The promised page experience updates from Google that caused such a stir last year are far from being done, so Tom takes a look at where we are now and what happens next for the algorithm’s infamous Core Web Vitals.

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

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. This week’s video is about Core Web Vitals. Before you immediately pull that or pause the video, press Back, something like that, no, we haven’t got stuck in time. This isn’t a video from 2020. This is looking forwards. I’m not going to cover what the basic metrics are or how they work, that kind of thing in this video. There is a very good Whiteboard Friday about a year ago from Cyrus about all of those things, which hopefully will be linked below. What this video is going to be looking at is where we are now and what happens next, because the page experience updates from Google are very much not done. They are still coming. This is still ongoing. This is probably going to get more important over time, not less, even though the hype has kind of subsided a little bit.

Historical context

So, firstly, I want to look at some of the historical context in terms of how we got where we are. So I’ve got this timeline on this side of the board. You can see in May 2020, which is nearly two years ago now, Google first announced this. This is an extraordinary long time really in SEO and Google update terms. But they announced it, and then we had these two delays and it felt like it was taking forever. I think there are some important implications here because my theory is that — I’ve written about this before and again, hopefully, that will also be linked  below — but my theory is that the reason for the delays was that too few pages would have been getting a boost if they had rolled out when they originally intended to, partly because too few sites had actually improved their performance and partly because Google is getting data from Chrome, the Chrome user experience or CrUX data. It’s from real users using Chrome.

For lots of pages for a long time, including now really, they didn’t really have a good enough sample size to draw conclusions. The coverage is not incredible. So because of that, initially when they had even less data, they were in an even worse position to roll out something. They don’t want to make a change to their algorithm that rewards a small number of pages disproportionately, because that would just distort their results. It will make their results worse for users, which is not what they’re aiming for with their own metrics.

So because of these delays, we were sort of held up until June last year. But what I’ve just explained, this system of only having enough sample size for more heavily visited pages, this is important for webmasters, not just Google. We’ll come back to it later when we talk about what’s going to happen next I think, but this is why whenever we display Core Web Vitals data in Moz Pro and whenever we talk about it publicly, we encourage you to look at your highest traffic or most important pages or your highest ranking pages, that kind of thing, rather than just looking at your slowest pages or something like that. You need to prioritize and triage. So we encourage you to sort by traffic and look at that alongside performance or something like that.

So anyway, June 2021, we did start having this rollout, and it was all rolled out within two or three months. But it wasn’t quite what we expected or what we were told to expect. 

What happened after the rollout? 

In the initial FAQ and the initial documentation from from Google, they talked about sites getting a boost if they passed a certain threshold for all three of the new metrics they were introducing. Although they kind of started to become more ambiguous about that over time, that definitely isn’t what happened with the rollout.

So we track this with MozCast data. So between the start and the end of when Google said they were rolling it out, we looked at the pages ranking top 20 in MozCast that had passes for zero, one, two, or three of the metrics against the thresholds that Google published. 

Now one thing that’s worth noticing about this chart, before you even look at it anymore closely, is that all of these lines trend downwards, and that’s because of what I was talking about with the sample sizes increasing, with Google getting data on more pages over time. So as they got more pages, they started incorporating more low traffic or in other words low ranking pages into the CrUX data, and that meant that the average rank of a page that has CrUX data will go down, because when we first started looking at this, even though this is top 20 rankings for competitive keywords, only about 30% of them even had CrUX data in the first place when we first looked at this. It’s gone up a lot since then. So it now includes more low ranking pages. So that’s why there’s this sort of general downwards shift.

So the thing to notice here is the pages passing all three thresholds, these are the ones that Google said were going to get a big boost, and these went down by 0.2, which is about the same as the pages that were passing one or two thresholds. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that was just the general fit caused by incorporating more pages into CrUX data. 

The really noticeable thing was the pages that passed zero. The pages that passed zero thresholds, they went down by 1.1. They went down by 1.1 positions. So instead of it being pass all three and get a boost, it’s more like pass zero and get a penalty. Or you could rephrase that positively and say the exact same thing, as pass one and get a boost relative to these ones that are falling off the cliff and dropping over one ranking position.

So there was a big impact it seems from the rollout, but not necessarily the one that we were told to expect, which is interesting. I suspect that’s because Google perhaps was more confident about the data on the sites performing very badly than about the data on the sites performing very well.

What happens next? 

Desktop rollout

Now, in terms of what happens next, I think this is relevant because in February and March, probably as you’re watching this video, Google have said they’re going to be rolling out this same expect page experience update on desktop. So we assume it will work the same way. So what you’ve seen here on a smartphone only, this will be replicated on desktop at the start of this year. So you’ll probably see something very similar with very poorly performing sites. If you’re already watching this video, you probably have little or no time to get this fixed or they’ll see a ranking drop, which if maybe that’s one of your competitors, that could be good news.

But I don’t think it will stop there. There are two other things I expect to happen. 

Increased impact

So one is you might remember with HTTPS updates and particularly with Mobilegeddon, we expected this really big seismic change. But what actually happened was when the update rolled out, it was very toned down. Not much noticeable shifted. But then, over time, Google sort of quietly turned up the wick. These days, we would all expect a very mobile-unfriendly site to perform very poorly in search, even though the initial impact of that algorithm update was very minor. I think something similar will happen here. The slower sites will feel a bigger and bigger penalty gradually building. I don’t mean like a manual penalty, but a bigger disadvantage gradually building over time, until in a few years’ time we would all intuitively understand that a site that doesn’t pass three thresholds or something is going to perform horribly.

New metrics

The last change I’m expecting to see, which Google hinted about initially, is new metrics. So they initially said that they would probably update this annually. You can already see on web.dev that Google is talking about a couple of new metrics. Those are smoothness and responsiveness. So smoothness is to do with the sort of frames per second of animations on the page. So when you’re scrolling up and down the page, is it more like a slideshow or a sort of fluid video? Then responsiveness is how quickly the page interacts or responds to your interactions. So we already have one of the current metrics is first input delay, but, as it says in the name, that’s only the first input. So I’m expecting this to care more about things that happen further into your browsing experience on that page.

So these are things I think you have to think about going forwards through 2022 and beyond for Core Web Vitals. I think the main lesson to take away is you don’t want to over-focus on the three metrics we have now, because if you just leave your page that’s currently having a terrible user experience but somehow sort of wiggling its way through these three metrics, that’s only going to punish you in the long run. It will be like the old-school link builders that are just constantly getting penalized as they find their way around every new update rather than finding a more sustainable technique. I think you have to do the same. You have to aim for a genuinely good user experience or this isn’t going to work out for you.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Hope the rest of your Friday is enjoyable. See you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

There are 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, and 84% of people use Google at least three times per day to search for information.

When there is a search query on Google, Google Ads runs a quick auction to determine which ads will show for that search query, and what the ad positions should be. This ad auction is repeated every time an ad is eligible to appear for a search term out of the billions searched each day.

To determine if an ad is eligible to be shown in the Google search results, and what the position of the ad will be, Google uses a value called Ad Rank. If an ad does not meet the Ad Rank thresholds, it will not be shown. Ad Rank also determines the CPC (cost per click) that the advertiser pays for a click on their ad.

In this post, I cover the main factors that are used by Google to determine the Ad Rank of an ad during the auction, and what those factors mean for your ad strategy.

Understanding the Google Ads auction

How the Google Ads auction works

When a user makes a search query, Google Ads runs a split-second auction of all the ads whose keywords are relevant to it. This will determine which ads are eligible to be shown, their ad position relative to competing ads, and the CPC that the advertiser will pay for a click on their ad.

