The Moz Blog

Google Posts: Conversion Factor — Not Ranking Factor

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

While Google Posts aren’t a ranking factor, they can still be an incredibly effective resource for increasing local business conversions — when used correctly. This week’s Whiteboard Friday host, Greg Gifford, shows you how to put your best post forward.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Fridays. I'm Greg Gifford, the Vice President of Search at SearchLab, a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in local SEO and paid search. I'm here today to talk about— you guessed it — Google Posts, the feature on Google My Business that lets you post interesting and attractive things to attract potential customers.

The importance of Google My Business

Mike Blumenthal said it first. Your Google My Business listing is your new homepage. Then we all kind of stole it, and everybody says it now. But it's totally true. It's the first impression that you make with potential customers. If someone wants your phone number, they don't have to go to your site to get it anymore. Or if they need your address to get directions or if they want to check out photos of your business or they want to see hours or reviews, they can do it all right there on the search engine results page.

If you're a local business, one that serves customers face-to-face at a physical storefront location or that serves customers at their location, like a plumber or an electrician, then you're eligible to have a Google My Business listing, and that listing is a major element of your local SEO strategy. You need to stand out from competitors and show potential customers why they should check you out. Google Posts are one of the best ways to do just that thing.

How to use Google Posts effectively

For those of you who don't know about Google Posts, they were released back in 2016, and they used to show up, up at the top of your Google My Business panel, and most businesses went crazy over them. In October of 2018, they moved them down to the very bottom of the GMB panel on desktop and out of the overview panel on mobile results, and most people kind of lost interest because they thought there would be a huge loss of visibility.

But honestly, it doesn't matter. They're still incredibly effective when they're used correctly.

Posts are basically free advertising on Google. You heard that right. They're free advertising. They show up in Google search results. Seriously, especially effective on mobile when they're mixed in with other organic results.

But even on desktop, they help your business attract potential customers and stand out from other local competitors. More importantly, they can drive pre-site conversions. You've heard about zero-click search. Now people can convert without getting to your site. They appear as a thumbnail, an image with a little bit of text underneath. Then when the user clicks on the thumbnail, the whole post pops up in a pop-up window that basically fills the window on either mobile or desktop.

Now they have no influence on ranking. They're a conversion factor, not a ranking factor. Think of it this way though. If it takes you 10 minutes to create a post and you do only one a week, that's just 40 minutes a month. If you get a conversion, isn't it worth doing? If you do them correctly, you can get a lot more than just one conversion.

In the past, I would have told you that posts stay live in your profile for seven days, unless you use one of the post templates that includes a date range, in which case they stay live for the entire date range. But it looks like Google has changed the way that posts work, and now Google displays your 10 most recent posts in a carousel with a little arrow to scroll through. Then when you get to the end of those 10 posts, it has a link to view all of your older posts.

Now you shouldn't pay attention to most of what you see online about Posts because there's a ridiculous amount of misinformation or simply outdated information out there.

Avoid words on the "no-no" list

Quick tip: Be careful about the text that you use. Anything with sexual connotation will get your post denied. This is really frustrating for some industries. If you put up a post about weather stripping, you get vetoed because of the word "stripping." Or if you're a plumber and you post about "toilet repairs" or "unclogging a toilet", you get denied for using the word "toilet."

So be careful if you have anything that might be on that no-no, naughty list.

Use an enticing thumbnail

The full post contains an image. A full post has the image and then text with up to 1,500 characters, and that's all most people pay attention to. But the post thumbnail is the key to success. No one is going to see the full post if the thumbnail isn't enticing enough to click on.

Think of it like you're creating a paid search campaign. You need really compelling copy if you want more clicks on your ad or a really awesome image to attract attention if it's a banner image. The same principle applies to posts.

Make them promotional

It's also important to be sure that your posts are promotional. People are seeing these posts in the search results before they go to your site. So in most cases they have no idea who you are yet.

The typical social fluff that you share on other social platforms doesn't work. Don't share links to blog posts or a simple "Hey, we sell this" message because those don't work. Remember, your users are shopping around and trying to figure out where they want to buy, so you want to grab their attention with something promotional.

Pick the right template

Most of the stuff out there will tell you that the post thumbnail displays 100 characters of text or about 16 words broken into 4 distinct lines. But in reality, it's different depending on which post template you use and whether or not you include a call to action link, which then replaces that last line of text.

But, hey, we're all marketers. So why wouldn't we include a CTA link, right?

There are three main post types. In the vast majority of cases, you want to use the What's New post template. That's the one that allows for the most text in the thumbnail view, so it's easier to write something compelling. Now with the What's New post, once you include that call to action, it replaces that last line so you end up with three full lines of available text space.

Both the Event and Offer post templates include a title and then a date range. Some people dig the date range because the post stays visible for that whole date range. But now that posts stay live and visible forever, there's no advantage there. Both of those post types have that separate title line, then a separate date range line, and then the call to action link is going to be on the fourth line, which leaves you only a single line of text or just a few words to write something compelling.

Sure, the Offer post has a cool little price tag emoji there next to the title and some limited coupon functionality, but that's not a reason. You should have full coupon functionality on your site. So it's better to write something compelling with a "What's New" post template and then have the user click through on the call to action link to get to your site to get more information and convert there.

There's also a new COVID update post type, but you don't want to use it. It shows up a lot higher on your Google My Business profile, actually just below your top line information, but it's text only. Only text, no image. If you've got an active COVID post, Google hides all of your other active posts. So if you want to share a COVID info post or updates about COVID, it's better to use the What's New post template instead.

Pay attention to image cropping

The image is the frustrating part of things. Cropping is super wonky and really inconsistent. In fact, you could post the same image multiple times and it will crop slightly differently each time. The fact that the crop is slightly higher than vertical center and also a different size between mobile and desktop makes it really frustrating.

The important areas of your image can get cropped out, so half of your product ends up being gone, or your text gets cropped out, or things get really hard to read. Now there's a rudimentary cropping tool built into the image upload function with posts, but it's not locked to an aspect ratio. So then you're going to end up with black bars either on the top or on the side if you don't crop it to the correct aspect ratio, which is, by the way, 1200 pixels width by 900 pixels high.

You need to have a handle on what the safe area is within the image. So to make things easier, we created this Google Posts Cropping Guide. It's a Photoshop document with built-in guides to show you what the safe area is. You can download it at bit.ly/posts-image-guide. Make sure you put that in lowercase because it's case sensitive.

But it looks like this. Anything within that white grid is safe and that's what's going to show up in that post thumbnail. But then when you see the full post, the rest of the image shows up. So you can get really creative and have things like here's the image, but then when it pops up, there's additional text at the bottom.

Include UTM tracking

Now, for the call to action link, you need to be sure that you include UTM tracking, because Google Analytics doesn't always attribute that traffic correctly, especially on mobile.

Now if you include UTM tagging, you can ensure that the clicks are attributed to Google organic, and then you can use the campaign variable to differentiate between the posts that you published so you'll be able to see which post generated more click-throughs or more conversions and then you can adjust your strategy moving forward to use the more effective post types.

So for those of you that aren't super familiar with UTM tagging, it's basically adding a query string like this to the end of the URL that you're tagging so it forces Google Analytics to attribute the session a certain way that you're specifying.

So here's the structure that I recommend using when you do Google posts. It's your domain on the left. Then ?UTM_Source is GMB.Post, so it's separated. Then UTM_Medium is Organic, and UTM_Campaign is some sort of post identifier. Some people like to use Google as the source.

But at a high level, when you look at your source medium report, that traffic all gets lumped together with everything from Google. So sometimes it's confusing for clients who don't really understand that they can look at secondary dimensions to break apart that traffic. So more importantly, it's easier for you to see your post traffic separately when you look at the default source medium report.

You want to leave organic as your medium so that it's lumped and grouped correctly on the default channel report with all organic traffic. Then you enter some sort of identifier, some sort of text string or date that can let you know which post you're talking about with that campaign variable. So make sure it's something unique so that you know which post you're talking about, whether it's car post, oil post, or a date range or the title of the post so you know when you're looking in Google Analytics.

It's also important to mention that Google My Business Insights will show you the number of views and clicks, but it's a bit convoluted because multiple impressions and/or multiple clicks from the same users are counted independently. That's why adding the UTM tagging is so important for tracking accurately your performance.

Upload videos

Final note, you can also upload videos so a video shows in the thumbnail and in the post.

So when users see that thumbnail that has a little play button on it and they click it, when the post pops up, the video will play there. Now the file size limit is 30 seconds or 75 MB, which if you got commercials, that's basically the perfect size. So even though they've been around for a few years, most businesses still ignore Posts. Now you know how to rock Posts so you'll stand out from competitors and generate more click-throughs.

Hopefully you enjoyed the video. If you've got any additional tips to share, please throw them in the comments down below. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you again next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The Potential Impact of Gen Z on SEO

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by stewartfussell

Generation Z's behaviors differ from the cohorts that came before it, creating a new challenge for businesses marketing to consumers within it. Gen Z's presence is also growing in the marketing industry itself and, as such, learning how to work with and appeal to these young people is a critical step to take sooner rather than later.

Who is Generation Z?

Social media stars might be the first people who come to mind when you think of Gen Z (also affectionately called Zoomers), but this age group is more than just TikTokers and YouTubers. Although the purported birth years of this generation vary across different sources, Pew Research refers to them as individuals born from 1997 and onward. With that in mind, it may come as a surprise that these Americans now make up about 28.7% of the total population. For context, Baby Boomers now account for a smaller proportion of just 21.8%, and Millennials around 22%.

Even more shocking than these statistics may be the fact that the oldest members of Generation Z are now well into their twenties. While it’s easy to think of this group as teenagers and children, they’ve grown up quickly, and are now major players in the world’s economy. In fact, this group has an annual spending power of around $143 billion, and currently accounts for approximately 40% of global consumers.

It’s well known that members of this cohort are digital natives and have been raised alongside technology. In 2014, the UK’s Office of Communications tested the technological proficiency of children versus adults only to find that the average 6-year-old outperformed those in their 40s. It’s safe to assume most members of this new generation have a solid grasp of technology, and a skill set that rivals people much older. This may be even more prevalent now with the rising use of digital resources due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Pew Social Trends noted in a recent essay that much like Millennials, who faced the Great Recession during their coming-of-age years, Gen Z will be affected by the pandemic for a long time to come. With a job market that is more competitive than ever and digital skills in high demand, a career in search may become increasingly attractive. Although search engine optimization is ever-changing, its importance has been unwavering for nearly two decades, making it a stable option in an unpredictable world.

How do Zoomers interact with marketing as a whole?

When it comes to targeting this cohort, its members are creating new challenges for businesses. First and foremost, their relationships with brands are very different than those of the generations that came before them. Reports from IBM in association with the National Retail Federation found that, for Gen Z, brand loyalty must be earned. Zoomers are looking for a reflection of their personal values in brands and are prepared to hold them accountable. Beyond their resistance to conventional brand loyalty, research has also found that they are more difficult to engage.

Generally speaking, in this day and age, consumers are bombarded with thousands of ads a day and have become harder to reach. As such, it’s not shocking that a common statistic claims that members of Gen Z have the smallest attention spans of just eight seconds. However, Fast Company presents this information in a new light by explaining that they actually have “8-second filters”. These filters allow them to quickly process the tremendous amounts of information they encounter each day to hone in on what they actually care about, uniquely preparing them to glaze over advertising attempts (as they’ve been conditioned to do basically since birth).

To combat this trend, marketers have been pursuing a variety of novel strategies and methods. For example, experiential marketing has proven to be effective with Gen Z, and they're also especially excited by virtual reality.

While there are many new marketing opportunities available, social media continues to be a major channel for Gen Z engagement. This is especially true when it comes to video content on sites like YouTube and TikTok. All in all, as these consumers move away from traditional television viewership, the need for alternative marketing avenues grows.

How does Gen Z use search?

With all of this background information in mind, it’s easy to see that search is well-positioned to access this target demographic. Generation Z may not be as responsive to direct advertisements, but they’re accustomed to searching.

As a matter of fact, search engines have been around longer than Gen Z has, with the first search engine appearing in 1990, so it’s no surprise that their use is second nature to this age group. Zoomers fully understand how to use search tools, and they have the capacity to quickly evaluate SERPs prior to deciding on which link will get their click.

They’ve always had the answers to any question readily available, so they also use search for more intentional discovery. Despite their noted “8-second filter”, Fast Company additionally found that they could become deeply focused on topics they find to be worthwhile. Furthermore, their nonchalance towards brand loyalty means they may be less likely to opt for a big brand website over others.

Finally, their use and reliance on mobile devices can't be overlooked or overstated. The stereotype that people are now glued to their phones has some merit, and companies like Google have taken notice. They’ve already begun catering towards this shift, with things like mobile-first indexing and AMP pages now taking on greater importance. IBM and NRF discovered that, in a global survey of 15,600 Gen Z-ers, 60% would not use an app or site that loads too slowly. This puts the importance of mobile site speed into a greater perspective for SEOs hoping to capture this demographic through search.

The findings of a recent Fractl survey clearly align with each of these trends. They found that out of all the generations, Gen Z has the highest preference for long-tail queries. They know that a short-tail query will produce broad results, and they may not find what they’re looking for. In addition, their mobile usage has created an uptick in voice assistant search functions, which utilize these multi-word phrases as well.

Zoomers working as SEOs

Although this age group is well equipped to use search engines, it’s likely that the concept of SEO still remains somewhat foreign to them. A quick Coursera search shows that there are almost no SEO-specific college courses currently available to students. While some general digital marketing classes may have a chapter or section on SEO, that information can oftentimes be outdated due to the ever-changing nature of search. There are also a few certificate programs and online workshops, but the aforementioned issue is still present. In summary, the most accessible way for students to learn is through their own research, an internship, or some other similar experience that they happen upon.

That said, this industry can provide a fantastic career path for members of Gen Z, should they discover and choose to pursue it. Working in search allows you to develop a variety of skills from critical thinking to problem-solving and data analysis. Those in the SEO community are always up to date on the latest tech and trends, which is valuable in many facets of business. Furthermore, working within an agency provides the opportunity to learn about a vast range of industries and niches. Many SEOs even pick up web development, data science, and programming experience along the way, and these are three competencies that are in very high demand. All things considered, the many hard and soft skills that can be developed through SEO work are the foundations for being successful throughout a career.

Zoomers already have an aptitude for work in technology-based spaces, and those with the determination can pick up expertise quickly in this field. Prime examples of this include the use of SEO tools and content management systems. For instance, once a CMS such as WordPress is learned, that knowledge can be easily transferred to others like Drupal, HubSpot, and so on. The same can be said for tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, because understanding how to evaluate data within those platforms can be translated to a variety of others. In essence, SEO and Gen Z could truly be a match made in digital marketing heaven.

Understanding client-side Gen Z-ers

While SEO may not yet be a mainstream career path for most young people, those in the digital marketing field will likely encounter it at some point. As such, it’s important to keep in mind that members of this generation will also be working on the client side of search.

As previously mentioned, some Zoomers are already part of the workforce, and the presence of this cohort will only continue to grow. In the year 2020 alone, Gen Z made up approximately 24% of the worldwide workforce.

With an influx of new workers on the horizon, working with them may be a unique experience given their strong grasp of technology. On top of that, they're also more familiar with concepts like analytics and data science as those careers are seeing a boom in the higher education sector. Members of this age group shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to absorbing the ins-and-outs of SEO from the client’s point of view.

As Gen Z continues entering the workforce, likely in entry-level positions, it’s important to remember that they'll be decision-makers in a few short years. They'll have an increasing ability to influence budgeting decisions, so it's absolutely critical to think about ways to connect with them now and communicate the value of SEO to save time, energy, and money in the long run. A few steps to work through are as follows:

Understand that they’re eager to learn and can do so quickly.
- Walk them through the reasoning behind each recommendation to build their knowledge over time. As with clients of any age, this improves trust and helps them to see how SEO really works.
Take them seriously and listen to their insights.
- They may have concerns, as any client might when it comes to SEO strategies and how they play into the overall marketing plan. Listen to what they have to say, as they may be new, but they could still provide impactful insights.
Embrace novel ideas and creative thinking.
- Fresh ideas are never a bad thing, but it can be easy to feel resistant towards those that seem to come out of left field. Fight the impulse to immediately shut these down and instead seriously consider how they could be incorporated into the project.
Don’t shy away from using new tools and technologies.
- As mentioned above, Gen Z isn't intimidated by new forms of technology. Share interesting findings from tools like HotJar, Tableau, or Google Tag Manager to make SEO more exciting for them.
Be candid and transparent about performance analytics.
- Be up front about the state of the site’s performance to build their confidence and appreciation for search. In the age of instant gratification, there are few things more satisfying than a positive trend line. On the other side of that, be sure to research and determine the causes for any downturns.

Conclusion

While Gen Z may be a mystery in many ways, two things are certain: they are well on their way to dominating many industries, and they shouldn't be overlooked. Likewise, if you’re not preparing for their arrival, you might already be falling behind.

Give these findings and tips some thought, and if there are already Gen Z-ers in your organization, try to take time to pick their brains. Go ahead and learn to embrace the change – as we so often do in SEO – because these TikTokers and YouTubers will only be growing in influence.

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How Did US Stimulus Checks Impact On-Site Traffic and Conversions? [Case Study]

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by OeuyownK

As a Senior Analytics Strategist working at an agency with clients across industries, I’ve seen wildly contrasting performance throughout the pandemic. Certain online retailers and auto sites were far surpassing any historical performance, while others had to cut back budgets significantly. The variances in revenue performances also empirically correlated with time frames when the public received more support, in the form of stimulus checks.

My team at Portent conducted the study detailed below to verify our hypotheses that the pandemic caused revenue increases in online retailers and auto industries, and that those spikes correlated with stimulus distributions. We discovered a few specific factors that increased the probability of confirming our hypothesis along the way.

“Unprecedented” has undoubtedly been the word of the year, and it’s touched all aspects of life and business. There have been changes in consumer behavior across all industries — we’ve unfortunately seen swaths of shutdowns in particular markets while others have sustained or are even thriving. This post will provide some observations in online behavior along with some consumer data that should be used as predictive indicators through the rest of the pandemic.

