Google shook up the SEO world by announcing big changes to how publishers should mark nofollow links. The changes — while beneficial to help Google understand the web — nonetheless caused confusion and raised a number of questions. We’ve got the answers to many of your questions here.
14 years after its introduction, Google today announced significant changes to how they treat the “nofollow” link attribute. The big points:
Nofollow can now be specified with 3 different attributes — “nofollow”, “sponsored”, and “ugc” — each signifying a different meaning.
For ranking purposes, Google now treats each of the nofollow attributes as “hints” — meaning they likely won’t impact ranking, but Google may choose to ignore the directive and use nofollow links for rankings.
Google continues to ignore nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes, but this strict behavior changes March 1, 2020, at which point Google begins treating nofollow attributes as “hints”, meaning they may choose to crawl them.
You can use the new attributes in combination with each other. For example, rel=”nofollow sponsored ugc” is valid.
Paid links must either use the nofollow or sponsored attribute (either alone or in combination.) Simply using “ugc” on paid links could presumably lead to a penalty.
Publishers don’t have to do anything. Google offers no incentive for changing, or punishment for not changing.
Publishers using nofollow to control crawling may need to reconsider their strategy.
Why did Google change nofollow?
Google wants to take back the link graph.
Google introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005 as a way for publishers to address comment spam and shady links from user-generated content (UGC). Linking to spam or low-quality sites could hurt you, and nofollow offered publishers a way to protect themselves.
Google also required nofollow for paid or sponsored links. If you were caught accepting anything of value in exchange for linking out without the nofollow attribute, Google could penalize you.
The system generally worked, but huge portions of the web—sites like Forbes and Wikipedia—applied nofollow across their entire site for fear of being penalized, or not being able to properly police UGC.
This made entire portions of the link graph less useful for Google. Should curated links from trusted Wikipedia contributors really not count? Perhaps Google could better understand the web if they changed how they consider nofollow links.
By treating nofollow attributes as “hints”, they allow themselves to better incorporate these signals into their algorithms.
Hopefully, this is a positive step for deserving content creators, as a broader swath of the link graph opens up to more potential ranking influence. (Though for most sites, it doesn’t seem much will change.)
What is the ranking impact of nofollow links?
Prior to today, SEOs generally believed nofollow links worked like this:
Not used for crawling and indexing (Google didn’t follow them.)
Might be used for ranking, though the observed effect was typically small or nonexistent
To be fair, there’s a lot of debate and speculation around the second statement, and Google has been opaque on the issue. Experimental data and anecdotal evidence suggest Google has long considered nofollow links as a potential ranking signal.
As of today, Google’s guidance states nofollowed attributes—including sponsored and ugc—are treated like this:
Still not used for crawling and indexing (see the changes taking place in the future below)
For ranking purposes, all nofollow directives are now officially a “hint” — meaning Google may choose to ignore it and use it for ranking purposes. Many SEOs believe this is how Google has been treating nofollow for quite some time.
Beginning March 1, 2020, nofollow attributes will be treated as hints across the board, meaning:
In some cases, they may be used for crawling and indexing
In some cases, they may be used for ranking
Emphasis on the word “some.” Google is very explicit that in most cases they will continue to ignore nofollow links as usual.
Do publishers need to make changes?
For most sites, the answer is no — only if they want to. Google isn’t requiring sites to make changes, and as of yet, there is no business case to be made.
That said, there are a couple of cases where site owners may want to implement the new attributes:
Sites that want to help Google better understand the sites they—or their contributors—are linking to. For example, it could be to everyone’s benefit for sites like Wikipedia to adopt these changes. Or maybe Moz could change how it marks up links in the user-generated Q&A section (which often links to high-quality sources.)
Sites that use nofollow for crawl control. For sites with large faceted navigation, nofollow is sometimes an effective tool at preventing Google from wasting crawl budget. It’s too early to tell if publishers using nofollow this way will need to change anything before Google starts treating nofollow as a crawling “hint” but it may be important to pay attention to.
To be clear, if a site is properly using nofollow today, SEOs do not need to recommend any changes be made. Though sites are free to do so, they should not expect any rankings boost for doing so, or new penalties for not changing.
That said, Google’s use of nofollow may evolve, and it will be interesting to see in the future—through study and analysis—if a ranking benefit does emerge from using nofollow attributes in a certain way.
Which nofollow attribute should you use?
If you choose to change your nofollow links to be more specific, Google’s guidelines are very clear, so we won’t repeat them in-depth here. In brief, your choices are:
rel=”sponsored” – For paid or sponsored links. This would assumingly include affiliate links, although Google hasn’t explicitly said.
rel=”ugc” – Links within all user-generated content. Google has stated if UGC is created by a trusted contributor, this may not be necessary.
rel=”nofollow” – A catchall for all nofollow links. As with the other nofollow directives, these links generally won’t be used for ranking, crawling, or indexing purposes.
Additionally, attributes can be used in combination with one another. This means a declaration such as rel=”nofollow sponsored” is 100% valid.
Can you be penalized for not marking paid links?
Yes, you can still be penalized, and this is where it gets tricky.
Google advises to mark up paid/sponsored links with either “sponsored” or “nofollow” only, but not “ugc”.
This adds an extra layer of confusion. What if your UGC contributors are including paid or affiliate links in their content/comments? Google, so far, hasn’t been clear on this.
For this reason, we may likely see publishers continue to markup UGC content with “nofollow” as a default, or possibly “nofollow ugc”.
Can you use the nofollow attributes to control crawling and indexing?
Nofollow has always been a very, very poor way to prevent Google from indexing your content, and it continues to be that way.
If you want to prevent Google from indexing your content, it’s recommended to use one of several other methods, most typically some form of “noindex”.
Crawling, on the other hand, is a slightly different story. Many SEOs use nofollow on large sites to preserve crawl budget, or to prevent Google from crawling unnecessary pages within faceted navigation.
Based on Google statements, it seems you can still attempt to use the nofollow attributes in this way, but after March 1, 2020, they may choose to ignore this. Any SEO using nofollow in this way may need to get creative in order to prevent Google from crawling unwanted sections of their sites.
Final thoughts: Should you implement the new nofollow attributes?
While there is no obvious compelling reason to do so, this is a decision every SEO will have to make for themselves.
Given the initial confusion and lack of clear benefits, many publishers will undoubtedly wait until we have better information.
That said, it certainly shouldn’t hurt to make the change (as long as you mark paid links appropriately with “nofollow” or “sponsored”.) For example, the Moz Blog may someday change comment links below to rel=”ugc”, or more likely rel=”nofollow ugc”.
Finally, will anyone actually use the “sponsored” attribute, at the risk of giving more exposure to paid links? Time will tell.
What are your thoughts on Google’s new nofollow attributes? Let us know in the comments below.
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Click Through Rate (CTR) is an important metric that’s useful for making a lot of calculations about your site’s SEO performance, from estimating revenue opportunity, prioritize keyword optimization, to the impact of SERP changes within the market. Most SEOs know the value of creating custom CTR curves for their sites to make those projections more accurate. The only problem with custom CTR curves from Google Search Console (GSC) data is that GSC is known to be a flawed tool that can give out inaccurate data. This convolutes the data we get from GSC and can make it difficult to accurately interpret the CTR curves we create from this tool. Fortunately, there are ways to help control for these inaccuracies so you get a much clearer picture of what your data says.
By carefully cleaning your data and thoughtfully implementing an analysis methodology, you can calculate CTR for your site much more accurately using 4 basic steps:
Extract your sites keyword data from GSC — the more data you can get, the better.
Remove biased keywords — Branded search terms can throw off your CTR curves so they should be removed.
Find the optimal impression level for your data set — Google samples data at low impression levels so it’s important to remove keywords that Google may be inaccurately reporting at these lower levels.
Choose your rank position methodology — No data set is perfect, so you may want to change your rank classification methodology depending on the size of your keyword set.
Let’s take a quick step back
Before getting into the nitty gritty of calculating CTR curves, it’s useful to briefly cover the simplest way to calculate CTR since we’ll still be using this principle.
To calculate CTR, download the keywords your site ranks for with click, impression, and position data. Then take the sum of clicks divided by the sum of impressions at each rank level from GSC data you’ll come out with a custom CTR curve. For more detail on actually crunching the numbers for CTR curves, you can check out this article by SEER if you’re not familiar with the process.
Where this calculation gets tricky is when you start to try to control for the bias that inherently comes with CTR data. However, even though we know it gives bad data we don’t really have many other options, so our only option is to try to eliminate as much bias as possible in our data set and be aware of some of the problems that come from using that data.
Without controlling and manipulating the data that comes from GSC, you can get results that seem illogical. For instance, you may find your curves show position 2 and 3 CTR’s having wildly larger averages than position 1. If you don’t know that data that you’re using from Search Console is flawed you might accept that data as truth and a) try to come up with hypotheses as to why the CTR curves look that way based on incorrect data, and b) create inaccurate estimates and projections based on those CTR curves.