When setting up Google Ads pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns, advertisers identify which keywords they want to bid on and set their max CPC bid. The advertiser also sets up ad groups with keywords and creates related ads.

When there is a search query, the Google Ads auction begins. Here is the auction process according to Google:

• For every search query, Google Ads finds all the ads whose keywords are relevant to the search terms.

• The system ignores ads that are not eligible for that location and any disapproved ads.

• The remaining ads will be evaluated based on their Ad Rank. The Ad Rank is based on the max CPC bid, ad quality, Ad Rank thresholds, search context and the ad extensions and formats used.

The eligible ads that won the auction are shown on the SERP based on their Ad Rank.

The layout of the Google search results page changes constantly. Currently, Google shows three ads above the organic search results and three ads below the search results on each search page. Depending on the popularity of the search term, and the number of qualified ads, ads may be shown on multiple search pages for the search term.

Here is an example of a search for “eye doctors Dallas” that shows three eligible Google Ads above the organic search results:

What is Ad Rank?

The ad with the highest Ad Rank will be shown in the top position of the search results page for a relevant search term. This is followed by the ad with the second highest Ad Rank and so on. Ads that do not meet the Ad Rank eligibility requirements will not be shown on Google.

Ad Rank calculation

Ad Rank = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score plus additional factors like the impact of ad extensions and ad formats, Ad Rank thresholds, search context, and competitiveness of auction.

Thus, spending more does not necessarily guarantee you the best Ad Rank. Here is an example of basic Ad Rank calculations for four advertisers competing for ad positions in the Google Search Results:

As seen in the example, Advertiser 1 had a lower max CPC bid than the other three advertisers, but was able to qualify for the top ad position because their quality score was high. Advertiser 4, in contrast, had the highest max CPC bid but the lowest quality score, and ended up in the lowest ad position.

Why should you care about your Ad Rank?

Google sets minimum Ad Rank thresholds that will determine if an ad is shown at all on Google.

In the example in Figure 2 above, there are four advertisers competing for an auction with Ad Ranks of 24, 20, 12, 8. If the minimum Ad Rank to show above the organic search results is 20, only Advertisers 1 and 2 will show above the search results. If the minimum Ad Rank to show below the search results is 10, only advertiser 3 will show below the search results. Advertiser 4 will not meet the minimum Ad Rank thresholds, and their ads will not be shown on Google at all.

Advertisers compete to have their ad shown in the top-most position on the SERP since that leads to a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) and results in more leads. Ad CTR changes considerably depending on your ad position.

The average CTR across all ads on Google Ads is 3.17% in search. But that CTR ranges considerably depending on industry and position, with a “good” CTR for position 1 being 6% or higher.

Even those minor differences in percentage can equate to thousands of clicks more for higher-ranked ads.

With that in mind, let’s dig into the two main factors determining your Ad Rank a bit more.

What is CPC?

Cost per click (CPC) is the price you pay per click on your ads in your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns.

When you set up a Google Ads PPC campaign, you set the max CPC bid for the keywords in your account. The max CPC bid can be set up at the keyword level or at the ad group level:

• The maximum CPC is the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ads.

• The actual CPC is the final amount you’re charged for a click on your ad. Your Actual CPC is determined at the time of the auction and may be less than the max CPC amount.

• The average CPC is the average amount you’re charged for a click on your ads.

While CPC costs can vary depending on your industry, the average CPC in Google Ads is $2.69 for search and $0.63 for display.

CPC pricing is also called PPC or pay-per-click. Hence, Google Ads is called PPC or pay-per-click advertising.

How Ad Rank affects actual CPC

Ad Rank also affects the actual CPC you pay for a click on your ads.

Google Ads uses a second-price auction system. The actual CPC you pay is calculated at the time of auction based on your Quality Score and the Ad Rank of the advertiser below you, plus $0.01. Because the auction is dynamic, the actual CPC can vary with each auction.

Google does not disclose the details of how they calculate the Average CPC for Google Ads. According to Search Engine Land, the Actual CPC you pay for a click on your ad is determined at the time of the auction by the following formula:

Actual CPC = (Ad rank of Advertiser below/Your Quality score) + $0.01

What is Quality Score?

The Quality Score is a diagnostic tool that is used to estimate the overall quality of your ad compared to other advertisers.

Ads and landing pages that are considered more relevant and useful to the search query get a higher Quality Score. This helps to ensure that more useful ads are shown at a higher position on the SERP.

Quality Score is measured on a scale of 1-10, and is available for every keyword. It is based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword.

Three factors that determine Quality Score

Quality Score is calculated based on the performance of three main factors:

Expected CTR

The expected CTR is a prediction of the ad clickthrough rate when the ad is shown on Google. Expected CTR projections are based on user CTR, which helps to decide which ads will perform best when shown for a search query.

CTR is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: CTR=clicks/impressions.

Landing page experience

The landing page experience measures how relevant and useful your website landing page is to the person who clicked on the ad.

Ad Relevance

Ad relevance measures how well your ad matches the user’s search intent. It ensures that only the most useful ads are shown for every search query, and prevents ads that are unrelated to the product or service from being shown for a search query.

Each of the three Quality Score factors is given a rating of “Above Average”, “Average” or “Below Average”.

In addition to the three factors above, Google considers additional factors during the real-time auction such as the type of device used, location of the user, time of day, impact of ad extensions, and more.

How to check your Quality Score in Google Ads

Google Ads provides four Quality Score status columns at the keyword level to check Quality Score:

• Quality score

• Landing page experience

• Expected CTR

• Ad relevance

To check your Quality Score in your Google Ads account:

1. Log in to your Google Ads account

2. Click on “Keywords” in the left menu

3. Click on the “Columns” icon in the upper right corner of the table

4. Click on “Modify columns for keywords” and scroll to the Quality Score section. Add the following components to your table metrics (see Figure 4):

• Quality score

• Landing page experience

• Expected CTR

• Ad relevance

5. Click Apply

6. Once these columns are added, scroll to the right on each keyword in the table to check the Quality Score and its components (see Figure 5).

7. If there is a “-“ in the Quality score column, it means that there are not enough searches that exactly match your keywords to determine the Quality Score for that keyword.

For information on improving your Quality Score, read these tips from Google.

Conclusion

The Google Ads auction is a real-time auction that is triggered with every search on Google to determine which ads will be shown for that search term, and in what position. The Ad Rank and Quality Score of the ads are important factors in the ad auction and help to determine whether an ad is eligible to be shown on Google. By improving the individual components of Ad Rank and Quality Score, you can improve the eligibility and rank of your ads.

MozCon is heading back to Seattle this July, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!

Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!)

Not sure what a community speaker is?

At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these sessions are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results.

Cue our MozCon community speaker program! We reserve six 15-minute community speaking slots throughout our three-day conference. We encourage anyone in the SEO community to submit their best and most exciting presentation ideas for MozCon. Not only are these sessions incredibly well-received by our attendees, but they’re also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when it comes to the SEO speaking circuit.

Interested in pitching your own idea? Read on for everything you need to know:

How to submit

To submit a pitch, fill out the community speaker submission form below. Only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most passionate about.

Talks must be related to online marketing and be a topic you can cover in 15 minutes. Submissions close on Friday, February 25th at 5pm PDT — no exceptions!

If chosen, you’ll be required to present your talk July 11-13, 2022 at MozCon in Seattle, WA. Incomplete submissions will not be considered, and all decisions are final. All speakers must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct and follow our Covid-19 health protocols including providing proof of full vaccination.

Submit my pitch!

If you submit a pitch, you’ll hear back from us regardless of your acceptance status, so please be patient until you hear back — we’ll work hard to make our decisions as quickly as we can! Please note that due to the volume of submissions we typically receive, we’re unable to provide specific feedback on individual applications.