The study

The observations of changes in online behavior were pulled and anonymized from 16 of our clients across 8 different industries. We narrowed those 8 industries down to three categories defined by Google Analytics for the purposes of this analysis: Shopping (10), Travel (3), and Autos & Vehicles (3).

The sites included in this analysis were limited to the US where possible and ranged in monthly revenue from $16K to $103K and in monthly sessions from 4K to 44K.

Observation #1: Stimulus checks resulted in increases in online behavior

Stimulus checks initiated the first revival of spending since the start of the pandemic. Granted, it was only about a month between the first notice of a lockdown and the beginning of stimulus payments. However, that increase in spend remained at higher levels after the majority of stimulus checks were distributed for most sites in this analysis—of course, excluding the Travel sites.

The first round of stimulus checks provided some form of relief to single Americans that made less than $99K a year, with those who made less than a $75K salary receiving the full $1,200. There were differences in limits depending on whether you have children or how you filed your taxes.

There was a noticeable jump in both sessions and revenue during the (1) week of April 13th, when $80M worth of stimulus payments were deposited for taxpayers who had direct deposits set up. By the (2) week of April 20th, additional rounds of deposits were made to those who manually set up direct deposits through the IRS. And by the (3) week of June 3rd, the IRS had delivered $270B in stimulus checks to Americans. At this point, revenue and sessions began to normalize below that period of stimulus distributions until the undeniable Black Friday sales occurred.

Observation #2: The impact depends on the market

There were obvious industries that were impacted most by the changes in consumer behavior and are still barely recovering: travel, in-store retail, and restaurants, to name those that were hit the hardest. On the other hand, some industries are actually performing better than before, such as online retail sales and food and beverage stores.

The analyses from S&P Global and the U.S. Census Bureau were accurately reflected in our study as well. Through the end of November, the average revenue for the Shopping sites in our analysis was 27.5% higher than our dip seen in March while sessions were 24.4% higher.

What came as a surprise, however, was that the Autos & Vehicles sites actually sustained higher averages than the Shopping sites. The sites in this industry saw 26.8% higher sessions and 36.8% higher revenue compared to the dip seen in the beginning of the pandemic and also well above prior levels in the beginning of the year.

The stark jump in sessions and revenue also aligned with when the distribution of stimulus checks began. In hindsight, the increase in consumer spending in this industry could have been anticipated considering the limitations and fear associated with traveling by plane. Online behavior is higher in the summer months as well, as those who were becoming restless from quarantining began to take road trips to satisfy their wanderlust.

There were a few other predictable trends that we identified in our study:

There was one quick spike in athletic wear purchases with the average sustaining higher than pre-pandemic levels.
There was a prolonged spike in revenue and especially traffic for baking goods and flour purchases, which remained at much higher levels compared to prior numbers. Then there was the seasonal influx of interest during the holidays. Interestingly, the conversion rate was 123% higher during the holidays compared to its peak in the beginning of the pandemic.
With parents and families stuck at home, there was an exponential and lengthy growth in online behavior for children’s toys. Although the growth has tapered, it continues to see an upward trend.
As expected, travel sites have taken the largest hit out of our study with a significant drop that has resulted in little to no recovery. The increase in revenue and sessions in the summer is almost entirely attributed to a resort that saw a similar increase in interest from the wanderlusts of the Autos & Vehicles sites.

Observation #3: There’s a positive correlation between AOV and % change in revenue

There was a fairly strong correlation of 0.76 between average order value (AOV) and % change in revenue YoY* for Shopping sites only. The consumer behavior on Autos & Vehicles sites was more dependent on stimulus checks and weather while the behavior on Travel sites was dependent on the feeling of safety.

*The data in this chart was pulled with the following notes:

YoY comparison was for November 2019 vs. November 2020 (November being the highest performing month based on seasonality)
Two anomalies were excluded from this data: (1) A flour company and, (2) A company with an AOV of nearly $2K

This one makes intuitive sense if you think about who’s been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Industries that are still thriving are ones that were able to more easily transition to 100% remote work and ones that had enough funds to weather some dropoff in clientele. Those who were fortunate enough to be employed in those industries during this time are also more likely to be paid higher than the median. In fact, only 30% of parents earning $200K or more lost their jobs since the pandemic, compared to 65% of parents earning less than $25K. Those who lost jobs in higher income brackets were also more likely to be able to find work again.

High-income spenders weren’t significantly impacted by the pandemic aside from the first few months, during which the change in consumer spending came from uncertainty. Although high- and low-income brackets both saw significant drops in spending initially, high-income consumers returned to levels comparable to January 2020 while low-income consumers were still about 10% below on average through September 2020.

Considerations to forecast future performance

There’s quite honestly nothing novel in this analysis that hasn’t been surfaced through market research, and these observations have been corroborated by economic data. The key takeaways here are to pay attention to the trends we're seeing, think about how they relate to your target audience or customer, and pay attention to new developments that may signal a shift toward normalcy once again as you re-enter the digital marketplace.

Stay informed of economic trends

Keep up-to-date with economic research published by S&P and monitor news releases from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to identify trends in Personal Income, Disposable Personal Income (DPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE). The PCE started dipping in July, which correlates with the changes in consumer behavior we saw in our study. Although the reports don’t come out immediately, staying updated on the direction of these trends could inform your efforts.

Consider your target audience

It’s important to narrow down your research to your target audience. If your business is international, you likely won’t be as impacted by future stimulus checks in the US. However, different international markets will recover at differing rates.

Similarly, it’s important to keep your industry in mind. S&P is already estimating that the most-affected industries may not recover fully until 2022. This means that industries like in-store retail, travel, and service will have to find alternative ways to pivot during this time to return to normal levels.

Once you’ve considered your market and industry, weigh the risks based on your AOV and the income level of your average consumer. The higher the average income level, the more likely it is that your market has already recovered or the higher your chances are of being able to adjust successfully.

Additional federal support

Although the support from the US government throughout the pandemic has been lackluster at best, there’s a possibility of additional support. The recent round of stimulus checks were more limited than the first, meaning the impact on consumer behavior might be less noticeable. Economists are guessing that consumers would rather save this smaller amount than put it back into the economy. However, these bills should be accounted for in forecasting with the hopeful potential of additional (and more significant) federal support.

The distribution of vaccinations is likely to take at least several months to be impactful and possibly even longer to reach herd immunity. During this time of forward movement in the pandemic, we will all need to monitor and predict consumer behavior in unprecedented ways until we begin to see normalcy again.

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The Strategic Value of Structured Data Implementation on SME Websites

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by CrystalontheWeb

Structured data is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website content and increase the sustainability of your SEO as Google implements regular updates to the SERP environment. Over the last five years, many of Google’s most game-changing SERP features have been driven by the use of structured data from across the web. Google for Jobs, Google Shopping, featured snippets, how-to instructions, recipe cards, knowledge panels, and other rich snippets all serve content from sites with structured data.

So, when we think about how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can compete in today's ever-evolving SERP landscape, time and time again, well-implemented structured data is what makes the difference.

In this blog I’ll explain the following:

What is structured data?
Why should SMEs prioritize structured data implementation?
How do you identify which structured data is best for your SEO strategy?
Strategies for adding schema to your site
How to measure and demonstrate the impact of structured data

In my experience, well-implemented structured data is effective for websites of all sizes and in all verticals. For my own clients, schema implementation has enabled growth, improved performance on search and created opportunities to reach new audiences.

For an established national retail brand with a thriving social media following, schema optimisations contributed to a 50% increase in organic conversions within a month. And six months on, the improvements we made to product markup, organisation, and blog schema had helped drive a 230% increase in organic conversion value.
For a local recruitment site, we combined niche targeted schema and sitemap optimization to increase both organic clicks and impressions by over 80% each, within four months.
For an international B2B retailer, improving existing schema formed the basis for marketing strategy that enabled us to grow our tally of ranking keywords by an average of 70% across three countries, increase our revenue by 35% when compared to the previous period, and create new marketing channels, within 6 months.
For a professional services provider, we built E-A-T centric schema optimisations into a blog and were able to improve average ranking position by 30% in 3 months and by 43% within a year.

Though the target markets, objectives and audiences differed in each case, I was able to use schema markup as a strategic underpinning of a wider SEO and marketing strategy. This is because schema has become a fundamental element of scalable SEO.

What is structured data in SEO?

On a website, structured data is a means of defining content with a uniform set of names and values, so that bots and machines can better read, index, understand, and serve the content of your site. While the phrase “structured data” can include elements like open graph for social media, microdata, or indeed any set of data that is organized uniformly (think of your CRM), generally when SEOs talk about structured data, we’re referring to structured data markup in JSON-LD as specified by Schema.org and recommended by Google.

Why is Schema.org structured data so strategically important?

Schema.org has become structured data HQ, because its framework — sets of vocabularies and relationships — was created and is maintained through a cross-platform partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yandex, and other major search engines. They regularly create new schema types and relationships aimed at making the information on the web more easily accessible to users.

Schema.org breaks down content into common vocabulary of predefined @types, which each have predefined properties, and can then be expressed using a common Javascript notation (JSON-LD). Like entries to the Oxford English Dictionary, the team behind Schema.Org are constantly adding new @types and properties in order to keep pace with user needs. At present, there are 778 types, but that number will continue to grow. Each new type brings more clarity, consistency, and ease of access to the information on the web — something that’s brilliant for search engines, and great for your traffic.

What does that mean in practice?

Sometimes when I'm explaining structured data to clients, I describe it as a means of essentially turning your beautiful website into a spreadsheet for robots. They can prioritize and process the critical information about the content of the page without having to understand the layout of your particular Wordpress theme, reams of CSS, or navigate your Joomla configuration.

This means that information a bot has on a page can be more consistent and resilient, even if the content changes day-to-day. So, in the example of a retailer with seasonal specials and campaigns that change the front end home page layout, structured data tells Google the same information about the page in the same way every time:

Why should SMEs prioritize structured data implementation?

Simply put, structured data gives you the chance to jump the queue on the SERP.

When we look at the ways in which Google has enhanced its SERPs over the last few years, what we see consistently is the use of JSON-LD structured data in combination with Google APIs to create new features and new channels for content. Rich snippet SERP features like Google for Jobs, Google Shopping, featured snippets, how-to instructions, recipe cards, knowledge panels, and other monumental changes to the SERP have all been driven or improved by the creation and utilization of structured data frameworks.

Users love these features because they’re multi-media search enhancements, and are impossible to miss as they often take up the entire viewport on mobile:

Left to right: rich results for Google for Jobs, recipes, video

Not a plain blue link in sight.

In many cases, your content cannot be included in these attractive rich snippets without structured data. So, if you literally want to get ahead of the competition, structured data needs to be a component in your SEO strategy.

What are the other advantages of structured data for small businesses?

Along with increased visibility, structured data implementation offers the following advantages for small businesses:

You will likely outpace your local competitors. SMEs are likely to feature within local pack search results with other small businesses. Here, competition for keywords is fierce, but many have yet to incorporate structured data into their sites. This is an opportunity to increase your visibility, gain more market share, and therefore increase conversions.
Schema markup is a fully scalable optimization. While some SEO tasks like content creation can require pages to be optimized one-by-one, Schema markup can be built into the structure of the page. This means that once it’s set up, every new product listing page, for instance, would already have the optimization as you expand the site, whether you stock six products or six thousand. The time this saves is especially significant for small marketing teams.
Schema markup implementation can be carried out as a single project within a few months. This can be a win for clients and SEOs, because in many cases, there is a clear demarcation before and after, followed by solid results which help to build confidence in further SEO activities, give clear ROI and satisfy clients looking for quick wins.

How do you identify which structured data is best for SEO strategy?

With almost 800 types of schema markup available to add to a website, it can be difficult to decide which are the best for your page, but to start, you can introduce or improve some new elements to help you better perform online and complement your existing content or e-commerce SEO strategy.

Does your site pass the schema markup need-to-have checklist?

There are certain sets of schema markup that apply to almost every site, and others — like Product and Job Postings — that are niche critical to effective SEO. As a general rule of thumb, every time I get a new client, I run through the following initial checks:

Do the homepage and about pages have Organisation or Local Business schema?
Do the blogs have schema for Articles or Blog Postings?
Do the team pages have Person schema?
If it’s an e-commerce site, does it have the niche critical Product schema?
If it is a recruiter site, does it have the niche critical Job Postings schema?
If the business is in another niche with dedicated Google SERP features, does it have the necessary markup?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions and the site doesn’t have the appropriate markup, then you should add schema markup to your site.

If the answer to these questions is “yes”, then it’s important to test the quality of the implementation before moving on to the next step. To do this, take a look at Search Console’s Rich Results Report to review pages at scale, or use their Structured Data Testing Tool and Rich Results Test to inspect individual pages. If you see errors, they should be addressed.

How to Find Address Schema Errors

Valid schema markup in Search Console

First, take a look at Search Console’s Rich Results Report to review pages at scale and identify which content is being read as Valid, Valid with Errors or Error.

Valid: If your markup is ‘Valid’, then it is being crawled and indexed correctly. These pages are unlikely to require further action.

Errors: Pages with markup that is identified with an ‘Error’ tend to have incorrect syntax, so you should review the individual page and correct the code as soon as possible. When the changes are complete, use the Validate Fix button, to request reassessment.

Valid with Warning: If your content is showing as ‘Valid a Warning’, then you are likely displaying schema markup with a Missing field. These warnings do not make the page or the markup invalid, but they can make the page less competitive, because the content is less targeted. Review your content to ensure that your schema is reflecting as much of the on page content as possible in order to reduce these errors, and therefore increase the performance of your schema markup.

Schema markup warnings in Search Console

Structured Data Testing Tool and Rich Results Test allow you to troubleshoot improvements to structured data on individual pages. Each of these tools you can enter the URL in question and you will receive itemised information on any errors or warnings.

Warnings on structured data testing tool

Warnings on rich results test

The missing fields highlighted here correspond to properties within the Event schema type. So, to improve this markup, you would look up the definitions of the relevant properties on schema.org and, where applicable, use their example HTML to guide your optimizations.

Property definitions in schema.org

Example "performer" HTML script from schema.org

In this instance, to improve the performance of my schema, I may need to build new performer fields into the CMS, or to work with the dev team to add the content from existing CMS data fields into the schema regex.

In either case you will be making improvements that help you better target and serve users.

Strategies for adding schema to your site

If you need to add schema to your site there are a few options for implementation.

Adding schema to single static pages

For some single pages with largely static content, adding markup types like Local Business, Organization, or a single FAQ page, can be a straightforward process of generating the code and placing it into the HTML of the page. Major CMS platforms like Shopify and Wordpress have plugins to assist with generating the markup for these pages which is easy to implement. Those with custom CMS configurations can use tools like the Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD, then pass it onto the development team to push it live.

Adding scalable schema for bulk implementation

Bulk schema implementation is almost essential for high volume content creators. This applies to e-commerce shops, but also to those who regularly post standard format content like recipes, blogs, articles, job vacancies, events, training courses, etc.

For these pages, the most effective way to get the most out of the schema on your site is to automate the process by building it into the structure of your site. In most instances, this involves a four phase approach, working in coordination with your developers and clients.

Start with your sitemap. You should have a dynamic XML sitemap that helps Google index pages as they are created, and includes the elements that are listed within the structured data. For an e-commerce site, this means having a sitemap that includes the product listings pages, but also the image sitemap and customer service pages.

Optimize for on-page SEO: Ensure that you have strong on-page SEO with good keyword research, headings, and accurate information. Schema offers increased targeting opportunities, so this will help you to double down on any on-page SEO efforts.

Organize your content. For bulk implementation, you should work with your content, and try to assign a type and property to each standard field for content on your page. Treat it like a formula that can be applied to each page with the same format. If you don’t have fields that correspond with the required properties for your schema type, add them. If you have a bulk of information, try to ensure that you have properties that support the USPs of your content. Then work with your developers to update your template so that the schema generates consistently across the site.

Connect with relevant Google APIs. Once your sitemap is solid, your content is optimised and your markup is in place. check to see if the schema you're using has an API and, if it does, get your site connected to it. Some of the most-used rich results connect directly with dedicated Google APIs, which further integrate with PPC tools to round out your marketing mix.

Examples of Schema Types with Dedicated Google APIs

Lodging schema connects with the Hotel API and can be used with Google Hotels PPC
Job Posting schema connects with the Indexing API to enable inclusion in Google for Jobs
Product schema connects with Content API to enable inclusion in Google Shopping search results and ad listings.

How to measure and demonstrate the impact of schema markup

Measuring Schema Enable Rich Results in Search Console

The impact of schema markup which generates rich results, can be easily monitored and measured in Search Console. Within the Enhancements tab, you can monitor the quality of your implementation and any current or recent errors.

View schema-enabled rich content in the Search Console Enhancements tab

To monitor impressions, rankings, clicks and CTR, visit the Search Appearance tab under Performance. This tab provides historic data that can be compared to earlier configurations of the site.

Visit Performance > Search Appearance tab to see rich result performance

Within Google Analytics, your tracking and monitoring will depend upon your implementation. For instance, google-jobs-apply clicks may show as a separate source from standard search results within Organic. But I’ve also seen Google Shopping clicks show as part of the (other) channel. In either case, annotate your implementation dates to monitor relevant content for changes in clicks, impressions, and conversions.

For many small businesses, Search Console data should be sufficient but there are also tools which can help you drill down further into the data.

In summary

Taking a strategic, integrated approach to structured data implementation helps SMEs to stay competitive in today’s search environment because of its scalability, versatility and measurability. Furthermore, the applicability of schema markup as the underpinning of a cohesive content and advertising strategy, brings much needed efficiencies for SME marketers who want to make the most out of their content.

Want to learn more about technical SEO? Check out the Moz Academy Technical SEO Certification Series, an in-depth training series that hones in on the nuts and bolts of technical SEO.

Sign Me Up!