Step 1: Pull your data
The first part of any analysis is actually pulling the data. This data ultimately comes from GSC, but there are many platforms that you can pull this data from that are better than GSC’s web extraction.
Google Search Console — The easiest platform to get the data from is from GSC itself. You can go into GSC and pull all your keyword data for the last three months. Google will automatically download a csv. file for you. The downside to this method is that GSC only exports 1,000 keywords at a time making your data size much too small for analysis. You can try to get around this by using the keyword filter for the head terms that you rank for and downloading multiple 1k files to get more data, but this process is an arduous one. Besides the other methods listed below are better and easier.
Google Data Studio — For any non-programmer looking for an easy way to get much more data from Search Console for free, this is definitely your best option. Google Data Studio connects directly to your GSC account data, but there are no limitations on the data size you can pull. For the same three month period trying to pull data from GSC where I would get 1k keywords (the max in GSC), Data Studio would give me back 200k keywords!
Google Search Console API — This takes some programming know-how, but one of the best ways to get the data you’re looking for is to connect directly to the source using their API. You’ll have much more control over the data you’re pulling and get a fairly large data set. The main setback here is you need to have the programming knowledge or resources to do so.
Keylime SEO Toolbox — If you don’t know how to program but still want access to Google’s impression and click data, then this is a great option to consider. Keylime stores historical Search Console data directly from the Search Console API so it’s as good (if not better) of an option than directly connecting to the API. It does cost $49/mo, but that’s pretty affordable considering the value of the data you’re getting.
The reason it’s important what platform you get your data from is that each one listed gives out different amounts of data. I’ve listed them here in the order of which tool gives the most data from least to most. Using GSC’s UI directly gives by far the least data, while Keylime can connect to GSC and Google Analytics to combine data to actually give you more information than the Search Console API would give you. This is good because whenever you can get more data, the more likely that the CTR averages you’re going to make for your site are going to be accurate.
Step 2: Remove keyword bias
Once you’ve pulled the data, you have to clean it. Because this data ultimately comes from Search Console we have to make sure we clean the data as best we can.
Remove branded search & knowledge graph keywords
When you create general CTR curves for non-branded search it’s important to remove all branded keywords from your data. These keywords should have high CTR’s which will throw off the averages of your non-branded searches which is why they should be removed. In addition, if you’re aware of any SERP features like knowledge graph you rank for consistently, you should try to remove those as well since we’re only calculating CTR for positions 1–10 and SERP feature keywords could throw off your averages.
Step 3: Find the optimal impression level in GSC for your data
The largest bias from Search Console data appears to come from data with low search impressions which is the data we need to try and remove. It’s not surprising that Google doesn’t accurately report low impression data since we know that Google doesn’t even include data with very low searches in GSC. For some reason Google decides to drastically over report CTR for these low impression terms. As an example, here’s an impression distribution graph I made with data from GSC for keywords that have only 1 impression and the CTR for every position.
If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, I’m right there with you. This graph says a majority of the keywords with only one impression has 100 percent CTR. It’s extremely unlikely, no matter how good your site’s CTR is, that one impression keywords are going to get a majority of 100 percent CTR. This is especially true for keywords that rank below #1. This gives us pretty solid evidence low impression data is not to be trusted, and we should limit the number of keywords in our data with low impressions.
Step 3 a): Use normal curves to help calculate CTR
For more evidence of Google giving us biased data we can look at the distribution of CTR for all the keywords in our data set. Since we’re calculating CTR averages, the data should adhere to a Normal Bell Curve. In most cases CTR curves from GSC are highly skewed to the left with long tails which again indicates that Google reports very high CTR at low impression volumes.
If we change the minimum number of impressions for the keyword sets that we’re analyzing we end up getting closer and closer to the center of the graph. Here’s an example, below is the distribution of a site CTR in CTR increments of .001.
The graph above shows the impressions at a very low impression level, around 25 impressions. The distribution of data is mostly on the right side of this graph with a small, high concentration on the left implies that this site has a very high click-through rate. However, by increasing the impression filter to 5,000 impressions per keyword the distribution of keywords gets much much closer to the center.
This graph most likely would never be centered around 50% CTR because that’d be a very high average CTR to have, so the graph should be skewed to the left. The main issue is we don’t know how much because Google gives us sampled data. The best we can do is guess. But this raises the question, what’s the right impression level to filter my keywords out to get rid of faulty data?
One way to find the right impression level to create CTR curves is to use the above method to get a feel for when your CTR distribution is getting close to a normal distribution. A Normally Distributed set of CTR data has fewer outliers and is less likely to have a high number of misreported pieces of data from Google.
3 b): Finding the best impression level to calculate CTR for your site
You can also create impression tiers to see where there’s less variability in the data you’re analyzing instead of Normal Curves. The less variability in your estimates, the closer you’re getting to an accurate CTR curve.
Tiered CTR tables
Creating tiered CTR needs to be done for every site because the sampling from GSC for every site is different depending on the keywords you rank for. I’ve seen CTR curves vary as much as 30 percent without the proper controls added to CTR estimates. This step is important because using all of the data points in your CTR calculation can wildly offset your results. And using too few data points gives you too small of a sample size to get an accurate idea of what your CTR actually is. The key is to find that happy medium between the two.
In the tiered table above, there’s huge variability from All Impressions to >250 impressions. After that point though, the change per tier is fairly small. Greater than 750 impressions are the right level for this site because the variability among curves is fairly small as we increase impression levels in the other tiers and >750 impressions still gives us plenty of keywords in each ranking level of our data set.
When creating tiered CTR curves, it’s important to also count how much data is used to build each data point throughout the tiers. For smaller sites, you may find that you don’t have enough data to reliably calculate CTR curves, but that won’t be apparent from just looking at your tiered curves. So knowing the size of your data at each stage is important when deciding what impression level is the most accurate for your site.
Step 4: Decide which position methodology to analyze your data
Once you’ve figured out the correct impression-level you want to filter your data by you can start actually calculating CTR curves using impression, click, and position data. The problem with position data is that it’s often inaccurate, so if you have great keyword tracking it’s far better to use the data from your own tracking numbers than Google’s. Most people can’t track that many keyword positions so it’s necessary to use Google’s position data. That’s certainly possible, but it’s important to be careful with how we use their data.
How to use GSC position
One question that may come up when calculating CTR curves using GSC average positions is whether to use rounded positions or exact positions (i.e. only positions from GSC that rank exactly 1. So, ranks 1.0 or 2.0 are exact positions instead of 1.3 or 2.1 for example).
Exact position vs. rounded position
The reasoning behind using exact position is we want data that’s most likely to have been ranking in position 1 for the time period we’re measuring. Using exact position will give us the best idea of what CTR is at position 1. Exact rank keywords are more likely to have been ranking in that position for the duration of the time period you pulled keywords from. The problem is that Average Rank is an average so there’s no way to know if a keyword has ranked solidly in one place for a full time period or the average just happens to show an exact rank.
Fortunately, if we compare exact position CTR vs rounded position CTR, they’re directionally similar in terms of actual CTR estimations with enough data. The problem is that exact position can be volatile when you don’t have enough data. By using rounded positions we get much more data, so it makes sense to use rounded position when not enough data is available for exact position.
The one caveat is for position 1 CTR estimates. For every other position average rankings can pull up on a keywords average ranking position and at the same time they can pull down the average. Meaning that if a keyword has an average ranking of 3. It could have ranked #1 and #5 at some point and the average was 3. However, for #1 ranks, the average can only be brought down which means that the CTR for a keyword is always going to be reported lower than reality if you use rounded position.
A rank position hybrid: Adjusted exact position
So if you have enough data, only use exact position for position 1. For smaller sites, you can use adjusted exact position. Since Google gives averages up to two decimal points, one way to get more “exact position” #1s is to include all keywords which rank below position 1.1. I find this gets a couple hundred extra keywords which makes my data more reliable.
And this also shouldn’t pull down our average much at all, since GSC is somewhat inaccurate with how it reports Average Ranking. At Wayfair, we use STAT as our keyword rank tracking tool and after comparing the difference between GSC average rankings with average rankings from STAT the rankings near #1 position are close, but not 100 percent accurate. Once you start going farther down in rankings the difference between STAT and GSC become larger, so watch out how far down in the rankings you go to include more keywords in your data set.
I’ve done this analysis for all the rankings tracked on Wayfair and I found the lower the position, the less closely rankings matched between the two tools. So Google isn’t giving great rankings data, but it’s close enough near the #1 position, that I’m comfortable using adjusted exact position to increase my data set without worrying about sacrificing data quality within reason.
