if Google chooses not to show your ad, you won't know how many impressions you potentially missed out on, and that can be frustrating too.

So AdWords today, using PPC as an SEO tool, a content marketing tool is a little bit of a black box. I would really recommend against it. As long as you know what you're doing and you want to find some inspiration there, fine. But otherwise, I'd rely on some of these other tools. Some of them are free, some of them are paid. All of them are better than AdWords.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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January 11, 2018 at 10:09PM

How to Get New Clients at Every Stage of Your Business

Posted by dohertyjf

I remember when I first went out on my own to build my business. Because I planned to bootstrap the product into existence, I needed to pick up some consulting work to cover my own bills before I felt comfortable taking time to build my product.

I had a sizable group of peers that I contacted to let them know that I was no longer with my last company and was looking to bring on a few new clients. Within a week, I had to stop taking introductions because I was so busy! If you’re a brand-new freelance consultant, this post has some goodies for you.

I have other friends who are purposefully freelance consultants with no current plans to scale beyond it. In fact, they’ve resisted these opportunities because they enjoy what they're doing so much, and are able to charge a premium for it. This post will help you out.

Some of my friends are at a different stage. They’ve worked for themselves for 3–4 years or longer now and are growing an agency beyond themselves and their own skillset. Along the way, of course, they’re figuring out the challenges of growing headcount and types/sizes of clients while they themselves learn to level up as a CEO, as a manager, and as a sales executive, since agency founders are often the salespeople for the first few years of their company’s existence. The client acquisition strategies change. This post is also for you.

And finally, agencies often decide that they are ready to expand beyond their main core offering and offer tangential services that they are either being asked for actively or where they perceive an opportunity exists. Since they already have a functional and maybe even (wildly) profitable services business, how can they justify taking time away from that to build out a new service offering? The mindset and strategies change once again. We’ll get into some of those.

Building a service-based business is hard

Over the last two years, I’ve worked with over 150 agencies and have seen over 800 businesses (it’s probably closer to 1,000 at this point) looking to hire an agency or consultant. I’ve also worked in-house, as a solo consultant, and for a quickly growing boutique digital agency.

After the experiences I’ve had seeing everyone — from new scared-out-of-their-wits solo consultants all the way to long-established agencies looking to grow their practice — I decided to take a step back and reflect on the strategies I’ve seen both work and not work for consulting entities at different stages of growth.

That’s what we’ll cover today. If you’re a new consultant, an agency looking to level up the size of your accounts, or an agency looking to move into new service offerings, you’ll find something in this post for you.

Along the way, you’ll hear from consultants and agency owners at different stages of their business and what they did to get to where they are currently. After all, war stories are way more fun than “here are x steps you can follow to also be amazing” anecdotes.

New consultants

Tell me if you’ve seen this happen before: a friend is tired of their job, gets laid off, or otherwise finds themselves unemployed. They decide that they’re going to give freelance consulting a go.

Three months later, they’ve taken a new job at a new agency and are repeating the cycle they went through before.

Sound familiar? If you’re in the digital marketing consulting world, you likely know at least a few, if not closer to a dozen people where this has held true.

I’m not going to say that everyone goes back to traditional employment because they're having a difficult time getting new clients, but this is far and away the largest reason I see. They get a few months in, they have too few clients paying them too little, and so they panic and go take a job doing what is comfortable. They’ll repeat the cycle in a few years again.

I get it. The beginning of working for yourself can be terrifying. I’ve been there. Saw a therapist, got the t-shirt, am I right?

What if I told you that you could avoid this if you really want to? That you could use some proven techniques to get new clients that pay you what you're worth?

Overcoming common "new consultant" fears with strategic thinking

You’ll hear entrepreneurs who have built and sold their companies (sometimes multiple times) tell you to take a “burn the ships” approach, where you set off and don’t give yourself a time limit or an out if you can’t make it work.

The problem with this is that it’s a fallacy brought about by survivorship bias — defined as "the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.” Often these entrepreneurs look back and talk about how they could have done it, or how they did it for their second or third business once they'd already made quite a bit of money.

Quite simply, if you want to set yourself up for success, you should already have replaced (or have a clear path to replacing) your income from your day job before you even go out on your own.

You can do this by picking up freelance work on the side from your day job. Get one or two clients that pay you every month and learn how to manage those. Learn what it takes to retain these clients and even grow the accounts.

Next, figure out the minimum amount of money you need to make every month while only working the number of hours you want to work before you take the leap. If you have two clients, you can probably get two more pretty easily. If you spend 10 hours a week on these two clients and only want to bill 30 hours per week (which is actually quite a lot), then you know you can bring on four more clients at the same level (and fewer clients if they pay you more) and have the lifestyle and income you want.

It’s simple math.

The "new consultant" sales mindset

Clients come to solo consultants instead of agencies for a very specific reason. They want direct access to your specific brain and to be able to speak with the person actually doing the work. In fact, I’ve seen many companies come through Credo who need multiple services (not just strategy) across organic and paid, but they don’t want an account manager setup like they’ve had before with an agency.

This, plus your experience, is your competitive moat. During the initial discovery call with every potential client, don’t forget that you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. You need to learn:

What they are specifically looking to accomplish through retaining someone’s services;

What their expectations are for how quickly they will see this;

If they have resources to get done what you recommend, or if you have time to implement what they need;

Whether they're willing to pay you what you are worth.

Assuming all of these check out, then in my opinion, you're good to move forward with the proposal process.

A quick word on pricing

If you've never worked for an agency before, you should ask agency friends or other freelance friends what they charge per hour, then use that as a benchmark. If you want to raise your rates, then do it slowly with new clients until you hit a ceiling. Now you know your price ceiling for the current services (whether strategy, implementation, or both) you offer.

New client acquisition channels

Now that we have the common fears identified and you're armed with a better sales mindset, let’s explore the strategies you should leverage first to build your consulting practice to a base where it sustains your lifestyle and you're able to remove the stress of starting from the equation and eventually think about growth.

The strategies I always counsel brand new solo consultants to use are:

Referrals – Ask your circle of professional peers if they know anyone looking for what you have to offer;

Referrals – Ask your friends and family if they know anyone that might need what you're offering;

Agency white label – Approach agencies in your area to see if they need help on a contract basis with their clients;

Teaching – This is a longer-term play, but a great way to get clients in the long run is to teach others how to do what you do. I’ve seen it hold true that if you teach people how to do what you do, they’ll want to hire you to do it for them.

These are the easiest and most direct ways to get introductions to potential clients who are highly likely to close into clients.

Long-term this does not scale, but it can get you to the point of covering your expenses, allowing you to breathe a little bit and invest for the future. And if you’re smart about it and haven’t signed yourself up for 60+ hours per week of billed work, you can have a great life balance.

To give some real-world examples, I reached out to two of my friends who became solo consultants in 2013/2014.

First is Tom Critchlow, who went solo in late 2014 after two years at Google New York. When asked how he got his first consulting clients, Tom said that his first leads came from direct referrals from a friend:

“Since that first lead I've gotten about 80% of my clients through referrals from my direct network,” he shared. “I’d definitely emphasize the importance of a strong network and ensuring that you're communicating with your network often to keep them up-to-date with what work you’re doing.”

Next I chatted with Michael King, who has since built his agency iPullRank into an industry powerhouse, and asked him how he got his first clients when he left the NYC agencies he worked for. To get his first, he shared that thought leadership played a huge role:

“My first two clients came through two different methods of thought leadership. One came via a post I’d written for Moz about content strategy, and the other came from a panel I spoke on. Overnight, I went from 0 to 10.5K MRR.”

Solo consultants happy staying solo

If this is you, then congratulations. In my mind, you’re finding nirvana in a lot of ways.

Solo consultants with more years of direct consulting experience are able to charge good hourly rates and monthly minimums from clients, according to my data.

Once a consultant has survived the initial push to get new clients, the journey is far from over. In fact, many solo consultants have come up against this and gone through droughts where they were between projects.

This brings up the question: How can solo consultants, who can only realistically bring on a limited number of clients before they become too numerous, keep a strong potential client pipeline?

Define your niche and build processes

The answer is usually to tightly define your niche and then, depending on your niche, to build processes to deliver high quality work.

High-touch strategic consulting does not scale. It also does not have to scale if you charge a high hourly rate ($300/hr for strategic consulting that drives large revenue increases is not crazy, and may even be too low), in which case you can work with just a few clients and still create a great income for yourself.

When you’ve defined your niche, whether affiliate marketing driven by content or local SEO for realtors, then you put together the strategy to reach them.

This should go without saying, but if you're asking how to define your niche, then you aren’t ready to be a highly paid solo consultant yet. Hone your craft and discover who you love to do work for, then go serve those customers on your own.

Once your niche is defined, you can focus on that group.

Targeting your ideal audience

As mentioned above, the toughest part of being and staying a solo consultant is managing your workload and saying "no" or “not yet” to potential clients, while at the same time protecting your downside should a client decide to stop your services for any reason, whether your fault or because of internal actions.

The best solo consultants that I know, who also have a strong pipeline of potential clients, have built this through:

Content. They produce content related to their target market’s problems and thus become a thought leader in that niche. This will often lead to recurring columns in industry publications.

A strong referral network. They know the who’s who of their niche and are their go-to when someone needs the consultant’s specific skillset.

Speaking. Getting a one-off or set of speaking engagements in front of your target audience often directly drives potential clients and cements you as an expert in their minds.

The goal is to build your own name as an expert so that you consistently have potential customers approaching you to see if you can work with them, while also knowing your limits and when you may next have available time.

The goal isn’t to magically be able to get new inquiries when you need them (though this may happen if you’ve built this system), but to be able to go back to a group of people who have already inquired about your services and tell them that you have some availability. A pro move is also to ask if they know anyone who may need your services, as well.

Creating processes

Not every consultant desires working with large clients who each pay the equivalent of a full-time salary. Some consultants prefer working with smaller clients, mostly small or local businesses, because of the unique challenges that these clients face.

In this case, the challenge is to work out how you scale quantity without sacrificing quality or client retention. There are many ways to do this:

Find an agency or group of consultants you trust that you can outsource certain parts of the project to;

Leverage technologies like HubSpot, Moz, or others that allow you to automate a lot of the work;

Use tools like HubSpot, Calendly, UberConference, or others to help scale scheduling and admin parts of the business;

Use virtual assistants, bookkeeping services like Bench, and payroll services like Gusto to alleviate a lot of the business operations so you have more time to work for clients.

As Francois Marcil of Ehook.co shared:

“When you have over 10 clients, the time spent attending meetings is the biggest obstacle to serving all your clients well. For this reason, I reserve 2 days of the week for meetings and 3 days for work. The rule is strict, and I inform my clients from the start."

When a solo consultant sets up these processes, it not only makes their life a lot easier and their clients happier (which leads to better retention, which leads to a healthier business), but it also sets them up for success should they decide later that they want to start an agency. In this case, their processes of both acquiring and managing new clients will let them generate the cash flow needed to make the leap to employing someone full time.

Agencies leveling up

Some business owners don’t feel the need to constantly push and grow their business. They’re bootstrapped, their business affords them and their employees a great lifestyle, and they have no desire to take on more responsibility with their business. If this is you, then I’m a bit envious and encourage you to enjoy it.

If you’re anything like me, though, you're never happy with maintaining. You always want to be growing, to be learning, to push yourself and your business to see what it’s capable of. If you’re on this course, then keep reading.

Your strategies have to change a bit when you go from being a solo consultant to growing your agency. A lot of your processes are going to break or need tweaking as you grow the number of people working on accounts. Your challenge now becomes managing the growth of your headcount while maintaining quality and bringing in great new clients at the same time.

This is likely way too much for one person to handle, so at some point you’ll be forced to decide what you are great at (and love doing) that is also instrumental to the business’s success. Then hire out for the rest.

Let’s focus on the sales part, of course.

At the beginning of your journey as a brand-new consultant, you were likely heavily dependent on one-off referrals from family and friends. But referrals don’t really scale.

As you’re looking to grow your business quickly, your channels have likely shifted to:

Speaking. If you have a dynamic founder who is a keynote-level (or heading in that direction) speaker, this can be great lead generation;

Strategic partnerships with investors or other agencies;

Your own search traffic and thought leadership on your own website;

Your own advertising of your services online.

You’re facing the unique challenge of increasing the quantity of potential clients contacting you while not sacrificing quality. While difficult, this is absolutely possible. You can grow your revenue by:

Targeting new clients who have similar traits to your existing ideal clients;

Growing accounts by upselling your existing clients to other services you offer that they need;

Defining a specific niche or type of company where you get outsized returns, and then target them specifically through content, speaking, education, or both.

Sales changes as you grow. You’re looking for long-term sustainable clients as it is four to ten times cheaper to retain and grow your current clients than to get new clients (source). If you're investing in landing new clients, you should not also have to worry about retaining your current clients. If you are, then you are simply refilling a leaky bucket and you will not grow.

Michael King of iPullRank is no stranger to the challenges that agency founders face as they grow, but he’s successfully transitioned from solo consultant to now managing seven figures in agency income. So what does he do differently?

“The difference is really that it's far more dire,” he shared. “The maintenance of payroll becomes the battery in your back to have to just figure it out. Whereas when you're by yourself and you have a low month or you lose a client, it's not that big of a deal.”

Johnathan Dane of KlientBoost credits lessons he’s learned about sales along the way in growing KlientBoost from himself to $4M in revenue in just a few years:

“We’ve been very fortunate to have 99% of our sales come from our content, and when that happens, our sales cycle is drastically reduced because the potential client already likes us and has found value from what we’ve given them,” he said. “So even 2.5 years in, I still handle the inbound sales — which I know isn’t scalable — but you gotta allow yourself to still have some fun.”

I should also note that at this point, you should have someone dedicated to sales and onboarding new clients full-time. This can be filled by the founder if the founder is stellar at sales, but most often I see this role being given to a dedicated sales executive who hopefully also has marketing experience, or has proven their aptitude for learning and applying it so they sell the right work.

Agencies moving into new service offerings

At some point, you may max out your growth in your current niche and with your current offerings. At the same time, you want to continue growing but don’t have the option of increasing client budgets. Or, maybe a new platform emerges (think: Snapchat) that has the opportunity to be big and you want to be an early mover in helping your clients get exposure.

But moving into new niches is hard when you've established yourself in another service offering and that's how you're known. Every agency has a primary service offering, so how do you move into new niches?

There are two main ways:

Think of this new service offering as a startup in and of itself. It is responsible for its own profit and loss (P&L), as well as landing its own new clients;

Upsell your current clients into this new offering as well.

This is hard. Brandon Doyle of Wallaroo Media, who went from being a generic SEO agency to leading the way in travel marketing and Snapchat from their offices in Provo, Utah, knows this firsthand:

“With a background in SEO, we strongly believed in its ability as a channel,” he shared. “We utilized SEO and evergreen content to carve out a name for ourselves both in the travel space, and more recently as a leader in Snapchat-related content, strategies, and news. The latter paid off, as we were just recently named an official Snapchat Agency Partner!”

Will Critchlow, CEO of digital marketing agency Distilled (full disclosure: I used to work for Distilled), also knows a thing or two about moving into an adjacent vertical. The agency recently become recognized for not only SEO, but creative content and outreach services, too:

“All our moves have come from the passion of the team,” shared Will. “Team members saw an opportunity, started doing part of the solution, and pitched the rest.”

Finally, your marketing will change as you seek traction in this new vertical. The topics you write about, the people you reference, the outreach you do, and the places you choose to interact will necessarily change.

This is specifically why I recommend tasking someone specifically with building out this new area. At Wallaroo, this was Brandon. At Distilled, this was Mark Johnstone who was previously an SEO consultant who had an interest in big creative content and Tom Anthony with an interest in technical A/B testing for SEO.

Conclusion

Consistently generating new potential projects at every cycle of your business’s growth is the best skill you can learn as a services business owner.

Leave a comment about the channels you’ve found to be the most effective!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-to-get-new-clients-at-every-stage.html
January 15, 2018 at 10:20PM

What to Do When a New Potential SEO Client Contacts You

Posted by dohertyjf

Editor's note: We originally published a different article by mistake due to an oversight and a valuable lesson in the dangers of copy-paste; you can see it live here. We truly apologize for the error.

If you’re an agency owner or solo consultant, you’re probably constantly thinking about getting new clients. And we’re inundated in this industry with too much advice around new marketing funnels, new marketing ideas, and "one weird tricks to 10x your traffic overnight."

But something we don’t talk about enough is what you do when you actually convert that person into a real contact on your site.

I’m not talking about “a lead” here, because that word is used widely in our space and has come to mean everything and nothing at the same time. A lead could be an email address and it could be a long-form submission telling you everything about their needs, as well as their budget and their birth city.

What I’m talking about here is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that you are going to turn into a sales qualified lead (SQL) so that you can turn them into a business qualified lead (aka a new client). (Note: I just made up business qualified lead, so don’t go around talking about BQLs. Or do, but credit me!).

Over the last two years I’ve helped a lot of businesses connect with great marketing providers through my company Credo, and through that I’ve been able to watch how agencies and consultants alike pitch work.

I see all sorts of strategies done to try to close a lead into a client, such as:

Send an intake survey to try to vet the lead more;

Send them a Calendly link to get them to schedule a call as soon as possible;

Send an initial proposal after the first call and then refine it with the client on the phone;

Send tracked proposals using a tool like DocSend so you can follow up depending on whether they’ve viewed it or not.

There are many more I've seen as well. Some work well, others don’t. This post isn’t going to dig into the various tactics you can use, as you should be testing those yourself.

What I care about is that you develop a sales strategy that sets a strong base and that you can build from into the future.

I also have a unique view on our industry, because I get to see what kind of sales process actually closes potential clients into actual clients. While you may be doing something that you think works really well, there's a great chance that I know a better way.

And today, I’m going to give you a view into what I know closes clients, and the sales process that I use to close a high percentage of projects who want to work with me into clients.

What to do when a client contacts you

The first rule of sales in a service business like a consulting agency is that the earlier you reply to a prospective client, the more likely you are to close them into an actual client.

Over the last couple of years, I've tried to educate businesses that they should speak with multiple agencies and get multiple proposals, to understand what each agency has to offer and be able to compare them in order to arrive at the right decision for their specific business.

And yet, time and time again I see the first agency to respond to be the one to close the project probably 70% of the time.

This can absolutely be a templated response, and tools like Gmail’s Canned Responses or templates within your CRM of choice can help. I personally use HubSpot’s and push form entries there via Zapier, but there are many different options out there; I'm sure you can find one that connects your form technology to your CRM.

In your response, you have to include these three points at minimum:

Respond as quickly as possible and thank them for contacting you

Acknowledge the project they say they're interested in

Schedule a time to chat on the phone as quickly as possible

As I said above, I’ve seen many agencies send an intake questionnaire that's a page or two long before even getting on the phone with the potential client.

I advise against this simply because this slows down the process. Some clients that you would otherwise win will simply move on to another agency. You’re giving them work when really what you need to do is remove friction from their decision to choose you.

This initial contact is also not the place to tell them all of the brands you've helped and the results you've gotten. If they’re contacting you, they're already interested. Don’t make them think.

You have one goal with your response: to get them to schedule a phone call with you.

What to learn on the first call

If you’ve followed my instructions above, you’re getting the client to schedule a call with you (when you're available) as quickly as possible. Don’t forget to have them include their phone number, as well!

Schedule the call for 30 minutes so that you can:

Get an understanding for their project, and

Not invest too much time into them in case they're not qualified enough.

As a side note, if you're getting too many “leads” (may we all be so lucky) that are not qualified for your business and thus wasting you or your salesperson’s time, then you may want to look at adding some friction to your lead forms. More is not always better.

You should have an idea of who your best clients are and the kind of work they've hired you to do that you are best-in-class doing; you need to walk away from this first call at minimum knowing if they're a good fit or not.

If they are a good fit, then you can move them forward in your sales process (usually a recap and another call).

You'll also be able to use this process to qualify out the leads who on the surface seem to be a good fit because they were able and willing to successfully fill out your lead form, but when you dig deeper into their business and needs, you realize they're not quite such a good fit. We’ll talk about this more in a minute.

On this initial phone call, you need to cover all of these points to determine whether you should pitch the work or not:

What their business model is, so that you can understand if they're profitable;

The type of project they're looking for, such as strategy or services or a combination thereof;

Their internal team structure and their knowledge of the marketing channel they're inquiring to you about;

Whether the person you're speaking with is the person who has final sign-off and budgetary control, or if they've been tasked with sourcing an agency but ultimately are not the decision maker;

Their budget range;

Their timetable for wanting to get started.

Thank them for their time and set their expectations about what you'll do next and when they can expect to hear back from you.

Now your work really begins.

After the first call

Assuming the first call with your prospective client goes well, you'll need a process to follow so that followups don't fail and the process moves forward.

This part is important.

Right after the call, follow up with the person you spoke with via email to recap the call and reiterate your next steps.

First, thank them for their time. Regardless of whether or not you ultimately decide to pitch the project, you should be grateful that they decided to speak with you and not someone else.

Second, recap what you discussed on the call. I like to take notes with my CRM (I use HubSpot, as mentioned above) and then use those to write the recap. A CRM should integrate with your email system and allow you to email the prospect from directly within it so that you don't have to move between your CRM and your email client.

Here's a templated response that I use when replying to someone after our initial call:

Hi FNAME,

Thank you for the conversation today! I enjoyed learning more about your business and how we can potentially help.

As we discussed, COMPANY is looking for TYPE OF PROJECT. (recap the project here)

As I mentioned on the call, my next step is to spend some time reviewing your site and your project to determine if it is the right fit for me as well. I will follow up with you within 48 hours (NOTE: THIS CAN CHANGE IF YOU CHATTED ON FRIDAY, IN WHICH CASE SAY END OF DAY ON MONDAY) with my findings and where I think I can add value to your business. In the case that your project is not the right fit for me, I can suggest some other people you should speak with.

Thanks FNAME, and you will hear from me soon!

John

Now you can review their project and website metrics to see where you can add value, and if it’s a project that can be successful within the budget they have outlined for you.

Then, decide if you should pitch for the project or refer them elsewhere.

Deciding whether to pitch the work

Sales is all about determining who the right prospects are and are not, then optimizing your time to focus on the clients you want to sign — not on the ones that are a poor fit for your business.

Hopefully you know who your ideal customer is, in terms of budget but also the type of work they need (strategy, services, or some combination thereof) as well as the marketing channel(s). Once you know who your ideal customer is (and is not), you'll have a much easier time determining whether or not you should pitch the work.

In my experience with seeing over a thousand projects introduced to marketing providers, the six factors mentioned in the “What to learn on the first call” section are the ones that reliably help you understand whether you should pitch the work or not.

Some of the factors to avoid are:

Unrealistic expectations or timelines

No or low budget

No resources to get things done

Their last four agencies haven't worked out

Going out of business "unless they get help"

I love that so many in the SEO industry are helpful and genuinely good people who want to help others, but if you start taking on clients that can’t pay you what you need to operate a profitable business or have had issues with many other agencies, then you're doing yourself and your business a disservice.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard an agency say that they “pitched the work, but set the budget high” I’d be financially independent and retired to a mountain town in Switzerland by now.

Hear me loud and clear here:

You do not have to pitch every project that falls into your lap.

If the project doesn't meet your minimum project budget, the type of client you can get outsized returns for, or is not within your core competency (your zone of genius), then you should not pitch the project.

Let me explain why.

If a client is below your minimum project threshold and you pitch them, you've wasted two people’s time. You've wasted your time by creating a proposal and potential project plan, and you've wasted their time because they took time out of their day to review something that they'll never sign off on.

Second, if they negotiate back to try to get the budget lower, you're going to spend your time to get a project that is smaller than what they ideally need and can afford. You're literally spending time to make less money, when you could take that time to pitch and negotiate with someone who can easily afford your services.

Should you sign the project that is smaller than or right at your minimum while at the same time being at very top end of their budget, you can rest assured that this client will take up more time than they're paying for because they feel pressure to make it work quickly. Unless you set expectations explicitly and are very good at saying no to requests for work that are outside of the scope of what they're paying for, this project will quickly snowball and take up too much time, thus putting it in the red.

Don’t pitch a project that's very likely to go into the red budget-wise. That is Business 101, and you will regret it. I promise.

Conclusion

I hope this post has been helpful to you in learning what to do when a new potential consulting client first contacts you or your agency.

First, speed is of the essence. While we want to believe that the best pitch will ultimately win the business, experience tells us that it is most often the first person to respond who actually gets to pitch and sign the business.

Second, get the potential client on the phone as quickly as possible. Don't rely on email, as you can gain way more information on a 30-minute call than in a string of emails. People are busy and you don't want to create more friction for them. Get them on the phone.

Third, you need to send a followup email within a few hours of the phone call where you thank them for their time, recap what you discussed, and set their expectations for what your next steps are and when they'll hear from you again. Feel free to use my template and adjust it for your specific needs.

Fourth, decide if you want to pitch the project. Don’t pitch projects that are too small, outside your/your agency’s zone of genius, where what you have to offer is not their highest leverage option, or where they're not set up internally to make the project successful. Your project will not succeed if any of these are true.

I am also writing an ebook, hopefully out in Q1 2018, about everything I’ve learned seeing over 1,100 projects come through Credo. If you’re interested to hear when it launches, sign up.

I’d love to hear your comments below and interact with you around better sales for digital marketing consulting work!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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January 16, 2018 at 11:28AM

Free Local SEO Tools That Belong in Your Kit

Posted by MiriamEllis

What a lot can change in just a few years! When I wrote the original version of this post in January 2014, the local SEO industry didn’t have quite the wealth of paid tools that now exists, and many of the freebies on my previous list have been sunsetted. Definitely time for a complete refresh of the most useful free tools, widgets, and resources I know of to make marketing local businesses easier and better.

While all of the tools below are free, note that some will require you to sign up for access. Others are limited, no-cost, or trial versions that let you get a good sense of what they provide, enabling you to consider whether it might be worth it to buy into paid access. One thing you may notice: my new list of local SEO tools offers increased support for organic SEO tasks, reflective of our industry’s growing understanding of how closely linked organic and local SEO have become.

Now, let’s open this toolkit and get 2018 off to a great start!

For Research

US Census Bureau Tool Set

Looking to better understand a target community for marketing purposes? You’ll find 20+ useful resources from the US Census Bureau, including population statistics, economic data, mapping and geocoding widgets, income and language information, and much more.

Client Onboarding Questionnaire & Phone Script

Onboarding a new client? Reduce repetitious follow-ups by asking all of the right questions the first time around with this thorough questionnaire and easy-to-follow phone call script from Moz. Includes helpful tips for why you are asking each question. As local SEO veterans will tell you, a missed question can lead to unhappy (and costly) surprises down the marketing road. Be sure you have the total picture of an incoming client in clear view before you begin strategizing.

Location Information Spreadsheet

Vital when marketing multi-location businesses, this free Moz spreadsheet will ensure that you’ve got all the info at your fingertips about each locale of a company.

*Pro tip: When working with large enterprises, be certain that the data you’re inputting in this spreadsheet has been approved by all relevant departments. It’s really no fun to find out six months into a marketing campaign that there’s internal disagreement about company NAP or other features.

Local Competitive Audit Spreadsheet

Now we’re really getting down to brass tacks. When you need to look for answers to the perennial client question, “Why is that guy outranking me?”, this free Moz spreadsheet will help you document key competitive data. The end result of filling out the sheet will be two columns of stats you can compare and contrast in your quest to discover competitors’ ranking strengths and weaknesses. Need more guidance? Read my blog post in which I put this audit spreadsheet into action for two San Francisco Bay Area Chinese restaurants.

Manual GeoLocation Chrome Extension

Watch Darren Shaw demo using this tool to show how a local pack changes when a user virtually crosses a street and you’ll quickly understand how useful this Chrome extension will be in approximating the impacts of user-to-business proximity. Works well on desktop devices.

Our industry still hasn’t fully recovered from Google removing the Local Search filter from its engine in 2015, and I still live in hope that they will bring it back one day, but in the meantime, this extension gives us a good sense of how searcher location affects search results. In fact, it may even be a superior solution.

The MozBar SEO Toolbar

Local businesses in competitive markets must master traditional SEO, and the free MozBar provides a wonderful introduction to the metrics you need to look at in analyzing the organic strengths and weaknesses of clients and competitors. On-page elements, link metrics, markup, HTTP status, optimization opportunities — get the data you need at a glance with the MozBar.

Google Advanced Search Operators

Not a tool, per se, but the best tutorial I have ever seen on using Google advanced search operators to deepen your research. Dr. Pete breaks this down into 67 steps that will enable you to use these search refinements for content and title research, checking for plagiarism, technical SEO audits, and competitive intelligence. Be totally wizardly and impress your clients and teammates, simply by knowing how to format searches in smart ways.

Google Search Console

Apologies if it already seems like a no-brainer to you that you should be signed up for Google’s console that gives you analytics, alerts you to serious errors, and so much more, but local SEO is just now crossing the threshold of understanding how deeply connected it is to organic search. When playing in Google’s backyard, GSC is a must-have for businesses of every type.

BrightLocal’s Search Results Checker

This popular tool does an excellent job of replicating local search results at a city or zip code level. In some cases, it’s best to search by city (for example, when there are multiple towns covered by a single zip code), but other times, it’s better search by zip code (as in the case of a large city with multiple zip codes). The tool doesn’t have the capability to recreate user-level results, so always remember that the proximity of a given user to a business may create quite different results than what you’ll see searching at a city or zip code level. I consider this a great tool to suss out the lay of the land in a community, identifying top competitors.

Offline Conversion Tracker Form

Give this handy Whitespark form to anyone who answers your phone so that they can document the answer to the important question, “How did you hear about us?” Submitted information is saved to Whitespark’s database and tracked in Google Analytics for your future reference and analysis. For local businesses, knowledge of offline factors can be priceless. This form provides a simple point of entry into amassing real-world data.

For Content

Answer the Public

One of the best-loved keyword research tools in the digital marketing world, Answer the Public lets you enter a keyword phrase and generate a large number of questions/topics related to your search. One of the most awesome facets of this tool is that it has a .CSV download feature — perfect for instantly generating large lists of keywords that you can input into something like Moz Keyword Explorer to begin the sorting process that turns up the most powerful keywords for your content dev and on-page optimization.

Buzzsumo

Another great content inspiration tool, Buzzsumo shows you lets you enter a keyword, topic or domain name, and then shows you which pieces are getting the most social shares. For example, a search for wholefoodsmarket.com shows that a highly shared piece of content at the time of my search is about an asparagus and broccoli soup. You can also sort by content type (articles, videos, infographics, etc.). Use of Buzzsumo can help you generate topics that might be popular if covered on your website.

OSHA Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) System Search

Another interesting resource for brainstorming a wide pool of potential keywords for content dev consideration, OSHA’s SIC search returns big, comprehensive lists. Just look up your industry’s SIC code, and then enter it along with a keyword/category to get your list.

USPS Look Up a ZIP Code Widget

Working with service area businesses (SABs)? Note the second tab in the menu of this widget: Cities by zip code. When you know the zip code of a business you’re marketing you can enter it into this simple tool to get a list of every city in that zip. Now, let’s not take a wrong step here: don’t publish large blocks of zips or city names on any website, but do use this widget to be sure you know of all the communities for which an SAB might strategize content, link building, brand building, real-world relationship building, social media marketing, and PPC.

Schema/JSON-LD Generators

Rather than list a single tool here, I’m going to take the advice of my friend, schema expert David Deering, who has taught me that no one tool is perfect. In David’s opinion, there isn’t currently a schema/JSON-LD generator that does it all, which is why he continues to build this type of markup manually. That being said, if you’re new to Schema, these generators will get you started:

https://webcode.tools/json-ld-generator

http://microdatagenerator.com/generator.html

https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/schema-markup-generator/

http://tools.seochat.com/category/schema-generators

For Citations

Moz Check Listing

I can say without bias that I know of no free tool that does a better job of giving you a lightning-fast overview of the health of a local business’ listings. On the phone with a new prospect? Just plug in the name and zip and see how complete and accurate the company’s citations are on the sources that matter most, including the major local business data aggregators (Acxiom, Factual, Infogroup, Localeze) plus key platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, YP, and more.