What do speakers receive?

As a community speaker you will receive:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation

• A free ticket to MozCon (we can issue a refund or transfer if you’ve already purchased yours)

• The complete MozCon 2022 bundle of speaker videos

• Travel and accommodations during MozCon

• Support and feedback as you build your final presentation deck to make sure you deliver the talk of your life on our stage.

• And a few more surprises…

How we select our speakers

We have an internal committee of experienced Mozzers that review every pitch. We analyze each topic to make sure there’s no overlap and to confirm that it’s a good fit for our audience.

Next, we look at the entirety of the pitch to help us get a comprehensive idea of what to expect from your talk on the MozCon stage and how it might be received by the audience. This is where links to previous decks, content, and videos of past presentations is helpful (but isn’t required).

Here’s how to make your pitch stand out:

• Keep your pitch focused on digital marketing. SEO topics are great but we also love topics that compliment or sit adjacent to SEO. The more actionable the pitch, the better.

• Be focused and concise. What value does your talk provide? We want to hear the actual takeaways our audience will be learning about and why it’s important — not just a vague reference to them. Remember, we receive a ton of pitches, so the more clearly you can explain the tactical steps and learning objectives for the audience, the better you’ll stand out.

• Do your research! Review the topics presented at past MozCons, on the Moz Blog and in our Whiteboard Friday videos for a sense of what resonates with our audience— we’re looking for sessions that are new and that round out our agenda to add to the stage.

• Brush up on how to prepare for speaking.

• No pitches will be evaluated in advance, so please don’t ask 🙂

• Using social media to lobby your pitch won’t help. Instead, put your time and energy into the actual pitch itself!

• Linking to a previous example of a slide deck or presentation isn’t required, but it does help the committee.

Leading up to MozCon

If your pitch is selected, the MozCon team is here to support you along the way. It’s our goal to make sure this is your best talk to date, whether it’s your first time under those bright stage lights or you’re a seasoned speaker who feels perfectly at home in front of a big crowd. We’ll answer any questions you may have and work with you to deliver a talk you’ll be proud of. Here are just a handful of ways that we’re here to help:

• Topic refinement

• Helping with your session title and description

• Reviewing any session outlines and drafts

• Providing plenty of tips around best practices — specifically with the MozCon stage and audience in mind

• Comprehensive show guide

• Being available to listen to you practice your talk

• Reviewing your final deck

• A full stage tour on the Sunday before MozCon to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the big screen, and get a feel for the show

• An amazing 15-person A/V team to support your presentation every second it’s on the big screen and beyond

We’ve got our fingers crossed for you. Good luck!

Submit my pitch!

When rolling out an SEO strategy, an important step is to establish goals you’re able to report on regularly. With Custom Reports in Moz Pro, you have the ability to set up automatic reports to send to key stakeholders regarding the goals you are seeking to achieve. In the previous Daily Fix edition we talked through the basics of creating reports. This time, we’ll dive deeper into some specific use cases that may help you and your team better relay critical information regarding your SEO goals and objectives.

Use Case: Rankings Opportunities

Staying on top of rankings opportunities and how your site stacks up against your competitor may be a critical piece in your SEO strategic puzzle.

In this video, Varad will walk through how you can further supplement the existing Rankings Opportunities template. This report will offer ongoing insight into possible opportunities to tackle next.

Use Case: Competitive Analysis

Setting up a competitive analysis report can help you answer questions from clients and team members regarding how they are performing next to their competitors. This is a common question when working in SEO and having a report ready to go can help set you up for success!

In this next video, Meghan will go over the Custom Report template for competitive analysis and how you can further segment data to bolster your reporting efforts.

If you need help determining who your competitors are, be sure to check out the True Competitor tool.

Use Case: Site Audit

If you are in charge of the technical SEO for your site, or your client’s site, you will likely be asked to regularly report on what issues you’ve resolved and what you’re currently working on. Moz’s Custom Report templates offer a variety of options for Site Audit reports which can help you stay on top of issues and better communicate with interested parties. You can even add in data from the Performance Metrics part of Site Crawl which reports on a tracked site’s Core Web Vitals performance.

Emilie will go over the different options available for Site Audit reports and how to add in that Core Web Vitals data.

Use Case: Traffic Reporting

If increasing organic traffic to your site or to a specific page on your site is one of your goals, it can be helpful to have a report set up to regularly send you updates in a digestible format. With Google Analytics connected to your Moz Pro Campaign, you can create traffic-related reports in the Custom Reports section.

In this next video, Christy will go over which modules you can add to your report so you’re able to keep tabs on organic traffic right alongside your other Campaign data.

Extra Tips & Tricks for Designing Reports

Although this next video isn’t technically a use case, we couldn’t resist adding one more video for you with extra tips and tricks for designing your report. The cherry on top, if you will! In this last video, Varad will go over some ways you can further customize your Custom Reports to elevate them to the next level.

Back in December of 2021, Google launched a redesigned version of Top Stories on desktop that got relatively little notice. At first glance, it appeared that Google introduced a two-column design, such as this Top Stories pack for “Nerf”:

Over time, SEOs spotted a rarer but more interesting variety, the 7-pack. Here’s one for “snow” (a topic very much on my mind in Chicago as I’m writing this post):

Beyond the redesign itself, this 7-pack occupies a huge amount of screen real-estate, especially compared to previous Top Stories lists and carousels that were limited to three stories.

Should we panic yet?

It’s easy to focus on the most extreme examples, but how often is this 7-pack variety actually occurring? Across the MozCast 10,000-keyword daily tracking set on February 3rd, we captured 2,121 page-one SERPs with Top Stories. Here’s the breakdown by story count:

In our data set, the 7-pack is pretty rare (<1%), with a bit under half (44%) of Top Stories packs containing four stories. Interestingly, there is a design break between three and four stories. Top Stories packs with three or fewer stories are presented in list format, like this one from a search for “dog breeds”:

Top Stories packs with four or more stories (on desktop) seem to switch to the newer, two-column format. While we don’t currently have data on the CTR impact, it will be interesting to see how the two formats impact CTRs and other searcher behaviors.

Is news a search intent?

While the 7-pack is still relatively rare, it represents a qualitatively different SERP — one where news is not just a SERP feature but looks more like a dominant intent for that search. Consider the fuller SERP context of my search for “snow”:

Sorry for the vertical scroll, but these are just the features before the #1 organic result. Obviously, weather SERPs have some unique features, but there’s also a 7-pack of Top Stories, Twitter results, and the new “Local news” pack (launched in December), all suggesting time-sensitive, news-style intent. This is a search where even the most evergreen informational content isn’t going to compete.

Note that, because the news itself is always changing, even the presence of Top Stories packs is very dynamic. Their presence across SERPs follows a cycle that peaks around Wednesday or Thursday and falls off into Sunday and Monday. Some searches may shift intent only on special occasions. For example, consider my search for “groundhog” on February 2nd:

This was not a search for “Groundhog Day” — simply for “groundhog” the animal. Outside of the holiday timeline, this SERP is very likely to be informational. While these dramatic shifts are somewhat unusual, it’s important to remember that search intent is not a static concept.

Is Google testing the waters?

As always, Google giveth and Google taketh away. These Top Stories packs could increase, disappear, or evolve into something entirely new. I do think that Google is testing how searchers interact with news results and trying to separate news as a part of a SERP (when multiple types of content are useful) versus news as a primary intent.

For now, it’s worth monitoring your own results to see where news content may be outshining informational content. In 2022, organic SEO is as much about the searches you don’t pursue as the ones you do and putting your time and money where the ROI makes the most sense.