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7 Emerging Technologies in SEO and Their Applications

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by AbdulGaniy_Shehu

SEO is a dynamic industry. What worked some weeks ago might not work again right now.

As an SEO professional, you need to know the latest trends and emerging technologies, to keep up with the ever-changing demand of the industry. That way, you can stay on top of your game and become more efficient in your business.

In this post, I’ll share with you seven emerging technologies in the SEO industry and how they impact your work as an SEO expert. Finally, I’ll show you how to apply them in your business for optimal results.

If you want to scale your SEO processes in 2021 and beyond, you should watch out for these technologies, and start implementing them in your business right away.

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

In December 2019, Google officially rolled out the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm update worldwide. This update brought NLP to the fore, and it’s been a technology to watch out for in the SEO industry since.

With NLP, Google can understand what a word in a sentence means by looking at its context.

This means that Google no longer relies on the specific words or phrases that users are searching for to provide them with the right answers. Rather, they’re looking at the intent behind each search.

Here’s an example of how BERT (an offshoot of NLP), affects a search query according to Google.

Before NLP, if someone searches for the query “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”, Google thinks that this is an informational query to confirm if a U.S citizen can travel to Brazil without a visa. Hence, it shows a Washington Post article that answers the question on top of the SERPs.

As you can see, the context behind this search is someone wanting to travel to the USA from Brazil who needs a visa. While it was difficult for Google to figure out what these kinds of queries meant in the past, with BERT, the algorithm understands the context behind each search and provides the user with the right information.

How to utilize NLP in your SEO processes

With NLP, informational content is more crucial than ever. However, optimizing for BERT isn’t something you can do as an SEO.

Rather, you should focus on creating high-quality content that answers search queries accurately. When you do, you’ll definitely rank well.

This Moz article shows you how to write amazing pieces of content for search engines and people.

2. Natural Language Generation (NLG) for short-form content

With NLG, SEOs can now produce meaningful phrases and sentences just like a natural language, but using technology.

Instead of battling with writers’ block and spending hours thinking of what to write, NLG removes that burden through automation. And if you’re a content creator, this helps you focus just on polishing the content and making it read better.

While there are a lot of use cases for NLG, at the moment, it’s better used to write short-form content such as headlines, product descriptions, meeting memos, and so on.

How to use NLG as an SEO

There are a lot of use cases for NLG technologies. With a tool such as Copy.ai, you can create landing page hero text, Facebook primary text, blog introductions, email subject lines, listicles, meta descriptions, and so on.

Here’s an example of some listicles I created for the topic “quality blog content” using this tool:

As you can see, if I wanted to write an article on this topic, I can use some of these suggestions as an outline for my post. With these, I can focus instead on researching the individual sub-topics.

Here’s another example of some website taglines that I created for Moz by entering the brand name and a brief description of “The Ultimate SEO tool you can trust” into the tool:

If you were starting a new brand as an SEO, you can use NLG tools such as this, to discover awesome taglines to use for your brand.

3. TF*IDF

TF*IDF stands for “Term Frequency times Inverse Document Frequency”. This measures how you use a term on a particular page and how it compares to a collection of pages for that specific keyword.

While TF*IDF might seem like a measurement of keyword density, it’s actually measuring how important a keyword phrase is by comparing it to that keyword’s frequency in a large set of documents.

Although it’s not yet clear if Google uses TF*IDF in its algorithm, it’s a good practice to incorporate it into your on-page SEO strategy.

Before applying TF*IDF, you need to create a piece of content targeting a particular keyword. Once that’s done, plug the content into a TF*IDF tool. Some recommended options are Text Tools, SEO PowerSuite, Ryte, and Surfer SEO.

How to use TF*IDF in your SEO processes

With technology and some information about your keyword, TF*IDF tools usually suggest some phrases you can add or remove from your pages. As an SEO, you can optimize your page based on these suggestions to meet the required TF*IDF score for that keyword.

That way, you can figure out some phrases which are closely related to the keyword you’re writing about, but not present in your content. When you add these phrases and words to your content, it makes your article topically relevant and helps your page rank better in the SERPs.

4. GPT-3 for automated content creation

In September 2020, The Guardian published a story on its website that was written by a robot. Since then, Generative Pre-trained Transformer Number 3 (GPT-3) has been a hot topic in the SEO industry.

The GPT-3 API works in an interesting way because it’s been trained with a large pool of datasets to mimic how humans write. This includes the Common Crawl dataset, Wikipedia, relevant historical books, and so on.

When you provide the GPT-3 API with a writing prompt, it tries to predict exactly what would come after that, based on the information it’s read on the Internet.

The screenshot below is an example of GPT-3-generated content that went viral on Hacker news some months ago. Most users commented on it, just like they would on a regular post, without knowing that it was written by a robot.

How to Use GPT-3 for automated content creation

Email writing: As an SEO, you most likely recognize that writing great emails is a skill that’ll help your business grow, yet find it difficult to do so. With GPT-3, you can write emails easily. All you need to do is provide some bullet points outlining all you want to cover in the email, and it’ll automatically write it for you.
First draft writing: Creating the first draft is the most difficult aspect of writing. With GPT-3, you can create the first draft of your content, and then edit it afterwards to meet your brand voice. This saves you a lot of time and makes you more efficient.

5. SEO A/B testing

Most SEOs focus more on user A/B testing and less on SEO A/B testing. While user testing involves randomly assigning visitors (users) of your website to different versions of your pages, and eventually deciding on the one to use based on the performance. In SEO A/B testing, the users are Googlebots and not end-users, and they’re typically shown the same version of the page.

What this means is that when you implement SEO/AB testing, you’re only showing users or Google only one version of the page, and not multiple pages.

How to implement SEO/AB testing

There are different ways to implement SEO A/B testing, depending on what you want to achieve for your business. If you’re just starting out, some things you can test include:

Title tags
Meta description
H1

Take for instance, Etsy conducted a title tag SEO A/B testing for some of its pages, and within a few days, they started seeing significant traffic changes to their pages.

If you’re an intermediate/advanced SEO, you can test other things such as:

AMP pages
Internal anchor texts
Schema markup
New content
And so on

For example, SearchPilot ran an internal link SEO A/B testing for a grocery store, and saw a 25% increase in organic traffic.

Conducting SEO A/B tests such as these will help you know exactly what works well for your brand and what doesn’t. That way, you can make more informed decisions when optimizing your pages for SEO.

For instance, if your traffic decreased to a particular page after making changes to it during the SEO A/B test, it shows that the test didn’t work out.

Typically, you should expect to start seeing results from your SEO A/B testing as soon as Google crawls your variant page. If Google crawls your test page within say 7-14 days, then you can compare it with the main page.

Some SEO A/B testing tools you can use for this purpose include: Google Tag Manager, Rankscience, Optimizely, etc.

6. Automated on-page content optimization

When creating a long-form piece of content, you typically:

Check the top-ranking pages on the SERPs
Go through each piece of content ranking on the SERPs
Figure out the specific headings and subheadings the pages are covering
Identify the missing points in the pages
Create a better outline of our own piece.
And so on

This usually takes a lot of time. You have to spend hours manually checking one piece of content after another and taking note of the most important points to include in your own piece.

How to use automated on-page content optimization

Instead of spending hours to create content briefs and researching the information you want to include in your content, you can use SEO tools such as Frase AI and Content Harmony.

With Frase AI, you can shorten the time you use for content research. Say you want to write about “how to lose weight fast”, you can input the main keyword into the tool.

Once done, it’ll automatically check the top-ranking pages in the SERPs, and provide you with some useful information you can use when creating your content. These include the top results for the keyword, statistics and data you can add in your content, questions your target audience are asking on Quora, Reddit, and Google’s People Also Ask.

With a tool such as Content Harmony, you can automatically create content briefs that meet search intent in less time.

All you need to get started is your keyword. Once you input it into the software, it automatically analyzes the SERPs using different data points. Afterwards, you can build your content briefs from there.

7. Non-text content factors

Non-text content factors are becoming more prominent in SEO because they help you create a nicer user experience on your website pages.

If you read a piece of content with blocks of texts all over it, you’ll most likely find it unappealing to look at. And with the upcoming enforcement of Core Web Vitals by Google in March 2021, non-text content factors will have a huge impact on SEO.

Some of these non-text content factors include:

Images
Infographics
Graphs
Charts
Videos
Audio clips
Animations
Slideshows
Downloadable files such as PDFs

How to use non-text content factors for SEO

Canva: With this tool, you create high-quality non-stock images for your pages.
Venngage: If you want to create infographics that catches your readers’ attention, then you should use Venngage.
Invideo: Invideo helps you create and edit videos online in a few minutes with different ready-made templates.
Animaker: If you don’t have a design background and want to create animated videos, then this tool will help you greatly.

With these tools, you can make your pages and posts more appealing. Hence, your readers will spend more time on your website, and your bounce rate will eventually decrease drastically.

Conclusion

As we look forward into the future of the SEO industry, new technology developments will definitely play a significant role. While some of them are already in use, others are still in development.

If you’re an SEO who wants to remain on top of things in the industry, then you should keep an eye out for these emerging technologies and start applying them to grow your business. Have more SEO tech to add to this list? Let me know in the comments.

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How to Explain Domain Authority to a Non-SEO

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by Orbiteer

Do you ever have to explain the importance of Domain Authority to clients or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, this week’s WBF host — Andy Crestodina — walks through how to get your message across successfully.

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

Video Transcription

SEO is actually really hard to explain. There are so many concepts. But it's also really important to explain so that we can show value to our clients and to our employers.

My name is Andy Crestodina. I'm the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. We're a web design company here in Chicago. I've been doing SEO for 20 years and explaining it for about as long. This video is my best attempt to help you explain a really important concept in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to someone who doesn't know anything at all about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to someone who is maybe not even a marketer.

Here is one framework, one set of language and words that you can use to try to explain Domain Authority to people who maybe need to understand it but don't have a background in this stuff whatsoever.

Search ranking factors

Okay. Here we go. Someone searches. They type something into a search engine. They see search results.

Why do they see these search results instead of something else? The reason is: search ranking factors determined that these were going to be the top search results for that query or that keyword or that search phrase.

Relevance

There are two main search ranking factors, in the end two reasons why any web page ranks or doesn't rank for any phrase. Those two main factors are, first of all, the page itself, the words, the content, the keywords, the relevance.

SEOs, we call this relevance. So that's the most important. That's one of the key search ranking factors is relevance, content and keywords and stuff on pages. I think everyone kind of gets that. But there's a second, super important search ranking factor. It's something that Google innovated and is now a really, really important thing across the web and all search.

Links

It's links. Do these pages have links to them? Are they trusted by other websites? Have other websites kind of voted for them based on their content? Have they referred back to it, cited it? Have they linked to these pages and these websites? That is called authority.

So the two main search ranking factors are relevance and authority. Therefore, the two main types of SEO are on-page SEO, creating content, and off-site SEO, PR, link building, and authority. Because links basically are trust. Web page, links to web page, that's kind of like a vote.

That's a vote of confidence. That's saying that this web page is probably credible, probably important. So links are credibility. Good way to think about it. Quantity matters. If a lot of pages link to your page, that adds credibility. That's important that there's a number of sites that link to you.

Link quality

Also important is the quality of those links. Links from sites that they themselves have many links to them are worth much more. So links from authoritative websites are more valuable than just any other link. It's the quantity and the quality of links to your website or links to your page that has a lot to do with whether or not you rank when people search for a related key phrase.

If a page doesn't rank, it's got one of two problems almost always. It's either not a great page on the topic, or it's not a page on a site that is trusted by the search engine because it hasn't built up enough authority from other sites, related sites, media sites, other sites in the industry. The name for this stuff originally in Google was called PageRank.

PageRank

Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not web page, not search results page, but named after Larry Page, the guy who kind of came up with this, one of the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that we all used to kind of know. It was visible in this toolbar that we used back in the day.

They stopped reporting on that. They don't update that anymore. We don't really know our PageRank anymore, so you can't really tell. So the way that we now understand whether a page is credible among other websites is by using tools that emulate PageRank by similarly crawling the internet, looking to see who's linking to who and then creating their own metrics, which are basically proxy metrics for PageRank.

Domain Authority

Moz has one. It's called Domain Authority. When spelled with the capital D and captial A, that's the Moz metric. Other search tools, other SEO tools also have their own, such as SEMrush has one called Authority Score. Ahrefs has one called Domain Rating. Alexa, another popular tool, has one called Competitive Power. They're all basically the same thing. They are showing whether or not a site or a page is trusted among other websites because of links to them.

Now we know for a fact that some links are worth much, much more than others. We can do this by reading Google patents or by experiments or just best practices and expertise and firsthand knowledge that some links are worth much more.

But it's not just that they're worth a little more. Links from sites with lots of authority are worth exponentially more. It's not really a fair fight. Some sites have tons and tons and tons of authority. Most sites have very, very little. So it's on a curve. It's a log scale.

It's on an exponential curve the amount of authority that a site has and its ranking potential. The value of a link from another site to you is on an exponential curve. Links from some sites are worth exponentially more than links from other smaller sites, smaller blogs. These are quantifiable within these tools, tools like Moz, tools that emulate the PageRank metric.

And what they can do is look at all of the pages that rank for a phrase, look at all of the authority of all of those sites and all of those pages, and then average them to show the likely difficulty of ranking for that key phrase. The difficulty would be more or less the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and then determine whether that's a page that you actually have a chance of ranking for or not.

This could be called something like keyword difficulty. I searched for "baseball coaching" using a tool. I used Moz, and I found that the difficulty for that key phrase was something like 46 out of 100. In other words, your page has to have about that much authority to have a chance of ranking for that phrase. There's a subtle difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority, but we're going to set that aside for now.

"Squash coaching," wow, different sport, less popular sport, less content, less competitive phrases ranking for that key phrase. Wow, "squash coaching" much less competitive. The difficulty for that was only 18. So that helps us understand the level of authority that we would have to have to have a chance of ranking for that key phrase. If we lack sufficient authority, it doesn't matter how awesome our page is, we're not likely to ever rank.

So it's really important to understand one of the things that Domain Authority tells us is our ranking potential. Are we sufficiently trusted to be able to target that key phrase and potentially rank for that? That's the first thing that the Domain Authority defines, measures, shows. The second thing that it shows, which I mentioned a second ago, is the value of a link from another site to us.

So if a super authoritative website links to us, high Domain Authority site, that Domain Authority in that case of that site is showing us the value of that link to us. A link from a site, a brand-new blog, a young site, a smaller brand would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less value.

Conclusion

So bottom line, Domain Authority is a proxy for a metric inside Google, which we no longer have access to. It's created by an SEO tool, in this case Moz. When spelled with a capital D, capital A, it's Moz's own metric. It shows us two things. Domain Authority is the ranking potential of pages on that domain. And secondly, Domain Authority measures the value of another site should that site link back to your site. That's it.

Hope this was helpful. Feel free to pass this along to anyone that you're trying to explain this to. Add to it. Let us know in the comments. Hope this was useful, and it was a huge pleasure and honor to be able to make a Whiteboard Friday for Moz. Again, Andy from Orbit Media. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Presenting: The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 09:00:00 GMT

Posted by MiriamEllis

Untie the ribbons and hear the paper crackle — it’s a handcrafted gift, ready for you to unwrap!

This guide is a labor of love that Moz has worked on through the toughest year in local SEO, with hopes of a stronger 2021 for local brands. It’s free, it’s jam-packed with over eight chapters of actionable local search marketing strategies for your agency or local business, it's…

The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide!

What is The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide?

Moz is publishing this free guide to support digital marketing agencies and local business owners who want to gain an excellent understanding of topics and tactics within local search marketing.

This multi-chapter guide covers:

Understanding Google’s local SERPs
Assessing demand and analyzing local markets
Analyzing on-page SEO and local business listings
Analyzing and developing a reputation and reviews strategy
Analyzing local business content and creating a publishing strategy
Crafting a robust local marketing strategy
Local search automation, analytics, and reporting

It also includes a special chapter on local SEO in the time of COVID-19 and a handy local search glossary.

Who will get value from this guide?

Any reader who has a beginning-to-intermediate acquaintance with local SEO should find next-level education in this guide to improve their skill set. Experts will find useful and practical perspectives to help them communicate with teams, stakeholders, and clients, thus improving the chances of buy-in for projects.

If you’re responsible for marketing any aspect of a local business, The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide contains workflows you can implement today to achieve local brand and agency goals.

Share this guide with:

Single and multi-location local businesses.
Brick-and-mortar models, service-area businesses, and hybrids.
All relevant staff at your local brand, from in-house marketers to key customer service personnel, from bloggers, to webmasters, to social media managers.
Incoming staff at your digital marketing agency who need training in local SEO to become a greater asset to your company.
Any member of your team tasked with the many facets of marketing local businesses.
Friends, family and colleagues who own a local business and could use a great playbook for a better 2021.

What makes this guide different?

This highly detailed and illustrated guide is special, in that it teaches not just the “how” of local SEO, but the “why”.

Expert explanations will help you see the big picture of local SEO as a sensible whole, rather than just random tactics in no particular order. We’re not aware of another free guide on the market that delves more deeply into the mindset of serving local communities with the objective of turning a local business into a local household name.

This robust guide will help you put the three pillars of local search — proximity, prominence, and relevance — to work for the brands you’re marketing, and build the visibility and reputation essential to success.

Moz knows local businesses are the backbone of the economy, and we want to do everything we can to support sustainable, diverse, thriving towns and cities through the presence of strong local brands. We hope you’ll take this guide as our gift to help build a better future for the local businesses you’re marketing. Unwrap it today!

Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide!

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5 Tips to Invigorate Boring SEO Reports with Storytelling

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by chrisgiarratana

Add value to SEO reports with storytelling

Monthly SEO reports are a vital part of any SEO strategy because they provide an outlet to educate customers, show ROI, and guide the conversion for upsells.

While SEO reports are crucial in many ways, they are usually reduced to boilerplate PDF templates sent to clients each month with a generic message. If this describes your SEO reporting approach, you’re missing out on vital opportunities to retain clients and upsell with carefully crafted storytelling strategies.