Literally at a glance, you can tell if inconsistencies and duplicate listings are holding a business back. It can also be used for competitive analysis, defining whether a clean or messy citation set is impacting competitors. The value of the free Check Listing tool becomes most fully realized by signing up for the paid Moz Local product, which automates aggregator-level listing management even at an enterprise level with hundreds or thousands of listings, and offers options for review monitoring, ranking analysis, and more.

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder (free version)

The free version of this cool tool from our friends at Whitespark will give you a sense of how the paid version can help you discover additional places, beyond the basics, where you might want to get listed. It also analyzes your competitors’ citations.

For Reviews

The Hoth’s Online Business Review Checker Tool

You’ll have to sign up, but this free tool gives you an overview report of a local business’ reviews on a variety of platforms. This is a smart thing to do for every incoming client, to gauge reputation strengths and weaknesses. The state of a company’s reviews indicates whether it has an offline problem that needs to be corrected at a real-world structural level, or if its core challenge is a lack of strategy for simply earning a competitive number of positive reviews.

Free Review Monitoring

Need to know when a new review comes in on a major or industry-specific review site? Signing up for this free tool will send you email alerts so that you can respond quickly. Watch the little video and pay attention to its statement that the majority of unhappy customers will consider visiting a business again if it quickly resolves a complaint. Good to know!

Review Handout Generator

Another freebie from Whitespark in partnership with Phil Rozek, this very simple resource lets you enter some business info and generate a printable handout your public-facing staff can give to customers. Active review management has become a must in even moderately competitive geo-industries. How nice to have a physical asset to offer your customers to get more of those reviews rolling in!

Google Review Link Generator

Google’s local product has gone through so many iterations that finding a link to point consumers to when requesting a GMB review has been foolishly difficult at times. Whitespark helps out again, at least for brick-and-mortar businesses, with this easy widget that lets you enter your business info and generate a shareable link. Unfortunately, SABs or home-based businesses with hidden addresses can’t use this tool, but for other business models, this widget works really well.

For social

Notify

Whenever your business gets mentioned on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and a variety of other platforms, Notify uses Slack or HipChat to send you an alert. By being aware of important conversations taking place about your brand, and participating in them, your business can achieve an excellent status of responsiveness. Social media has become part of the customer service environment, so a tool like this comes in very handy.

Followerwonk

A free trial is available for this app which acts as serious analytics for Twitter. If Twitter is a favorite platform in your industry, definitely give this resource a spin. Understand the characteristics of your followers, find and connect with influencers, and use data to improve your outreach.

Character Count Online

I use this ultra-basic tool all of the time for three specific tasks. Some social platforms either have character limits and don’t always have counters, or (like Google Posts) truncate your social messaging so that only a limited snippet appear at the highest interface. Just plug in your text and see the character count.

And, of course, you’ll want a character counter to be sure your on-page title tags and meta descriptions read right in the SERPs.

My third use for this counter relates to content marketing. Most publications have character count parameters for the pieces they will accept. Here on the Moz Blog, we’re not into length limits, because we believe thorough coverage is the right coverage of important topics. But, when I’m invited to blog elsewhere, I have to rein myself in and be sure I haven’t galloped past that 800-character limit. If you’ve found that to be a problem, too, a character counter can keep you on-track as you write. Whoa, horsie!

So, what did I miss?

If you’re saying to yourself right now, “I can’t believe this totally awesome free local SEO tool I use every week isn’t included,” please share it with our community in the comments. One thing I know I’d love to find a free solution for would be a tool that does review sentiment analysis. Paid solutions exist for this, but I’ve yet to encounter a freebie.

My criteria for a great tool is that it makes work better, stronger, faster… or is that the intro to The Six Million Dollar Man? Well, Steve Austin had some amazing capabilities (and a cool 70s jogging suit, to boot!), and I’m hoping you’ll feel kitted up for success, too, with this list of free tools in the year ahead.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/01/free-local-seo-tools-that-belong-in.html
January 17, 2018 at 10:12PM

Should SEOs & Content Marketers Play to the Social Networks' "Stay-On-Our-Site" Algorithms? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Increasingly, social networks are tweaking their algorithms to favor content that remains on their site, rather than send users to an outside source. This spells trouble for those trying to drive traffic and visitors to external pages, but what's an SEO or content marketer to do? Do you swim with the current, putting all your efforts toward placating the social network algos, or do you go against it and continue to promote your own content? This edition of Whiteboard Friday goes into detail on the pros and cons of each approach, then gives Rand's recommendations on how to balance your efforts going forward.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about whether SEOs and content marketers, for that matter, should play to what the social networks are developing in their visibility and engagement algorithms, or whether we should say, "No. You know what? Forget about what you guys are doing. We're going to try and do things on social networks that benefit us." I'll show you what I'm talking about.

Facebook

If you're using Facebook and you're posting content to it, Facebook generally tends to frown upon and lower the average visibility and ability of content to reach its audience on Facebook if it includes an external link. So, on average, posts that include an external link will fare more poorly in Facebooks' news feed algorithm than on-site content, exclusively content that lives on Facebook.

For example, if you see this video promoted on Facebook.com/Moz or Facebook.com/RandFishkin, it will do more poorly than if Moz and I had promoted a Facebook native video of Whiteboard Friday. But we don't want that. We want people to come visit our site and subscribe to Whiteboard Friday here and not stay on Facebook where we only reach 1 out of every 50 or 100 people who might subscribe to our page.

So it's clearly in our interest to do this, but Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook's website, because then they can do the most advertising and targeting to you and get the most time on site from you. That's their business, right?

Twitter

The same thing is true of Twitter. So it tends to be the case that links off Twitter fare more poorly. Now, I am not 100% sure in Twitter's case whether this is algorithmic or user-driven. I suspect it's a little of both, that Twitter will promote or make most visible to you when you log in to Twitter the posts that have been made or the tweets that have been made that are self-contained. They live entirely on Twitter. They might contain a bunch of different stuff, a poll or images or be a thread. But links off Twitter will be dampened.

Instagram

The same thing is true on Instagram. Well, on Instagram, they're kind of the worst. They don't allow links at all. The only thing you can do is a link in profile. More engaging content on Instagram, as of just a couple weeks ago, more engaging content equals higher placement in the feed. In fact, Instagram has now just come out and said that they will show you content posts from people you're not following but that they think will be engaging to you, which gives influential Instagram accounts that get lots of engagement an additional benefit, but kind of hurts everyone else that you're normally following on the network.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, LinkedIn's algorithm includes extra visibility in the feed for self-contained post content, which is why you see a lot of these posts of, "Oh, here's all the crazy amounts of work I did and what my experience was like building this or doing that." If it's a self-contained, sort of blog post-style content in LinkedIn that does not link out, it will do much better than posts that contain an external link, which LinkedIn sort of dampens in their visibility algorithm for their feed.

Play to the algos?

So all of these sites have these components of their algorithm that basically reward you if you are willing to play to their algos, meaning you keep all of the content on their sites and platform, their stuff, not yours. You essentially play to what they're trying to achieve, which is more time on site for them, more engagement for them, less people going away to other places. You refuse or you don't link out, so no external linking to other places. You maintain sort of what I call a high signal to noise ratio, so that rather than sharing all the things you might want to share, you only share posts that you can count on having relatively high engagement.

That track record is something that sticks with you on most of these networks. Facebook, for example, if I have posts that do well, many in a row, I will get more visibility for my next one. If my last couple of posts have performed poorly on Facebook, my next one will be dampened. You sort of get a string or get on a roll with these networks. Same thing is true on Twitter, by the way.

$#@! the algos, serve your own site?

Or you say, "Forget you" to the algorithms and serve your own site instead, which means you use the networks to tease content, like, "Here's this exciting, interesting thing. If you want the whole story or you want to watch full video or see all the graphs and charts or whatever it is, you need to come to our website where we host the full content." You link externally so that you're driving traffic back to the properties that you own and control, and you have to be willing to promote some potentially promotional content, in order to earn value from these social networks, even if that means slightly lower engagement or less of that get-on-a-roll reputation.

My recommendation

The recommendation that I have for SEOs and content marketers is I think we need to balance this. But if I had to, I would tilt it in favor of your site. Social networks, I know it doesn't seem this way, but social networks come and go in popularity, and they change the way that they work. So investing very heavily in Facebook six or seven years ago might have made a ton of sense for a business. Today, a lot of those investments have been shown to have very little impact, because instead of reaching 20 or 30 out of 100 of your followers, you're reaching 1 or 2. So you've lost an order of magnitude of reach on there. The same thing has been true generally on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram. So I really urge you to tilt slightly to your own site.

Owned channels are your website, your email, where you have the email addresses of the people there. I would rather have an email or a loyal visitor or an RSS subscriber than I would 100 times as many Twitter followers, because the engagement you can get and the value that you can get as a business or as an organization is just much higher.

Just don't ignore how these algorithms work. If you can, I would urge you to sometimes get on those rolls so that you can grow your awareness and reach by playing to these algorithms.

So, essentially, while I'm urging you to tilt slightly this way, I'm also suggesting that occasionally you should use what you know about how these algorithms work in order to grow and accelerate your growth of followers and reach on these networks so that you can then get more benefit of driving those people back to your site. You've got to play both sides, I think, today in order to have success with the social networks' current reach and visibility algorithms.

All right, everyone, look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/01/should-seos-content-marketers-play-to.html
January 18, 2018 at 10:12PM

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "President-elect Donald Trump",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686"
]
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "US",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30"
]
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "Inauguration Day",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233"
]
}
]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

Appendix

Spotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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January 21, 2018 at 10:09PM

Why Search Agencies Should Embrace the Adjacency of Email Marketing

Posted by davidmihm

As someone who’s spent virtually his entire career in local search, I’m by no means an early proponent of email. But in my interactions at marketing conferences, studies of industry research, and social media conversations, I get the feeling that many of my peers are even further down the adoption curve than I’ve been.

With this post, I encourage you to take a hard look at email marketing for yourselves, or an even harder look if you’ve already done so. If you’ve focused exclusively on offering SEO and SEM services to clients in the past, I hope I’ll convince you that email should be a natural and profitable complement to those offerings.

And if you’re a local business reading this post, I hope many of these points convince you to take a look at email marketing yourselves!

Making the case for email

High ROI

With a return on investment (ROI) of 44:1, marketers consistently rate email as the top-performing channel. According to Campaign Monitor, that ROI has actually increased since 2015, and it’s particularly true for B2B companies. Despite the supposed unpopularity of email among millennials, it remains far and away the most-preferred channel by which to receive communication from a business.

Just plain cheap

The fact that email’s so cheap helps the denominator of that 44:1 stat a bunch. Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers, as are MailerLite and SendinBlue, and many other providers offer plans under $10/month depending on your number of subscribers.

It’s also cheap in terms of time cost. Unlike social media where daily or even hourly presence performs best, email allows you to duck in and duck out as you have time.

As far as the numerator, average open rates far exceed social media reach on most platforms. And even if they don’t open, ⅓ of people report purchasing based on an email they received from a brand (!). Search provides better purchase intent, but the top-of-mind awareness and referral potential from email is unmatched.

Makes other channels more effective

Gathering customer email addresses is essential for other critical forms of local business marketing already — you need an email address to ask for a review, build lookalike audiences, and make customer intelligence solutions like FullContact most effective.

Actually offering something of value, whether that’s a discount code, loyalty program, whitepaper, or newsletter subscription, increases the odds of earning that email address for all of those purposes.

Last best option?

Frankly, the number of organic digital channels available to small businesses is shrinking. Facebook’s latest announcement signals a tough road ahead there for businesses without the budget to Boost posts, and Google’s expansion of its Local Service Ad program to verticals and locales across the United States in the next couple of years seems inevitable to me. Now is the time to start building an email program as these monetization pressures intensify.

Why agencies should offer email

Your customers know it works.

Local businesses might be more aware of email’s potency than some of the agencies that are serving them. Email consistently rates among the top three marketing channels in industry surveys by the Local Search Association, StreetFight, Clutch, and more.

At the very least, email requires barely any client education. Unlike the black box of SEO or the complexity of PPC, by and large, small businesses inherently understand email marketing. They know they should be sending emails to their customers, but many of them just aren’t yet doing it, or are doing it poorly.

It’s a concrete deliverable.

Unlike so much of the behind-the-scenes work that leads to success in SEO, clients can actually see an email campaign delivered to their inbox, as well as the results of that campaign: every major Email Service Provider tracks opens and clicks by default.

It leverages existing offerings.

I already mentioned some of the ways that email marketing complements other channels above. But it can tie in even more closely to an agency’s existing content offering: many of you are already developing full content calendars, or at the very least social content.

(For those clients whom you’re helping with social media, their newsletter can be built using Tidings with no additional effort on your part.)

Building email into your client content strategy can help their content reach a deeper audience, and possibly even a different audience.

It’s predictable.

Though you could argue that the Gmail and Apple Mail interface configurations are algorithms of a kind, generally speaking, email marketing is not subject to wild algorithmic changes or inexplicable ranking fluctuations.

And unlike Google’s unrealistic link building axiom that great content will naturally attract inbound links, great content actually does naturally attract more subscribers and more customers as they receive forwarded emails.

You can expand it over time.

Unlike SEO for local businesses, which generally includes relatively easy wins up front and gets progressively harder to deliver the same value over time, email marketing offers numerous opportunities to expand the scope of your engagement with a client.

Beyond fulfilling the emails themselves, there are plenty of other email-related services to offer, including managing and optimizing list sign-up, welcome emails and drip campaigns, A/B testing subject lines and content, and ongoing customer intelligence.

Tactical ingredients for success with email

Use a reputable Email Service Provider.

Running an email marketing program through Gmail or Outlook is an easy way to get your primary address blacklisted. You also won’t have access to open rate or click rate, nor an easy way to automate signups onto specific lists or segments.

Be consistent.

Setting expectations for your subscribers and then following through on those expectations is a particularly important practice for email newsletters, but also holds true for explicitly commercial emails and automated emails.

You should be generally consistent with the day on which you send weekly specials, appointment reminders, or service follow-ups. Consistency helps form a habit among your subscribers.

Consistency also applies to branding. It’s fine to A/B test subject lines and content types over time, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot from a brand perspective by designing every email you send from scratch. Leave that kind of advanced development to big brands with full in-house email teams.

The other reason to be consistent is that designing for email is really, really difficult — a lesson I learned the hard way last year prior to launching Tidings. Complex email clients like Microsoft Outlook use their own markup languages to render emails, and older email clients can’t interpret a lot of modern HTML or CSS declarations.

Choose a mobile-first template.

Make sure your layout renders well on phones, since that’s where more than 2/3 of email gets opened. Two- or three-column layouts that force pinching and zooming on mobile devices are a no-no, and at this point, most subscribers are used to scrolling a bit to see content.

As long as your template reflects your brand accurately, the content of that layout is far more important than its design. Look no further than the simple email layouts chosen by some of the most successful companies in their respective industries, including Amazon, Kayak, and Fast Company.

Pick a layout that’s proven to work on phones and stick with it.

Include an email signup button or form prominently on your website.

It’s become a best practice to include social icons in the header and/or footer of your website. But there’s an obvious icon missing from so many sites!

An email icon should be the first one in the lineup, since it’s the channel where your audience is most likely to see your content.

Also consider using Privy or Mailmunch to embed a signup banner or popover on your website with minimal code.

The specific place of newsletters

Plenty of people way smarter than me are on the newsletter bandwagon (and joined it much earlier than I did). Moz has been sending a popular “Top 10” newsletter for years, Kick Point sends an excellent weekly synopsis, and StreetFight puts out a great daily roundup, just to name a few. As a subscriber, those companies are always top-of-mind for me as thought leaders with their fingers on the pulse of digital marketing.

But newsletters work far beyond the digital marketing industry, too.

Sam Dolnick, the man in charge of the New York Times’ digital initiatives, puts a lot of stock in newsletters as a cornerstone channel, calling them “a lo-fi way to form a deep relationship with readers.”

I love that description. I think of a newsletter as a more personalized social channel. In the ideal world it’s halfway between a 1:1 email and a broadcast on Facebook or Twitter.

Granted, a newsletter may not be right for every local business, and it’s far from the only kind of email marketing you should be doing. But it’s also one of the easiest ways to get started with email marketing, and as Sam Dolnick said, an easy-to-understand way to start building relationships with customers.

For more newsletter best practices, this ancient (1992!) article actually covers print newsletters but almost all of its advice applies equally well to digital versions!

A great option or a strategic imperative?

Facebook’s ongoing reduction in organic visibility, Google’s ongoing evolution of the local SERP, and the shift to voice search will combine to create an existential threat to agencies that serve smaller-budget local businesses over the next 2–3 years.

Agencies simply can’t charge the margin to place paid ads that they can charge for organic work, particularly as Google and Facebook do a better and better job of optimizing low-budget campaigns. More ads, more Knowledge Panels, and more voice searches mean fewer organic winners at Google than ever before (though because overall search volume won’t decline, the winners will win bigger than ever).

Basic SEO blocking-and-tackling such as site architecture, title tags, and citation building will always be important services, but their impact for local businesses has declined over the past decade, due to algorithmic sophistication, increased competition, and decreased organic real estate.

To grow or even maintain your client base, it’ll be critical for you as an agency to offer additional services that are just as effective and scalable as these techniques were a decade ago.

As a concrete, high-margin, high-ROI deliverable, email should be a centerpiece of those additional services. And if it just doesn’t feel like something you’re ready to take on right now, Tidings is happy to handle your referrals :D!

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January 22, 2018 at 10:16PM

Why It Can Pay to Get Links from Domains that Don't Always Rank Highly - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Contrary to popular belief, the top ranking pages aren't always the best targets for your link building efforts. There are good reasons to chase those links, sure, but there are also drawbacks — as well as some hidden alternatives you may not have considered trying. This Whiteboard Friday delves into the pros and cons of targeting high-ranking sites for links and why you should consider a link intersect strategy, targeting sites that rank for broader topics, and earning links from publications ranking beyond page one of the SERPs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about why it may not actually pay to get links expressly or exclusively from the websites and pages that are ranking highly for your keywords. There's a bunch of reasons why behind this. There's a corollary to it, which is high-ranking websites may not always be the best link targets.

Are these the *best* links you can get to rank for "target keyword(s)"?

So okay, let's start with this question of when you're trying to rank for a target keyword, let's say you're trying to rank for "stylish sofas." You've decided you want to replace your couch, and you want something stylish. So you search for "stylish sofas." The results that come up, we're not talking about the paid results. That would be a mistake to try and get links from those. They're pretty commercially focused. They probably don't want to link to you, and I'm not sure it's all that valuable, necessarily, at least from an SEO perspective. But are these links, the ones that rank in the organic results top five, are they necessarily the best links you could possibly get? There are some reasons for and some reasons against.

In favor:

Let's talk about in favor of why these are good link targets. The first one is pretty simple and pretty obvious.

A. These pages get lots of real visitors interested in this topic who may click on/visit your site (if it's linked-to here)

These pages get a lot of search volume, get a lot of search visits from this query. If you're somewhere in this page, if my website is linked to here, that's actually a really nice thing. Maybe someone will click on the top result and then they'll find me and they'll click on it and they'll go to my page instead. That would be great. So if it's linked to there, you could get direct traffic from those pages, so nice link to have.

B. Google has put some trust/indication of authority in these pages and sites

Google has put some sort of trust and a signal of authority for this keyword by ranking it here. It's saying, "Hey, you know what? This top result and these top results are all highly relevant and authoritative for this particular query."

So those are absolutely true things, but I think they bias SEOs and link builders to think in terms of, oh, if I want to rank well for this, these are the only things I should be looking at or the first things I should be looking at or the best places to get links from.

Against:

Here's why that's not necessarily the case, so some points against.

A. Ranking is not actually an explicit signal from Google that these are the best quality links

By putting a page here, in the top of the results, Google is saying, "We, Google, believe that this page will do a great job of solving the searcher's query," not, "We, Google, know that if you get a link from here, you have a very good chance to rank for this keyword." That's not explicitly or implicitly said. It's not an implication. Google has never stated that publicly. I don't think it's necessarily the smartest thing to do in their ranking algorithm to have this recursive system that looks at who that already ranks is linking to someone else and replace them. That would be poor for Google's own user experience for a bunch of reasons.

B. Google and searchers expect that these pages that rank here are going to solve the searcher's query themselves (not force another click)

Not they're going to link to something that's going to solve the searcher's query, at least certainly not necessarily, and definitely that they're not going to force you to make another click. Google wants to rank pages here that solve the searcher's problem directly. So saying, "Oh, well, I don't think they do that and maybe they should link to me to solve this aspect of the problem," this is a spurious connection.

C. Of course, earning links from these pages, incredibly difficult

These people, especially if they're ranking for a commercial, non-branded query, like "stylish sofas," they really, really don't want to link to one of their competitors, to someone who's trying to actively outrank them. That would be pretty challenging.

I recognize that many times when link builders go about this, they look at, okay, this page is ranking. Let me see if I can find another page from this domain from which I can get a link. That's not terrible logic. That's a totally reasonable way to go about link building. But whether it's the best or the only one is what I'm going to challenge here. I don't think it is necessarily the best or only way that you should go about doing your link building for all these reasons we've just talked about.

Alternatively, links like these may be more achievable and provide more ranking value:

Now, what are the alternatives? You might be asking yourself, "Well, Rand, show me where should I be doing this if not from here?" I'm going to present a few alternatives. There's obviously an infinite number of link building tactics you could pursue, but I think some of the smarter ones would be to think about some alternatives like...

1. Sites and pages that link to multiple high-ranking targets

For example, if one and three and four are all linked to by SiteA.com, SiteA.com seems to carry, not necessarily for sure, it could be correlation and not causation, but it's certainly worth looking at as to whether Site A is relevant and provides high-quality links and could conceptually link to you and whether that's a good resource. I think that link intersect concept is a really good one to start with. In fact, I think, from a logic perspective, it makes more sense that sites and pages that tend to link to these top results probably provide more potential power to your ranking authority than just the pages that are already ranking.

2. Sites and pages that rank well for what I'd call broader keywords/broader topics related to the space you're in

So if it's "stylish sofas," you might look at keywords like, well, who's ranking for "interior design" or "interior design magazines" or "interior design events" or perhaps it's "decoration ideas." If I can find the people who are ranking for those sorts of things, that probably is going to say those are the types of places that will link out to other resources that have more specific targeting, like targeting "stylish sofas," and probably provide a lot of value there.

3. Influential publications and resources in the topic space that may not be doing good keyword targeting or SEO

I like going and trying to find influential publications and resources, that are in the topic space, that might not actually be doing good keyword targeting or good SEO, which means it's hard to use Google to find them. You may find them ranking on page two, page three, or page four. You may need to do some other types of research, like look on Instagram and see what companies or what publications are using these hashtags and have lots of followers in this interior design or decoration or furniture space.

From there, that will lead you to influential publications in the space that maybe have lots of readership, lots of engagement on social channels or on their website, but haven't done a particularly great job in Google. Those influential publications, I think Google is doing a very good job of identifying, "Hey, wait a minute. Here's a bunch of publications that are in important in space X and they are all linking to this website, which is doing a good job of targeting these keywords. So, therefore, that's who we should potentially rank."

So hopefully, this Whiteboard Friday will help you to expand your link building opportunities and also to recognize why the top ranking pages might not always be and certainly aren't necessarily the best link targets.

Thanks everyone. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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January 25, 2018 at 10:12PM

Google Questions and Answers: A Case Study

Posted by MiriamEllis

Ever since Google rolled out Questions and Answers in mid-2017, I’ve been trying to get a sense of its reception by consumers and brands. Initially restricted to Android Google Maps, this fascinating feature which enables local business owners and the public to answer consumer questions made it to desktop displays this past December, adding yet another data layer to knowledge panels and local finders.

As someone who has worked in Q&A forums for the majority of my digital marketing life, I took an immediate shine to the idea of Google Questions and Answers. Here’s a chance, I thought, for consumers and brands to take meaningful communication to a whole new level, exchanging requests, advice, and help so effortlessly. Here’s an opportunity for businesses to place answers to FAQs right upfront in the SERPs, while also capturing new data about consumer needs and desires. So cool!

But, so far, we seem to be getting off to a slow start. According to a recent, wide-scale GetFiveStars study, 25% of businesses now have questions waiting for them. I decided to hone in on San Francisco and look at 20 busy industries in that city to find out not just how many questions were being asked, but also how many answers were being given, and who was doing the answering. I broke down responders into three groups: Local Guides (LGs), random users (RUs), and owners (Os). I looked at the top 10 businesses ranking in the local finder for each industry:

Industry

Number of Questions

Number of Answers

LGs

RUs

Os

Dentists

1

0

0

0

0

Plumbers

2

0

-

-

-

Chiropractors

0

-

-

-

-

Mexican Restaurants

10

23

22

1

-

Italian Restaurants

15

20

19

1

-

Chinese Restaurants

16

53

49

4

-

Car Dealers

4

5

3

2

-

Supermarkets

7

27

24

3

-

Clothing Stores

4

1

1

-

-

Florists

1

0

-

-

-

Hotels

44

142

114

28

-

Real Estate Agencies

0

-

-

-

-

General Contractors

1

0

-

-

-

Cell Phone Stores

14

3

3

-

-

Yoga Studios

1

0

-

-

-

Banks

1

0

-

-

-

Carpet Cleaning

0

-

-

-

-

Hair Salons

1

0

-

-

-

Locksmiths

1

0

-

-

-

Jewelry Stores

0

-

-

-

-

Takeaways from the case study

Here are some patterns and oddities I noticed from looking at 123 questions and 274 answers:

There are more than twice as many answers as questions. While many questions received no answers, others received five, ten, or more.

The Owners column is completely blank. The local businesses I looked at in San Francisco are investing zero effort in answering Google Questions and Answers.

Local Guides are doing the majority of the answering. Of the 274 answers provided, 232 came from users who have been qualified as Local Guides by Google. Why so lopsided? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that Google sends alerts to this group of users when questions get asked, and that they can earn 3 points per answer they give. Acquiring enough points gets you perks like 3 free months of Google Play Music and a 75% discount off Google Play Movies.

Unfortunately, what I’m seeing in Google Questions and Answers is that incentivizing replies is leading to a knowledge base of questionable quality. How helpful is it when a consumer asks a hotel if they have in-room hair dryers and 10 local guides jump on the bandwagon with “yep”? Worse yet, I saw quite a few local guides replying “I don’t know,” “maybe,” and even “you should call the business and ask.” Here and there, I saw genuinely helpful answers from the Local Guides, but my overall impression didn’t leave me feeling like I’d stumbled upon a new Google resource of matchless expertise.

Some members of the public seem to be confused about the use of this feature. I noticed people using the answer portion to thank people who replied to their query, rather than simply using the thumbs up widget.

Additionally, I saw people leaving reviews/statements, instead of questions: And with a touch of exasperated irony: And to rant:

Some industries are clearly generating far more questions than others. Given how people love to talk about hotels and restaurants, I wasn’t surprised to see them topping the charts in sheer volume of questions and answers. What did surprise me was not seeing more questions being asked of businesses like yoga studios, florists, and hair salons; before I actually did the searches, I might have guessed that pleasant, “chatty” places like these would be receiving lots of queries.

Big brands everywhere are leaving Google Questions and Answers unanswered

I chose San Francisco for my case study because of its general reputation for being hip to new tech, but just in case my limited focus was presenting a false picture of how local businesses are managing this feature, I did some random searches for big brands around the state and around the country.

I found questions lacking owner answers for Whole Foods, Sephora, Taco Bell, Macy’s, Denny’s, Cracker Barrel, Target, and T-Mobile. As I looked around the nation, I noted that Walmart has cumulatively garnered thousands of questions with no brand responses.

But the hands-down winner for a single location lacking official answers is Google in Mountain View. 103 questions as of my lookup and nary an owner answer in sight. Alphabet might want to consider setting a more inspiring example with their own product… unless I’m misunderstanding their vision of how Google Questions and Answers is destined to be used.

Just what is the vision for Google Questions and Answers, I wonder?

As I said at the beginning of this post, it’s early days yet to predict ultimate outcomes. Yet, the current lay of the land for this feature has left me with more questions than answers:

Does Google actually intend questions to be answered by brands, or by the public? From what I’ve seen, owners are largely unaware of or choosing to ignore this feature many months post-launch. As of writing this, businesses are only alerted about incoming questions if they open the Google Maps app on an Android phone or tablet. There is no desktop GMB dashboard section for the feature. It’s not a recipe for wide adoption. Google has always been a fan of a crowdsourcing approach to their data, so they may not be concerned, but that doesn’t mean your business shouldn’t be.

What are the real-time expectations for this feature? I see many users asking questions that needed fast answers, like “are you open now?” while others might support lengthier response times, as in, “I’m planning a trip and want to know what I can walk to from your hotel.” For time-sensitive queries, how does Questions and Answers fit in with Google’s actual chat feature, Google Messaging, also rolled out last summer? Does Google envision different use cases for both features? I wonder if one of the two products will win out over time, while the other gets sunsetted.

What are the real, current risks to brands of non-management? I applauded Mike Blumenthal’s smart suggestion of companies proactively populating the feature with known FAQs and providing expert answers, and I can also see the obvious potential for reputation damage if rants or spam are ignored. That being said, my limited exploration of San Francisco has left me wondering just how many people (companies or consumers) are actually paying attention in most industries. Google Knowledge Panels and the Local Finder pop-ups are nearing an information bloat point. Do you want to book something, look at reviews, live chat, see menus, find deals, get driving directions, make a call? Websites are built with multiple pages to cover all of these possible actions. Sticking them all in a 1” box may not equal the best UX I’ve ever seen, if discovery of features is our goal.

What is the motivation for consumers to use the product? Personally, I’d be more inclined to just pick up the phone to ask any question to which I need a fast answer. I don’t have the confidence that if I queried Whole Foods in the AM as to whether they’ve gotten in organic avocados from California, there’d be a knowledge panel answer in time for my lunch. Further, some of the questions I’ve asked have received useless answers from the public, which seems like a waste of time for all parties. Maybe if the feature picks up momentum, this will change.

Will increasing rates of questions = increasing rates of business responses? According to the GetFiveStars study linked to above, total numbers of questions for the 1700 locations they investigated nearly doubled between November–December of 2017. From my microscopic view of San Francisco, it doesn’t appear to me that the doubling effect also happened for owner answers. Time will tell, but for now, what I’m looking for is question volume reaching such a boiling point that owners feel obligated to jump into management, as they have with reviews. We’re not there yet, but if this feature is a Google keeper, we could get there.

So what should you be doing about Google Questions and Answers?

I’m a fan of early adoption where it makes sense. Speculatively, having an active Questions and Answers presence could end up as a ranking signal. We’ve already seen it theorized that use of another Google asset, Google Posts, may impact local pack rankings. Unquestionably, leaving it up to the public to answer questions about your business with varying degrees of accuracy carries the risk of losing leads and muddying your online presence to the detriment of reputation. If a customer asks if your location has wheelchair access and an unmotivated third party says “I don’t know,” when, in fact, your business is fully ADA-compliant, your lack of an answer becomes negative customer service. Because of this, ignoring the feature isn’t really an option. And, while I wouldn’t prioritize management of Questions and Answers over traditional Google-based reviews at this point, I would suggest:

Do a branded search today and look at your knowledge panel to see if you’ve received any questions. If so, answer them in your best style, as helpfully as possible

Spend half an hour this week translating your company’s 5 most common FAQs into Google Questions and Answers queries and then answering them. Be sure you’re logged into your company’s Google account when you reply, so that your message will be officially stamped with the word “owner.” Whether you proactively post your FAQs while logged into your business’ account is up to you. I think it’s more transparent to do so.