If you want to serve local business owners, allying your company with their deepest needs matters. Recently, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance provided a valuable opportunity to hear directly from localism advocates and elected officials about small business owners’ goals and obstacles. If your brand is marketing software or other services to this largest sector of American commerce, I highly recommend setting aside an hour this week to watch the whole recording (embedded at the end of this post). 

Today, I’ll briefly recap the information from this event that stood out to me as most illuminating, in hopes that you will be able to evaluate these messages to help you find common cause with clients and customers. 

The present state of local economics in the U.S.

ILSR’s co-director, Stacy Mitchell, began the webinar by remarking that, just a decade ago, it was not common to hear much political talk surrounding small businesses versus monopolies, but that this is changing. Advocacy groups are gaining strength and political factions like the 100-member progressive caucus are increasingly getting out the message about the present state of U.S. local economics, which Mitchell summed up this way:

“Today, we know that economic concentration and the losses that we’ve seen both for working people and for small businesses have had devastating effects on communities; that the decline of small businesses and the growing concentration across our communities is really driving racial and economic inequality, ultimately undermining our democracy. And we know that the primary driver of this is corporate power, whether it’s the power these corporations wield in the market or the political power they have to rig government policy in their own favor and to undermine their smaller competitors.”

What local business owners want

Chanda Causer, the Co-Executive Director of The Main Street Alliance, gave this list of priorities she hears voiced by the SMB owners she speaks with every day:

• Breaking up monopolies

• A fair system of taxation

• Healthcare

• Paid family leave

• Access to capital by non-dominant groups

The question was raised as to what business owners and organizers can do to get the public to care about these requirements, and about local economic health. Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Brandi Collins-Dexter explained, 

“I think that everybody I talk to cares about this; big business has such a ubiquitous role in our lives that I think people just don’t know what to do about it.”

This quote will resonate with every local search marketer who has been reading survey stats for the past two years that claim three-quarters or more of the public is committed to shopping more locally, and yet, sees how all of our choices have been whittled down to a frustrating dependence on Amazon, Walmart, Target, or dollar store-type options.

I believe that the majority of Americans genuinely do want to shop small and care sincerely about the communities in which they live, but when we need to buy a blender or a book, we increasingly face the stark reality that our town’s independent hardware store or bookshop was driven out of business by economic policy. Meanwhile, our intelligence is repeatedly insulted by monopolies portraying themselves as local heroes and using offensive scare tactics to warn SMBs and the public against any legislation that would limit their profits. 

Solutions, obstacles, and hope

If industry surveys and local advocacy groups indicate that the public already cares about the survival of local business owners, we’re already part of the way to solving the dilemma of the economic role of small businesses being cut by 50% over the past 40 years. 

What emerged from the ILSR event was a three-part approach to realizing the society that surveys say we want.  If implemented, it would take local business owners on a journey from a place of fear to a place of respect and protection.

Education

First, Ms. Causer emphasized the need for continuing dialogue and education, encouraging individuals to take the time to speak about their concerns with their own neighbors, concerns like the effects of monopoly on the community. An educated public is one that can bring pressure to bear on representatives.

Pro-local legislation

Secondly, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who represents the Seattle area and part of King County, is focused on a legislative approach. She is the vice-chair of the subcommittee on antitrust, which conducted a 16-month investigation into the operations of tech monopolies. She introduced HR 3825, designed to prevent corporations like Amazon from demoting merchants on their platforms while simultaneously preferencing their own cheaper product lines – a practice that has been devastating to small entrepreneurs. She is also attempting to directly address the dire needs of all business owners (and the general public) for healthcare amid the pandemic with her HR 1976 Medicare for All bill. As she stated, “The way that local communities do well is to have a thriving small business economy.”

However, Assemblymember Ron Kim, whose district has the largest proportion of small business owners in New York State, was frank about the obstacles standing in the way of the needs of local business owners and communities being met: 

“As long as we’re spending, in a place like New York, $7-8 billion a year in tax breaks to subsidize the growth of mega-monopolies and big companies who, in return, donate millions and millions of dollars to executive officers and governors and mayors to keep this game going, we’re going to have a continuous problem.”

Make bribes illegal

This means that the third, and most essential, element in the three-part dynamic is to make it illegal to bribe political candidates and elected officials. Without this stipulation, even the most caring and educated public will find its needs ignored, and pro-local legislation will continue to be defeated by corrupt officials who have been paid by corporations to create policy that serves them. 

The scenario may seem hopeless, but it isn’t, because you — who work in tech amid the long-shadowed boulders of monopoly — are reading this article and have a voice. Your co-workers have voices, too, and can advocate for your brands developing authentic allyship with clients and customers. 

Our industry has published volumes on the necessity of building relationships with the communities we want to serve. It’s a worthy aspiration, which hinges on listening well and demonstrating solidarity. Honest chats with independent business owners produce stories like Assemblymember Kim’s, about how one of the oldest Korean-American restaurants in his community is becoming a worker co-op to be able to continue operating in a broken economy.

You’ll hear family stories like those of Ms. Collins-Dexter, whose great-grandfather was forced off his land by a powerful tobacco trust, and had to start over again as an auto mechanic whose shop became a major source of community aid during the Great Depression. 

You’ll hear neighbors like Ms. Causer explain that 68% of respondents surveyed by her organization want to talk about monopoly, and that she’s advocating for people tp start singing the union songs again — that our grandmothers sang.

And you’ll hear the local business owners whom Congresswoman Jayapal said would only give comments to her antitrust committee in private, because they so fear punishment by the monopolies.

The takeaway

The next time you’re asked how to build out the stages of your customer’s journey, consider asking your team and bosses to begin by donning the shoes of a local business owner. They’re the people in your community who are living in real fear of being put out of business by national, state, and local policy, and of being made invisible by powerful platforms in daring to speak out. Empathy for this plight could be the start of the most genuine relationships your company has ever developed. It could even be the basis of a coalition of industry agencies and SaaS groups bringing their own, collective pressure to bear on public servants, to insist that we finally do get money out of politics and re-balance our economics to prioritize societal well-being.

As a local SEO, I’ve often looked at Google’s local guides program. There are roughly 150 million of these community interpreters globally, and they write an average of 62% of the reviews you read. That’s a lot of people with a lot of potential power, if they ever chose to organize on behalf of the local businesses they so abundantly grade. Why would they do that? Because there is little left to review when a local business landscape is reduced to just one or two monopolies. There is no fun or joy in that.

I think Brandi Collins-Dexter is right about good people not knowing what to do, and I suspect a lot of that feeling of powerlessness is rooted in a sense of isolation. But, just like there are a lot of local guides, there are a lot of tech workers, and together, we can help build the hope we seek from emboldened collaboration. 

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Watch the recording

Maximizing the value in your keyword data is crucial if you’re a brand trying to rank on the forever-changing SERPs. With that in mind, Moz Learning and Development Specialist Zoe Pegler walks you through the key features in STAT Search Analytics that will help you glean extra (and important) insights from that data. 

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

Video Transcription

Hi and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Zoe. I work in the Learning team here at Moz, and my focus is on developing educational materials and resources to promote understanding of our STAT tool. Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can use STAT to surface additional insights in your keyword data. Looking for value in your keyword data is important if you’re a brand trying to stay visible and on top of the forever-changing SERPs. Looking for those additional insights is paramount to making informed SEO decisions.

What is STAT?

So what is STAT? If you haven’t come across STAT before, it’s a large-scale rank tracker, but it’s also fantastic for many other things, SERP analysis and intent, a competitive landscape tool. Its value is really how you can dig into the data it provides.