SEO reporting has always been an important part of my deliverables. Whether I'm working with clients through my agency, StrategyBeam, or when I worked in a corporate team, I found that good reporting made a big difference with trust building and overall strategy. Regardless of who you're working with — national brands or local businesses — I’ve found that solid SEO reporting helps ground the client relationship. Over the past eight years, I've been able to grow StrategyBeam to a mid-six-figure agency. Customer service and results have always been our bread and butter, and SEO reports help us show how we stand out from the competition, and create long-term relationships with our clients.

Be sure to incorporate SEO reports into your regular cadence if you are struggling to keep a client, or you just want a way to engage with your clients in a deeper way. Now, more than ever we need to show clients the value we bring to the table.

So, let's take a look at the things all useful SEO reports should include, and how you can use storytelling tactics to build a relationship with your customers, prove your strategies' value, and uncover upsell opportunities today!

1. Organic impressions, clicks, and CTR

While SEO has a broad reach, you need to get the right message to the right people if you want them to click through to your content and convert.

This is why a good SEO report should include high-level metrics like organic impressions and clicks. While this information doesn’t provide much insight into on-page performance, it does offer a jumping-off point for you to talk to your customer about changes in market trends and user behavior.

I like to cover high-level data at the start of each reporting call to set the table for more detailed discussions with customers. I've used this data to recommend additional work for clients and use these metrics to show YoY improvement, and justify work during specific periods.

I present data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics to help my clients understand how we can influence their site's overall performance. Here are a few points that I touch on based on current click and impressions:

What it means: Impressions = how often content appears, clicks = how many times people click on SERPs.
Where to find it: Google Search Console
When to use it: Identify content and build approach. Build sprints to address problem areas. Pages that are performing between 3-12 should be optimized, and low CTR should improve meta, interlinking, and technical considerations.
How to optimize: High impressions + low clicks = update title and meta description. Low impressions = add FAQ schema.

Even though clicks and impressions don't convey too much information about a website's performance, you can use this part of your SEO report to ease into upsell opportunities and show your SEO chops when it comes to the broader scope of SEO marketing and how everything is interconnected.

2. Keyword ranking

Since SEO is all about getting specific pages to rank for target keywords, you need to include keyword performance and rankings in your SEO report. I love using keyword information to jumpstart a conversation with my clients around user intent and bringing SEO strategy back to their business goals.

I love using this time to show that I understand SEO is more than keywords and Google. At the end of the day, if my SEO strategy is not driving qualified traffic and boosting conversions, then my clients will find another agency.

Keywords are the basis of search engines, and I like to use keyword ranking data to tie in the "bigger picture", along with specific SEO tactics and push to secure more sales.

Here are a few talking points to consider with keyword performance in my monthly SEO reports and client check-ins:

Show snapshots of keyword tools like Moz Keyword Tool and Ahrefs to show patterns. Tie MoM changes into an SEO report template to show progress and boost each client call's energy.
Recommend content optimizations, outreach, and other SEO tactics to drive target keywords. Tie keyword ranking to your services, results, and your client's business goals.
Run a quick technical SEO audit and content audit to provide new opportunities for additional work. This is a great way to improve your client's site's performance while also increasing trust and monthly income.

Keyword rankings give a strong signal around user intent, market trends, and competitor strategies. You can use keyword rankings in your SEO reports to focus attention on success and move the conversation towards upselling opportunities to shift gears and align your SEO strategy with your clients' business goals.

3. Describe how people engage with your content

SEO strategies are typically described in abstract terms, so it's our job as SEO professionals to connect the dots for clients whenever possible between SEO metrics and their business goals.

You probably spend a lot of time talking about different SEO marketing angles, like the customer journey, website performance, and user intent. All of these factors influence how search engines rank content, and even more importantly, all of these factors influence conversion rates.

However, SEO is abstract and challenging for our clients to understand. That's why we need to include concrete terms, visuals, and explanations in our reports for ongoing education and trust-building measures.

For example, I manage SEO and content for a large player in the shipping industry. This industry is extremely niche, but each sale can lead to 8-figure deals for my client. I was able to illustrate to the client about how they could increase leads by expanding their existing content Hub/Spoke model and use their SEO reports to talk them through different aspects of their business like:

Categorize content on your site and assign specific metrics and goals for your clients.
Track content based on topics and what content moved people through the customer journey.
Use Content Drill Down in Google Analytics to show how readers move through the website. This information is valuable to highlight opportunities to optimize content.
Jumpstart a conversation around other SEO tactics like interlinking, blogging, and on-page optimizations.

Showing how people engage with my client’s website was a key part to increase education, and help visualize how your monthly SEO work impacts your client's website. If you can point out a bottleneck in the customer journey and offer CRO, interlinking, or on-page optimizations, then you are on your way to build client trust and slide into an upsell opportunity.

4. Google Analytics events

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager can be used to show how your SEO and CRO strategies impact user behavior when they reach your website. You can educate your customers about on-page SEO by tracking clicks on specific CTAs throughout individual pages.

In recent months I've started working with several clients on CRO and content optimization projects. Not only are these great ways to help clients reach their goals, but they are also high-margin projects that can show immediate results.

One of the metrics I focus on when I review clients' results is how people engage with their CTAs. This means that I have to connect Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to show that our optimizations push more website visitors to valuable pages like contact forms and sales pages.

For example, I recently ran a small test for a client to show them that with some on-page SEO tweaks we could improve CTR for various posts and pages. I identified a few pages that would show the best results, closed the project, and after a month of testing I was able to include CTA clicks on different pages that I optimized.

After a few months of on-page optimizations I can see a big improvement for CTR and lead generation on their site. Here is a quick screenshot of CTA clicks on the client’s site from the pages/posts I optimized:

This small test was a success and lead to ongoing monthly optimizations across their deep content library. As a result, I am able to show the impact our on-page optimizations make to their lead quality and bottomline.

This is a perfect example of how we can use reports to build rapport, show our knowledge, and test ideas with clients. Plus, it can all lead to beneficial upsells- but none of this is possible without a good looking and informative report to backup our claims.

While this is not a big part of my SEO reporting process, I try to include metrics around user behavior to explain how people engage with on-page content. This information can also help tie high-level SEO metrics to business goals, which are significant parts of the overall story I convey to my clients each month.

5. Add local SEO info

Local SEO is an essential part of an SEO strategy to drive qualified leads and sales for local business owners. You can save a lot of time by using a tool like Moz Local to keep NAP and listings consistent for your clients, and you can use excellent local SEO reporting tools to show the results of your local SEO tactics.

I have several clients that offer local SEO services. Not only do these services offer immediate value to these clients, but the local SEO services also provide me with a great way to pitch additional services like outreach, page optimizations, and blogging.

While local SEO is not a great fit for all of your clients, you can unwrap great opportunities if you offer honest solutions to address their needs and present precise data to show your efforts' value.

Be sure to include local SEO metrics in your SEO reports when it makes sense, and point out the metrics that matter to business owners like phone calls, foot traffic, and driving directions!

Use SEO analytics to tell a story and build customer trust!

Reports are not the main reason many SEOs started in this profession, but monthly SEO reports help us paint a picture of our clients' SEO efforts. You'll be able to show the value of your SEO services and keep clients longer if you know how to tell a story around each metric, and tie results back to your agency!

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Impactful SEO Audits for B2B

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by carlycs

A comprehensive audit of your B2B website can mean the difference between winning new clients and losing them to the competition. In this brand new episode of Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through four areas that can take your audits to the next level.

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

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I'm a Senior SEO Manager at Obility. We're a B2B digital marketing agency here in Portland, Oregon. Now if you work for an agency, you know that sometimes a really valuable SEO audit can be the difference between winning over a client and losing out to someone else.

So something I sometimes struggle with is how to level up your basic SEO audit into something that's really impactful for a B2B company that is in need of a long-term, strategic plan. Now when I'm talking about an SEO audit, I'm not just talking about a technical audit, something you can just pull from Screaming Frog.

It's really about getting a clear picture of a site's current SEO compliance and most importantly showing the ways, both in the short and long term, that you can work with them to help them achieve their goals. So today I'm going to walk you through my approach to SEO audits and walk you through step by step. Now before we get started pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out first.

Competitors and goals

Number one is competitors. So SEO, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If we want to improve our rankings, a competitor is likely going to have to lose rankings. So it's really important to get an idea of what competitors you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, again, it's really important to make sure that your competitors are realistic.

I can't tell you how many times I've been given Google as a competitor. Now maybe they're a competitor for you, but it's really important to make sure that you're being realistic and finding competitors that are of a similar size so that the insights you're providing are actually going to be valuable and actionable. So if someone gives you Google as a competitor, think about it, maybe provide some alternatives.

Another thing I like to take a look at is goals. So if you're evaluating a company, ask them what their goals are. Maybe they just launched a new product and they really would like some specific insights as to how they can improve that content. Or maybe they're going through a site migration in a few months, and they really want some insights related to that.

So good audits are not one size fits all. So you can really level up your audit by making sure that it's tailored to the site and the company you're looking at specifically. So now that we've got our competitors, we've got our goals, let's get started by taking a look at keywords.

1. Keywords

Obviously, keywords are so important. It's where you need to start because keywords are the backbone of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a full keyword research strategy here. This shouldn't take you all day. But there are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some really interesting and helpful information about keywords without having to put in a whole bunch of time.

So Moz's Keyword Explorer is a really great place to start. I love to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is a really good way to take a look at one site versus its competitors and see how it's doing from a really high level. It'll help you identify if there's someone who's really elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's maybe not the most realistic competitor to monitor yourself against.

You can see if maybe there's a site that's really comparable. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for hardly any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to worry about. So it's a really good place to start just to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another really helpful thing to look at is the keyword overlap. So we've seen total keywords.

But what are those keywords specifically that are performing well? So my lovely drawing here of a keyword overlap chart gives you an idea. So let's say the blue is your top competitor, green is competitor two, and then the red is you. So you really want to take a look at that area where your competitors overlap but you don't have any keywords that are ranking.

This is so important, because maybe you'll identify a topic area where all of your competitors have content for, but the site you're looking at doesn't. This is a really good place to start and can help you provide some initial content suggestions and get sort of a window into your competitors' content strategies. So speaking of content, let's talk about looking at content for an SEO audit.

2. Content

So this is probably where I spend the most time personally when I do audits, because it's really valuable and there are also so many different things to look at and you can find something new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, however, one thing you want to make sure you're taking a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel stages, and are they funneling people from one stage to the next?

So take a look at their site like you're someone visiting it for the first time. Take a look at their awareness content and see: Are there mid-funnel CTAs? Are they making the next step they want me to take clear? Or what is that ultimate conversion that they want people to take in the purchase stage? Do they have a really clear contact form?

Is it easy to navigate to the demo, if that's a really important conversion to them? Take a look at their content and what they're doing, specifically making sure that they have content for the full funnel. This is another good opportunity to evaluate your competitors. So do the same thing on your competitors' sites. See if there's something they're doing really, really well, that the site you're looking at is not.

Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a competitor is doing that maybe you can learn from and find a way to do your own version of on your site.

3. Technical

All right. Another area to always make sure you include is technical, because we all know that even if you have the best, amazing content on your site, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not really going to matter if you're not able to get that content indexed.

So a good place to start is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 errors, duplicate content, maybe they have missing metadata on all of their really valuable top pages. That's good information to have and to share. Then you also want to expand that to look at things like site speed. Maybe they have really poor site speed, and it's nothing that they've ever prioritized.

Use Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some specific recommendations that you can give them and that you can help them fix, because ultimately it's about trying to get them to want to work with you and showing how you could help them fix those issues. You can also take a look at things that might be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.

Take a look at their sitemap. Just check all the boxes and make sure that there's nothing that might be impacting their search appearance.

4. Off-site

Finally, I always like to take a look at off-site. This is another great use of Moz. I love to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles option to get an idea of how you stack up with your competitors when it comes to off-site.

Now I know that off-site is really difficult. Link building is hard, and it takes a long time to really show results. But knowing how you stack up against your competitors, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to total links, really helps you get an idea of how hard it's going to be and how long it's going to take to catch up with your competitors in the search engine results page.

So I always like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, linking domains and really just finding insights as far as who's going to be the most difficult, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, very similar to the competitor overlap.

See if there's a site where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you don't. Maybe it's really relevant, an industry publication, and you can provide them that and you can help them eventually, hopefully, get a link from there too. All right. So we've taken a look at keywords, content, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the steps, you should have a really great audit with some super actionable, short-term and long-term action items to provide.

So I hope this was really helpful, and thank you for joining me.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Combine SEO and CRO for the Ultimate Lead Generation Strategy

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by IzabelleHundrev

If there’s one thing that most marketers have in common, it’s that we want more leads.

Sure, not all leads are good. Some are even downright unqualified. But leads are what drive business, and as a result, many of us are held accountable for generating more of them.

Out of all of the lead generation strategies out there, there’s one that I find particularly effective: search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) working together.

While this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many marketing teams are really good at one or the other, but fail to find the balance between both.

Below, I’ll share why it’s critical to find alignment between SEO and CRO, and how to do it so that both of these functions work together to drive qualified leads for your business.

SEO and CRO: Why you can’t have one without the other

Being discoverable is more important than it’s ever been. If a prospective buyer can’t find your business online, there’s a good chance that you’re leading them right into the arms of your competitors.

By now, most businesses understand the importance of having a presence in organic search results. SEO is more than just a buzzword, it’s a given. And it’s critical to growing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.

But there’s a catch.

Traffic doesn’t magically turn into paying customers and revenue. Ask yourself, when someone clicks on an organic result and lands on your website, what kind of browsing experience are they having? Is your site easy to navigate? Are your web pages optimized to guide the user towards an action?

Traffic without conversions is essentially just a vanity metric. CRO is the piece that ties it all together.

Put simply, conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing a web page to lead a user toward a desired action. Typically, this action comes in the form of a conversion. This can be a demo request, email newsletter sign up, webinar registration — you get the gist.

The idea here is to entice the user to move further down the marketing funnel in some way.

SEO is what brings people to your website and CRO is what gets them to convert.

It sounds like a match made in marketing heaven, but achieving alignment is often easier said than done.

Start with a strong SEO foundation

I could write thousands of words on what it takes to build a strong SEO foundation for your website, but that’s not what this article is about. With that being said, a discussion about the relationship between SEO and CRO wouldn’t be complete without a mention of it.

Earlier, I said you can’t have SEO without CRO. But this goes both ways.

While it’s true that conversions are a meaningful standalone metric, you can’t have conversions without web visitors. Plus, experimentation and testing is a big part of what makes CRO so effective. It can be difficult to run tests if your website doesn’t get a healthy amount of traffic. More on this later.

A successful SEO strategy fuels the inbound marketing engine to bring new prospective buyers to your site on a regular basis. With SEO, your entire marketing team could be on PTO for a week and your website will still be generating traffic on its own.

If you’re still working to build a powerful SEO strategy, there are countless SEO resources that are available to you.

Be intentional about your content

Content and SEO go hand-in-hand.

When a buyer goes to a search engine, they want to find content that brings them an answer to their question.

As marketers, we want to create that content and match it to a buyer’s specific search query. We do this through extensive keyword research and on-page optimization to ensure that every piece of content that’s published has a likelihood to rank on page one.

Although this approach to content creation is effective at generating organic traffic, sometimes we forget to think about how a piece can drive impact beyond just ranking number one for a keyword.

CRO doesn’t just apply to landing pages or core solutions pages. There are elements of CRO that apply to your long-from content as well.

When strategizing topic ideas and doing keyword research, assign a goal to every piece of content that you publish. Ask yourself, “what action do I want the reader to take when they land on this page?”

Build this goal into your content calendar and incorporate it as a call-to-action (CTA) on each page that you publish.

As always, be mindful of the reader and their position in the funnel. Someone that lands on “The Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation” probably isn’t ready for a live demo just yet.

Instead, guide that reader toward a less intimidating action, such as signing up for your email newsletter. A good CTA shouldn’t feel spammy or overly promotional, it should provide additional value to the reader overall.

Following this process forces you to think beyond just traffic — you’re focusing on conversions before you even hit the “publish” button.

Test, optimize, and repeat

User experience (UX) is at the heart of both SEO and CRO.

If your website is slow, glitchy, and hard to navigate, it’s going to negatively affect both traffic and conversions. The goal is to continuously refine your website to ensure that anyone who lands on it has a frictionless browsing experience — thereby increasing their likelihood to convert.

This is why split testing is so important.

Split testing, sometimes referred to as A/B testing, is the process of testing multiple variants of a web page to determine which one converts at a higher rate. This is a core practice among marketers who specialize in CRO. You can test different types of lead forms, CTA buttons, copy variants, and even page layouts.

Here’s an example of a split test between a single and multi-step lead form:

Some SEOs may be hesitant to run split tests because they worry it will negatively affect organic rankings. The truth is that Google not only encourages testing, but it even has its own tool that helps marketers to run split tests.

As long as you’re abiding by Google’s webmaster guidelines, you should see no major negative impact on organic traffic due to testing.

It’s also worth noting that you can’t reach statistical significance in your split tests without a big enough sample size. In other words, you need traffic to have accurate test results.

There’s no hard and fast rule for what counts as “enough traffic” but the general consensus is that your web visitors should be in the thousands, at least. I recommend using this sample size calculator tool to get a better idea of a number that’s unique to your website.

This is yet another example of how closely intertwined SEO and CRO truly are. Earlier we discussed how important it is to start with a solid foundation in SEO, now you know how it fits into the bigger picture.

The common thread here?

CRO and SEO have a symbiotic relationship. What’s good for one is good for the other. And both are working toward the same common goal of generating revenue.

Identify marketing funnel gaps

When looking at the big picture of your inbound marketing efforts, SEO and CRO can help you identify and fix any gaps in your funnel.

Let’s say you have a product page that ranks #1 for its primary keyword and generates lots of traffic. But, when you dig into the conversion data, you notice that only a small percentage of users that land on that page actually convert.

This is a red flag that something is off with the page.