Conclusion
GSC is an imperfect tool, but it gives SEOs the best information we have to understand an individual site’s click performance in the SERPs. Since we know that GSC is going to throw us a few curveballs with the data it provides its important to control as many pieces of that data as possible. The main ways to do so is to choose your ideal data extraction source, get rid of low impression keywords, and use the right rank rounding methods. If you do all of these things you’re much more likely to get more accurate, consistent CTR curves on your own site.
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When it comes to Google’s algorithms, there’s quite a difference between how they treat local and organic. Get the scoop on which factors drive the local algorithm and how it works from local SEO extraordinaire, Joy Hawkins, as she offers a taste of her full talk from MozCon 2019.
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Video Transcription
Hello, Moz fans. I’m Joy Hawkins. I run a local SEO agency from Toronto, Canada, and a search forum known as the Local Search Forum, which basically is devoted to anything related to local SEO or local search. Today I’m going to be talking to you about Google’s local algorithm and the three main factors that drive it.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about when I say the local algorithm, this is the algorithm that fuels what we call the three-pack here. When you do a local search or a search that Google thinks has local intents, like plumbers let’s say, you traditionally will get three results at the top with the map, and then everything below it I refer to as organic. This algorithm I’ll be kind of breaking down is what fuels this three-pack, also known as Google My Business listings or Google Maps listings.
They’re all talking about the exact same thing. If you search Google’s Help Center on what they look at with ranking these entities, they tell you that there are three main things that fuel this algorithm. The three things that they talk about are proximity, prominence, and relevance. I’m going to basically be breaking down each one and explaining how the factors work.
1. Proximity
I’ll kind of start here with proximity. Proximity is basically defined as your location when you are searching on your phone or your computer and you type something in. It’s where Google thinks you are located. If you’re not really sure, often you can scroll down to the bottom of your page, and at the bottom of your page it will often list a zip code that Google thinks you’re in.
Zip code (desktop)
The other way to tell is if you’re on a phone, sometimes you can also see a little blue dot on the map, which is exactly where Google thinks you’re located. On a high level, we often think that Google thinks we’re located in a city, but this is actually pretty false, which I know that there’s been actually a lot of talk at MozCon about how Google pretty much always knows a little deeper than that as far as where users are located.
Generally speaking, if you’re on a computer, they know what zip code you’re in, and they’ll list that at the bottom. There are a variety of tools that can help you check ranking based on zip codes, some of which would be Moz Check Your Presence Tool, BrightLocal, Whitespark, or Places Scout. All of these tools have the ability to track at the zip code level.
Geo coordinates (mobile)
However, when you’re on a phone, usually Google knows your location even more detailed, and they actually generally know the geo coordinates of your actual location, and they pinpoint this using that little blue dot.
It knows even more about the zip code. It knows where you’re actually located. It’s a bit creepy. But there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer.
I use this all the time in an incognito browser if I want to just see what search results look like from a very, very specific location. Now these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it’s really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.
There aren’t enough lawyers to make a huge difference at certain like little points inside a given zip code. However, if you work with dentists or restaurants, let’s say, you really need to be looking at geo coordinate levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will scan a specific keyword using these two tools, and depending on where in that zip code we are, we see completely different three-packs.
It’s very, very key to know that this factor here for proximity really influences the results that you see. This can be challenging, because when you’re trying to explain this to clients or business owners, they search from their home, and they’re like, “Why am I not there?” It’s because their proximity or their location is different than where their office is located.
I realize this is a challenging problem to solve for a lot of agencies on how to represent this, but that’s kind of the tools that you need to look at and use.
2. Prominence
Moving to the next factor, so prominence, this is basically how important Google thinks you are. Like Is this business a big deal, or are they just some random, crappy business or a new business that we don’t know much about?
This looks at things like links, for example.
Store visits, if you are a brick-and-mortar business and you get no foot traffic, Google likely won’t think you’re very prominent.
Reviews, the number of reviews often factors in here. We often see in cases where businesses have a lot of reviews and a lot of old reviews, they generally have a lot of prominence.
Citations can also factor in here due to the number of citations. That can also factor into prominence.
3. Relevance
Moving into the relevance factor, relevance is basically, does Google think you are related to the query that is typed in? You can be as prominent as anyone else, but if you do not have content on your page that is structured well, that covers the topic the user is searching about, your relevance will be very low, and you will run into issues.
It’s very important to know that these three things all kind of work together, and it’s really important to make sure you are looking at all three. On the relevance end, it looks at things like:
content,
onsite SEO, so your title tags, your meta tags, all that nice SEO stuff
Citations also factor in here, because it looks at things like your address. Like are you actually in this city? Are you relevant to the city that the user is trying to get locations from?
Categories are huge here, your Google My Business categories. Google currently has just under 4,000 different Google My Business categories, and they add an insane amount every year and they also remove ones. It’s very important to keep on top of that and make sure that you have the correct categories on your listing or you won’t rank well.
The business name is unfortunately a huge factor as well in here. Merely having keywords in your business name can often give you relevance to rank. It shouldn’t, but it does.
Then review content. I know Mike Blumenthal did a really cool experiment on this a couple years ago, where he actually had a bunch of people write a bunch of fake reviews on Yelp mentioning certain terms to see if it would influence ranking on Google in the local results, and it did. Google is definitely looking at the content inside the reviews to see what words people are using so they can see how that impacts relevance.
How to rank without proximity, prominence, or relevance
Obviously you want all three of these things. It is possible to rank if you don’t have all three, and I’ll give a couple examples. If you’re looking to expand your radius, you service a lot of people.
You don’t just service people on your block. You’re like, “I serve the whole city of Chicago,” for example. You are not likely going to rank in all of Chicago for very common terms, things like dentist or personal injury attorney. However, if you have a lot of prominence and you have a really relevant page or content related to really niche terms, we often see that it is possible to really expand your radius for long tail keywords, which is great.
Prominence is probably the number one thing that will expand your radius inside competitive terms. We’ll often see Google bringing in a business that is slightly outside of the same area as other businesses, just because they have an astronomical number of reviews, or maybe their domain authority is ridiculously high and they have all these linking domains.
Those two factors are definitely what influences the amount of area you cover with your local exposure.
Spam and fake listings
On the flip side, spam is something I talk a lot about. Fake listings are a big problem in the local search space. Fake listings, these lead gen providers create these listings, and they rank with zero prominence.
They have no prominence. They have no citations. They have no authority. They often don’t even have websites, and they still rank because of these two factors. You create 100 listings in a city, you are going to be close to someone searching. Then if you stuff a bunch of keywords in your business name, you will have some relevance, and by somehow eliminating the prominence factor, they are able to get these listings to rank, which is very frustrating.
Obviously, Google is kind of trying to evolve this algorithm over time. We are hoping that maybe the prominence factor will increase over time to kind of eliminate that problem, but ultimately we’ll have to see what Google does. We also did a study recently to test to see which of these two factors kind of carries more weight.
An experiment: Linking to your site within GMB
One thing I’ve kind of highlighted here is when you link to a website inside your Google My Business listing, there’s often a debate. Should I link to my homepage, or should I link to my location page if I’ve got three or four or five offices? We did an experiment to see what happens when we switch a client’s Google My Business listing from their location page to their homepage, and we’ve pretty much almost always seen a positive impact by switching to the homepage, even if that homepage is not relevant at all.
In one example, we had a client that was in Houston, and they opened up a location in Dallas. Their homepage was optimized for Houston, but their location page was optimized for Dallas. I had a conversation with a couple of other SEOs, and they were like, “Oh, well, obviously link to the Dallas page on the Dallas listing. That makes perfect sense.”
But we were wondering what would happen if we linked to the homepage, which is optimized for Houston. We saw a lift in rankings and a lift in the number of search queries that this business showed for when we switched to the homepage, even though the homepage didn’t really mention Dallas at all. Something to think about. Make sure you’re always testing these different factors and chasing the right ones when you’re coming up with your local SEO strategy. Finally, something I’ll mention at the top here.
Local algorithm vs organic algorithm
As far as the local algorithm versus the organic algorithm, some of you might be thinking, okay, these things really look at the same factors. They really kind of, sort of work the same way. Honestly, if that is your thinking, I would really strongly recommend you change it. I’ll quote this. This is from a Moz whitepaper that they did recently, where they found that only 8% of local pack listings had their website also appearing in the organic search results below.
I feel like the overlap between these two is definitely shrinking, which is kind of why I’m a bit obsessed with figuring out how the local algorithm works to make sure that we can have clients successful in both spaces. Hopefully you learned something. If you have any questions, please hit me up in the comments. Thanks for listening.
If you liked this episode of Whiteboard Friday, you’ll love all the SEO thought leadership goodness you’ll get from our newly released MozCon 2019 video bundle. Catch Joy’s full talk on the differences between the local and organic algorithm, plus 26 additional future-focused topics from our top-notch speakers:
We suggest scheduling a good old-fashioned knowledge share with your colleagues to educate the whole team — after all, who didn’t love movie day in school? 😉
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A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.