If you’re finding this part of your Knowledge Panel isn’t getting any questions, checking it once a week is likely going to be enough for the present.

If you happen to be marketing a business that is seeing some good Questions and Answers activity, and you have the bandwidth, I’d add checking this to the daily social media rounds you make for the purpose of reputation management. I would predict that if Google determines this feature is a keeper, they’ll eventually start sending email alerts when new queries come in, as they’re now doing with reviews, which should make things easier and minimize the risk of losing a customer with an immediate need. Need to go pro on management right now due to question volume? GetFiveStars just launched an incredibly useful Google Q&A monitoring feature, included in some of their ORM software packages. Looks like a winner!

Do be on the lookout for spam inquiries and responses, and report them if they arise.

If you’re totally new to Google Questions and Answers, this simple infographic will get you going in a flash:

For further tips on using Google Questions and Answers like a pro, I recommend following GetFiveStars’ 3-part series on this topic.

My questions, your answers

My case study is small. Can you help expand our industry’s knowledge base by answering a few questions in the comments to add to the picture of the current rate of adoption/usefulness of Google’s Questions and Answers? Please, let me know:

Have you asked a question using this feature?

Did you receive an answer and was it helpful?

Who answered? The business, a random user, a Local Guide?

Have you come across any examples of business owners doing a good job answering questions?

What are your thoughts on Google Questions and Answers? Is it a winner? Worth your time? Any tips?

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January 28, 2018 at 10:30PM

An Introduction to Google Tag Manager

Posted by Angela_Petteys

Digital marketing thrives on data. No matter what type of site you have, whether it’s a large e-commerce site, a personal website, or a site for a small business, it’s essential to understand how people interact with your site. Google Analytics can provide a lot of the important insights you’re looking for, but when used alone, it does have its limitations. But by tagging your site and using Google Tag Manager in conjunction with Google Analytics, you’re able to collect much more data than you can otherwise.

Tags are snippets of code which are added to a site to collect information and send it to third parties. You can use tags for all sorts of purposes, including scroll tracking, monitoring form submissions, conducting surveys, generating heat maps, remarketing, or tracking how people arrive at your site. They’re also used to monitor specific events like file downloads, clicks on certain links, or items being removed from a shopping cart.

Sites commonly use several different tags and the amount of code needed to create them all can be pretty overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to add or edit tags by going directly into the site’s source code. Google Tag Manager is a tool with a user-friendly, web-based interface that simplifies the process of working with tags. With GTM, you’re able to add, edit, and disable tags without having to touch the source code.

While GTM is, obviously, a Google product, it’s hardly limited to just working with tags for other Google services like AdWords or Analytics. You can use it to manage many different third-party tags, including Twitter, Bing Ads, Crazy Egg, and Hotjar, just to name a few. If there’s another tag which doesn’t have a template in GTM, you can add your own custom code. There are only a few types of tags GTM doesn’t work well with.

The pros and cons of GTM

Lessens reliance on web devs

By far, the biggest benefit to Google Tag Manager is that it makes it easier for marketers to implement tags without having to rely on web developers to do it for them. Developers are usually busy with other high-priority projects, so tagging often ends up on the back burner. But since Google Tag Manager helps you avoid touching the source code, marketers can quickly add and make changes to tags on their own. This is a big advantage if, for example, you only need to use a tag to collect data for a very brief amount of time. Without GTM, there’s a good chance that it would take longer for the tag to be added than it would actually be live for.

Still requires some technical implementation

Although GTM helps reduce the reliance on developers, it doesn’t completely eliminate it. You’ll still need someone to add the container code to each page of your site. And while GTM has plenty of tag templates to choose from which are easy enough for a non-developer to work with, more complex customized tags will likely require the help of someone who really understands coding. If you have existing tags that were manually added to your site’s source code, those will need to be removed first so that you don’t end up with duplicate data.

Most businesses can benefit from using it

Businesses of any size can potentially benefit from GTM. Since GTM makes it so much easier to add and edit tags without a developer, it’s great for smaller businesses that might have limited access to technical support. And since sites for enterprise-level businesses can easily use dozens of tags, GTM makes it easier to manage them all and improves site speed by helping them load more efficiently.

Tags can slow down site speed if fired synchronously

One issue with traditional tracking tags is that if they fire synchronously, they can slow down site speeds. When tags fire synchronously, one tag being slow to load slows down all the other tags that are waiting on it. And the longer a site takes to load, the more likely it is that people will leave without converting. But tags created in GTM load asynchronously by default, meaning each tag can fire anytime it’s ready to. If you need to control the order in which your tags are fired, there is tag sequencing and firing priority functionality to let you do that.

Can be used for AMP sites and mobile apps, as well

You’re not even limited to just using GTM with standard websites. GTM can also be used to manage tags for AMP sites and mobile apps. In the case of mobile apps, GTM can be a huge help since it lets you add and edit your tags without having to issue an updated version of your app, which users might not be quick to actually download. In some respects, using GTM for AMP sites or mobile apps is pretty similar to using it for a regular website, but they do have their differences. In this guide, we’re going to focus on using GTM for web.

Components of tags & GTM

On the surface, tags and tag managers are pretty straightforward. But before you can start working with them, there are a few main concepts you’ll need to know about.

Containers

When you start working with GTM, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a container. A container essentially “holds” all the tags for your site.

After creating a new container, GTM gives you some code to add to your site. This is your container code and it will need to be added to the source code so it displays on each page of your site. Some CMSes, such as WordPress, have plugins to help add the container code for you, but you may need to contact your web developer to have it added. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to add, edit, disable, or remove your tags as needed through GTM.

Triggers

Each tag on a site needs to serve a specific purpose. Maybe you want to have a tag send information when someone downloads a file, when an outbound link is clicked, or when a form is submitted. These sorts of events are known as triggers and all tags need to have at least one trigger assigned to it; otherwise, it’s not going to do anything.

Triggers can be broken down into two main components: events and filters. When you go to configure a trigger in GTM, you’ll be given a long list of types of triggers to choose from. These are your events. Once you choose an event, you’ll be able to set up your filter.

Filters can be divided further down into three parts: variables, operators, and values. We’ll talk more about variables in just a minute, but in this case, it refers to the type of variable involved. The operator tells the tag whether an event needs to equal (or if it should be greater or less than a certain value, contain a certain value, etc.) And of course, the value is the condition which needs to be met. Even though the word “value” is typically used in reference to numbers and prices, remember that in this case, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a numerical value. In many cases, your value will be something like a URL or a keyword.

For example, let’s say I wanted to see how many people were reading the blog content on my site in depth. I could create a tag with a Scroll Depth event trigger that should fire when the vertical scroll depth reaches 75%. If I wanted this to fire on every page of my site, I could leave the “All Pages” option selected in the trigger configuration box and I wouldn’t have to create any further filters. But since I’m focusing on blog content, I’d choose “Some Pages” and create the filter “Page URL” “Contains” “fakewebsitename.com/blog.”

There might also be some circumstances when you don’t want a tag to fire. In this case, you can create a blocking trigger to prevent it from firing on those occasions. GTM prioritizes blocking triggers over other types of triggers, so if you have a blocking trigger that contradicts a condition set by another trigger, Google Tag Manager will follow what’s specified by the blocking trigger. For instance, if you have a tag that’s set to fire on all of your pages, but there are a few pages you’d like to have excluded from that, you can just use a blocking trigger to prevent it from firing on those few pages.

Variables & constants

While tags depend on triggers, triggers depend on variables. Variables contain the value a trigger needs to evaluate to know whether or not it should fire. The tag compares the value of the variable to the value defined in the trigger and if the variable meets the conditions of the trigger, the tag will fire.

Tags also use variables to collect information that can be passed onto the data layer as a user interacts with the site. A common example of this would be if a tag was set to fire when a person adds a certain amount of products to their shopping cart.

Variables can often be reused between tags. One of the most popular tips for using GTM is to create constant variables with the ID numbers or tracking codes you’ll need to use more than once. For example, if you’ll need to use your Google Analytics property ID number in multiple tags, you could just create a constant string variable with the value being your ID number. That way, instead of repeatedly having to look up and enter your ID number, you could just select the variable name.

When using GTM, you’ll be working with two different types of variables: built-in variables and user-defined variables. Built-in variables are some of the most commonly used types of variables, so Google went ahead and made them easy to access in GTM.

Once you select a built-in variable, you’ll be able to configure its settings however you’d like. Note that these are just a few of the built-in variables for regular web containers. You can find more built-in variables by clicking the “Configure” button. If you’re using GTM for AMP sites or mobile apps, you may see different options to choose from.

If you need another type of variable that’s not included as a built-in variable, you can create a user-defined variable. When you go to add a user-defined variable, you’ll be given a list of types of variables to choose from. For more information on each type of variables, Simo Ahava has a very helpful guide to different variable types.

Variables can be created from the GTM dashboard by clicking on the “Variable” option on the left side menu. You can also create them while you’re creating a tag by clicking on the button next to the field that looks like a Lego block with a plus sign on it.

Data layers

Tags need information to know whether or not they should fire, but how (or where) do they get that information? One way they could find it is by checking the page’s HTML structure, but that’s really not an ideal solution. When tags need to search through HTML to find what they’re looking for, it can take longer for them to fire. And if the site’s HTML structure changes over time, tags can break. Besides, there are certain types of information a tag might need which won’t be found in a page’s HTML, like a transaction total.

A data layer is a JavaScript object which keeps the information tags need separate from the rest of your site’s code. Since tags don’t have to spend time searching through the HTML to find the information they need, this is another way GTM can help improve site speed. Instead, everything they’re looking for can be found in one place and it’s readily available when the page loads.

Technically, data layers are optional. You don’t have to specifically define one yourself; GTM can initiate one for you. But if you want to use GTM to track specific events, you’ll need to have a data layer.

To start off with, a new data layer object will look like this:

When adding a data layer, the object needs to be placed before the GTM container code. If the data layer object is placed after the container code, GTM won’t be able to access the information in it and the data layer will basically reset after loading.

Once the data layer object has been added to a page’s code, the brackets in the second line can be populated with information, variables, and events. Some types of information can be written directly into the data layer, but other types of information can be pushed into the data layer dynamically as a user interacts with your site, such as if someone downloads a file or if they add a certain amount of products to their shopping cart.

Working with GTM

Creating accounts and containers

To get started, go to tagmanager.google.com and create an account. Under “Setup Account,” enter the name of the company whose site is being managed and hit “Continue.”

Next, you’ll set up your container. Enter your domain name as the container name, choose which type of page or app it will be used on, and click “Create.” If you choose iOS or Android, you’ll also have to specify whether you’re using Firebase SDK or a legacy SDK.

Note that I specifically said to use the company name as the account name and the site’s domain for the container name. In theory, you can name these anything you want. This is just how Google recommends naming them as a best practice. Generally speaking, one of the best things you can do when working with GTM is make sure everything is named very clearly. Otherwise, it’s very easy for mistakes to be made.

Multiple GTM accounts can be managed within a single GTM account, but Google advises creating one container per domain. You don’t have to create separate containers for each individual tag or for every individual page on a site; all tags can all be placed within one container.

For most companies and organizations, one container is all they’ll need. But in the case of a company that has subsidiaries or owns separate businesses, the website for each subsidiary/business should get its own container and all the containers can be managed from one main GTM account. If a site has a subdomain that is treated separately from the main domain, the subdomain should also be given its own container.

When a marketing agency is managing tags on behalf of a company, Google recommends that the company create their own GTM account, then add the agency’s Google account as a user. This way, the agency can access GTM, but it’s easy for the company to revoke access should they decide to change agencies.

After creating your container, accept the GTM terms of service and you’ll be given your container code.

Once the container code has been added, you’re able to start creating tags. But before you get started, it’s a good idea to take some time to figure out exactly which tags you want to add. Even though there aren’t any limits to the amount of tags you can put in a container, for best performance, Google advises keeping the amount of tags you use to a minimum. If you’re migrating your tags to GTM from another tag manager or are making the switch from tags coded in your source code, this is a good time to review the tags currently on your site. In many cases, sites have tags that are associated with services they’re no longer using or were used to track things that aren’t being monitored anymore, so this is a good opportunity to "clean house," so to speak.

Creating a tag

When you create or select a container, the first thing you’ll see is the GTM dashboard. We’ll eventually get around to talking about almost everything you see here, but let’s begin by creating a tag. Click “Add a New Tag” to open up a window where you’ll be able to name and configure your tag.

Before we go any further into the process of creating tags, remember to name your tags very clearly. Since sites often use several different tags, you won’t want there to be any confusion about which tag does what. Google’s recommended tag naming convention is: Tag Type - Detail - Location. For example, a Google Analytics tag that tracks form submissions on a Contact Us page would be named “GA - Form Submission - Contact Us.” Including the location of a tag in its name is a good idea because it helps distinguish it from similar tags on other pages. So if I had other GA form submission tags on my site, specifying that this one is on the Contact Us page would help me avoid editing the wrong one by mistake.

Putting the tag type at the beginning of a tag name also helps keep your tags organized. GTM lists tags alphabetically, so if you’re creating multiple tags for the same service or tool, all of those tags will all be grouped together and easy to find.

Now, back to creating a tag. When you click “Add a new tag” on the dashboard, this is the window you’ll see. Choose “Tag Configuration” and you’ll be given a long list of tag templates, which includes many of the most commonly used types of tags. If any of these are what you’re looking for, click on it and enter the information requested. If you don’t see the type of tag you want to create listed, choose “Custom HTML” to add your own code.

Since the exact information you’ll need to provide will vary depending on which type of tag you’re working with, I can’t possibly go into how to make every single type of tag. But as an example, let’s say I wanted to notify Google Analytics anytime someone views my pricing page. After choosing Universal Analytics, this is what I’d see:

All I would need to do is choose “Page View” from the “Track Type” dropdown menu, then enter the variable with my Google Analytics account information. If I hadn’t created that variable ahead of time, I could make one now by clicking the dropdown menu under “Google Analytics Settings” and choosing “New Variable.”

If I wanted to make changes to the tag firing sequence or create a firing schedule, I could do that by clicking on the “Advanced Settings” option. Click outside the tag configuration window to go back to the previous screen.

Next, you’ll need to create at least one trigger. Click the “Triggering” box underneath “Tag Configuration” to get started. If you don’t have a previously created trigger to choose from in the list that opens up, click the + sign in the upper right corner of the window. This will bring up a new window where you’ll be asked to name your new trigger. Do that and click on the “Tag Configuration” box so see a list of trigger types. In my case, I’d choose “Page View.”

Since I only want my tag to fire on one page, I’d choose “Some Page Views,” then create a filter specifying that the page URL needs to equal the URL of my pricing page. If I had another filter to add, I could click the plus (+) button next to the filter to set one up. If I had created multiple filters for this tag and later decided to get rid of one of them, all I’d have to do is hit the subtract (–) button next to the filter in question. When you’re done, click outside the window to exit.

Once your tag and trigger have been configured, save it and you can either keep working by creating more tags or you can preview your tag and make sure it’s working correctly before publishing it.

Previewing, debugging, and publishing tags

GTM’s “Preview & Debug” mode lets you test tags before publication so that you can make sure everything is working correctly and that you won’t have any errors throwing off your data.

To enter “Preview & Debug,” click the “Preview” button in the upper right corner of the GTM dashboard and you’ll see an orange banner notifying you that you are now in “Preview” mode. Next, open the site you’re tagging. If you already have your site open in another tab, refresh the page and you should see a “Debug” panel at the bottom of your screen. (Don’t worry, visitors to your site won’t be able to see it.)

The “Debug” panel shows all sorts of detailed information about your tags, triggers, and data layer. On the left side of the panel is an event timeline summary, which outlines all the events that occur in the data layer. At a minimum, you should be seeing at least three events listed here: Page View, DOM Ready, and Window Loaded. It’s OK to see more than three events, but if any of those three are missing, there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.

When you click on any of the events in your timeline, you’ll see all the tags which are set to fire when that event occurs. Click on any of the tags to see more detailed information about its triggers, properties, and if there are any blocking triggers associated with it.

As you work in “Preview & Debug” mode, you’re the only one who can see the information about your tags. But let’s say you’re working as part of a team on a tagging project and you find an issue you want to bring to another person’s attention. There is a way to do that. Switch back over to your GTM dashboard and look at the orange banner. On the right, there’s a “Share Preview” button. Click on it and you’ll bring up a box where you can enter the URL of the page in question. This will generate a preview link you can use to send to another person.

If you’re having a hard time getting “Preview & Debug” to work correctly, Analytics Mania has a great guide to solving some of the most common reasons why this happens.

Even after a tag has been published, Google still makes it easy to go back and check to make sure there aren’t any problems. Google Tag Assistant is a free Chrome extension and once it’s installed, you can visit any page on your site and it will tell you if your tags are firing correctly or if there are any improvements that could be made. GTA uses a three color system to indicate its findings: green, blue, and red. Green means all of your tags are working, blue means GTA has suggestions for how a tag could be improved, and red means it’s not working.

Once it appears that all of your tags are firing correctly, you can go ahead and publish them. From the GTM dashboard, hit the “Submit” button in the upper right corner and you’ll be asked to review your changes. If everything looks OK, enter a name and description for your new container version and publish it.

When you publish changes in GTM, it creates a new version of your container. If there’s ever a problem and you have to revert to an earlier version of your container, all you have to do is click the “Versions” button at the top of the GTM dashboard, choose the version you’d like to revert to from the list, click “Action,” then “Publish.”

If you’re migrating your tags from another tag manager or from hard-coded tags on your site, Google advises setting up all of your tags in GTM, then removing your old tags all at once and publishing the GTM container with your new tags as quickly as possible. You might have a very small gap in your data collection, but there shouldn’t be any more issues after your new tags are live.

Workspaces, workspace changes, and activity history

If you have multiple people working on a tagging project at the same time, workspaces can help make life a little easier. Even if you’re not collaborating with others, sometimes having the option to create separate workspaces can still be very helpful.

In older versions of GTM, all edits had to be made in a common container draft. If one person or team finished adding tags before another person/team, they couldn’t publish their new tags without also publishing the other team’s tags-in-progress. But with workspaces, multiple users can work on tagging at the same time without interfering with each other’s work.

Each workspace uses the current published container version as a basis, but tags in each workspace can be edited, previewed, debugged, and even published independently from the tags in other workspaces. If you’re working with the free version of GTM, you can have up to three different workspaces, one default workspace and two others, but if you use Google Tag Manager 360, you can create an unlimited amount of workspaces.

When one workspace is published, it creates a new version of the container. If there are any other workspaces with unpublished changes saved in them, the user(s) working in those spaces will see a notice saying that they need to update the workspace. Updating the workspace syncs the changes in the container to their workspace. While it’s not required to do so to continue working, it’s generally best to stay on top of updates so that you’re not working with an outdated version of the container.

After syncing changes in a workspace, you’ll be notified if there are any conflicts which need to be resolved. If any conflicts exist, you’ll be asked to review them and either ignore the conflict or copy the change. When you copy the change, the field in question in your workspace will be overwritten with the information from the latest container version.

If necessary, you can set user permissions on workspaces to prevent users from making unwanted changes. For example, if you had a developer working on some really complicated custom tags, the developer might want to create a separate workspace to work in and limit the user permissions so that only they can make changes to it. This way, marketers will be able to go in and make changes without accidentally making changes to the custom tags.

Another great thing about GTM, particularly if you have more than one person working on tagging, is that it lets you see which changes were made, when they were made, and who made them. On the dashboard, you’ll see a Workspace Changes section, which outlines some of the most recent changes that have been made to tags and triggers. If mistakes any mistakes have been made, you can use the “Abandon Change” option to delete those changes. Beneath Workspace Changes, there’s Activity History, which shows all activity on a GTM account.

Additional resources

Google Tag Manager has a lot to offer, but learning how to use it in depth can be pretty overwhelming. This guide helped introduce you to the tool, but there’s still a lot more to learn if you want to use GTM to its full potential. LunaMetrics and Simo Ahava have written about GTM very extensively, so they’re excellent places to start if you have any questions or want to learn more. Of course, Google also has a lot of helpful information. Even if you’re not a developer, Google’s Tag Manager Guide for Developers is worth taking a look at since it does a great job of explaining some of the concepts related to GTM and has a lot of good information about how to use it. With all these resources, you should have all the information you need to get the most out of GTM.

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January 29, 2018 at 10:15PM

How to Earn More Links and Social Shares: Insights From 759 Content Marketing Campaigns

Posted by kerryjones

Is there a formula for wildly successful content marketing campaigns? It’s a question we ponder a lot at the Fractl office.

We do have our own tried-and-true formula that we continually tweak based on our observations of what does and doesn’t succeed. To help us spot trends that shape this formula, we collect data about every content marketing campaign we create for our clients. But we don’t keep this data to ourselves – sharing our internal data with the marketing community helps others create better content based on what’s worked for us.

We did this a few years ago using a set of 345 campaigns, and now that we have double the number of our campaigns under our belt, we dug into our data again. This time, the sample size was 759 campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2017.

As part of our analysis, we looked at the relationship between campaign performance, measured by the number of placements and social shares a campaign earned, and the campaign’s attributes, including emotionality, the target audience size, and timeliness. "Placement" or “pickup” refers to any time a campaign received media coverage. In link building lingo, a placement may refer to a link that is dofollow, cocitation or nofollow; we also count client mentions without links as placements.

Campaign performance was grouped into three buckets:

High success: more than 100 placements and/or 20,000 social shares

Moderate success: Between 20–100 placements and/or between 1,000 and 20,000 social shares

Low success: Fewer than 20 placements and/or fewer than 1,000 social shares

What sets apart our top performing campaigns

Our campaigns that were either emotionally resonant or surprising were significantly more likely to yield a high volume of media placements and social shares than content that does not include these elements.

The chart below shows the prevalence of three factors across the different campaign performance groups.

As you can see, emotions and an element of surprise were far more common in campaigns that performed extremely well.

Seventy percent of high success campaigns had an emotional hook compared to 45% of moderate success and 25% of low success campaigns.

Seventy-six percent of high success campaigns were surprising compared to 54% of moderate success and 47% of low success campaigns.

There wasn’t as great of a difference when it came to whether or not campaigns were broadly appealing. We believe on its own this isn’t enough to hit a home run, but it’s telling that this trait was nearly ubiquitous among the top performers:

Almost all of our high success campaigns (96%) had broad appeal, compared to 81% of moderate success and 86% of low success campaigns.

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these three factors correlated to campaign performance.

An emotional hook

Campaigns with an emotional hook earned 70% more media pickups and 127% more social shares on average than campaigns that lacked emotional resonance.

Creating an emotional response in viewers is crucial for driving sharing and engagement. This is clearly demonstrated by our campaign data, with emotional resonance being a key factor in our top campaigns and emotional campaigns performing far better on average than non-emotional campaigns.

In our research on viral emotions, we found certain emotional reactions are best for getting content to spread:

Keep it positive. Creating a purely positive emotional reaction works best for garnering attention and igniting shares. Why is this? People want to share things that make others feel good.

Put the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. Complex emotional responses are also extremely effective for striking the right emotional chord. Consider pairing contrasting emotions, such as hope and despair or admiration and sadness, to pack the greatest emotional punch.

Pair negative emotions with surprise. Avoid rousing strictly negative feelings. Surprise is crucial if you’re hitting the audience with a negative emotion, such as fear or anger.

An element of surprise

Surprising campaigns earned 39% more media pickups and 108% more social shares than campaigns that weren’t surprising.

Surprise doesn’t necessarily mean shocking. Novelty, or newness, can also elicit feelings of surprise; incorporating information that isn’t widely known or new data are effective ways to play into this because it triggers a feeling of “I didn’t already know this,” which draws interest and encourages sharing the new information with others.

Furthermore, surprise or novelty can greatly improve your outreach efforts. Since newness is a pillar of newsworthiness, publishers are eager to get their hands on exclusive stories. This is why offering the media something never published before is essential for effective PR outreach.

Broad appeal

As I mentioned previously, broad appeal on its own isn’t going to have a huge impact on campaign success. However, universal appeal still plays a role in getting a campaign in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Campaigns that appealed to a wide audience earned 38% more media pickups and 96% more social shares on average than campaigns created for a niche demographic.

Creating broadly appealing versus niche-focused content is a choice of fishing in a big pond or a little pond. You’ll have a larger volume of outreach targets and greater potential audience reach with a broadly appealing campaign. On the other hand, niche campaigns have limited reach because they’re much harder to get picked up by widely-read general news sites that want stories with mass appeal. Instead, you can only pitch the handful of publishers that cover the niche topic.

For this reason, we often create tangential content, or content about a popular topic related to a client’s vertical, for many of our clients whose goals include a high volume of links and media mentions. This being said, it’s possible to get a ton of media attention and engagement with niche-focused campaigns, which I explore later in this post.

When a combination of emotions, surprise, and broad appeal was present in a campaign, it supercharged the results.

So we know emotions and surprise work well on their own. However, when these factors were paired together with a broadly appealing topic, we saw even greater success.

Campaigns that were both emotional and surprising earned 199 pickups and 23,730 social shares on average. Incorporating all three made the biggest impact on the average results; campaigns that were emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing earned 207 pickups and 25,017 social shares on average.

We know audiences are drawn to emotionally resonant, universally appealing, and surprising content, but these traits play a big role in campaign success before the public even sees the content – they’re crucial for getting your outreach pitch read and acted upon.

Content with these three traits has strong headline potential, which publishers immediately pick up on when they read a pitch. In other words, it’s going to be easy for publishers to write an irresistible headline if they publish your campaign. Without a great headline, it’s much harder to draw clicks and views to a story, which are required initial steps for getting others to link to and share the content.

Can’t picture how a single headline can be emotional, surprising, and have mass appeal? Here are examples of headlines from our campaigns that hit all of these factors:

Drinking from a refillable water bottle could be worse than licking a dog toy

More American high school students smoke pot than binge drink, report says

Here’s which states post the nastiest tweets [From this campaign]

Online fast food calculator reveals how long you need to run or swim to be guilt-free (and it's more than you think)

The surprising reason why most men cheat

If you were browsing your social feeds and came across any of those headlines, they’d be hard to resist clicking, right? Here’s a look at the campaign behind that last headline.

Campaign example: The surprising reason why most men cheat

Client vertical: Online pharmacy

The campaign

We went straight to the source to conduct a survey of people who have cheated on a significant other. This was clearly an emotionally charged subject that would intrigue a large segment of the population. Furthermore, the campaign offered a fresh take on a topic commonly discussed to the point of oversaturation by big publishers that cover relationships. By coming at it from from the angle of “from the mouth of a cheater,” which isn’t often covered and definitely not in a data-centered way, the campaign had a strong surprise and novelty factor that went over well with both publishers and audiences.

The results? 175 placements, including features on Fox News, The New York Post, Cosmopolitan, and Men’s Health, and nearly 40,000 social shares.

Pro Tip: When you pitch an idea to a publisher, they picture potential headlines. It shouldn’t be overly complicated to communicate that your idea is emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing. Try the headline test: Consider how all three factors would fit into a headline by writing a few mock headlines that concisely capture the selling points of the campaign. Does it make for the perfect eye-catching headline?

How you can still score big without emotions and surprise

Of course, there are exceptions to the rules. Here’s how you can still earn a lot of media pickups and social shares with content that’s neither emotional nor surprising.

Exception #1: Target one or more niche groups

Our high performing campaigns that appealed to a certain demographic or fan base were less likely to be emotionally resonant or surprising than those that appealed to a wide audience.

Successful niche campaigns were mostly educational and informative rather than purely entertaining, and many of these campaigns were data heavy. It’s no surprise that passionate niche groups are eager to learn more about the topics they care about.

Campaign example: The rise of the freelance worker

Client vertical: HR and payroll services

The campaign

We analyzed 400,000 freelancer resumes to uncover new insights about the freelancing economy. While this topic isn’t universally appealing, it did have overlapping appeal within several niche audiences, such as HR and recruitment, freelance employees, and the general business community, which led to 269 placements including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fox News, plus more than 20,000 social shares.

Pro Tip: If your campaign topic appeals to several niche groups, you can increase your chances for media coverage on a variety of niche publishers, thus expanding your potential reach.

Exception #2: Incorporate "geo-bait"

Based on our data, we found that campaigns that were absent of an emotional hook or element of surprise but did have a strong geographic angle still performed quite well.

Since our identities are closely tied to where we come from and where we live, campaigns based on geographical areas (countries, cities, states, regions) play into the audiences’ egos. In Fractl terms, we call this “geo-bait.”

Campaign example: Which states use the most solar power?

Client vertical: Home improvement

The campaign

Using data from the US Department of Energy, we looked at which states were producing the most solar energy and installing the most solar panels. There wasn’t much surprising data here, as environmentally progressive states topped the rankings (hello, California), but incorporating fresh data and featuring a ranking of solar-friendly states helped this campaign earn more than 200 placements. In addition to the geo-bait angle, this topic had strong appeal to the environmental niche, which helped it get picked up by green publishers.

Pro Tip: Geo-bait campaigns are especially appealing when they compare or rank multiple places.

Other key factors that affect campaign performance

Adding three magical elements into your content won’t automatically lead to success. A handful of other variables can make or break your campaign, some of which will be out of your control. So which variables in your control can increase your chances for success?

Exceptional outreach

Even the best content will fail to get any coverage if your outreach game is weak. This means absolutely no mass pitching your campaign to a long list of publishers. Not only do you need to choose the right targets for outreach (a.k.a. publishers that actually publish stories about your campaign topic), you need to choose the right person at that publication (a.k.a. the person who regularly writes about the topic). That way, you're not alienating writers with irrelevant pitches. You also need to send compelling, personalized outreach pitches to each target (don’t worry, we have a checklist for that). By sending solid pitches, they're more likely to open your emails in the future.

Credibility

You’ll quickly lose trust with publishers (and audiences) if your campaign includes questionable data and inaccuracies. Make credibility a top priority for your work and you’ll have an easier time becoming a trustworthy content creator and maintaining your trustworthiness in the long term.

First, you need to only use authoritative sources and data in your campaign.

What’s a good source?

Government websites and databases

Higher education sites

Peer-reviewed journals

Notable publishers with stringent editorial standards

What’s not a good source?

Websites lacking editorial oversight (in other words, contributors can automatically publish content without an editor’s review)

Branded websites

User-generated content

Studies backed by corporate

Second, your campaign won’t be trusted if it’s riddled with errors. Our editorial team ensures campaigns don’t get released into the wild with glaring grammatical and factual mistakes. Include editorial guidelines and a quality assurance check within your production process to keep campaigns error-free.

One final word of advice: evaluate whether a campaign concept will be emotionally resonant, surprising, and broadly appealing before you move it into production. Our ideation guide sheds light on how we do this by scoring our ideas based on a 5-point grading rubric.

What trends have you noticed about your most successful content marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear how your observations confirm or differ from what I’ve shared.

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January 31, 2018 at 10:17PM

What Does It Mean to "Write for SEO" in 2018? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes" — it's a quote that's actually quite applicable when it comes to writing for SEO. Much of the advice given to copywriters, journalists, editors, and other content creators for SEO writing is dangerously out of date, leaning on practices that were once tried and true but that could now get your site penalized.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we hope you enjoy a brief history lesson on what should be avoided, what used to work and no longer does, and a brief 5-step process you should start using today for writing content that'll get you to the front of the SERPs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about writing for SEO and what that means in 2018.

So writing for SEO has had a long history, and it meant something many years ago that it does not mean today. Unfortunately, I see a lot of bad advice, terrible advice out there for journalists and editors and authors of all kinds about what you need to do in terms of writing for SEO, meaning writing to get you to the top of search engines.

"Writing for SEO" in 2001

Now, let's be clear, some of this stuff is mired in pure mythology. But some of it is mired in historical fact that just hasn't been updated. So let's talk about what writing for SEO used to be back in 2001, how it evolved in sort of the middle era of 2008, let's say, and then what it means today in 2018.