It could be the messaging, the offer, or the lead form. Just because it works for Google doesn’t mean it’s working for your audience. And their opinion is the only one that matters.

This goes the other way around too.

Say you have a product page that’s converting at a high rate, but you notice that it’s one of the lowest-trafficked pages on your site. This should alert you to revisit the content on that page and identify opportunities to re-optimize it. If you don’t, there are likely hundreds of potential conversions that you’re missing out on.

Final thoughts

SEO and CRO is kind of like the digital marketing version of the chicken and the egg. You can’t be really good at one without the other.

Realistically, it doesn’t matter what came first. What does matter is achieving alignment between these two key marketing tactics. By doing so, your website has the potential to become a major driver of leads and revenue for your business.

If there’s one thing you take away from this article, it’s to integrate your SEO and CRO efforts and view them as one cohesive part of your lead generation strategy.

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How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by KameronJenkins

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

As an SEO Manager, you’re responsible for growing your company’s organic search traffic. You’re working with your dev team on some technical improvements, but you notice a big slice of the opportunity lies with content. Your company has a content team, but you notice they’re not using keyword research to inform their articles. You’ve tried to send them keyword ideas, but so far, they haven’t been receptive to your suggestions.

Or how about this scenario?

You’re a marketing director at a startup. You know that you need content, but don’t have the expertise or time to do it yourself, so you ask your network for recommendations and find yourself a freelance writer. The only problem is, you’re not always sure what to assign them. With little instruction to work off of, they produce content that misses the mark.

The solution in both of these scenarios is a content brief. However, not all content briefs are created equal.

As someone who lives with one foot in content and the other in SEO, I can shed some light on how to make your content briefs both comprehensive and beloved by your content team.

Let’s start by agreeing on some terminology.

What’s a content brief?

A content brief is a set of instructions to guide a writer on how to draft a piece of content. That piece of content can be a blog post, a landing page, a white paper, or any number of other initiatives that require content.

Without a content brief, you risk getting back content that doesn’t meet your expectations. This will not only frustrate your writer, but it’ll also require more revisions, taking more of your time and money.

Typically, content briefs are written by someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.
Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers
Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for
And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.
Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.
Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups
Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)
Case studies
Free trials
Request demo
Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.
Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?
Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?
What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?
What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

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The Definitive Guide to JavaScript SEO (2021 Edition)

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by PierceBrelinsky

The web is in a golden age of front-end development, and JavaScript and technical SEO are experiencing a renaissance. As a technical SEO specialist and web dev enthusiast at an award-winning digital marketing agency, I’d like to share my perspective on modern JavaScript SEO based on industry best practices and my own agency experience. In this article, you'll learn how to optimize your JS-powered website for search in 2021.

What is JavaScript SEO?

JavaScript SEO is the discipline of technical SEO that’s focused on optimizing websites built with JavaScript for visibility by search engines. It’s primarily concerned with:

Optimizing content injected via JavaScript for crawling, rendering, and indexing by search engines.
Preventing, diagnosing, and troubleshooting ranking issues for websites and SPAs (Single Page Applications) built on JavaScript frameworks, such as React, Angular, and Vue.
Ensuring that web pages are discoverable by search engines through linking best practices.
Improving page load times for pages parsing and executing JS code for a streamlined User Experience (UX).

Is JavaScript good or bad for SEO?

It depends! JavaScript is essential to the modern web and makes building websites scalable and easier to maintain. However, certain implementations of JavaScript can be detrimental to search engine visibility.

How does JavaScript affect SEO?

JavaScript can affect the following on-page elements and ranking factors that are important for SEO:

Rendered content
Links
Lazy-loaded images
Page load times
Meta data

What are JavaScript-powered websites?

When we talk about sites that are built on JavaScript, we’re not referring to simply adding a layer of JS interactivity to HTML documents (for example, when adding JS animations to a static web page). In this case, JavaScript-powered websites refer to when the core or primary content is injected into the DOM via JavaScript.

App Shell Model.

This template is called an app shell and is the foundation for progressive web applications (PWAs). We’ll explore this next.

How to check if a site is built with JavaScript

You can quickly check if a website is built on a JavaScript framework by using a technology look-up tool such as BuiltWith or Wappalyzer. You can also “Inspect Element” or “View Source” in the browser to check for JS code. Popular JavaScript frameworks that you might find include:

Angular by Google
React by Facebook
Vue by Evan You

JavaScript SEO for core content

Here’s an example: Modern web apps are being built on JavaScript frameworks, like Angular, React, and Vue. JavaScript frameworks allow developers to quickly build and scale interactive web applications. Let’s take a look at the default project template for Angular.js, a popular framework produced by Google.

When viewed in the browser, this looks like a typical web page. We can see text, images, and links. However, let’s dive deeper and take a peek under the hood at the code:

Now we can see that this HTML document is almost completely devoid of any content. There are only the app-root and a few script tags in the body of the page. This is because the main content of this single page application is dynamically injected into the DOM via JavaScript. In other words, this app depends on JS to load key on-page content!

Potential SEO issues: Any core content that is rendered to users but not to search engine bots could be seriously problematic! If search engines aren’t able to fully crawl all of your content, then your website could be overlooked in favor of competitors. We’ll discuss this in more detail later.

JavaScript SEO for internal links

Besides dynamically injecting content into the DOM, JavaScript can also affect the crawlability of links. Google discovers new pages by crawling links it finds on pages.

As a best practice, Google specifically recommends linking pages using HTML anchor tags with href attributes, as well as including descriptive anchor texts for the hyperlinks:

However, Google also recommends that developers not rely on other HTML elements — like div or span — or JS event handlers for links. These are called “pseudo” links, and they will typically not be crawled, according to official Google guidelines:

Despite these guidelines, an independent, third-party study has suggested that Googlebot may be able to crawl JavaScript links. Nonetheless, in my experience, I’ve found that it’s a best practice to keep links as static HTML elements.

Potential SEO issues: If search engines aren’t able to crawl and follow links to your key pages, then your pages could be missing out on valuable internal links pointing to them. Internal links help search engines crawl your website more efficiently and highlight the most important pages. The worst-case scenario is that if your internal links are implemented incorrectly, then Google may have a hard time discovering your new pages at all (outside of the XML sitemap).

JavaScript SEO for lazy-loading images

JavaScript can also affect the crawlability of images that are lazy-loaded. Here’s a basic example. This code snippet is for lazy-loading images in the DOM via JavaScript:

Googlebot supports lazy-loading, but it does not “scroll” like a human user would when visiting your web pages. Instead, Googlebot simply resizes its virtual viewport to be longer when crawling web content. Therefore, the “scroll” event listener is never triggered and the content is never rendered by the crawler.

Here’s an example of more SEO-friendly code:

This code shows that the IntersectionObserver API triggers a callback when any observed element becomes visible. It’s more flexible and robust than the on-scroll event listener and is supported by modern Googlebot. This code works because of how Googlebot resizes its viewport in order to “see” your content (see below).

You can also use native lazy-loading in the browser. This is supported by Google Chrome, but note that it is still an experimental feature. Worst case scenario, it will just get ignored by Googlebot, and all images will load anyway:

Native lazy-loading in Google Chrome.

Potential SEO issues: Similar to core content not being loaded, it’s important to make sure that Google is able to “see” all of the content on a page, including images. For example, on an e-commerce site with multiple rows of product listings, lazy-loading images can provide a faster user experience for both users and bots!

Javascript SEO for page speed

Javascript can also affect page load times, which is an official ranking factor in Google’s mobile-first index. This means that a slow page could potentially harm rankings in search. How can we help developers mitigate this?

Minifying JavaScript
Deferring non-critical JS until after the main content is rendered in the DOM
Inlining critical JS
Serving JS in smaller payloads

Potential SEO issues: A slow website creates a poor user experience for everyone, even search engines. Google itself defers loading JavaScript to save resources, so it’s important to make sure that any served to clients is coded and delivered efficiently to help safeguard rankings.

JavaScript SEO for meta data

Also, it’s important to note that SPAs that utilize a router package like react-router or vue-router have to take some extra steps to handle things like changing meta tags when navigating between router views. This is usually handled with a Node.js package like vue-meta or react-meta-tags.

What are router views? Here’s how linking to different “pages” in a Single Page Application works in React in five steps:

When a user visits a React website, a GET request is sent to the server for the ./index.html file.
The server then sends the index.html page to the client, containing the scripts to launch React and React Router.
The web application is then loaded on the client-side.
If a user clicks on a link to go on a new page (/example), a request is sent to the server for the new URL.
React Router intercepts the request before it reaches the server and handles the change of page itself. This is done by locally updating the rendered React components and changing the URL client-side.

In other words, when users or bots follow links to URLs on a React website, they are not being served multiple static HTML files. But rather, the React components (like headers, footers, and body content) hosted on root ./index.html file are simply being reorganized to display different content. This is why they’re called Single Page Applications!

Potential SEO issues: So, it’s important to use a package like React Helmet for making sure that users are being served unique metadata for each page, or “view,” when browsing SPAs. Otherwise, search engines may be crawling the same metadata for every page, or worse, none at all!

How does this all affect SEO in the bigger picture? Next, we need to learn how Google processes JavaScript.

How does Google handle JavaScript?

In order to understand how JavaScript affects SEO, we need to understand what exactly happens when GoogleBot crawls a web page:

Crawl
Render
Index

First, Googlebot crawls the URLs in its queue, page by page. The crawler makes a GET request to the server, typically using a mobile user-agent, and then the server sends the HTML document.

Then, Google decides what resources are necessary to render the main content of the page. Usually, this means only the static HTML is crawled, and not any linked CSS or JS files. Why?

According to Google Webmasters, Googlebot has discovered approximately 130 trillion web pages. Rendering JavaScript at scale can be costly. The sheer computing power required to download, parse, and execute JavaScript in bulk is massive.

This is why Google may defer rendering JavaScript until later. Any unexecuted resources are queued to be processed by Google Web Rendering Services (WRS), as computing resources become available.

Finally, Google will index any rendered HTML after JavaScript is executed.

Google crawl, render, and index process.

In other words, Google crawls and indexes content in two waves:

The first wave of indexing, or the instant crawling of the static HTML sent by the webserver
The second wave of indexing, or the deferred crawling of any additional content rendered via JavaScript

Google wave indexing. Source: Google I/O'18

The bottom line is that content dependent on JS to be rendered can experience a delay in crawling and indexing by Google. This used to take days or even weeks. For example, Googlebot historically ran on the outdated Chrome 41 rendering engine. However, they’ve significantly improved its web crawlers in recent years.

Googlebot was recently upgraded to the latest stable release of the Chromium headless browser in May 2019. This means that their web crawler is now “evergreen” and fully compatible with ECMAScript 6 (ES6) and higher, or the latest versions of JavaScript.

So, if Googlebot can technically run JavaScript now, why are we still worried about indexing issues?

The short answer is crawl budget. This is the concept that Google has a rate limit on how frequently they can crawl a given website because of limited computing resources. We already know that Google defers JavaScript to be executed later to save crawl budget.

While the delay between crawling and rendering has been reduced, there is no guarantee that Google will actually execute the JavaScript code waiting in line in its Web Rendering Services queue.

Here are some reasons why Google might not actually ever run your JavaScript code:

Blocked in robots.txt
Timeouts
Errors

Therefore, JavaScript can cause SEO issues when core content relies on JavaScript but is not rendered by Google.

Real-world application: JavaScript SEO for e-commerce

E-commerce websites are a real-life example of dynamic content that is injected via JavaScript. For example, online stores commonly load products onto category pages via JavaScript.

JavaScript can allow e-commerce websites to update products on their category pages dynamically. This makes sense because their inventory is in a constant state of flux due to sales. However, is Google actually able to “see” your content if it does not execute your JS files?

For e-commerce websites, which depend on online conversions, not having their products indexed by Google could be disastrous.

How to test and debug JavaScript SEO issues

Here are steps you can take today to proactively diagnose any potential JavaScript SEO issues:

Visualize the page with Google’s Webmaster Tools. This helps you to view the page from Google’s perspective.
Use the site search operator to check Google’s index. Make sure that all of your JavaScript content is being indexed properly by manually checking Google.
Debug using Chrome’s built-in dev tools. Compare and contrast what Google “sees” (source code) with what users see (rendered code) and ensure that they align in general.

There are also handy third-party tools and plugins that you can use. We’ll talk about these soon.

Google Webmaster Tools

The best way to determine if Google is experiencing technical difficulties when attempting to render your pages is to test your pages using Google Webmaster tools, such as:

URL Inspection tool in Search Console
Mobile-Friendly Test

Google Mobile-Friendly Test.

The goal is simply to visually compare and contrast your content visible in your browser and look for any discrepancies in what is being displayed in the tools.

Both of these Google Webmaster tools use the same evergreen Chromium rendering engine as Google. This means that they can give you an accurate visual representation of what Googlebot actually “sees” when it crawls your website.

There are also third-party technical SEO tools, like Merkle’s fetch and render tool. Unlike Google’s tools, this web application actually gives users a full-size screenshot of the entire page.

Site: Search Operator

Alternatively, if you are unsure if JavaScript content is being indexed by Google, you can perform a quick check-up by using the site: search operator on Google.

Copy and paste any content that you’re not sure that Google is indexing after the site: operator and your domain name, and then press the return key. If you can find your page in the search results, then no worries! Google can crawl, render, and index your content just fine. If not, it means your JavaScript content might need some help gaining visibility.

Here’s what this looks like in the Google SERP:

Chrome Dev Tools

Another method you can use to test and debug JavaScript SEO issues is the built-in functionality of the developer tools available in the Chrome web browser.

Right-click anywhere on a web page to display the options menu and then click “View Source” to see the static HTML document in a new tab.

You can also click “Inspect Element” after right-clicking to view the content that is actually loaded in the DOM, including JavaScript.

Inspect Element.

Compare and contrast these two perspectives to see if any core content is only loaded in the DOM, but not hard-coded in the source. There are also third-party Chrome extensions that can help do this, like the Web Developer plugin by Chris Pederick or the View Rendered Source plugin by Jon Hogg.

How to fix JavaScript rendering issues

After diagnosing a JavaScript rendering problem, how do you resolve JavaScript SEO issues? The answer is simple: Universal Javascript, also known as “Isomorphic” JavaScript.

What does this mean? Universal or Isomorphic here refers to JavaScript applications that are capable of being run on either the server or the client.

There are a few different implementations of JavaScript that are more search-friendly than client-side rendering, to avoid offloading JS to both users and crawlers:

Server-side rendering (SSR). This means that JS is executed on the server for each request. One way to implement SSR is with a Node.js library like Puppeteer. However, this can put a lot of strain on the server.
Hybrid rendering. This is a combination of both server-side and client-side rendering. Core content is rendered server-side before being sent to the client. Any additional resources are offloaded to the client.
Dynamic rendering. In this workaround, the server detects the user agent of the client making the request. It can then send pre-rendered JavaScript content to search engines, for example. Any other user agents will need to render their content client-side. For example, Google Webmasters recommend a popular open-source solution called Renderton for implementing dynamic rendering.
Incremental Static Regeneration, or updating static content after a site has already been deployed. This can be done with frameworks like Next.js for React or Nuxt.js for Vue. These frameworks have a build process that will pre-render every page of your JS application to static assets that you can serve from something like an S3 bucket. This way, your site can get all of the SEO benefits of server-side rendering, without the server management!

Each of these solutions helps make sure that, when search engine bots make requests to crawl HTML documents, they receive the fully rendered versions of the web pages. However, some of these can be extremely difficult or even impossible to implement after web infrastructure is already built. That’s why it’s important to keep JavaScript SEO best practices in mind when designing the architecture of your next web application.

Note, for websites built on a content management system (CMS) that already pre-renders most content, like WordPress or Shopify, this isn’t typically an issue.

Key takeaways

This guide provides some general best practices and insights into JavaScript SEO. However, JavaScript SEO is a complex and nuanced field of study. We recommend that you read through Google’s official documentation and troubleshooting guide for more JavaScript SEO basics. Interested in learning more about optimizing your JavaScript website for search? Leave a comment below.

The web has moved from plain HTML - as an SEO you can embrace that. Learn from JS devs & share SEO knowledge with them. JS's not going away.
— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) August 8, 2017

Want to learn more about technical SEO? Check out the Moz Academy Technical SEO Certification Series, an in-depth training series that hones in on the nuts and bolts of technical SEO.

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Local SEO Tips for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by MiriamEllis

Some business models exist in the ditches of Google’s information highways, belonging in local search results, but not well addressed by the official guidelines. Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations exemplify this: They’re all over local packs, finders, and maps, but their models is a bit unusual, and Google has yet to update the guidelines to show exactly how to represent them in the Google My Business setting.

Today, we’ll pull together our own set of EV charging station best practices — based on Google’s rules for similar enterprises — and throw a few free local search marketing tips into the trunk as well.

How to handle your EV charging station Google My Business listings

Whether you’re an owner, in-house marketer, or agency staffer who’s been tasked with promoting a fleet of EV charging stations online, having a presence in Google’s local search results — including local packs, local finders, Google Business Profiles, and Google Maps — should be core to your digital strategy.

While Google’s helpful guidelines don’t specifically address EV charging stations, proof that they’re eligible for inclusion can be seen in the extra special features and categories Google has released for these models. For example, the above screenshot shows the charger icons, charger type designations, and wattage displays in the local results. In the US and UK, Google displays live charger availability data for some networks for consumer convenience. Even the map pins have special icons in them for EV charging stations.

Google definitely knows about them, and wants this industry to get listed.

If you’ve never set up a GMB listing before, Google’s own resources will walk you through the process of filling out and validating a profile for an individual location, but EV charging station marketers are most likely dealing with many locations at once. If you need to get 10 or more locations listed, you’ll be using Google’s bulk upload functionality, instead. You’ll also want to go for bulk verification of these large batches of listings.

But before you get started, here’s special guidance for handling some of the major fields you’ll be filling out for any EV charging station you’re marketing.