As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.
Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as “set it and forget it.”
Enter the power of SEO.
When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.
The academic vs. The stockbroker
Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.
Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google
Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.
In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:
“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon
Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues
When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.
On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:
“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”
Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:
“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”
On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.
With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.
Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient
Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.
Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.
With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity
What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.
There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as “direct” and “indirect” ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.
At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.
Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.
On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.
Conversion rate
Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.
Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.
Optimize pricing
Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.
Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.
However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”
Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.
Create listings that sell
As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.
Title
Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.
Bullet points
These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.
Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.
Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?
Product descriptions
Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.
Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.
Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.
Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.
For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.
AB test images
Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.
Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.
Amazon sponsored ads
The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.
Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.
A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.
External traffic
External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.
While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.
Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.
With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.
Keyword relevance
A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.
While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.
Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.
Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:
Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.
Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.
Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.
Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords.
Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.
Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:
Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.
Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.
Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.
Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.
Customer satisfaction
Account health
Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.
Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.
On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage.
Customer reviews
Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.
On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.
Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.
Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:
Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.
Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.
Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.
Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.
And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.
Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO
As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.
Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.
Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.
Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.
Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.
Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.
Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.
Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.
What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!
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Even though blogging has been around for a while, it looks a lot different today than it did in the early 2000s. In those days, people read your blog because they followed it (anyone else have a few old .blogspot blogs floating around out there?) or subscribed to your RSS feed.
Online behavior has changed since then. While some people might stumble onto a blog they like and subscribe to its email list for updates, many people discover blog content through search engines. With more people searching than ever before, it’s a great time for bloggers to explore using keyword research in their content strategy.
This post was written for those that may be new to blogging, as well as those who have been blogging for some time but are just now starting to explore keyword research.
Ready? It’s time to dive into the beginner’s guide to keyword research for bloggers!
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words someone types (or speaks!) into a search engine.
People use search engines for all sorts of things — things like looking up movie times, seeing what the day’s weather will be like, or getting their local pizza place’s number. Every search is a quest for information, and the goal of search engines like Google is to supply the searcher with a satisfying answer as quickly as possible.
What does this mean for you as a blogger? It means that if you want to write for these searchers, you’ll need to know the questions they’re asking (keywords) and deliver the answer in your blog posts.
How will keywords change my blog strategy?
Blog posts developed on the basis of keyword research are different from other types of blog posts in that they focus on answering an existing question.
Contrast this with something like a blog post about a personal experience, or a post introducing a completely new idea — in both these scenarios, because your content doesn’t answer an existing question, it likely won’t get much traffic from search engines like Google, simply because no one is searching for it.
Does that mean you can only write to answer existing questions? Not at all! Even topics with no search demand could get great engagement and traffic on other channels like Facebook or Twitter, but if you want long-term free traffic, the best place to get it is from Google, and the best way to get Google to send you that traffic is to build your blogs on the foundation of keyword research.
This tool allows you to find new keyword ideas two main ways: by typing in a word or a phrase and getting back related keywords (the “Explore by Keyword” feature):
…or by typing in a page/website and getting back keywords that page or website ranks for (the “Explore by Site” feature):
Another great feature is the filter for “are questions” — this allows you to see only keywords that are formatted as questions. Since answering your audience’s questions is such a key component of optimizing your content for search, this is a great tool to give you insight into what your audience wants to know.
What keywords do I pick?
Just because you found a keyword in a keyword research tool doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it in your blogging strategy. Once you have a list of keywords, it’s a good idea to whittle it down. Here’s how.
Choose keywords that match your audience
Knowing your audience is a prerequisite for keyword research because it helps you filter out keywords that, although technically related to your topic, are a mismatch for your audience.
If you haven’t done so yet, document an ideal audience for your blog. For example, if you run a fitness blog, you could write down something as simple as “fitness enthusiasts.” You could also go a bit deeper and create audience personas, full profiles of your ideal audience that include things like age, demographics, and interests.
The deeper your understanding of your ideal audience, the easier it will be to detect which keywords out of the bunch they would have searched for.
Evaluate each keyword’s difficulty score
You may also want to whittle down your keyword list to leave only those with an appropriate Difficulty Score, which Keyword Explorer will assign to every keyword. That score is determined by the strength of the pages that are currently ranking on page 1 for that keyword.
If you’re just getting started blogging and you have a fairly low Domain Authority (which you can check by downloading the MozBar plugin or using the free version of Moz Link Explorer), you may want to start with keywords that have a Difficulty Score in the 20-30 range, or even lower. For more on how to use Difficulty Score in your keyword research, check out this write-up from Rand Fishkin.
Look at each keyword’s search volume
Search volume gives you an estimate of how many people are searching for that keyword every month. It’s great to choose keywords that lots of people are searching for, but remember that quantity doesn’t always equal quality. You may opt for a lower-volume keyword because it’s much more relevant to your audience and your goals.
How do I use the keywords on my page?
When Google’s algorithm was less mature than it is today, it was easy to get your page to rank at the top of search results for certain phrases by repeating that keyword many times on the page.
Over the years though, Google has gotten better at ranking pages that answer the query, rather than just repeat it on the page. This is important to keep in mind because it’s tempting to think that all you have to do with your keyword list is add those words to your pages. To perform well in search engines though, you have to provide an answer to those queries that’s better than anything else out there.
Here are some tips for using keywords to guide your blog content:
Keywords are the input. You’re creating the output. Instead of asking yourself “How can I include this keyword on my page?” ask yourself, “How can I answer this question?”
You don’t have to have a separate page for every keyword you want to rank for. If you’re writing a blog post about “choosing the best running shoes,” for example, it makes perfect sense to answer multiple questions related to that topic within the same post, such as “road vs. trail running shoes” and “running shoe features.”
Check out the pages that are currently ranking for your target keyword and think about how you can create a page better than that.
Where do I go from here?
The best thing to do next is to dive in and try it for yourself! As with most things, keyword research gets easier once you start to apply it.
A huge part of growing your blog effectively is developing a content strategy. There’s a fantastic free video course from HubSpot that walks you through developing your own content strategy, including how to use Moz Keyword Explorer for your keyword research. If you’re a visual learner like me, you should find it helpful!
The most important thing to remember is that offering the right content tells you what your audience wants to know. As a blogger, this insight is invaluable! Write to answer their questions, and they’ll be more likely to find your content in search engines.
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“To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.” – Taisen Deshimaru, Buddhist philosopher
A woman stands in a busy supermarket checkout line. The shopper in front of her realizes that they don’t have enough money with them to cover their purchase, so she steps in and makes up the balance. Then, when she reaches the checkout, her own receipt totals up higher than she was expecting. She doesn’t have enough left in her purse.
A bystander snaps a photo and posts the story to Facebook. The story ends up on local radio and TV news. Unstructured citations for the grocery store start crackling like popcorn. National news takes notice. A scholarship foundation presents a check to the clerk. When asked how he felt about it, the clerk said:
“Personally, I think it’s undeserved attention. Because she did something so good … I felt like it was my responsibility to return the favor.”
In the process, if only for a moment in time, an everyday supermarket is transformed into a rescue operation for hope in humanity. Through the lens of local SEO, it’s also a lesson in how good deeds can be rewarded by good mentions.
Studying business kindness can be a rewarding task for any motivated digital marketing agency or local brand owner. I hope this post will be both a pick-me-up for the day, and a rallying cry to begin having deeper conversations about the positive culture businesses can create in the communities they serve.
10+ evocative examples of business kindness
“We should love people and use things, but sadly, we love things and use people,” Roger Johnson, Artisan
As a youngster in the American workforce, I ran into some very peculiar styles of leadership.
For instance, one boss gruffly told me not to waste too much time chatting with the elderly customers who especially loved buying from me…as if customer support doesn’t make or break business reputations.
And then there was the cranky school secretary who reprimanded me for giving ice packs to children because she believed they were only “trying to get attention” … as if schools don’t exist to lavish focus on the kids in their care.
In other words, both individuals would have preferred me to be less kind, less human, than more so.
Perhaps it was these experiences of my superiors taking a miserly approach to workplace human kindness that inspired me to keep a little file of outbreaks of goodwill that earned online renown. These examples beg self-reflective questions of any local business owner:
What if visitors to your community had their bikes stolen on a road trip and your shop gifted them new bikes and ended up on the news?
One business owner was so grateful for his community’s help in overcoming addiction, he’s been washing their signage for free. What has your community done for you and how have you thanked them?
I only know about these stories because of the unstructured citations (online references to a local business) they generated. They earned online publicity, radio, and television press. The fame for some was small and local, for others, internationally viral. Some activities were planned, but many others took place on the spur of the moment. Kindness, empathy, and gratitude, flow through them all like a river of hope, inviting every business owner to catch the current in their own way. One easy way for local business owners to keep better track of any positive mentions is by managing and monitoring reviews online with the New Moz Local.