So, back in the day, writing for SEO did mean things like...

I. Keyword stuffing

If you wanted to rank highly in early search engines, especially the late '90s into the early 2000s, keyword stuffing was a real tactic that really did have effectiveness. So SEOs would cram keywords into all sorts of tags and locations.

II. They would use and reuse a bunch of different variants, slight keyword variants

So if I'm targeting the word blue watches, I would have blue watch, blue watches, blue watch accessory, blue watch accessories, blue watches accessory, blue watches accessories, ridiculous little variants on plurals because the search engines were not great at figuring out that all these things sort of had the same intent and meant the same thing. So raw, rough keyword matching, exact keyword matching was part of SEO.

III. Keyword use in every tag possible

If there was a tag, you'd cram keywords into it.

IV. Domain name and subdomain keyword use

So this is why you saw that brands would be outranked by, to use our example, blue-watch-accessories.bluewatchaccessories.info, that kind of silly stuff would be ranking. Some of it even maintained for a while.

V. SEO writing was writing for engines and then trying not to annoy or piss off users

So, a lot of the time, people would want to cloak. They'd want to show one set of content to the search engines and another set to searchers, to actual users, because they knew that if they showed this dense, keyword-stuffed content to users, they'd be turned off and they wouldn't find it credible and they'd go somewhere else.

"Writing for SEO" in 2008

2008, we evolve on a bunch of these fronts, but not all of them and certainly not perfectly.

I. Keywords are still important in important locations

II. Exact matching still matters in a lot of places. So people were crafting unique pages even for keywords that shared the same intent.

Blue watches and blue timepieces might have two different pages. Blue watch and blue watches could even have two separate pages and do effectively well in 2008. 2018, that's not the case anymore.

III. Domain names were definitely less powerful, subdomains more so, but still influential

They still had some play in the engines. You still saw a lot of debates back in '08 about whether to create a keyword-rich domain.

IV. Since links in 2008 were overwhelmingly powerful rather than on-page signals, writing in order to get links is incredibly prized

In fact, it still is, but we'll talk about the evolution of that a little bit.

"Writing for SEO" in 2018

So now let's jump another decade forward. We're in 2018. This year, what does writing for SEO mean? Well, a bunch of things.

I. Solving the searcher's query matter most -- writing that doesn't do this tends not to rank well (for long)

Because engines have gotten so much better, Google in particular, but Bing as well, have gotten so much better at essentially optimizing for solving the searcher's task, helping them accomplish the thing that they wanted to accomplish, the writing that does the best job of solving the searcher's task tends to be the most highly prized. Stuff that doesn't, writing that doesn't do that, doesn't tend to rank well, doesn't tend to rank for long. You can sometimes get to the top of the search results, but you will almost certainly invariably be taken out by someone who does a great job of solving the searcher's query.

II. Intent matching matters a lot more in 2018 than exact keyword matching.

Today, no credible SEO would tell you to create a page for blue watch and blue watches or blue watch accessories and blue watch accessory or even blue timepieces and blue watches, maybe if you're targeting clocks too. In this case, it's really about figuring out what is the searcher's intent. If many keywords share the same intent, you know what? We're going to go ahead and create a single page that serves that intent and all of the keywords or at least many of the keywords that that intent is represented by.

III. Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly.

So SEO writing today, there are really only two that are not very fungible. Those are the title element and the body content. That's not to say that you can't rank without using the keyword in these two places, just that it would be inadvisable to do so. This is both because of search engines and also because of searchers. When you see the keyword that you search for in the title element of the page in the search results, you are more inclined to click on it than if you don't see it. So it's possible that some click-baity headline could outrank a keyword-rich headline. But the best SEO writers are mixing both of those. We have a Whiteboard Friday about headline writing on just that topic.

A few other ones, however, a few other tags are nice to have in 2018 still. Those include:

Headline tags (the H1, the H2),

URL field, so if you can make your URL include the words and phrases that people are searching for, that is mildly helpful. It's both helpful for searchers who see the URL and would think, "Oh, okay, that is referring to the thing that I want," as well as for people who copy and paste the URL and share it with each other, or people who link with the URL and, thus, the anchor text is carried across by that URL and those keywords in there.

The meta description, not used for rankings, but it is read by searchers. When they see a meta description that includes the words and phrases that they've queried, they are more likely to think this will be a relevant result and more likely to click it. More clicks, as long as the engagement is high, tends to mean better rankings.

The image alt attribute, which is helpful both for regular search results, but particularly helpful for Google Images, which, as you may know from watching Whiteboard Friday, Google Images gets a tremendous amount of search traffic even on its own.

IV. Employing words, phrases, and concepts that Google's identified as sort of commonly associated with the query

This can provide a significant boost. We've seen some really interesting experimentation on this front, where folks will essentially take a piece of content, add in missing words and phrases that other pages that are highly ranking in Google have associated with those correct words and phrases.

In our example, I frequently use "New York neighborhoods," and a page that's missing words like Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, Staten Island, that's weird, right? Google is going to be much more likely to rank the page that includes these borough names than one that doesn't for that particular query, because they've learned to associate that text with relevance for the query "New York neighborhoods."

What I do want to make clear here is this does not mean LSI or some other particular tactic. LSI is an old-school, I think late '80s, early '90s computer tactic, software tactic for identifying words that are semantically connected to each other. There's no reason you have to use this old-school junk methodology that became like pseudoscience in the SEO world and had a recent revival. But you should be using words and phrases that Google has related to a particular keyword. Related topics is a great thing to do. You can find some via the Moz Bar. We did a Whiteboard Friday on related topics, so you can check that out.

V. The user experience of the writing and content matters more than ever, and that is due to engagement metrics

Essentially, Google is able to see that people who click on a particular result are less likely to click the back button and choose a different result or more likely to stay on that page or site and engage further with that content and solve their whole task. That is a good sign to Google, and they want to rank more of those.

A brief "SEO writing" process for 2018

So, pragmatically, what does this history and evolution mean? Well, I think we can craft a brief sort of SEO writing process for 2018 from this. This is what I recommend. If you can do nothing else, do these five steps when you are writing for SEO, and you will tend to have more success than most of your competition.

Step 1: Assemble all the keywords that a page is targeting

So there should be a list of them. They should all share the same intent. You get all those keywords listed out.

Step 2: You list what the searchers are actually trying to accomplish when they search those queries

So someone searched for blue watches. What do they want? Information about them, they want to see different models, they want to know who makes them, they want to buy them, they want to see what the costs are like, they want to see where they can get them online, probably all of those things. Those are the intents behind those queries.

Step 3: Create a visual layout

Here's going to be our headline. Here's our subheadline. We're going to put this important key concept up at the top in a callout box. We're going to have this crucial visual next up. This is how we're going to address all of those searcher intents on the page visually with content, written or otherwise.

Step 4: Write first and then go add the keywords and the crucial, related terms, phrases, top concepts, topics that you want into the page

The ones that will hopefully help boost your SEO, rather than writing first with the keywords and topics in mind. You can have a little bit of that, but this would be what I suggest.

Step 5: Craft the hook, the hook that will make influential people and publications in this space likely to amplify, likely to link

Because, in 2018, links still do matter, still are an important part of SEO.

If you follow this and learn from this history, I think you'll do a much better job, generally speaking, of writing for SEO than a lot of the common wisdom out there. All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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February 01, 2018 at 10:17PM

How to Face 3 Fundamental Challenges Standing Between SEOs and Clients/Bosses

Posted by sergeystefoglo

Every other year, the good people at Moz conduct a survey with one goal in mind: understand what we (SEOs) want to read more of. If you haven’t seen the results from 2017, you can view them here.

The results contain many great questions, challenges, and roadblocks that SEOs face today. As I was reading the 2017 Moz Blog readership survey, a common thread stood out to me: there are disconnects on fundamental topics between SEOs and clients and/or bosses. Since I work at an agency, I’ll use “client” through the rest of this article; if you work in-house, replace that with “boss.”

Check out this list:

I can definitely relate to these challenges. I’ve been at Distilled for a few years now, and worked in other firms before — these challenges are real, and they’re tough. Through sharing my experience dealing with these challenges, I hope to help other consultants and SEOs to overcome them.

In particular, I want to discuss three points of disconnect that happen between SEOs and clients.

My client doesn’t understand the value of SEO and it’s difficult to prove ROI.

My client doesn’t understand how SEO works and I always have to justify my actions.

My client and I disagree about whether link building is the right answer.

Keep in mind, these are purely my own experiences. This doesn’t mean these answers are the end-all-be-all. In fact, I would enjoy starting a conversation around these challenges with any of you so please grab me at SearchLove (plug: our San Diego conference is selling out quickly and is my favorite) or MozCon to bounce off more ideas!

1. My client doesn’t understand the value of SEO and it’s difficult to prove ROI

The value of SEO is its influence on organic search, which is extremely valuable. In fact, SEO is more prominent in 2018 than it has ever been. To illustrate this, I borrowed some figures from Rand’s write up on the state of organic search at the end of 2017.

Year over year, the period of January–October 2017 has 13% more search volume than the same months in 2016.

That 13% represents 54 billion more queries, which is just about the total number of searches Google did, worldwide, in 2003.

Organic search brings in the most qualified visitors (at a more consistent rate) than any other digital marketing channel. In other words, more people are searching for things than ever before, which results in more potential to grow organic traffic. How do we grow organic traffic? By making sure our sites are discoverable by Google and clearly answer user queries with good content.

Source: Search Engine Land

When I first started out in SEO, I used to think I was making all my clients all the moneys. “Yes, Bill, if you hire me and we do this SEO thing I will increase rankings and sessions, and you will make an extra x dollars!” I used to send estimates on ROI with every single project I pitched (even if it wasn’t asked of me).

After a few years in the industry I began questioning the value of providing estimates on ROI. Specifically, I was having trouble determining ift I was doing the right thing by providing a number that was at best an educated guess. It would stress me out and I would feel like I was tied to that number. It also turns out, not worrying about things that are out of our control helps control stress levels.

I’m at a point now where I’ve realized the purpose of providing an estimated ROI. Our job as consultants is to effect change. We need to get people to take action. If what it takes to get sign-off is to predict an uplift, that’s totally fine. In fact, it’s expected. Here’s how that conversation might look.

In terms of a formula for forecasting uplifts in SEO, Mike King said it best:

“Forecast modeling is questionable at best. It doesn’t get much better than this:”

Traffic = Search Volume x CTR

Number of Conversions = Conversion Rate x Traffic

Dollar Value = Traffic x # Conversions x Avg Conversion Value

TL;DR:

Don’t overthink this too much — if you do, you’ll get stuck in the weeds.

When requested, provide the prediction to get sign-off and quickly move on to action.

For more in-depth thoughts on this, read Will Critchlow’s recent post on forecast modeling.

Remember to think about seasonality, overall trends, and the fact that few brands exist in a vacuum. What are your competitors doing and how will that affect you?

2. My client doesn’t understand how SEO works and I always have to justify my actions

Does your client actually not understand how SEO works? Or, could it be that you don’t understand what they need from you? Perhaps you haven’t considered what they are struggling with at the moment?

I’ve been there — constantly needing to justify why you’re working on a project or why SEO should be a focus. It isn’t easy to be in this position. But, more often than not I’ve realized what helps the most is to take a step back and ask some fundamental questions.

A great place to start would be asking:

What are the things my client is concerned about?

What is my client being graded on by their boss?

Is my client under pressure for some reason?

The answers to these questions should shine some clarity on the situation (the why or the motivation behind the constant questioning). Some of the reasons why could be:

You might know more about SEO than your client, but they know more about their company. This means they may see the bigger picture between investments, returns, activities, and the interplay between them all.

SEO might be 20% of what your client needs to think about — imagine a VP of marketing who needs to account for 5–10 different channels.

If you didn’t get sign off/budget for a project, it doesn’t mean your request was without merit. This just means someone else made a better pitch more aligned to their larger goals.

When you have some answers, ask yourself, “How can I make what I’m doing align to what they’re focused on?” This will ensure you are hitting the nail on the head and providing useful insight instead of more confusion.

That conversation might look like this:

TL;DR

This is a good problem to have — it means you have a chance to effect change.

Also, it means that your client is interested in your work!

It’s important to clarify the why before getting to in the weeds. Rarely will the why be “to learn SEO.”

3. My client and I disagree about whether link building is the right answer

The topic of whether links (and by extension, link building) are important is perhaps the most talked about topic in SEO. To put it simply, there are many different opinions and not one “go-to” answer. In 2017 alone there have been many conflicting posts/talks on the state of links.

My colleague Tom Capper presented this deck at SearchLove San Diego last year which goes into detail about whether or not Google needs links anymore (accompanying blog post here).

Malcolm Slade from Epiphany presented this deck at BrightonSEO last year which dives into brand influence on search, and what that means for the topic of links.

Branded3 released an overview of ranking factors for 2018. The biggest factor? Links.

/r/BigSEO searches from the past month show that people have many questions still.

The quick answer to the challenge we face as SEOs when it comes to links is, unless authority is holding you back do something else.

That answer is a bit brief and if your client is constantly bringing up links, it doesn’t help. In this case, I think there are a few points to consider.

If you’re a small business, getting links is a legitimate challenge and can significantly impact your rankings. The problem is that it’s difficult to get links for a small business. Luckily, we have some experts in our field giving out ideas for this. Check out this, this, and this.

If you’re an established brand (with authority), links should not be a priority. Often, links will get prioritized because they are easier to attain, measurable (kind of), and comfortable. Don’t fall into this trap! Go with the recommendation above: do other impactful work that you have control over first.

Reasoning: Links tie success to a metric we have no control over — this gives us an excuse to not be accountable for success, which is bad.

Reasoning: Links reduce an extremely complicated situation into a single variable — this gives us an excuse not to try and understand everything (which is also bad).

It’s good to think about the topic of links and how it’s related to brand. Big brands get talked about (and linked to) more than small brands. Perhaps the focus should be “build your brand” instead of “gain some links”.

If your client persists on the topic of links, it might be easier to paint a realistic picture for them. This conversation might look like this:

TL;DR

There are many opinions on the state of links in 2018: don’t get distracted by all the noise.

If you’re a small business, there are some great tactics for building links that don’t take a ton of time and are probably worth it.

If you’re an established brand with more authority, do other impactful work that’s in your control first.

If you are constantly getting asked about links from your client, paint a realistic picture.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, I’m really interested in hearing how you deal with these issues within your company. Are there specific challenges you face within the topics of ROI, educating on SEO, getting sign-off, or link building? How can we start tackling these problems more as an industry?

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February 05, 2018 at 10:22PM

A Look Back at a Great 2017: 5 Major Moz Product Investments and a Sneak Peek Into 2018

Posted by adamf

It’s hard to believe that 2017 is already past. We entered the year with big ambitions and we've made some great strides. As has become tradition, I’ve compiled a rundown of some of the most interesting updates that you may have seen (or missed) this past year. We’ve intentionally focused on significant product updates, but I’ve also shared a little about some newer programs that provide value for customers in different ways.

TL;DR, here are some of the larger and more interesting additions to Moz in 2017:

Keywords by Site: Keyword Explorer adds site-based keyword research and competitive intelligence

Site Crawl V2: Overhauled Site Crawl for better auditing and workflow

Major investments in infrastructure: Better performance and resilience across the Moz toolset

New instructor-led training programs: Targeted classes to level-up your SEO knowledge

Customer Success: Custom walkthroughs to help you get the most out of Moz

Bonus! MozPod: Moz’s new free podcast keeps you up to date on the latest industry topics and trends

Big updates

This year and last, we've been spending a disproportionate focus on releasing large infrastructural improvements, new datasets, and foundational product updates. We feel these are crucial elements that serve the core needs of SEOs and will fuel frequent improvements and iterations for years to come.

To kick things off, I wanted to share some details about two big updates from 2017.

1) Keywords by Site: Leveling up keyword research and intelligence

Rank tracking provides useful benchmarks and insights for specific, targeted keywords, but you can’t track all of the keywords that are relevant to you. Sometimes you need a broader look at how visible your sites (and your competitors’ sites) are in Google results.

We built Keywords by Site to provide this powerful view into your Google presence. This brand-new dataset in Moz significantly extends Keyword Explorer and improves the quality of results in many other areas throughout Moz Pro. Our US corpus currently includes 40 million Google SERPs updated every two weeks, and allows you to do the following:

See how visible your site is in Google results

This view not only shows how authoritative a site is from a linking perspective, but also shows how prominent a site is in Google search results.

Compare your ranking prominence to your competitors

Compare up to three sites to get a feel for their relative scale of visibility and keyword ranking overlap. Click on any section in the Venn diagram to view the keywords that fall into that section.

Dig deep: Sort, filter, and find opportunities, then stash them in keyword lists

For example, let’s say you're looking to determine which pages or content on your site might only require a little nudge to garner meaningful search visibility and traffic. Run a report for your site in Keyword Explorer and then use the filters to quickly hone in on these opportunities:

Our focus on data quality

We’ve made a few decisions to help ensure the freshness and accuracy of our keyword corpus. These extend the cost and work to maintain this dataset, but we feel they make a discernible difference in quality.

We recollect all of our keyword data every 2 weeks. This means that the results you see are more recent and more similar to the results on the day that you're researching.

We cycle up to 15 million of our keywords out on a monthly basis. This means that as new keywords or terms trend up in popularity, we add them to our corpus, replacing terms that are no longer getting much search volume.

A few improvements we’ve made since launch:

Keyword recommendations in your campaigns (tracked sites) are much improved and now backed by our keyword corpus.

These keyword suggestions are also included in your weekly insights, suggesting new keywords worth tracking and pages worth optimizing.

Coming very soon: We’re also on the cusp of launching keyword corpuses for the UK, Canada, and Australia. Stay tuned.

A few resources to help you get more from Keywords by Site:

Rand’s Whiteboard Friday offers tips to help you improve keyword research and targeting

Dr. Pete shares how to do a keyword driven content audit with Keyword Explorer

Hayley demonstrates how to discover competitive keyword opportunities

Try out Keywords by Site!

2) Site Crawl V2: Big enhancements to site crawling and auditing

Another significant project we completed in 2017 was a complete rewrite of our aging Site Crawler. In short, our new crawler is faster, more reliable, can crawl more pages, and surfaces more issues. We’ve also made some enhancements to the workflow, to make regular crawls more customizable and easy to manage. Here are a few highlights:

Week-over-week crawl comparisons

Our new crawler keeps tabs on what happened in your previous crawl to show you which specific issues are no longer present, and which are brand new.

Ignore (to hide) individual issues or whole issue types

This feature was added in response to a bunch of customer requests. While Moz does its best to call out the issues and priorities that apply to most sites, not all sites or SEOs have the same needs. For example, if you regularly noindex a big portion of your site, you don’t need us to keep reminding you that you’ve applied noindex to a huge number of pages. If you don’t want them showing your reports, just ignore individual issues or the entire issue type.

Another workflow improvement we added was the ability to mark an issue as fixed. This allows you to get it out of your way until the next crawl runs and verifies the fix.

All Pages view with improved sorting and filtering

If you're prioritizing across a large number of pages or trying to track down an issue in a certain area of your site, you can now sort all pages crawled by Issue Count, Page Authority, or Crawl Depth. You can also filter to show, for instance, all pages in the /blog section of my site that are redirects, and have a crawl issue.

Recrawl to verify fixes

Moz’s crawler monitors your site by crawling it every week. But if you’ve made some changes and want to verify them, you can now recrawl your site in between regular weekly crawls instead of waiting for the next crawl the start.

Seven new issues checked and tracked

These include such favorites as detecting Thin Content, Redirect Chains, and Slow Pages. While we were at it, we revamped duplicate page detection and improved the UI to help you better analyze clusters of duplicate content and figure out which page should be canonical.

A few resources to help you get more from Site Crawl:

Dr. Pete suggests how to get started with the new site crawl results

Britney Muller provides tips on how to prioritize your many SEO tasks

Jo Cameron shares how to uncover low value content and stay ahead of Google updates

3) Major investments in infrastructure for performance and resilience

You may not have directly noticed many of the updates we’ve made this year. We made some significant investments in Moz Pro and Moz Local to make them faster, more reliable, and allow us to build new features more quickly. But here are a few tangible manifestations of these efforts:

“Infinite” history on organic Moz Pro search traffic reports

Okay, infinite is a bit of a stretch, but we used to only show the last 12 months or weeks of data. Now we'll show data from the very inception of a campaign, broken down by weeks or months. This is made possible by an updated architecture that makes full historical data easy to surface and present in the application. It also allows for custom access to selected date ranges.

Also worth noting is that the new visualization shows how many different pages were receiving organic search traffic in context with total organic search traffic. This can help you figure out whether traffic increase was due to improved rankings across many pages, or just a spike in organic traffic for one or a few pages.

More timely and reliable access to Moz Local data at all scales

As Moz Local has brought on more and bigger customers with large numbers of locations, the team discovered a need to bolster systems for speed and reliability. A completely rebuilt scheduling system and improved core location data systems help ensure all of your data is collected and easy to access when you need it.

Improved local data distribution

Moz Local distributes your location data through myriad partners, each of which have their own formats and interfaces. The Local team updated and fine-tuned those third-party connections to improve the quality of the data and speed of distribution.

4) New instructor-led training programs: Never stop learning

Not all of our improvements this year have shown up in the product. Another investment we’ve made is in training. We've gotten a lot of requests for this over the years and are finally delivering. Brian Childs, our trainer extraordinaire, has built this program from the ground up. It includes:

Boot camps to build up core skills

Advanced Seminars to dig into more intensive topics

Custom Training for businesses that want a more tailored approach

We have even more ambitious plans for 2018, so if training interests you, check out all of our training offerings here.

5) Customer Success: Helping customers get the most out of Moz

Our customer success program took off this year and has one core purpose: to help customers get maximum value from Moz. Whether you're a long-time customer looking to explore new features or you're brand new to Moz and figuring out how to get started, our success team offers product webinars every week, as well as one-on-one product walkthroughs tailored to your needs, interests, and experience level.

The US members of our customer success team hone their skills at a local chocolate factory (Not pictured: our fantastic team members in the UK, Australia, and Dubai)

If you want to learn more about Moz Pro, check out a webinar or schedule a walkthrough.

Bonus! MozPod: Moz’s new free podcast made its debut

Okay, this really strays from product news, but another fun project that's been gaining momentum is MozPod. This came about as a side passion project by our ever-ambitious head trainer. Lord knows that SEO and digital marketing are fast-moving and ever-changing; to help you keep up on hot topics and new developments, we’ve started the Mozpod. This podcast covers a range of topics, drawing from the brains of key folks in the industry. With topics ranging from structured data and app store optimization to machine learning and even blockchain, there's always something interesting to learn about.

Join Brian every week for a new topic and guest:

iTunes

Google Play

The MozPod homepage

What’s next?

We have a lot planned for 2018 — probably way too much. But one thing I can promise is that it won’t be a dull year. I prefer not to get too specific about projects that we've not yet started, but here are a few things already in the works:

A significant upgrade to our link data and toolset

On-demand Site Crawl

Added keyword research corpuses for the UK, Australia, and Canada

Expanded distribution channels for local to include Facebook, Waze, and Uber

More measurement and analytics features around local rankings, categories, & keywords

Verticalized solutions to address specific local search needs in the restaurant, hospitality, financial, legal, & medical sectors

On top of these and many other features we're considering, we also plan to make it a lot easier for you to use our products. Right now, we know it can be a bit disjointed within and between products. We plan to change that.

We’ve also waited too long to solve for some specific needs of our agency customers. We're prioritizing some key projects that’ll make their jobs easier and their relationships with Moz more valuable.

Thank you!

Before I go, I just want to thank you all for sharing your support, suggestions, and critical feedback. We strive to build the best SEO data and platform for our diverse and passionate customers. We could not succeed without you. If you’d like to be a part of making Moz a better platform, please let us know. We often reach out to customers and community members for feedback and insight, so if you’re the type who likes to participate in user research studies, customer interviews, beta tests, or surveys, please volunteer here.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-look-back-at-great-2017-5-major-moz.html
February 06, 2018 at 10:13PM

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/02/rewriting-beginners-guide-to-seo.html
February 07, 2018 at 10:38PM

Diagnosing Why a Site's Set of Pages May Be Ranking Poorly - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Your rankings have dropped and you don't know why. Maybe your traffic dropped as well, or maybe just a section of your site has lost rankings. It's an important and often complex mystery to solve, and there are a number of boxes to check off while you investigate. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a detailed process to follow to diagnose what went wrong to cause your rankings drop, why it happened, and how to start the recovery process.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk about diagnosing a site and specifically a section of a site's pages and why they might be performing poorly, why their traffic may have dropped, why rankings may have dropped, why both of them might have dropped. So we've got a fairly extensive process here, so let's get started.

Step 1: Uncover the problem

First off, our first step is uncovering the problem or finding whether there is actually a problem. A good way to think about this is especially if you have a larger website, if we're talking about a site that's 20 or 30 or even a couple hundred pages, this is not a big issue. But many websites that SEOs are working on these days are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages. So what I like to urge folks to do is to

A. Treat different site sections as unique segments for investigation. You should look at them individually.

A lot of times subfolders or URL structures are really helpful here. So I might say, okay, MySite.com, I'm going to look exclusively at the /news section. Did that fall in rankings? Did it fall in traffic? Or was it /posts, where my blog posts and my content is? Or was it /cities? Let's say I have a website that's dealing with data about the population of cities. So I rank for lots of those types of queries, and it seems like I'm ranking for fewer of them, and it's my cities pages that are poorly performing in comparison to where they were a few months ago or last year at this time.

B. Check traffic from search over time.

So I go to my Google Analytics or whatever analytics you're using, and you might see something like, okay, I'm going to look exclusively at the /cities section. If you can structure your URLs in this fashion, use subfolders, this is a great way to do it. Then take a look and see, oh, hang on, that's a big traffic drop. We fell off a cliff there for these particular pages.

This data can be hiding inside your analytics because it could be that the rest of your site is performing well. It's going sort of up and to the right, and so you see this slow plateauing or a little bit of a decline, but it's not nearly as sharp as it is if you look at the traffic specifically for a single subsection that might be performing poorly, like this /cities section.

From there, I'm going to next urge you to use Google Trends. Why? Why would I go to Google Trends? Because what I want you to do is I want you to look at some of your big keywords and topics in Google Trends to see if there has been a serious decline in search volume at the same time. If search demand is rising or staying stable over the course of time where you have lost traffic, it's almost certainly something you've done, not something searchers are doing. But if you see that traffic has declined, for example, maybe you were ranking really well for population data from 2015. It turns out people are now looking for population data for 2016 or '17 or '18. Maybe that is part of the problem, that search demand has fallen and your curve matches that.

C. Perform some diagnostic queries or use your rank tracking data if you have it on these types of things.

This is one of the reasons I like to rank track for even these types of queries that don't get a lot of traffic.

1. Target keywords. In this case, it might be "Denver population growth," maybe that's one of your keywords. You would see, "Do I still rank for this? How well do I rank for this? Am I ranking more poorly than I used to?"

2. Check brand name plus target keyword. So, in this case, it would be my site plus the above here plus "Denver population growth," so My Site or MySite.com Denver population growth. If you're not ranking for that, that's usually an indication of a more serious problem, potentially a penalty or some type of dampening that's happening around your brand name or around your website.

3. Look for a 10 to 20-word text string from page content without quotes. It could be shorter. It could be only six or seven words, or it could be longer, 25 words if you really need it. But essentially, I want to take a string of text that exists on the page and put it in order in Google search engine, not in quotes. I do not want to use quotes here, and I want to see how it performs. This might be several lines of text here.

4. Look for a 10 to 20-word text string with quotes. So those lines of text, but in quotes searched in Google. If I'm not ranking for this, but I am for this one ... sorry, if I'm not ranking for the one not in quotes, but I am in quotes, I might surmise this is probably not duplicate content. It's probably something to do with my content quality or maybe my link profile or Google has penalized or dampened me in some way.

5. site: urlstring/ So I would search for "site:MySite.com/cities/Denver." I would see: Wait, has Google actually indexed my page? When did they index it? Oh, it's been a month. I wonder why they haven't come back. Maybe there's some sort of crawl issue, robots.txt issue, meta robots issue, something. I'm preventing Google from potentially getting there. Or maybe they can't get there at all, and this results in zero results. That means Google hasn't even indexed the page. Now we have another type of problem.

D. Check your tools.

1. Google Search Console. I would start there, especially in the site issues section.

2. Check your rank tracker or whatever tool you're using, whether that's Moz or something else.

3. On-page and crawl monitoring. Hopefully you have something like that. It could be through Screaming Frog. Maybe you've run some crawls over time, or maybe you have a tracking system in place. Moz has a crawl system. OnPage.org has a really good one.

4. Site uptime. So I might check Pingdom or other things that alert me to, "Oh, wait a minute, my site was down for a few days last week. That obviously is why traffic has fallen," those types of things.

Step 2: Offer hypothesis for falling rankings/traffic

Okay, you've done your diagnostics. Now it's time to offer some hypotheses. So now that we understand which problem I might have, I want to understand what could be resulting in that problem. So there are basically two situations you can have. Rankings have stayed stable or gone up, but traffic has fallen.

A. If rankings are up, but traffic is down...

In those cases, these are the five things that are most typically to blame.

1. New SERP features. There's a bunch of featured snippets that have entered the population growth for cities search results, and so now number one is not what number one used to be. If you don't get that featured snippet, you're losing out to one of your competitors.

2. Lower search demand. Like we talked about in Google Trends. I'm looking at search demand, and there are just not as many people searching as there used to be.

3. Brand or reputation issues. I'm ranking just fine, but people now for some reason hate me. People who are searching this sector think my brand is evil or bad or just not as helpful as it used to be. So I have issues, and people are not clicking on my results. They're choosing someone else actively because of reputation issues.

4. Snippet problems. I'm ranking in the same place I used to be, but I'm no longer the sexiest, most click-drawing snippet in the search results, and other people are earning those clicks instead.

5. Shift in personalization or location biasing by Google. It used to be the case that everyone who searched for city name plus population growth got the same results, but now suddenly people are seeing different results based on maybe their device or things they've clicked in the past or where they're located. Location is often a big cause for this.

So for many SEOs for many years, "SEO consultant" resulted in the same search results. Then Google introduced the Maps results and pushed down a lot of those folks, and now "SEO consultant" results in different ranked results in each city and each geography that you search in. So that can often be a cause for falling traffic even though rankings remain high.

B. If rankings and traffic are down...

If you're seeing that rankings have fallen and traffic has fallen in conjunction, there's a bunch of other things that are probably going on that are not necessarily these things. A few of these could be responsible still, like snippet problems could cause your rankings and your traffic to fall, or brand and reputation issues could cause your click-through rate to fall, which would cause you to get dampened. But oftentimes it's things like this:

1. & 2. Duplicate content and low-quality or thin content. Google thinks that what you're providing just isn't good enough.

3. Change in searcher intent. People who were searching for population growth used to want what you had to offer, but now they want something different and other people in the SERP are providing that, but you are not, so Google is ranking you lower. Even though your content is still good, it's just not serving the new searcher intent.

4. Loss to competitors. So maybe you have worse links than they do now or less relevance or you're not solving the searcher's query as well. Your user interface, your UX is not as good. Your keyword targeting isn't as good as theirs. Your content quality and the unique value you provide isn't as good as theirs. If you see that one or two competitors are consistently outranking you, you might diagnose that this is the problem.

5. Technical issues. So if I saw from over here that the crawl was the problem, I wasn't getting indexed, or Google hasn't updated my pages in a long time, I might look into accessibility things, maybe speed, maybe I'm having problems like letting Googlebot in, HTTPS problems, or indexable content, maybe Google can't see the content on my page anymore because I made some change in the technology of how it's displayed, or crawlability, internal link structure problems, robots.txt problems, meta robots tag issues, that kind of stuff.