Business title

Google wants you to fill out this field with the exact name of the business as it appears in the real world. The majority of the listings I looked at in this sector were adding the words “charging station” to their brand name, which technically violates Google’s guidelines. Just as gas stations are supposed to list themselves as “Shell” or “Valero”, EV charging stations wanting to stick scrupulously to the guidelines should just be “EVgo” or “ChargePoint”.

According to the guidelines, Google wouldn’t want listings entitled “Shell Gas Station” or “EVgo Charging Station”, any more than they’d want “McDonald’s Fast Food Restaurant” or “Macy’s Department Store.”

But now for a home truth: Google says you’re only supposed to put your real-world brand in these titles, but they don’t take much action on enforcing this guideline, and having keywords in the business title that match search language is strongly believed to improve local rankings. So, if you adhere to the guidelines and remove “charging station” from your business titles, your rankings may decrease. This weighting of keywords in the business title is a longstanding issue Google needs to resolve.

Frankly, I think having the words “charging station” in the listing title might actually help users who are just now becoming accustomed to emergent EV technology and trying to understand where to get charged up, but my common sense and Google’s policies are often at odds.

Keep your business title free of other extraneous information like location information, or adjectives like “cheapest” or “best”.

Address

It’s a dominant trend for EV charging stations to be located in the parking lots of busy public spaces, like shopping centers, railroad stations, and business parks. Typically, to be eligible for a GMB listing, a business has to have its own address, but a look at Google’s local search engine results (including Google Maps) shows charging stations being permitted to use the address of the public space. For example, an EV charging station in a strip mall near me is using the same address as the Target that anchors the shopping center.

Additionally, businesses that host a charging station are allowed to have a link on their listings publicizing this feature.

Also related to address, many EV Charging stations will find details on their listings that describe them as “located in” a public space. If the “located in” descriptor is wrong, look up the business on google.com/maps, click the “suggest an edit” button, and try to edit the information in this field:

If you see no correction within a couple of weeks of taking this action, contact Google My Business support and explain what’s going on.

Phone number

We’ll take our cue here from Google’s requirements of ATMs and kiosks. As I previously covered in my column on local product kiosks, the EV charging stations you’re marketing need a customer support phone number.

Again, this is one of those unusual grey areas. Normally, it’s standard advice for each location of a business to have a unique phone number. But, for EV charging stations, this obviously isn’t practical. Rather, be sure your listings have your help hotline number for customer service needs.

A word to the wise: Google has sometimes been prone to conflating listings with too-similar information. Having dozens, hundreds, or thousands of listings with the same brand AND phone number on them could potentially result in the accidental creation of duplicate listings. Large, multi-listing enterprises like EV charging brands might want to check out the automated duplicate detection and resolution services offered by Moz Local so that pesky duplicates aren’t interfering with listings management, visibility goals, and consumer direction.

Hours of operation

Google’s guidelines state that gas stations should list the hours of operation that their pumps are available, and for most EV charging stations, this would presumably be 24 hours a day. As stated above, you’ll probably be uploading your data to Google via a bulk upload spreadsheet and the proper configuration for indicating 24-hours-a-day in the spreadsheet is 12:00AM-12:00AM.

URL

You’ll be allowed to include a website link on each listing you create. The best user experience I’m encountering on EV charger station listings is when the listing links to a landing page for the location I’m researching. On the flip side, you may get a ranking boost if you link to the brand’s homepage, instead, due to homepages typically having greater Page Authority than landing pages.

Photos/Videos

Make each listing stand out for customers by adding a few photos of the charger’s location. Given the fact that so many chargers are in vast parking lots, try to take some shots that illustrate the relationship of the station to the largest anchor business near it. This will help orient customers. And, given the newness of EV technology, uploading a video of how to use each type of charger would be extremely helpful to new electric vehicle owners.

Reviews

Looking around the SF Bay area, I couldn’t help noticing how few reviews these entities are receiving, meaning there are easy wins out there for any EV charger brand that makes a concerted review acquisition effort. If you’re building out landing pages on the brand’s website for each charging station locale, include a strong call to action and link to leave a review on Google on these pages. You can also use a free review link generator and then shorten the URL using a service like bitly for text or email-based review requests.

Just don’t ask for reviews in bulk; if you get too many at once, Google may filter them out as suspicious. And never incentivize reviews in any way — it can result in review loss, penalties, and legal actions.

Questions & Answers

Unsurprisingly, EV charging station listings show customers using Google’s Q&A feature to ask about costs and how to use the kiosks. These are leads for the brand and should be answered by the brand, rather than being left up to the public for responses of varying quality. If you’re using Moz Local to manage your listings, the dashboard will alert you each time a new question comes in on any of your listings.

Google Posts

Google Posts are a great way to make a brand stand out from less active competitors by microblogging persuasive content that appears on your listings, but for the typical EV charging brand, this feature is problematic. Google doesn’t allow large chains to post in bulk to their listings. There are some third-party services that facilitate hacks for this scenario.

Listings beyond Google

Google may be your dominant source of local business listings, but don’t hit the brakes there. Moz has mapped out the partners in our location data distribution network that currently support listings for EV charging stations. Talk to us about building your presence in key mapping applications like Apple Maps, search engines like Bing, aggregators like Infogroup, and mobile navigation providers like Navmii. Moz Local can help you get listed on multiple platforms so that potential customers can find your charging station locations via their preferred search methods.

Local search marketing tips for EV charging stations

JP Morgan predicts that EVs and HVs will make up 30% of total vehicle sales in the next five years and Statista estimates there are about 25,000 charging stations in the US. It’s big business, and while the convenience of charging at home can’t be beat, the presence of chargers and superchargers all over cities will do much to increase awareness of the rise of the EV, and to ease the transition away from fossil fuel transportation.

As a resident of California — the state with the most electric vehicles and also the state experiencing some of the worst devastation from Climate Change — every new charging station that pops up on Google Maps is a sign of hope to me. But I’ll be frank; I’m not a “car” person, and despite making a concerted effort over the past couple of years to understand how I could personally transition from a worried, gas-powered driver to a proud EV traveler has taught me that it’s a road paved with countless questions.

And that’s actually good news for EV charging station brands!

Whether you’re marketing EVgo, Blink, Tesla, ChargePoint, or the dozens of other charging solutions, your online marketing strategy is going to hinge on publishing content that solves consumers’ problems by answering their questions. Luckily for your industry, customers’ questions are so abundant that they are paving the way for you to develop absolutely fantastic website content that will support your organic and local rankings over time as you develop authority.

Here’s a simple six-step workflow for getting it right:

1. Survey customers

Making a minor investment in survey tech will let you directly ask the public what they want most from charging stations. Is it speed, location, more ports, better instructions, different payment options? Find out and document your learnings.

2. Analyze industry reviews and questions

Look at the common themes in your online reviews. For example, one thread I see running through the EV charging vertical is complaints about sitting in hot cars for 30+ minutes while charging up. When you think about it, gas stations provide shade at the pumps, though patrons are only there for ten minutes. If your customers are being inconvenienced in the summer heat, would properties permit you to build a canopy, or perhaps even better, plant some native trees to double down on your green goals?

Moz Local will surface the 100 most common words in your reviews for sentiment analysis purposes. Dig deeply into these for content inspiration and structural improvements.

And check out the positive and negative sentiment your competitors’ reviews contain. What is the competition getting wrong that you could get right? If you find opportunities like these, be sure you’re writing about them.

3. Fire up keyword research tools

How do electric car charging stations work?
Where can I charge my electric car?
What is the best EV charging station?
How to find free charging stations
How many miles does a Tesla get per charge?
Are EVgo stations free?
Can I use ChargePoint at EVgo?
What is a level 3 charging station?

Questions truly abound in the EV charging space. Moz Pro Keyword Explorer lets you type in keywords and phrases you feel could be important to the business you’re marketing, and then filter the results to see questions like the ones in my list, above. If you sign up for a free Moz community account, you can make 10 free queries a month or upgrade to a paid account for more robust keyword research.

Other free options include Google’s Ads Keyword Planner and the unpaid version of Answer the Public.

Document your findings so that you have created a list of questions around which you can base content publication.

4. Take a peek at Google Trends

Google Trends will show you interest in topics across time related to EV charging stations, and you can even see this broken out by regions of a country to help you localize your marketing. My glance at this data shows that interest in this subject took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged but is now steadily rising again. Glean further insights from this tool for topics you should be covering.

5. Analyze the competition

If you have a Moz Pro account, you can use Moz’s On-Page Grader feature not just to look at pages on your own website to see how to improve their optimization, but also to analyze what your competition is getting right and wrong. If you can find weaknesses in the strategy of a tough competitor, you can go one better with the actionable optimization tips On-Page Grader provides.

Look carefully at what your competitors are writing about on their websites and social accounts. If they’re covering a topic your keyword research hasn’t surfaced, note it down.

6. Get writing!

Now, take the list of questions and keyword phrases you’ve discovered, group them by topics, and begin creating pages for them on your website, or posts on the brand’s blog, providing answers. Some pages may be short, and others may be long — the rule of thumb is simply to cover each question thoroughly. You may find that some topics are best answered via other media, like short videos. That’s great, if you can produce them, but don’t forget to provide written transcripts.

Your findings can also fuel your social media posting, your Google posts, and provide the top FAQs you can ask and answer via Google Questions & Answers on your Google Business Profiles.

Finally, remember that marketing requires active promotion. Don’t just let your content sit on your website hoping someone will arrive to read it. Actively promote your best pieces via social media, to local print and online media journalists, and in local community hubs, like neighborhood websites and hyperlocal blogs. Work to build real relationships in the cities where you’re marketing your charging station locations so that you are always increasing awareness of your brand’s commitment to making towns and cities better places to live.

Have questions? Ask me in the comments. I’m personally rooting for the rapid spread of EV charging stations across the US and around the world, and if you’re marketing this model, I’d love to hear from you!

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Using STAT to Identify Featured Snippet Opportunities

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by Zoe.Pegler

Winning the featured snippet for a target keyword means increased traffic to that page, and you can use STAT to achieve those wins. In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz Learning and Development Specialist Zoe Pegler walks you through how you can do so in five easy steps.

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

Video Transcription

Hi. I'm Zoe from Moz's Learning Team. Today I'm going to be showing you how to use STAT to identify featured snippet opportunities. If you're not familiar with STAT, it's a ranking tool which is very good at pulling big data.

What's a featured snippet?

For those of you that might not know what a featured snippet is, it's one of those answer boxes that appear at the top of a search results page. It's the result that shows up directly beneath the ads after the search is performed. So, for example, if you did a search for something like "Is coffee good for you," you're going to see an answer box saying, "Recent studies found that coffee drinkers are less likely to die from some of the leading causes of death."

Websites that have URLs ranked in the featured snippet often experience heightened brand visibility and the majority of available traffic from the associated keyword. Where do you start if you want to become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities? Well, the first step here is keyword research.

1. Upload keywords to STAT and filter

You want to discover keywords that you can start monitoring optimizing for. Ideally, you want to find keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. STAT's keywords tab is a great place to start with this. In this feature, you can upload a bunch of keywords, and once you've allowed some time for the data to gather, you can really dig into what keywords you have that are triggering answer boxes and what opportunities there are.

There's an extremely useful feature in STAT where you can filter a table of keywords to show earned SERP features and specifically answers. You can filter for specific answer subtypes too. STAT currently parse lists, paragraphs, tables, carousels, and videos.

So you can check out all of these. You should also filter for keywords specifically on page one. So do that. Filter the "Rank" column to show results ranking between one and 10. Once you have found all of those keywords, there's a really smart, useful way of collecting them all together, and that's by putting them into a dynamic tag.

2. Create a dynamic tag

This lets you group those keywords together and label them. You could call this tag featured snippet opportunities for example. The magic of putting the keywords into that dynamic tag is that it acts like a smart playlist. These fancy segments automatically populate each day with keywords that match the specific criteria you set for them, making it quick and easy to see which of your keywords are featured snippet opportunities.

Being able to segment keywords into these dynamic tags is what makes STAT so much more valuable. Being able to create reports in granular keyword levels is powerful stuff.

3. Check the data set over time

Okay, so what is the next step to prioritize your featured snippet opportunities by the highest potential ROI keywords? It's usually much easier to take a featured snippet or to steal one if you're also on page one.

Taking a look at STAT's SERP Features tab can help out here. There's a nifty graph which allows you to see how answer boxes appear if your keywords have changed over time. Using this will help you to access opportunity. You can then start pulling out and comparing some of that data and digging into things like average monthly search volume, current featured snippet URLs, and the featured snippet type.

Is it a paragraph, a list, or a table? Is there any markup? What's your rank? How does the page look in general? You might want to start investigating which long-tail keywords you could potentially optimize your site for. There are a couple of reports you can pull in STAT which can definitely help you in this research.

4. Set up reports

The People Also Ask report will show you questions and their rank within the box as well as the URL sourced in each answer. It's worth taking a look at the Related Searches report as well to see related search queries offered by Google which users may also be searching. Once you've identified long-tail keywords you want to track and keep an eye on, you can copy and paste those keywords into Google Keyword Planner or even back into STAT.

That way you can see what the rankings, search volume, and CPC look like. You can use one of those smart dynamic tags in STAT to group and label them again as you start optimizing on the keywords you think will be valuable to your site. Once you've identified and optimized your site, you'll want to keep careful watch over your hard work, so monitor.

5. Set up and monitor alerts

I recommend setting up alerts for this. STAT lets you do this so you'll be notified any time your ranking goes up or down for your featured snippet target keywords, meaning you're not going to miss seeing an opportunity. I hope this has been helpful and you're feeling more prepared to try some of this.

If you already have a STAT subscription and want to get even more familiar with the tool features, think about taking the STAT Fundamentals Certification course. Have a great day, and thank you for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.
high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”
“[industry] tools”
“[competitor] alternatives”
“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem
They search Google for a solution
Google shows them multiple solutions on page one
They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision
They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.
Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with
What you disagree with
What you want to change about how something is currently done
How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).
Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.
SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.
User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.
Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

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Fast & Featured: How Entities Can Help You Conquer Snippets in Less Than 4 Minutes

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by larissa-lacerda

From the moment I started working with SEO, I was faced with countless optimization tactics. After heading down numerous rabbit holes, I came to see how important it is to identify your low hanging fruit: the opportunities to generate great results with less effort.

The first time I saw notable results in my work was in the optimizations I put into practice to reach featured snippets. The thrill of jumping to the top of the page was so great that it soon became my passion.

But not everything in SEO is so simple (or stable). Soon, methods that had previously brought results were no longer working. With the competition growing increasingly competent and challenging, great results were becoming less frequent.

If, like me, you’ve reached that point — don't worry! I’ll show you how I overcame this with a method that I lovingly refer to as “Fast & Featured”.

What are SEO entities?

I started with an unpretentious study of entities. I hadn’t read much on the topic, but what caught my attention was the understanding entities can offer into how search algorithms work.

Google’s definition is: “A thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.”But this definition is very broad, leading to even greater confusion. I wanted a clearer understanding of what entities are all about, so I crafted my own definition that I’ll share with you today.

Basically, an entity in SEO is everything definable, unique, and not limited to a specific shape, spelling, or image (e.g. mom, mother, mummy, and a picture of a mother all relate to the same entity).

I really like to make an association with the following image, famous in the study of semiotics, which illustrates entities very well:

"One and Three Chairs", 1965, by Joseph Kosuth. Gautier Poupeau, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here, we have three chairs: the physical chair, the representation of a chair, and the dictionary definition of what a chair is. All three refer to a single entity: the chair.

What matters here is the essence, the content, and what lies behind it.

In the same way, this is how algorithms understand elements that exist on the web, overcoming restrictions of language, form, or representation — which results in huge improvements in the accuracy of the SERP results.

So, what if I use this concept to understand which entities are most important in searches with featured snippets? With this knowledge, I’d have an in-depth understanding of what the ideal answers are, not just the ones I, totally biased, considered good.

It may seem a simple concept, but it's like telling your SEO to focus on basic practices or understand the user's intention. No matter how much you talk about it or how obvious it seems, people will still be reluctant to do it. The tendency is to look for more complicated or advanced hacks — but that’s not what we want here.

Our goal is to show how to associate a basic concept with a previously understood practice, making each step very clear, logical, and uncomplicated.

Let's get down to the method!

How to use the Fast & Featured method

As mentioned, this method was developed to make achieving featured snippets more intelligent and strategic, so each of these seven steps is essential to increase your probability of success.

1. Understand context and objectives

As with any strategy, whether SEO, marketing, or across other areas, we must first understand the current context — what we have at the moment (and how it serves us) — to then determine our objectives, where we intend to catch up.

As a result, the first step is to compile a list of searches for keywords that you rank in the top ten positions for, and note which already have featured snippets. For even greater chances, filter for just the top three positions as well, since that’s where Google selects the featured snippet 70% of the time.

There are several methods for this, with the main difference being speed. I will share three approaches, to cover the range of demands that different teams may have.

Moz Keyword Explorer

In a very intuitive way, Moz's Keyword Explorer has an easy approach to help you out with this stage of creating your list of opportunities.

To do this, simply access the keywords you rank for and filter positions 1-10.

Then, create your own list and then select the “Featured Snippet” option under “SERP feature”.

Source: Moz

Now you have a complete list of opportunities!

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs WebMaster Tools (the free version of Ahrefs) can also be used to create your list of opportunities.

The process is largely similar, simply access the “Organic keywords” feature, click on “SERP features” (under “Include”) and select “Featured snippet”.

After doing this, the tool will present a series of results, including snippets that you have already achieved. You can follow up on each result separately or export the complete list.

To clean your data, leaving only the opportunities, exclude all keywords that are in first place — those already considered featured snippets by the tool — after all, you hear less about position zero nowadays.

Google Search Console

This technique was used when free tools were not yet available and a user simply needed a way to generate this list.

If this is not your case — and you’re not curious to find out more — feel free to skip ahead.

To find opportunities where there is less competition and greater focus on long tails, it’s necessary to access the "Performance" report, go to "Search results" and filter by "Queries" using expressions such as "what is", "concept", "definition" , “how to” among others.

As it’s not possible to identify the SERP features this way, it’s not as accurate, but is worth mentioning.