In Demark, schoolchildren learn empathy as a class subject. The country is routinely rated as one of the happiest in the world. At Moz, we have the TAGFEE code, which includes both generosity and empathy, and our company offers internal workshops on things like “How to be TAGFEE when you disagree.” We are noted for the kindness of our customer support, as in the above review.
According to Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, people “catch” cooperation and generosity from others. In his study, the monetary amount donors gave to charity went up or down based on whether they were told their peers gave much or little. They matched the generosity or stinginess they witnessed. In part two of the study, the groups who had seen others donating generously went on to offer greater empathy in writing letters to penpals suffering hard times. In other words, kindness isn’t just contagious — its impact can spread across multiple activities.
Mercedes-Benz CEO, Stephen Cannon, wanted employees to catch the kindness bug because of its profound impact on sales. He invited his workforce to join a “grassroots movement” that resulted in surprising shoppers with birthday cakes, staff rushing to remote locations with spare tires, and other memorable consumer experiences. Cannon noted:
“There is no scientific process, no algorithm, to inspire a salesperson or a service person to do something extraordinary. The only way you get there is to educate people, excite them, incite them. Give them permission to rise to the occasion when the occasion to do something arises. This is not about following instructions. It’s about taking a leap of faith.”
“Organizations that trade in kindness allow their employees to give that currency away. If you’re a waitress, can you give someone a free piece of pie because the kid at the next table spilled milk on their foot? If you’re a clerk in a hotel, do you have the authority to give someone a discounted rate because you can tell they’ve had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day?”
There may be no formula for teaching kindness, but if Zaki is right, then leadership can be the starting point of demonstrative empathy that can emanate through the staff and to its customers. How do you build for that?
A cared-for workforce for customer service excellence
You can find examples of individual employees behaving with radical kindness despite working for brands that routinely disregard workers’ basic needs. But, this hardly seems ideal. How much better to build a business on empathy and generosity so that cared-for staff can care for customers.
I ran a very quick Twitter poll to ask employees what their very most basic need is:
Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents cited a living wage as their top requirement. Owners developing a kind workforce must ensure that staff are housing-and-food-secure, and can afford the basic dignities of life. Any brand that can’t pay its staff a living wage isn’t really operational — it’s exploitation.
Flexibility in both hours and location to create a healthy work/life balance
Ethics in company technology, practices, and transparency
Equity in pay ratios, regardless of gender
Empathy in the workplace, both internally and in having a positive societal impact with customers
It’s just not very hard to connect the dots between a workforce that has its basic and aspirational needs met, and one possessing the physical, mental and emotional health to extend those values to consumers. As I found in a recent study of my own, 70 percent of negative review resolution was driven by brands having to overcome bad/rude service with subsequent caring service.
Kindness as currency, with limitless growth potential
“I wanted a tangible item that could track acts of kindness. From that, the Butterfly Coin emerged.” Bruce Pedersen, Butterfly Coins
Maybe someday, you’ll be the lucky recipient of a Butterfly Coin, equipped with a unique tracking code, and gifted to you by someone doing a kind act. Then, you’ll do something nice for somebody and pass it on, recording your story amongst thousands of others around the world. People, it seems, are so eager for tokens of kindness that the first mint sold out almost immediately.
The butterfly effect (the inspiration for the name of these coins) in chaos theory holds that a small action can trigger multiple subsequent actions at a remove. In a local business setting, an owner could publicly reward an employee’s contributions, which could cause the employee to spread their extra happiness to twenty customers that day, which could cause those customers to be in a mood to tip waitstaff extra, which could cause the waitstaff to comp meals for hungry neighbors sitting on their doorsteps, and on and on it goes.
The most priceless aspect of kindness is that it’s virtually limitless. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be quantified. The Butterfly Coin idea is attempting to track kindness, and as a local business owner, you have a practical means of parsing it, too. It will turn up in unstructured citations, reviews, and social media, if you originate it at the leadership level, and share it out from employee to customer with an open hand.
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Ruth Burr Reedy is an SEO and online marketing consultant and speaker and the Vice President of Strategy at UpBuild, a technical marketing agency specializing in SEO, web analytics, and conversion rate optimization. This is the first post in a recurring monthly series and we’re excited!
When you’re onboarding a new SEO client who works with a lead generation model, what do you do?
Among the many discovery questions you ask as you try to better understand your client’s business, you probably ask them, “What makes a lead a good lead?” That is, what are the qualities that make a potential customer more likely to convert to sale?
A business that’s given some thought to their ideal customer might send over some audience personas; they might talk about their target audience in more general terms. A product or service offering might be a better fit for companies of a certain size or budget, or be at a price point that requires someone at a senior level (such as a Director, VP, or C-level employee) to sign off, and your client will likely pass that information on to you if they know it. However, it’s not uncommon for these sorts of onboarding conversations to end with the client assuring you: “Just get us the leads. We’ll make the sales.”
Since SEO agencies often don’t have access to our clients’ CRM systems, we’re often using conversion to lead as a core KPI when measuring the success of our campaigns. We know enough to know that it’s not enough to drive traffic to a site; that traffic has to convert to become valuable. Armed with our clients’ assurances that what they really need is more leads, we dive into understanding the types of problems that our client’s product is designed to solve, the types of people who might have those problems, and the types of resources they might search for as they tend to solve those problems. Pretty soon, we’ve fixed the technical problems on our client’s site, helped them create and promote robust resources around their customers’ problems, and are watching the traffic and conversions pour in. Feels pretty good, right?
Unfortunately, this is often the point in a B2B engagement where the wheels start to come off the bus. Looking at the client’s analytics, everything seems great — traffic is up, conversions are also up, the site is rocking and rolling. Talk to the client, though, and you’ll often find that they’re not happy.
“Leads are up, but sales aren’t,” they might say, or “yes, we’re getting more leads, but they’re the wrong leads.” You might even hear that the sales team hates getting leads from SEO, because they don’t convert to sale, or if they do, only for small-dollar deals.
What happened?
At this point, nobody could blame you for becoming frustrated with your client. After all, they specifically said that all they cared about was getting more leads — so why aren’t they happy? Especially when you’re making the phone ring off the hook?
A key to client retention at this stage is to understand things from your client’s perspective — and particularly, from their sales team’s perspective. The important thing to remember is that when your client told you they wanted to focus on lead volume, they weren’t lying to you; it’s just that their needs have changed since having that conversation.
Chances are, your new B2B client didn’t seek out your services because everything was going great for them. When a lead gen company seeks out a new marketing partner, it’s typically because they don’t have enough leads in their pipeline. “Hungry for leads” isn’t a situation any sales team wants to be in: every minute they spend sitting around, waiting for leads to come in is a minute they’re not spending meeting their sales and revenue targets. It’s really stressful, and could even mean their jobs are at stake. So, when they brought you on, is it any wonder their first order of business was “just get us the leads?” Any lead is better than no lead at all.
Now, however, you’ve got a nice little flywheel running, bringing new leads to the sales team’s inbox all the livelong day, and the team has a whole new problem: talking to leads that they perceive as a waste of their time.
A different kind of lead
Lead-gen SEO is often a top-of-funnel play. Up to the point when the client brought you on, the leads coming in were likely mostly from branded and direct traffic — they’re people who already know something about the business, and are closer to being ready to buy. They’re already toward the middle of the sales funnel before they even talk to a salesperson.
SEO, especially for a business with any kind of established brand, is often about driving awareness and discovery. The people who already know about the business know how to get in touch when they’re ready to buy; SEO is designed to get the business in front of people who may not already know that this solution to their problems exists, and hopefully sell it to them.
A fledgling SEO campaign should generate more leads, but it also often means a lower percentage of good leads. It’s common to see conversion rates, both from session to lead and from lead to sale, go down during awareness-building marketing. The bet you’re making here is that you’re driving enough qualified traffic that even as conversion rates go down, your total number of conversions (again, both to lead and to sale) is still going up, as is your total revenue.
So, now you’ve brought in the lead volume that was your initial mandate, but the leads are at a different point in their customer journey, and some of them may not be in a position to buy at all. This can lead to the perception that the sales team is wasting all of their time talking to people who will never buy. Since it takes longer to close a sale than it does to disqualify a lead, the increase in less-qualified leads will become apparent long before a corresponding uptick in sales — and since these leads are earlier in their customer journey, they may take longer to convert to sale than the sales team is used to.
At this stage, you might ask for reports from the client’s CRM, or direct access, so you can better understand what their sales team is seeing. To complicate matters further, though, attribution in most CRMs is kind of terrible. It’s often very rigid; the CRM’s definitions of channels may not match those of Google Analytics, leading to discrepancies in channel numbers; it may not have been set up correctly in the first place; it’s opaque, often relying on “secret sauce” to attribute sales per channel; and it still tends to encourage salespeople to focus on the first or last touch. So, if SEO is driving a lot of traffic that later converts to lead as Direct, the client may not even be aware that SEO is driving those leads.