Maybe at the server level, someone on the tech ops team of my website decided, "Oh, there's this really problematic bot coming from Mountain View that's costing us a bunch of bandwidth. Let's block bots from Mountain View." No, don't do that. Bad. Those kinds of technical issues can happen.

6. Spam and penalties. We'll talk a little bit more about how to diagnose those in a second.

7. CTR, engagement, or pogo-sticking issues. There could be click-through rate issues or engagement issues, meaning pogo sticking, like people are coming to your site, but they are clicking back because they weren't satisfied by your results, maybe because their expectations have changed or market issues have changed.

Step 3: Make fixes and observe results

All right. Next and last in this process, what we're going to do is make some fixes and observe the results. Hopefully, we've been able to correctly diagnose and form some wise hypotheses about what's going wrong, and now we're going to try and resolve them.

A. On-page and technical issues should solve after a new crawl + index.

So on-page and technical issues, if we're fixing those, they should usually resolve, especially on small sections of sites, pretty fast. As soon as Google has crawled and indexed the page, you should generally see performance improve. But this can take a few weeks if we're talking about a large section on a site, many thousands of pages, because Google has to crawl and index all of them to get the new sense that things are fixed and traffic is coming in. Since it's long tail to many different pages, you're not going to see that instant traffic gain and rise as fast.

B. Link issues and spam penalty problems can take months to show results.

Look, if you have crappier links or not a good enough link profile as your competitors, growing that can take months or years even to fix. Penalty problems and spam problems, same thing. Google can take sometimes a long time. You've seen a lot of spam experts on Twitter saying, "Oh, well, all my clients who had issues over the last nine months suddenly are ranking better today," because Google made some fix in their latest index rollout or their algorithm changed, and it's sort of, okay, well we'll reward the people for all the fixes that they've made. Sometimes that's in batches that take months.

C. Fixing a small number of pages in a section that's performing poorly might not show results very quickly.

For example, let's say you go and you fix /cities/Milwaukee. You determine from your diagnostics that the problem is a content quality issue. So you go and you update these pages. They have new content. It serves the searchers much better, doing a much better job. You've tested it. People really love it. You fixed two cities, Milwaukee and Denver, to test it out. But you've left 5,000 other cities pages untouched.

Sometimes Google will sort of be like, "No, you know what? We still think your cities pages, as a whole, don't do a good job solving this query. So even though these two that you've updated do a better job, we're not necessarily going to rank them, because we sort of think of your site as this whole section and we grade it as a section or apply some grades as a section." That is a real thing that we've observed happening in Google's results.

Because of this, one of the things that I would urge you to do is if you're seeing good results from the people you're testing it with and you're pretty confident, I would roll out the changes to a significant subset, 30%, 50%, 70% of the pages rather than doing only a tiny, tiny sample.

D. Sometimes when you encounter these issues, a remove and replace strategy works better than simply upgrading old URLs.

So if Google has decided /cities, your /cities section is just awful, has all sorts of problems, not performing well on a bunch of different vectors, you might take your /cities section and actually 301 redirect them to a new URL, /location, and put the new UI and the new content that better serves the searcher and fixes a lot of these issues into that location section, such that Google now goes, "Ah, we have something new to judge. Let's see how these location pages on MySite.com perform versus the old cities pages."

So I know we've covered a ton today and there are a lot of diagnostic issues that we haven't necessarily dug deep into, but I hope this can help you if you're encountering rankings challenges with sections of your site or with your site as a whole. Certainly, I look forward to your comments and your feedback. If you have other tips for folks facing this, that would be great. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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February 08, 2018 at 10:18PM

New Research: 35% of Competitive Local Keywords Have Local Pack Ads

Posted by Dr-Pete

Over the past year, you may have spotted a new kind of Google ad on a local search. It looks something like this one (on a search for "oil change" from my Pixel phone in the Chicago suburbs):

These ads seem to appear primarily on mobile results, with some limited testing on desktop results. We've heard rumors about local pack ads as far back as 2016, but very few details. How prevalent are these ads, and how seriously should you be taking them?

11,000 SERPs: Quick summary

For this study, we decided to look at 110 keywords (in 11 categories) across 100 major US cities. We purposely focused on competitive keywords in large cities, assuming, based on our observations as searchers, that the prevalence rate for these ads was still pretty low. The 11 categories were as follows:

Apparel

Automotive

Consumer Goods

Finance

Fitness

Hospitality

Insurance

Legal

Medical

Services (Home)

Services (Other)

We purposely selected terms that were likely to have local pack results and looked for the presence of local packs and local pack ads. We collected these searches as a mobile user with a Samsung Galaxy 7 (a middle-ground choice between iOS and a "pure" Google phone).

Why 11 categories? Confession time – it was originally 10, and then I had the good sense to ask Darren Shaw about the list and realized I had completely left out insurance keywords. Thanks, Darren.

Finding #1: I was very wrong

I'll be honest – I expected, from casual observations and the lack of chatter in the search community, that we'd see fewer than 5% of local packs with ads, and maybe even numbers in the 1% range.

Across our data set, roughly 35% of SERPs with local packs had ads.

Across industry categories, the prevalence of pack ads ranged wildly, from 10% to 64%:

For the 110 individual keyword phrases in our study, the presence of local ads ranged from 0% to 96%. Here are the keywords with >=90% local pack ad prevalence:

"car insurance" (90%)

"auto glass shop" (91%)

"bankruptcy lawyer" (91%)

"storage" (92%)

"oil change" (95%)

"mattress sale" (95%)

"personal injury attorney" (96%)

There was no discernible correlation between the presence of pack ads and city size. Since our study was limited to the top 100 US cities by population, though, this may simply be due to a restricted data range.

Finding #2: One is the magic number

Every local pack with ads in our study had one and only one ad. This ad appeared in addition to regular pack listings. In our data set, 99.7% of local packs had three regular/organic listings, and the rest had two listings (which can happen with or without ads).

Finding #3: Pack ads land on Google

Despite their appearance, local packs ads are more like regular local pack results than AdWords ads, in that they're linked directly to a local panel (a rich Google result). On my Pixel phone, the Jiffy Lube ad at the beginning of this post links to this result:

This is not an anomaly: 100% of the 3,768 local pack ads in our study linked back to Google. This follows a long trend of local pack results linking back to Google entities, including the gradual disappearance of the "Website" link in the local pack.

Conclusion: It's time to get serious

If you're in a competitive local vertical, it's time to take local pack ads seriously. Your visitors are probably seeing them more often than you realize. Currently, local pack ads are an extension of AdWords, and require you to set up location extensions.

It's also more important than ever to get your Google My Business listing in order and make sure that all of your information is up to date. It may be frustrating to lose the direct click to your website, but a strong local business panel can drive phone calls, foot traffic, and provide valuable information to potential customers.

Like every Google change, we ultimately have to put aside whether we like or dislike it and make the tough choices. With more than one-third of local packs across the competitive keywords in our data set showing ads, it's time to get your head out of the sand and get serious.

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February 12, 2018 at 10:14PM

The 2018 Local SEO Forecast: 9 Predictions According to Mozzers

Posted by MiriamEllis

It's February, and we've all dipped our toes into the shallow end of the 2018 pool. Today, let's dive into the deeper waters of the year ahead, with local search marketing predictions from Moz's Local SEO Subject Matter Expert, our Marketing Scientist, and our SEO & Content Architect. Miriam Ellis, Dr. Peter J. Myers, and Britney Muller weigh in on what your brand should prepare for in the coming months in local.

WOMM, core SEO knowledge, and advice for brands both large and small

Miriam Ellis, Moz Associate & Local SEO SME

LSAs will highlight the value of Google-independence

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) and loyalty initiatives will become increasingly critical to service area business whose results are disrupted by Google’s Local Service Ads. SABs aren’t going to love having to “rent back” their customers from Google, so Google-independent lead channels will have enhanced value. That being said, the first small case study I’ve seen indicates that LSAs may be a winner over traditional Adwords in terms of cost and conversions.

Content will be the omni-channel answer

Content will grow in value, as it is the answer to everything coming our way: voice search, Google Posts, Google Questions & Answers, owner responses, and every stage of the sales funnel. Because of this, agencies which have formerly thought of themselves as strictly local SEO consultants will need to master the fundamentals of organic keyword research and link building, as well as structured data, to offer expert-level advice in the omni-channel environment. Increasingly, clients will need to become “the answer” to queries… and that answer will predominantly reside in content dev.

Retail may downsize but must remain physical

Retail is being turned on its head, with Amazon becoming the “everything store” and the triumphant return of old-school home delivery. Large brands failing to see profits in this new environment will increasingly downsize to the showroom scenario, significantly cutting costs, while also possibly growing sales as personally assisted consumers are dissuaded from store-and-cart abandonment, and upsold on tie-ins. Whether this will be an ultimate solution for shaky brands, I can’t say, but it matters to the local SEO industry because showrooms are, at least, physical locations and therefore eligible for all of the goodies of our traditional campaigns.

SMBs will hold the quality high card

For smaller local brands, emphasis on quality will be the most critical factor. Go for the customers who care about specific attributes (e.g. being truly local, made in the USA, handcrafted, luxury, green, superior value, etc.). Evaluating and perfecting every point of contact with the customer (from how phone calls are assisted, to how online local business data is managed, to who asks for and responds to reviews) matters tremendously. This past year, I’ve watched a taxi driver launch a delivery business on the side, grow to the point where he quit driving a cab, hire additional drivers, and rack up a profusion of 5-star, unbelievably positive reviews, all because his style of customer service is memorably awesome. Small local brands will have the nimbleness and hometown know-how to succeed when quality is what is being sold.

In-pack ads, in-SERP features, and direct-to-website traffic

Dr. Peter J. Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz

In-pack ads to increase

Google will get more aggressive about direct local advertising, and in-pack ads will expand. In 2018, I expect local pack ads will not only appear on more queries but will make the leap to desktop SERPs and possibly Google Home.

In-SERP features to grow

Targeted, local SERP features will also expand. Local Service Ads rolled out to more services and cities in 2017, and Google isn’t going to stop there. They’ve shown a clear willingness to create specialized content for both organic and local. For example, 2017 saw Google launch a custom travel portal and jobs portal on the “organic” side, and this trend is accelerating.

Direct-to-website traffic to decline

The push to keep local search traffic in Google properties (i.e. Maps) will continue. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen local packs go from results that link directly to websites, to having a separate “Website” link to local sites being buried 1–2 layers deep. In some cases, local sites are being almost completely supplanted by local Knowledge Panels, some of which (hotels being a good example) have incredibly rich feature sets. Google wants to deliver local data directly on Google, and direct traffic to local sites from search will continue to decline.

Real-world data and the importance of Google

Britney Muller, SEO & Content Architect at Moz

Relevance drawn from the real world

Real-world data! Google will leverage device and credit card data to get more accurate information on things like foot traffic, current gas prices, repeat customers, length of visits, gender-neutral bathrooms, type of customers, etc. As the most accurate source of business information to date, why wouldn’t they?

Google as one-stop shop

SERPs and Maps (assisted by local business listings) will continue to grow as a one-stop-shop for local business information. Small business websites will still be important, but are more likely to serve as a data source as opposed to the only place to get their business information, in addition to more in-depth data like the above.

Google as friend or foe? Looking at these expert predictions, that's a question local businesses of all sizes will need to continue to ask in 2018. Perhaps the best answer is "neither." Google represents opportunity for brands that know how to play the game well. Companies that put the consumer first are likely to stand strong, no matter how the nuances of digital marketing shift, and education will remain the key to mastery in the year ahead.

What do you think? Any hunches about the year ahead? Let us know in the comments.

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February 13, 2018 at 10:24PM

Reading Between the Lines: A 3-Step Guide to Reviewing Web Page Content

Posted by Jackie.Francis

In SEO, reviewing content is an unavoidable yet extremely important task. As the driving factor that brings people to a page, best practice dictates that we do what we can to ensure that the work we've invested hours and resources into creating remains impactful and relevant over time. This requires occasionally going back and re-evaluating our content to identify areas that can be improved.

That being said, if you've ever done a content review, you know how surprisingly challenging this is. A large variety of formats and topics alongside the challenge of defining “good” content makes it hard to pick out the core elements that matter. Without these universal focus areas, you may end up neglecting an element (e.g. tone of voice) in one instance but paying special attention to that same element in another.

Luckily there are certain characteristics — like good spelling, appealing layouts, and relevant keywords — that are universally associated with what we would consider “good” content. In this three-step guide, I'll show you how to use these characteristics (or elements, as I like to call them) to define your target audience, measure the performance of your content using a scorecard, and assess your changes for quality assurance as part of a review process that can be applied to nearly all types of content across any industry.

Step 1: Know your audience

Arguably the most important step mentioned in this post, knowing your target reader will identify the details that should make up the foundation of your content. This includes insight into the reader’s intent, the ideal look and feel of the page, and the goals your content’s message should be trying to achieve.

To get to this point, however, you first need to answer these two questions:

What does my target audience look like?

Why are they reading my content?

What does my target audience look like?

The first question relies on general demographic information such as age, gender, education, and job title. This gives a face to the ideal audience member(s) and the kind of information that would best suit them. For example, if targeting stay-at-home mothers between the ages of 35 and 40 with two or more kids under the age of 5, we can guess that she has a busy daily schedule, travels frequently for errands, and constantly needs to stay vigilant over her younger children. So, a piece that is personable, quick, easy to read on-the-go, and includes inline imagery to reduce eye fatigue would be better received than something that is lengthy and requires a high level of focus.

Why are they reading my content?

Once you have a face to your reader, the second question must be answered to understand what that reader wants from your content and if your current product is effectively meeting those needs. For example, senior-level executives of mid- to large-sized companies may be reading to become better informed before making an important decision, to become more knowledgeable in their field, or to use the information they learn to teach others. Other questions you may want to consider asking:

Are they reading for leisure or work?

Would they want to share this with their friends on social media?

Where will they most likely be reading this? On the train? At home? Waiting in line at the store?

Are they comfortable with long blocks of text, or would inline images be best?

Do they prefer bite-sized information or are they comfortable with lengthy reports?

You can find the answers to these questions and collect valuable demographic and psychographic information by using a combination of internal resources, like sales scripts and surveys, and third-party audience insight tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights. With these results you should now have a comprehensive picture of your audience and can start identifying the parts of your content that can be improved.

Step 2: Tear apart your existing content

Now that you understand who your audience is, it’s time to get to the real work: assessing your existing content. This stage requires breaking everything apart to identify the components you should keep, change, or discard. However, this task can be extremely challenging because the performance of most components — such as tone of voice, design, and continuity — can’t simply be bucketed into binary categories like “good” or “bad.” Rather, they fall into a spectrum where the most reasonable level of improvement falls somewhere in the middle. You'll see what I mean by this statement later on, but one of the most effective ways to evaluate and measure the degree of optimization needed for these components is to use a scorecard. Created by my colleague, Ben Estes, this straightforward, reusable, and easy to apply tool can help you objectively review the performance of your content.

Make a copy of the Content Review Grading Rubric

Note: The card sampled here, and the one I personally use for similar projects, is a slightly altered version of the original.

As you can see, the card is divided into two categories: Writing and Design. Listed under each category are elements that are universally needed to create a good content and should be examined. Each point is assigned a grading scale ranging from 1–5, with 1 being the worst score and 5 being best.

To use, start by choosing a part of your page to look at first. Order doesn’t matter, so whether you choose to first check “spelling and grammar” or “continuity” is up to you. Next, assign it a score on a separate Excel sheet (or mark it directly on the rubric) based on its current performance. For example, if the copy has no spelling errors but some minor grammar issues, you would rank “spelling and grammar” as a four (4).

Finally, repeat this process until all elements are graded. Remember to stay impartial to give an honest assessment.

Once you’re done, look at each grade and see where it falls on the scale. Ideally each element should have a score of 4 or greater, although a grade of 5 should only be given out sparingly. Tying back to my spectrum comment from earlier, a 5 is exclusively reserved for top-level work and should be something to strive for but will typically take more effort to achieve than it is worth. A grade of 4 is often the highest and most reasonable goal to attempt for, in most instances.

A grade of 3 or below indicates an opportunity for improvement and that significant changes need to be made.

If working with multiple pieces of content at once, the grading system can also be used to help prioritize your workload. Just collect the average writing or design score and sort them in ascending/descending order. Pages with a lower average indicate poorer performance and should be prioritized over pages whose averages are higher.

Whether you choose to use this scorecard or make your own, what you review, the span of the grading scale, and the criteria for each grade should be adjusted to fit your specific needs and result in a tool that will help you honestly assess your content across multiple applications.

Don’t forget the keywords

With most areas of your content covered by the scorecard, the last element to check before moving to the editing stage is your keywords.

Before I get slack for this, I’m aware that the general rule of creating content is to do your keyword research first. But I’ve found that when it comes to reviews, evaluating keywords last feels more natural and makes the process a lot smoother. When first running through a page, you’re much more likely to notice spelling and design flaws before you pick up whether a keyword is used correctly — why not make note of those details first?

Depending on the outcomes stemming from the re-evaluation of your target audience and content performance review, you will notice one of two things about your currently targeted keywords:

They have not been impacted by the outcomes of the prior analyses and do not need to be altered

They no longer align with the goals of the page or needs of the audience and should be changed

In the first example, the keywords you originally target are still best suited for your content’s message and no additional research is needed. So, your only remaining task is to determine whether or not your keywords are effectively used throughout the page. This means assessing things like title tag, image alt attributes, URL, and copy.

In an attempt to stay on track, I won’t go into further detail on how to optimize keywords but if you want a little more insight, this post by Ken Lyons is a great resource.

If, however, your target keywords are no longer relevant to the goals of your content, before moving to the editing stage you’ll need to re-do your keyword research to identify the terms you should rank for. For insight into keyword research this chapter in Moz’s Beginner's Guide to SEO is another invaluable resource.

Step 3: Evaluate your evaluation

At this point your initial review is complete and you should be ready to edit.

That’s right. Your initial review.

The interesting thing about assessing content is that it never really ends. As you make edits you’ll tend to deviate more and more from your initial strategy. And while not always a bad thing, you must continuously monitor these changes to ensure that you are on the right track to create a highly valued piece of content.

The best approach would be to reassess all your material when:

50% of the edits are complete

85% of the edits are complete

You have finished editing

At the 50% and 85% marks, keep the assessment quick and simple. Look through your revisions and ask the following questions:

Am I still addressing the needs of my target audience?

Are my target keywords properly integrated?

Am I using the right language and tone of voice?

Does it look like the information is structured correctly (hierarchically)?

If your answer is “Yes” to all four questions, then you've effectively made your changes and should proceed. For any question you answer “No,” go back and make the necessary corrections. The areas targeted here become more difficult to fix the closer you are to completion and ensuring they're correct throughout this stage will save a lot of time and stress in the long run.

When you've finished and think you're ready to publish, run one last comprehensive review to check the performance status of all related components. This means confirming you've properly addressed the needs of your audience, optimized your keywords, and improved the elements highlighted in the scorecard.

Moving forward

No two pieces of content are the same, but that does not mean there aren’t some important commonalities either. Being able to identify these similarities and understand the role they play across all formats and topics will lead the way to creating your own review process for evaluating subjective material.

So, when you find yourself gearing up for your next project, give these steps a try and always keep the following in mind:

Your audience is what makes or breaks you, so keep them happy

Consistent quality is key! Ensure all components of your content are performing at their best

Keep your keywords optimized and be prepared to do additional research if necessary

Unplanned changes will happen. Just remember to remain observant as to keep yourself on track

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February 14, 2018 at 10:14PM

Using the Cross Domain Rel=Canonical to Maximize the SEO Value of Cross-Posted Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Same content, different domains? There's a tag for that. Using rel=canonical to tell Google that similar or identical content exists on multiple domains has a number of clever applications. You can cross-post content across several domains that you own, you can benefit from others republishing your own content, rent or purchase content on other sites, and safely use third-party distribution networks like Medium to spread the word. Rand covers all the canonical bases in this not-to-be-missed edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the cross-domain rel=canonical tag. So we've talked about rel=canonical a little bit and how it can be used to take care of duplicate content issues, point Google to the right pages from potentially other pages that share similar or exactly the same content. But cross-domain rel=canonical is a unique and uniquely powerful tool that is designed to basically say, "You know what, Google? There is the same content on multiple different domains."

So in this simplistic example, MyFriendSite.com/green-turtles contains this content that I said, "Sure, it's totally fine for you, my friend, to republish, but I know I don't want SEO issues. I know I don't want duplicate content. I know I don't want a problem where my friend's site ends up outranking me, because maybe they have better links or other ranking signals, and I know that I would like any ranking credit, any link or authority signals that they accrue to actually come to my website.

There's a way that you can do this. Google introduced it back in 2009. It is the cross-domain rel=canonical. So essentially, in the header tag of the page, I can add this link, rel=canonical href — it's a link tag, so there's an href — to the place where I want the link or the canonical, in this case, to point to and then close the tag. Google will transfer over, this is an estimate, but roughly in the SEO world, we think it's pretty similar to what you get in a 301 redirect. So something above 90% of the link authority and ranking signals will transfer from FriendSite.com to MySite.com.

So my green turtles page is going to be the one that Google will be more likely to rank. As this one accrues any links or other ranking signals, that authority, those links should transfer over to my page. That's an ideal situation for a bunch of different things. I'll talk about those in a sec.

Multiple domains and pages can point to any URL

Multiple domains and pages are totally cool to point to any URL. I can do this for FriendSite.com. I can also do this for TurtleDudes.com and LeatherbackFriends.net and SeaTees.com and NatureIsLit.com. All of them can contain this cross-domain rel=canonical pointing back to the site or the page that I want it to go to. This is a great way to potentially license content out there, give people republishing permissions without losing any of the SEO value.

A few things need to match:

I. The page content really does need to match

That includes things like text, images, if you've embedded videos, whatever you've got on there.

II. The headline

Ideally, should match. It's a little less crucial than the page content, but probably you want that headline to match.

III. Links (in content)

Those should also match. This is a good way to make sure. You check one, two, three. This is a good way to make sure that Google will count that rel=canonical correctly.

Things that don't need to match:

I. The URL

No, it's fine if the URLs are different. In this case, I've got NatureIsLit.com/turtles/p?id=679. That's okay. It doesn't need to be green-turtles. I can have a different URL structure on my site than they've got on theirs. Google is just fine with that.

II. The title of the piece

Many times the cross-domain rel=canonical is used with different page titles. So if, for example, CTs.com wants to publish the piece with a different title, that's okay. I still generally recommend that the headlines stay the same, but okay to have different titles.

III. The navigation

IV. Site branding

So all the things around the content. If I've got my page here and I have like nav elements over here, nav elements down here, maybe a footer down here, a nice little logo up in the top left, that's fine if those are totally different from the ones that are on these other pages cross-domain canonically. That stuff does not need to match. We're really talking about the content inside the page that Google looks for.

Ways to use this protocol

Some great ways to use the cross-domain rel=canonical.

1. If you run multiple domains and want to cross-post content, choose which one should get the SEO benefits and rankings.

If you run multiple domains, for whatever reason, let's say you've got a set of domains and you would like the benefit of being able to publish a single piece of content, for whatever reason, across multiples of these domains that you own, but you know you don't want to deal with a duplicate content issue and you know you'd prefer for one of these domains to be the one receiving the ranking signals, cross-domain rel=canonical is your friend. You can tell Google that Site A and Site C should not get credit for this content, but Site B should get all the credit.

The issue here is don't try and do this across multiple domains. So don't say, "Oh, Site A, why don't you rel=canonical to B, and Site C, why don't you rel=canonical to D, and I'll try and get two things ranked in the top." Don't do that. Make sure all of them point to one. That is the best way to make sure that Google respects the cross-domain rel=canonical properly.

2. If a publication wants to re-post your content on their domain, ask for it instead of (or in addition to) a link back.

Second, let's say a publication reaches out to you. They're like, "Wow. Hey, we really like this piece." My wife, Geraldine, wrote a piece about Mario Batali's sexual harassment apology letter and the cinnamon rolls recipe that he strangely included in this apology. She baked those and then wrote about it. It went quite viral, got a lot of shares from a ton of powerful and well-networked people and then a bunch of publications. The Guardian reached out. An Australian newspaper reached out, and they said, "Hey, we would like to republish your piece." Geraldine talked to her agent, and they set up a price or whatever.

One of the ways that you can do this and benefit from it, not just from getting a link from The Guardian or some other newspaper, but is to say, "Hey, I will be happy to be included here. You don't even have to give me, necessarily, if you don't want to, author credit or link credit, but I do want that sweet, sweet rel=canonical." This is a great way to maximize the SEO benefit of being posted on someone else's site, because you're not just receiving a single link. You're receiving credit from all the links that that piece might generate.

Oops, I did that backwards. You want it to come from their site to your site. This is how you know Whiteboard Friday is done in one take.

3. Purchase/rent content from other sites without forcing them to remove the content from their domain.

Next, let's say I am in the opposite situation. I'm the publisher. I see a piece of content that I love and I want to get that piece. So I might say, "Wow, that piece of content is terrific. It didn't do as well as I thought it would do. I bet if we put it on our site and broadcast it with our audience, it would do incredibly well. Let's reach out to the author of the piece and see if we can purchase or rent for a time period, say two years, for the next two years we want to put the cross-domain rel=canonical on your site and point it back to us and we want to host that content. After two years, you can have it back. You can own it again."

Without forcing them to remove the content from their site, so saying you, publisher, you author can keep it on your site. We don't mind. We'd just like this tag applied, and we'd like to able to have republishing permissions on our website. Now you can get the SEO benefits of that piece of content, and they can, in exchange, get some money. So your site sending them some dollars, their site sending you the rel=canonical and the ranking authority and the link equity and all those beautiful things.

4. Use Medium as a content distribution network without the drawback of duplicate content.

Number four, Medium. Medium is a great place to publish content. It has a wide network, people who really care about consuming content. Medium is a great distribution network with one challenge. If you post on Medium, people worry that they can't post the same thing on their own site because you'll be competing with Medium.com. It's a very powerful domain. It tends to rank really well. So duplicate content is an issue, and potentially losing the rankings and the traffic that you would get from search and losing that to Medium is no fun.

But Medium has a beautiful thing. The cross-domain rel=canonical is built in to their import tool. So if you go to Medium.com/p/import and you are logged in to your Medium account, you can enter in their URL field the content that you've published on your own site. Medium will republish it on your account, and they will include the cross-domain rel=canonical back to you. Now, you can start thinking of Medium as essentially a distribution network without the penalties or problems of duplicate content issues. Really, really awesome tool. Really awesome that Medium is offering this. I hope it sticks around.

All right, everyone. I think you're going to have some excellent additional ideas for the cross-domain rel=canonical and how you have used it. We would love you to share those in the comments below, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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February 15, 2018 at 10:20PM

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
- Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

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February 18, 2018 at 10:13PM

The Google Ranking Factor You Can Influence in an Afternoon [Case Study]

Posted by sanfran

What does Google consider “quality content"? And how do you capitalize on a seemingly subjective characteristic to improve your standing in search?

We’ve been trying to figure this out since the Hummingbird algorithm was dropped in our laps in 2013, prioritizing “context” over “keyword usage/frequency.” This meant that Google’s algorithm intended to understand the meaning behind the words on the page, rather than the page’s keywords and metadata alone.

This new sea change meant the algorithm was going to read in between the lines in order to deliver content that matched the true intent of someone searching for a keyword.

Write longer content? Not so fast!

Watching us SEOs respond to Google updates is hilarious. We’re like a floor full of day traders getting news on the latest cryptocurrency.

One of the most prominent theories that made the rounds was that longer content was the key to organic ranking. I’m sure you’ve read plenty of articles on this. We at Brafton, a content marketing agency, latched onto that one for a while as well. We even experienced some mixed success.

However, what we didn’t realize was that when we experienced success, it was because we accidentally stumbled on the true ranking factor.

Longer content alone was not the intent behind Hummingbird.

Content depth

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario.

If you were to search the keyword “search optimization techniques,” you would see a SERP that looks similar to the following:

Nothing too surprising about these results.

However, if you were to go through each of these 10 results and take note of the major topics they discussed, theoretically you would have a list of all the topics being discussed by all of the top ranking sites.

Example:

Position 1 topics discussed: A, C, D, E, F

Position 2 topics discussed: A, B, F

Position 3 topics discussed: C, D, F

Position 4 topics discussed: A, E, F

Once you finished this exercise, you would have a comprehensive list of every topic discussed (A–F), and you would start to see patterns of priority emerge.

In the example above, note “topic F” is discussed in all four pieces of content. One would consider this a cornerstone topic that should be prioritized.

If you were then to write a piece of content that covered each of the topics discussed by every competitor on page one, and emphasized the cornerstone topics appropriately, in theory, you would have the most comprehensive piece of content on that particular topic.

By producing the most comprehensive piece of content available, you would have the highest quality result that will best satisfy the searcher’s intent. More than that, you would have essentially created the ultimate resource center for everything a person would want to know about that topic.

How to identify topics to discuss in a piece of content

At this point, we’re only theoretical. The theory makes logical sense, but does it actually work? And how do we go about scientifically gathering information on topics to discuss in a piece of content?

Finding topics to cover:

Manually: As discussed previously, you can do it manually. This process is tedious and labor-intensive, but it can be done on a small scale.

Using SEMrush: SEMrush features an SEO content template that will provide guidance on topic selection for a given keyword.

Using MarketMuse: MarketMuse was originally built for the very purpose of content depth, with an algorithm that mimics Hummingbird. MM takes a largely unscientific process and makes it scientific. For the purpose of this case study, we used MarketMuse.

The process

Watch the process in action

1. Identify content worth optimizing

We went through a massive list of keywords our blog ranked for. We filtered that list down to keywords that were not ranking number one in SERPs but had strong intent. You can also do this with core landing pages.

Here’s an example: We were ranking in the third position for the keyword “financial content marketing.” While this is a low-volume keyword, we were enthusiastic to own it due to the high commercial intent it comes with.

2. Evaluate your existing piece

Take a subjective look at your piece of content that is ranking for the keyword. Does it SEEM like a comprehensive piece? Could it benefit from updated examples? Could it benefit from better/updated inline embedded media? With a cursory look at our existing content, it was clear that the examples we used were old, as was the branding.

3. Identify topics

As mentioned earlier, you can do this in a few different ways. We used MarketMuse to identify the topics we were doing a good job of covering as well as our topic gaps, topics that competitors were discussing, but we were not. The results were as follows:

Topics we did a good job of covering:

Content marketing impact on branding

Impact of using case studies

Importance of infographics

Business implications of a content marketing program

Creating articles for your audience

Topics we did a poor job of covering:

Marketing to millennials

How to market to existing clients

Crafting a content marketing strategy

Identifying and tracking goals

4. Rewrite the piece

Considering how out-of-date our examples were, and the number of topics we had neglected to discuss, we determined a full rewrite of the piece was warranted. Our writer, Mike O’Neill, was given the topic guidance, ensuring he had a firm understanding of everything that needed to be discussed in order to create a comprehensive article.

5. Update the content

To maintain our link equity, we kept the same URL and simply updated the old content with the new. Then we updated the publish date. The new article looks like this, with updated content depth, modern branding, and inline visuals.

6. Fetch as Google

Rather than wait for Google to reindex the content, I wanted to see the results immediately (and it is indeed immediate).

7. Check your results

Open an incognito window and see your updated position.

Promising results:

We have run more than a dozen experiments and have seen positive results across the board. As demonstrated in the video, these results are usually realized within 60 seconds of reindexing the updated content.

Keyword target

Old Ranking

New ranking

“Financial content marketing”

3

1

“What is a subdomain”

16

6

“Best company newsletters”

32

4

“Staffing marketing”

7

3

“Content marketing agency”

16

1

“Google local business cards”

16

5

“Company blog”

7

4

“SEO marketing tools”

9

3

Of those tests, here’s another example of this process in action for the keyword, “best company newsletters.”