Quick wins

So where are the quick wins here? Well, we know that usually improved ranking position means increased or at least some uplift in traffic for that term. Knowing where you sit on the SERPs and what features you’re winning can make or break your content strategy. This is where STAT’s dynamic tags can be hugely useful.

Dynamic tagging

Dynamic tagging allows you to group keywords together based on criteria you set. That group is then automatically populated daily with keywords based on changeable filter criteria. This means you have the ability to create a group of keywords with any criteria that’s important to your business. A great grouping criteria to set here is keywords based on ranking position.

For example, flagging keywords which are sitting just outside the top 3, top 5, or top 10 positions and adding a traffic benchmark means you can easily discover which keywords with traffic potential need just a little bit of extra work to shift them into that better position.

So maybe your strategy includes hunting down a featured snippet. If so, you can use STAT to set up a dynamic tag that monitors keywords that result in featured snippets. If you see keywords that aren’t ranking well within that grouping, they’re not winning those snippets. 

So if you’re tracking keywords for a client, this is a great way of seeing where your client owns a snippet and where they don’t. You can try to take the spot from their competitors by finding new opportunities to create optimized content. Using this feature is powerful for getting quick feedback on the intent and type of content that perform best in a keyword set, which ultimately is what you can use to guide your content strategy.

Data views

So we know that organizing your data is key. How do you organize your data so it’s meaningful to you while allowing you to see potential opportunities to quickly report back to a client? In STAT, you can hold all your keyword groups, your tags in a single data view. So keeping selected tags in a data view means you get a single dashboard of metrics for those chosen keyword groups

For example, you could easily put together a data view of tags that reflect the tactical aspirations of your client. If you’re a search marketer, you may choose to set up a data view containing keyword segments that cover stages of the conversion funnel. You really want to split keywords into segments that reflect what your clients want to target. So that could be industry sectors, services, or locations. If product categories are important to your client, you can set up a data view containing keywords tagged as shoes, sportswear, swimwear, or whatever specific attributes you need to track across a product line.

Tags tab

Okay. So maybe you’re looking for a quick health check on how that specific set of keyword groupings are doing. Well, there’s a smart little feature in STAT that allows you to compare all of your tags and how well each of those are performing in terms of visibility online, and it’s called the Tags tab. So this feature is pretty cool because it allows you to see the performance of all those tags in one place. You’ll get the overall picture of how your SEO strategy is progressing and where to focus your attention based on your most important metrics. You can set a specific date range. You can see average rank, top 10 change.

Visibility

Another key piece of information is finding out who you’re up against for those keyword sets you just put together. You can use STAT to view share of voice across that specific set of keyword tags or for that entire market. The share of voice metric used in STAT measures the visibility of a given keyword set on Google. This means you can get invaluable insights, such as where competitors are increasing or decreasing in their visibility.

Now, you may have clients that need formalized insights into the progression of a campaign. What’s the best way of displaying those reports? Well, in STAT, we have built connectors that allow you to pull live data from STAT into Google Data Studio reports. These visualizations make it easier to share insights with clients and for them to see those top level metrics really quickly.

So hopefully these tips and tools mean you can really investigate how much extra value and insights you can squeeze out of your keyword data. Have a great day and thank you for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Because of its broad field, SEO has many touch points with a variety of different marketing channels. As other channels’ operations influence SEO, both directly and indirectly, it’s essential to deploy an integrated marketing approach in which each channel supports the other, in order to optimize marketing efforts and enhance your brand’s user experience.

This article provides you with a number of different actionable tips for combining SEO with the marketing channels listed below, that will not only save you time, resources, and money, but will lead to even better results for your team and company:

• SEA
• Affiliate
• PR
• Social Media
• Email
• UX/UI
• Content

Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

Both SEO and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) are keyword-driven processes that focus on ensuring a website reaches the top positions of the search engine results page (SERP).

While SEO is a slower process that focuses on organic positions with long-term results, SEA is a much faster approach that focuses on the position of ads with short-lived results.

Although SEO and SEA might seem like adversarial approaches, they actually complement each other — by sharing data, knowledge, and insights, both can be leveraged to achieve better performances.

Here are a few of the different ways that SEA and SEO can work in symbiosis:

Achieve SERP domination

SERP domination means achieving a prominent position on the SERPs for both paid and unpaid results. Maximizing SERP “real estate” increases a sites’ visibility, credibility, and chances of getting clicks from searchers.

For some competitive terms, ranking in position one organically is insufficient to be visible above the fold, as the number of paid ads and SERP features pushes the organic results down. Both site awareness and confidence from potential visitors increase when a website is visible organically as well as through paid ads, which will result in the site showing up multiple times on the SERP.

Use SEA to predict SEO

While SEO is a fundamental channel with tremendous potential ROI, it is a long-term and continuous process that requires initial resources and the passage of time before it begins to show results.

As SEA campaigns provide immediate results, they can help to make sure your SEO strategies are worthwhile by testing their initial priorities. Information like the conversion rate and potential of different keywords and pages in paid campaigns can help determine whether or not they should be optimized for long-term SEO strategies.

Optimize metadata

PPC campaigns provide precise results not only in terms of conversions, but also with regards to click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, and time on site for different sessions. It allows for the assessment of the searchers’ intent with regards to keywords and landing pages.

The data from A/B testing done by the SEA team can be used to enhance metadata for SEO. For example, using the copy from the best-performing ads to optimize page titles and meta descriptions can help improve organic CTR.

This strategy works the other way around, too: high-performing SEO snippets can be a source of inspiration for SEA ad copy.

Improve Quality Score

Optimizing Google Quality Score is crucial for an effective SEA strategy, as it determines the performance and cost of PPC campaigns.

One decisive Quality Score factor is the landing page’s relevance and quality.

As SEO is all about providing the best experience to users, SEA can benefit from the help of SEO to make sure their ads direct users to highly relevant and optimized landing pages.

Optimize bidding strategy and budget management

SEO and SEA go hand-in-hand when aiming for an optimal and dynamic bidding strategy.

When organic rankings for certain keywords generate a relatively high number of conversions (without necessarily ranking in top positions), it would be wise to start advertising for these queries in PPC campaigns and/or increase their allocated budget.

Also, if you observe specific keywords generating high conversions through PPC campaigns, it would be a good idea to begin optimizing for them in your broader SEO strategy, in order to obtain better organic positions.

In the long-term, this also provides the opportunity to reduce the SEA budget for (expensive) keywords when they are already performing well in organic search, especially if the ad budget is limited.

Use SEA as a backup strategy

SEO isn’t an exact science, and many variables influence organic rankings.

Results might take longer than initially expected, or rankings can decrease significantly in a short period of time. PPC can be used as a short-term solution to maintain a site’s presence and generate traffic from the SERPs.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing and SEO both rely on links.

From the SEO side, backlinks contribute to a website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines, and are one of the most important ranking factors. The higher the authority, the higher the likelihood of ranking.

From the affiliate side, links are sales streams to generate conversions.

Finding the right partners to drive relevant traffic to a website that converts is the main goal. Unlike organic links, search engines do not see affiliate links as “votes” due to the obvious commercial relation with tracking parameters applied.

Both Affiliate Marketing and SEO need to build up a strong network of publishers to promote and enhance their content. There are three ways in which both channels can inspire each other:

Streamline partner research

SEO uses a variety of strategies to find relevant domains to obtain backlinks. For example, looking at competitors’ referring domains and top-ranking domains for specific topics is the specialty of an off-page SEO.

Affiliate Marketing and SEO can sometimes target the same domains without being aware of it. Inefficient outreach due to channels not communicating internally costs unnecessary time and looks unprofessional.