None of this matters, of course, if the client fires you before you have a chance to show the revenue that SEO is really driving. You need to show that you can drive lead quality from the get-go, so that by the time the client realizes that lead volume alone isn’t what they want, you’re prepared to have that conversation.
Resist the temptation to qualify at the keyword level
When a client is first distressed about lead quality, It’s tempting to do a second round of keyword research and targeting to try to dial in their ideal decision-maker; in fact, they may specifically ask you to do so. Unfortunately, there’s not a great way to do that at the query level. Sure, enterprise-level leads might be searching “enterprise blue widget software,” but it’s difficult to target that term without also targeting “blue widget software,” and there’s no guarantee that your target customers are going to add the “enterprise” qualifier. Instead, use your ideal users’ behaviors on the site to determine which topics, messages, and calls to action resonate with them best — then update site content to better appeal to that target user
Change the onboarding conversation
We’ve already talked about asking clients, “what makes a lead a good lead?” I would argue, though, that a better question is “how do you qualify leads?”
Sit down with as many members of the sales team as you can (since you’re doing this at the beginning of the engagement — before you’re crushing it driving leads, they should have a bit more time to talk to you) and ask how they decide which leads to focus on. If you can, ask to listen in on a sales call or watch over their shoulder as they go through their new leads.
At first, they may talk about how lead qualification depends on a complicated combination of factors. Often, though, the sales team is really making decisions about who’s worth their time based on just one or two factors (usually budget or title, although it might also be something like company size). Try to nail them down on their most important one.
Implement a lead scoring model
There are a bunch of different ways to do this in Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager (Alex from UpBuild has a writeup of our method, here). Essentially, when a prospect submits a lead conversion form, you’ll want to:
Look for the value of your “most important” lead qualification factor in the form,
And then fire an Event “scoring” the conversion in Google Analytics as e.g. Hot, Warm, or Cold.
This might look like detecting the value put into an “Annual Revenue” field or drop-down and assigning a score accordingly; or using RegEx to detect when the “Title” field contains Director, Vice President, or CMO and scoring higher. I like to use the same Event Category for all conversions from the same form, so they can all roll up into one Goal in Google Analytics, then using the Action or Label field to track the scoring data. For example, I might have an Event Category of “Lead Form Submit” for all lead form submission Events, then break out the Actions into “Hot Lead — $5000+,” “Warm Lead — $1000–$5000,” etc.
Note: Don’t use this methodology to pass individual lead information back into Google Analytics. Even something like Job Title could be construed as Personally Identifiable Information, a big no-no where Google Analytics is concerned. We’re not trying to track individual leads’ behaviors, here; we’re trying to group conversions into ranges.
How to use scored leads
Drive the conversation around sales lifecycle. The bigger the company and the higher the budget, the more time and touches it will take before they’re ready to even talk to you. This means that with a new campaign, you’ll typically see Cold leads coming in first, then Hot and Warm trickling in overtime. Capturing this data allows you to set an agreed-upon time in the future when you and the client can discuss whether this is working, instead of cutting off campaigns/strategies before they have a chance to perform (it will also allow you to correctly set Campaign time-out in GA to reflect the full customer journey).
Allocate spend. How do your sales team’s favorite leads tend to get to the site? Does a well-timed PPC or display ad after their initial visit drive them back to make a purchase? Understanding the channels your best leads use to find and return to the site will help your client spend smarter.
Create better-targeted content. Many businesses with successful blogs will have a post or two that drives a great deal of traffic, but almost no qualified leads. Understanding where your traffic goals don’t align with your conversion goals will keep you from wasting time creating content that ranks, but won’t make money.
Build better links. The best links don’t just drive “link equity,” whatever that even means anymore — they drive referral traffic. What kinds of websites drive lots of high-scoring leads, and where else can you get those high-quality referrals?
Optimize for on-page conversion. How do your best-scoring leads use the site? Where are the points in the customer journey where they drop off, and how can you best remove friction and add nurturing? Looking at how your Cold leads use the site will also be valuable — where are the points on-site where you can give them information to let them know they’re not a fit before they convert?
The earlier in the engagement you start collecting this information, the better equipped you’ll be to have the conversation about lead quality when it rears its ugly head.
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It’s too easy to fall into a rut with your SEO audits. If it doesn’t meet best practices it ought to be fixed, right? Not always. Though an SEO audit is essentially a checklist, it’s important to both customize your approach and prioritize your fixes to be efficient and effective with your time and effort. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins teaches us her methods for saying adios to generic, less effective SEO audits and howdy to a better way of improving your site.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we’re going to be talking about the SEO audit. We’re going to be talking about how to take it from its kind of current generic state to something that’s a little bit more customized and it has prioritization baked in so hopefully we’re going to be doing these SEO audits for higher impact than we’re currently doing them.
What is an SEO audit?
So I think it’s safe to start with a definition of what an SEO audit is. Now, depending on who you ask, an SEO audit can mean a lot of different things. So if you were to boil it down to its just barest of bones, here’s what I would say an SEO audit usually is. This is what someone means when they say SEO audit.
An SEO audit is a checklist to see if your site is compliant
So it’s a list of checks basically. You have all of these things that are SEO best practices, and you run your site through this sieve and you try to see is my site compliant or not compliant essentially.
So you have things like: Missing H1s, yes or no? Broken links, yes or no? Duplicate title tags, yes or no? So you end up with this whole big, long list of things that are wrong and not according to SEO best practices on your site.
Purpose = improving SEO metrics
The whole purpose of this is usually to improve some kind of SEO metrics.
Maybe you’re trying to correct a traffic drop or something like that. So you have this whole laundry list of things now that you need to fix as a result of this SEO audit. So usually what you end up saying is, hey, dev team or client or whoever you’re giving this to, “You need to fix these things because they’re SEO best practice.” What’s wrong with this though?
“Fix it because it’s SEO best practice.” What’s wrong with this picture?
I think there are a couple things wrong with this.
1. May or may not be hurting you
Number one, it means that we’re addressing things that may or may not actually be the culprit of whatever issue we’re facing. It’s just a list of things that didn’t meet a best practices list, but we don’t really know and we’re not really sure if these things are actually causing the issues that we’re seeing on our site.
2. May or may not have an impact
So because we don’t know if these are the culprit and the things that are hurting us, they may or may not have an impact when we actually spend our time on them.
3. May be wasting time
Number three, that leads to a lot of potential wasted time. This is especially true, well, for everyone. Everyone is very busy. But this is especially true for people who work at enterprises and they have a very large website, maybe a really strapped for time and resources development team. If you give them a list of fixes and you say, “Hey, fix these things because it’s SEO best practices,”they are just going to say, “Yeah, sorry, no.I don’t have time for that, and I don’t see the value in it.I don’t really know why I’m doing this.”
So I think there’s a better way. Move over to this side.
How to customize
Customization and prioritization I think are a lot better alternatives to doing our SEO audits. So there are three kind of main ways that I like to customize my SEO audits.
1. Don’t look at everything
Number one, it may sound a little bit counterintuitive, but don’t look at everything. There are plenty of times when you do an SEO audit and it makes sense to do a kind of comprehensive audit, look through all kinds of things.
You’re doing links. You’re doing content. You’re doing the site architecture. You’re doing all kinds of things. Usually I do this when I’m taking over a new client and I want to get to know it and I want to get to know the website and its issues a little bit better. I think that’s a totally valid time to do that. But a lot of times we’re doing more work than we actually have to be doing when we look at the entire website and every single scenario on the website.
So maybe don’t look at everything.
2. Start with a problem statement
Instead I think it could be a good idea to start with a goal or a problem statement. So a lot of times SEO audits kind of come in response to something. Maybe your client is saying, “Hey, our competitor keeps beating us for this. Why are they beating us?” Or, “Hey, we’ve had year-over-year decline in traffic.What’s going on? Can you do an SEO audit?”
So I think it’s a good idea to start with that as kind of a goal or a problem statement so that you can narrow and target your SEO audit to focus on the things that are actually the issue and why you’re performing the audit.
3. Segment to isolate
Number three, I think it’s a really good idea to segment your site in order to isolate the actual source of the problem. So by segment, I mean dividing your site into logical chunks based on their different purposes.
So, for example, maybe you have product pages. Maybe you have category pages. You have a blog section and user-generated content. There are all these different sections of your website. Segment those, isolate them, and look at them in isolation to see if maybe one of the sections is the culprit and actually experiencing issues, because a lot of times you find that, oh, maybe it’s the product pages that are actually causing my issues and it’s not the blog posts or anything else at all.