Before:

After

Assumptions:

From these results, we can assume that content depth and breadth of topic coverage matters — a lot. Google’s algorithm seems to have an understanding of the competitive topic landscape for a keyword. In our hypothetical example from before, it would appear the algorithm knows that topics A–F exist for a given keyword and uses that collection of topics as a benchmark for content depth across competitors.

We can also assume Google’s algorithm either a.) responds immediately to updated information, or b.) has a cached snapshot of the competitive content depth landscape for any given keyword. Either of these scenarios is very likely because of the speed at which updated content is re-ranked.

In conclusion, don’t arbitrarily write long content and call it “high quality.” Choose a keyword you want to rank for and create a comprehensive piece of content that fully supports that keyword. There is no guarantee you’ll be granted a top position — domain strength factors play a huge role in rankings — but you’ll certainly improve your odds, as we have seen.

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February 19, 2018 at 10:23PM

How to Deal with Fake Negative Reviews on Google

Posted by JoyHawkins

Fake reviews are a growing problem for those of us that own small businesses. In the online world, it's extremely easy to create a new account and leave either a positive or negative review for any business — regardless of whether you’ve ever tried to hire them.

Google has tons of policies for users that leave reviews. But in my experience they're terrible at automatically catching violations of these policies. At my agency, my team spends time each month carefully monitoring reviews for our clients and their competitors. The good news is that if you’re diligent at tracking them and can make a good enough case for why the reviews are against the guidelines, you can get them removed by contacting Google on Twitter, Facebook, or reporting via the forum.

Recently, my company got hit with three negative reviews, all left in the span of 5 minutes:

Two of the three reviews were ratings without reviews. These are the hardest to get rid of because Google will normally tell you that they don’t violate the guidelines — since there's no text on them. I instantly knew they weren’t customers because I'm really selective about who I work with and keep my client base small intentionally. I would know if someone that was paying me was unhappy.

The challenge with negative reviews on Google

The challenge is that Google doesn’t know who your customers are, and they won’t accept “this wasn't a customer” as an acceptable reason to remove a review, since they allow people to use anonymous usernames. In most cases, it’s extremely difficult to prove the identity of someone online.

The other challenge is that a person doesn’t have to be a customer to be eligible to leave a review. They have to have a “customer experience,” which could be anything from trying to call you and getting your voicemail to dropping by your office and just browsing around.

How to respond

When you work hard to build a good, ethical business, it's always infuriating when a random person has the power to destroy what took you years to build. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the least bit upset when these reviews came in. Thankfully, I was able to follow the advice I’ve given many people in the last decade, which is to calm down and think about what your future prospects will see when they come across review and the way you respond to it.

Solution: Share your dilemma

I decided to post on Twitter and Facebook about my lovely three negative reviews, and the response I got was overwhelming. People had really great and amusing things to say about my dilemma.

Dear: Whoever spammed my listing this morning with fake reviews. You probably should have gone with more believable usernames. #StopCrapOnTheMap pic.twitter.com/9Nat163d93

— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) January 16, 2018

Whoever was behind these three reviews was seeking to harm my business. The irony is that they actually helped me, because I ended up getting three new positive reviews as a result of sharing my experience with people that I knew would rally behind me.

For most businesses, your evangelists might not be on Twitter, but you could post about it on your personal Facebook profile. Any friends that have used your service or patronized your business would likely respond in the same manner. It’s important to note that I never asked anyone to review me when posting this — it was simply the natural response from people that were a fan of my company and what we stand for. If you’re a great company, you’ll have these types of customers and they should be the people you want to share this experience with!

But what about getting the negative reviews removed?

In this case, I was able to get the three reviews removed. However, there have also been several cases where I’ve seen Google refuse to remove them for others. My plan B was to post a response to the reviews offering these “customers” a 100% refund. After all, 100% of zero is still zero — I had nothing to lose. This would also ensure that future prospects see that I’m willing to address people that have a negative experience, since even the best businesses in the world aren’t perfect. As much as I love my 5-star rating average, studies have shown that 4.2–4.5 is actually the ideal average star rating for purchase probability.

Have you had an experience with fake negative reviews on Google? If so, I’d love to hear about it, so please leave a comment.

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February 20, 2018 at 10:18PM

How (and Whether) to Invest in and Structure Online Communities - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Building an online community sounds like an attractive idea on paper. A group of enthusiastic, engaged users working on their own to boost your brand? What's the hitch?

Well, building a thriving online community takes a great deal of effort, often with little return for a very long time. And there are other considerations: do you build your own platform, participate in an existing community, or a little of both? What are the benefits from a brand, SEO, and content marketing perspective? In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand answers all your questions about building yourself an online community, including whether it's an investment worth your time.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're chatting about how and whether to invest in and structure online communities.

I want to say a thank you to @DaveCraige on Twitter. Dave, thank you very much for the question, an excellent one. I think this is something that a lot of content marketers, web marketers, community builders think about is, "Should I be making an investment in building my own community? Should I leverage someone's existing community? How can I do that and benefit from an SEO perspective and a content marketing and a brand awareness perspective?" So we'll try and tackle some of those questions today on Whiteboard Friday.

Strategy first!

First off, before you go and invest anywhere or build anything, I urge you to think strategy first, meaning your business has goals. You have things that you want to accomplish. Maybe those are revenue growth or conversions. Maybe they have to do with entering a new sphere of influence or pursuing a new topic. Maybe you're trying to launch a new product. Maybe you're trying to pivot the business or disrupt yourself, change with technology.

Whatever those business goals are, they should lead you to marketing goals, the things that marketing can help to accomplish in those business goals. From that should fall out a bunch of tactics and initiatives. It's only down here, in your marketing goals and tactical initiatives, that if online communities match up with those and serve your broader business goals, that you should actually make the investment. If not or if they fall below the line of, "Well, we can do three things that we think this year and do them well and this is thing number 4 or number 5 or number 10," it doesn't make the cut.

Online communities fit here if...

1. A passionate group of investment-worthy size exists in your topic.

So if, for example, you are targeting a new niche. I think Dave himself is in cryptocurrency. There's definitely a passionate group of people in that sphere, and it is probably of investment-worthy size. More recently, that investment has been a little rocky, but certainly a large size group, and if you are targeting that group, a community could be worthwhile. So we have passion. We have a group. They are of sizable investment.

2. You/your brand/your platform can provide unique value via a community that's superior to what's available elsewhere.

Second, you or your brand or your platform can provide not just value but unique value, unique value different from what other people are offering via a community superior to what's available elsewhere. Dave might himself say, "Well, there's a bunch of communities around crypto, but I believe that I can create X, which will be unique in ways Y and Z and will be preferable for these types of participants in this way." Maybe that's because it enables sharing in certain ways. Maybe it enables transparency of certain kinds. Maybe it's because it has no vested interest or ties to particular currencies or particular companies, whatever the case may be.

3. You're willing to invest for years with little return to build something of great long-term value.

And last but not least, you're willing to invest potentially for years, literally years without return or with very little return to build something of great long-term value. I think this is the toughest one. But communities are most similar in attribute to content marketing, where you're going to put in a ton of upfront effort and a lot of ongoing effort before you're going to see that return. Most of the time, most communities fail because the people behind them were not willing to make the investments to build them up, or they made other types of mistakes. We'll talk about that in a second.

Two options: Build your own platform, or participate in an existing community

You have two options here. First, you can build your own platform. Second, you can participate in an existing community. My advice on this is never do number one without first spending a bunch of time in number two.

So if you are unfamiliar with the community platforms that already exist in interior decorating or in furniture design or in cryptocurrency or in machining tools or in men's fashion, first participate in the communities that already exist in the space you're targeting so that you are very familiar with the players, the platforms, the options, and opportunities. Otherwise, you will never know whether it's an investment-worthy size, a passionate group. You'll never know how or whether you can provide unique value. It's just going to be too tough to get those things down. So always invest in the existing communities before you do the other one.

1. Build your own platform

Potential structures

Let's talk quickly about building your own platform, and then we'll talk about investing in others. If you're deciding that what matches your goals best and your strategy best is to build your own platform, there are numerous opportunities. You can do it sort of halfway, where you build on someone else's existing platform, for example creating your own subreddit or your own Facebook or LinkedIn group, which essentially uses another community's platform, but you're the owner and administrator of that community.

Or you can actually build your own forum or discussion board, your own blog and comments section, your own Q&A board, your own content leaderboard, like Hacker News or like Dharmesh and I did with Inbound.org, where we essentially built a Reddit or Hacker News-like clone for marketers.

Those investments are going to be much more severe than a Facebook group or a Twitter hashtag, a Twitter chat or a LinkedIn group, or those kinds of things, but you want to compare the benefits and drawbacks. In each, there are some of each.

Benefits & drawbacks

So forums and discussions, those are going to have user-generated content, which is a beautiful thing because it scales non-linearly with your investment. So if you build up a community of people who are on an ongoing basis creating topics and answering those topics and talking about those things in either a Q&A board or a forum discussion or a content leaderboard, what's great is you get that benefit, that SEO benefit of having a bunch of longtail, hopefully high-quality content and discussion you're going to need to do.

Mostly, what you're going to worry about is drawbacks like the graveyard effect, where the community appears empty and so no one participates and maybe it drags down Google's perception of your site because you have a bunch of low quality or thin pages, or people leave a bunch of spam in there or they become communities filled with hate groups, and the internet can devolve very quickly, as you can see from a lot of online communities.

Whatever you're doing, blog and comments, you get SEO benefits, you get thought leadership benefits, but it requires regular content investments. You don't get the UGC benefit quite like you would with a forum or a discussion. With Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, Twitter hashtags, it's easy to build, but there's no SEO benefit, usually very little to none.

With a Q&A board, you do get UGC and SEO. You still have those same moderation and graveyard risks.

With content leaderboards, they're very difficult to maintain, Inbound.org being a good example, where Dharmesh and I figured, "Hey, we can get this thing up and rolling," and then it turns out no, we need to hire people and maintain it and put in a bunch of effort and energy. But it can become a bookmarkable destination, which means you get repeat traffic over and over.

Whatever you're choosing, make sure you list out these benefits and then align these with the strategy, the marketing goal, the tactics and initiatives that flow from those. That's going to help determine how you should structure, whether you should structure your own community.

2. Participate in existing communities

Size/reach

The other option is participating in existing ones, places like Quora, subreddits, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, existing forums. Same thing, you're going to take these. Well, we can participate on an existing forum, and we can see that the size and reach is on average about nine responses per thread, about three threads per day, three new threads per day.

Benefits & drawbacks

The benefit is that it can build up our thought leadership and our recognition among this group of influential people in our field. The drawback is it builds our competitor's content, because this forum is going to be ranking for all those things. They own the platform. It's not our owned platform. Then we align that with our goals and initiatives.

Four bits of advice

1. If you build, build for SEO + owned channels. Don't create on someone else's platform.

So I'm not going to dive through all of these, but I do want to end on some bits of advice. So I mentioned already make sure you invest in other people's communities before you build your own. I would also add to that if you're going to build something, if you're going to build your own, I would generally rule these things out — LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Twitter hashtag groups. Why? Because those other platforms control them, and then they can change them at any time and your reach can change on those platforms. I would urge you to build for SEO and for an owned media channel.

2. Start with a platform that doesn't lose credibility when empty (e.g. blog > forum).

Second, I'd start with a platform that doesn't lose credibility when it's empty. That is to say if you know you want to build a forum or a content leaderboard or a Q&A board, make it something where you know that you and your existing team can do all the work to create a non-graveyard-like environment initially. That could mean limiting it to only a few sections in a forum, or all the Q&A goes in one place as opposed to there are many subforums that have zero threads and zero comments and zero replies, or every single thing that's posted, we know that at least two of us internally will respond to them, that type of stuff.

3. Don't use a subdomain or separate domain.

Third, if you can, avoid using a subdomain and definitely don't use a separate domain. Subdomains inherit some of the ranking ability and benefits of the primary domain they're on. Separate domains tend to inherit almost none.

4. Before you build, gather a willing, excited crew via an email group who will be your first active members.

Last, but not least, before you build, gather a willing, excited group of people, your crew, hopefully via an email group — this has served me extremely well — who will be those first active members.

So if you're building something in the crypto space, as maybe Dave is considering, I might say to him, hey, find those 10 or 15 or 20 people who are in your world, who you talk to online already, create an email group, all be chatting with each other and contributing. Then start your Q&A board, or then start your blog and your comments section, or then start your forum, what have you. If you can seed it with that initial passionate group, you will get over a lot of the big hurdles around building or rolling your own community system.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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February 22, 2018 at 10:22PM

MozCon 2018: Making the Case for the Conference (& All the Snacks!)

Posted by Danielle_Launders

You’ve got that conference looming on the horizon. You want to go — you’ve spent the past few years desperately following hashtags on Twitter, memorizing catchy quotes, zooming in on grainy snapshots of a deck, and furiously downloading anything and everything you can scour from Slideshare.

But there’s a problem: conferences cost money, and your boss won’t even approve a Keurig in the communal kitchen, much less a ticket to a three-day-long learning sesh complete with its own travel and lodging expenses.

What’s an education-hungry digital marketer to do?

How do you convince your boss to send you to the conference of your dreams?

First of all, you gather evidence to make your case.

There are a plethora of excellent reasons why attending conferences is good for your career (and your bottom line). In digital marketing, we exist in the ever-changing tech space, hurtling toward the future at breakneck speed and often missing the details of the scenery along the way.

A good SEO conference will keep you both on the edge of your seat and on the cutting-edge of what’s new and noteworthy in our industry, highlighting some of the most important and impactful things your work depends on.

A good SEO conference will flip a switch for you, will trigger that lightbulb moment that empowers you and levels you up as both a marketer and a critical thinker.

If that doesn’t paint a beautiful enough picture to convince the folks that hold the credit card, though, there are also some great statistics and resources available:

HubSpot's statistics showing the value of meeting face-to-face and networking

Rand's excellent deep-dive into the reasons for and against attending marketing conferences

The ROI of investing in employee education

Specifically, we're talking about MozCon

Yes, that MozCon!

Let’s just take a moment to address the elephant in the room here: you all know why we wrote this post. We want to see your smiling face in the audience at MozCon this July (the 9th–11th, if you were wondering). There are a few specific benefits worth mentioning:

Speakers and content: Our speakers bring their A-game each year. We work with them to bring the best content and latest trends to the stage to help set you up for a year of success.

Videos to share with your team: About a month or so after the conference, we’ll send you a link to professionally edited videos of every presentation at the conference. Your colleagues won’t get to partake in the morning Top Pot doughnuts or Starbucks coffee, but they will get a chance to learn everything you did, for free.

Great food onsite: We understand that conference food isn’t typically worth mentioning, but at MozCon you can expect snacks from local Seattle vendors - in the past this includes Trophy cupcakes, KuKuRuZa popcorn, Starbucks’ Seattle Reserve cold brew, and did we mention bacon at breakfast? Let’s not forget the bacon.

Swag: Expect to go home with a one-of-a-kind Roger Mozbot, a super-soft t-shirt from American Apparel, and swag worth keeping. We’ve given away Roger Legos, Moleskine notebooks, phone chargers, and have even had vending machines with additional swag in case you didn’t get enough.

Networking: You work hard taking notes, learning new insights, and digesting all of that knowledge — that’s why we think you deserve a little fun in the evenings to chat with fellow attendees. Each night after the conference, we'll offer a different networking event that adds to the value you'll get from your day of education.

A supportive network after the fact: Our MozCon Facebook group is incredibly active, and it’s grown to have a life of its own — marketers ask one another SEO questions, post jobs, look for and offer advice and empathy, and more. It’s a great place to find TAGFEE support and camaraderie long after the conference itself has ended.

Discounts for subscribers and groups: Moz Pro subscribers get a whopping $500 off their ticket cost (even if you're on a free 30-day trial!) and there are discounts for groups as well, so make sure to take advantage of savings where you can!

Ticket cost: At MozCon our goal is to break even, which means we invest all of your ticket price back into you. Check out the full breakdown below:

Can you tell we're serious about the snacks?

You can check out videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers. We’ll also be putting out a call for community speaker pitches in April, so if you’ve been thinking about breaking into the speaking circuit, it could be an amazing opportunity — keep an eye on the blog for your chance to submit a pitch.

If you’ve ever seriously considered attending an SEO conference like MozCon, now’s the time to do it. You’ll save actual hundreds of dollars by grabbing subscriber or group pricing while you can (think of all the Keurigs you could get for that communal kitchen!), and you'll be bound for an unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the three days you spend in Seattle.

Grab your ticket to MozCon!

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February 25, 2018 at 10:23PM

Google's Walled Garden: Are We Being Pushed Out of Our Own Digital Backyards?

Posted by Dr-Pete

Early search engines were built on an unspoken transaction — a pact between search engines and website owners — you give us your data, and we'll send you traffic. While Google changed the game of how search engines rank content, they honored the same pact in the beginning. Publishers, who owned their own content and traditionally were fueled by subscription revenue, operated differently. Over time, they built walls around their gardens to keep visitors in and, hopefully, keep them paying.

Over the past six years, Google has crossed this divide, building walls around their content and no longer linking out to the sources that content was originally built on. Is this the inevitable evolution of search, or has Google forgotten their pact with the people's whose backyards their garden was built on?

I don't think there's an easy answer to this question, but the evolution itself is undeniable. I'm going to take you through an exhaustive (yes, you may need a sandwich) journey of the ways that Google is building in-search experiences, from answer boxes to custom portals, and rerouting paths back to their own garden.

I. The Knowledge Graph

In May of 2012, Google launched the Knowledge Graph. This was Google's first large-scale attempt at providing direct answers in search results, using structured data from trusted sources. One incarnation of the Knowledge Graph is Knowledge Panels, which return rich information about known entities. Here's part of one for actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (note: this image is truncated)...

The Knowledge Graph marked two very important shifts. First, Google created deep in-search experiences. As Knowledge Panels have evolved, searchers have access to rich information and answers without ever going to an external site. Second, Google started to aggressively link back to their own resources. It's easy to overlook those faded blue links, but here's the full Knowledge Panel with every link back to a Google property marked...

Including links to Google Images, that's 33 different links back to Google. These two changes — self-contained in-search experiences and aggressive internal linking — represent a radical shift in the nature of search engines, and that shift has continued and expanded over the past six years.

More recently, Google added a sharing icon (on the right, directly below the top images). This provides a custom link that allows people to directly share rich Google search results as content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and by email. Google no longer views these pages as a path to a destination. Search results are the destination.

The Knowledge Graph also spawned Knowledge Cards, more broadly known as "answer boxes." Take any fact in the panel above and pose it as a question, and you're likely to get a Knowledge Card. For example, "How old is Chiwetel Ejiofor?" returns the following...

For many searchers, this will be the end of their journey. Google has answered their question and created a self-contained experience. Note that this example also contains links to additional Google searches.

In 2015, Google launched Medical Knowledge Panels. These gradually evolved into fully customized content experiences created with partners in the medical field. Here's one for "cardiac arrest" (truncated)...

Note the fully customized design (these images were created specifically for these panels), as well as the multi-tabbed experience. It is now possible to have a complete, customized content experience without ever leaving Google.

II. Live Results

In some specialized cases, Google uses private data partnerships to create customized answer boxes. Google calls these "Live Results." You've probably seen them many times now on weather, sports and stock market searches. Here's one for "Seattle weather"...

For the casual information seeker, these are self-contained information experiences with most or all of what we care about. Live Results are somewhat unique in that, unlike the general knowledge in the Knowledge Graph, each partnership represents a disruption to an industry.

These partnerships have branched out over time into even more specialized results. Consider, for example, "Snoqualmie ski conditions"...

Sports results are incredibly disruptive, and Google has expanded and enriched these results quite a bit over the past couple of years. Here's one for "Super Bowl 2018"...

Note that clicking any portion of this Live Result leads to a customized portal on Google that can no longer be called a "search result" in any traditional sense (more on portals later). Special sporting events, such as the 2018 Winter Olympics, have even more rich features. Here are some custom carousels for "Olympic snowboarding results"...

Note that these are multi-column carousels that ultimately lead to dozens of smaller cards. All of these cards click to more Google search results. This design choice may look strange on desktop and marks another trend — Google's shift to mobile-first design. Here's the same set of results on a Google Pixel phone...

Here, the horizontal scrolling feels more intuitive, and the carousel is the full-width of the screen, instead of feeling like a free-floating design element. These features are not only rich experiences on mobile screens, but dominate mobile results much more than they do two-column desktop results.

III. Carousels

Speaking of carousels, Google has been experimenting with a variety of horizontal result formats, and many of them are built around driving traffic back to Google searches and properties. One of the older styles of carousels is the list format, which runs across the top of desktop searches (above other results). Here's one for "Seattle Sounders roster"...

Each player links to a new search result with that player in a Knowledge Panel. This carousel expands to the width of the screen (which is unusual, since Google's core desktop design is fixed-width). On my 1920x1080 screen, you can see 14 players, each linking to a new Google search, and the option to scroll for more...

This type of list carousel covers a wide range of topics, from "cat breeds" to "types of cheese." Here's an interesting one for "best movies of 1984." The image is truncated, but the full result includes drop-downs to select movie genres and other years...

Once again, each result links to a new search with a Knowledge Panel dedicated to that movie. Another style of carousel is the multi-row horizontal scroller, like this one for "songs by Nirvana"...

In this case, not only does each entry click to a new search result, but many of them have prominent featured videos at the top of the left column (more on that later). My screen shows at least partial information for 24 songs, all representing in-Google links above the traditional search results...

A search for "laptops" (a very competitive, commercial term, unlike the informational searches above) has a number of interesting features. At the bottom of the search is this "Refine by brand" carousel...

Clicking on one of these results leads to a new search with the brand name prepended (e.g. "Apple laptops"). The same search shows this "Best of" carousel...

The smaller "Mentioned in:" links go to articles from the listed publishers. The main, product links go to a Google search result with a product panel. Here's what I see when I click on "Dell XPS 13 9350" (image is truncated)...

This entity live in the right-hand column and looks like a Knowledge Panel, but is commercial in nature (notice the "Sponsored" label in the upper right). Here, Google is driving searchers directly into a paid/advertising channel.

IV. Answers & Questions

As Google realized that the Knowledge Graph would never scale at the pace of the wider web, they started to extract answers directly from their index (i.e. all of the content in the world, or at least most of it). This led to what they call "Featured Snippets", a special kind of answer box. Here's one for "Can hamsters eat cheese?" (yes, I have a lot of cheese-related questions)...

Featured Snippets are an interesting hybrid. On the one hand, they're an in-search experience (in this case, my basic question has been answered before I've even left Google). On the other hand, they do link out to the source site and are a form of organic search result.

Featured Snippets also power answers on Google Assistant and Google Home. If I ask Google Home the same question about hamsters, I hear the following:

On the website TheHamsterHouse.com, they say "Yes, hamsters can eat cheese! Cheese should not be a significant part of your hamster's diet and you should not feed cheese to your hamster too often. However, feeding cheese to your hamster as a treat, perhaps once per week in small quantities, should be fine."

You'll see the answer is identical to the Featured Snippet shown above. Note the attribution (which I've bolded) — a voice search can't link back to the source, posing unique challenges. Google does attempt to provide attribution on Google Home, but as they use answers extracted from the web more broadly, we may see the way original sources are credited change depending on the use case and device.

This broader answer engine powers another type of result, called "Related Questions" or the "People Also Ask" box. Here's one on that same search...

These questions are at least partially machine-generated, which is why the grammar can read a little oddly — that's a fascinating topic for another time. If you click on "What can hamsters eat list?" you get what looks a lot like a Featured Snippet (and links to an outside source)...

Notice two other things that are going on here. First, Google has included a link to search results for the question you clicked on (see the purple arrow). Second, the list has expanded. The two questions at the end are new. Let's click "What do hamsters like to do for fun?" (because how can I resist?)...

This opens up a second answer, a second link to a new Google search, and two more answers. You can continue this to your heart's content. What's especially interesting is that this isn't just some static list that expands as you click on it. The new questions are generated based on your interactions, as Google tries to understand your intent and shape your journey around it.

My colleague, Britney Muller, has done some excellent research on the subject and has taken to calling these infinite PAAs. They're probably not quite infinite — eventually, the sun will explode and consume the Earth. Until then, they do represent a massively recursive in-Google experience.

V. Videos & Movies

One particularly interesting type of Featured Snippet is the Featured Video result. Search for "umbrella" and you should see a panel like this in the top-left column (truncated):

This is a unique hybrid — it has Knowledge Panel features (that link back to Google results), but it also has an organic-style link and large video thumbnail. While it appears organic, all of the Featured Videos we've seen in the wild have come from YouTube (Vevo is a YouTube partner), which essentially means this is an in-Google experience. These Featured Videos consume a lot of screen real-estate and appear even on commercial terms, like Rihanna's "umbrella" (shown here) or Kendrick Lamar's "swimming pools".

Movie searches yield a rich array of features, from Live Results for local showtimes to rich Knowledge Panels. Last year, Google completely redesigned their mobile experience for movie results, creating a deep in-search experience. Here's a mobile panel for "Black Panther"...

Notice the tabs below the title. You can navigate within this panel to a wealth of information, including cast members and photos. Clicking on any cast member goes to a new search about that actor/actress.

Although the search results eventually continue below this panel, the experience is rich, self-contained, and incredibly disruptive to high-ranking powerhouses in this space, including IMDB. You can even view trailers from the panel...

On my phone, Google displayed 10 videos (at roughly two per screen), and nine of those were links to YouTube. Given YouTube's dominance, it's difficult to say if Google is purposely favoring their own properties, but the end result is the same — even seemingly "external" clicks are often still Google-owned clicks.

VI. Local Results

A similar evolution has been happening in local results. Take the local 3-pack — here's one on a search for "Seattle movie theaters"...

Originally, the individual business links went directly to each of those business's websites. As of the past year or two, these instead go to local panels on Google Maps, like this one...

On mobile, these local panels stand out even more, with prominent photos, tabbed navigation and easy access to click-to-call and directions.

In certain industries, local packs have additional options to run a search within a search. Here's a pack for Chicago taco restaurants, where you can filter results (from the broader set of Google Maps results) by rating, price, or hours...

Once again, we have a fully embedded search experience. I don't usually vouch for any of the businesses in my screenshots, but I just had the pork belly al pastor at Broken English Taco Pub and it was amazing (this is my personal opinion and in no way reflects the taco preferences of Moz, its employees, or its lawyers).

The hospitality industry has been similarly affected. Search for an individual hotel, like "Kimpton Alexis Seattle" (one of my usual haunts when visiting the home office), and you'll get a local panel like the one below. Pardon the long image, but I wanted you to have the full effect...

This is an incredible blend of local business result, informational panel, and commercial result, allowing you direct access to booking information. It's not just organic local results that have changed, though. Recently, Google started offering ads in local packs, primarily on mobile results. Here's one for "tax attorneys"...

Unlike traditional AdWords ads, these results don't go directly to the advertiser's website. Instead, like standard pack results, they go to a Google local panel. Here's what the mobile version looks like...

In addition, Google has launched specialized ads for local service providers, such as plumbers and electricians. These appear carousel-style on desktop, such as this one for "plumbers in Seattle"...

Unlike AdWords advertisers, local service providers buy into a specialized program and these local service ads click to a fully customized Google sub-site, which brings us to the next topic — portals.

VII. Custom Portals

Some Google experiences have become so customized that they operate as stand-alone portals. If you click on a local service ad, you get a Google-owned portal that allows you to view the provider, check to see if they can handle your particular problem in your zip code, and (if not) view other, relevant providers...

You've completely left the search result at this point, and can continue your experience fully within this Google property. These local service ads have now expanded to more than 30 US cities.

In 2016, Google launched their own travel guides. Run a search like "things to do in Seattle" and you'll see a carousel-style result like this one...

Click on "Seattle travel guide" and you'll be taken to a customized travel portal for the city of Seattle. The screen below is a desktop result — note the increasing similarity to rich mobile experiences.

Once again, you've been taken to a complete Google experience outside of search results.

Last year, Google jumped into the job-hunting game, launching a 3-pack of job listings covering all major players in this space, like this one for "marketing jobs in Seattle"...

Click on any job listing, and you'll be taken to a separate Google jobs portal. Let's try Facebook...

From here, you can view other listings, refine your search, and even save jobs and set up alerts. Once again, you've jumped from a specialized Google result to a completely Google-controlled experience.

Like hotels, Google has dabbled in flight data and search for years. If I search for "flights to Seattle," Google will automatically note my current location and offer me a search interface and a few choices...

Click on one of these choices and you're taken to a completely redesigned Google Flights portal...

Once again, you can continue your journey completely within this Google-owned portal, never returning back to your original search. This is a trend we can expect to continue for the foreseeable future.

VIII. Hard Questions

If I've bludgeoned you with examples, then I apologize, but I want to make it perfectly clear that this is not a case of one or two isolated incidents. Google is systematically driving more clicks from search to new searches, in-search experiences, and other Google owned properties. This leads to a few hard questions...

Why is Google doing this?

Right about now, you're rushing to the comments section to type "For the money!" along with a bunch of other words that may include variations of my name, "sheeple," and "dumb-ass." Yes, Google is a for-profit company that is motivated in part by making money. Moz is a for-profit company that is motivated in part by making money. Stating the obvious isn't insight.

In some cases, the revenue motivation is clear. Suggesting the best laptops to searchers and linking those to shopping opportunities drives direct dollars. In traditional walled gardens, publishers are trying to produce more page-views, driving more ad impressions. Is Google driving us to more searches, in-search experiences, and portals to drive more ad clicks?

The answer isn't entirely clear. Knowledge Graph links, for example, usually go to informational searches with few or no ads. Rich experiences like Medical Knowledge Panels and movie results on mobile have no ads at all. Some portals have direct revenues (local service providers have to pay for inclusion), but others, like travel guides, have no apparent revenue model (at least for now).

Google is competing directly with Facebook for hours in our day — while Google has massive traffic and ad revenue, people on average spend much more time on Facebook. Could Google be trying to drive up their time-on-site metrics? Possibly, but it's unclear what this accomplishes beyond being a vanity metric to make investors feel good.

Looking to the long game, keeping us on Google and within Google properties does open up the opportunity for additional advertising and new revenue streams. Maybe Google simply realizes that letting us go so easily off to other destinations is leaving future money on the table.

Is this good for users?

I think the most objective answer I can give is — it depends. As a daily search user, I've found many of these developments useful, especially on mobile. If I can get an answer at a glance or in an in-search entity, such as a Live Result for weather or sports, or the phone number and address of a local restaurant, it saves me time and the trouble of being familiar with the user interface of thousands of different websites. On the other hand, if I feel that I'm being run in circles through search after search or am being given fewer and fewer choices, that can feel manipulative and frustrating.

Is this fair to marketers?

Let's be brutally honest — it doesn't matter. Google has no obligation to us as marketers. Sites don't deserve to rank and get traffic simply because we've spent time and effort or think we know all the tricks. I believe our relationship with Google can be symbiotic, but that's a delicate balance and always in flux.

In some cases, I do think we have to take a deep breath and think about what's good for our customers. As a marketer, local packs linking directly to in-Google properties is alarming — we measure our success based on traffic. However, these local panels are well-designed, consistent, and have easy access to vital information like business addresses, phone numbers, and hours. If these properties drive phone calls and foot traffic, should we discount their value simply because it's harder to measure?

Is this fair to businesses?

This is a more interesting question. I believe that, like other search engines before it, Google made an unwritten pact with website owners — in exchange for our information and the privilege to monetize that information, Google would send us traffic. This is not altruism on Google's part. The vast majority of Google's $95B in 2017 advertising revenue came from search advertising, and that advertising would have no audience without organic search results. Those results come from the collective content of the web.

As Google replaces that content and sends more clicks back to themselves, I do believe that the fundamental pact that Google's success was built on is gradually being broken. Google's garden was built on our collective property, and it does feel like we're slowly being herded out of our own backyards.