Therefore, united research and sharing the list of potential affiliate and SEO partners can be beneficial before starting a campaign.

Combine partner acquisition

Streamlining outreach between different departments not only saves precious time, but can also save a significant amount of budget.

When a particular website is potentially valuable for both channels, it is favorable to negotiate a cooperation with its webmaster for the two channels simultaneously.

By killing two birds with one stone, it’s possible to negotiate the best overall deal and conditions.

Seize content inspiration

Editorial affiliate links are placed in relevant context within a page copy. Whenever a referral partner generates many leads, it indicates that their content is trusted and appreciated by its readers.

SEO can use this as a source of inspiration for its own content creation strategy.

PR

The role of Public Relations (PR) is to create brand awareness and strengthen brand image and authority.

SEO’s role is to increase a website’s overall authority to acquire more organic traffic.

As both PR and SEO need to reach out to authoritative and relevant websites, they can help each other in the following ways:

Identify target audience and trending topics

PR aims to spread the message of a company, and communicate that message in the best possible way. Leveraging SEO for PR helps to detect who the target audience is and what their interests are in order to improve awareness and visibility.

A way to enhance this message is to associate it with currently trending affairs. SEO can provide great insights into search volume for specific keywords throughout the calendar year, and topics presently trending using Google Trend data.

Utilize press releases for SEO

Press releases do not directly provide ranking benefits for SEO if the publication is clearly marked as such; as John Mueller of Google stated, the best practice for links in press releases is to put them in “Nofollow” according to Google’s guidelines.

In addition, Google ignores most links within press releases.

Nevertheless, press releases might be of interest to publishers who will be willing to write a piece of content about your news and link back naturally to your website, thus providing SEO value.

For this reason, PR should inform SEO when press releases are being sent out, as they could be used by SEO as link baits to obtain organic publications and “Dofollow” backlinks.

Create link baits

Digital PR consists of acquiring qualitative backlinks through the promotion of valuable content.

SEO and PR should cooperate to create linkable assets (infographics, guestographics, studies, interviews, etc.), which are powerful elements to acquire backlinks and increase authority and brand awareness.

Convert unlinked brand mentions into backlinks

Some media platforms happily write about a brand without linking to their website in the publication.

SEOs can easily track these unlinked brand mentions using alerts from various tools in order to gain backlinks.

Reaching out to the authors of articles and asking for a link back to the website will work in most cases, as it is editorially relevant for readers to gain more information about the brand and the product or service that they offer.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and SEO both need to serve users with engaging content to generate traffic and trigger conversions. They share common goals and can support each other in the following ways:

Get content indexed faster

Sharing new content on social media platforms stimulates pages to get (re)indexed faster as search engines noticing and following the links in the posts will be encouraged to (re)crawl the pages.

Understand user intent

SMM can generate tons of insights about the target audience, as it is often easier for users to share and interact with content on social media than on websites. This type of data allows for the creation of highly relevant landing pages that directly answer searcher intent.

By measuring which content generates the most engagement, how users interact with it, and which questions and/or problems they might encounter using a product or service, SEO can improve the communication and user experience on the website. Plus, social media can provide additional information regarding new trending topics and keywords related to the niche and company.

By using third-party tools, SMM can, for instance, analyze which topics on Twitter are frequently associated with either their brand or their competitors. By sharing this information, SEO can confirm that these themes are also present on the website.

Optimize posts with relevant keywords

As social media platforms use algorithms that utilize keywords when deciding to display content to their users, SMM must optimize their hashtags and keywords in their posts.

SEO can assist SMM by providing the right set of keywords and queries optimized to reach the most relevant and largest possible audience on social media platforms. In addition, social media posts might appear on the SERPs for certain keywords in specific niches.

Promote new content

SMM is an excellent and easy way to promote a website’s new content to its audience. When a new piece of content comes online on the website, it’s important to share on the different active social media accounts. This will encourage traffic and user engagement.

Stimulate link building

Although social links to a website don’t directly influence SEO rankings, actively sharing content on social media is a great way to attract natural and high-quality backlinks to a website. Making influencers aware of a quality piece of highly relevant content might lead to them referencing it on their blog or platform.

Develop joint partnerships

As many website and blog owners are also active on social media, a joint approach between SEO and SMM in acquiring partnerships can save time, effort, and budget for the marketing channels and company as a whole.

Email Marketing

SEO and Email Marketing (EMM) focus on different aspects of marketing, but are both powerful acquisition channels. By sharing their respective data, both channels can highlight potential issues and discover opportunities:

Increase CTR and open rates

By knowing which email subject lines achieve the best open rates, SEO can take inspiration to further optimize page titles and meta descriptions to increase organic CTR.

Vice versa, it can also benefit EMM to copy headlines of landing pages with the highest CTR on the SERPs.

Improve content relevancy

Measuring email click-to-open rates (CTOR) and landing page bounce rates can be very insightful for both channels, to know what keeps users from taking the desired actions.

When adjustments in either lead to improvements in user behavior, the changes can be implemented in the other channel as well.

Recycle content

Newsletter content is not being indexed by search engines. Therefore, successful emails can be recycled, fine-tuned, and turned into blog posts that can be shared across different channels.

Promote content and earn backlinks

Sending out an email to customers and followers is a great way to make them aware of new content on the website that might interest them, leading to more traffic and user engagement.

Linking to blog posts within the emails can increase the chances that people will further link back to it, resulting in an increase in natural backlinks.

UX/UI

SEO + UX = SXO: Search Experience Optimization.

User experience is an essential aspect of SEO. In June 2021, Google released the Page Experience update, which rewards websites for providing an excellent on-site experience to their users.

Communication and cooperation between SEO and User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI) are both needed, as both can support each other on different elements such as:

Build information architecture

Logical site architecture is fundamental in order to allow search engines to crawl, index, and rank a website appropriately. From the user perspective, a good website structure allows one to easily navigate a website and get a clear understanding of it.

The deeper a page is buried in the site architecture, the harder it will be for it to rank, as it takes more effort for search engine crawlers and users to reach it.

Because navigational links are given more weight, only important and useful pages should be kept in the navigation.

Ensure mobile-friendliness

SEO and UX should ensure that a website is mobile-friendly.

Mobile-friendliness has been a ranking factor since 2015 and is becoming even more important with the Page Experience update.

Responsive design, text size, and tap targets size are examples of elements Google considers when evaluating if a site is mobile-friendly.

Improve page speed

Speed is decisive for user experience and rankings, especially when optimizing for Core Web Vitals.

Some website design elements can be implemented on the website without consideration of their impact on website performance, and SEO has to monitor the effects that changes made by developers and designers have on the speed of a page.

Manage pop-ups and ads

While pop-ups and ads are an excellent way to catch and/or retain users, they can have a negative impact on your rankings.

In January 2017, Google released an update stating that intrusive ads are now a negative ranking factor. As such, it has to be guaranteed that interstitial ads are being used with a lot of care so that they don’t interfere with an optimal user experience.

Content

Writing content that no one reads is the tragic reality companies that don’t invest in SEO are facing.

The role of SEO is to make sure that the writers produce content that people are actually looking for. Although content is part of SEO work in many companies, both channels still work independently from each other.

There are several elements to consider where SEO can guide content creation to serve quality content, optimized for both visitors and search engines:

Provide content relevance

Qualitative and keyword-rich content, which answers and satisfies searchers’ intent, will drive user engagement and enhance visibility on the SERPs.

SEOs can help content writers to make sure that the topics they write about are actually sought-after and relevant for a company’s potential clients and customers.

Content format, structure, length, and freshness have to be defined with users’ expectations in mind.