So that way you’re able to really waste less time and focus, take a more targeted, focused look at what’s actually going on with your website. So once you’ve kind of audited your site through that lens, through a more customized lens, it’s time to prioritize, because you still have a list of things that you need to fix. You can’t just heap them all onto whatever team you’re passing this on to and say,” Here, fix these all.”
How to prioritize
It’s a lot better to prioritize and tell them what’s more important and why. So here’s how I like to do that. I would plot this out on a matrix. So a pretty simple matrix. At the top, your goal goes there. It keeps you really focused. All of these little things, say pretend these are just the findings from our SEO audit.
On the y-axis, we have impact. On the x-axis, we have time. So essentially we’re ordering every single finding by what kind of impact it’s going to have and how much time it’s going to take to complete. So you’re going to end up with these four quadrants of tasks.
Quick wins
So in this green quadrant here, you have your quick wins.
These are the things that you should do right now, because they’re going to have a really high impact and they’re not going to take a lot of time to do. So definitely prioritize those things.
Schedule & tackle in sprints
In this blue quadrant here, you have things that are going to make a really high impact, but they also take a lot of time. So schedule those after the green quadrant if you can. I would also suggest breaking those larger, time-intensive tasks into smaller, bite-sized chunks.
This is a good idea no matter what you’re doing, but this is especially helpful if you’re working with a development team who probably runs in two-week sprints anyway. It’s a really good idea to segment and tackle those little bits at a time. Just get it on the schedule.
Deprioritize
In this orange down here, we have things to maybe deprioritize. Still put them on the schedule, but they’re not as important as the rest of the tasks.
So these are things that aren’t going to make that high of an impact, some impact, but not that high, and they’re not going to take that much time to do. Put them on the schedule, but they’re not as important.
Just don’t do it
Then in this last quadrant here, we have the just don’t do it quadrant. Hopefully, if you’re taking this really nice targeted look at your site and your audit through this lens, you won’t have too many of these, if any.
But if something is going to take you a lot of time and it’s not going to make that big of an impact, no one really has time for that. We want to try to avoid those types of tasks if at all possible. Now I will say there’s a caveat here for urgency. Sometimes we have to work on things regardless of what kind of impact they’re going to make on our site.
Maybe it’s because a client has a deadline, or it’s something in their contract and we just have to get something done because it’s a fire. We all have love/hate relationships with those fires. We don’t want to be handling them all of the time. If at all possible, let’s make sure to make those the exception and not the rule so that we actually get these priority tasks, these important things that are going to move the needle done and we’re not constantly pushing those down for fires.
One last thing, I will say impact is something that trips up a lot of people, myself included. How do you actually determine how much of an impact something is going to have before you do it? So that can be kind of tricky, and it’s not an exact science. But there are two main ways that I kind of like to do that. Number one, look for correlations on your website.
So if you’re looking at your website through the lens of these pages are performing really well, and they have these things true about them, and they’re on your list of things to fix on these other pages, you can go into that with a certain degree of certainty, knowing that, hey, if it works for these pages, there is a chance that this will make a high impact on these other pages as well.
So look at the data on your own website and see what’s already performing and what qualities are true about those pages. Number two, I would say one of the biggest things you can do is just to start small and test. Sometimes you really don’t know what kind of an impact something is going to make until you test on a small section. Then if it does have a high impact, great. Put it here and then roll it out to the rest of your site.
But if it doesn’t have a good impact or it has minimal impact, you learn something from that. But at least now you know not to prioritize it, not to spend all of your time on it and roll it out to your entire website, because that could be potentially a waste of time. So that’s how I prioritize and I customize my SEO audits. I think a lot of us struggle with: What even is an SEO audit?
How do I do it? Where do I even look? Is this even going to make a difference? So that’s how I kind of try to make a higher impact with my SEO audits by taking a more targeted approach. If you have a way that you do SEO audits that you think is super helpful, pop it in the comments, share it with all of us. I think it’s really good to share and get on the same page about the different ways we could perform SEO audits for higher impact.
So hopefully that was helpful for you. That’s it for this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Please come back again next week for another one.
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Structured data (Schema markup) is a powerful tool SEOs can use to efficiently deliver the most important information on our webpages to search engines. When applied effectively across all relevant entities, Schema markup provides significant opportunities to improve a website’s SEO performance by helping search engines to better understand its content.
While Schema.org is continuously expanding and refining its documentation, Google updates its list of supported features that are eligible to be displayed as rich organic results far less frequently. When they happen, these updates are exciting because they give marketers new ways to affect how their organic listings appear in Google’s search results. To make things even more interesting, some of this year’s new Schema types offer the unique opportunity for marketers to use Schema to drive clicks to more than one page on their site through just one organic listing.
Three new Schema types worth focusing on are FAQ, HowTo, and Q&A Schema, all of which present great opportunities to improve organic search traffic with eye-catching, real estate-grabbing listing features. By strategically implementing these Schema types across eligible page content, marketers can dramatically increase their pages’ visibility in the search results for targeted keywords — especially on mobile devices.
Pro tip: When rolling out new Schema, use the Rich Results Testing Tool to see how your Schema can appear in Google’s search results. Google Search Console also offers reporting on FAQ, HowTo, and Q&A Schema along with other Schema types in its Rich Results Status Report.
FAQ Schema
According to Google, FAQ Schema can be used on any page that contains a list of questions and answers on any particular topic. That means FAQ Schema doesn’t have to be reserved only for company FAQ pages; you can create a “frequently asked questions” resource on any topic and use the Schema to indicate that the content is structured as an FAQ.
FAQ Schema is a particularly exciting new Schema type due to how much real estate it can capture in the organic listings. Marking up your FAQ content can create rich results that absolutely dominate the SERP, with the potential to take up a huge amount of vertical space compared to other listings. See the below example on mobile:
Like all Schema, the FAQ content must be a 100 percent match to the content displayed on the page, and displaying different content in your Schema than what is displayed on the page can result in a manual action. Google also requires that the content marked up with FAQ Schema is not used for advertising purposes.
Impacts on click-through rate
There is some risk involved with implementing this Schema: if the content is too informational in nature, it can create a situation where users to get the answers they need entirely within the search results. This is exactly what happened when we first rolled out FAQ Schema for one of our clients at Path Interactive — impressions to the page surged, but clicks fell just as quickly.
This conundrum led to us discover the single most exciting feature of FAQ Schema: The fact that Google supports links and other HTML within the answers. Look for opportunities within your FAQ answers to link to other relevant pages on your site, and you can use FAQ Schema to drive organic users to more than one page on your website. This is a great way to use informational content to drive users to your product or service pages.
Note that this tactic should be done within reason: The links to other pages should actually provide value to the user, and they must also be added to the page content so the Schema code is a 100 percent match with the content on the page. Check out my other detailed article on implementing FAQ Schema, which includes recommendations around tagging links in FAQ answers so you can monitor how the links are performing, and for distinguishing clicks to the FAQ links from your other organic listings.
HowTo Schema
HowTo Schema is another new Schema type that can be used to enhance articles containing instructions on “how to” do something. Like FAQ Schema, Google lays out certain content requirements about what can and can’t be marked up with HowTo Schema, including:
Not marking up offensive, violent or explicit content
The entire content of each “step” must be marked up
Not using HowTo markup to advertise a product
Including relevant images, as well as materials and tools used to complete the task
HowTo should not be used for Recipes, which have their own Schema
Unfortunately, unlike FAQ Schema, the text included within each HowTo step is not linkable. However, the individual steps themselves can become links to an anchor on your page that corresponds to each step in the process, if you include anchored links and images in your HowTo markup.
One layout includes image thumbnails for each step in the process. With this layout, users can click on each step and be taken directly to that step on your page. Anchored (#) links also appear separately in Google Search Console, so you can track impressions and clicks to each step in your HowTo process.
The second HowTo layout uses accordions to display the steps.
One added benefit of HowTo Schema is its voice search potential: properly marked up HowTo content is eligible to be read aloud by Google Assistant devices. When voice searchers ask their Google Assistants for help with a task that is best answered with a “how to” guide, content marked up with HowTo Schema will be more likely to be read aloud as the answer.
Like FAQ Schema, HowTo markup presents pros and cons for marketers. Given that the rich result takes up so much space in the SERP, it’s a great way to make your listing stand out compared to competing results. However, if users can get all the information they need from your marked-up content within the search results, it may result in fewer clicks going to your website, which coincides with Google’s rise in no-click searches.
In rolling out HowTo markup, it’s important to monitor the impact the Schema has on your impressions, clicks, and rankings for the page, to make sure the Schema is producing positive results for your business. For publishers whose sites rely on ad revenue, the potential loss in click-through-rate might not be worth the enhanced appearance of HowTo markup in the search results.
Does HowTo markup earn featured snippets for “how to” queries?