2. Start a SERP analysis

Now that you’ve managed to create a respectable list, select your priorities. Again, keywords with higher positions and more traffic coverage are ideal.

Start by accessing the SERP and identifying the following aspects:

What type of snippet is it?
Are there other definitions highlighted on the page? (This could include definitions under a “knowledge panel” or “people also ask”.)

This information will help you understand what Google interprets as the ideal answer, giving you more information than just what the featured snippet contains. This way, you will know if the snippet is a paragraph or shorter, or what the user hopes to find when searching for that term.

For the keyword “interactive ebook”, we find a paragraph snippet. Below, the SERP presents PAAs on how to make interactive ebooks and the difference between digital books and ebooks.

Hang on to this info, as we’ll need it in step 4.

3. Look at competitor content

In addition to the previous questions related to the SERP, the time has come to meet the current winner and understand what sets it apart from the rest. Identify:

Who has the current snippet?
Where is it located on the page? (first paragraph, summary, middle of the text)
How is the concept in question currently defined?
How objective is it?

Look for answers to these questions and, especially for the last two, try to set aside your current definition or how you would approach it differently, in order to be as impartial as possible in your analysis — however difficult it may be at times.

In the example I presented, the competitor is Visme, the snippet was taken from the beginning of the second title, the definition is very objective, succinct, and logical, and takes advantage of the formats that make up an interactive ebook.

4. Use a comparative analysis

I consider this next step to be the most important. I suggest that you write down the information somewhere. I usually use an online text counter, but feel free to do it on a spreadsheet or another platform.

Whatever tool you use, first record the result of the snippet. Then, add another definition, if found on the SERP (could be a Google dictionary or Wikipedia definition), then finally add your current definition.

Now, the time has come to apply the concept of entities. We will focus on the first two definitions from the beginning of this post.

Below, list the entities you found and how many times they appear in the text — which helps to indicate their relevance in context.

To get the hang of this when starting, you can use Google's own NLP API demo tool or another tool, such as TextRazor, to help you identify it:

5. Identify entities

After you identify the entities and their level of relevance for the definitions you found (the snippet itself and another highlighted definition), see which entities are most repeated on both lists (if the SERP presents more than one definition) and the relationships established between them.

Once you do that, you have the set of entities considered the most important for that Google search and can then avoid relying on “I prefer this” or “I think this word is better”, because it will be based on what the search engine understands to be the best.

Then, just like a puzzle, assemble these entities with your own text in an objective and easy to understand way.

Ideally, your definition should be slightly shorter than the current one, making it as unbiased as possible — very important, especially for voice searches.

Take a look at this example:

In blue are the entities I decided to use on my new definition. You can also note that this paragraph is a lot shorter than the previous one.

Finally, insert your updated paragraph into your text, making sure it fits with the rest of the text, and avoiding any breaks in the flow of the text that could throw off your reader.

6. Re-index your page

After making these changes, the next step is to request that your page be re-indexed through Google Search Console.

This action wasn’t possible until a few weeks ago, but Google announced on December 22, 2020 that “Request Indexing” is back to their tool.

The re-indexing part is not an indispensable step, but it is ideal to streamline the process and verify whether it was possible to achieve the snippet or not more quickly.

To illustrate the results my team and I were able to make, here are some snippets won using this strategy:

And the one that made me proudest (it is in Portuguese, my native language):

Before:

After four minutes:

Besides conquering it incredibly fast, this exact snippet made me realize I had created an effective strategy and I needed to share it with the SEO community.

7. Don’t give up

Something went wrong? Check if your content as a whole relates to what is presented in the snippet text, and make the necessary adjustments or consider re-analyzing the entities to see if something important was left out.

For some tests I’ve carried out, simply shortening the definition by two words was enough for Google to accept my definition and not a competitor's.

In addition, there are cases of reaching the snippet, but then quickly losing it. While this can be very frustrating, it’s a sign that you are on the right track. Several factors can influence this, such as your text not being attractive enough or sounding confusing.

When this happens, keep trying and update your definition from time to time (at two-week intervals), to continue increasing the chance that you show up on the snippet.

Final tips

Here are a few final thoughts. If you have other advice, let me know in the comments!

Test the use of abstracts in WordPress (that bold section that appears at the beginning of the text).
Try to work concepts into your text objectively, preferably using the composition “what is + the keyword” in the given intertitle. This doesn’t mean that your copy should lack variety and personality, but look for ways to adapt this formula your own way to attract people with your style, while also being accessible to a wide audience.
Intertitles of lists should be more obvious as well: "What are the best channels on Youtube" — something simple and without being too distracting.

See how reaching snippets can be simple (and fast) when using a clear method?

It may feel great to achieve a position without much effort or even when we don't know what we did, but it's much better when we know exactly what it takes — without mistakes or crazy tricks.

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Announcing the New Technical SEO Certification Series: What It Is & How to Get Certified

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by KaviKardos

SEO education has been central to Moz’s mission since the start. In addition to our many guides, blog posts, and videos, we’ve shifted in recent years to offer on-demand video training courses through Moz Academy. Our team has been blown away by the reception of our online training programs. To date, over 142,000 students have enrolled in a course through Moz Academy. Wowie!

On top of that, 94% of Moz Academy students said they would recommend the course(s) they took to a friend or colleague. We’re so glad that our content is resonating with you and helping to level up your knowledge in various SEO subject areas.

We launched our SEO Essentials Certification Series back in May 2019, and we’ve seen almost 500 students get certified in that timeframe. Since then, we’ve heard requests from across the Moz community for more technical-focused coursework and more advanced course options. As a result, we’re stoked to be adding another outstanding certification to our collection of coursework.

The Learning Team has put in many, many hours of work to develop a technically focused, in-depth training series that hones in on the nuts and bolts of technical SEO. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Technical SEO Certification Series through Moz Academy.

I want to get started!

What’s included in the Technical SEO Certification Series?

The Technical SEO Certification is a five-part series dedicated to technical SEO, combining video lessons with tasks and activities to allow for practical application of important concepts. The series culminates in a final exam, and with a passing score, you’ll be awarded an official Moz Certificate and badge for your LinkedIn profile.

The Certification Series was built to help you efficiently grow your technical skills and think critically about websites and SEO strategy from an informed technical perspective. By the time you wrap up the series, you’ll be ready to build a technical strategy for your website that ensures crawlability, indexability, accessibility, and site performance.

The certification series focuses on four core competency areas:

Explore the Fundamentals of Technical SEO
Design for Crawlability
Build for Indexation
Prioritize Accessibility & Site Performance

Dig into what’s included in the coursework below:

1. Explore the Fundamentals of Technical SEO

In building a certification series solely focused on technical SEO, we knew laying the groundwork would be critical. Although many folks in the SEO space are aware of various components of technical SEO, we felt it was important to identify where these tactics fit within a larger strategy.

The Explore the Fundamentals course analyzes the reasoning behind technical SEO and its foundational impact on other SEO work. In addition to defining core terminology and principles, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how technical SEO fits into the larger SEO methodology. You’ll learn how search engines find and analyze websites, readying you to apply that knowledge to the concepts of crawling, indexing, accessibility, and site performance that we’ll dive into in later sections.

2. Design for Crawlability

Once we’ve gotten the fundamentals down pat, the Certification Series jumps into crawlability – search engines’ ability to discover and navigate a website. In developing this section of the coursework, we wanted to be sure to provide a thorough background on how search engines operate, what they value, and a step-by-step process to ensure that your website is crawler-friendly.

You’ll learn the importance of optimizing your crawl budget to help crawlers get to the parts of your site that matter most. These considerations can also improve overall SEO health and even site conversions. In addition, we’ll cover robots.txt, site architecture, response codes, log file analysis, and more, using a variety of tools to give you hands-on practice with designing for crawlability.

By the end of this section, you’ll be well-versed in how to optimize for efficient crawling and how to implement and scale fixes across your website.

3. Build for Indexation

Up next in our Certification Series is indexation – how search engines understand, store, and organize information while crawling the web. We want to be sure that you’re confident in your ability to build and present a website that will be indexed properly by the search engines. You’ll next learn how to utilize sitemaps, canonicalization, and structured data to support indexation.

We’ll dig into what search engines typically value as they organize the information they’ve ingested, and how you can use that knowledge to implement tactics that will get your most important content indexed. This will ensure that your valuable content makes its way into the SERPs and, ultimately, to your target audience.

4. Prioritize Accessibility & Site Performance

There are heaps of articles across the web addressing accessibility, and we wanted to build a comprehensive section of the Certification Series dedicated to this vital concern as well as site performance. Here, we dig into top priorities to ensure a site is accessible to all users and performing at its best, as well as tasks to help you do so.

You’ll learn how to conduct an accessibility audit to identify and prioritize optimization efforts. You’ll also discover how components such as URL structure, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and site security impact performance. We’ll look at various tools to help us test these, so that you can create a repeatable process for auditing in the future.

By the end of this class, you’ll be familiar with strategies you can implement to ensure a great (and accessible!) user experience.

Following the courses on these four core competency areas, you will take a final exam to test your knowledge. The exam will consist of 50 multiple-choice questions.

Technical SEO Certification Series FAQs

How do I get certified?

The Technical SEO Certification Series is available through Moz Academy. Just select the series from the catalog, move through the registration process, and get started! After completing the series and taking the final exam, you’ll be awarded an official Moz Certificate and a LinkedIn badge.

Who is this Certification Series best for?

This series is ideal for intermediate SEOs and digital marketers with existing SEO knowledge who are looking to level up their technical skills. The series content covers technical topics that pair nicely with a solid understanding of keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, and content marketing. If you already have familiarity with the SEO fundamentals and are looking to grow your technical expertise, this series is great for you.

If you’re new to SEO and looking to learn the ropes, we’d recommend the SEO Essentials Certification.

How long will the series take to complete?

The certification series includes three hours of instructor-led curriculum, in addition to activities to test your understanding and the final exam. With all of that in mind, you can expect your time commitment to be about five hours in total.

How long is the Technical SEO Certification valid? Do my certification credentials expire?

No, your Technical SEO Certification credentials will not expire.

I don't have a Moz Pro subscription – is the Technical SEO Certification Series still relevant for me?

Yes! While we do use Moz Pro to apply certain concepts throughout the series, having a Moz Pro subscription is not a requirement to benefit from this certification. We’ll also explore a number of technical tasks in other tools outside of Moz. In general, the concepts, activities, and theories covered in the series are agnostic of tools.

Sign me up!

Any other questions or thoughts about the Technical SEO Certification Series? Drop them in the comments below – we’d love to chat with you!

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SEO Forecasting in Google Sheets

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by Tom.Capper

Way back in 2015, I published an article giving away a free, simple, forecasting tool, and talking through use cases for forecasting in SEO. It was a quick, effective way to see if a change to your site traffic is some kind of seasonality you can ignore, something to celebrate, or a worrying sign of traffic loss.

In short: you could enter in a series of data, and it would plot it out on a graph like the image above.

Five years later, I still get people — from former colleagues to complete strangers — asking me about this tool, and more often than not, I’m asked for a version that works directly in spreadsheets.

I find this easy to sympathize with: a spreadsheet is more flexible, easier to debug, easier to expand upon, easier to maintain, and a format that people are very familiar with.

The tradeoff when optimizing for those things is, although I’ve improved on that tool from a few years ago, I’ve still had to keep things manageable in the famously fickle programming environment that is Excel/Google Sheets. That means the template shared in this post uses a simpler, slightly less performant model than some tools with external code execution (e.g. Forecast Forge).

In this post, I’m going to give away a free template, show you how it works and how to use it, and then show you how to build your own (better?) version. (If you need a refresher on when to use forecasting in general, and concepts like confidence intervals, refer to the original article linked above.).

Types of SEO forecast

There is one thing I want to expand on before we get into the spreadsheet stuff: the different types of SEO forecast.

Broadly, I think you can put SEO forecasts into three groups:

“I’m feeling optimistic — add 20% to this year” or similar flat changes to existing figures. More complex versions might only add 20% to certain groups of pages or keywords. I think a lot of agencies use this kind of forecast in pitches, and it comes down to drawing on experience.
Keyword/CTR models, when you estimate a ranking change (or sweeping set of ranking changes), then extrapolate the resulting change in traffic from search volume and CTR data (you can see a similar methodology here). Again, more complex versions might have some basis for the ranking change (e.g. “What if we swapped places with competitor A in every keyword of group X where they currently outrank us?”).
Statistical forecast based on historical data, when you extrapolate from previous trends and seasonality to see what would happen if everything remained constant (same level of marketing activity by you and competitors, etc.).

Type two has its merits, but if you compare the likes of Ahrefs/SEMRush/Sistrix data to your own analytics, you’ll see how hard this is to generalize. As an aside, I don’t think type one is as ridiculous as it looks, but it’s not something I’ll be exploring any further in this post. In any case, the template in this post fits into type three.

What makes this an SEO forecast?

Why, nothing at all. One thing you’ll notice about my description of type three above is that it doesn’t mention anything SEO-specific. It could equally apply to direct traffic, for example. That said, there are a couple of reasons I’m suggesting this specifically as an SEO forecast:

We’re on the Moz Blog and I’m an SEO consultant.
There are better methodologies available for a lot of other channels.

I mentioned that type two above is very challenging, and this is because of the highly non-deterministic nature of SEO and the generally poor quality of detailed data in Search Console and other SEO-specific platforms. In addition, to get an accurate idea of seasonality, you’d need to have been warehousing your Search Console data for at least a couple of years.

For many other channels, high quality, detailed historic data does exist, and relationships are far more predictable, allowing more granular forecasts. For example, for paid search, the Forecast Forge tool I mentioned above builds in factors like keyword-level conversion data and cost-per-click based on your historical data, in a way that would be wildly impractical for SEO.

That said, we can still combine multiple types of forecast in the template below. For example, rather than forecasting the traffic of your site as a whole, you might forecast subfolders separately, or brand/non-brand separately, and you might then apply percentage growth to certain areas or build in anticipated ranking changes. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

How to use the template

FREE TEMPLATE

The first thing you’ll need to do is make a copy (under the “File” menu in the top left, but automatic with the link I’ve included). This means you can enter your own data and play around to your heart’s content, and you can always come back and get a fresh copy later if you need one.

Then, on the first tab, you’ll notice some cells have a green or blue highlight:

You should only be changing values in the colored cells.

The blue cells in column E are basically to make sure everything ends up correctly labelled in the output. So, for example, if you’re pasting session data, or click data, or revenue data, you can set that label. Similarly, if you enter a start month of 2018-01 and 36 months of historic data, the forecast output will begin in January 2021.

On that note, it needs to be monthly data — that’s one of the tradeoffs for simplicity I mentioned earlier. You can paste up to a decade of historic monthly data into column B, starting at cell B2, but there are a couple of things you need to be careful of:

You need at least 24 months of data for the model to have a good idea of seasonality. (If there’s only one January in your historic data, and it was a traffic spike, how am I supposed to know if it was a one-off thing, or an annual thing?)
You need complete months. So if it’s March 25, 2021 when you’re reading this, the last month of data you should include is February 2021.

Make sure you also delete any leftovers of my example data in column B.

Outputs

Once you’ve done that, you can head over to the “Outputs” tab, where you’ll see something like this:

Column C is probably the one you’re interested in. Keep in mind that it’s full of formulas here, but you can copy and paste as values into another sheet, or just go to File > Download > Comma-separated values to get the raw data.

You’ll notice I’m only showing 15 months of forecast in that graph by default, and I’d recommend you do the same. As I mentioned above, the implicit assumption of a forecast is that historical context carries over, unless you explicitly include changed scenarios like COVID lockdowns into your model (more on that in a moment!). The chance of this assumption holding two or three years into the future is low, so even though I’ve provided forecast values further into the future, you should keep that in mind.

The upper and lower bounds shown are 95% confidence intervals — again, you can recap on what that means in my previous post if you so wish.

Advanced use cases

You may by now have noticed the “Advanced” tab:

Although I said I wanted to keep this simple, I felt that given everything that happened in 2020, many people would need to incorporate major external factors into their model.

In the example above, I’ve filled in column B with a variable for whether or not the UK was under COVID lockdown. I’ve used “0.5” to represent that we entered lockdown halfway through March.

You can probably make a better go of this for the relevant factors for your business, but there are a few important things to keep in mind with this tab:

It’s fine to leave it completely untouched if you don’t want to add these extra variables.
Go from left to right — it’s fine to leave column C blank if you’re using column B, but it’s not fine to leave B blank if you’re using C.
If you’re using a “dummy” variable (e.g. “1” for something being active), you need to make sure you fill in the 0s in other cells for at least the period of your historic data.
You can enter future values — for example, if you predict a COVID lockdown in March 2021 (you bastard!), you can enter something in that cell so it’s incorporated into the forecast.
If you don’t enter future values, the model will predict based on this number being zero in the future. So if you’ve entered “branded PPC active” as a dummy variable for historic data, and then left it blank for future periods, the model will assume you have branded PPC turned off in the future.
Adding too much data here for too few historic periods will result in something called “overfit” — I don’t want to get into detail on this, which is why this tab is called “Advanced”, but try not to get carried away.

Here’s some example use cases of this tab for you to consider:

Enter whether branded PPC was active (0 or 1)
Enter whether you’re running TV ads or not
Enter COVID lockdowns
Enter algorithm updates that were significant to your business (one column per update)

Why are my estimates different to your old tool? Is one of them wrong?

There’s two major differences in method between this template and my old tool:

The old tool used Google’s Causal Impact library, the new template uses an Ordinary Least Squares regression.
The old tool captured non-linear trends by using time period squared as a predictive variable (e.g. month 1 = 1, month 2 = 4, month 3 = 9, etc.) and trying to fit the traffic curve to that curve. This is called a quadratic regression. The new tool captures non-linear trends by fitting each time period as a multiple of the previous time period (e.g. month 1 = X * month 2 where X can be any value). This is called an AR(1) model.

If you’re seeing a significant difference in the forecast values between the two, it almost certainly comes down to the second reason, and although it adds a little complexity, in the vast majority of cases the new technique is more realistic and flexible.