Ensure uniqueness

Each piece of content must be unique. Duplicate content, whether internal or external, can prevent pages from appearing in the search results.

SEO can ensure that every page has unique content, especially above the fold, to prevent duplicate content issues.

Enhance E-A-T

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is a concept used by Google Quality raters to assess web pages’ quality.

It is essential to display information about the author(s) of the content on a website, especially for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) websites.

Is E-A-T a ranking factor? Not if you mean there’s some technical thing like with speed that we can measure directly.

We do use a variety of signals as a proxy to tell if content seems to match E-A-T as humans would assess it.

In that regard, yeah, it’s a ranking factor.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 11, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

A piece of content is considered qualitative and is valued by users when its author has experience (in either an academic or professional capacity) in the field he or she is writing about. SEO can assist content creators in optimizing for E.AT. on the website.

Conclusion

SEO is a fundamental and powerful channel for increasing a website’s presence and value. As we’ve seen from the above examples, there’s massive potential for achieving dramatically better results when SEO is used in conjunction with other marketing channels. Whether this is SEA, Affiliate, EMM, or any of the other discussed examples, SEO can be integrated in order to achieve optimal results and greater conversions.

If you know Moz, you know the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s the resource marketers the world over have used to learn SEO and get a taste for its potential and power. And while we offer a delectable buffet of guides in our content smörgåsbord, there hasn’t been one comprehensive resource to serve as a follow-up for those who’ve mastered the beginner level. That’s why we’ve developed the Professional’s Guide to SEO: a guide that will help folks take the next step, preparing them with all the baseline knowledge they need to practice SEO in a professional capacity.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing chapters and/or chapter excerpts here on the blog, with the full guide releasing at the end. Yes, we want to whet your appetite, but we’d also love to hear your feedback — if there’s something you know in your heart of hearts we should cover, get at us on Twitter (@moz) and let us know!

First up, we’re sharing a portion of our chapter on advanced SEO strategy. Brought to you by the inimitable Kavi Kardos, Moz alumni and SEO Manager at Automox, this chapter looks at getting started with a next-step strategy, tactics to implement, and resources for leveling up.

Bon appétit!

Advanced SEO Strategy

Getting started: SEO priorities & plausibility

In the beginning stages, it’s easy to audit a site and come up with long lists of pie-in-the-sky ideas for content, link building, technical, and so on. Most sites, especially those that have never been handled by an advanced SEO, need a lot of work, and the new strategist arriving on the scene often gets pulled in several directions by various teams seeking their expertise.

Prioritization of the tasks you’ll undertake and the tactics you’ll employ is a vital first step in developing an advanced SEO strategy. And it’s important to work on this step thoughtfully — ask questions, be realistic, and involve as many stakeholders as you’re able to meet with. A misstep in the prioritization stage can throw off your schedule for the whole quarter and cause important tasks to fall through the cracks.

Try a SWOT analysis

It may feel old-fashioned, but the classic SWOT analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a great way to frame your initial site audit because it will familiarize you with both the website itself and the competitive landscape in which it lives. As you explore both, jot down your thoughts in a Google Doc that you can return to whenever you discover something new.

• Strengths: What is already working well? What high-value terms does the site already rank for? What high-authority sites already link to you? Does the site already score well in page speed and performance tests or avoid other common technical snafus?

• Weaknesses: What is the site lacking? Is it difficult to navigate? Are its sitemaps and robots.txt file messy? Is the organization lacking insight because it doesn’t make use of basic reporting tools like Google Analytics? Does it have a lackluster content strategy?

• Opportunities: What’s on the horizon that could be capitalized on as part of your strategy? Is there a highly valuable asset that’s already been created and is now begging for distribution? Is a tough competitor lagging behind in a certain content area?

• Threats: What’s on the horizon that could be harmful to your search visibility? Is there an up-and-coming competitor with an obvious wealth of SEO resources? Is there a platform migration looming? Is the site likely to fall victim to the next algorithm update?

Being conscious of the site’s current standings, both in the SERPs and in terms of its overall health, will help you prioritize tactics based on urgency. The most dire threats should usually be addressed first, while minor weaknesses can often be moved to your “nice to have” list.

Assess the organization’s search maturity

Regardless of how urgent the need is or how simple a task seems to you, the difficulty of getting your SEO recommendations implemented will vary from organization to organization. The plausibility of executing your strategy depends largely on the organization’s search maturity, or how fully they understand and integrate SEO at all levels of the business.

The concept of search maturity was developed by Heather Physioc of VMLY&R, and her guidance on diagnosing where your organization falls along the maturity spectrum is an absolute must-read at this stage in the strategic planning process. Not only does using this model help you solidify your recommendations; it also makes it more likely that those recommendations will see the light of day because it allows you to communicate with stakeholders on their level.

How much buy-in can you expect from your department, your direct manager or client contact, and the rest of the larger team all the way up to the C-suite? If SEO has been socialized across the organization and is already a part of the company culture, you can probably expect your recommendations to be met with excitement. If not, you may experience some pushback when asking for necessary resources. At an agency, you’ll be dealing with the confines of existing SEO packages as well as the amount of time you’re expected to spend on each client each month. As an in-house SEO, you may have more autonomy but must often answer to more stakeholders and navigate more red tape.

How difficult will it be to get recommended changes implemented? If the content team has an existing calendar that tends to be jam-packed, new assets may not get slotted in as quickly as you’d like. If the web devs are slammed, working back-end fixes into their sprint cycle can be challenging.

What resources will be available for SEO? Resources come in many forms, and the most scarce of them tend to be headcount and tools. Are there writers on staff who are capable of creating best-in-class content? Does the marketing team have dedicated developers, or are the folks with access to the site’s code in a totally separate department? What tool subscriptions already exist, and how much budget is available to add to your tool kit?

Create an impact vs. effort matrix

Once you know which areas of the site need the most help the fastest, it’s time to make a list of recommended tactics and further prioritize that list by likely impact weighed against required effort, based on what you learned in the previous step.

Create a matrix like the one above, perhaps in a meeting with relevant stakeholders. The likely impact of a tactic could be small, medium, or large, and the same scale will apply to the level of effort required to complete it. Plot each planned tactic into its own cell. Your list of tactics for the quarter, the year, or whatever time frame is dictated by your organization can include granular tasks as well as larger-scale projects — just make sure you’ve broken down any bigger ideas into pieces that make sense within the plot.

Taking urgency into account, tackle the tactics that will have the highest impact and require the lowest effort first. You may also want to set in motion some more demanding, high-impact tactics at kickoff if they can be chipped away at simultaneously. Low-impact, high-effort tactics can often be reevaluated.

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Keep me updated!

Last year was an incredible year for Core Updates, and for changes to how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs, led by developments in Google’s algorithms, and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.

Multimedia first

Why should you consider a multimedia-first SEO strategy?

MUM is the latest in Google’s suite of super-powerful algorithms, which help them to understand information in new and different ways. It runs alongside BERT, but it’s actually much more powerful than BERT.

MUM stands for “multitask unified model”, and not only does it process natural language, but it does so in over 75 languages — and counting. It’s also able to process text and images with a similar quality, and is increasing its ability to process video and audio in the near future. This means we’re likely to see the impact of this in the SERPs, specifically what they look like, which is also likely to shape some of the targeted algorithm updates in the future.

This shift in focus is a natural evolution of a mobile-first digital experience that allows users to engage with content dynamically using a mix of inputs, outputs, and tools, often simultaneously. Google’s push towards better understanding — and towards ranking media like image and video — will require SEOs to look at multimedia content with fresh eyes.

Which short-term multimedia optimizations should you prioritize in 2022?