Given that virtually every “How To” query generates a Featured Snippet result, I wanted to see whether there was any correlation between implementing HowTo Schema and earning Featured Snippets. I conducted an analysis of 420 URLs currently ranking in Featured Snippets for common “how to” queries, and only 3 these pages are currently using HowTo markup. While this Schema type is still relatively new, it doesn’t appear to be the case that using HowTo markup is a prerequisite for earning the Featured Snippet for “how to” queries.
Q&A Schema
Q&A Schema is another new Schema type used for pages that contain a question and a way for users to submit answers to that question. The Q&A Schema should be applied only on pages that have one question as the main focus on the page — not a variety of different questions. In its documentation, Google also distinguishes between Q&A and FAQ markup: If users are not able to add their own answers to the question, FAQ markup should be used instead.
Q&A Schema is great for forums or other online message boards where users can ask a question and the community can submit answers, such as the Moz Q&A Forum.
Google strongly recommends that Q&A Schema include a URL that links directly to each individual answer to improve user experience. As with HowTo Schema, this can be done using anchor (#) links, which can then be monitored individually in Google Search Console.
Another exciting new development with these new Schema types is the opportunity to blend multiple types of Schema that generate rich results on the same page. FAQ Schema in particular works as a great supplement to other Schema types, such as Product or Professional Service, which can generate stars, review counts, or other attributes in the SERP. Below is an example of how these combined Schema types can look on mobile:
If it makes sense for your content, it may be worth testing adding FAQ or HowTo markup to pages that already have other Schema types that generate rich results. It’s possible that Google will display multiple rich result types at once for certain queries, or it could change the rich appearance of your listing depending on the query. This could potentially lead to a big increase in the click-through-rate given how much space these mixed results take up in the SERP.
Note: there is no guarantee Google will always display blended Schema types the way it currently does for websites who have already done this implementation. Google is always changing how it displays rich results, so it’s important to test this on your own pages and see what Google chooses to display.
Risks involved with implementing Schema
It would be irresponsible to write about using Schema without including a warning about the potential risks involved. For one, Google maintains specific criteria about how Schema should be used, and misusing the markup (whether intentionally or not) can result in a structured data manual action. A common way this occurs is when the JSON-LD code includes information that is not visible for users on the page.
Secondly, it can be tempting to implement Schema markup without thoroughly thinking through the impact it can have on the click-through-rate of the page. It is possible that Schema markup can result in such a positive user experience within the SERP, that it can actually cause a decline in click-through-rate and less traffic to your site (as users get all the information they need within the search results). These considerations require that marketers think strategically about whether and how to implement Schema to ensure they are not only complying with Google’s guidelines but also using Schema in a way that will provide meaningful results for their websites.
Lastly, it is possible that Google will update its quality guidelines around how rich results are displayed if they find that these new Schema types are leading to spam or low-quality results.
Avoid misusing Schema, or it’s possible Google might take away these fantastic opportunities to enhance our organic listings in the future.
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If you’re anything like me, you might be wondering how the heck it’s already August — where did the first half of the year go?
As we move into the last months of 2019, it’s a great time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished so far this year. And here at Moz, we’ve been hard at work getting a bunch of cool features out the door.
We’ve made these improvements with you in mind, to help your day-to-day workflows and make your experience in our tools easier and more efficient. Ready for a quick look back at the new functionalities we’ve rolled out? Let’s do it!
Gauging the strength of a website can be a complicated task. Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) metric has served the SEO industry for years as one such method of measurement. In March, we updated the algorithm that powers DA — to keep pace with the search engines and predict ranking ability better than ever before. You can use DA to identify the growth of your own site over time, understand the strength of your website against competitors, determine the difficulty to rank on a particular SERP, and much more.
Pro tip: Always use DA as a relative metric in comparison to your competitors’ sites, rather than as an absolute metric in isolation.
Want to know how others are using Moz Pro to get the competitive edge? See how TopSpot increased their organic traffic by 29 percent within 90 days of switching domains by leveraging Link Explorer, Page Authority, and DA.
Keyword clusters are groups of closely-related keywords — and tracking keywords as clusters (rather than as individual terms) allows you to more accurately track your ranking, understand your search visibility, and stay ahead of your competitors. In June, we introduced fresh functionality in Campaign setup that supports clustering of semantically-related keywords. We’ll even help you get started by automatically suggesting potential clusters and keywords you might want to track as part of these groups!
As you set up a Campaign to begin tracking a site, you’ll have the opportunity to group keywords into different clusters. Once you’ve got your Campaign set up, the Search Visibility graph in the Rankings section will allow you to compare multiple clusters to each other. To see a keyword cluster’s performance, use the filter. Click the plus sign, and type in the names of the clusters you’d like to compare. This will give you a visual representation for how each keyword cluster is performing – including which are your strongest topics, and which are your weakest, to identify what areas need more attention.
Pro tip: Consider building separate clusters for each of the product types you offer, the types of services your business provides, or related query types that you hope to rank for.
Bulk upload keywords by CSV
Speaking of labels and keyword clusters, we’ve made one of your most-requested features a reality and added the option to bulk upload keywords to a Campaign. Rather than adding keywords manually, use a CSV to quickly and easily upload keywords, with labels and locations tied to them. In your Tracked Keywords Overview, simply click Add Keywords and toggle to the Upload CSV tab.
Filter by SERP Feature in Keyword Lists
Having trouble prioritizing keywords? Identify opportunities for featured snippets and other SERP features faster than ever. If you already have a keyword list in Keyword Explorer, simply hop into the list and refresh all keywords. Once the list is refreshed, you’ll be able to quickly view, filter, and export SERP Feature data for your keywords.
Pro tip: Want the inside scoop on which content is most likely to win you a particular feature snippet type on a SERP? Use this filter to get a glimpse into which terms already have featured snippets; then apply what you’ve learned to drive your own content creation.
Advanced filtering in Keyword Suggestions
Keyword research can take even the savviest SEO quite a bit of time to navigate. Advanced filtering in Keyword Explorer helps you to keep your keyword research laser-focused and saves you major time and effort. Filter your keyword suggestions to include a particular term that is important to you— or exclude a term that you don’t need mucking up your suggestions list. Stack up your “includes” and “excludes” to refine your suggestions list and ensure you’re seeing the types of keywords that meet your needs.
Pro tip: Try excluding branded terms (your own, or your competitors’ branded terms) to keep keyword suggestions brand-agnostic.
Format annotations in Custom Reports
Custom Reports allow you to share your hard work and SEO efforts with stakeholders, providing the opportunity to pull in areas of your Moz Pro Campaign. Drag and drop modules from your Campaign into your custom-ordered report, and add customizable notes to help your readers understand and interpret your SEO work.
All-new custom formatting of those notes allows you to add in your preferred formatting — from headers to font formatting, to bullets, links, images, and more, using Markdown. Ensure that the stakeholders reading your reports know exactly what your work means and see the value of the SEO efforts you’ve been working on.
Improved Moz Pro navigation
We’ve improved navigation within Moz Pro to help you quickly access all areas of the tool. In the left navigation, you’ll have the option of toggling between Campaigns, navigating around a Campaign easily, and hopping straight into the research tools.
“Make a Suggestion” button
If you’ve ever been in the Moz tools and thought, “I wish I could tell Moz how I feel about this feature!” this one is just for you.
When you hop into a Campaign, you’ll notice a button on the top of your Dashboard that says “Make a Suggestion.” A click of this button will give you the power to tell us what you want to see. We love hearing from you and we’re always looking for ways to iterate and improve our product for you so that your job as an SEO is as easy as possible.
Outside of Moz Pro, other big things are happening
Moz Certification
We launched the Moz Certification in April — an instructor-led, six-part course covering the SEO Essentials. The Certification brings six hours of online content that you can take at your own pace and includes exams to test your knowledge as well as and a LinkedIn badge to share your credentials with your network.
Client Onboarding Course
Outside of the Certification, we also have standalone courses on additional topics, including our newest addition: The Client Onboarding Course — perfect for when you’ve just signed a new SEO client and want to know what the next steps are. This course delves deep into internal communication processes, how to best get to know your new client, setting expectations—and even provides a new client questionnaire that Moz’s SEO experts have developed.
New Moz Local
As local search continues to evolve, we’ve been working to evolve our toolset in a number of ways.
The launch of the new Moz Local in June brought features like real-time profile management and sync, data cleansing, automated duplicate detection and deletion, and deep integrations with Google and Facebook. The new platform also provides the chance to manage your reviews and post to social networks, straight from the Moz Local interface! Check out how PAPYRUS saw a 42 percent increase in direction requests and a 26 percent increase in click-to-call requests after Wpromote harnessed Moz Local to optimize their business listings. This drove 90,000 more potential in-store shoppers annually and was celebrated by the US Search Awards!
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have oodles of exciting more launches on the docket before the end of the year is through. Stay tuned!
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Exemplo de Mulher Cursos 