We also have to consider the deeper question of content ownership. If Google chooses to pursue private data partnerships — such as with Live Results or the original Knowledge Graph — then they own that data, or at least are leasing it fairly. It may seem unfair that they're displacing us, but they have the right to do so.

Much of the Knowledge Graph is built on human-curated sources such as Wikidata (i.e. Wikipedia). While Google undoubtedly has an ironclad agreement with Wikipedia, what about the people who originally contributed and edited that content? Would they have done so knowing their content could ultimately displace other content creators (including possibly their own websites) in Google results? Are those contributors willing participants in this experiment? The question of ownership isn't as easy as it seems.

If Google extracts the data we provide as part of the pact, such as with Featured Snippets and People Also Ask results, and begins to wall off those portions of the garden, then we have every right to protest. Even the concept of a partnership isn't always black-and-white. Some job listing providers I've spoken with privately felt pressured to enter Google's new jobs portal (out of fear of cutting off the paths to their own gardens), but they weren't happy to see the new walls built.

Google is also trying to survive. Search has to evolve, and it has to answer questions and fit a rapidly changing world of device formats, from desktop to mobile to voice. I think the time has come, though, for Google to stop and think about the pact that built their nearly hundred-billion-dollar ad empire.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/02/googles-walled-garden-are-we-being.html
February 26, 2018 at 10:18PM

How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer

Posted by Daniel_Marks

Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.

Is it just normal noise?

Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:

A.) Do you trust the data?

This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.

The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.

One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.

B.) Is this just normal variance?

Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.

For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).

SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.

Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.

Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop

1. Was there a recent Google algorithm update?

MozCast, Search Engine Land, and Moz’s algorithm history are all good resources here.

Expedia seems to have been penalized by a Penguin-related update.

If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.

2. Is the drop specific to any segment?

One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:

Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)

Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.)

But there will likely be plenty of other segments that might make sense to look at for your business (for example, product category).

3. Are you being penalized?

This is unlikely, but it’s also usually pretty quick to disprove. Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. If you’re not showing up, then you might be penalized.

Rap Genius (now Genius) was penalized for their link building tactics and didn’t show up for their own brand name on Google.

4. Did the drop coincide with a major site change?

This can take a thousand different forms (did you migrate a bunch of URLs, move to a different JavaScript framework, update all your title tags, remove your navigation menu, etc?). If this is the case, and you have a reasonable hypothesis for how this could impact SEO traffic, you might have found your culprit.

Hulu.com saw a pretty big drop in SEO traffic after changing their JavaScript framework.

5. Did you lose ranking share to a competitor?

There are a bunch of tools that can tell you if you’ve lost rankings to a competitor:

BrightEdge’s Share of Voice

GetStat’s Share of Voice

SEMrush’s Rankings Distribution Report

If you've lost rankings, it’s worth investigating the specific keywords that you’ve lost and figuring out if there’s a trend. Did your competitors launch a new page type? Did they add content to their pages? Do they have more internal links pointing to these pages than you do?

GetStat’s Share of Voice report lets you quickly see whether a competitor is usurping your rankings

It could also just be a new competitor that’s entered the scene.

6. Did it coincide with a rise in direct or dark traffic?

If so, make sure you haven’t changed how you’re classifying this traffic on your end. Otherwise, you might simply be re-classifying organic traffic as direct or dark traffic.

7. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about?

You can either use Moz’s SERP features report, or manually look at the SERPs you care about to figure out if their design has materially changed. It’s possible that Google is now answering many of your relevant queries directly in search results, put an image carousel on them, added a local pack, etc. — all of which would likely decrease your organic search traffic.

Celebritynetworth.com lost most of its SEO traffic because of rich snippets like the one above.

8. Is the drop specific to branded or unbranded traffic?

If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. You could also look at this data through AdWords if you spend on paid search. Another simple proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (for most sites, the majority of homepage traffic will be branded). If the drop is specific to branded search then it’s probably a brand problem, not an SEO problem.

9. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index?

Search Console’s Index Status Report will make it clear if you suddenly have way fewer URLs being indexed. If this is the case, you might be accidentally disallowing or noindexing URLs (through robots.txt, meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers).

Search Console’s Index Status Report is a quick way to make sure you’re not accidentally noindexing or disallowing large portions of your site.

10. Did your number of referring domains and/or links drop?

It’s possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.

Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you might have lost these links.

A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop.

11. Is SEM cannibalizing SEO traffic?

It’s possible that your paid search team has recently ramped up their spend and that this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check on this pretty quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.

To be clear, some level of cannibalization between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it’s still worth understanding how much of your traffic is being cannibalized and whether the incremental clicks your SEM campaigns are driving outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually do outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).

If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the (slightly extreme) one above, then SEM campaigns might be cannibalizing your SEO traffic.

That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop. Are there any other questions that you’ve found particularly helpful for diagnosing traffic drops? Let me know in the comments.

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February 28, 2018 at 10:32PM

The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that's destined to fail isn't a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don't see success due to the same issue: they aren't known to their audiences. There's no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they're going into, new markets and audiences they're addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.

Here's how it usually goes. You've got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they're like, "Hey, we have this great new product. Let's spread the word." So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.

The marketer is like, "Okay, yeah, I'll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions."

Then a few months later, you basically get this. "How's that paid ad campaign going?" "Well, not so good. I have bad news."

The cycle

Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company's campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You're probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.

Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it's a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you're naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don't make it here. They don't make it there. Why is that?

Why does this happen?

Well, before we address that, let's talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they're shown to far fewer people.

So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because...

The audience that you're trying to reach hasn't heard of you before. They don't know who you are.

They don't know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don't click. They don't click. They don't buy. They don't share. They don't like.

They don't do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.

I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don't need a previously existing brand association. I've seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don't expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they're trying to discover them.

So it's not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I'm calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.

The solution

There's only one solution and it's not pretty. The solution is...

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to...

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google's retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don't do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don't want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You're going to be a lot happier.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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March 01, 2018 at 10:47PM

Declining Organic Traffic? How to Tell if it’s a Tracking or Optimization Issue

Posted by andrewchoco

Picture this scenario. You’re a new employee that has just been brought in to a struggling marketing department (or an agency brought on to help recover lost numbers). You get access to Google Analytics, and see something like this:

(Actual screenshot of the client I audited)

This can generate two types of emotional response: excitement or fear (or both). The steady decline in organic traffic excites you because you have so many tactics and ideas that you think can save this company from spiraling downward out of control. But there’s also the fear that these tactics wont be enough to correct the course.

Regardless of whether these new tactics would work or not, it’s important to understand the history of the account and determine not only what is happening, but why.

The company may have an idea of why the traffic is declining (i.e. competitors have come in and made ranking for keywords much harder, or they did a website redesign and have never recovered).

Essentially, this boils down to two things: 1) either you’re struggling with organic optimization, or 2) something was off with your tracking in Google Analytics, has since been corrected, and hasn’t been caught.

In this article, I’ll go over an audit I did for one of my clients to help determine if the decline we saw in organic traffic was due to actual poor SEO performance, an influx in competitors, tracking issues, or a combination of these things.

I’ll be breaking it down into five different areas of investigation:

Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017

Did the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 change drastically in 2017? Did we lose rankings and therefore lose organic traffic?

Top organic landing pages from 2015–2017

Are the top ranking organic landing pages the same currently as they were in 2015? Are we missing any pages due to a website redesign?

On-page metric

Did something happen to the site speed / bounce rate / page views etc.

SEMrush/Moz keyword, traffic, and domain authority data

Looking at the SEMrush organic traffic cost metric as well as Moz metrics like Domain Authority and competitors.

Goal completions

Did our conversion numbers stay consistent throughout the traffic drop? Or did the conversions drop in correlation with the traffic drop?

By the end of this post, my goal is that you’ll be able to replicate this audit to determine exactly what’s causing your organic traffic decline and how to get back on the right track.

Let’s dive in!

Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017

This was my initial starting point for my audit. I started with this specifically because the most obvious answer, for a decline in traffic is a decline in keyword rankings.

I wanted to look at what keywords we were ranking for in 2015 to see if we significantly dropped in the rankings or if the search volume had dropped. If the company you’re auditing has had a long-running Moz account, start by looking at the keyword rankings from the initial start of the decline, compared to current keyword rankings.

I exported keyword data from both SEMrush and Moz, and looked specifically at the ranking changes of core keywords.

March was a particularly strong month across the board, so I narrowed it down and exported the keyword rankings in:

March 2015

March 2016

March 2017

December 2017 (so I could get the most current rankings)

Once the keywords were exported, I went in and highlighted in red the keywords that we were ranking for in 2015 (and driving traffic from) that we were no longer ranking for in 2017. I also highlighted in yellow the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 that were still ranking in 2017.

2015 keywords:

2017 keywords:

(Brand-related queries and URLs are blurred out for anonymity)

One thing that immediately stood out: in 2015, this company was ranking for five keywords, including the word “free.” They have since changed their offering, so it made sense that in 2017, we weren’t ranking for those keywords.

After removing the free queries, we pulled the “core” keywords to look at their differences.

March 2015 core keywords:

Appointment scheduling software: position 9

Online appointment scheduling: position 11

Online appointment scheduling: position 9

Online scheduling software: position 9

Online scheduler: position 9

Online scheduling: position 13

December 2017 core keywords:

Appointment scheduler: position 11

Appointment scheduling software: position 10

Online schedule: position 6

Online appointment scheduler: position 11

Online appointment scheduling: position 12

Online scheduling software: position 12

Online scheduling tool: position 10

Online scheduling: position 15

SaaS appointment scheduling: position 2

There were no particular red flags here. While some of the keywords have moved down 1–2 spots, we had new ones jump up. These small changes in movement didn’t explain the nearly 30–40% drop in organic traffic. I checked this off my list and moved on to organic landing pages.

Top organic landing page changes

Since the dive into keyword rankings didn’t provide the answer for the decline in traffic, the next thing I looked at were the organic landing pages. I knew this client had switched over CMS systems in early 2017, and had done a few small redesign projects the past three years.

After exporting our organic landing pages for 2015, 2016, and 2017, we compared the top ten (by organic sessions) and got the following results.

2015 top organic landing pages:

2016 top organic landing pages:

2017 top organic landing pages:

Because of their redesign, you can see that the subfolders changed between 2015/2016 to 2017. What really got my attention, however, is the /get-started page. In 2015/2016, the Get Started page accounted for nearly 16% of all organic traffic. In 2017, the Get Started page was nowhere to be found.

If you run into this problem and notice there are pages missing from your current top organic pages, a great way to uncover why is to use the Wayback Machine. It's a great tool that allows you to see what a web page looked like in the past.

When we looked at the /get-started URL in the Wayback Machine, we noticed something pretty interesting:

In 2015, their /get-started page also acted as their login page. When people were searching on Google for “[Company Name] login,” this page was ranking, bringing in a significant amount of organic traffic.

Their current setup sends logins to a subdomain that doesn’t have a GA code (as it’s strictly used as a portal to the actual application).

That helped explain some of the organic traffic loss, but knowing that this client had gone through a few website redesigns, I wanted to make sure that all redirects were done properly. Regardless of whether or not your traffic has changed, if you’ve recently done a website redesign where you’re changing URLs, it’s smart to look at your top organic landing pages from before the redesign and double check to make sure they’re redirecting to the correct pages.

While this helped explain some of the traffic loss, the next thing we looked at was the on-page metrics to see if we could spot any obvious tracking issues.

Comparing on-page engagement metrics

Looking at the keyword rankings and organic landing pages provided a little bit of insight into the organic traffic loss, but it was nothing definitive. Because of this, I moved to the on-page metrics for further clarity. As a disclaimer, when I talk about on-page metrics, I’m talking about bounce rate, page views, average page views per session, and time on site.

Looking at the same top organic pages, I compared the on-page engagement metrics.

2015 on-page metrics:

2016 on-page metrics:

2017 on-page metrics:

While the overall engagement metrics changed slightly, the biggest and most interesting discrepancy I saw was in the bounce rates for the home page and Get Started page.

According to a number of different studies (like this one, this one, or even this one), the average bounce rate for a B2B site is around 40–60%. Seeing the home page with a bounce rate under 20% was definitely a red flag.

This led me to look into some other metrics as well. I compared key metrics between 2015 and 2017, and was utterly confused by the findings:

Looking at the organic sessions (overall), we saw a decrease of around 80,000 sessions, or 27.93%.

Looking at the organic users (overall) we saw a similar number, with a decrease of around 38,000 users, or 25%.

When we looked at page views, however, we saw a much more drastic drop:

For the entire site, we saw a 50% decrease in pageviews, or a decrease of nearly 400,000 page views.

This didn’t make much sense, because even if we had those extra 38,000 users, and each user averaged roughly 2.49 pages per session (looking above), that would only account for, at most, 100,000 more page views. This left 300,000 page views unaccounted for.

This led me to believe that there was definitely some sort of tracking issue. The high number of page views and low bounce rate made me suspect that some users were being double counted.

However, to confirm these assumptions, I took a look at some external data sources.

Using SEMrush and Moz data to exclude user error

If you have a feeling that your tracking was messed up in previous years, a good way to confirm or deny this hypothesis is to check external sources like Moz and SEMrush.

Unfortunately, this particular client was fairly new, so as a result, their Moz campaign data wasn’t around during the high organic traffic times in 2015. However, if it was, a good place to start would be looking at the search visibility metric (as long as the primary keywords have stayed the same). If this metric has changed drastically over the years, it’s a good indicator that your organic rankings have slipped quite a bit.

Another good thing to look at is domain authority and core page authority. If your site has had a few redesigns, moved URLs, or anything like that, it’s important to make sure that the domain authority has carried over. It’s also important to look at the page authorities of your core pages. If these are much lower than when they were before the organic traffic slide, there’s a good chance your redirects weren’t done properly, and the page authority isn’t being carried over through those new domains.

If, like me, you don’t have Moz data that dates back far enough, a good thing to check is the organic traffic cost in SEMrush.

Organic traffic cost can change because of a few reasons:

Your site is ranking for more valuable keywords, making the organic traffic cost rise.

More competitors have entered the space, making the keywords you were ranking for more expensive to bid on.

Usually it’s a combination of both of these.

If our organic traffic really was steadily decreasing for the past 2 years, we’d likely see a similar trendline looking at our organic traffic cost. However, that’s not what we saw.

In March of 2015, the organic traffic cost of my client’s site was $14,300.

In March of 2016, the organic traffic cost was $22,200

In December of 2017, the organic traffic cost spiked all the way up to $69,200. According to SEMrush, we also saw increases in keywords and traffic.

Looking at all of this external data re-affirmed the assumption that something must have been off with our tracking.

However, as a final check, I went back to internal metrics to see if the conversion data had decreased at a similar rate as the organic traffic.

Analyzing and comparing conversion metrics

This seemed like a natural final step into uncovering the mystery in this traffic drop. After all, it’s not organic traffic that's going to profit your business (although it’s a key component). The big revenue driver is goal completions and form fills.

This was a fairly simple procedure. I went into Google Analytics to compare goal completion numbers and goal completion conversion rates over the past three years.

If your company is like my client’s, there’s a good chance you’re taking advantage of the maximum 20 goal completions that can be simultaneously tracked in Analytics. However, to make things easier and more consistent (since goal completions can change), I looked at only buyer intent conversions. In this case it was Enterprise, Business, and Personal edition form fills, as well as Contact Us form fills.

If you’re doing this on your own site, I would recommend doing the same thing. Gated content goal completions usually have a natural shelf life, and this natural slowdown in goal completions can skew the data. I’d look at the most important conversion on your site (usually a contact us or a demo form) and go strictly off those numbers.

For my client, you can see those goal completion numbers below:

Goal completion name

2015

2016

2017

Contact Us

579

525

478

Individual Edition

3,372

2,621

3,420

Business Edition

1,147

1,437

1,473

Enterprise Edition

1,178

1,053

502

Total

6,276

5,636

5,873

Conversion rates:

Goal completion name

2015

2016

2017

Contact Us

0.22%

0.22%

0.23%

Individual Edition

1.30%

1.09%

1.83%

Business Edition

0.46%

0.60%

0.76%

Enterprise Edition

0.46%

0.44%

0.29%

Average

0.61%

0.58%

0.77%

This was pretty interesting. Although there was clearly fluctuation in the goal completions and conversion rates, there were no differences that made sense with our nearly 40,000 user drop from 2015 to 2016 to 2017.

All of these findings further confirmed that we were chasing an inaccurate goal. In fact, we spent the first three months working together to try and get back a 40% loss that, quite frankly, was never even there in the first place.

Tying everything together and final thoughts

For this particular case, we had to go down all five of these roads in order to reach the conclusion that we did: Our tracking was off in the past.

However, this may not be the case for your company or your clients. You may start by looking at keyword rankings, and realize that you’re no longer ranking on the first page for ten of your core keywords. If that’s the case, you quickly discovered your issue, and your game plan should be investing in your core pages to help get them ranking again for these core keywords.

If your goal completions are way down (by a similar percentage as your traffic), that’s also a good clue that your declining traffic numbers are correct.

If you’ve looked at all of these metrics and still can’t seem to figure out the reasoning for the decrease and you’re blindly trying tactics and struggling to crawl your way back up, this is a great checklist to go through to confirm the ominous question of tracking issue or optimization issue.

If you’re having a similar issue as me, I’m hoping this post helps you get to the root of the problem quickly, and gets you one step closer to create realistic organic traffic goals for the future!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger http://loseweightfas0.blogspot.com/2018/03/declining-organic-traffic-how-to-tell.html
March 04, 2018 at 10:10PM

The Website Migration Guide: SEO Strategy & Process

Posted by Modestos

What is a site migration?

A site migration is a term broadly used by SEO professionals to describe any event whereby a website undergoes substantial changes in areas that can significantly affect search engine visibility — typically substantial changes to the site structure, content, coding, site performance, or UX.

Google’s documentation on site migrations doesn’t cover them in great depth and downplays the fact that so often they result in significant traffic and revenue loss, which can last from a few weeks to several months — depending on the extent search engine ranking signals have been affected, as well as how long it may take the affected business to rollout a successful recovery plan.

Quick access links

Site migration examples
Site migration types
Common site migration pitfalls
Site migration process
1. Scope & planning
2. Pre-launch preparation
3. Pre-launch testing
4. Launch day actions
5. Post-launch testing
6. Performance review
Appendix: Useful tools

Site migration examples

The following section discusses how both successful and unsuccessful site migrations look and explains why it is 100% possible to come out of a site migration without suffering significant losses.

Debunking the “expected traffic drop” myth

Anyone who has been involved with a site migration has probably heard the widespread theory that it will result in de facto traffic and revenue loss. Even though this assertion holds some truth for some very specific cases (i.e. moving from an established domain to a brand new one) it shouldn’t be treated as gospel. It is entirely possible to migrate without losing any traffic or revenue; you can even enjoy significant growth right after launching a revamped website. However, this can only be achieved if every single step has been well-planned and executed.

Examples of unsuccessful site migrations

The following graph illustrates a big UK retailer’s botched site migration where the website lost 35% of its visibility two weeks after switching from HTTP to HTTPS. It took them about six months to fully recover, which must have had a significant impact on revenue from organic search. This is a typical example of a poor site migration, possibly caused by poor planning or implementation.

Example of a poor site migration — recovery took 6 months!

But recovery may not always be possible. The below visibility graph is from another big UK retailer, where the HTTP to HTTPS switchover resulted in a permanent 20% visibility loss.

Another example of a poor site migration — no signs of recovery 6 months on!

In fact, it’s is entirely possible to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS without losing so much traffic and for so such a long period, aside from the first few weeks where there is high volatility as Google discovers the new URLs and updates search results.

Examples of successful site migrations

What does a successful site migration look like? This largely depends on the site migration type, the objectives, and the KPIs (more details later). But in most cases, a successful site migration shows at least one of the following characteristics:

Minimal visibility loss during the first few weeks (short-term goal)

Visibility growth thereafter — depending on the type of migration (long-term goal)

The following visibility report is taken from an HTTP to HTTPS site migration, which was also accompanied by significant improvements to the site’s page loading times.

The following visibility report is from a complete site overhaul, which I was fortunate to be involved with several months in advance and supported during the strategy, planning, and testing phases, all of which were equally important.

As commonly occurs on site migration projects, the launch date had to be pushed back a few times due to the risks of launching the new site prematurely and before major technical obstacles were fully addressed. But as you can see on the below visibility graph, the wait was well worth it. Organic visibility not only didn’t drop (as most would normally expect) but in fact started growing from the first week.

Visibility growth one month after the migration reached 60%, whilst organic traffic growth two months post-launch exceeded 80%.

Example of a very successful site migration — instant growth following new site launch!

This was a rather complex migration as the new website was re-designed and built from scratch on a new platform with an improved site taxonomy that included new landing pages, an updated URL structure, lots of redirects to preserve link equity, plus a switchover from HTTP to HTTPS.

In general, introducing too many changes at the same time can be tricky because if something goes wrong, you’ll struggle to figure out what exactly is at fault. But at the same time, leaving major changes for a later time isn’t ideal either as it will require more resources. If you know what you’re doing, making multiple positive changes at once can be very cost-effective.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how you can turn a complex site migration project into a success, it’s important to run through the main site migration types as well as explain the main reason so many site migrations fail.

Site migration types

There are many site migration types. It all depends on the nature of the changes that take place to the legacy website.

Google’s documentation mostly covers migrations with site location changes, which are categorised as follows:

Site moves with URL changes

Site moves without URL changes

Site move migrations

These typically occur when a site moves to a different URL due to any of the below:

Protocol change

A classic example is when migrating from HTTP to HTTPS.

Subdomain or subfolder change

Very common in international SEO where a business decides to move one or more ccTLDs into subdomains or subfolders. Another common example is where a mobile site that sits on a separate subdomain or subfolder becomes responsive and both desktop and mobile URLs are uniformed.

Domain name change

Commonly occurs when a business is rebranding and must move from one domain to another.

Top-level domain change

This is common when a business decides to launch international websites and needs to move from a ccTLD (country code top-level domain) to a gTLD (generic top-level domain) or vice versa, e.g. moving from .co.uk to .com, or moving from .com to .co.uk and so on.

Site structure changes

These are changes to the site architecture that usually affect the site’s internal linking and URL structure.

Other types of migrations

There are other types of migration which are triggered by changes to the site’s content, structure, design, or platform.

Replatforming

This is the case when a website is moved from one platform/CMS to another, e.g. migrating from WordPress to Magento or just upgrading to the latest platform version. Replatforming can, in some cases, also result in design and URL changes because of technical limitations that often occur when changing platforms. This is why replatforming migrations rarely result in a website that looks exactly the same as the previous one.

Content migrations

Major content changes such as content rewrites, content consolidation, or content pruning can have a big impact on a site’s organic search visibility, depending on the scale. These changes can often affect the site’s taxonomy, navigation, and internal linking.

Mobile setup changes

With so many options available for a site’s mobile setup moving, enabling app indexing, building an AMP site, or building a PWA website can also be considered as partial site migrations, especially when an existing mobile site is being replaced by an app, AMP, or PWA.

Structural changes

These are often caused by major changes to the site’s taxonomy that impact on the site navigation, internal linking and user journeys.

Site redesigns

These can vary from major design changes in the look and feel to a complete website revamp that may also include significant media, code, and copy changes.

Hybrid migrations

In addition to the above, there are several hybrid migration types that can be combined in practically any way possible. The more changes that get introduced at the same time the higher the complexity and the risks. Even though making too many changes at the same time increases the risks of something going wrong, it can be more cost-effective from a resources perspective if the migration is very well-planned and executed.

Common site migration pitfalls

Even though every site migration is different there are a few common themes behind the most typical site migration disasters, with the biggest being the following:

Poor strategy

Some site migrations are doomed to failure way before the new site is launched. A strategy that is built upon unclear and unrealistic objectives is much less likely to bring success.

Establishing measurable objectives is essential in order to measure the impact of the migration post-launch. For most site migrations, the primary objective should be the retention of the site’s current traffic and revenue levels. In certain cases the bar could be raised higher, but in general anticipating or forecasting growth should be a secondary objective. This will help avoid creating unrealistic expectations.

Poor planning

Coming up with a detailed project plan as early as possible will help avoid delays along the way. Factor in additional time and resources to cope with any unforeseen circumstances that may arise. No matter how well thought out and detailed your plan is, it’s highly unlikely everything will go as expected. Be flexible with your plan and accept the fact that there will almost certainly be delays. Map out all dependencies and make all stakeholders aware of them.

Avoid planning to launch the site near your seasonal peaks, because if anything goes wrong you won’t have enough time to rectify the issues. For instance, retailers should avoid launching a site close to September/October to avoid putting the busy pre-Christmas period at risk. In this case, it would be much wiser launching during the quieter summer months.

Lack of resources

Before committing to a site migration project, estimate the time and effort required to make it a success. If your budget is limited, make a call as to whether it is worth going ahead with a migration that is likely to fail in meeting its established objectives and cause revenue loss.

As a rule of thumb, try to include a buffer of at least 20% in additional resource than you initially think the project will require. This additional buffer will later allow you to quickly address any issues as soon as they arise, without jeopardizing success. If your resources are too tight or you start cutting corners at this early stage, the site migration will be at risk.

Lack of SEO/UX consultation

When changes are taking place on a website, every single decision needs to be weighted from both a UX and SEO standpoint. For instance, removing great amounts of content or links to improve UX may damage the site’s ability to target business-critical keywords or result in crawling and indexing issues. In either case, such changes could damage the site’s organic search visibility. On the other hand, having too much text copy and few images may have a negative impact on user engagement and damage the site’s conversions.

To avoid risks, appoint experienced SEO and UX consultants so they can discuss the potential consequences of every single change with key business stakeholders who understand the business intricacies better than anyone else. The pros and cons of each option need to be weighed before making any decision.

Late involvement

Site migrations can span several months, require great planning and enough time for testing. Seeking professional support late is very risky because crucial steps may have been missed.

Lack of testing

In addition to a great strategy and thoughtful plan, dedicate some time and effort for thorough testing before launching the site. It’s much more preferable to delay the launch if testing has identified critical issues rather than rushing a sketchy implementation into production. It goes without saying that you should not launch a website if it hasn’t been tested by both expert SEO and UX teams.

Attention to detail is also very important. Make sure that the developers are fully aware of the risks associated with poor implementation. Educating the developers about the direct impact of their work on a site’s traffic (and therefore revenue) can make a big difference.

Slow response to bug fixing

There will always be bugs to fix once the new site goes live. However, some bugs are more important than others and may need immediate attention. For instance, launching a new site only to find that search engine spiders have trouble crawling and indexing the site’s content would require an immediate fix. A slow response to major technical obstacles can sometimes be catastrophic and take a long time to recover from.

Underestimating scale

Business stakeholders often do not anticipate site migrations to be so time-consuming and resource-heavy. It’s not uncommon for senior stakeholders to demand that the new site launch on the planned-for day, regardless of whether it’s 100% ready or not. The motto “let's launch ASAP and fix later” is a classic mistake. What most stakeholders are unaware of is that it can take just a few days for organic search visibility to tank, but recovery can take several months.

It is the responsibility of the consultant and project manager to educate clients, run them through all the different phases and scenarios, and explain what each one entails. Business stakeholders are then able to make more informed decisions and their expectations should be easier to manage.

Site migration process

The site migration process can be split into six main essential phases. They are all equally important and skipping any of the below tasks could hinder the migration’s success to varying extents.

Phase 1: Scope & Planning

Work out the project scope

Regardless of the reasons behind a site migration project, you need to be crystal clear about the objectives right from the beginning because these will help to set and manage expectations. Moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS is very different from going through a complete site overhaul, hence the two should have different objectives. In the first instance, the objective should be to retain the site’s traffic levels, whereas in the second you could potentially aim for growth.

A site migration is a great opportunity to address legacy issues. Including as many of these as possible in the project scope should be very cost-effective because addressing these issues post-launch will require significantly more resources.

However, in every case, identify the most critical aspects for the project to be successful. Identify all risks that could have a negative impact on the site’s visibility and consider which precautions to take. Ideally, prepare a few forecasting scenarios based on the different risks and growth opportunities. It goes without saying that the forecasting scenarios should be prepared by experienced site migration consultants.

Including as many stakeholders as possible at this early stage will help you acquire a deeper understanding of the biggest challenges and opportunities across divisions. Ask for feedback from your content, SEO, UX, and Analytics teams and put together a list of the biggest issues and opportunities. You then need to work out what the potential ROI of addressing each one of these would be. Finally, choose one of the available options based on your objectives and available resources, which will form your site migration strategy.

You should now be left with a prioritized list of activities which are expected to have a positive ROI, if implemented. These should then be communicated and discussed with all stakeholders, so you set realistic targets, agree on the project, scope and set the right expectations from the outset.

Prepare the project plan

Planning is equally important because site migrations can often be very complex projects that can easily span several months. During the planning phase, each task needs an owner (i.e. SEO consultant, UX consultant, content editor, web developer) and an expected delivery date. Any dependencies should be identified and included in the project plan so everyone is aware of any activities that cannot be fulfilled due to being dependent on others. For instance, the redirects cannot be tested unless the redirect mapping has been completed and the redirects have been implemented on staging.

The project plan should be shared with everyone involved as early as possible so there is enough time for discussions and clarifications. Each activity needs to be described in great detail, so that stakeholders are aware of what each task would entail. It goes without saying that flawless project management is necessary in order to organize and carry out the required activities according to the schedule.

A crucial part of the project plan is getting the anticipated launch date right. Ideally, the new site should be launched during a time when traffic is low. Again, avoid launching ahead of or during a peak period because the consequences could be devastating if things don’t go as expected. One thing to bear in mind is that as site migrations never go entirely to plan, a certain degree of flexibility will be required.

Phase 2: Pre-launch preparation

These include any activities that need to be carried out while the new site is still under development. By this point, the new site’s SEO requirements should have been captured already. You should be liaising with the designers and information architects, providing feedback on prototypes and wireframes well before the new site becomes available on a staging environment.

Wireframes review

Review the new site’s prototypes or wireframes before development commences. Reviewing the new site’s main templates can help identify both SEO and UX issues at an early stage. For example, you may find that large portions of content have been removed from the category pages, which should be instantly flagged. Or you may discover that some high traffic-driving pages no longer appear in the main navigation. Any radical changes in the design or copy of the pages should be thoroughly reviewed for potential SEO issues.

Preparing the technical SEO specifications

Once the prototypes and wireframes have been reviewed, prepare a detailed technical SEO specification. The objective of this vital document is to capture all the essential SEO requirements developers need to be aware of before working out the project’s scope in terms of work and costs. It’s during this stage that budgets are signed off on; if the SEO requirements aren’t included, it may be impossible to include them later down the line.

The technical SEO specification needs to be very detailed, yet written in such a way that developers can easily turn the requirements into actions. This isn’t a document to explain why something needs to be implemented, but how it should be implemented.

Make sure to include specific requirements that cover at least the following areas:

URL structure

Meta data (including dynamically generated default values)

Structured data

Canonicals and meta robots directives

Copy & headings

Main & secondary navigation

Internal linking (in any form)

Pagination

XML sitemap(s)

HTML sitemap

Hreflang (if there are international sites)

Mobile setup (including the app, AMP, or PWA site)

Redirects

Custom 404 page

JavaScript, CSS, and image files

Page loading times (for desktop & mobile)

The specification should also include areas of the CMS functionality that allows users to:

Specify custom URLs and override default ones

Update page titles

Update meta descriptions

Update any h1–h6 headings

Add or amend the default canonical tag

Set the meta robots attributes to index/noindex/follow/nofollow

Add or edit the alt text of each image

Include Open Graph fields for description, URL, image, type, sitename

Include Twitter Open Graph fields for card, URL, title, description, image

Bulk upload or amend redirects

Update the robots.txt file

It is also important to make sure that when updating a particular attribute (e.g. an h1), other elements are not affected (i.e. the page title or any navigation menus).