Visual recognition for Google Lens

Google has invested significantly in image recognition solutions for almost 10 years, but they have recently picked up the pace and scale of its integration into everyday search.

As a result, improvements to and new uses for Google Lens have been front and center at flagship events like Google I/O and SearchOn during the last 12 months, while their future plans to move into health depend significantly on honing their visual search abilities.

In 2021, they added Google Lens directly into the search widget for Pixel, Android phones, and onto Chrome’s mobile search bar. Last year’s Google Lens updates included the ability to translate text in over 100 languages via AR and carry out targeted visual searches of screenshots. Add to this list of features their upcoming rollout of a MUM-enabled ability to “Add Questions” to Lens searches, and you can see that change is afoot.

How does Google Lens impact image SEO?

Standard image optimization elements like alt-text, schema markup, file names, image titles, and file sizes will continue to be important and relevant in regards to how search engines understand your image. Building upon this, though, elements like composition will also come to the fore. This means that SEOs might need to have more strategic conversations about what images look like, as well as how they’re rendered on a site.

This is because, while AI-driven image processing tools like Google Cloud’s Vision AI and Google Lens are developing rapidly, images that have clear composition will be better understood for visual search than images that are cluttered, complex, or partially visible.

Simply put, cleaner images mean that your content is surfaced with more relevant search results and business outcomes.

SEO value of image composition

Need to illustrate the point to stakeholders? Released in 2015, Vision AI’s image recognition tech underpins many of the functions of Google Lens, and their free demo tool can be used to demonstrate how images are interpreted at a high level. Pair this with real-time Google Lens results to illustrate where you should be concentrating your image optimization efforts as MUM matures.

Case in point, in the diagram below, you can see two photos of the same enamel teapot as analyzed with Google Cloud’s Vision AI API testing tool and then with Google Lens.

In the image where you can’t see the handle and spout at the same time, the Vision AI interprets the photo as a Tableware object with 76% certainty and adds Kettle as the most relevant searchable label with 74% certainty. Conversely, the image with the teapot in the profile is understood as a Teapot with 94% certainty and given a Teapot label with 89% certainty. 

When we click through to the SERPs for kettle and teapot, we can see a clear difference in results. It is also clear that the latter is a much closer match to the actual object, thus more likely to satisfy customer needs, resulting in more click-throughs and driving better SEO for the site overall.

When we search the same images directly in Google Lens, the overall results are better: this time both are showing enamel teapots. But again, we see that the side profile photo is delivering near-exact matches to my IRL teapot. Thus, better photo composition equates to better search optimization.

In practice, this means that while there may be a desire to fill a site with stylish lifestyle or Instagram-ready images, for SEO purposes, it is important to prioritize clean, — dare I say “boring” — images, particularly for transactional pages like product listings.

While this methodology is not necessarily new, the accessibility and integration of “search what you see” tools in the daily search experience will make image composition considerations for SEO a priority moving forward.

AI is allowing Google to make comparable strides with video and audio analysis, meaning investment in the knowledge of audio quality and video aesthetics could pay SEO dividends in the future.

Security for speed

Security and speed are both established ranking factors. During the great Core Web Vitals push of 2021, many came to understand that the two elements are closely linked. On an individual account level, I’ve seen server security optimization improve page performance for multiple clients. On a larger scale, when hosting platform Wix tripled their year-over-year CWV performance, enhancements like universal HTTP/2 to improve SSL times were critical to the task.

In the coming year, we will see Google prioritize security in its products and search services. Chrome promises the rollout of increased security and privacy tools, with updates that will include security features for <iframes> and cross-site navigation that add more checks as users transfer between links and use certain features.

This could give sites with top-tier security a competitive advantage for speed, page experience, and conversions in the coming year. And as the desktop page experience ranking update arrives in February 2022, the impact may be seen across many more domains.

Add to this trend the enthusiastic adoption of high-speed HTTP/3 by big tech players like Facebook and Google, and you can see that legacy tech will struggle to keep pace with user and bot expectations.

The use of HTTP/3, the latest HTTP protocol, has seen a fivefold increase across the web in the last year and is now live on about 25% of domains. Though this protocol is active on Cloudflare and many other top cloud providers, it is not yet standard. If you want to make the most of the benefits here, you may need to manually enable the update for your main server and/or CDN. And if you’re considering a new CDN or server partner in the coming year, this should be a deciding factor.

SEO specialisms for Google channel diversity

Google continues to reduce friction as users move between their dedicated channels and apps. In the process, they’re creating a more dynamic and niche SERP that requires SEO specialism to gain traction.

From a user experience, this makes for rich mobile-friendly SERPs, which take users directly into high-performance apps like Google Maps and dedicated channels like Google Travel. Furthermore, it affords Google the opportunity to access and combine the information users need in a highly contextualized manner. Since Google-managed properties give them control over many informational feeds at once, enhancing and connecting existing channels will be essential to their aims to serve ever more nuanced search results.

While this has long been the preserve of transactional verticals like shopping and hotels, Google’s commitment to multi-modality means this is likely to become more prevalent amongst queries at the top of the funnel as well. This means SEO efforts must also be made to optimize profiles and performance within each of the most relevant channels in order to maximize visibility in the SERPs. Due to the rate of change for each channel, SEO generalism is increasingly less likely to build a critical mass for impact. Instead, coordinated teams for SEO specialisms are likely to see the most gains.

If we look at Local Inventory Ads (LIA) for instance, we can see optimizations for multiple channels converge to make a complex, high-value search feature. Introduced last year, this free and paid Google Shopping feature allows users to find products in stock at shops near their location. Google uses data and content from websites, Google Business Profiles, Maps, and Merchant Center to surface this information when users need it. Ongoing optimization for LIA requires expertise in each of these channels, running in tandem with a collection of SEO skill sets.

All of this is to say that assembling a well-rounded SEO team will be essential to top performance as multimodal search evolves. Consider nurturing in-house channel champions and/or engaging external product experts via an agency or freelance support, and coordinate to achieve business goals in search.

Borderless international SEO

In the coming year, three factors will become significant drivers for international SEO: the rise of borderless e-commerce, the maturity of AI translation tools, and the rollout of MUM.

Borderless e-commerce

Digital acceleration has changed our digital experience significantly.

The relevance of a business’s physical location, currency, and time zone is shifting, and the barriers to entry for brands to go global are being significantly reduced. Brick-and-mortar businesses still have a significant impact on local SEO and local pack SERPs, but customers are increasingly more willing (and more often, expecting) to buy from retailers outside their country. Research shows that tentative markets, where around 40% of consumers were willing to purchase from overseas sellers in 2016, had shifted to 55% willingness in 2021.

Shopify launched Shopify Markets at the start of Q4 2021, full of confidence in this global retail trend and its potential for sellers, meaning that competition here is likely to heat up in the coming months.

As SEOs, our task is to meet customers where they are, and this change in customer expectations brings opportunities for business growth. To get started here, consider tried-and-tested international SEO tactics alongside low-cost, low-friction market entry channels like free Google Merchant Listings.

If your international growth includes selling on top international marketplaces like Amazon, Wish, AliExpress, or eBay, consider optimizing your landing pages and on-site e-commerce E-A-T to build trust with new customers. Finally, think mobile-first for shoppers in Asia and other emerging markets.

In summary

All in all, I’m optimistic. As MUM matures we should see more varied content types emerge from around the web. Improvements to speed and security are a win for everyone. More layered SERP features help to demonstrate the importance of SEO. And building a borderless customer base helps to make brands more resilient in a changeable marketplace. Some of the changes we are likely to see are substantial, but they should move SEO in a positive direction.