It’s also far less likely to predict zero or negative traffic in the case of a severe downwards trend, which is nice.

How does it work?

There’s a hidden tab in the template where you can take a peek, but the short version is the “LINEST()” spreadsheet formula.

The inputs I’m using are:

Dependent variables
- Whatever you put as column B in the inputs tab (like traffic)
Independent variables
- Linear passing of time
- Previous period’s traffic
- Dummy variables for 11 months (12th month is represented by the other 11 variables all being 0)
- Up to three “advanced” variables

The formula then gives a series of “coefficients” as outputs, which can be multiplied with values and added together to form a prediction like:

“Time period 10” traffic = Intercept + (Time Coefficient * 10) + (Previous Period Coefficient * Period 9 traffic)

You can see in that hidden sheet I’ve labelled and color-coded a lot of the outputs from the Linest formula, which may help you to get started if you want to play around with it yourself.

Potential extensions

If you do want to play around with this yourself, here are some areas I personally have in mind for further expansion that you might find interesting:

Daily data instead of monthly, with weekly seasonality (e.g. dip every Sunday)
Built-in growth targets (e.g. enter 20% growth by end of 2021)

Richard Fergie, whose Forecast Forge tool I mentioned a couple of times above, also provided some great suggestions for improving forecast accuracy with fairly limited extra complexity:

Smooth data and avoid negative predictions in extreme cases by taking the log() of inputs, and providing an exponent of outputs (smoothing data may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective!).
Regress on the previous 12 months, instead of using the previous 1 month + seasonality (this requires 3 years’ minimum historical data)

I may or may not include some or all of the above myself over time, but if so I’ll make sure I use the same link and make a note of it in the spreadsheet, so this article always links to the most up-to-date version.

If you’ve made it this far, what would you like to see? Let me know in the comments!

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The Anatomy of the Perfect Pitch Email

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by amandamilligan

If you need to get backlinks and generate brand awareness for clients, a great way to start is by creating original research and then pitching that research to writers. But the promotion of your work is probably the trickiest part, and a lot of it comes down to the pitch email you send to a writer.

To make this task a bit less daunting, in this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Amanda Milligan of Fractl walks you through a real pitch email that resulted in coverage of one of their stories.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Amanda Milligan. I'm the Marketing Director at Fractl. Today I'm going to talk to you about the anatomy of the perfect pitch email.

This has to do with the digital PR space. The way that we get backlinks and brand awareness for our clients is by creating original research, new studies and surveys, and then pitching those things to writers. Now the pitching and the promotion is some of the trickiest part, and a lot of it comes down to this — the email you send to a writer.

So what I've done here is literally write out a real pitch email that was sent to a writer that resulted in a publication and coverage of the story. I'll shout out to Skylar who wrote this one. What I'm going to do is walk through each piece of it, each element that we think is extremely important and that we include in all of our emails.

Human connection

So to start, I actually use this email because it didn't delve too much into the personalization. I wanted to show an example of what happens if you can't personalize as well. But personalization or any kind of human connection is extremely important, and it should be the lead into the body of your email.

So in this case, it's a little more general. It says, "We all remember the horror flicks that left us sleeping with the lights on." So that's a more general human experience. I know I slept with the lights on when I saw "The Ring" for the first time. That's just some way to connect with the person who's reading it, to have them think of a memory.

However, if you actually have a chance to personalize an email, for example, if the writer has written something that resonates with you recently or you follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn and you like something that they shared, you can connect with them — you went to the same school, you have the same love of animals. We actually have a lot of people who pitched this year like pitching pictures of their animals and talking about how much they love dogs or cats.

Anything that is genuine can do really well. But remember that there's a human being on the other side of the email that you're sending, and just humanize this a little bit. So that should be about a sentence or two. As you can see here, it ends about here. So you don't want to go into a whole life story, but touch on that a little bit.

Top-level project description

The next segment is a top-level project description. So the next sentence here says, "Could you imagine if one of those characters occupied the room next to yours?" So now we're bridging the kind of anecdote to the actual project. "To explore this further, my team asked over 1,000 TV and movie fans about their most and least desirable fictional roommates."

So right there you know exactly what the project is about. It's about a survey we did asking people which fictional characters in all kinds of media they would like to live with. So it's very fun. It's a light piece. It's a fun piece. However, the structure is still the same when creating these pitch emails. No matter if it's hard news or something a little more lighthearted, this is a really effective way to go.

Main takeaways

So that covers human connection and top-level project description. This next piece is arguably the most important. This, as you can see over here, are the main takeaways, the biggest, most interesting, new insights from this study that you did. You don't want the writer to be sifting through your content trying to figure out why they care or why any of their readers are going to care.

It's your job to pull the two or three most interesting takeaways, literally create a bulleted list for them so that they can see it very quickly. So in this case, Skylar literally said, "Here's what we found: The Beetlejuice home ranks as one of the most identifiable movie houses. However, Beetlejuice was the least desirable fictional roommate."

Understandably. The reason why I can assume she called this out is because, in this particular pitch, she was pitching a home publication, so she's talking about houses. The reason I highlight that is you shouldn't have even the same body of a pitch that you send to everyone. It depends on who their readers are and the topics that they cover, the subtopics they cover.

Even if you know they're relevant and you're pitching them in the first place, make sure to tailor every aspect of the email to them specifically. You might have a list of 10 to 15 interesting takeaways, and you piece together which ones make the most sense per writer. So then some other facts. "Movie fans agree Norman Bates would have been equally undesirable as the Hulk would be as a roommate."

Which is just fun. "Despite appearing in your dreams while you're fast asleep, Freddy Krueger ranks as less desirable than Hannibal Lecter." So the fun thing about this project and something I didn't mention at the top is that we were pitching it around Halloween. So it makes a little more sense. You have that timeliness factor also.

This is fun, but they're basically writing these bullet points thinking like, "What can the writer's headline be? What are they going to say is the most interesting part of this project, and why do they think it's going to be fun or funny or entertaining or useful or informative?" So that covers this section. It's extremely important. Honestly, as you're creating content, you should be thinking of these things, hypothesizing what these could look like.

Link to the content

If you can't even imagine what little bullet points you're going to be able to create after you do something, it might not be interesting enough, or you might not be on the right track. So then this is important. It's small, but it's important. "Here's a link to the full study." Linked. Some people do the tactic of kind of asking, "Oh, do you want to see the rest? We can send it to you."

We don't recommend doing that because you don't want to add an extra step. You don't want writers to have to work for anything. You want to give them everything they need to make a decision. So you're making it easy for them by calling out the bullet points that are the most relevant. Then you're saying, "But listen, look at the whole study if you want. If this is intriguing to you, here it is. You can view the whole thing and make a decision as to whether it's a good fit for your audience." So be sure to do that.

Direct ask

Then Skylar did a good job by saying, "It's the very first day of October," which it was at the time, "and your readers are gearing up for Halloween." So she's tying it back to the relevancy of the project to their readers, which is what you always have to think about. The writer only cares about whether something is going to resonate with their readership. That means that they're doing a good job. So she kind of ties that up. "Any interest in sharing this exclusive study with [the publication]?" So I highlighted here a direct ask. So come out and say like, "So do you want to cover this?" In this case, we were pitching it as an exclusive, meaning nobody else hadn't covered it yet, which makes it a little more appealing.

You're saying, "You're going to be the first ones to talk about this study." You can say it's exclusive, and you can highlight that in the email as well. But even if you're not doing that, if you're pitching it to a bunch of people or somebody has already covered it and you're still pitching it, just make sure you directly ask, "Are you interested in covering this?" Don't assume that they even know how to respond. So those are the four main components of a pitch email.

Conclusion

Now there's a lot that goes into making this work. This is just one piece of a greater puzzle. Your content has to be fantastic, because, as I say, no fantastic pitch can salvage a terrible project. You just can't pitch your way out of it. But also you need to be targeting the right people.

So sometimes we have fantastic pitch emails go out, or anybody has fantastic pitch emails go out, but the person, for whatever reason, can't cover the content. That happens. It certainly happens. Sometimes people have full editorial calendars, or they just wrote about something recently similar. But you want to avoid the situation where they say, "Cool pitch, but this isn't my niche."

This happens all the time in the industry. We surveyed 500 publishers last year, in 2019, depending on when you're listening to this, and they said that their number one pet peeve is being pitched content that does not match their niche. So they're being pitched things that they don't typically write about. So this is a fantastic way to increase the chances of your pitch being successful, but that doesn't mean that it's foolproof if you haven't done all these other steps.

If you're interested in learning about those things, check out my other content on Moz. I've talked about what makes great content. I've talked about some things to look at when it comes to who to pitch. All these things fit together. But I did want to break down for you exactly what that pitch can look like. So best of luck out there. I know it's tough.

Talk to you soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Finding Keyword Opportunities Without Historical Data

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Posted by Imogen_Davies

At Google’s Search On event in October last year, Prabhakar Raghavan explained that 15% of daily queries are ones that have never been searched before. If we take the latest figures from Internet Live Stats, which state 3.5 billion queries are searched every day, that means that 525 million of those queries are brand new.

That is a huge number of opportunities waiting to be identified and worked into strategies, optimization, and content plans. The trouble is, all of the usual keyword research tools are, at best, a month behind with the data they can provide. Even then, the volumes they report need to be taken with a grain of salt – you’re telling me there are only 140 searches per month for “women’s discount designer clothing”? – and if you work in B2B industries, those searches are generally much smaller volumes to begin with.

So, we know there are huge amounts of searches available, with more and more being added every day, but without the data to see volumes, how do we know what we should be working into strategies? And how do we find these opportunities in the first place?

Finding the opportunities

The usual tools we turn to aren’t going to be much use for keywords and topics that haven’t been searched in volume previously. So, we need to get a little creative — both in where we look, and in how we identify the potential of queries in order to start prioritizing and working them into strategies. This means doing things like:

Mining People Also Ask
Scraping autosuggest
Drilling into related keyword themes

Mining People Also Ask

People Also Ask is a great place to start looking for new keywords, and tends to be more up to date than the various tools you would normally use for research. The trap most marketers fall into is looking at this data on a small scale, realizing that (being longer-tail terms) they don’t have much volume, and discounting them from approaches. But when you follow a larger-scale process, you can get much more information about the themes and topics that users are searching for and can start plotting this over time to see emerging topics faster than you would from standard tools.

To mine PAA features, you need to:

1. Start with a seed list of keywords.

2. Use SerpAPI to run your keywords through the API call – you can see their demo interface below and try it yourself:

3. Export the “related questions” features returned in the API call and map them to overall topics using a spreadsheet:

4. Export the “related search boxes” and map these to overall topics as well:

5. Look for consistent themes in the topics being returned across related questions and searches.

6. Add these overall themes to your preferred research tool to identify additional related opportunities. For example, we can see coffee + health is a consistent topic area, so you can add that as an overall theme to explore further through advanced search parameters and modifiers.

7. Add these as seed terms to your preferred research tool to pull out related queries, like using broad match (+coffee health) and phrase match (“coffee health”) modifiers to return more relevant queries:

This then gives you a set of additional “suggested queries” to broaden your search (e.g. coffee benefits) as well as related keyword ideas you can explore further.

This is also a great place to start for identifying differences in search queries by location, like if you want to see different topics people are searching for in the UK vs. the US, then SerpAPI allows you to do that at a larger scale.

If you’re looking to do this on a smaller scale, or without the need to set up an API, you can also use this really handy tool from Candour – Also Asked – which pulls out the related questions for a broad topic and allows you to save the data as a .csv or an image for quick review:

Once you’ve identified all of the topics people are searching for, you can start drilling into new keyword opportunities around them and assess how they change over time. Many of these opportunities don’t have swathes of historical data reported in the usual research tools, but we know that people are searching for them and can use them to inform future content topics as well as immediate keyword opportunities.

You can also track these People Also Ask features to identify when your competitors are appearing in them, and get a better idea of how they’re changing their strategies over time and what kind of content and keywords they might also be targeting. At Found, we use our bespoke SERP Real Estate tool to do just that (and much more) so we can spot these opportunities quickly and work them into our approaches.

Scraping autosuggest

This one doesn’t need an API, but you’ll need to be careful with how frequently you use it, so you don’t start triggering the dreaded captchas.

Similar to People Also Ask, you can scrape the autosuggest queries from Google to quickly identify related searches people are entering. This tends to work better on a small scale, just because of the manual process behind it. You can try setting up a crawl with various parameters entered and a custom extraction, but Google will be pretty quick to pick up on what you’re doing.

To scrape autosuggest, you use a very simple URL query string:

https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&hl=&gl=uk&q=

Okay, it doesn’t look that simple, but it’s essentially a search query that outputs all of the suggested queries for your seed query.

So, if you were to enter “cyber security” after the “q=”, you would get:

This gives you the most common suggested queries for your seed term. Not only is this a goldmine for identifying additional queries, but it can show some of the newer queries that have started trending, as well as information related to those queries that the usual tools won’t provide data for.

For example, if you want to know what people are searching for related to COVID-19, you can’t get that data in Keyword Planner or most tools that utilize the platform, because of the advertising restrictions around it. But if you add it to the suggest queries string, you can see:

This can give you a starting point for new queries to cover without relying on historical volume. And it doesn’t just give you suggestions for broad topics – you can add whatever query you want and see what related suggestions are returned.

If you want to take this to another level, you can change the location settings in the query string, so instead of “gl=uk” you can add “=us” and see the suggested queries from the US. This then opens up another opportunity to look for differences in search behavior across different locations, and start identifying differences in the type of content you should be focusing on in different regions — particularly if you’re working on international websites or targeting international audiences.

Refining topic research

Although the usual tools won’t give you that much information on brand new queries, they can be a goldmine for identifying additional opportunities around a topic. So, if you have mined the PAA feature, scraped autosuggest, and grouped all of your new opportunities into topics and themes, you can enter these identified “topics” as seed terms to most keyword tools.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Currently in beta, Google Ads now offers a “Refine keywords” feature as part of their Keyword Ideas tool, which is great for identifying keywords related to an overarching topic.

Below is an example of the types of keywords returned for a “coffee” search:

Here we can see the keyword ideas have been grouped into:

Brand or Non-Brand – keywords relating to specific companies
Drink – types of coffee, e.g. espresso, iced coffee, brewed coffee
Product – capsules, pods, instant, ground
Method – e.g. cold brew, French press, drip coffee

These topic groupings are fantastic for finding additional areas to explore. You can either:

Start here with an overarching topic to identify related terms and then go through the PAA/autosuggest identification process.
Start with the PAA / autosuggest identification process and put your new topics into Keyword Planner

Whichever way you go about it, I’d recommend doing a few runs so you can get as many new ideas as possible. Once you’ve identified the topics, run them through the refine keywords beta to pull out more related topics, then run them through the PAA/autosuggest process to get more topics, and repeat a few times depending how many areas you want to explore or how in-depth you need your research to be.

Google Trends

Trends data is one of the most up-to-date sets you can look at for topics and specific queries. However, it is worth noting that for some topics, it doesn’t hold any data, so you might run into problems with more niche areas.

Using “travel ban” as an example, we can see the trends in searches as well as related topics and specific related queries:

Now, for new opportunities, you aren’t going to find a huge amount of data, but if you’ve grouped your opportunities into overarching topics and themes, you’ll be able to find some additional opportunities from the “Related topics” and “Related queries” sections.

In the example above we see these sections include specific locations and specific mentions of coronavirus – something that Keyword Planner won’t provide data on as you can’t bid on it.

Drilling into the different related topics and queries here will give you a bit more insight into additional areas to explore that you may not have otherwise been able to identify (or validate) through other Google platforms.

Moz Keyword Explorer

The Moz interface is a great starting point for validating keyword opportunities, as well as identifying what’s currently appearing in the SERPs for those terms. For example, a search for “london theatre” returns the following breakdown:

From here, you can drill into the keyword suggestions and start grouping them into themes as well, as well as being able to review the current SERP and see what kind of content is appearing. This is particularly useful when it comes to understanding the intent behind the terms to make sure you’re looking at the opportunities from the right angle – if a lot more ticket sellers are showing than news and guides, for example, then you want to be focusing these opportunities on more commercial pages than informational content.

Other tools

There are a variety of other tools you can use to further refine your keyword topics and identify new related ideas, including the likes of SEMRush, AHREFS, Answer The Public, Ubersuggest, and Sistrix, all offering relatively similar methods of refinement.

The key is identifying the opportunities you want to explore further, looking through the PAA and autosuggest queries, grouping them into themes, and then drilling into those themes.

Keyword research is an ever-evolving process, and the ways in which you can find opportunities are always changing, so how do you then start planning these new opportunities into strategies?

Forming a plan

Once you’ve got all of the data, you need to be able to formalize it into a plan to know when to start creating content, when to optimize pages, and when to put them on the back burner for a later date.

A quick (and consistent) way you can easily plot these new opportunities into your existing plans and strategies is to follow this process:

Identify new searches and group into themes
Monitor changes in new searches. Run the exercise once a month to see how much they change over time
Plot trends in changes alongside industry developments. Was there an event that changed what people were searching for?
Group the opportunities into actions: create, update, optimize.
Group the opportunities into time-based categories: topical, interest, evergreen, growing, etc.
Plot timeframes around the content pieces. Anything topical gets moved to the top of the list, growing themes can be plotted in around them, interest-based can be slotted in throughout the year, and evergreen pieces can be turned into more hero-style content.

Then you end up with a plan that covers:

All of your planned content.
All of your existing content and any updates you might want to make to include the new opportunities.
A revised optimization approach to work in new keywords on existing landing pages.
A revised FAQ structure to answer queries people are searching for (before your competitors do).
Developing themes of content for hubs and category page expansion.

Conclusion

Finding new keyword opportunities is imperative to staying ahead of the competition. New keywords mean new ways of searching, new information your audience needs, and new requirements to meet. With the processes outlined above, you’ll be able to keep on top of these emerging topics to plan your strategies and priorities around them. The world of search will always change, but the needs of your audience — and what they are searching for — should always be at the center of your plans.

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