Identifying priority pages

One of the biggest challenges with site migrations is that the success will largely depend on the quantity and quality of pages that have been migrated. Therefore, it’s very important to make sure that you focus on the pages that really matter. These are the pages that have been driving traffic to the legacy site, pages that have accrued links, pages that convert well, etc.

In order to do this, you need to:

Crawl the legacy site

Identify all indexable pages

Identify top performing pages

How to crawl the legacy site

Crawl the old website so that you have a copy of all URLs, page titles, meta data, headers, redirects, broken links etc. Regardless of the crawler application of choice (see Appendix), make sure that the crawl isn’t too restrictive. Pay close attention to the crawler’s settings before crawling the legacy site and consider whether you should:

Ignore robots.txt (in case any vital parts are accidentally blocked)

Follow internal “nofollow” links (so the crawler reaches more pages)

Crawl all subdomains (depending on scope)

Crawl outside start folder (depending on scope)

Change the user agent to Googlebot (desktop)

Change the user agent to Googlebot (smartphone)

Pro tip: Keep a copy of the old site’s crawl data (in a file or on the cloud) for several months after the migration has been completed, just in case you ever need any of the old site’s data once the new site has gone live.

How to identify the indexable pages

Once the crawl is complete, work on identifying the legacy site’s indexed pages. These are any HTML pages with the following characteristics:

Return a 200 server response

Either do not have a canonical tag or have a self-referring canonical URL

Do not have a meta robots noindex

Aren’t excluded from the robots.txt file

Are internally linked from other pages (non-orphan pages)

The indexable pages are the only pages that have the potential to drive traffic to the site and therefore need to be prioritized for the purposes of your site migration. These are the pages worth optimizing (if they will exist on the new site) or redirecting (if they won’t exist on the new site).

How to identify the top performing pages

Once you’ve identified all indexable pages, you may have to carry out more work, especially if the legacy site consists of a large number of pages and optimizing or redirecting all of them is impossible due to time, resource, or technical constraints.

If this is the case, you should identify the legacy site’s top performing pages. This will help with the prioritization of the pages to focus on during the later stages.

It’s recommended to prepare a spreadsheet that includes the below fields:

Legacy URL (include only the indexable ones from the craw data)

Organic visits during the last 12 months (Analytics)

Revenue, conversions, and conversion rate during the last 12 months (Analytics)

Pageviews during the last 12 months (Analytics)

Number of clicks from the last 90 days (Search Console)

Top linked pages (Majestic SEO/Ahrefs)

With the above information in one place, it’s now much easier to identify your most important pages: the ones that generate organic visits, convert well, contribute to revenue, have a good number of referring domains linking to them, etc. These are the pages that you must focus on for a successful site migration.

The top performing pages should ideally also exist on the new site. If for any reason they don’t, they should be redirected to the most relevant page so that users requesting them do not land on 404 pages and the link equity they previously had remains on the site. If any of these pages cease to exist and aren’t properly redirected, your site’s rankings and traffic will negatively be affected.

Benchmarking

Once the launch of the new website is getting close, you should benchmark the legacy site’s performance. Benchmarking is essential, not only to compare the new site’s performance with the previous one but also to help diagnose which areas underperform on the new site and to quickly address them.

Keywords rank tracking

If you don’t track the site’s rankings frequently, you should do so just before the new site goes live. Otherwise, you will later struggle figuring out whether the migration has gone smoothly or where exactly things went wrong. Don’t leave this to the last minute in case something goes awry — a week in advance would be the ideal time.

Spend some time working out which keywords are most representative of the site’s organic search visibility and track them across desktop and mobile. Because monitoring thousands of head, mid-, and long-tail keyword combinations is usually unrealistic, the bare minimum you should monitor are keywords that are driving traffic to the site (keywords ranking on page one) and have decent search volume (head/mid-tail focus)

If you do get traffic from both brand and non-brand keywords, you should also decide which type of keywords to focus on more from a tracking POV. In general, non-brand keywords tend to be more competitive and volatile. For most sites it would make sense to focus mostly on these.

Don’t forget to track rankings across desktop and mobile. This will make it much easier to diagnose problems post-launch should there be performance issues on one device type. If you receive a high volume of traffic from more than one country, consider rank tracking keywords in other markets, too, because visibility and rankings can vary significantly from country to country.

Site performance

The new site’s page loading times can have a big impact on both traffic and sales. Several studies have shown that the longer a page takes to load, the higher the bounce rate. Unless the old site’s page loading times and site performance scores have been recorded, it will be very difficult to attribute any traffic or revenue loss to site performance related issues once the new site has gone live.

It’s recommended that you review all major page types using Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse tools. You could use summary tables like the ones below to benchmark some of the most important performance metrics, which will be useful for comparisons once the new site goes live.

MOBILE

Speed

FCP

DCL

Optimization

Optimization score

Homepage

Fast

0.7s

1.4s

Good

81/100

Category page

Slow

1.8s

5.1s

Medium

78/100

Subcategory page

Average

0.9s

2.4s

Medium

69/100

Product page

Slow

1.9s

5.5s

Good

83/100

DESKTOP

Speed

FCP

DCL

Optimization

Optimization score

Homepage

Good

0.7s

1.4s

Average

81/100

Category page

Fast

0.6s

1.2s

Medium

78/100

Subcategory page

Fast

0.6s

1.3s

Medium

78/100

Product page

Good

0.8s

1.3s

Good

83/100

Old site crawl data

A few days before the new site replaces the old one, run a final crawl of the old site. Doing so could later prove invaluable, should there be any optimization issues on the new site. A final crawl will allow you to save vital information about the old site’s page titles, meta descriptions, h1–h6 headings, server status, canonical tags, noindex/nofollow pages, inlinks/outlinks, level, etc. Having all this information available could save you a lot of trouble if, say, the new site isn’t well optimized or suffers from technical misconfiguration issues. Try also to save a copy of the old site’s robots.txt and XML sitemaps in case you need these later.

Search Console data

Also consider exporting as much of the old site’s Search Console data as possible. These are only available for 90 days, and chances are that once the new site goes live the old site’s Search Console data will disappear sooner or later. Data worth exporting includes:

Search analytics queries & pages

Crawl errors

Blocked resources

Mobile usability issues

URL parameters

Structured data errors

Links to your site

Internal links

Index status

Redirects preparation

The redirects implementation is one of the most crucial activities during a site migration. If the legacy site’s URLs cease to exist and aren’t correctly redirected, the website’s rankings and visibility will simply tank.

Why are redirects important in site migrations?

Redirects are extremely important because they help both search engines and users find pages that may no longer exist, have been renamed, or moved to another location. From an SEO point of view, redirects help search engines discover and index a site’s new URLs quicker but also understand how the old site’s pages are associated with the new site’s pages. This association will allow for ranking signals to pass from the old pages to the new ones, so rankings are retained without being negatively affected.

What happens when redirects aren’t correctly implemented?

When redirects are poorly implemented, the consequences can be catastrophic. Users will either land on Not Found pages (404s) or irrelevant pages that do not meet the user intent. In either case, the site’s bounce and conversion rates will be negatively affected. The consequences for search engines can be equally catastrophic: they’ll be unable to associate the old site’s pages with those on the new site if the URLs aren’t identical. Ranking signals won’t be passed over from the old to the new site, which will result in ranking drops and organic search visibility loss. In addition, it will take search engines longer to discover and index the new site’s pages.

301, 302, JavaScript redirects, or meta refresh?

When the URLs between the old and new version of the site are different, use 301 (permanent) redirects. These will tell search engines to index the new URLs as well as forward any ranking signals from the old URLs to the new ones. Therefore, you must use 301 redirects if your site moves to/from another domain/subdomain, if you switch from HTTP to HTTPS, or if the site or parts of it have been restructured. Despite some of Google’s claims that 302 redirects pass PageRank, indexing the new URLs would be slower and ranking signals could take much longer to be passed on from the old to the new page.

302 (temporary) redirects should only be used in situations where a redirect does not need to live permanently and therefore indexing the new URL isn’t a priority. With 302 redirects, search engines will initially be reluctant to index the content of the redirect destination URL and pass any ranking signals to it. However, if the temporary redirects remain for a long period of time without being removed or updated, they could end up behaving similarly to permanent (301) redirects. Use 302 redirects when a redirect is likely to require updating or removal in the near future, as well as for any country-, language-, or device-specific redirects.

Meta refresh and JavaScript redirects should be avoided. Even though Google is getting better and better at crawling JavaScript, there are no guarantees these will get discovered or pass ranking signals to the new pages.

If you’d like to find out more about how Google deals with the different types of redirects, please refer to John Mueller’s post.

Redirect mapping process

If you are lucky enough to work on a migration that doesn’t involve URL changes, you could skip this section. Otherwise, read on to find out why any legacy pages that won’t be available on the same URL after the migration should be redirected.

The redirect mapping file is a spreadsheet that includes the following two columns:

Legacy site URL –> a page’s URL on the old site.

New site URL –> a page’s URL on the new site.

When mapping (redirecting) a page from the old to the new site, always try mapping it to the most relevant corresponding page. In cases where a relevant page doesn’t exist, avoid redirecting the page to the homepage. First and foremost, redirecting users to irrelevant pages results in a very poor user experience. Google has stated that redirecting pages “en masse” to irrelevant pages will be treated as soft 404s and because of this won’t be passing any SEO value. If you can’t find an equivalent page on the new site, try mapping it to its parent category page.

Once the mapping is complete, the file will need to be sent to the development team to create the redirects, so that these can be tested before launching the new site. The implementation of redirects is another part in the site migration cycle where things can often go wrong.

Increasing efficiencies during the redirect mapping process

Redirect mapping requires great attention to detail and needs to be carried out by experienced SEOs. The URL mapping on small sites could in theory be done by manually mapping each URL of the legacy site to a URL on the new site. But on large sites that consist of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages, manually mapping every single URL is practically impossible and automation needs to be introduced. Relying on certain common attributes between the legacy and new site can be a massive time-saver. Such attributes may include the page titles, H1 headings, or other unique page identifiers such as product codes, SKUs etc. Make sure the attributes you rely on for the redirect mapping are unique and not repeated across several pages; otherwise, you will end up with incorrect mapping.

Pro tip: Make sure the URL structure of the new site is 100% finalized on staging before you start working on the redirect mapping. There’s nothing riskier than mapping URLs that will be updated before the new site goes live. When URLs are updated after the redirect mapping is completed, you may have to deal with undesired situations upon launch, such as broken redirects, redirect chains, and redirect loops. A content-freeze should be placed on the old site well in advance of the migration date, so there is a cut-off point for new content being published on the old site. This will make sure that no pages will be missed from the redirect mapping and guarantee that all pages on the old site get redirected.

Don’t forget the legacy redirects!

You should get hold of the old site’s existing redirects to ensure they’re considered when preparing the redirect mapping for the new site. Unless you do this, it’s likely that the site’s current redirect file will get overwritten by the new one on the launch date. If this happens, all legacy redirects that were previously in place will cease to exist and the site may lose a decent amount of link equity, the extent of which will largely depend on the site’s volume of legacy redirects. For instance, a site that has undergone a few migrations in the past should have a good number of legacy redirects in place that you don’t want getting lost.

Ideally, preserve as many of the legacy redirects as possible, making sure these won’t cause any issues when combined with the new site’s redirects. It’s strongly recommended to eliminate any potential redirect chains at this early stage, which can easily be done by checking whether the same URL appears both as a “Legacy URL” and “New site URL” in the redirect mapping spreadsheet. If this is the case, you will need to update the “New site URL” accordingly.

Example:

URL A redirects to URL B (legacy redirect)

URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)

Which results in the following redirect chain:

URL A –> URL B –> URL C

To eliminate this, amend the existing legacy redirect and create a new one so that:

URL A redirects to URL C (amended legacy redirect)

URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)

Pro tip: Check your redirect mapping spreadsheet for redirect loops. These occur when the “Legacy URL” is identical to the “new site URL.” Redirect loops need to be removed because they result in infinitely loading pages that are inaccessible to users and search engines. Redirect loops must be eliminated because they are instant traffic, conversion, and ranking killers!

Implement blanket redirect rules to avoid duplicate content

It’s strongly recommended to try working out redirect rules that cover as many URL requests as possible. Implementing redirect rules on a web server is much more efficient than relying on numerous one-to-one redirects. If your redirect mapping document consists of a very large number of redirects that need to be implemented as one-to-one redirect rules, site performance could be negatively affected. In any case, double check with the development team the maximum number of redirects the web server can handle without issues.

In any case, there are some standard redirect rules that should be in place to avoid generating duplicate content issues:

URL case: All URLs containing upper-case characters should be 301 redirected to all lower-case URLs, e.g. https://www.website.com/Page/ should be automatically redirecting to https://www.website.com/page/

Host: For instance, all non-www URLs should be 301 redirected to their www equivalent, e.g. https://website.com/page/ should be redirected to https://www.website.com/page/

Protocol: On a secure website, requests for HTTP URLs should be redirected to the equivalent HTTPS URL, e.g. http://www.website.com/page/ should automatically redirect to https://www.website.com/page/

Trailing slash: For instance, any URLs not containing a trailing slash should redirect to a version with a trailing slash, e.g. http://www.website.com/page should redirect to http://www.website.com/page/

Even if some of these standard redirect rules exist on the legacy website, do not assume they’ll necessarily exist on the new site unless they’re explicitly requested.

Avoid internal redirects

Try updating the site’s internal links so they don’t trigger internal redirects. Even though search engines can follow internal redirects, these are not recommended because they add additional latency to page loading times and could also have a negative impact on search engine crawl time.

Don’t forget your image files

If the site’s images have moved to a new location, Google recommends redirecting the old image URLs to the new image URLs to help Google discover and index the new images quicker. If it’s not easy to redirect all images, aim to redirect at least those image URLs that have accrued backlinks.

Phase 3: Pre-launch testing

The earlier you can start testing, the better. Certain things need to be fully implemented to be tested, but others don’t. For example, user journey issues could be identified from as early as the prototypes or wireframes design. Content-related issues between the old and new site or content inconsistencies (e.g. between the desktop and mobile site) could also be identified at an early stage. But the more technical components should only be tested once fully implemented — things like redirects, canonical tags, or XML sitemaps. The earlier issues get identified, the more likely it is that they’ll be addressed before launching the new site. Identifying certain types of issues at a later stage isn’t cost effective, would require more resources, and cause significant delays. Poor testing and not allowing the time required to thoroughly test all building blocks that can affect SEO and UX performance can have disastrous consequences soon after the new site has gone live.

Making sure search engines cannot access the staging/test site

Before making the new site available on a staging/testing environment, take some precautions that search engines do not index it. There are a few different ways to do this, each with different pros and cons.

Site available to specific IPs (most recommended)

Making the test site available only to specific (whitelisted) IP addresses is a very effective way to prevent search engines from crawling it. Anyone trying to access the test site’s URL won’t be able to see any content unless their IP has been whitelisted. The main advantage is that whitelisted users could easily access and crawl the site without any issues. The only downside is that third-party web-based tools (such as Google’s tools) cannot be used because of the IP restrictions.

Password protection

Password protecting the staging/test site is another way to keep search engine crawlers away, but this solution has two main downsides. Depending on the implementation, it may not be possible to crawl and test a password-protected website if the crawler application doesn’t make it past the login screen. The other downside: password-protected websites that use forms for authentication can be crawled using third-party applications, but there is a risk of causing severe and unexpected issues. This is because the crawler clicks on every link on a page (when you’re logged in) and could easily end up clicking on links that create or remove pages, install/uninstall plugins, etc.

Robots.txt blocking

Adding the following lines of code to the test site’s robots.txt file will prevent search engines from crawling the test site’s pages.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

One downside of this method is that even though the content that appears on the test server won’t get indexed, the disallowed URLs may appear on Google’s search results. Another downside is that if the above robots.txt file moves into the live site, it will cause severe de-indexing issues. This is something I’ve encountered numerous times and for this reason I wouldn’t recommend using this method to block search engines.

User journey review

If the site has been redesigned or restructured, chances are that the user journeys will be affected to some extent. Reviewing the user journeys as early as possible and well before the new site launches is difficult due to the lack of user data. However, an experienced UX professional will be able to flag any concerns that could have a negative impact on the site’s conversion rate. Because A/B testing at this stage is hardly ever possible, it might be worth carrying out some user testing and try to get some feedback from real users. Unfortunately, user experience issues can be some of the harder ones to address because they may require sitewide changes that take a lot of time and effort.

On full site overhauls, not all UX decisions can always be backed up by data and many decisions will have to be based on best practice, past experience, and “gut feeling,” hence getting UX/CRO experts involved as early as possible could pay dividends later.

Site architecture review

A site migration is often a great opportunity to improve the site architecture. In other words, you have a great chance to reorganize your keyword targeted content and maximize its search traffic potential. Carrying out extensive keyword research will help identify the best possible category and subcategory pages so that users and search engines can get to any page on the site within a few clicks — the fewer the better, so you don’t end up with a very deep taxonomy.

Identifying new keywords with decent traffic potential and mapping them into new landing pages can make a big difference to the site’s organic traffic levels. On the other hand, enhancing the site architecture needs to be done thoughtfully. Itt could cause problems if, say, important pages move deeper into the new site architecture or there are too many similar pages optimized for the same keywords. Some of the most successful site migrations are the ones that allocate significant resources to enhance the site architecture.

Meta data & copy review

Make sure that the site’s page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and copy have been transferred from the old to the new site without issues. If you’ve created any new pages, make sure these are optimized and don’t target keywords that have already been targeted by other pages. If you’re re-platforming, be aware that the new platform may have different default values when new pages are being created. Launching the new site without properly optimized page titles or any kind of missing copy will have an immediate negative impact on your site’s rankings and traffic. Do not forget to review whether any user-generated content (i.e. user reviews, comments) has also been uploaded.

Internal linking review

Internal links are the backbone of a website. No matter how well optimized and structured the site’s copy is, it won’t be sufficient to succeed unless it’s supported by a flawless internal linking scheme. Internal links must be reviewed throughout the entire site, including links found in:

Main & secondary navigation

Header & footer links

Body content links

Pagination links

Horizontal links (related articles, similar products, etc)

Vertical links (e.g. breadcrumb navigation)

Cross-site links (e.g. links across international sites)

Technical checks

A series of technical checks must be carried out to make sure the new site’s technical setup is sound and to avoid coming across major technical glitches after the new site has gone live.

Robots.txt file review

Prepare the new site’s robots.txt file on the staging environment. This way you can test it for errors or omissions and avoid experiencing search engine crawl issues when the new site goes live. A classic mistake in site migrations is when the robots.txt file prevents search engine access using the following directive:

Disallow: /

If this gets accidentally carried over into the live site (and it often does), it will prevent search engines from crawling the site. And when search engines cannot crawl an indexed page, the keywords associated with the page will get demoted in the search results and eventually the page will get de-indexed.

But if the robots.txt file on staging is populated with the new site’s robots.txt directives, this mishap could be avoided.

When preparing the new site’s robots.txt file, make sure that:

It doesn’t block search engine access to pages that are intended to get indexed.

It doesn’t block any JavaScript or CSS resources search engines require to render page content.

The legacy site’s robots.txt file content has been reviewed and carried over if necessary.

It references the new XML sitemaps(s) rather than any legacy ones that no longer exist.

Canonical tags review

Review the site’s canonical tags. Look for pages that either do not have a canonical tag or have a canonical tag that is pointing to another URL and question whether this is intended. Don’t forget to crawl the canonical tags to find out whether they return a 200 server response. If they don’t you will need to update them to eliminate any 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx server responses. You should also look for pages that have a canonical tag pointing to another URL combined with a noindex directive, because these two are conflicting signals and you;’ll need to eliminate one of them.

Meta robots review

Once you’ve crawled the staging site, look for pages with the meta robots properties set to “noindex” or “nofollow.” If this is the case, review each one of them to make sure this is intentional and remove the “noindex” or “nofollow” directive if it isn’t.

XML sitemaps review

Prepare two different types of sitemaps: one that contains all the new site’s indexable pages, and another that includes all the old site’s indexable pages. The former will help make Google aware of the new site’s indexable URLs. The latter will help Google become aware of the redirects that are in place and the fact that some of the indexed URLs have moved to new locations, so that it can discover them and update search results quicker.

You should check each XML sitemap to make sure that:

It validates without issues

It is encoded as UTF-8

It does not contain more than 50,000 rows

Its size does not exceed 50MBs when uncompressed

If there are more than 50K rows or the file size exceeds 50MB, you must break the sitemap down into smaller ones. This prevents the server from becoming overloaded if Google requests the sitemap too frequently.

In addition, you must crawl each XML sitemap to make sure it only includes indexable URLs. Any non-indexable URLs should be excluded from the XML sitemaps, such as:

3xx, 4xx, and 5xx pages (e.g. redirected, not found pages, bad requests, etc)

Soft 404s. These are pages with no content that return a 200 server response, instead of a 404.

Canonicalized pages (apart from self-referring canonical URLs)

Pages with a meta robots noindex directive




(…)

(…)


Pages with a noindex X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2017 17:12:43 GMT
(…)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(…)

Pages blocked from the robots.txt file

Building clean XML sitemaps can help monitor the true indexing levels of the new site once it goes live. If you don’t, it will be very difficult to spot any indexing issues.

Pro tip: Download and open each XML sitemap in Excel to get a detailed overview of any additional attributes, such as hreflang or image attributes.

HTML sitemap review

Depending on the size and type of site that is being migrated, having an HTML sitemap can in certain cases be beneficial. An HTML sitemap that consists of URLs that aren’t linked from the site’s main navigation can significantly boost page discovery and indexing. However, avoid generating an HTML sitemap that includes too many URLs. If you do need to include thousands of URLs, consider building a segmented HTML sitemap.

The number of nested sitemaps as well as the maximum number of URLs you should include in each sitemap depends on the site’s authority. The more authoritative a website, the higher the number of nested sitemaps and URLs it could get away with.

For example, the NYTimes.com HTML sitemap consists of three levels, where each one includes over 1,000 URLs per sitemap. These nested HTML sitemaps aid search engine crawlers in discovering articles published since 1851 that otherwise would be difficult to discover and index, as not all of them would have been internally linked.

The NYTimes HTML sitemap (level 1)

The NYTimes HTML sitemap (level 2)

Structured data review

Errors in the structured data markup need to be identified early so there’s time to fix them before the new site goes live. Ideally, you should test every single page template (rather than every single page) using Google’s Structured Data Testing tool.

Be sure to check the markup on both the desktop and mobile pages, especially if the mobile website isn’t responsive.

The tool will only report any existing errors but not omissions. For example, if your product page template does not include the Product structured data schema, the tool won’t report any errors. So, in addition to checking for errors you should also make sure that each page template includes the appropriate structured data markup for its content type.

Please refer to Google’s documentation for the most up to date details on the structured data implementation and supported content types.

JavaScript crawling review

You must test every single page template of the new site to make sure Google will be able to crawl content that requires JavaScript parsing. If you’re able to use Google’s Fetch and Render tool on your staging site, you should definitely do so. Otherwise, carry out some manual tests, following Justin Brigg’s advice.

As Bartosz Góralewicz’s tests proved, even if Google is able to crawl and index JavaScript-generated content, it does not mean that it is able to crawl JavaScript content across all major JavaScript frameworks. The following table summarizes Bartosz’s findings, showing that some JavaScript frameworks are not SEO-friendly, with AngularJS currently being the most problematic of all.

Bartosz also found that other search engines (such as Bing, Yandex, and Baidu) really struggle with indexing JavaScript-generated content, which is important to know if your site’s traffic relies on any of these search engines.

Hopefully, this is something that will improve over time, but with the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks in web development, this must be high up on your checklist.

Finally, you should check whether any external resources are being blocked. Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can control 100% because many resources (such as JavaScript and CSS files) are hosted by third-party websites which may be blocking them via their own robots.txt files!

Again, the Fetch and Render tool can help diagnose this type of issue that, if left unresolved, could have a significant negative impact.

Mobile site SEO review

Assets blocking review

First, make sure that the robots.txt file isn’t accidentally blocking any JavaScript, CSS, or image files that are essential for the mobile site’s content to render. This could have a negative impact on how search engines render and index the mobile site’s page content, which in turn could negatively affect the mobile site’s search visibility and performance.

Mobile-first index review

In order to avoid any issues associated with Google’s mobile-first index, thoroughly review the mobile website and make there aren’t any inconsistencies between the desktop and mobile sites in the following areas:

Page titles

Meta descriptions

Headings

Copy

Canonical tags

Meta robots attributes (i.e. noindex, nofollow)

Internal links

Structured data

A responsive website should serve the same content, links, and markup across devices, and the above SEO attributes should be identical across the desktop and mobile websites.

In addition to the above, you must carry out a few further technical checks depending on the mobile site’s set up.

Responsive site review

A responsive website must serve all devices the same HTML code, which is adjusted (via the use of CSS) depending on the screen size.

Googlebot is able to automatically detect this mobile setup as long as it’s allowed to crawl the page and its assets. It’s therefore extremely important to make sure that Googlebot can access all essential assets, such as images, JavaScript, and CSS files.

To signal browsers that a page is responsive, a meta="viewport" tag should be in place within the of each HTML page.



If the meta viewport tag is missing, font sizes may appear in an inconsistent manner, which may cause Google to treat the page as not mobile-friendly.

Separate mobile URLs review

If the mobile website uses separate URLs from desktop, make sure that:

Each desktop page has a tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL.

Each mobile page has a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

When desktop URLs are requested on mobile devices, they’re redirected to the respective mobile URL.

Redirects work across all mobile devices, including Android, iPhone, and Windows phones.

There aren’t any irrelevant cross-links between the desktop and mobile pages. This means that internal links on found on a desktop page should only link to desktop pages and those found on a mobile page should only link to other mobile pages.

The mobile URLs return a 200 server response.

Dynamic serving review

Dynamic serving websites serve different code to each device, but on the same URL.

On dynamic serving websites, review whether the vary HTTP header has been correctly set up. This is necessary because dynamic serving websites alter the HTML for mobile user agents and the vary HTTP header helps Googlebot discover the mobile content.

Mobile-friendliness review

Regardless of the mobile site set-up (responsive, separate URLs or dynamic serving), review the pages using a mobile user-agent and make sure that:

The viewport has been set correctly. Using a fixed width viewport across devices will cause mobile usability issues.

The font size isn’t too small.

Touch elements (i.e. buttons, links) aren’t too close.

There aren’t any intrusive interstitials, such as Ads, mailing list sign-up forms, App Download pop-ups etc. To avoid any issues, you should use either use a small HTML or image banner.

Mobile pages aren’t too slow to load (see next section).

Google’s mobile-friendly test tool can help diagnose most of the above issues:

Google’s mobile-friendly test tool in action

AMP site review

If there is an AMP website and a desktop version of the site is available, make sure that:

Each non-AMP page (i.e. desktop, mobile) has a tag pointing to the corresponding AMP URL.

Each AMP page has a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop page.

Any AMP page that does not have a corresponding desktop URL has a self-referring canonical tag.

You should also make sure that the AMPs are valid. This can be tested using Google’s AMP Test Tool.

Mixed content errors

With Google pushing hard for sites to be fully secure and Chrome becoming the first browser to flag HTTP pages as not secure, aim to launch the new site on HTTPS, making sure all resources such as images, CSS and JavaScript files are requested over secure HTTPS connections.This is essential in order to avoid mixed content issues.

Mixed content occurs when a page that’s loaded over a secure HTTPS connection requests assets over insecure HTTP connections. Most browsers either block dangerous HTTP requests or just display warnings that hinder the user experience.

Mixed content errors in Chrome’s JavaScript Console

There are many ways to identify mixed content errors, including the use of crawler applications, Google’s Lighthouse, etc.

Image assets review

Google crawls images less frequently than HTML pages. If migrating a site’s images from one location to another (e.g. from your domain to a CDN), there are ways to aid Google in discovering the migrated images quicker. Building an image XML sitemap will help, but you also need to make sure that Googlebot can reach the site’s images when crawling the site. The tricky part with image indexing is that both the web page where an image appears on as well as the image file itself have to get indexed.

Site performance review

Last but not least, measure the old site’s page loading times and see how these compare with the new site’s when this becomes available on staging. At this stage, focus on the network-independent aspects of performance such as the use of external resources (images, JavaScript, and CSS), the HTML code, and the web server’s configuration. More information about how to do this is available further down.

Analytics tracking review

Make sure that analytics tracking is properly set up. This review should ideally be carried out by specialist analytics consultants who will look beyond the implementation of the tracking code. Make sure that Goals and Events are properly set up, e-commerce tracking is implemented, enhanced e-commerce tracking is enabled, etc. There’s nothing more frustrating than having no analytics data after your new site is launched.

Redirects testing

Testing the redirects before the new site goes live is critical and can save you a lot of trouble later. There are many ways to check the redirects on a staging/test server, but the bottom line is that you should not launch the new website without having tested the redirects.

Once the redirects become available on the staging/testing environment, crawl the entire list of redirects and check for the following issues:

Redirect loops (a URL that infinitely redirects to itself)

Redirects with a 4xx or 5xx server response.

Redirect chains (a URL that redirects to another URL, which in turn redirects to another URL, etc).

Canonical URLs that return a 4xx or 5xx server response.

Canonical loops (page A has a canonical pointing to page B, which has a canonical pointing to page A).

Canonical chains (a canonical that points to another page that has a canonical pointing to another page, etc).

Protocol/host inconsistencies e.g. URLs are redirected to both HTTP and HTTPS URLs or www and non-www URLs.

Leading/trailing whitespace characters. Use trim() in Excel to eliminate them.

Invalid characters in URLs.

Pro tip: Make sure one of the old site’s URLs redirects to the correct URL on the new site. At this stage, because the new site doesn’t exist yet, you can only test whether the redirect destination URL is the intended one, but it’s definitely worth it. The fact that a URL redirects does not mean it redirects to the right page.

Phase 4: Launch day activities

When the site is down...

While the new site is replacing the old one, chances are that the live site is going to be temporarily down. The downtime should be kept to a minimum, but while this happens the web server should respond to any URL request with a 503 (service unavailable) server response. This will tell search engine crawlers that the site is temporarily down for maintenance so they come back to crawl the site later.

If the site is down for too long without serving a 503 server response and search engines crawl the website, organic search visibility will be negatively affected and recovery won’t be instant once the site is back up. In addition, while the website is temporarily down it should also serve an informative holding page notifying users that the website is temporarily down for maintenance.

Technical spot checks

As soon as the new site has gone live, take a quick look at:

The robots.txt file to make sure search engines are not blocked from crawling

Top pages redirects (e.g. do requests for the old site’s top pages redirect correctly?)

Top pages canonical tags

Top pages server responses

Noindex/nofollow directives, in case they are unintentional

The spot checks need to be carried out across both the mobile and desktop sites, unless the site is fully responsive.

Search Console actions

The following activities should take place as soon as the new website has gone live:

Test & upload the XML sitemap(s)

Set the Preferred location of the domain (www or non-www)

Set the International targeting (if applicable)

Configure the URL parameters to tackle early any potential duplicate content issues.

Upload the Disavow file (if applicable)

Use the Change of Address tool (if switching domains)

Pro tip: Use the “Fetch as Google” feature for each different type of page (e.g. the homepage, a category, a subcategory, a product page) to make sure Googlebot can render the pages without any issues. Review any reported blocked resources and do not forget to use Fetch and Render for desktop and mobile, especially if the mobile website isn’t responsive.

Blocked resources prevent Googlebot from rendering the content of the page

Phase 5: Post-launch review

Once the new site has gone live, a new round of in-depth checks should be carried out. These are largely the same ones as those mentioned in the “Phase 3: Pre-launch Testing” section.

However, the main difference during this phase is that you now have access to a lot more data and tools. Don’t underestimate the amount of effort you’ll need to put in during this phase, because any issues you encounter now directly impacts the site’s performance in the SERPs. On the other hand, the sooner an issue gets identified, the quicker it will get resolved.

In addition to repeating the same testing tasks that were outlined in the Phase 3 section, in certain areas things can be tested